project of embodying and dramatizing the ideal of the system they inculcated in the person of Christ?  And yet they have succeeded, though choosing to attempt the wonderful task in a life full of unearthly incidents, which they have somehow wrought into an exquisite harmony!  But even if one such man in such an age and nation could have been found equal to all this, could we, I argued, believe that several (with undeniable individual varieties of manner) were capable of working into the picture similarly unique, but different materials, with similar success, and of reproducing the same portrait, in varying posture and attitude, of the great Moral Idea?  Could we believe that, in achieving this task, not one, but several, were intellectual magicians enough to solve that great problem of producing compositions in a form independent of language,—­of laying on colors which do not fade by time; so that while Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, suffer grievous wrong the moment their thoughts are transferred into another tongue, these men should have written so that their wonderful narrative naturally adapts itself to every dialect under heaven?

These intellectual anomalies, I confessed,—­if these had been all,—­ staggered me.  As Lord Bacon said that he would sooner believe “all the fables of the Talmud, than that this universal frame was without a mind,” so I could sooner believe all those fables, than that minds that can only produce Talmuds should have conceived such fictions as the Gospel.  I could as soon believe that some dull chronicler of the Middle Ages composed Shakspeare’s plays, or a ploughman had written Paradise Lost; only that, to parallel the present case, we ought to believe that four ploughmen wrote four Paradise Losts!  Nay, I said, I would as soon believe that most laughable theory of learned folly, that the monks of the Middle Ages compiled all the classics!  Nor could it help me to say that it was Christians, not Jews, who compiled the New Testament; for they must have been Jews before they were Christians:  and the twofold moral and intellectual problem comes back upon our hands,—­to imagine how the Jewish mind could have given birth to the ideas of Christianity, or have embodied them in such a surpassing form.  And as to the intellectual part of the difficulty,—­unhappily abundant proof exists in Christian literature that the early Christians could as little have manufactured such fictions as the Jews themselves!  The New Testament is not more different from the writings of Jews, or superior to them, than it is different from the writings of the Fathers, and superior to them.  It stands alone, like the Peak of Teneriffe.  The Alps amidst the flats of Holland would not present a greater contrast than the New Testament and the Fathers.  And the further we come down, the less capable morally, and nearly as incapable intellectually, do the rapidly degenerating Christians appear, of producing such a fiction as the New Testament; so that, if it be asked whether it was not possible that some Christians of after times might have forged these books, one must say with Paley, that they could not.