According to its conclusion, the tree of good and evil was
nothing but a venomous plant, probably a manchineal tree, under which
our first parents fell asleep. The shining face of Moses on the heights
of Mount Sinai was the natural result of electricity; the vision of
Zachariah was effected by the smoke of the chandeliers in the temple;
the Magian kings, with their offerings of myrrh, of gold, and of
incense, were three wandering merchants, who brought some glittering
tinsel to the Child of Bethlehem; the star which went before them a
servant bearing a flambeau; the angels in the scene of the temptation, a
caravan traversing the desert, laden with provisions; the two angels in
the tomb, clothed in white linen, an illusion caused by a linen garment;
the Transfiguration, a storm.' Who would not sooner be an old-fashioned
infidel than such a doting and maundering rationalist?
____
But the first and most natural question to ask is obviously this: how
any mortal can pretend to extract any thing certain, much more divine,
from records, the great bulk of which he has reduced to pure frauds,
illusions, or legends,--and the great bulk of the remainder to an
absolute uncertainty of how little is true and how much false?* Surely
it would need nothing less than a new revelation to reveal this sweeping
restriction of the old; and we should then be left in an ecstasy of
astonishment-first, that the whole significance of it should have
been veiled in frauds, illusions, or fictions; secondly, that its true
meaning should have been hidden from the world for eighteen hundred
years after its divine promulgation; thirdly, that it should be revealed
at last, either in results which needed no revelation to reveal them,
or in the Egyptian darkness of the
allegorieo-metaphysico-mystico-logico-transendental, 'formulae' of the
most obscure and contentious philosophy ever devised by man; and lastly,
that all this superfluous trouble is to give us, after all, only the
mysteries of a most enigmatical philosophy: For of Hegel, in particular,
we think it may with truth be said that the reader is seldom fortunate
enough to know that he knows his meaning, or even to know that Hegel
knew his own.
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