erefore, if they embarrass the writer.

That large portion of the Gospels, the miracles, is scarcely worth a
thought from M. Renan. He dismisses the whole question of miracles with
a _bon mot_. 'Many people followed Jesus into the desert. Thanks to
their extreme frugality, they lived there. They naturally believed they
saw in that a miracle.' Now is not that wonderful! The circumstantial
relation of the miraculous feeding is supposed to be satisfactorily
explained by people 'naturally believing' that _frugality_ was 'a
miracle'! But the great miracle of all, the miracle which seals the
story, which gives ground of hope and faith to all Christian men, that
miracle, without which they have always felt the Gospel would be
preached in vain, that grand consummating and awful miracle, which
flashed brightness into the sepulchre, which shot the light of
immortality athwart the darkness of Death, and gave mortal man a sure
grasp on immortality, that great crowning miracle, the resurrection of
our Lord, on which so much depended, which so many jealous eyes were
watching, which was so early asserted on the very spot where it claims
to have occurred--this M. Renan treats as unworthy serious refutation.
It is not even necessary to try to disprove it. It is simply sufficient
for him to mention 'the strong _imagination_ of Mary Magdalene,' and to
exclaim so _beautifully_!--'Divine power of love, sacred moments in
which the passion of a hallucinated woman gives to the world a
resurrected God!'

There it is! The _doctrine_ of the resurrection, and all that clings
around it for humanity, the doctrine preached always as one of the
foundations of the faith ('because he preached unto them Jesus and the
resurrection'), and the _fact_ of the resurrection, the fact always put
forth as the clinching argument, the justification of the whole story,
thrown into the face of Jew and Greek as a perpetual challenge--this
doctrine and this fact are disposed of by a bit of sickly sentiment!

Now, this sort of thing may be very rhetorical, and very beautiful, when
done up in approved, sentimental French, but it is certainly neither
logical nor philosophical. We have a right to insist that M. Renan shall
come with no theory which compels him to reject half the facts
unexamined, and to garble and misuse half the rest. Those facts stand on
the same ground as all the others. The same authority which tells us
that Christ lived at Nazareth, tells us also th