should have thought it worth while to write two bulky volumes of minute
criticism on the subject. A miracle he declares to be an absurdity, an
contradiction, an impossibility. If we believed this, we should deem a
very concise enthymene (after having proved that postulatum though) all
that it was necessary to construct on the subject. A miracle cannot be
true; ergo, Christianity, which in the only records by which we know
anything about it, avows its absolute dependence upon miracles, must be
false.

It is a modification of one or other of these monstrous forms of
unbelieving belief and Christian infidelity, that Mr. Foxton, late of
Oxford, has adopted in his 'Popular Christianity;' as perhaps also Mr.
Froude in his 'Nemesis.' It is not very easy, indeed, to say what
Mr. Foxton positively believes; having, like his German prototypes, a
greater facility of telling what he does believe, and of wrapping up
what he does believe in a most impregnable mysticism. He certainly
rejects, however, all that which, when rejected a century ago, left,
in the estimate of every one, an infidel in puris naturalibus. Like his
German acquaintances, he accepts the infidel paradoxes--only, like them,
he will still be a Christian. He believes, with Strauss, that a miracle
is an impossibility and contradiction--'incredible per se.' As to the
inspiration of Christ--he regards it as, in its nature, the same as that
of Zoraster, Confucius, Mahomet, Plato, Luther, and Wickliffe--a curious
assortment of 'heroic souls.'(Pp. 62, 63.) With a happy art of confusing
the 'gifts of genius' no matter whether displayed in intellectual or
moral power, and of forgetting that other men are not likely to overlook
the difference, he complacently declares 'the wisdom of Solomon and the
poetry of Isaiah the fruit of the same inspiration which is popularly
attributed to Milton or Shakspeare, or even to the homely wisdom of
Benjamin Franklin' (P. 72.) in the same pleasant confusion of mind, he