experience, which may, besides, have been
repeated; of the second, to confide in his understanding, which says:
'Less marvel that the reporter should have erred than that nature should
have been violated.'

How dearly do these people betray their own hypocrisy about the divinity
of Christianity, and at the same time the meanness of their own natures,
who think the Messiah, or God's Messenger, must first prove His own
commission by an act of power; whereas (1) a new revelation of moral
forces could not be invented by all generations, and (2) an act of power
much more probably argues an alliance with the devil. I should gloomily
suspect a man who came forward as a magician.

Suppose the Gospels written thirty years after the events, and by
ignorant, superstitious men who have adopted the fables that old women
had surrounded Christ with--how does this supposition vitiate the report
of Christ's parables? But, on the other hand, they could no more have
invented the parables than a man alleging a diamond-mine could invent a
diamond as attestation. The parables prove themselves.

_XXII. 'LET HIM COME DOWN FROM THE CROSS.'_

Now, this is exceedingly well worth consideration. I know not at all
whether what I am going to say has been said already--life would not
suffice in every field or section of a field to search every nook and
section of a nook for the possibilities of chance utterance given to any
stray opinion. But this I know without any doubt at all, that it cannot
have been said effectually, cannot have been so said as to publish and
disperse itself; else it is impossible that the crazy logic current upon
these topics should have lived, or that many separate arguments should
ever for very shame have been uttered. Said or not said, let us presume
it unsaid, and let me state the true answer as if _de novo_, even if by
accident somewhere the darkness shelters this same answer as uttered
long ago.

Now, therefore, I will suppose that He _had_ come down from the Cross.
No case can so powerfully illustrate the filthy falsehood and pollution
of that idea which men generally entertain, which the sole creditable
books universally build upon. What would have followed? This would have
followed: that, inverting the order of every true emanation from God,
instead of growing and expanding for ever like a [symbol: <], it would
have attained its _maximum_ at the first. The effect for the half-hour
would have been prodigious