One; behold him who
dies, who is raised again, who mounts into the heavens I Believe in this
Christ! In his death, his resurrection, man is justified before God!'+

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* The main objection, both with the old and the new forms of infidelity,
is, that against the miracles; the main argument with both, those which
attempt to show their antecedent impossibility; and criticism directed
against the credulity of the records which contain them. The principal
difference is, that modern infidelity shrinks from the coarse imputation
of fraud and imposture on the founders of Christianity; and prefers the
theory of illusion or myth to that of deliberate fraud. But with this
exception, which touches only the personal character of the founders
of Christianity, the case remains the same. The same postulates and the
same arguments are made to yield substantially the same conclusion.
For, all that is supernatural in Christianity and all credibility in
its records, vanish equally on either assumption. Nor is even the modern
mode of interpreting many of the miracles (as illusions or legends)
unknown to the older infidelity; only it more consistently felt that
neither the one theory nor the other, could be trusted to alone. Velis
et remis was its motto. + Such is Quinet's brief statement of Strauss's
mystico-mythical Christiantity, founded on the Hegelian philosophy.
For a fuller, we dare not say a more intelligible, account of it in
Strauss's own words, and the metaphysical mysteries on which it depends,
the reader may consult Dr. Beard's translation;--pp. 44, 45. of his
Essay entitled 'Strauss, Hegel, and their Opinions.
____

Whether it be the Rationalism of Paulus, or the Rationalism of
Strauss--whether that which declares all that is supernatural in
Christianity (forming the bulk of its history) to be illusion, or that
which declares it myth,--the conclusions can be made out only by a
system of interpretation which can be compared to nothing but the
wildest dreams and allegorical systems of some of the early Fathers#;
while the results themselves are either those elementary principles of
ethics for which there was no need to invoke a revelation at all,
or some mystico-metaphysical philosophy, expressed in language as
unintelligible as the veriest gibberish of the Alexandrian Platonists.
In fact, by such exegesis and by such philosophy, any thing may be made
out of any thing; and the most fantastical data be compelled to yield
eq