"But I, who am now awake and perfectly sensible—"
He laughed outright. "Are you so sure," said he, "that you are awake.
How do you know it?"
"Because I am conscious of it," said I.
"And this too, I suppose, is a philosopher," he muttered to himself. "Well," he continued aloud, "we must not discuss these matters just now; you must believe me when I say that the communities to which our experimenters go to work, on their own hypotheses, are just as capable of ingenious reasoning and impartial and candid deliberation, as you are now in your present waking moments. You wish to hear a few of these experiments?"
I nodded.
"Well, then, first, there was one worthy philosopher, who, having seen the advantages which infidelity has gained from the discrepancies and other difficulties occasioned by the varied testimonies which the evangelical historians have left behind them, resolved, after having wrought a number of splendid miracles (uniformly affirmed and never denied by the parties in whose presence they were performed), that they should all be consigned to one single history., so admirably constructed that there was not a single discrepancy from beginning to end."
"And what was the effect?"
"Why, in the first place, you must recollect that, according to that or any other mode of authenticating a divine communication by miracles, there were a great many more of those who never saw the miracles than of those who did; for if miracles had been common, they would have ceased to be miracles. There were vast numbers, therefore, who, even in the age in which they were performed, never believed them; but, what is more, in four generations there was not a soul that did not treat them as old wives' fables."
"Surely they were very unreasonable," I said.
"Not at all; it was inevitable; for it was asked (and every one assented to it), whether it was reasonable that a story so marvellous, and so contrary to experience, should be believed on any single testimony, however unexceptionable? There were also keen critics who said, that, as there was proof that in the very age in which the miracles were wrought there were many who did not believe the message which they professedly confirmed, it was a strong indication that the whole was a fiction; while some others of still greater acumen discovered that the very freedom from all discrepancies and contradictions in the account itself smelt very strongly of art and design; that this perfection of consistency was not the characteristic of any history ever written by an honest man, and that no doubt it had been elaborately contrived by a single highly inventive mind."