han that this universal frame was without a
mind," so I could sooner believe all those fables, than that minds
that can only produce Talmuds should have conceived such fictions as
the Gospel. I could as soon believe that some dull chronicler of the
Middle Ages composed Shakspeare's plays, or a ploughman had written
Paradise Lost; only that, to parallel the present case, we ought to
believe that four ploughmen wrote four Paradise Losts! Nay, I said,
I would as soon believe that most laughable theory of learned folly,
that the monks of the Middle Ages compiled all the classics! Nor could
it help me to say that it was Christians, not Jews, who compiled the
New Testament; for they must have been Jews before they were Christians:
and the twofold moral and intellectual problem comes back upon our
hands,--to imagine how the Jewish mind could have given birth to the
ideas of Christianity, or have embodied them in such a surpassing form.
And as to the intellectual part of the difficulty,--unhappily abundant
proof exists in Christian literature that the early Christians could as
little have manufactured such fictions as the Jews themselves! The
New Testament is not more different from the writings of Jews, or
superior to them, than it is different from the writings of the
Fathers, and superior to them. It stands alone, like the Peak of
Teneriffe. The Alps amidst the flats of Holland would not present a
greater contrast than the New Testament and the Fathers. And the further
we come down, the less capable morally, and nearly as incapable
intellectually, do the rapidly degenerating Christians appear, of
producing such a fiction as the New Testament; so that, if it be asked
whether it was not possible that some Christians of after times might
have forged these books, one must say with Paley, that they could not.

And by the by, gentlemen, said I, (interrupting my narrative, and
addressing the present company,) I may remind some of you who are
great admirers of Professor Newman, that he admits (as indeed all
must, who have had an opportunity of comparing them) the infinite
inferiority of the Fathers, though he does not attempt to account,
as surely he ought, for so singular a circumstance. He says in his
Phases: "On the whole, this reading [of the Apostolical Fathers]
greatly exalted my sense of the unapproachable greatness of the New
Testament. The moral chasm between it and the very earliest Christian
writers seemed to me so vast,