as a fine beginning for an ingenuous neophyte, who was eager
to be fully initiated in infidel theology!

It set me to examine the miracles themselves, and the evidence
for them.

"They were the simple result of fraud practising upon simplicity,"
said one of the genuine descendants of Bolingbroke and Tindal.

I pondered over it a good deal. At last I said one day to another
infidel acquaintance, "You ask me to believe that the miraculous
events of the New Testament were contrivances of fraud; which, though
ventured upon in the very eyes of those who were interested in
detecting them, who must have been prejudiced against them, nay, the
majority of whom (as the events show) were determined, whether they
detected them or not, not to believe those who wrought them,
were yet successfully practised, not only on the deluded disciples
of the impostors, but on their unbelieving persecutors, who admitted
them to be miracles, only of Beelzebub's performing. I really know
not how to believe it. As I look at the general history of religion,
I see that this open-day appeal to miracles--especially such as
raising the dead--among prejudiced spectators interested in
unmasking them is, if unsupported by truth, just the thing under
which a religious enterprise inevitably fails."

I reminded him that the French prophets in England got on pretty
well till their unlucky attempt to raise the dead, when the bubble
burst instantly; that for this reason the more astute impostors have
refrained from any pretensions of the kind, from Mahomet downwards;
(How discreetly cautious, again, have the Mormonites been on this point!)
that the miracles they professed to have wrought were conveniently
wrought in secret, on the safe theatre of their mental consciousness;
or that they were reserved for times when their disciples were
predetermined to believe them, because they were cordial believers
already in the religion which appealed to them! I said nothing of the
unlikelihood of the instruments--Galilean Jews--whom the theory invests
with such superhuman powers of deception; or of the prodigious
intellect and lofty ambition with which it also so liberally endows
these obscure vagabonds, who not only conceived, in spite of their
narrow-hearted Jewish bigotry, such a system as Christianity, but
proclaimed their audacious resolve of establishing it on the ruins
of every other religion,--Jewish or Heathen. I said nothing of the
still stranger moral attri