reject Christianity altogether;
and regard the New Testament, and speak of it, exactly as they would of
Homer's 'Iliad,' or Virgil's 'Aeneid.' Such men, consistently enough,
trouble themselves not at all in ascertaining what residuum of truth,
historical or critical, may remain in a book which certainly gives
ten falsehoods for one truth, and welds both together in inextricable
confusion. The German infidels, on the other hand, with infinite labour,
and amidst infinite uncertainties, extract either truth 'as old as the
creation,' and as universal as human reason,--or truth which, after
being hidden from the world for eighteen hundred years in mythical
obscurity, is unhappily lost again the moment it is discovered, in the
infinitely deeper darkness of the philosophy of Hegel and Strauss; who
in vain endeavour to gasp out, in articulate language, the still
latent mystery of the Gospel! Hegel, in his last hours, is said to have
said,--and if he did not say, he ought to have said,--'Alas! there is
but one man in all Germany who understands my doctrine,--and he does not
understand it!' And yet, by his account, Hegelianism and Christianity,
'in their highest results,' [language, as usual, felicitously obscure]
'are one.' Both, therefore, are, alas! now for ever lost.

That great problem--to account for the origin and establishment Of
Christianity in the world, with a denial at the same time of its
miraculous pretensions--a problem, the fair solution of which is
obviously incumbent on infidelity--has necessitated the most gratuitous
and even contradictory hypotheses, and may safely be said still to
present as hard a knot as ever. The favourite hypothesis, recently, has
been that of Strauss--frequently re-modified and re-adjusted indeed by
himself--that Christianity is a myth, or collection of myths--that is,
a conglomerate (as geologists would say) of a very slender portion
of facts and truth, with an enormous accretion of undesigned fiction,
fable, and superstitions; gradually framed and insensibly received, like
the mythologies of Greece and Rome, or the ancient systems of Hindoo
theology. It is true, indeed, that the particular critical arguments,
the alleged historic discrepancies and so forth, on which this author
founds his conclusion--are for the most part, not original; most of
them having been insisted on before, both in Germany, and especially
in our own country during the Deistical controversies of the preceding
cen