but two things to reply to this:  first, that, as Paley says in relation to the question whether any accumulation of testimony can establish a miraculous fact, we are content ‘to try the theorem upon a simple case,’ and affirm that man is so constituted that if he himself sees the blind restored to sight and the dead raised, under such circumstances as exclude all doubt of fraud on the part of others and all mistake on his own, he will uniformly associate authority with such displays of superhuman power; and, secondly, that the notion in question is in direct contravention of the language and spirit of Christ himself, who expressly suspends his claims to men’s belief and the authority of his doctrine on the fact of his miracles.  ’The works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me.’  ’If ye believe not me, believe my works.’  ’If I had not come among them, and done the works that none other man did, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloak for their sin.’

We have enumerated some of the paradoxes which infidelity is required to believe; and the old-fashioned, open, intelligible infidelity of the last century accepted them, and rejected Christianity accordingly.  That was a self-consistent, simple, Ingenuous thing, compared with those monstrous forms of credulous reason, incredulous faith, metaphysical mysticism, even Christian Pantheism—­so many varieties of which have sprung out of the incubation of German rationalism and German philosophy upon the New Testament.  The advocates of these systems, after adopting the most formidable of the above paradoxes of infidelity, and (notwithstanding the frequent boast of originality) depending mainly on the same objections, and defending them by the very same critical arguments*, delude themselves with the idea that they have but purified and embalmed Christianity; not aware that they have first made a mummy of it.  They are so greedy of paradox, that they, in fact, aspire to be Christians and infidels at the same time.  Proclaiming the miracles of Christianity to be illusions of imagination or mythical legends,—­the inspiration of its records no other or greater than that of Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ or even ’Aesop’s Fables;’—­rejecting the whole of that supernatural clement with which the only records which can tell us any thing about the matter are full; declaring its whole history so uncertain that the ratio of truth to error must be a vanishing fraction;—­the advocates of these systems yet proceed to rant and rave—­they are really the only words we know which can express our sense of their absurdity—­in a most edifying vein about the divinity of Christianity, and to reveal to us its true glories.  ‘Christ,’ says Strauss, ’is not an individual, but an idea; that is to say, humanity.  In the human race behold the God-made-man! behold the child of the visible virgin and the invisible Father!—­that is, of matter and of mind; behold the Saviour, the Redeemer, the Sinless 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!’+