and re-adjusted indeed by himself—­that Christianity is a myth, or collection of myths—­that is, a conglomerate (as geologists would say) of a very slender portion of facts and truth, with an enormous accretion of undesigned fiction, fable, and superstitions; gradually framed and insensibly received, like the mythologies of Greece and Rome, or the ancient systems of Hindoo theology.  It is true, indeed, that the particular critical arguments, the alleged historic discrepancies and so forth, on which this author founds his conclusion—­are for the most part, not original; most of them having been insisted on before, both in Germany, and especially in our own country during the Deistical controversies of the preceding century.  His idea of myths, however, may be supposed original; and he is very welcome to it.  For of all the attempted solutions of the great problem, this will be hereafter regarded as, perhaps, the most untenable.  Gibbon, in solving the same problem, and starting in fact from the same axioms,—­for he too endeavoured to account for the intractable phenomenon—­on natural causes alone,—­assigned, as one cause, the reputation of working miracles, the reality of which he denied; but he was far too cautious to decide whether the original thunders of Christianity had pretended to work miracles, and had been enabled to cheat the world into the belief of them, or whether the world had been pleased universally to cheat itself into that belief.  He was far too wise to tie himself to the proof that in the most enlightened period of the world’s history—­amidst the strongest contrarieties of national and religious feeling—­amidst the bitterest bigotry of millions in behalf of what was old, and the bitterest contempt of millions of all that was new—­amidst the opposing forces of ignorance and prejudice on the one hand and philosophy and scepticism on the other—­amidst all the persecutions which attested and proved those hostile feelings on the part of the bulk of mankind—­and above all, in the short space of thirty years (which is all that Dr. Stauss allows himself),—­Christianity could be thus deposited, like the mythology of Greece and Rome!  These, he knew, were very gradual and silent formations; originating in the midst of a remote antiquity and an unhistoric age, during the very infancy and barbarism of the races which adopted them, confined, be it remembered, to those races alone; and displaying, instead of the exquisite and symmetrical beauty of Christianity, those manifest signs of gradual accretion which were fairly to be expected; in the varieties of the deposited or irrupted substances—­in the diffracted appearance of various parts—­in the very weather stains, so to speak, which mark the whole mass.