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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tual endowments: the love of truth, an exquisite sensibility to the mercy of God and the misery of man, and a deep sense of that increasing purpose which runs through the ages. And thus endowed by the Holy Spirit of God, he has given us this unique History, so genuinely human, and therefore, in all its parts, so genuinely divine; a mighty, because a simply truthful, record of the words and deeds of Him who was both God and man. 6 We may not be ready to agree with any of these estimates, taken as a whole, and yet they may be sufficient to convince us that the Gospel according to Matthew is a most notable book, according to the judgment of most able and competent authorities, a book worthy of our study in any detail, and a book whose author must have been a most notable man. All ancient times agreed that the author was Matthew, and all modern efforts to disprove the unanimous testimony of antiquity have fallen far short of conclusiveness. Therefore we begin our study with some notice of this man. II. Matthew I. His Name. His name was Levi, TS; but this original Hebrew name, recorded in Mark 2. 14 and Luke 5. 27, seems to have been replaced after his call into the discipleship of Jesus with the new name Matthew, Ma00woc, from the Hebrew np or Fppm, equivalent to the Greek 0e6dpo?, Theodore or Theodoretus or Dorotheus or Adeodatus, and meaning the gift of Jehovah, or the gift of God. At the time of his call Simon was given his new name Cephas or Peter,7 and this new name displaced the old in the usage and memory of the Christian Church. Saul, the greatest persecutor of the early church, became the greatest apostle in that church; and the church came to know him by a new name, Paul. Here is another apostle to whom a new Messages of the Books, pp. 47, 48. 1 John ...