The Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time

The book collects the substance of the lectures Cooper delivered around Britain after his return to Christianity — pitched at the mechanics’ institutes and lecture halls where he had made his name as an unbeliever, and written in the direct platform manner of a man used to hecklers.

The argument is historical rather than philosophical: that the chain of evidence for the Christian facts runs back unbroken, that the New Testament documents are early and can be corroborated, and that the received text could in large part be reconstructed from quotation alone. He is fond of concrete illustrations of that last point, and repeats the anecdote of the challenge put to Lord Hales about whether the New Testament could be recovered from the writings of the second- and third-century fathers.

Its interest now is as much biographical as evidential. This is what a Victorian secularist found answerable in his own former position, argued for exactly the audience he had once persuaded the other way.

The 1871 edition is free at Archive.org as a Google-scanned copy; the OCR is fair but noisy in places. Our edition is a corrected typesetting.

This edition follows the first edition of The Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time, published at London by Hodder & Stoughton in 1871.

Archive.org holds a second scan, of an 1877 printing, which runs some four thousand words longer. We checked that gap rather than assume it, because a difference in length is how an abridgement shows itself: it turns out to be a later edition with more of the publisher’s advertising bound in, not a fuller text. The 1871 scan is also much the cleaner of the two, at 21 unknown words per thousand against 43.

The book is a course of lectures that Cooper had been giving for fourteen years before he wrote any of it down, and he says in the preface that he has deliberately kept the manner of the lecturer rather than rewriting it as an essay — “the iteration, the colloquialism, the lively interrogative.” We have not smoothed that out.

Its divisions are his: nineteen arches of a bridge running backwards from the nineteenth century to the first, each introduced by the question “What shall we call this century?” The last section is far the longest, and that is by design — having reached the second century and the first, which he names the Arch of the Fathers and the Arch of the Apostles, he writes: “I propose now that we take our steps more slowly, and very circumspectly.” We have not broken it up to make the chapters more even, because the shape is the argument.

The scan numbers the eleventh arch “XL” rather than “XI”, which is the ordinary confusion of a trailing I for an L; the order of the sections settles it. The running heads change from page to page and describe whatever is on that page — “The Testimony of Fathers”, “The Pillow in Peter’s Boat” — so they look like section headings and are not. They have been removed with the other furniture.

The publisher’s list of other books, bound in after the text, is not part of the book and is not in this edition.

Cooper’s own story is in The Life of Thomas Cooper, Written by Himself, which we also publish.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.