in and its success.

This is the best thing philosophic and philologic unbelief has to offer,
the most rational account it has to give in the year 1864. Surely
unbelief must have large faith in human nature's capacity of spiritual
swallow, if men are expected to take this down, as more reasonable than
what they will hear in the next pulpit!

Nay, after all, the Christian theory of Christianity is the most
rational yet. It has mysteries, but it calls them mysteries, things
above reason. It accepts them, and so escapes absurdity--ends with no
means, effects from no causes, wonders that spring out of the ground,
divine teachers produced by a 'charming' climate, and impostures that
are holy truths! Above all, it escapes moral idiocy, and holds there is
a line between right and wrong! On the whole, it is, as yet, the only
theory which explains all the facts, the only one of which the
consequences may be logically accepted, which makes Christ or His
religion reasonable or possible.

M. Renan's 'beautiful' young Galilean carpenter, with such power over
'hallucinated' Magdalens, conducting grand picnics in that 'charming'
climate, and making life a May day, is not the world's mighty Deliverer;
and his miracle-mongering demagogue, claiming to be the Son of David in
lying genealogies, and the Son of God in blasphemous audacity, is not
the world's Teacher of all Truth and Righteousness. The new Jesus is a
poor substitute for the Divine Man whom we adore.

We cannot, therefore, accept the new theory. It is not logically
competent to the facts. Established on garbled evidence with painful
struggles, it will not, when completed, fulfil the conditions. It is not
reasonable. It is not moral. We have desired to present this view of it.
The details of criticism we leave to others, who can easily deal with M.
Renan. We have aimed to show, what any plain reader can see, the
unreasonableness and immorality of this theory of Christianity's origin.

As long as we have faith in a righteous God, so long can we never
believe that the best, purest, and holiest religion is born in fraud and
trickery. M. Renan's theory declares the purity and the holiness of
Christianity, and yet insists on the trickery and the fraud: therefore
we must reject his theory.

So long as we believe that a true God is _omnipotent_, we cannot believe
that fraud and deception are masters of the world. But M. Renan insists
that Christianity has mastered the world, and