The new school of critics does not question so severely as other critics have done the authenticity of the Christian documents, or the date of their origin. Indeed, one of their chief apostles concedes the authenticity of the gospels and their antiquity. [24] But after having admitted the authenticity and antiquity of the Christian documents, they then proceed to mutilate the story they relate--the gospel they teach--as to render it practically valueless to mankind. This is accomplished by regarding the Christian documents as legends, [25] from which if we would arrive at historical truth must be excluded all that is miraculous, [26] and hence all that makes Christ God. And while to the imagination of the idealist much that is of value and that is beautiful may remain in the attenuated Christianity which the new criticism would leave us, yet for the great body of humanity such a Christianity would be worthless. For however beautiful the moral precepts of the merely human Jesus may be, they will have no perceptible influence on the lives of the multitude unless back of them stands divine authority, accompanied by a conviction of the fact of man's immortality and his accountability to God for his conduct. Shorn of these parts, what remains may be beautiful; but it would be as the beauty of a man from whom the spark of life had fled--the beauty of the dead. Of course the orthodox Christian denies that this style of attack on the Christian religion has had any success. To him it is an "attack" which has "failed." "In spite of all the efforts of an audacious criticism," says one, "as ignorant as bold--the truth of the sacred narrative stands firm, the stronger for the shocks that it has resisted; the boundless store of truth and life which for eighteen centuries has been the ailment of humanity is not (as Rationalism boasts) dissipated. God is not divested of his grace, or man of his dignity--nor is the tie between heaven and earth broken. The foundation of God--the everlasting gospel--still standeth secure--and every effort that is made to overthrow, does but more firmly establish it." [27] Let us examine this matter more nearly, and with less partiality than Rawlinson has done. If for the new school of critics to succeed means that the orthodox view respecting Jesus of Nazareth, and the religion he founded must be entirely overthrown by being driven out of existence, then the new criticism is an "attack" which has "failed," for orthodox Christianity, that is, the Christianity which recognizes Christ as divine--as God, and the New Testament as divinely inspired and stating the substantial facts of Messiah's life--is still with us.