27. Such and so great, then, in brief, are among the more prominent evils that have arisen out of the ancient and widespread belief in a "life to come," of which the resurrection of Jesus, and the connected doctrines and practices, constitute one important development; to which the religion of Moses was antagonistic, not, as Christians claim, antecedent, but which, under one form or other, has exercised a powerful sway under almost all, if not all, the other ancient religions. CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION 1. The results, then, of this inquiry are:-- (a.) It has been shown that none of the supernatural occurrences mentioned in the New Testament, as testimonies to the supernatural claims of Jesus, rest on the accordant testimony of two or three witnesses; that there is also the most serious variance between the accounts of the different writers,--not that variance resulting in substantial agreement which often characterises the statements of two independent eye-witnesses relating different impressions of the same event, but that variance which characterises illusion and man-deifying fable. Thus, a condition of ordinary proof, required by the deity of the Mosaic as well as by the deity of the Christian system, is not fulfilled. Far less does the evidence satisfy that most righteous demand ever put forward by each earnest man, for proof of the highest and strictest kind, before he yields a conscience-approved assent to occurrences and to claims professing to be specially representative of a being held to be beyond and supreme over Nature. How else but by the demand for strictest proof could special manifestations of a true God (if any such had occurred or were to occur) be distinguished from pretence and imposture? Each religious system judges the pretensions of all others by severe tests of evidence and rightful incredulity, but refuses to apply these to its own. And what sort of being can they conceive an Almighty to be who affirm that he not only commands and approves belief in supernatural events, on such evidence and on such grounds as are put forth by the New Testament compilers, or on the impassioned utterances of preachers or other emotional influences, but also that he has left those to perish in their sins who do not so believe. He, an Almighty maker of the universe, approve credulity, disapprove rightful incredulity and keen inquiry, ordain belief without conscience-satisfying evidence, less regardful of truth, less righteous than man!