llustrate the
case. A man meets you who inquires in a hurried, suppose even in an
agitated way, whether you met a tall man, blind of one eye, dressed in
such a coloured dress, etc. Now, does it ever occur to you that the
inquirer is lying? Lying! Wherefore should he lie? Or again, if you say
that your house stands under a hill, that three out of four chimneys
smoke, and that you must indeed try some of the inventions for remedying
this annoyance, would any man in his senses think of speculating on the
possibility that all this should be a romance? Or, to come nearer in the
kind of fact, if a man represented his family fortune as having been
bequeathed by a maiden aunt in the last generation, would any man say
otherwise than that doubtless the man knew his own benefactors and
relatives best? On this same principle, when Christ was mentioned as the
divinity adored by a certain part of the Jews who were by way of
distinction called Christians, why should a Roman object? What motive
could he have for denying the existence or the divine existence of
Christ? Even the idea of dissent or schism, some Jews worshipping, some
protesting, would not much puzzle him. Something like it had occurred in
Pagan lands. Neptune and Athene had contended for Attica. And under the
slight inquiry which he would ever make, or listen to when made by
others, he might wonder at the rancour displayed by the protesting
party, but he would take it for granted that a divinity of some local
section had been unduly pushed into pre-eminence over a more strictly
epichorial divinity. He would go off with this notion, that whereas, the
elder Jews insisted on paying vows, etc., to a God called Jehovah, a
section sought to transfer that allegiance to a divinity called Christ.
If he were further pressed on the subject, he would fancy that very
possibly, as had been thought, found or imagined in the case of Syrian
deities or Egyptian, etc., that perhaps Christ might correspond to
Apollo, as Astarte to Diana, Neptune of Latium to the Poseidon of
Greece. But if not, that would cause no scruple at all. Thus far it was
by possibility a mere affair of verbal difference. But suppose it
ascertained that in no point of the symbols surrounding the worship of
Christ, or the conception of His person, He could be identified with any
previously-known Pagan God--that would only introduce Him into the
matricula of Gods as a positive novelty. Nor would it have startled a
Roman t