last. For my part, I see clearly, on
this theory, that either the Apostles or their commentators were the
most crazy, addle-headed wretches in the world. Either Paulus of Tarsus
or Paulus of Heidelberg was certainly cracked: I believe the last. No,
my friend; depend upon it that the Gospels consist of a number of
fictions,--many of them very beautiful,--invented, I am inclined to
believe, for a very pious purpose, by highly imaginative minds."

This sat me thinking again. And, in time, my doubts, as usual, assumed
a determinate shape, and I hastened to another oracle of infidelity in
hopes of a solution.

If the New Testament be supposed a series of fictions, I argued,--the
work of highly imaginative minds for a pious purposes--there is perhaps
a slight moral anomaly in the case (but I do not insist upon it): I mean
that of supposing pious men writing fictions which they evidently wish to
impose on the world as simple history, and which they must have known
would, if received at all, be actually regarded as such; as, in fact,
they have been. I do not quite understand how pious men should thus
endeavor to cheat men into virtue, nor inculcate sanctity and truth
through the medium of deliberate fraud and falsehood. But let that pass;
perhaps one could forgive it. Other anomalies, far more inexplicable,
strike me. That Galilean Jews (such as the history of the time represents
them), with all their national and inveterate prejudices,--wedded not
more to the law of Moses than to their own corruptions of it, bigoted
and exclusive beyond all the nations that ever existed, eaten up with
the most beggarly superstitions,--should rise to the moral grandeur,
the nobility of sentiment, the catholicity of spirit, which characterize
the Gospel, and, above all, to such an ideal as Jesus Christ,--this is
a moral anomaly, which is to me incomprehensible: the improbability of
Christianity having its natural origin in such a source is properly
measured by the hatred of the Jews against it, both then and through
all time. I said I could as little understand the intellectual anomalies
of such a theory. Could men, among the most ignorant of a nation sunk
in that gross and puerile superstition of which the New Testament itself
presents a true picture, and which is reflected in the Jewish literature
of that age, and ever since,--a nation whose master minds then and ever
since (think of that!) have given us only such stuff as fills the Talmud,