Now the obvious course would have been to have assumed that the conception of the original character was the creation of some great poet, and that the fourfold modification of it which our present Gospels exhibit has been the work of four subsequent poets. But this supposition the facts and phenomena of the case consign to the region of hopeless impossibilities. It is therefore necessary to assume that the character itself, and the Christianity of the New Testament, have been gradually elaborated bit by bit, not by a succession of great poets, but of credulous, enthusiastic mythologists; and that the Synoptic Gospels originated in piecing together a multitude of tales which in the latter end of the first century were floating on the surface of the Christian Church. It is impossible to deny that the Jesus of the Evangelists is an immeasurably finer conception than either the Prometheus of Æschylus, which exhibits the divine in suffering, or the Macbeth or Hamlet of Shakspeare. Each of these characters is distinguished by a unity of conception which proves that as characters they are the creation of a single mind. But supposing we were to be told that these, and the dramas which contain them, were not the creations of single poets, nor even of a succession of poets, but had been slowly elaborated, step by step, during a considerable interval of time by a number of credulous enthusiasts. My opponents would be the first to receive such a suggestion with shouts of derision. It is plain that if the portraiture of our Lord be an ideal creation, those who framed it must have been gifted with a high order of genius. Let me illustrate the position by the art of painting. High genius in painting is analogous to high genius in poetry. Let us suppose that we are contemplating a great ideal picture,--_e.g._, the Marriage Feast in Cana of Galilee, at the Louvre,--and that we are told that it is not the work of a single artist, nor even of four, but of a succession who gradually developed it.