eserve the same inimitable marks of reality, truth, and
nature in their narrations--the miraculous and the ordinary alike--and
to assume and preserve, with infinite case, amidst their infinite
impostures, the tone and air of undissembled earnestness.+
____

* To Christ alone, of all the characters ever portrayed to man, belongs
that assemblage of qualities which equally attract love and veneration;
to him alone belong in perfection those rare traits which the Roman
historian, with affectionate flattery, attributes too absolutely to the
merely mortal object of his eulogy: 'Nec illi, quod est rarissimum aut
facilitas auctoritatem, aut severitas amorem, deminuit.' Still more
beautiful is the Apostles description of superiority to all Human
failings, with ineffable pity for human sorrows: 'He can be touched with
the feelings of our infirmities, though without sin.' + Was there ever
in truth a man who could read the appeals of Paul to his converts, and
doubt either that the letters were real or that the man was in earnest?
We scarcely venture to think it.
____

If, on the other hand, he supposes that all the congruities of which
we have spoken, were the effect not of fraudulent design, but of happy
accident,--that they arranged themselves in spontaneous harmony--he must
believe that chance has done what even the most prodigious powers of
invention could not do. And lastly, he must believe that these same
illiterate men, who were capable of so much, were also capable of
projecting a system of doctrine singularly remote from all ordinary and
previous speculation; of discerning the necessity of taking under their
special patronage those passive virtues which man least loved, and found
it must difficult to cultivate; and of exhibiting, in their preference
of the spiritual to the ceremonial, and their treatment of many of the
most delicate questions of practical ethics and casuistry, a justness
and elevation of sentiment as alien as possible from the superstition
and fanaticism of their predecessors who had corrupted the Law--and the
superstition and fanaticism of their followers very soon corrupted the
Gospel; and that they, and they alone, rose above the strong tendencies
to the extravagances which had been so conspicuous during the past,
and were soon to be as conspicuous in the future.--These and a thousand
other paradoxes (arising out of the supposition that Christianity is
the fraudulent or fictitious product of such an a