aspirations’; that it was rather his strong aspirations after immortality which made Paul believe the supposed fact, than the supposed fact which gave strength to his aspirations after immortality.  Now it is very clear (from texts which, for whatsoever reasons, are not quoted by Mr. Newman), that the Apostle Paul made his whole argument depend on the alleged fact of Christ’s resurrection, whether carelessly received or not:  ’If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain, and our preaching is also vain ....  Then are we of all men most miserable.’”

“But you recollect that Mr. Newman alleges that Paul deals very superficially with the evidence,—­with that of the ‘five hundred,’ for example.  He observes that Paley would have made a widely different matter of it.”

“See how variously men may argue,” replied Fellowes, candidly.  “I was talking on that very point with one of the orthodox the other day, and he reasoned in some such way as this:—­

“On the supposition, he said, that the possession of miraculous powers was notorious in the Church,—­that many of those whom Paul addressed had actually witnessed them,—­that the Gospel, when preached by him and by the other Apostles, was confirmed by ’signs and wonders,’—­nothing could be more natural than the very tone which the Apostles employed:  that, so far from its being suspicious, it was one of the truest touches of nature and verisimilitude in their compositions; so much so, that, supposing there were no miracles, that very tone required itself to be accounted for as unnatural; he said that it is, in fact, just the way in which men talk and write of any other extraordinary events which notoriously happened in their time.  They never think of posterity, and what it may think; of anticipating either future doubts or charges of fraud.  It is natural that men should speak in this, as we should call it, loose way, of what is transpiring under their very noses.  If, on the other hand, there had been no miracles to appeal to, so as to render this style as natural as, on the contrary supposition, it was the reverse, he could not, he said, imagine, that, in that or any other age, any men, especially men opposed to such pretensions, would so easily have been satisfied, even had the Apostles confined themselves to rumors of alleged distant miracles; but much less where similar wonders were said to have been brought under the eyes of the very parties to whom the appeal was made!  He said he would even go a step further, and affirm that, under the circumstances of the professed notoriety of the miraculous occurrences to which Paul and the other Apostles appealed, any declaration that they had instituted that careful scrutiny of evidence, that minute circumstantial cross-examination of the witnesses,—­which would be a course all very well in the days of Paley, eighteen hundred years after, but absolutely preposterous then,—­would have appeared to our age a much more suspicious thing