that, though not altogether satisfied with it, he would sooner believe all the frigid glosses by which the school of Paulus had endeavored to resolve the miracles into misunderstood “natural phenomena.”  As the dispute became more animated between these three champions, they exhibited a delicate trait of human nature, which I saw our sceptical host most maliciously enjoyed.  Each became more anxious to prove that his mode of proving Christianity false was the true mode, than to prove the falsehood of Christianity itself.  “I tell you what,” said the Straussian, with some warmth, “sooner than believe all the absurdities of such an hypothesis as that of Paulus, I could believe Christianity to be what it professes to be.”  “I may say the same of that of Strauss,” said the other, with equal asperity; “if I had no better escape than his, I could say to him, as Agippa to Paul, ’Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.’” “For my part,” exclaimed the Deist, who was perfectly contented with his brief solution,—­the difficulties of the problem he had never had the patience to master, —­“I should rather say, as Festus to Paul, ’Much learning has made you both mad’:  and sooner than believe the impossibilities of the theory of either,—­sooner than suppose men honestly and guilelessly to have misled the world by a book which you and I admit to be a tissue of fables, legends, and mystical non-sense,—­I could almost find it in my heart to go over to the Pope himself.”

“Good,” whispered our host to me, who sat at his left hand; “we shall have them all becoming Christians, by and by, just to spite one another.”  The admirer of Mr. Atkinson and Miss Martineau here reminded the company that the miracles of the New Testament might be true,—­only the result of mesmerism.  “Christ,” said he, “to employ the words of Mr. Atkinson, was constitutionally a clairvoyant .....  Prophecy and miracle and inspiration are the effects of abnormal conditions of man .....  Prophecy, clairvoyance, healing by touch, visions, dreams, revelations, .... are now known to be simple matters in nature, which may be induced at will, and experimented upon at our firesides, here in England (climate and other circumstances permitting), as well as in the Holy Land."* But no one seemed prepared to receive this hypothesis.  At last, our host, addressing the Deist, said, “But you forget, Mr. M., that, though you find it insurmountably difficult to conceive a book full of lies (as you express it) to have been, consciously or unconsciously, the product of honest and guileless minds, you ought to find it a little difficult to conceive a book (as you admit the New Testament to be) of profound moral worth produced by shameless impostors.  But let that pass.  Let us assume that Christianity, as a supernaturally revealed and miraculously authenticated system, is false, though you are dolefully at variance as to how it is to be proved so; let us assume, I say, that this system is false, and dismiss it.  I am much more anxious to hear what is the positive system of religious truth, which you are of course each persuaded is the true one.  I have left off to seek,’ but if any one will find the truth for me without my ‘seeking’ it, how rejoiced shall I be!”