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 reject Christianity altogether; and regard the New Testament, and speak of it, exactly as they would of Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ or Virgil’s ‘Aeneid.’  Such men, consistently enough, trouble themselves not at all in ascertaining what residuum of truth, historical or critical, may remain in a book which certainly gives ten falsehoods for one truth, and welds both together in inextricable confusion.  The German infidels, on the other hand, with infinite labour, and amidst infinite uncertainties, extract either truth ’as old as the creation,’ and as universal as human reason,—­or truth which, after being hidden from the world for eighteen hundred years in mythical obscurity, is unhappily lost again the moment it is discovered, in the infinitely deeper darkness of the philosophy of Hegel and Strauss; who in vain endeavour to gasp out, in articulate language, the still latent mystery of the Gospel!  Hegel, in his last hours, is said to have said,—­and if he did not say, he ought to have said,—­’Alas! there is but one man in all Germany who understands my doctrine,—­and he does not understand it!’ And yet, by his account, Hegelianism and Christianity, ‘in their highest results,’ [language, as usual, felicitously obscure] ‘are one.’  Both, therefore, are, alas! now for ever lost.

That great problem—­to account for the origin and establishment Of Christianity in the world, with a denial at the same time of its miraculous pretensions—­a problem, the fair solution of which is obviously incumbent on infidelity—­has necessitated the most gratuitous and even contradictory hypotheses, and may safely be said still to present as hard a knot as ever.  The favourite hypothesis, recently, has been that of Strauss—­frequently re-modified