ng whatever light
is thrown on the question by all the theories together.' He therefore
proposes, with great and gratuitous liberality, to heap all these
theories together, and to take them as they are wanted; not withholding
any of the wonders of modern science--even, as would seem, the possible
knowledge of 'chloroform' (PP. 104.. 86, 87.)--from the propagators of
Christianity!

But, alas! the phenomena are still intractable. The stubborn 'Book' will
still baffle all such efforts to explain it away; it is willing to be
rejected, if it so pleases men, but it guards itself from being
thus made a fool of. For who can fail to see that neither all or any
considerable part of the multifarious miracles of the New Testament can
be explained by any such gratuitous extension of ingenious fancies;
and that if they could be so explained, it would be still impossible
to exculpate the men who need such explanations from the charge of
perpetuating the grossest frauds! Yet this logical ostrich, who
am digest all these stones, presumptuously declares a miracle an
impossibility and the very notion of it a contradiction.* But enough of
Mr. Foxton.

____

* Mr. Foxton denies that men, in Paley's 'single case in which he
tries the general theorem,' would believe the miracle; but he finds
it convenient to leave out the most significant circumstances on which
Paley makes the validity of the testimony to depend, instead of stating
them fairly in Paley's own words. Yet that the sceptics (if such there
could be) must be the merest fraction of the species, Mr. Foxton himself
immediately proceeds to prove by showing what is undeniably the case)
that almost all mankind readily receive miraculous occurrences on far
lower evidence than Paley's common sense would require them to demand.
Surely he must be related to the Irishman who placed his ladder against
the bough he was cutting off. I

____

There are no doubt some minds amongst us, whose power we admit, and
whose perversion of power we lament, who have bewildered themselves by
really deep meditation on inexplicable mysteries; who demand certainty
where certainty is not given to man, or demand for truths which are
established by sufficient evidence, other evidence than those truths
will admit. We can even painfully sympathise in that ordeal of doubt
which such powerful minds are peculiarly exposed--with their Titanic
struggles against the still mightier power of Him who has said to the