h truth be said that the reader is seldom fortunate
enough to know that he knows his meaning, or even to know that Hegel
knew his own.
____

* Daub naively enough declares that, if you except all that relates
to angels, demons, and miracle, there is scarcely any mythology in the
Gospel.' An exception which reminds one of the Irish prelate who, on
reading 'Gulliver's Travels,' remarked that there were some things in
that book which he could not think true.
____

Whether, then, we regard the original compilers of the evangelic records
as inventing all that Paulus or Strauss rejects, or sincerely believing
their own delusions, or that their statements have been artfully
corrupted or unconsciously disguised, till Christ and his Apostles are
as effectually transformed and travestied as these dreamers are pleased
to imagine, with what consistency can we believe any thing certain
amidst so many acknowledged fictions inseparably incorporated with them?
If A has told B truth once and falsehood fifty times, (wittingly or
unwittingly,) what can induce B to believe that he has any reason to
believe A in that only time in which he does believe him, unless he
knows the same truth by evidence quite independent of A, and for
which he is not indebted to him at all? Should we not, then, at once
acknowledge the futility of attempting to educe any certain historic
fact, however meagre, or any doctrine, whether intelligible or obscure,
from documents nine tenths of which are to be rejected as a tissue of
absurd fictions? Or why should we not fairly confess that, for aught
we can tell, the whole is a fiction? For certainly, as to the amount of
historic fact which these men affect to leave, it is obviously a matter
of the most trivial importance whether we regard the whole Bible as
absolute fiction or not. Whether an obscure Galilean teacher, who taught
a moral system which may have been as good (we can never know from
such corrupt documents that it was as good) as that of Confucius, or
Zoroaster, ever lived or not; and whether we are to add another name to
those who have enunciated the elementary truths of ethics, is really of
very little moment. Upon their principles we can clearly know nothing
about him except that he is the centre of a vast mass of fictions, the
invisible nucleus of a huge conglomerate of myths. A thousand times
more, therefore, do we respect those, as both more honest and more
logical, who, on similar grounds, openly