Let us look carefully and fairly at this view of the subject. If it be reasonable it may be true; if it be true we need not fear to accept it. Nothing in Jesus calls on men to profess to believe what to them is not the truth; nothing can be more unlike him than to use words without convictions. We cannot do otherwise than “hold fast that which is true” to us; indeed we cannot hold fast to any thing else, though it be called truth by never so many voices of men. The theory that Jesus is an invention is another way of saying that he is the hero of a romance, a creation of constructive imagination. It involves this: four Jews at about the same time, among a people not given to making books of any kind--least of all books of the imagination--were seized with desire to write books, and thus it came about that they have given to the world, as the product of dramatic genius, this character of Jesus. As, for illustration, it may be said, in a sense, that Bulwer invented the “Margrave” of _A Strange Story_. Let us inquire into the antecedent probabilities that these men would naturally attempt to construct and put into form such a work of the imagination; nay, more: whether they were likely to attempt any dramatic work at all. We are not left to guesses in considering such questions. It is historically certain that the Hebrew mind in ancient days was not given to this sort of literary work. The Greek mind gave dramas to the world, matchless of their kind; the Hebrew mind gave none. There is nothing in Hebrew literature of the period assigned to Jesus, of the period succeeding him, or from the time of Moses, to indicate so much as a tendency to such creations of the imagination. We have much to judge by, and there can be no mistake. We have the Old Testament Scriptures, the apocryphal books, the comments of the scribes--called Targums--upon their sacred writing, the little book called “Acts of the Apostles,” the other New Testament writings, and the works of Josephus as specimens, showing the trend and method of Hebrew literature. The Hebrew mind in ancient days was not given to art, but to morals. The Jew did not develop art impulses till he had become cosmopolitan and Christianity had changed the world. In ancient Hebrew literature, whether in plain prose--in history, statute laws, or proverbs; whether in psalms or other poetry; whether in the magnificent imagery of the prophets, we find that morals, not art, inspire the thought and form the expression. There are neither paintings, nor statues, nor dramas. Their architecture was borrowed from the Phenicians; they were original in their ideas of morals and in their laws and customs relating to rights and wrongs. Their literature is dominated by religion, and not by art, in any of its manifold developments. Read it all--all ancient Hebrew literature; we have history, laws, proverbs, poetry, prophecies, but we have no dramas.