when he wrote, and
implying that the story had been believed ever since, and received by
him (the writer) from those who had seen this Jesus, and that the fact
was so essential to the religion that it was itself called "the Gospel,"
a name continually given to the whole system of Christianity, and
moreover that he himself, when in company with others, had seen this
Jesus at noon-day, and, the history asserts, had been blinded by the
sight. Now let the reader recall to his mind any public man who died
twenty-five years ago, that is, in 1850, and imagine this man appearing,
not as a disembodied spirit, but in his resuscitated body to first one
of his friends, then to eleven or twelve, then to another, then to five
hundred persons at one time, and a flourishing and aggressive
institution founded upon this his appearance, and numbers of persons
giving up their property, and breaking with all their friends, and
adopting a new religion, and a new course of life of great self-denial,
and even encountering bitter persecution and death, simply because they
believed this man to be alive from the dead, and moreover some
professing to do miracles, and to confer the power of doing miracles in
the name and by the power of this risen man.

Let the reader, I say, try to imagine all this, and then he will be able
to judge of the credulity with which the author credits his readers when
he writes:--

"All history shows how rapidly pious memory exaggerates and
idealizes the traditions of the past, and simple actions might
readily be transformed into miracles as the narrative circulated, in
a period so prone to superstition, and so characterized by love of
the marvellous." (Vol. ii. p. 209.)

"All history," the author says; but why does he not give us a few
instances out of "all history," that we might compare them with this
Gospel account, and see if there was anything like it?

Such a story, if false, is not a myth. A myth is the slow growth of
falsehood through long ages, and this story of the Resurrection was
written circumstantially within twenty years of its promulgation, by one
who had been an unbeliever, and who had conferred with those who must
have been the original promoters of the falsehood, if it be one.

To call such a story a myth, is simply to shirk the odium of calling it
by its right name, or more probably to avoid having to meet the
astounding historical difficulty of supposing that men endured w