I pondered over it a good deal. At last I said one day to another infidel acquaintance, "You ask me to believe that the miraculous events of the New Testament were contrivances of fraud; which, though ventured upon in the very eyes of those who were interested in detecting them, who must have been prejudiced against them, nay, the majority of whom (as the events show) were determined, whether they detected them or not, not to believe those who wrought them, were yet successfully practised, not only on the deluded disciples of the impostors, but on their unbelieving persecutors, who admitted them to be miracles, only of Beelzebub's performing. I really know not how to believe it. As I look at the general history of religion, I see that this open-day appeal to miracles--especially such as raising the dead--among prejudiced spectators interested in unmasking them is, if unsupported by truth, just the thing under which a religious enterprise inevitably fails." I reminded him that the French prophets in England got on pretty well till their unlucky attempt to raise the dead, when the bubble burst instantly; that for this reason the more astute impostors have refrained from any pretensions of the kind, from Mahomet downwards; (How discreetly cautious, again, have the Mormonites been on this point!) that the miracles they professed to have wrought were conveniently wrought in secret, on the safe theatre of their mental consciousness; or that they were reserved for times when their disciples were predetermined to believe them, because they were cordial believers already in the religion which appealed to them! I said nothing of the unlikelihood of the instruments--Galilean Jews--whom the theory invests with such superhuman powers of deception; or of the prodigious intellect and lofty ambition with which it also so liberally endows these obscure vagabonds, who not only conceived, in spite of their narrow-hearted Jewish bigotry, such a system as Christianity, but proclaimed their audacious resolve of establishing it on the ruins of every other religion,--Jewish or Heathen. I said nothing of the still stranger moral attributes with which it invests them, (in spite of their being such odious tricksters, in spite of all their grovelling notions and exclusive prejudices,) as the teachers of a singularly elevated and catholic morality; what is still stranger as suffering for it,--strangest of all, as apparently practising it. I said nothing of what is still more wonderful, their acting this inconsistent part from motives we cannot assign or even imagine; their encountering obloquy, persecution, death, in the prosecution of their object, whatever it was. I said nothing of the innumerable and one would think inimitable, traits of nature and sincerity in the narrative of those who record these miracles, and which, if simulated by such liars, would be almost a miracle itself; a narrative, in which majestic indifference to human criticism is everywhere exhibited;