tury. His idea of myths, however, may be supposed original; and he
is very welcome to it. For of all the attempted solutions of the
great problem, this will be hereafter regarded as, perhaps, the most
untenable. Gibbon, in solving the same problem, and starting in fact
from the same axioms,--for he too endeavoured to account for the
intractable phenomenon--on natural causes alone,--assigned, as one
cause, the reputation of working miracles, the reality of which he
denied; but he was far too cautious to decide whether the original
thunders of Christianity had pretended to work miracles, and had been
enabled to cheat the world into the belief of them, or whether the world
had been pleased universally to cheat itself into that belief. He was
far too wise to tie himself to the proof that in the most enlightened
period of the world's history--amidst the strongest contrarieties
of national and religious feeling--amidst the bitterest bigotry of
millions in behalf of what was old, and the bitterest contempt of
millions of all that was new--amidst the opposing forces of ignorance
and prejudice on the one hand and philosophy and scepticism on the
other--amidst all the persecutions which attested and proved those
hostile feelings on the part of the bulk of mankind--and above all, in
the short space of thirty years (which is all that Dr. Stauss allows
himself),--Christianity could be thus deposited, like the mythology
of Greece and Rome! These, he knew, were very gradual and silent
formations; originating in the midst of a remote antiquity and an
unhistoric age, during the very infancy and barbarism of the races which
adopted them, confined, be it remembered, to those races alone;
and displaying, instead of the exquisite and symmetrical beauty of
Christianity, those manifest signs of gradual accretion which were
fairly to be expected; in the varieties of the deposited or irrupted
substances--in the diffracted appearance of various parts--in the very
weather stains, so to speak, which mark the whole mass.

That the prodigious aggregate of miracles which the New Testament
asserts, would, if fabulous, pass unchallenged, elude all detection, and
baffle all scepticism.--collect in the course of a few years energetic
and zealous assertors of their reality, in the heart of every civilised
and almost every barbarous community, and in the course of three
centuries, change the face of the world and destroy every other myth
which fairly came