Chapter 4

On the supposition that neither of these theories, whether of fraud or fiction, will account, if taken by itself, for the whole of the supernatural phenomena, which strew the pages of the New Testament, then the objector, who relies on both, must believe, in turn, both sets of the above paradoxes; and then, with still more reason than before, may we exclaim, 'O infidel, great is thy Faith!'

Again; he must believe that till those apparent coincidences, which seem to connect Prophecy with the facts of the origin and history of Christianity,--some, embracing events too vast for hazardous speculations and others, incidents too minute for it,--are purely fortuitous; that all the cases in which the event seems to tally with the prediction, are mere chance coincidences: and he must believe this, amongst other events, of two of the most unlikely to which human sagacity was likely to pledge itself, and yet which have as undeniably occurred, (and after the predictions) as they were a priori improbable and anomalous in the world's history; the one is that the Jews should exist as a distinct nation in the very bosom of all other nations, without extinction, and without amalgamation,--other nations and even races having so readily melted away under less than half the influence which have been at work upon them*; the other, and opposite paradox,--that a religion, propagated by ignorant, obscure, and penniless vagabonds, should diffuse itself amongst the most diverse nations in spite of all opposition,--it being the rarest of phenomena to find any religion which is capable of transcending the limits of race, clime, and the scene of its historic origin; a religion which, if transplanted, will not die, a religion which is more than a local or national growth of superstition! That such a religion as Christianity should so easily break these barriers, and though supposed to be cradled in ignorance, fanaticism, and fraud, should, without force of arms, and in the face of persecution, 'ride forth conquering and to conquer,' through a long career of victories, defying the power of kings and emptying the temples of deities,--who, but an infidel, has faith enough to believe?+

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* The case of the Gipsies, often alleged as a parallel, is a ludicrous evasion of the argument. These few and scattered vagabonds, whose very safety has been obscurity and contempt, have never attracted towards them a thousandth part of the attention, or the hundred thousandth part of the cruelties, which have been directed against the Jews. Had it been otherwise, they would long since have melted away from every country in Europe. We repeat that the existence of a nation for 1800 years in the bosom of all nations, conquered and persecuted, yet never extinguished, and the propagation of a religion amongst different races without force, and even against it,--are both, so far as known, paradoxes in history. + 'They may say,' says Butler, 'that the conformity between the prophecies and the event is by accident; but there are many instances in which such conformity itself cannot be denied.' His whole remarks on the subject, and especially those on the impression to be derived from the multitude of apparent coincidences, in a long series of prophecies, some vast, some minute; and the improbability of their all being accidental are worthy of his comprehensive genius. It is on the effect of the whole, not on single coincidences, that the argument depends. ____

