If the New Testament be supposed a series of fictions, I argued,—­the work of highly imaginative minds for a pious purposes—­there is perhaps a slight moral anomaly in the case (but I do not insist upon it):  I mean that of supposing pious men writing fictions which they evidently wish to impose on the world as simple history, and which they must have known would, if received at all, be actually regarded as such; as, in fact, they have been.  I do not quite understand how pious men should thus endeavor to cheat men into virtue, nor inculcate sanctity and truth through the medium of deliberate fraud and falsehood.  But let that pass; perhaps one could forgive it.  Other anomalies, far more inexplicable, strike me.  That Galilean Jews (such as the history of the time represents them), with all their national and inveterate prejudices,—­wedded not more to the law of Moses than to their own corruptions of it, bigoted and exclusive beyond all the nations that ever existed, eaten up with the most beggarly superstitions,—­should rise to the moral grandeur, the nobility of sentiment, the catholicity of spirit, which characterize the Gospel, and, above all, to such an ideal as Jesus Christ,—­this is a moral anomaly, which is to me incomprehensible:  the improbability of Christianity having its natural origin in such a source is properly measured by the hatred of the Jews against it, both then and through all time.  I said I could as little understand the intellectual anomalies of such a theory.  Could men, among the most ignorant of a nation sunk in that gross and puerile superstition of which the New Testament itself presents a true picture, and which is reflected in the Jewish literature of that age, and ever since,—­a nation whose master minds then and ever since (think of that!) have given us only such stuff as fills the Talmud, —­could such men, I said, have created such fictions as those of the New Testament,—­reached such elevated sentiments, or conveyed them in perfectly original forms, embodied truth so sublime in a style so simple?  Throughout those writings is a peculiar tone which belongs to no other compositions of man.  While the individuality of the writers not lost, there are still peculiarities which pervade the whole, and have, as I think, justly been called a Scripture style.  One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since.  Could such men attain this uniform elevation?  Could such men have invented those extraordinary fictions,—­the miracles and the parables?  Could they, in spite of their gross ignorance, have so interwoven the fictitious and the historical as to make the fiction let into the history seem a natural part of it?  Could they, above all, have conceived the daring, but glorious,