Let not unbelievers, therefore, decline to grapple with the question. Let them cease to pass it over in silence. I propose to them the following questions for solution. If both sets of Gospels originated with minds intensely credulous and superstitious, whence has come the difference between them? Why is the one set of miracles dignified, and the other mean? Whence the entire difference of their moral aspect? Why is the Jesus of the Canonical Gospels the most elevated personage in history, and the Jesus of the Apocryphal ones, one of the most mean and silly? If two of the Apocryphal and the four Canonical Gospels are the production of the superstition and credulity of the same century, whence the marvellous contrast between them? Which of the Fathers of the second or third century was equal to the task of reducing a mass of floating legends, the creations of numbers of superstitious men, into their present form, as they stand in our Canonical Gospels? Would they not certainly have coloured the events with their own absurdities? If, on the other hand, it be allowed that the Canonical Gospels are the production of the first century, and the Apocryphal Gospels of subsequent ones, how came the credulous followers of Jesus to produce fictions dramatized with such admirable taste in the first century, and the same spirit in subsequent centuries to present so striking a contrast? The only possible answer which can be returned to these questions is that the phenomena of the Canonical Gospels are inconsistent with the supposition that their miraculous narratives are the invention of men who were the prey either of credulity or dense superstition; they must have been men well able to distinguish between a genuine miracle and a mythic parody of one. But it has been urged that the dignified character of Jesus induced the compilers of our present Gospels to select all the miraculous stories of a high type which were current in the hotbed of Christian fanaticism, and to attribute them to Jesus, and to suppress all of a contrary description. If this be the true solution of the facts, then it certainly follows that the compilers of the Gospels must have been free from the superstitions of the times in which they lived. Otherwise, how came they to select all the elevated stories and attribute them to Jesus, and to consign those of a lower type to a well‐merited oblivion? Is it not a fact that credulous and superstitious people have often attributed what is contemptible and mean to elevated characters? Let the Apocryphal Gospels bear witness. It follows, therefore, that even on this supposition the question must be decided in favour of the authors of our present Canonical Gospels, that they must have been free from the degraded superstitious to which their fellow‐believers were a prey.