"The idiots!" I exclaimed. "Why, this very circumstance ought surely to have led them to argue the other way." "They thought otherwise; and I must say I think they argued very plausibly, and that very much is to be said for them. They thought that perfect self-consistency might possibly be obtained by a single mind of highly inventive power, and they preferred believing that, to receiving such wonderful things supported by any single testimony." "But did none attempt to remedy this defect of the unhappy speculator?" "O, yes; another attempted to establish in a second community of our reasonable shadows a revelation on the same basis of miracles; but instead of trusting to one witness, he recorded the results by ten; and with such perfection of art, that all the ingenuity of all the critics of succeeding ages could not detect a single variation other than in language; the records themselves and their contents were precisely the same. "And what was the result." "Much the same as before; for this identity of substance and almost of manner showed most evidently, said the critics, that there had been collusion between the several parties who had framed the revelation:--and in the course of three or four generations it was universally rejected, as totally unworthy of belief." "I see not, then, how a revelation by any such means could be authenticated at all?" "Why, our reasonable creatures require a great deal of management, --that is the truth. There is no way in which you cannot prove to your own satisfaction, that no one of any divine communications (given under the conditions aforesaid) is to be believed; but perhaps after all, the method would have been more sure, had these sages confined these communications to different testimonies, in which the general harmony and undesigned coincidences should be manifest, but which should contain slight discrepancies, and even some apparent contradictions, which the parties, if there had been collusion, would certainly have obviated. This would, perhaps, have been the best guaranty that there could not be any fraud in the case." "But this," I remarked, "was just the mode in which the Gospels of Christ were consigned to mankind." "And you see with what mixed result. It was sufficient, indeed, to justify the method, if it was attended with less disastrous effects than any other mode. For it is a problem of limits even at the very best."