less falsely, mistook natural phenomena for supernatural miracles.  What more easy than to suppose people dead when they were not, and who were merely recovered from a swoon or trance? than to imagine the blind, deaf, or dumb to be miraculously healed, when in fact they were cured by medical skill? than to fancy the blaze of a flambeau to be a star, and to shape thunder into articulate speech, and so on?  Christ was no miracle-worker, but he was a capital doctor.”

I pondered over this “natural” explanation for a long time.  At last I ventured to express to a third infidel friend my dissatisfaction with it.  “Not only,” said I, “is such a perpetual and felicitous genius for gross blundering, such absolute craziness of credulity, in strange contrast with the intellectual and moral elevation which the New Testament writers everywhere evince, and especially in the conception of that Ideal of Excellence which even those who reject all that is supernatural in Christianity acknowledge to be so sublime a masterpiece,—­in whose discourses the most admirable ethics are illustrated, and in whose life they are still more divinely dramatized,—­not only is such ludicrous madness of fanaticism at variance with the tone of sobriety and simplicity everywhere traceable; but,—­what is more,—­when I reflect on the number and grossness of these supposed illusions, I find it hard to imagine how to image how even individual could have been honestly stupid enough to be beguiled by them, and utterly impossible to suppose that a number of men should on many occasions have been simultaneously thus befooled!  But, what is much more, how can those who must often have managed the phenomena which were thus misinterpreted into miracles,—­how, especially, can the great Physician himself, who knew that he was only playing the doctor, be supposed honestly to have allowed the simple-minded followers to persist in so strange an error?  Either he, or they, or both, must, one would think, have been guilty of the grossest frauds.  But the mere number and simultaneity of such strange illusions, under such a variety of circumstances, render it impossible to receive this hypothesis.  I cannot see, I said, that it is so very easy for a number of men to have been continually mistaking ‘flambeaux’ for ‘stars,’ ‘thunder’ for ‘human speech,’ and ‘Roman soldiers’ for ‘angels.’”

My friend laughed outright.  “I should think it is not easy, indeed!” he exclaimed, “especially that last.  For my part, I see clearly, on this theory, that either the Apostles or their commentators were the most crazy, addle-headed wretches in the world.  Either Paulus of Tarsus or Paulus of Heidelberg was certainly cracked:  I believe the last.  No, my friend; depend upon it that the Gospels consist of a number of fictions,—­many of them very beautiful,—­invented, I am inclined to believe, for a very pious purpose, by highly imaginative minds.”

This sat me thinking again.  And, in time, my doubts, as usual, assumed a determinate shape, and I hastened to another oracle of infidelity in hopes of a solution.