a harmony, properly so called. No endeavor has been made to reconcile apparent discrepancies. Where there were variations in the minor details of an incident as given in the Gospels, I have followed that which was the fullest and the most vivid. I might have gone further in piecing together the narratives, but this sort of patchwork has been often made at the expense of fluency and interest in the history. To have woven into the narrative all the varying phrases of the four historians, even at the expense of clearness and grammatical construction, would have been to sacrifice to a masoretic veneration for the letter of the sacred text the interest and usefulness of the work. All marginal readings, and all references to the several Gospels, and all marks of chapters and verses in the Gospels, have been carefully omitted, that the attention of the reader might never be diverted from the narrative itself, and that the picture of Christ s life might be presented with that unbroken continuity to which we are accustomed in reading modern books. The preface to Luke, as pertaining to but one Gospel, and the two genealogies, have been omitted; since, however valuable they may be in their places, they would not help, but rather hinder, the purpose of this compilation. The present arrangement, therefore, is in the exact words of the authorized version of the Gospels; there is nothing added, nothing changed. But it makes no pretension to include every word of all the Gospels. It is better to be useful than ingenious.
The order of time is chiefly that marked out by Dr. Ellicott in his Hulsean Lectures. In minor arrangements and adaptations of the text much assistance has been derived from an anonymous Diatesseron published in Oxford in 1837.
I am fully aware that the principal attraction of the book is not the part which fell to my share, but the illustrations after Alexandre Bida's magnificent designs. The artist s pencil has hardly ever told THE STORY so effectively. To these the publishers have added a series of exegetical illustrations that serve exceedingly well
