from documents nine tenths of which are to be rejected as a tissue of
absurd fictions? Or why should we not fairly confess that, for aught
we can tell, the whole is a fiction? For certainly, as to the amount of
historic fact which these men affect to leave, it is obviously a matter
of the most trivial importance whether we regard the whole Bible as
absolute fiction or not. Whether an obscure Galilean teacher, who taught
a moral system which may have been as good (we can never know from
such corrupt documents that it was as good) as that of Confucius, or
Zoroaster, ever lived or not; and whether we are to add another name to
those who have enunciated the elementary truths of ethics, is really of
very little moment. Upon their principles we can clearly know nothing
about him except that he is the centre of a vast mass of fictions, the
invisible nucleus of a huge conglomerate of myths. A thousand times
more, therefore, do we respect those, as both more honest and more
logical, who, on similar grounds, openly reject Christianity altogether;
and regard the New Testament, and speak of it, exactly as they would of
Homer's 'Iliad,' or Virgil's 'Aeneid.' Such men, consistently enough,
trouble themselves not at all in ascertaining what residuum of truth,
historical or critical, may remain in a book which certainly gives
ten falsehoods for one truth, and welds both together in inextricable
confusion. The German infidels, on the other hand, with infinite labour,
and amidst infinite uncertainties, extract either truth 'as old as the
creation,' and as universal as human reason,--or truth which, after
being hidden from the world for eighteen hundred years in mythical
obscurity, is unhappily lost again the moment it is discovered, in the
infinitely deeper darkness of the philosophy of Hegel and Strauss; who
in vain endeavour to gasp out, in articulate language, the still
latent mystery of the Gospel! Hegel, in his last hours, is said to have
said,--and if he did not say, he ought to have said,--'Alas! there is
but one man in all Germany who understands my doctrine,--and he does not