The Eclipse of Faith Part 15

It was the distractions with regard to the evidences of Christianity that ruined me; and at last condemned me to be a Christian.

I was first troubled, like so many in our day, about the miracles. I could hardly bring my mind to believe them. One day, talking with a jovial fellow whom I casually met (not of very strong mind indeed, but who made up for it by very strong pa.s.sions) over the improbability of such occurrences, he exclaimed, as he mixed his third gla.s.s of brandy and water, "I only wonder how any one can be such a fool as to believe in any stuff of that sort? Do you think that, if the miracles had been really wrought, there could have been any doubters of Christianity?"

He tossed off the brandy and water with a triumphant air; and I quite forgot his argument in compa.s.sion for his b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. I expostulated with him. "You may spare your breath, Mr. Solomon," said he. "May this be my poison (as it will be my poison)," mixing a fourth gla.s.s, "if I need any sermons on the subject. Hark ye,--I am perfectly convinced that the habit I am chained to will be the destruction of health, of reputation, of my slender means,--will reduce to beggary and starvation my wife and children,--and yet," drinking again, "I know I shall never leave it off."

"Good heavens!" said I. "Why, you seem as plainly convinced of the infatuation of your conduct as if miracle had been wrought to convince you of it.

"I am." he said, unthinkingly; "ten thousand miracles could not make it plainer; so you may 'spare your breath to cool your porridge,' and preach to one who is not already in the condemned cell."

I was exceedingly shocked; but I thought within myself,--It appears, then, that man may act against convictions, as strong as any that a miracle could produce. It is clear there are no LIMITS to the perversity with which a depraved will and pa.s.sions can overrule evidence, even where it is admitted by the reason to be invincible.

It does not follow, then, that a miracle (which cannot present conclusions more clear) must triumph over them. If the pa.s.sions can defy the understanding, where it coolly acknowledges they cannot pervert the evidence, how much more easily may they cajole it to suggest doubts of the evidence itself! And what more easy than in relation to miracles? Such a phenomenon might from novelty produce a transient impression; but that would pa.s.s away, just as the vivid feelings sometimes excited by a sudden escape from death pa.s.s away; the half-roused debauchee resumes his old career, just as if he had never looked over the brink of eternity and shuddered with horror as he gazed. He who had seen a miracle might very soon, and probably would, if he did not like the doctrine it was to confirm, persuade himself that it was an illusion of his senses, for they have deceived him; unless, indeed, he saw a new miracle every day, and then he would be certain to get used to it. How much more easily could the Jews do this, who both hated the doctrine of Him who taught, and, not thinking miracles impossible, could conveniently refer them to Beelzebub!

I felt, therefore, that the brandy and water logic had perfectly convinced me that this was far too precarious ground on which to conclude that the miracles of the New Testament had been wrought.

I was further confirmed in my convictions of the illogical nature of all a priori views on the subject, by the whimsical differences of opinion among my infidel friends.

One told me that it was plain that miracles were "incredible," and "impossible," per se; but he was immediately contradicted by a second, who said that he really could not see any thing incredible or impossible about them; that all that was wanting to make them credible was sufficient evidence, which perhaps had in no case been given.

A third said, that it was of little consequence; that no miracle could prove a moral truth; and; taking a view just the opposite to that of my first acquaintance, swore that, if he saw a score of miracles, he should not be a bit the more inclined to believe in the authority of a religion authenticated by them.

Here was a fine beginning for an ingenuous neophyte, who was eager to be fully initiated in infidel theology!

It set me to examine the miracles themselves, and the evidence for them.

"They were the simple result of fraud practising upon simplicity,"

said one of the genuine descendants of Bolingbroke and Tindal.

I pondered over it a good deal. At last I said one day to another infidel acquaintance, "You ask me to believe that the miraculous events of the New Testament were contrivances of fraud; which, though ventured upon in the very eyes of those who were interested in detecting them, who must have been prejudiced against them, nay, the majority of whom (as the events show) were determined, whether they detected them or not, not to believe those who wrought them, were yet successfully practised, not only on the deluded disciples of the impostors, but on their unbelieving persecutors, who admitted them to be miracles, only of Beelzebub's performing. I really know not how to believe it. As I look at the general history of religion, I see that this open-day appeal to miracles--especially such as raising the dead--among prejudiced spectators interested in unmasking them is, if unsupported by truth, just the thing under which a religious enterprise inevitably fails."

