Stauss allows
himself),--Christianity could be thus deposited, like the mythology
of Greece and Rome! These, he knew, were very gradual and silent
formations; originating in the midst of a remote antiquity and an
unhistoric age, during the very infancy and barbarism of the races which
adopted them, confined, be it remembered, to those races alone;
and displaying, instead of the exquisite and symmetrical beauty of
Christianity, those manifest signs of gradual accretion which were
fairly to be expected; in the varieties of the deposited or irrupted
substances--in the diffracted appearance of various parts--in the very
weather stains, so to speak, which mark the whole mass.
That the prodigious aggregate of miracles which the New Testament
asserts, would, if fabulous, pass unchallenged, elude all detection, and
baffle all scepticism.--collect in the course of a few years energetic
and zealous assertors of their reality, in the heart of every civilised
and almost every barbarous community, and in the course of three
centuries, change the face of the world and destroy every other myth
which fairly came in contact with it,--who but Dr. Strauss can believe?
Was there no Dr.
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