, that our judgment to this effect cannot be
reasonably overborne by the "universal consent" of Christendom.--Thus
far we are dealing _a priori_, which here fully satisfies me: in such
an argument I need no _a posteriori_ evidence to arrive at my own
conclusion. Nevertheless, I am met by taunts and clamour, which are
not meant to be indecent, but which to my feeling are such. My critics
point triumphantly to the four gospels, and demand that I will make a
personal attack on a character which they revere, even when they know
that I cannot do so without giving great offence. Now if any one were
to call my old schoolmaster, or my old parish priest, a perfect and
universal Model, and were to claim that I would entitle him Lord, and
think of him as the only true revelation of God; should I not be
at liberty to say, without disrespect, that "I most emphatically
deprecate such extravagant claims for him"? Would this justify an
outcry, that I will publicly avow _what_ I judge to be his defects of
character, and will _prove_ to all his admirers that he was a sinner
like other men? Such a demand would be thought, I believe, highly
unbecoming and extremely unreasonable. May not my modesty, or my
regard for his memory, or my unwillingness to pain his family,
be accepted as sufficient reasons for silence? or would any one
scoffingly attribute my reluctance to attack him, to my conscious
inability to make good my case against his being "God manifest in
the flesh"? Now what, if one of his admirers had written panegyrical
memorials of him; and his character, therein described, was so
faultless, that a stranger to him was not able to descry any moral
defeat whatever in it? Is such a stranger bound to believe him to be
the Divine Standard of morals, unless he can put his finger on certain
passages of the book which imply weaknesses and faults? And is it
insulting a man, to refuse to worship him? I utterly protest against
every such pretence. As I have an infinitely stronger conviction
that Shakespeare was not in _intellect_ Divinely and Unapproachably
perfect, than that I can certainly point out in him some definite
intellectual defect; as, moreover, I am vastly more sure that Socrates
was _morally_ imperfect, than that I am able to censure him rightly;
so also, a disputant who concedes to me that Jesus is a mere man, has
no right to claim that I will point out some moral flaw in him, or
else acknowledge him to be a Unique Unparalleled Di