iest of the world's 'absolute
religion'!

But few of us, in this part of the world, can appreciate the
transcendental reasoning that makes an impostor half divine, or a cheat
holy. 'Good faith and imposture,' to quote our author, 'are words which,
in our rigid conscience, are opposed like two irreconcilable terms,'
though, he says, it is not so in 'the East,' from which our religion
came, and was certainly far from being so with our Teacher! We cannot
admire M. Renan here. The writing is very fine. He exhausts himself in
his 'charming' style to make it all right, and show us that we have
profound reason to admire this lying teacher, this cheating miracle
monger, whom he holds up between us and the pure 'Son of Mary.' But it
does not answer. In this cold climate a lie is a lie, a cheat is a
cheat, and a mountebank and impostor is not the teacher of 'the absolute
religion of humanity!'

As M. Renan writes His life, that is the way in which the Founder of
Christianity develops Himself. First we have the young man, amiable,
sweet, 'charming,' enacting a 'beautiful pastoral' in the 'delicious
climate of Galilee,' where it appears that nobody has anything to do
save to enact 'pastorals,' although we are told '_brigandage_ was common
in Galilee,' which seems a strange accompaniment to 'pastorals.' Where
He got His wisdom, how He came by these 'transcendent utterances,'
which, we are told, 'some few' only, even now, are lofty enough to
appreciate, we are not informed. There they are. But, right in the midst
of them, this wonderful young man, uttering these 'charming' lessons,
and these 'delicious' sayings, sets to work miracle-mongering, trying
His hand at thaumaturgy and legerdemain, becomes an impostor and a
mountebank, pretending, among other things, to raise a man who puts on a
shroud, gets into a grave, and shams dead! At last He is taken, and
then, in view of death, becomes penitent, reforms, and recovers His
purity!

Now Thomas Paine was, in a way, an honest man. We can say that of him.
Voltaire was, in his degree, honest too. Having said what M. Renan says,
they did not stultify themselves logically. They honestly pronounced
Christianity a delusion. We have respect for their consistency. But our
modern man says that a cheat in religion is no cheat, a lie no lie, that
a true saving faith can be built on a foundation of deception and
trickery! He says it, and undertakes to prove it by _the convincing
logic of sentimen