You may cite me to the book of Job. This is more like a drama than any other. If this be allowed, it is the one exception. But it belongs to a period very remote from that of the evangelists, and if it be a drama it is, as may be shown, such a work as a Hebrew might have written. But the story of Jesus is not such a drama as a Hebrew of his period might have written, allowing, what is not true, that at some other period it might have been imagined by a Hebrew, or any other writer of books. As to the book of Job, it is in harmony with Hebrew characteristics and with the time and country in which its scenes are laid. The books of the evangelists are not in harmony with them; they contradict them all and utterly. Consider well the four little books of the evangelists that we call gospels; study them just as you would any other ancient writings. See what is in them, that you may know what manner of men they were who wrote them. Reject them all, if there be reason, but look carefully to this one thing--whether these writers were given to dramatic creations, or, indeed, had faculty for such work. There is evidence enough in their writings that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not of the literary and book-making classes. They were of the common people; unlearned and unskilled in literature, laboring and business men, trained as laymen. Their lives were very far removed from the occupations and influences that dominated the very feeble literary instinct that belonged to that period of Hebrew literature. I conclude that it was antecedently as improbable that the evangelists would have attempted the production of any drama whatever, as I will show that it was impossible, had they made the attempt, for them to have invented such a story as they tell us of “The Man of Galilee.” CHAPTER II. “NO DRAMATIST CAN DRAW TALLER MEN THAN HIMSELF.” The doctrine I set forward concerning Jesus is this: Such a person must have actually lived, as the condition of conceiving such a character, for the reason that the power of creating such a character was never in the Hebrew mind, or any other. At this point let me tell you how my thoughts were directed in the lines the argument takes in this discussion. In the month of April, 1861, while a pastor in Sparta, Ga., I was reading one of Hugh Miller’s books, _First Impressions of England and Its People_. The writer of this to me entertaining and instructive volume was comparing, on the occasion of a visit to the grave of Shakespeare, the great poet, Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. Hugh Miller said (I believe the quotation is substantially correct; I have not seen the book in a long time--it was loaned to some of you): “No dramatist, whatever he may attempt, can draw taller men than himself.” I closed the book and said to myself: “Then Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not invent Jesus.”