There was scarcely a halt between the wrecking of the Old Testament by this new school of critics and their assault upon the New. Their success gave them confidence, and they attacked the Christian documents with more vigor than they had the Old Testament. By research which did not need to be very extensive in order to conduct them to the facts, they discovered that the age which witnessed the rise of the Christian religion was one in which there existed a strong preconception in favor of miracles; that is, the miraculous was universally believed, and it was held by our new school of critics that this pre-conception in favor of miracles influenced the writers of the New Testament to insert them in their narratives. Ever present in their New Testament criticism as in that of the Old, was the cardinal principle that miracles never take place--the miraculous is the impossible; [19] hence whenever our anti-miracle critics found accounts of miracles interwoven in the biographies of Jesus, or in the epistles of the apostles, they inexorably relegated them to the sphere of myth or legend. [20] Unhappily for orthodox believers who cling to the gospel narratives as reliable statements of fact, they themselves found it necessary to discard as apocryphal many of the books and writings which sprang into existence in the early Christian centuries; books which pretended to relate incidents in the life of Messiah, especially those which treated of his childhood and youth. The marvelous account of his moulding oxen, asses, birds and other figures out of clay, which at his command would walk or fly away; his power to turn his playmates into kids; his striking dead with a curse the boys who offended him; his stretching a short board to its requisite length; his silencing those who try to teach him [21]--all this, and much more, Christians had to discard as pure fable. But they stopped short with the pruning process at the books of the New Testament as we now have them.