Those who have no faith in Jesus, who admit not the supernatural character of his person, of his life, and of his work, do not feel this difficulty. Having beforehand done away with God and with miracles, the history of Jesus is for them nothing more than an ordinary history, which they narrate and explain like any other biography of man. But such historians fall into a far different difficulty, and wreck themselves on a far different rock. The supernatural being and power of Jesus may be disputed, but the perfection, the sublimity of his actions and of his precepts, of his life and of his moral law, are incontestable. {294} And in effect, not only are they not contested, but they are admired and celebrated enthusiastically, and complacently, too; it would seem as if it were desired to restore to Jesus as man, and man alone, the superiority of which men deprive Him in refusing to see in Him the Godhead. But then, what incoherence, what contradictions, what falsehood, what moral impossibility in his history, such as they make it; what a series of suppositions, irreconcilable with fact, nevertheless admitted! The man they make so perfect, so sublime, becomes by turns a dreamer or a charlatan; at once dupe and deceiver: dupe of his own mystical enthusiasm in believing in his own miracles; deceiver in tampering with evidence in order to accredit himself. The history of Jesus Christ is thus but a tissue of fables and falsehood. And nevertheless the hero of this history remains perfect, sublime, incomparable; the greatest genius, the noblest heart that the world ever saw; the type of virtue and moral beauty, the supreme and rightful chief of mankind. {295} And his disciples, in their turn justly admirable, have braved everything, suffered everything, in order to abide faithful to Him and to accomplish his work. And, in effect, the work has been accomplished: the pagan world has become Christian, and the whole world has nothing better to do than to follow the example. What a contradictory and insolvable problem they present to us instead of the one they are so anxious to suppress!