In former days, I had never dared to let my thoughts dwell inquisitively on the star, which the wise men saw in the East, and which accompanied them, and pointed out the house where the young child was.  I now thought of it, only to see that it was a legend fit for credulous ages; and that it must be rejected in common with Herod’s massacre of the children,—­an atrocity unknown to Josephus.  How difficult it was to reconcile the flight into Egypt with the narrative of Luke, I had known from early days:  I now saw that it was waste time to try to reconcile them.

But perhaps I might say:—­“That the writers should make errors about the infancy of Jesus was natural; they were distant from the time:  but that will not justly impair the credit of events, to which they may possibly have been contemporaries or even eye-witnesses.”—­How then would this apply to the Temptation, at which certainly none of them were present?  Is it accident, that the same three, who abound in the demoniacs, tell also the scene of the Devil and Jesuit on a pinnacle of the temple; while the same John who omits the demoniacs, omits also this singular story?  It being granted that the writers are elsewhere mistaken, to criticize the tale was to reject it.

In near connexion with this followed the discovery, that many other miracles of the Bible are wholly deficient in that moral dignity, which is supposed to place so great a chasm between them and ecclesiastical writings.  Why should I look with more respect on the napkins taken from Paul’s body (Acts xix. 12), than on pocket-handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of martyrs?  How could I believe, on this same writer’s hearsay, that “the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip” (viii. 39), transporting him through the air; as oriental genii are supposed to do?  Or what moral dignity was there in the curse on the barren fig-tree,—­about which, moreover, we are so perplexingly told, that it was not the time for figs?  What was to be said of a cure, wrought by touching the hem of Jesus’ garment, which drew physical virtue from him without his will?  And how could I distinguish the genius of the miracle of tribute-money in the fish’s mouth, from those of the apocryphal gospels?  What was I to say of useless miracles, like that of Peter and Jesus walking on the water,—­or that of many saints coming out of the graves to show themselves, or of a poetical sympathy of the elements, such as the earthquake and rending of the temple-veil when Jesus died?  Altogether, I began to feel that Christian advocates commit the flagrant sophism of treating every objection as an isolated “cavil,” and overrule each as obviously insufficient, with the same confidence as if it were the only one.  Yet, in fact, the objections collectively are very powerful, and cannot be set aside by supercilious airs and by calling unbelievers “superficial,” any more than by harsh denunciations.