' Very true; but what remedy? 'We find one
German writer endeavouring to explain away the miracles on the mystical
(mythical) theory; and another riding into the arena of controversy
on the miserable hobby-horse of "clairvoyance" or "mesmerism"; each of
these, and a host of others of the same class, rejecting whatever light
is thrown on the question by all the theories together.' He therefore
proposes, with great and gratuitous liberality, to heap all these
theories together, and to take them as they are wanted; not withholding
any of the wonders of modern science--even, as would seem, the possible
knowledge of 'chloroform' (PP. 104.. 86, 87.)--from the propagators of
Christianity!
But, alas! the phenomena are still intractable. The stubborn 'Book' will
still baffle all such efforts to explain it away; it is willing to be
rejected, if it so pleases men, but it guards itself from being
thus made a fool of. For who can fail to see that neither all or any
considerable part of the multifarious miracles of the New Testament can
be explained by any such gratuitous extension of ingenious fancies;
and that if they could be so explained, it would be still impossible
to exculpate the men who need such explanations from the charge of
perpetuating the grossest frauds! Yet this logical ostrich, who
am digest all these stones, presumptuously declares a miracle an
impossibility and the very notion of it a contradiction.
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