in contact with it,--who but Dr. Strauss can believe?
Was there no Dr. Strauss in those days? None to question and detect, as
the process went on, the utter baselessness of these legends? Was
all the world doting--was even the persecuting world asleep? Were all
mankind resolved on befooling themselves? Are men wont thus quietly to
admit miraculous pretensions, whether they be prejudiced votaries of
another system or sceptics as to all? No: whether we consider the age,
the country, the men assigned for the origin of these myths, we see the
futility of the theory. It does not account even for their invention,
much less for their success. We see that if any mythology could in such
an age have germinated at all, it must have been one very different from
Christianity; whether we consider the sort of Messiah the Jews expected,
or the hatred of all Jewish Messiahs, which the Gentiles could not but
have felt. The Christ offered them so far from being welcome, was to
the one a 'stumbling block' and to the other 'foolishness'; and yet he
conquered the prejudices of both.

Let us suppose a parallel myth--if we may abuse the name. Let us suppose
the son of some Canadian carpenter aspiring to be a moral teacher, but
neither working nor pretending to work miracles; as much hated by
his countrymen as Jesus Christ was hated by his, and both he and his
countrymen as much hated by all the civilised world beside, as were
Jesus Christ and the Jews: let us further suppose him forbidding his
followers the use of all force in propagating his doctrine's, and then
let us calculate the probability of an unnoticed and accidental deposit,
in thirty short years, of a prodigious accumulation about these simple
facts. of supernatural but universally accredited fables, these legends
escaping detection or suspicion as they accumulated, and suddenly laying
hold in a few years of myriads of votaries in all parts of both worlds,
and in three centuries uprooting and destroying Christianity and all
opposing systems! How long will it be before the Swedenborgian, or the
Mormonite, or any such pretenders, will have similar success? Have there
not been a thousand such, and has any one of them had the slightest
chance against systems in possession,--against the strongly rooted
prejudices of ignorance and the Argus-eyed investigations of scepticism?
But all these were opposed to the pretensions of Christianity; nor can
any one example of at all similar sudden succ