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power of God? The testimony of the man whom God authenticates, by
enabling him to do such miracles as those of Moses and of Christ, is
conclusive as to the power by which they are wrought. So you read in
Exodus iii. that God commissioned Moses to work miracles as signs of his
divine commission, and seals of his testimony recorded in the Bible.

If we proceed now to examine the facts of this history, it is evident,
that neither your reason or mine, nor our personal convictions, can be
any rule of what is true and valid. The most that reason can say about
history is, that the story seems probable; but so does any well-written
novel; or that it is improbable; but truth is often stranger than
fiction; and every genuine history relates wonderful events. Neither
does our personal knowledge enable us to tell what was the original
historical fact, how much was added by the Hebrew prejudices of Moses,
and which are the legends with which it was afterward adorned; for
neither you nor I were there to see. Nor can any two of those critics,
who have undertaken to divide the facts from the fables according to
their personal convictions of what is true and valid, agree upon any
common principle of gleaning, or in gathering in their results. And if
they could, the crop would not be worth barn-room; for the only
conclusion in which they seem at all likely to agree is, that the story
of creation in the beginning of the Book is a myth, like one of Ovid's
Metamorphoses; and that the prophecy of the resurrection, at the end, is
another; and that there are a great many legends in the middle. Now, if
so, why winnow such chaff?

But while the Jewish people exist as a distinct race, it is impossible
rationally to deny some extraordinary origin of their extraordinary
character and customs; and the Bible is the only history which pretends
to tell it. The utter failure of Rationalistic criticism to give any
rational account of the facts which must be admitted to account for the
existence of the Jews as a distinct people, is ludicrously apparent in
the attempts generally made to explain the miraculous narratives of the
Bible. The tree of good and evil was a poisonous plant, like the poison
oak, or the machineal tree, under which our first parents fell asleep,
and dreamed about the temptation, and the fall. The shining face of
Moses was the natural effect of electricity. Zechariah's vision was the
smoke of the lamps of the golden candlestick in t