I reminded him that the French prophets in England got on pretty well till their unlucky attempt to raise the dead, when the bubble burst instantly; that for this reason the more astute impostors have refrained from any pretensions of the kind, from Mahomet downwards; (How discreetly cautious, again, have the Mormonites been on this point!) that the miracles they professed to have wrought were conveniently wrought in secret, on the safe theatre of their mental consciousness; or that they were reserved for times when their disciples were predetermined to believe them, because they were cordial believers already in the religion which appealed to them! I said nothing of the unlikelihood of the instruments--Galilean Jews--whom the theory invests with such superhuman powers of deception; or of the prodigious intellect and lofty ambition with which it also so liberally endows these obscure vagabonds, who not only conceived, in spite of their narrow-hearted Jewish bigotry, such a system as Christianity, but proclaimed their audacious resolve of establis.h.i.+ng it on the ruins of every other religion,--Jewish or Heathen. I said nothing of the still stranger moral attributes with which it invests them, (in spite of their being such odious tricksters, in spite of all their grovelling notions and exclusive prejudices,) as the teachers of a singularly elevated and catholic morality; what is still stranger as suffering for it,--strangest of all, as apparently practising it. I said nothing of what is still more wonderful, their acting this inconsistent part from motives we cannot a.s.sign or even imagine; their encountering obloquy, persecution, death, in the prosecution of their object, whatever it was. I said nothing of the innumerable and one would think inimitable, traits of nature and sincerity in the narrative of those who record these miracles, and which, if simulated by such liars, would be almost a miracle itself; a narrative, in which majestic indifference to human criticism is everywhere exhibited; in which are no apologies for the extraordinary stories told, no attempt to conciliate prejudice, no embellishment, no invectives (as Pascal says) against the persecutors of Christ himself;--they are simple witnesses, and nothing more, and are seemingly indifferent whether men despise them or not. I repeat, I said nothing of all these paradoxes; I insisted that the mere fact of the successful machination of false miracles, of such a nature, at so many points, in open day, in defiance of every motive and prejudice which must have prompted the world to unmask the cheat,--of a conspiracy successfully prosecuted, not by one, but by many conspirators, whose fort.i.tude, obstinacy, and circ.u.mspection, both when acting together and acting alone, never allowed them to betray themselves,--was, per se, incredible; "and yet," said I to my friend, "you ask me to believe it?"

"I ask you to believe it?" cried he, in surprise which equalled my own. "I am not fool enough ask you to believe any thing of the kind: and they are fools who do. The miracles fraudulent machinations!

no, no, it was, as you say, evidently impossible. And where shall we look for marks of simplicity and truthfulness, if not in the records which contain them. The fact is." said he (I should mention that it was just about the time that the system of "naturalism" was culminating under the auspices of Paulus of Heidelberg, from whom, at second hand, my infidel friend borrowed as much as he wanted),--"the fact is, that the compilers of the New Testament were pious, simple-minded, excellent enthusiasts, who sincerely, but not the less falsely, mistook natural phenomena for supernatural miracles.

What more easy than to suppose people dead when they were not, and who were merely recovered from a swoon or trance? than to imagine the blind, deaf, or dumb to be miraculously healed, when in fact they were cured by medical skill? than to fancy the blaze of a flambeau to be a star, and to shape thunder into articulate speech, and so on?

Christ was no miracle-worker, but he was a capital doctor."

I pondered over this "natural" explanation for a long time. At last I ventured to express to a third infidel friend my dissatisfaction with it. "Not only," said I, "is such a perpetual and felicitous genius for gross blundering, such absolute craziness of credulity, in strange contrast with the intellectual and moral elevation which the New Testament writers everywhere evince, and especially in the conception of that Ideal of Excellence which even those who reject all that is supernatural in Christianity acknowledge to be so sublime a masterpiece,--in whose discourses the most admirable ethics are ill.u.s.trated, and in whose life they are still more divinely dramatized,--not only is such ludicrous madness of fanaticism at variance with the tone of sobriety and simplicity everywhere traceable; but,--what is more,--when I reflect on the number and grossness of these supposed illusions, I find it hard to imagine how to image how even individual could have been honestly stupid enough to be beguiled by them, and utterly impossible to suppose that a number of men should on many occasions have been simultaneously thus befooled! But, what is much more, how can those who must often have managed the phenomena which were thus misinterpreted into miracles,--how, especially, can the great Physician himself, who knew that he was only playing the doctor, be supposed honestly to have allowed the simple-minded followers to persist in so strange an error? Either he, or they, or both, must, one would think, have been guilty of the grossest frauds. But the mere number and simultaneity of such strange illusions, under such a variety of circ.u.mstances, render it impossible to receive this hypothesis. I cannot see, I said, that it is so very easy for a number of men to have been continually mistaking 'flambeaux' for 'stars,' 'thunder'

for 'human speech,' and 'Roman soldiers' for 'angels.'"

