That the prodigious aggregate of miracles which the New Testament asserts, would, if fabulous, pass unchallenged, elude all detection, and baffle all scepticism.—­collect in the course of a few years energetic and zealous assertors of their reality, in the heart of every civilised and almost every barbarous community, and in the course of three centuries, change the face of the world and destroy every other myth which fairly came in contact with it,—­who but Dr. Strauss can believe?  Was there no Dr. Strauss in those days?  None to question and detect, as the process went on, the utter baselessness of these legends?  Was all the world doting—­was even the persecuting world asleep?  Were all mankind resolved on befooling themselves?  Are men wont thus quietly to admit miraculous pretensions, whether they be prejudiced votaries of another system or sceptics as to all?  No:  whether we consider the age, the country, the men assigned for the origin of these myths, we see the futility of the theory.  It does not account even for their invention, much less for their success.  We see that if any mythology could in such an age have germinated at all, it must have been one very different from Christianity; whether we consider the sort of Messiah the Jews expected, or the hatred of all Jewish Messiahs, which the Gentiles could not but have felt.  The Christ offered them so far from being welcome, was to the one a ‘stumbling block’ and to the other ‘foolishness’; and yet he conquered the prejudices of both.

Let us suppose a parallel myth—­if we may abuse the name.  Let us suppose the son of some Canadian carpenter aspiring to be a moral teacher, but neither working nor pretending to work miracles; as much hated by his countrymen as Jesus Christ was hated by his, and both he and his countrymen as much hated by all the civilised world beside, as were Jesus Christ and the Jews:  let us further suppose him forbidding his followers the use of all force in propagating his doctrine’s, and then let us calculate the probability of an unnoticed and accidental deposit, in thirty short years, of a prodigious accumulation about these simple facts. of supernatural but universally accredited fables, these legends escaping detection or suspicion as they accumulated, and suddenly laying hold in a few years of myriads of votaries in all parts of both worlds, and in three centuries uprooting and destroying Christianity and all opposing systems!  How long will it be before the Swedenborgian, or the Mormonite, or any such pretenders, will have similar success?  Have there not been a thousand such, and has any one of them had the slightest chance against systems in possession,—­against the strongly rooted prejudices of ignorance and the Argus-eyed investigations of scepticism?  But all these were opposed to the pretensions of Christianity; nor can any one example of at all similar sudden success be alleged, except in the case of Mahomet; and to that the answer is brief.  The history of Mahomet is the history of a conqueror—­and his logic was the logic of the sword.