1. The results, then, of this inquiry are:—
(a.) It has been shown that none of the supernatural occurrences mentioned in the New Testament, as testimonies to the supernatural claims of Jesus, rest on the accordant testimony of two or three witnesses; that there is also the most serious variance between the accounts of the different writers,—not that variance resulting in substantial agreement which often characterises the statements of two independent eye-witnesses relating different impressions of the same event, but that variance which characterises illusion and man-deifying fable. Thus, a condition of ordinary proof, required by the deity of the Mosaic as well as by the deity of the Christian system, is not fulfilled. Far less does the evidence satisfy that most righteous demand ever put forward by each earnest man, for proof of the highest and strictest kind, before he yields a conscience-approved assent to occurrences and to claims professing to be specially representative of a being held to be beyond and supreme over Nature. How else but by the demand for strictest proof could special manifestations of a true God (if any such had occurred or were to occur) be distinguished from pretence and imposture? Each religious system judges the pretensions of all others by severe tests of evidence and rightful incredulity, but refuses to apply these to its own. And what sort of being can they conceive an Almighty to be who affirm that he not only commands and approves belief in supernatural events, on such evidence and on such grounds as are put forth by the New Testament compilers, or on the impassioned utterances of preachers or other emotional influences, but also that he has left those to perish in their sins who do not so believe. He, an Almighty maker of the universe, approve credulity, disapprove rightful incredulity and keen inquiry, ordain belief without conscience-satisfying evidence, less regardful of truth, less righteous than man!
(b) It has also been made clear that the New Testament deity is altogether different from the Mosaic, and that the various conceptions with reference to the supernatural claims of Jesus are of heathen (i.e., non-Mosaic) origin. A woman conceiving a child through direct intercourse with the deity, that child brought up as the reputed son of her husband, the tale of the star-gazing wise men of the East, the spirit of the Eternal appearing in a bodily shape like a dove, the ordinance of baptism, the arch-fiend Satan and his subject demons, the heaven and hell of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, his subsequent appearances, his ascension, the doctrine of a future life, all, it has been found, corresponded to the prominent religious beliefs of the various Gentile nations, and were wholly opposed to or ignored by Mosaic teaching. The claim of Christianity, therefore, to be the representative of the Mosaic deity is thus destroyed, and the alleged fulfilment of Jewish prophecy in the events of the life of Jesus is also seen, on careful examination of the details, to be altogether without foundation. There is thus no ground for that conscience-satisfying belief which might otherwise have rested on valid evidence of the power, and wonder-working, and special revelations, and faithfully fulfilled predictions of one and the same being continued down through many generations of men.
2. What, then, is left to those who had cherished these beliefs, and rested on them, when their fond faith and hope are overthrown by fairly prosecuted inquiry? What, rather, is not left? Their own life on earth; their fellow-men in their various relations; the good earth on which man holds the highest position and subdues to his own use; the knowledge and understanding of the material and moral laws of the universe and its harmony and order; the application of these laws, so far as they affect the well-being of man, to the alleviation of misery, to the diffusion of comfort, and to general progress, physical, moral, and intellectual,—all these remain,—sources of rejoicing and thankfulness, objects of affection, of solicitude, of admiration—ample scope for the exercise of every useful and loving and noble quality of the race. So, then, may we be taught to number the days of our brief life "that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."