My friend laughed outright. "I should think it is not easy, indeed!"

he exclaimed, "especially that last. For my part, I see clearly, on this theory, that either the Apostles or their commentators were the most crazy, addle-headed wretches in the world. Either Paulus of Tarsus or Paulus of Heidelberg was certainly cracked: I believe the last. No, my friend; depend upon it that the Gospels consist of a number of fictions,--many of them very beautiful,--invented, I am inclined to believe, for a very pious purpose, by highly imaginative minds."

This sat me thinking again. And, in time, my doubts, as usual, a.s.sumed a determinate shape, and I hastened to another oracle of infidelity in hopes of a solution.

If the New Testament be supposed a series of fictions, I argued,--the work of highly imaginative minds for a pious purposes--there is perhaps a slight moral anomaly in the case (but I do not insist upon it): I mean that of supposing pious men writing fictions which they evidently wish to impose on the world as simple history, and which they must have known would, if received at all, be actually regarded as such; as, in fact, they have been. I do not quite understand how pious men should thus endeavor to cheat men into virtue, nor inculcate sanct.i.ty and truth through the medium of deliberate fraud and falsehood. But let that pa.s.s; perhaps one could forgive it. Other anomalies, far more inexplicable, strike me. That Galilean Jews (such as the history of the time represents them), with all their national and inveterate prejudices,--wedded not more to the law of Moses than to their own corruptions of it, bigoted and exclusive beyond all the nations that ever existed, eaten up with the most beggarly superst.i.tions,--should rise to the moral grandeur, the n.o.bility of sentiment, the catholicity of spirit, which characterize the Gospel, and, above all, to such an ideal as Jesus Christ,--this is a moral anomaly, which is to me incomprehensible: the improbability of Christianity having its natural origin in such a source is properly measured by the hatred of the Jews against it, both then and through all time. I said I could as little understand the intellectual anomalies of such a theory. Could men, among the most ignorant of a nation sunk in that gross and puerile superst.i.tion of which the New Testament itself presents a true picture, and which is reflected in the Jewish literature of that age, and ever since,--a nation whose master minds then and ever since (think of that!) have given us only such stuff as fills the Talmud, --could such men, I said, have created such fictions as those of the New Testament,--reached such elevated sentiments, or conveyed them in perfectly original forms, embodied truth so sublime in a style so simple?

Throughout those writings is a peculiar tone which belongs to no other compositions of man. While the individuality of the writers not lost, there are still peculiarities which pervade the whole, and have, as I think, justly been called a Scripture style. One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since.

Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary fictions,--the miracles and the parables?

Could they, in spite of their gross ignorance, have so interwoven the fict.i.tious and the historical as to make the fiction let into the history seem a natural part of it? Could they, above all, have conceived the daring, but glorious, project of embodying and dramatizing the ideal of the system they inculcated in the person of Christ? And yet they have succeeded, though choosing to attempt the wonderful task in a life full of unearthly incidents, which they have somehow wrought into an exquisite harmony! But even if one such man in such an age and nation could have been found equal to all this, could we, I argued, believe that several (with undeniable individual varieties of manner) were capable of working into the picture similarly unique, but different materials, with similar success, and of reproducing the same portrait, in varying posture and att.i.tude, of the great Moral Idea?

Could we believe that, in achieving this task, not one, but several, were intellectual magicians enough to solve that great problem of producing compositions in a form independent of language,--of laying on colors which do not fade by time; so that while Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, suffer grievous wrong the moment their thoughts are transferred into another tongue, these men should have written so that their wonderful narrative naturally adapts itself to every dialect under heaven?

