As to the fourth point, you ask me to believe that, at a juncture when all the world was divided between deep-rooted superstition and incredulous scepticism,—­divided, as regards the into Pharisees and Sadducees, and, as regards the Gentiles, into their Pharisees and Sadducees, that is, into the vulgar who believed, or at least practised, all popular religions, and the philosophers who laughed at them all, and whose combined hostility was directed against the supposed new mythology,—­it nevertheless found favor with multitudes in almost all lands!  You ask me to believe that a mythology was rapidly received by thousands of different races and nations, when all history proclaims, that it is with the utmost difficulty that any such system ever passes the limits of the race which has originated it; and that you can hardly get another race even to look at it as a matter of philosophic curiosity!  You ask me to believe that this system was received by multitudes among many different races, both of Asia and Europe, without force, when a similar phenomenon has never been witnessed in relation to any mythology whatever!  Thus, after asking me to burden myself with a thousand perplexities to account for the origin of these fables, you afterwards burden me with a thousand more, to account for their success!  Lastly, you ask me to believe, not only that men of different races and countries became bigotedly attached to legends which none were likely to originate, which all were likely to hate, and, most of all, those who are supposed to have originated them; but that they received them as historic facts, when the known recency of their origin must have shown the world that they were the legendary birth of yesterday; and that they acted thus, though those who propagated these legends had no military power no civil authority, no philosophy, no science, no one instrument of human success to aid them, while the opposing prejudices which everywhere encountered them had!  I really know not how to believe all this.

“There are certainly many difficulties in the matter” candidly replied my infidel friend.  But, as if wishing to effect a diversion,—­“Have you ever read Gibbon’s celebrated chapter?”

Why, yes, I told him, two or three years before; but he does not say a syllable in solution of my chief difficulties; he does not tell me any thing as to the origin of the ideas of Christianity, nor who could have written the wonderful books in which they are embodied; besides, said I, in my simplicity, he yields the point, by allowing miracles to be the most potent cause of the success of Christianity.

“Ah” he replied, “but every one can see that he is there speaking ironically.”

Why, then, said I, laughing, I fear he is telling us how the success of Christianity cannot be accounted for, rather than how it can.

“O, but he gives you the secondary causes; which it is easy to see he considers the principal; and also sufficient.”