Once more then; if, from the external evidences of this religion, we pass to those which the only records by which we know any thing of its nature and origin supplies, the infidel must believe, amongst other paradoxes, that it is probable that a knot of obscure and despised plebeians--regarded as the scum of a nation which was itself regarded as the scum of all other nations--originated the purest, most elevated, and most influential theory of ethics the world has ever seen; that a system of sublimest truth, expressed with unparalleled simplicity, sprang from ignorance; that precepts enjoining the most refined sanctity were inculcated by imposture; that the first injunctions to universal love broke from the lips of bigotry! He must further believe that these men exemplified the ideal perfection of that beautiful system in the most unique, original, and faultless picture of virtue ever conceived--a picture which has extorted the admiration even of those who could not believe it to be a portrait, and who have yet confessed themselves unable to account for it except as such.* He must believe, too, that these ignorant and fraudulent Galileans voluntarily aggravated the difficulty of their task, by exhibiting their proposed ideal, not by bare enumeration and description of qualities, but by the most arduous of all methods of representation--that of dramatic action; and, what is more, that they succeeded; that in that representation they undertook to make him act with sublime consistency in scenes of the most extraordinary character and the most touching pathos, and utter moral truth in the most exquisite fictions in which such truth was ever embodied; and that again they succeeded; that so ineffably rich in genius were these obscure wretches, that no less than four of them were found equal to this intellectual achievement; and while each has told many events, and given many traits which the others have omitted, that they have all performed their task in the same unique style of invention and the same unearthly tone of art; that one and all, while preserving each his own individuality, has, nevertheless, attained a certain majestic simplicity of style unlike any tiring else (not only in any writings of their own nation, their alleged sacred writings, and infinitely superior to any thing which their successors, Jews or Christians, though with the advantage of these models, could ever attain,) but, unlike any acknowledged human writings in the world, and possessing the singular property of being capable of ready transfusion, without the loss of a thought or a grace, into every language spoken by man: he must believe that these fabricators of fiction, in common with the many other contributors to the New Testament, most insanely added to the difficulty of their task by delivering the whole in fragments and in the most various kinds of composition,--in biography, history, travels, and familiar letters; incorporating and interfusing with the whole an amazing number of minute facts, historic allusions, and specific references to persons, places, and dates, as if for the very purpose of supplying posterity with the easy means of detecting their impositions: he must believe that, in spite of their thus encountering what Paley calls the 'danger of scattering names and circumstances in writings where nothing but truth can preserve consistency,' they so happy succeeded, that whole volumes have been employed pointing out their latent and often most recondite congruities; many of them lying so deep, and coming out after such comparison of various passages and collateral lights, that they could never have answered the purposes of fraud, even if the most prodigious genius for fraud had been equal to the fabrication; congruities which, in fact, were never suspected to exist till they were expressly elicited by the attacks of Infidelity, and were evidently never thought of by the writers; he must believe that they were profoundly sagacious enough to construct such a fabric of artful harmonies, and yet such simpletons as, by doing infinitely more than was necessary, to encounter infinite risks of detection, to no purpose; sagacious enough to out-do all that sagacity has ever done, as shown by the effects, and yet not sagacious enough to be merely specious: and finally, he must believe that these illiterate impostors had the art in all their various writings, which evidently proceed from different minds, to preserve the same inimitable marks of reality, truth, and nature in their narrations--the miraculous and the ordinary alike--and to assume and preserve, with infinite case, amidst their infinite impostures, the tone and air of undissembled earnestness.+ ____

* To Christ alone, of all the characters ever portrayed to man, belongs that assemblage of qualities which equally attract love and veneration; to him alone belong in perfection those rare traits which the Roman historian, with affectionate flattery, attributes too absolutely to the merely mortal object of his eulogy: 'Nec illi, quod est rarissimum aut facilitas auctoritatem, aut severitas amorem, deminuit.' Still more beautiful is the Apostles description of superiority to all Human failings, with ineffable pity for human sorrows: 'He can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, though without sin.' + Was there ever in truth a man who could read the appeals of Paul to his converts, and doubt either that the letters were real or that the man was in earnest? We scarcely venture to think it. ____

If, on the other hand, he supposes that all the congruities of which we have spoken, were the effect not of fraudulent design, but of happy accident,--that they arranged themselves in spontaneous harmony--he must believe that chance has done what even the most prodigious powers of invention could not do. And lastly, he must believe that these same illiterate men, who were capable of so much, were also capable of projecting a system of doctrine singularly remote from all ordinary and previous speculation; of discerning the necessity of taking under their special patronage those passive virtues which man least loved, and found it must difficult to cultivate; and of exhibiting, in their preference of the spiritual to the ceremonial, and their treatment of many of the most delicate questions of practical ethics and casuistry, a justness and elevation of sentiment as alien as possible from the superstition and fanaticism of their predecessors who had corrupted the Law--and the superstition and fanaticism of their followers very soon corrupted the Gospel; and that they, and they alone, rose above the strong tendencies to the extravagances which had been so conspicuous during the past, and were soon to be as conspicuous in the future.--These and a thousand other paradoxes (arising out of the supposition that Christianity is the fraudulent or fictitious product of such an age, country, and, above all, such men as the problem limits us to), must the infidel receive, and receive all at once; and of him who can receive them we can but once more declare that so far 'from having no faith', he rather possesses the 'faith' which removes 'mountains!'--only it appears that his faith, like that of Rome or of Oxford, is a faith which excludes reason.