These intellectual anomalies, I confessed,--if these had been all,-- staggered me. As Lord Bacon said that he would sooner believe "all the fables of the Talmud, than that this universal frame was without a mind," so I could sooner believe all those fables, than that minds that can only produce Talmuds should have conceived such fictions as the Gospel. I could as soon believe that some dull chronicler of the Middle Ages composed Shakspeare's plays, or a ploughman had written Paradise Lost; only that, to parallel the present case, we ought to believe that four ploughmen wrote four Paradise Losts! Nay, I said, I would as soon believe that most laughable theory of learned folly, that the monks of the Middle Ages compiled all the cla.s.sics! Nor could it help me to say that it was Christians, not Jews, who compiled the New Testament; for they must have been Jews before they were Christians: and the twofold moral and intellectual problem comes back upon our hands,--to imagine how the Jewish mind could have given birth to the ideas of Christianity, or have embodied them in such a surpa.s.sing form.

And as to the intellectual part of the difficulty,--unhappily abundant proof exists in Christian literature that the early Christians could as little have manufactured such fictions as the Jews themselves! The New Testament is not more different from the writings of Jews, or superior to them, than it is different from the writings of the Fathers, and superior to them. It stands alone, like the Peak of Teneriffe. The Alps amidst the flats of Holland would not present a greater contrast than the New Testament and the Fathers. And the further we come down, the less capable morally, and nearly as incapable intellectually, do the rapidly degenerating Christians appear, of producing such a fiction as the New Testament; so that, if it be asked whether it was not possible that some Christians of after times might have forged these books, one must say with Paley, that they could not.

And by the by, gentlemen, said I, (interrupting my narrative, and addressing the present company,) I may remind some of you who are great admirers of Professor Newman, that he admits (as indeed all must, who have had an opportunity of comparing them) the infinite inferiority of the Fathers, though he does not attempt to account, as surely he ought, for so singular a circ.u.mstance. He says in his Phases: "On the whole, this reading [of the Apostolical Fathers]

greatly exalted my sense of the unapproachable greatness of the New Testament. The moral chasm between it and the very earliest Christian writers seemed to me so vast, as only to be accounted for by the doctrine ..... that the New Testament was dictated by the immediate action of the Holy Spirit." (Phases, p. 25.)

But to resume the statement of my early difficulties. I felt that the anomalies involved in the theory of the fict.i.tious origin of the New Testament were almost endless; I said that, however hard to believe that any men, much less such men as Jews of that age, were capable of such achievements as I had already specified, I must believe much more still; for the men, with all their wisdom, were fools enough to make their enterprise infinitely more hazardous,--by intrusting the execution of it to a league of many minds, thus multiplying indefinitely their chances of contradiction; by adopting every kind and style of composition, full of reciprocal allusions; and, above all, by dovetailing their fabrications into true history, thus encountering a perpetual danger of collision between the two; all as if to acc.u.mulate upon their task every difficulty which ingenuity could devise! Could I believe that such men as those to whom history restricts the problem had been able, while thus giving every advantage to the detection of imposture, to invent a narrative so infinitely varied in form and style, composed by so many different hands, traversing, in such diversified ways, contemporary characters and events, involving names of places, dates, and numberless specialities of circ.u.mstance, and yet maintain a general harmony of so peculiar a kind, such a callida junctura of these most heterogeneous materials, as to have imposed on the bulk of readers in all ages an impression of their artless truth and innocence, and that they were writing facts, and not fictions? Above all, could they be capable of fabricating those deeply-latent coincidences, which, if fraud employed them, overreached fraud itself; lying so deep as to be undiscovered for nearly eighteen centuries, and only recently attracting the attention of the world in consequence of the objections of infidels themselves? We know familiarly enough, that to sustain any verisimilitude in a fict.i.tious history (even though only one man has the manufacture of it) is almost impossible, because the relations of fact that must be antic.i.p.ated and provided against are so infinitely various, that the writer is certain to betray himself.

The constant detection of very limited fabrications of a similar nature, when evidence is sifted in a court of justice, shows us the impossibility of weaving a plausible texture of this kind.

Many things are sure to have been forgotten which ought to have been remembered. If this be the case, even where one mind has the fabrication of the whole, how much more would it be the case if many minds were engaged in the conspiracy? Should we not expect, at the very least, the hesitating, suspicious, self-betraying tone usual in all such cases? Could we expect that general air of truth which so undeniably prevails throughout the New Testament,--the inimitable tone of nature, earnestness, and frank sincerity, which, in the case of such extravagant forgeries, would alone be marvellous traits? But, at all events, could we expect those minute coincidences, which lay too deep for the eye of all ordinary readers, and would never have been discovered had not infidelity provoked Paley and others to excavate those subterranean galleries in which they are found?

