mistaken! how convincing!
His statements cannot be explained away: their whole tone, moreover,
is peculiar. On the contrary, the three first gospels contain much
that (after we see the writers to be credulous) must be judged
legendary.

The two first chapters of Matthew abound in dreams. Dreams? Was indeed
the "immaculate conception" merely told to Joseph in a _dream_? a
dream which not he only was to believe, but we also, when reported
to us by a person wholly unknown, who wrote 70 or 80 years after the
fact, and gives us no clue to his sources of information! Shall I
reply that he received his information by miracle? But why more than
Luke? and Luke evidently was conscious only of human information.
Besides, inspiration has not saved Matthew from error about demons;
and why then about Joseph's dream and its highly important contents?

In former days, I had never dared to let my thoughts dwell
inquisitively on the _star_, which the wise men saw in the East, and
which accompanied them, and pointed out the house where the young
child was. I now thought of it, only to see that it was a legend
fit for credulous ages; and that it must be rejected in common with
Herod's massacre of the children,--an atrocity unknown to Josephus.
How difficult it was to reconcile the flight into Egypt with the
narrative of Luke, I had known from early days: I now saw that it was
waste time to try to reconcile them.

But perhaps I might say:--"That the writers should make errors about
the _infancy_ of Jesus was natural; they were distant from the time:
but that will not justly impair the credit of events, to which they
may possibly have been contemporaries or even eye-witnesses."--How
then would this apply to the Temptation, at which certainly none of
them were present? Is it accident, that the same three, who abound
in the demoniacs, tell also the scene of the Devil and Jesuit on a
pinnacle of the temple; while the same John who omits the demoniacs,
omits also this singular story? It being granted that the writers are
elsewhere mistaken, to criticize the tale was to reject it.

In near connexion with this followed the discovery, that many other
miracles of the Bible are wholly deficient in that moral dignity,
which is supposed to place so great a chasm between them and
ecclesiastical writings. Why should I look with more respect on
the napkins taken from Paul's body (Acts xix. 12), than on
pocket-handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of mart