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