And here again I interrupted my narrative to remark, that Professor Newman acknowledges the force of these coincidences, and, as usual, gives no account of them. He says of the Horae Paulinae, in his "Phases": "This book greatly enlarged my mind as to the resources of historical criticism. Previously my sole idea of criticism was that of the discreet discernment of style; but I now began to understand what powerful argument rose out of combinations; and the very complete establishment which this work gives to the narrative concerning Paul in the latter half of the Acts appeared to me to reflect critical honor on the whole New Testament." (Phases, p. 23.)

But once more to resume my statement. Upon mentioning these and such like considerations to my infidel friend, who pleaded, that the New Testament was fiction, he replied. "As to the harmony in these fictions, --if they be such,--you acknowledge that it is not absolute: that are discrepancies."

Yes, I said, there are discrepancies, I admit; and I was about to mention that as another difficulty in the way of my reception of his theory: I refer to the nature and the limits of those discrepancies.

If there had been an absolute harmony, even to the mildest point, I am persuaded that, on the principle of evidence in all such cases, many would have charged collusion on the writers, and have felt that it was a corroboration of the theory of the fict.i.tious origin of these compositions. But as the case stands, the discrepancies, if the compositions be fict.i.tious indeed, are only a proof that these men attained a still more wonderful skill in aping verisimilitude than if there had been no discrepancies at all. They have left in the historic portions of their narrative an air of general harmony, with an exquisite congruity in points which lie deep below the surface,--a congruity which they must be supposed to have known would astonish the world when once discovered; and have at the same time left certain discrepancies on the surface (which criticism would be sure to point out), as if for the very purpose of affording guaranties and vouchers against the suspicion of collusion. The discords increase the harmony. Once more, I asked, could I believe Jews, Jews in the reign of Tiberius or Nero, equal to all these wonders?

But all this, even all this, I said, was as nothing compared with another difficulty involved in this theory. How came these fictions, containing such monstrous romance, if romance at all, and equally monstrous doctrines, to be believed; to be believed by mult.i.tudes of Jews and Gentiles, both opposed and equally opposed to them by previous inveterate superst.i.tion and prejudice? How came so many men of such different races and nations of mankind to hasten to unclothe themselves of all their previous beliefs in order to adopt these fantastical fables? How came they to persist in regarding them as authoritative truth? How came so many in so many different countries to do this at once? Nay, I added with a laugh, I think there are distinct traces, as far as we have any evidence, that these very peculiar fictions must have been believed by many before they were even compiled and published.

My infidel friend mused, and at last said, "I agree with you that these compositions could not have been fictions in the ordinary sense, that is, deliberately composed by a conspiracy of highly imaginative minds. That last argument alone, of their success, is conclusive against that; but may they not have been legends which gradually a.s.sumed this form out of floating traditions and previous popular and national prepossessions?" In short, he faintly sketched a notion somewhat similar to that mythic theory, since so elaborately wrought out by Strauss.

I answered somewhat as follows:--If the first place, on this hypothesis, all the intellectual and moral anomalies of the last theory reappear. That such legends should have been the product of the Jewish mind (whether designedly or undesignedly, consciously or unconsciously, makes no difference), is one of the princ.i.p.al difficulties. If it had been objected to Pere Hardouin, that Virgil's "Aeneid" could nor have been composed by one of the monks of the Middle Ages. I suppose that it would have been no relief from the difficulties of his hypothesis to say that it was a gradual, unconsciously formed deposit of the monkish mind! But besides all this, I said, the theory was loaded with other absurdities specially its own: for we must then believe all the indications of historic plausibility to which I had adverted in speaking of the previous theory to be the work of accident; a supposition, if possible, still more inconceivable than that some superhuman genius for fiction had been employed on their elaboration. Things moulder into rubbish, but they do not moulder into fabrics. And then (I continued) the greatest difficulty, as before, reappears, how came these queer legends, the product whether of design or accident, to be believed? Jews and Gentiles were and must have been thoroughly opposed to them.

To this he replied, "I suppose the belief, as you also do, anterior to the books, which express that belief, but did not cause it. I suppose the Christian system already existing as a floating vapor and merely condensed into the written form. It was a gradual formation, like the Greek and Indian mythologies." I thought on this for some time, and then said something like this:--

Worse and worse: for I fear that the age of Augustus was no age in which the world was likely to frame a mythology at all:--if it had been such an age, the problem does not allow sufficient time for it;--if there had been sufficient time, it would not have been such a mythology; --and if there had been any formed, it would not have been rapidly embraced, any more than other mythologies, by men of different races, but would have been confined to that which gave it birth.

