n
fifty years of His Death, or to within twenty, or even nearer?

The author of "Supernatural Religion" asserts that it was not
contemporaneous or anything like it. In fact, one might infer from his
book that the miracles of Christ were not heard of till say a century,
or three quarters of a century, after His time, for he says, "they were
never heard of out of Palestine until long after the events are said to
have occurred." [185:1] (P. 192.)

In such a case, "long after" is very indefinite. It may be a century, or
three quarters of a century, or perhaps half a century. It cannot be
less, for every generation contains a considerable number of persons
whose memories reach back for forty or fifty years. In a place of 3,000
inhabitants, in which I am now writing, there are above fifty persons
who can perfectly remember all that took place in 1830. There are some
whose memories reach to twenty years earlier. Now let the reader try and
imagine, if he can, the possibility of ascribing a number of remarkable
acts--we will not say miraculous ones--to some one who died in 1830, and
assuming also that these events were the basis of a society which had
commenced with his death, and was now making way, and that the chief
design of the society was to make known or keep up the memory of these
events, and that there had been a literature written between the present
time and the time of the said man's death, every line of which had been
written on the assumption that the events in question were true, and yet
these events had never really taken place. We must also suppose that the
person upon whom these acts are attempted to be fastened was regarded
with intense dislike by the great majority of his contemporaries, who
did all they could to ruin him when alive, and blacken his memory after
he had died, and who looked with especial dislike on the idea that he
was supposed to have done the acts in question. Let the reader, I say,
try and imagine all this, and he will see that, in the case of our Lord,
the author's "long after" must be sixty or seventy years at the least;
more likely a hundred.

Let us now summon another witness to the supernatural, whose testimony
we promised to consider, and this shall be Clement of Rome--the earliest
author to whom it has suited the purpose of the author of "Supernatural
Religion" to refer.

If we are to rely upon the almost universal consent of ancient authors
rather than the mere conjectures of mo