n, it was the reverse,
he could not, he said, imagine, that, in that or any other age, any men,
especially men opposed to such pretensions, would so easily have been
satisfied, even had the Apostles confined themselves to rumors of
alleged distant miracles; but much less where similar wonders were said
to have been brought under the eyes of the very parties to whom the
appeal was made! He said he would even go a step further, and affirm that,
under the circumstances of the professed notoriety of the miraculous
occurrences to which Paul and the other Apostles appealed, any
declaration that they had instituted that careful scrutiny of evidence,
that minute circumstantial cross-examination of the witnesses,--which
would be a course all very well in the days of Paley, eighteen hundred
years after, but absolutely preposterous then,--would have appeared to
our age a much more suspicious thing than the tone actually adopted;
that the scrupulous deposition of technical proof would have been
finessing too much, and would have been the strongest proof of collusion.
The very tone objected to, he said, supposing there were no miracles, is
one of the most striking proofs of the astonishing sagacity of these
men; for it is just the tone they would have used if there had been. So
differently may men reason from the same data! Whether (he concluded)
Mr. Newman's view of the facts, or his, was founded on a deeper and more
comprehensive knowledge of human nature, he must leave to my judgment."

"I protest," said I, "I think the orthodox had the best of it. But what
struck you next as unaccountable in Mr. Newman's view of this subject
of a future life?"

"I confess, then, that the reasoning by which he endeavors to show
that, even admitting the fact of Christ's resurrection, there could
be nothing in it to warrant the expectation of the resurrection of
any other human beings, simply because he must have differed so
stupendously from all the rest of mankind, appears to me very damaging
to us. Of what use is it, to argue upon such an hypothesis?"

"Of none in the world, certainly," said I, laughing.

"Surely not," he replied; "for if Christ's resurrection be admitted, we
know very well it will carry with it, in the estimation of the bulk of
mankind, all the other great facts implicated with the Christian system.
They will concede, at once, the supernatural character, the divine
origin, of the New Testament. I suppose them scarcely ever w