Now, this sort of thing may be very rhetorical, and very beautiful, when done up in approved, sentimental French, but it is certainly neither logical nor philosophical. We have a right to insist that M. Renan shall come with no theory which compels him to reject half the facts unexamined, and to garble and misuse half the rest. Those facts stand on the same ground as all the others. The same authority which tells us that Christ lived at Nazareth, tells us also that He fed five thousand with five loaves and two small fishes. M. Renan accepts the first statement, without examination, and denies the second, without examination. He does this because he has made up his mind beforehand that _prima facie_ a miracle is impossible. But that carries us out of the line of historical investigation altogether. That is a question of metaphysics. M. Renan's decision of the question is not admitted by an means universally, not even frequently. The truer decision as well as the more philosophical is that, _prima facie, all things are possible_, except contradictions. At all events, we hold that the Four Evangelists stand on their own merits. They are not to be declared impostors, either in whole or in part, beforehand, in order to save a metaphysical theory. The same logical viciousness shows itself in M. Renan's treatment of the Prophets. Daniel never could have written the book attributed to him, he says, because that book contains statements of fact which occurred long after Daniel! That is to say, M. Renan does not believe in such a thing as prophecy, and, by consequence, Daniel never wrote the book of Daniel! This is taking things for granted with a witness. And, by the way, we may as well ease our minds just here concerning another trick of the school to which M. Renan belongs, and of which he furnishes many marked examples. We mean the trick of arbitrarily deciding by what they are pleased to call 'philological criticism,' all about all the books and nearly all the chapters in the Bible. 'Learned men are agreed that such and such chapters were not written by Isaiah.' 'It is clear, from internal evidence of style, that this book was made up of earlier scattered memoranda.' 'These chapters, it is evident, were not written till such and such a time.' 'The best critics are agreed that this narration was added long after the writing of the book.' This is the way they write, to the astonishment of the simple.