On the other hand, to him who accepts Christianity, none of these paradoxes present themselves. On the supposition of the truth of the miracles and the prophecies, he does not wonder at its origin or success: and as little does he wonder at all the literary and intellectual achievements of its early chroniclers--if their elevation of sentiment was from a divine source, and if the artless harmony, and reality of their narratives was the simple effect of the consistency of truth, and of transcription from the life.

Now, on the other hand, what are the chief objections which Reconcile the infidel to his enormous burden of paradoxes, and which appear to the Christian far less invincible than the paradoxes themselves? They are, especially with all modern infidelity, objections to the a priori improbability of the doctrines revealed, and of the miracles which sustain them. Now, here we come to the very distinction on which we have already insisted, and which is so much insisted on by Butler. The evidence which sustains Christianity is all such as man is competent to consider; and is precisely of the same nature as that which enters into his every-day calculations of probability; While the objections are founded entirely on our ignorance and presumption. They suppose that we know more of the modes of the divine administration--of what God may have permitted, of what is possible and impossible to the ultimate development of an imperfectly developed system, and its relations to the entire universe,--than we do or can know.* ___

* The possible implications of Christianity with distant regions of the universe, and the dim hints which hints which Scripture seems to throw out as to such implication, are beautifully treated in the 4th, 5th, and 6th of Chalmer's 'Astronomical Discourses;' and we need not tell the read of Butler how much he insists upon similar considerations. ____

Of these objections the most widely felt and the most specious, especially in our day, is the assumption that miracles are an impossibility+; and yet we will venture to say that there is none more truly unphilosophical. That miracles are improbable viewed in relation to the experience of the individual or of the mass of men, is granted; for if they were not, they would, as Paley says, be no miracles; an every-day miracle is none. But that they are either impossible or so improbable that, if they were wrought, no evidence could establish them, is another matter. The first allegation involves a curious limitation of omnipotence; and the second affirms in effect, that, if God were to work a miracle, it would be our duty to disbelieve him! ___

+ It is, as we shall see, the avowed axiom of Strauss; he even acknowledges, that if it be not true, he would not think it worth while to discredit the history of the Evangelists; that is, the history must be discredited, because he has resolved that a miracle is an impossibility! ____

We repeat our firm conviction that this a priori assumption against miracles is but a vulgar illusion of one of Bacon's idola tribus. So far from being disposed to admit the principle that a 'miracle is an impossibility,' we shall venture on what may seem to some a paradox, but which we are convinced is a truth,--that time will come, and is coming, when even those who shall object to the evidence which sustains the Christian miracles will acknowledge that philosophy requires them to admit that men have no ground whatever to dogmatise on the antecedent impossibility of miracles in general; and that not merely because if theists at all, they will see the absurdity of the assertion, while they admit that the present order of things had a beginning; and, if Christians at all, the equal absurdity of the assertion, while they admit that it will have an end;--not only because the geologist will have familiarised the world with the idea of successive interventions, and, in fact, distinct creative acts, having all the nature of miracles;--not only, we say, for these special reasons, but for a more general one. The true philosopher will see that, with his limited experience and that of all his contemporaries, he has no right to dogmatise about all that may have been permitted or will be permitted in the Divine administration of the universe; he will see that those who with one voice denied, about half a century ago, the existence of aerolites, and summarily dismissed all the alleged facts as a silly fable, because it contradicted their experience,--that those who refused to admit the Copernican theory because, as they said, it manifestly contradicted their experience,--that the schoolboy who refuses to admit the first law of motion because, as he says, it gives the lie to all his experience,--that the Oriental prince (whose scepticism Hume vainly attempts, on his principle, to meet) who denied the possibility of ice because it contradicted his experience,--and, in the same manner, that the men who, with Dr. Strauss, lay down the dictum that a miracle is impossible and a contradiction because it contradicts their experience,--have all been alike contravening the first principles of the modest philosophy of Bacon, and have fallen into one of the most ordinary illusions against which he has warned us namely, that that cannot be true which seems in contradiction to our own experience. We confidently predict that the day will come when the favourite argument of many so called philosopher in this matter will be felt to be the philosophy of the vulgar only; and that though many may, even then, deny that the testimony which supports the Scripture miracles is equal to the task, they will all alike abandon the axiom which supersedes the necessity of at all examining such evidence, by asserting that no evidence can establish them.

