“As regards the credibility of the Gospel history, it ought to be clearly understood that the modern attack by Baur, Strauss, Zeller, and others is founded upon an à priori assumption. It is taken for granted beforehand that whatever is supernatural is unhistorical. The testimony into which a miracle enters is stamped at once as incredible. Christianity, it was assumed, was an evolution of thought upon the natural plane. At a later day Strauss fell into a materialistic way of thinking, which rendered him, if possible, more deaf to all the evidence which, if admitted, implies the supernatural. From the point of view taken in the sceptical school, therefore, the New Testament histories, so far as they relate to the wonderful works of Christ, and his resurrection and manifestation to his disciples after his death, must be discredited. But their principle, or prejudice, carries the negative critics farther. It must affect their judgment as to the authorship of the narratives which record the miracles. It is rendered difficult to believe, if not quite improbable, that these histories emanate from apostles, eye-witnesses of the life of Jesus. The myths, or the consciously-invented stories, the product of a theological ‘tendency’ in the primitive church, cannot well be ascribed to the immediate followers of Christ. The fact that the New Testament histories contain accounts of miracles also tends to weaken and vitiate their general authority, in the estimation of the sceptical school. That is to say, the credulity of the Gospel writers, or their willingness to deceive, as evinced in the supernatural elements embraced in their books, makes them less entitled to trust in their record of ordinary events into which the miracle does not enter....
“Connected with the unscientific assumption first noticed, other assumptions were adopted by the Tübingen school which are equally unsound. It was assumed that Christianity is an evolution of thought according to the scheme of the Hegelian logic, where it is held as a law that a doctrine in an undeveloped form must divaricate into two opposites, to be recombined afterwards in a higher unity. Thus, it was assumed that Paulinism, and the sharply-defined Judaizing system attributed to Peter, were the antagonistic types of opinion which sprang out of the seed of doctrine planted by Christ, and which were reunited in the old Catholic theology, the evangelical legalism of the fathers of the second century.”[[94]]
This statement is supplemented by another succinct and pregnant passage containing the elements of an argument of great comprehension and irrefragable conclusiveness. After affirming that “the mythical theory is wrecked upon a variety of difficulties which it cannot evade or surmount”—a statement which has much more force, taken in connection with the entire context of thorough critical reasoning, than it can show as a mere isolated quotation—the learned professor proceeds:
“What is the rationalistic theory of the origin of the Christian religion? It is that Jesus, a carpenter of Nazareth, with no prestige derived from birth or social standing, taught in Galilee for about a year—for to this period the class of whom we speak would limit his public work. From these brief labors, made up wholly of verbal instruction, came that profound impression of his superhuman dignity which was made indelibly upon his disciples, and which his crucifixion as a criminal did not weaken, and that transforming power which went forth upon them, and, in ever-increasing measure, upon all subsequent generations. The Apostolic Church, the conversion of Paul, and his Epistles, the narratives of the four Gospels, with all that they contain, and Christianity, as it appears in the history of mankind, all spring from that one year of mere teaching! The effect is utterly disproportionate to the cause assigned.”[[95]]
We must take notice that the author, with a competent knowledge of the theories and arguments of the German Biblical critics, has carefully refuted them, and presented solid proofs of the genuineness and authenticity of the historical books of the New Testament, before arriving at this part of his argument. He is summing up his plea after an examination and discussion of evidence. His reasoning is not, therefore, based on mere hypothesis, but is the conclusion of a well-sustained thesis, with all the weight derived from his precedent proofs. And he is therefore logically entitled to make the demand that Christianity shall be estimated by the historical measure, according to the full value of its miraculous facts and supernatural qualities, to the exclusion of any hypothesis which pretends to be rational but is really only fantastic, and therefore unphilosophical as well as unchristian.
“It is much more consistent with a sound philosophy, instead of taking refuge in an unreasonable denial of facts historically established, to seek to comprehend them. At the outset the notion should be banished that miracles are repugnant to nature; that the supernatural is anti-natural. There is one system; and supernatural agency, however it may modify the course of nature, does no violence to the universal order. For there is no such unbending rigidity in the course of nature that it cannot be modified by the interposition of voluntary agency. A steamship, cutting its way through the billows in the teeth of wind and tide, moves by the force of machinery which is contrived and directed by the human will.[[96]] The volitions of man produce an effect which nature, independently of this spiritual force, could never occasion. Now, of the limits of the possible control of matter by the power of spirit, any more than of the essence and origin of matter itself, we cannot speak. It is a presumptuous affirmation that there is no being in the universe who can infinitely outdo the power of man, vast as it is, in this direction.”[[97]]
In this brief and sententious manner, with a few heavy and well-directed strokes of sound reason, the author effectually demolishes all the brittle ware of transcendental nonsense which calls itself rationalism. We are reminded of a sentence we once heard uttered by that singular genius, Henry Giles, in a railway carriage, respecting a matter quite different: “Such theories are shattered like rotten glass by a single thump of common sense.”
We find no reason for quoting anything from Dr. Fisher’s exposition of the historical preparation for Christianity in the propædeutic system of Judaism. For the present we will only refer to the notice which he takes of the dispersion of the Hebrews over the world at the epoch of the birth of Christ, adopting the language of Mommsen, which designates Judaism as “an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism” working in the same direction with the imperial Roman polity toward a blending of nationalities in the more general solidarity “the nationality of which was really nothing but humanity.” Of the providential office of Greece and Rome in connection with that of Judea he thus speaks:
“These were three nations of antiquity, each of which was entrusted with a grand providential office in reference to Christianity. The Greeks, whatever they may have learned from Babylon, Egypt, and Tyre, excelled all other races in a self-expanding power of intellect—in ‘the power of lighting their own fire.’ They are the masters in science, literature, and art. Plato, speaking of his own countrymen, made ‘the love of knowledge’ the special characteristic of ‘our part of the world,’ as the love of money was attributed with equal truth to the Phœnicians and Egyptians. The robust character of the Romans, and their sense of right, qualified them to rule, and to originate and transmit their great system of law and their method of political organization. Virgil lets Anchises define the function of the Roman people in his address to Æneas, a visitor to the abodes of the dead:
“‘Others, I know, more tenderly may beat the breathing brass,