Still he is amusingly perplexed, like all the rest of the infidel world,
how to get rid of the miracles--whether on the principle of fraud, or
fiction, or illusion. He thinks there would be 'a great accession to
the ranks of reason and common sense by disproving the reality of the
miracles, without damaging the veracity or honestly of the simple,
earnest, and enthusiastic writers by whom they are recorded;' and
complains of the coarse and undiscriminating criticism of most of the
French and English Deists, who explain the miracles 'on the supposition
of the grossest fraud acting on the grossest credulity.' But he soon
finds that the materials for such a compromise are utterly intractable.
He thinks that the German Rationalists have depended too much on some
'single hypothesis, which often proves to be insufficient to meet the
great variety of conditions and circumstances with which the miracles
have been handed down to us.' Very true; but what remedy? 'We find one
German writer endeavouring to explain away the miracles on the mystical
(mythical) theory; and another riding into the arena of controversy
on the miserable hobby-horse of "clairvoyance" or "mesmerism"; each of
these, and a host of others of the same class, rejecting whatever light
is thrown on the question by all the theories together.' He therefore
proposes, with great and gratuitous liberality, to heap all these
theories together, and to take them as they are wanted; not withholding
any of the wonders of modern science--even, as would seem, the possible
knowledge of 'chloroform' (PP. 104.. 86, 87.)--from the propagators of
Christianity!

But, alas! the phenomena are still intractable. The stubborn 'Book' will
still baffle all such efforts to explain it away; it is willing to be
rejected, if it so pleases men, but it guards itself from being
thus made a fool of. For who can fail to see that neither all or any
considerable part of the multifarious miracles of the New Testament can