genius and learning:  genius and learning, not only in some sense professional, and often wrongfully represented as therefore interested, but much of both, strictly extra-professional; animated to its defence by nothing but a conviction of the force of the arguments by which its truth is sustained, and that ‘hope full of immortality’ which its promises have inspired.  Under such circumstances it must appear equally rash and gratuitous to suppose, even if it be a delusion, that an institute, which has thus enlisted the sympathies of so many of the greatest minds of all races and of all ages—­which is alone stable and progressive amidst instability and fluctuation,—­will soon come to an end.  Still more absurdly premature is it to raise a paean over its fall, upon every new attack upon it, when it has already survived so many.  This, in fact, is a tone which, though every age renews it, should long since have been rebuked by the constant falsification of similar prophecies, from the time of Julian to the time of Bolingbroke, and from the time of Bolingbroke to the time of Strauss.  As Addison, we think, humorously tells the Atheist, that he is hasty in his logic when he infers that if there be no God, immortality must be a delusion, since, if chance has actually found him a place in this bad world, it may, perchance, hereafter find him another place in a worse,—–­so we say, that if Christianity be a delusion, since it is a delusion which has been proof against so much of bitter opposition, and has imposed upon such hosts of mighty intellects, these is nothing to show that it will not do so still, in spite of the efforts either of Proudhon or a Strauss.  Such a tone was, perhaps, never so triumphant as during the heat of the Deistical controversy in our own country, and to which Butler alludes with so much characteristic but deeply satirical simplicity, in the preface to his great work:—­’It is come,’ says he, ’I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious ....  On the contrary, thus much at least will here be found, not taken for granted, but proved, that any reasonable man, who will thoroughly consider the matter, may be as much assured as he is of his own being, that it is not, however, so clear that there is nothing in it.’  The Christian, we conceive, may now say the same to the Froudes, and Foxtons, and to much more formidable adversaries of the present day.  Christianity, we doubt not, will still live, when they and their works, and the refutations of their works, are alike forgotten; and a new series of attacks and defences shall have occupied for a while (as so many others have done) the attention of the world.  Christianity, like Rome, has had both the Gaul and Hannibal at her gates:  But as the ‘Eternal City’ in the latter case calmly offered for sale, and sold, at an undepreciated price, the very ground on which the Carthaginian had