“For aught you know, then, since you know nothing of Christianity except from those documents in which the miracles and the doctrines are alike consigned to you, the said miracles, together with the other evidence, do equally establish the truths which you say are a part of divine revelation, and the errors which you say your ’spiritual faculty,’ ‘moral intuitions,’ or what you will, tells you that you are to reject.  You believe, then, in the force of evidence, which equally establishes truth and falsehood?”

“You can hardly expect me to admit that.”

“But I expect you to answer a plain question?”

“Why,” said the youth, with a little flippancy, but with a good-humored laugh too, “the proverb says ’Even a fool may ask questions which a wise man cannot answer.’”

“I acknowledge myself to be a fool” said Harrington, with a half serious, half comic air; “and you shall be the wise man who does not —­for I will not say cannot—­answer the fool’s question.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the other.  “I acknowledge that it was an uncourteous expression.”

“Enough said,” replied Harrington; “and now, since you are not pleased to answer my question, I will answer it myself; and I say, it is plain that the evidence to which you refer does affirm equally the truths you declare thus revealed to you, and the errors you declare you must reject.  Now either the evidence is not sufficient to prove the one, or it is sufficient to prove both.  So far, then, I think we may say, and say justly, that the supposed revelation is so constructed that you cannot accept a part and reject a part, on such a theory.  But to make the case a little plainer still, if possible.  There have been men, you know, who have taken precisely opposite views of the two doctrines you have mentioned; who have declared that the doctrine, not of man’s immortality, but of the resurrection, so far from being conceivable, is, in their judgment, a physical contradiction; but who have also declared that the doctrine of atonement, in some shape, is instinctively taught by human nature, and has consequently formed a part of almost every religion; that it is in analogy with many singular facts of this world’s constitution, and is not absolutely contradicted by any principle of our nature, intellectual or moral.  Such a man, therefore, might take the very opposite of the course you have taken.  He would proceed upon your common basis of a miraculously confirmed revelation, grossly infested with errors and falsehoods; he might say that he believed the authentication of the doctrine of ‘atonement’ in virtue of the evidence, because, though transcendental to his reason, it was not repugnant to it; but that he rejected the doctrine of the ‘resurrection,’ though equally established by the evidence, because contrary to the plainest conclusions of his reason.”

“I cannot in candor deny,” said the other, “the possibility of such a case.”