barbarous.  Or if we are hardly prepared to admit so much as this, this much at least has been established firmly—­that the Bible, if it does not give the lie itself to the astonishing claims that have been made for it, contains nothing in itself, at any rate, that can of itself be sufficient to support them.  This applies to the New Testament just as much as to the Old; and the consequences here are even more momentous.  Weighed as mere human testimony, the value of the Gospels becomes doubtful or insignificant.  For the miracles of Christ, and for his superhuman nature, they contain little evidence, that even tends to be satisfactory; and even his daily words and actions it seems probable may have been inaccurately reported, in some cases perhaps invented, and in others supplied by a deceiving memory.  When we pass from the Gospels to the Epistles, a kindred sight presents itself.  We discern in them the writings of men not inspired from above; but, with many disagreements amongst themselves, struggling upwards from below, influenced by a variety of existing views, and doubtful which of them to assimilate.  We discern in them, as we do in other writers, the products of their age and of their circumstances.  The materials out of which they formed their doctrines we can find in the lay world around them.  And as we follow the Church’s history farther, and examine the appearance and the growth of her great subsequent dogmas, we can trace all of them to a natural and a non-Christian origin.  We can see, for instance, how in part, at least, men conceived the idea of the Trinity from the teachings of Greek Mysticism; and how the theory of the Atonement was shaped by the ideas of Roman Jurisprudence.  Everywhere, in fact, in the holy building supposed to have come down from God, we detect fragments of older structures, confessedly of earthly workmanship.

But the matter does not end here.  Historical science not only shows us Christianity, with its sacred history, in this new light; but it sets other religions by the side of it, and shows us that their course through the world has been strangely similar.  They too have had their sacred books, and their incarnate Gods for prophets; they have had their priesthoods, their traditions, and their growing bodies of doctrine:  there is nothing in Christianity that cannot find its counterpart, even to the most marked details, in the life of its founder.  Two centuries, for instance, before the birth of Christ, Buddha is said to have been born without human father.  Angels sang in heaven to announce his advent; an aged hermit blessed him in his mother’s arms; a monarch was advised, though he refused, to destroy the child, who, it was predicted, should be a universal ruler.  It is told how he was once lost, and was found again in a temple; and how his young wisdom astonished all the doctors.  A woman in a crowd was rebuked by him for exclaiming, ’Blessed is the womb that bare thee.’  His prophetic career began