As to the first point, you ask me to believe that something like the mythology of the Hindoos or Egyptians could spring up and diffuse itself in such an age of civilization and philosophy, books and history; whereas all experience shows us that only a time of barbarism, before authentic history has commenced, is proper to the birth of such monstrosities; that this congelation of tradition and legend takes place only during the long frosts and the deep night of ages, and is impossible in the bright sun of history;--in whose very beams, nevertheless, these prodigious icicles are supposed to have been formed!

As to the second point, you ask me to believe that the thing should be done almost instantly; for in A.D. 1, we find, by all remains of antiquity, that both Jews and Gentiles were reposing in the shadow of their ancient superst.i.tions; and in A. D. 60. mult.i.tudes among different races had become the bigoted adherents of this novel mythology!

As to the third point, you ask me to believe that such a mythology as Christianity could have sprung up when those amongst whom it is supposed to have originated, and those amongst whom it is supposed to have been propagated, must have equally loathed it. National prepossessions of the Jews. Why, the kind of Messiah on which the national heart was set, the inveteracy with which they persecuted to the death the one that offered himself, and the hatred with which for eighteen hundred years they have recoiled from him, sufficiently show how preposterous this notion is! As a nation, they were, ever have been, and are now, more opposed to Christianity than any other nation on earth. Prepossessions of the Gentiles! There was not a Messiah that a Jew could frame a notion of, but would have been an object of intense loathing and detestation to them all! Yet you ask me to believe that a mythology originated in the prejudices of a nation the vast bulk of whom from its commencement have most resolutely rejected it, and was rapidly propagated among other nations and races, who must have been prejudiced against it; who even in its favor those venerable superst.i.tions which were consecrated by the most powerful a.s.sociations of antiquity!

As to the fourth point, you ask me to believe that, at a juncture when all the world was divided between deep-rooted superst.i.tion and incredulous scepticism,--divided, as regards the into Pharisees and Sadducees, and, as regards the Gentiles, into their Pharisees and Sadducees, that is, into the vulgar who believed, or at least practised, all popular religions, and the philosophers who laughed at them all, and whose combined hostility was directed against the supposed new mythology,--it nevertheless found favor with mult.i.tudes in almost all lands! You ask me to believe that a mythology was rapidly received by thousands of different races and nations, when all history proclaims, that it is with the utmost difficulty that any such system ever pa.s.ses the limits of the race which has originated it; and that you can hardly get another race even to look at it as a matter of philosophic curiosity! You ask me to believe that this system was received by mult.i.tudes among many different races, both of Asia and Europe, without force, when a similar phenomenon has never been witnessed in relation to any mythology whatever! Thus, after asking me to burden myself with a thousand perplexities to account for the origin of these fables, you afterwards burden me with a thousand more, to account for their success! Lastly, you ask me to believe, not only that men of different races and countries became bigotedly attached to legends which none were likely to originate, which all were likely to hate, and, most of all, those who are supposed to have originated them; but that they received them as historic facts, when the known recency of their origin must have shown the world that they were the legendary birth of yesterday; and that they acted thus, though those who propagated these legends had no military power no civil authority, no philosophy, no science, no one instrument of human success to aid them, while the opposing prejudices which everywhere encountered them had! I really know not how to believe all this.

"There are certainly many difficulties in the matter" candidly replied my infidel friend. But, as if wis.h.i.+ng to effect a diversion,--"Have you ever read Gibbon's celebrated chapter?"

Why, yes, I told him, two or three years before; but he does not say a syllable in solution of my chief difficulties; he does not tell me any thing as to the origin of the ideas of Christianity, nor who could have written the wonderful books in which they are embodied; besides, said I, in my simplicity, he yields the point, by allowing miracles to be the most potent cause of the success of Christianity.

"Ah" he replied, "but every one can see that he is there speaking ironically."

Why, then, said I, laughing, I fear he is telling us how the success of Christianity cannot be accounted for, rather than how it can.

"O, but he gives you the secondary causes; which it is easy to see he considers the princ.i.p.al; and also sufficient."

I will read him again, I said, and with deep attention. Some time after, in meeting with the same friend, I began upon Gibbon's secondary causes.

"They have given you satisfaction, I hope."

Any thing but that, I replied; they do not, as I said before, touch my princ.i.p.al difficulties: and even as to the success of the system when once elaborated,--his reasons are either a mere restatement of the difficulty to be solved, or aggravate it indefinitely.