This supernatural character of Christianity is capable of a rigorous historical and rational demonstration. Rationalists, as they call themselves, having first made themselves their own dupes, have duped the great mass of the unlearned and the unthinking in this age, and even imposed to a greater or a lesser degree on numbers of Catholics whose instruction in sound Christian knowledge is defective and superficial, by a shallow and pretentious system vaunted under the name of scientific criticism. Like the pseudo-Smerdis, its pretence to be the true, legitimate possessor of dominion, and heir to the acquisitions of reason and experience historically transmitted from the past, is founded on an illusory semblance of likeness to genuine science. As the impostor who passed himself off on a credulous people for the son of Cyrus was detected and exposed by stripping off the royal head-dress which he had stolen, and showing that his head had long since been deprived of the ears as an ignominious punishment for crime, so this base-born rationalism, when the logic of facts and sound reasoning seizes hold of it, meets the fate which befell the Persian usurper under the iron grasp and death-dealing sword of Darius, the son of Hystaspes. It is an old culprit, long since marked by the sword of truth, and doomed to perish under the blows of the genuine offspring of the noble, ancestral chiefs in the intellectual kingdom. Christianity is historical and rational, resting on the principles of contradiction and of the sufficient reason. That which has occurred and which exists cannot be denied or doubted, and must be referred to a sufficient reason and an adequate cause. The facts and events of the religion of Christ, as well those which preceded as those which have followed his human birth, are historically certain. The flimsy hypotheses of sceptical criticism have been destroyed by critical science. The penetrating acid of critical investigation, a solvent which is destructive of all counterfeits and semblances, has only made more manifest and clear of all accidental adhesions the real substance and imperishable solidity of the great historical structure of the primeval and universal religion. The books of Moses and his successors, the four Gospels and the other apostolic documents, together with all else that is accessory and corroborative of sacred history in the genuine records and works of antiquity, have come unscathed, and with brighter and clearer evidence than before, out of the restless and audacious researches of that modern school of rationalists who have sought to destroy all ancient science and belief, to make way for a new fabric of hypothesis which they call modern science and philosophy. Their visionary systems stand confronted with unassailable facts and convicted of falsehood. These great facts, from the creation of man to the resurrection of Christ, and from his resurrection to the present,