While on this subject, we may notice a certain fantastical tone of depreciation of miracles as an evidence of Christianity, which is occasionally adopted even by some who do not deny the possibility or probability, or even the fact, of their occurrence. They affirm them to be of little moment, and represent them--with an exquisite affectation of metaphysical propriety--as totally incapable of convincing men of any moral truth; upon the ground that there is no natural relation between any displays of physical power and any such truth. Now without denying that the nature of the doctrine is a criterion, and must be taken into account in judging of the reality of any alleged miracle, we have 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!'+

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* The main objection, both with the old and the new forms of infidelity, is, that against the miracles; the main argument with both, those which attempt to show their antecedent impossibility; and criticism directed against the credulity of the records which contain them. The principal difference is, that modern infidelity shrinks from the coarse imputation of fraud and imposture on the founders of Christianity; and prefers the theory of illusion or myth to that of deliberate fraud. But with this exception, which touches only the personal character of the founders of Christianity, the case remains the same. The same postulates and the same arguments are made to yield substantially the same conclusion. For, all that is supernatural in Christianity and all credibility in its records, vanish equally on either assumption. Nor is even the modern mode of interpreting many of the miracles (as illusions or legends) unknown to the older infidelity; only it more consistently felt that neither the one theory nor the other, could be trusted to alone. Velis et remis was its motto. + Such is Quinet's brief statement of Strauss's mystico-mythical Christiantity, founded on the Hegelian philosophy. For a fuller, we dare not say a more intelligible, account of it in Strauss's own words, and the metaphysical mysteries on which it depends, the reader may consult Dr. Beard's translation;--pp. 44, 45. of his Essay entitled 'Strauss, Hegel, and their Opinions. ____

Whether it be the Rationalism of Paulus, or the Rationalism of Strauss--whether that which declares all that is supernatural in Christianity (forming the bulk of its history) to be illusion, or that which declares it myth,--the conclusions can be made out only by a system of interpretation which can be compared to nothing but the wildest dreams and allegorical systems of some of the early Fathers#; while the results themselves are either those elementary principles of ethics for which there was no need to invoke a revelation at all, or some mystico-metaphysical philosophy, expressed in language as unintelligible as the veriest gibberish of the Alexandrian Platonists. In fact, by such exegesis and by such philosophy, any thing may be made out of any thing; and the most fantastical data be compelled to yield equally fantastical conclusions. ____

# Of the mode of accounting for the supernatural occurrences in the Scriptures by the illusion produced by mistaken natural phenomena, (perhaps the most stupidly jejune of all the theories ever projected by man), Quinet eloquently says, 'The pen which wrote the Provincial Letters would be necessary to lay bare the strange consequences of this theology. According to its conclusion, the tree of good and evil was nothing but a venomous plant, probably a manchineal tree, under which our first parents fell asleep. The shining face of Moses on the heights of Mount Sinai was the natural result of electricity; the vision of Zachariah was effected by the smoke of the chandeliers in the temple; the Magian kings, with their offerings of myrrh, of gold, and of incense, were three wandering merchants, who brought some glittering tinsel to the Child of Bethlehem; the star which went before them a servant bearing a flambeau; the angels in the scene of the temptation, a caravan traversing the desert, laden with provisions; the two angels in the tomb, clothed in white linen, an illusion caused by a linen garment; the Transfiguration, a storm.' Who would not sooner be an old-fashioned infidel than such a doting and maundering rationalist? ____