But all this, even all this, I said, was as nothing compared with another difficulty involved in this theory.  How came these fictions, containing such monstrous romance, if romance at all, and equally monstrous doctrines, to be believed; to be believed by multitudes of Jews and Gentiles, both opposed and equally opposed to them by previous inveterate superstition and prejudice?  How came so many men of such different races and nations of mankind to hasten to unclothe themselves of all their previous beliefs in order to adopt these fantastical fables?  How came they to persist in regarding them as authoritative truth?  How came so many in so many different countries to do this at once?  Nay, I added with a laugh, I think there are distinct traces, as far as we have any evidence, that these very peculiar fictions must have been believed by many before they were even compiled and published.

My infidel friend mused, and at last said, “I agree with you that these compositions could not have been fictions in the ordinary sense, that is, deliberately composed by a conspiracy of highly imaginative minds.  That last argument alone, of their success, is conclusive against that; but may they not have been legends which gradually assumed this form out of floating traditions and previous popular and national prepossessions?” In short, he faintly sketched a notion somewhat similar to that mythic theory, since so elaborately wrought out by Strauss.

I answered somewhat as follows:—­If the first place, on this hypothesis, all the intellectual and moral anomalies of the last theory reappear.  That such legends should have been the product of the Jewish mind (whether designedly or undesignedly, consciously or unconsciously, makes no difference), is one of the principal difficulties.  If it had been objected to Pere Hardouin, that Virgil’s “Aeneid” could nor have been composed by one of the monks of the Middle Ages.  I suppose that it would have been no relief from the difficulties of his hypothesis to say that it was a gradual, unconsciously formed deposit of the monkish mind!  But besides all this, I said, the theory was loaded with other absurdities specially its own:  for we must then believe all the indications of historic plausibility to which I had adverted in speaking of the previous theory to be the work of accident; a supposition, if possible, still more inconceivable than that some superhuman genius for fiction had been employed on their elaboration.  Things moulder into rubbish, but they do not moulder into fabrics.  And then (I continued) the greatest difficulty, as before, reappears, how came these queer legends, the product whether of design or accident, to be believed?  Jews and Gentiles were and must have been thoroughly opposed to them.

To this he replied, “I suppose the belief, as you also do, anterior to the books, which express that belief, but did not cause it.  I suppose the Christian system already existing as a floating vapor and merely condensed into the written form.  It was a gradual formation, like the Greek and Indian mythologies.”  I thought on this for some time, and then said something like this:—­