Still
more absurdly premature is it to raise a paean over its fall, upon every
new attack upon it, when it has already survived so many. This, in fact,
is a tone which, though every age renews it, should long since have been
rebuked by the constant falsification of similar prophecies, from
the time of Julian to the time of Bolingbroke, and from the time of
Bolingbroke to the time of Strauss. As Addison, we think, humorously
tells the Atheist, that he is hasty in his logic when he infers that if
there be no God, immortality must be a delusion, since, if chance
has actually found him a place in this bad world, it may, perchance,
hereafter find him another place in a worse,---so we say, that if
Christianity be a delusion, since it is a delusion which has been proof
against so much of bitter opposition, and has imposed upon such hosts
of mighty intellects, these is nothing to show that it will not do so
still, in spite of the efforts either of Proudhon or a Strauss. Such
a tone was, perhaps, never so triumphant as during the heat of the
Deistical controversy in our own country, and to which Butler alludes
with so much characteristic but deeply satirical simplicity, in the
preface to his great work:--'It is come,' says he, 'I know not how, to
be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much
a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be
fictitious .
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