--could such men, I said, have created such fictions as those of the New
Testament,--reached such elevated sentiments, or conveyed them in
perfectly original forms, embodied truth so sublime in a style so simple?
Throughout those writings is a peculiar tone which belongs to no other
compositions of man. While the individuality of the writers not lost,
there are still peculiarities which pervade the whole, and have, as I
think, justly been called a Scripture style. One of their most striking
characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform
freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment,
the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of
volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since.
Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have
invented those extraordinary fictions,--the miracles and the parables?
Could they, in spite of their gross ignorance, have so interwoven the
fictitious and the historical as to make the fiction let into the
history seem a natural part of it? Could they, above all, have conceived
the daring, but glorious, project of embodying and dramatizing the
ideal of the system they inculcated in the person of Christ? And yet
they have succeeded, though choosing to attempt the wonderful task in
a life full of unearthly incidents, which they have somehow wrought
into an exquisite harmony! But even if one such man in such an age
and nation could have been found equal to all this, could we, I argued,
believe that several (with undeniable individual varieties of manner)
were capable of working into the picture similarly unique, but
different materials, with similar success, and of reproducing the same
portrait, in varying posture and attitude, of the great Moral Idea?
Could we believe that, in achieving this task, not one, but several,
were intellectual magicians enough to solve that great problem of
producing compositions in a form independent of language,--of laying
on colors which do not fade by time; so that while Homer, Shakspeare,
Milton, suffer grievous wrong the moment their thoughts are transferred
into another tongue, these men should have written so that their
wonderful narrative naturally adapts itself to every dialect under
heaven?

These intellectual anomalies, I confessed,--if these had been all,--
staggered me. As Lord Bacon said that he would sooner believe "all the
fables of the Talmud, t