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