beneath mountains of fact and argument, seeming beyond hope of resurrection; but ever and anon the controversy breaks out anew, and the skeptical ovum seems inexhaustible. The history of skeptical thought is admirably illustrated by the fables of the Hydra, and the Phoenix. Decapitation produced no sensible effect upon the one, and fire was impotent to destroy the other. Dr. Miles' book is simply the skeptical Phoenix risen again from its ashes. It is an attempt, not a very adroit one, to reduce the Christ of the Evangelists to a purely human level, and to deprive the Gospels of every particle of value as reliable history. The degree of success attending this attempt, will sufficiently appear in the sequel; for the present, suffice it to say, that, from beginning to end, it has neither the charm of freshness, novelty, nor originality. In fact, every position taken in this book, and every argument advanced in its support, is musty with age, and has been exploded again and again. A detailed review, therefore, is unnecessary, and we shall not attempt one. It is simply our purpose to use Dr. Miles' book as a medium of contact with the opinions of certain parties in the Christian Church, who make rather large pretensions to "scholarship," and have a good deal to say about" advanced thought." With Dr. Miles they maintain the following thesis: "The story of Christ's life, as told by the Evangelists, is unreliable. The mother of Christ was not a virgin. He had a human father. He was conceived, born, lived, suffered, and died like other men. He was in no respect different from other men; save in superior endowment. His superior endowment was in no respect different from the endowment of great poets, philosophers, and moralists; save in degree. He was inspired as other men are inspired, only more perfectly; the difference being in measure, and not in kind. In a word, he was a man, in all respects such as we are; save that he was enlarged and extended to the extreme limit of our intellectual and spiritual nature.' Although acquainted, years ago, with this amazing thesis, and shocked by it then, we must confess that we experience a more severe shock, every time it puts in a new appearance. It gives us a sense of something frightfully blasphemous. How any one, acquainted with the Evangelists, can avoid being shocked, it is difficult to see. It is such a juggling with the narrative that it makes one think of the unholy attempt to discover forbidden secrets by reading the Lord's Prayer backwards! And yet, the method by which the thesis is attained, seems to us even more amazing than the thesis. As it appears in Dr. Miles's book, it is the best specimen of "sweating" the Bible, in order to diminish its value, that has come to our notice. In the first place, the stories of Matthew and Luke about the miraculous conception, and the phenomena attending the birth of Christ, must, in some way, be gotten rid of, or effectually invalidated. To effect this result, choice of one of three methods is presented: 1st. By dilution. 2d. By reducing the whole to a myth. 3d. By a plump charge of wholesale interpolation. Either of these methods will do. The first is, undoubtedly, the least troublesome of the three. Dr. Miles chooses the first; may be for that reason. At any rate, having made his choice, he proceeds to "water" the Gospel narrative until it bears scarcely the slightest resemblance to the original. He first dilutes the story of Zacharias. An angel, as the narrative relates, did not appear to the good priest, and assure him that his prayer for a child had been heard, and should be granted; but the incident, which the Evangelist very improperly misstates,-transpired in this way: "One day, while Zacharias was burning incense in a dark inclosure, his eye rested on some convolution of ascending smoke and flame at the right hand of the altar, as he was revolving in his mind his life-long prayer, and a persuasion took possession of his soul that, after all, God would answer it." The "convolution of smoke and flame " naturally enough he mistook for an angel; and belief, ever after, that he had really seen an angel, and been spoken to by one, was the natural result! Why should this version of the Evangelist's narrative be deemed incredible? Something similar has often happened to timid people, who, in the gloaming, have mistaken a stump for a ghost, and have been taken possession of by a ghost persuasion, and ever after have believed in ghosts! Moreover, Zacharias was not stricken dumb, as the Evangelist affirms, but his silence was "self-imposed." In other words, he practiced deceit, and pretended to be dumb! "In almost every age," Dr. Miles placidly remarks, "we find in some cases men, as a voluntary penance, have not spoken a word for fifteen or twenty years." The stcry that Zacharias was stricken dumb by an angel, somehow "got attached to the Gospel of Luke"; but, really is of no historical value. When critically investigated, it vanishes in the "flames fitfully playing on the ascending smoke" from the good priest's altar! The story of Joseph and Mary,- story so dear to the popular heart, is next diluted. Its "true inwardness" does not appear in the Gospels, and the keen scalpel of the critic must be applied to effect its development. The major part of the story is simply husk, gathered around quite an insignificant kernel. Here is the kernel: Mary, a young woman of sixteen, was espoused to a man much older than herself, named Joseph; whose business it was to make yokes and plows. Espousal, in those days, was in fact marriage, and Mary, soon after, found she would become a mother. Joseph was not expecting such an event; although he was not ignorant of the relation that had subsisted between them; and Mary was too modest to speak to him about it. "Time," she said to herself, "would reveal it." And time, of course, did reveal it; and the surprise and joy of Joseph at the event were very great; although he knew well enough what he had reason to expect! Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his "joy," he soon got it into his foolish old head that the birth of Mary's child was "too great a blessing to come to him," and he became jealous, and "supposed it possible," — knowing all the while that he had treated Mary as a wife,— “that Mary had been unfaithful to him." Thus Joseph was not - But Dr. only a very foolish, but also a very wicked old man. Miles tells us that his "foolish suspicions were all allayed by an angel-conviction," Joseph, like Zacharias, being subject to "angel-convictions," — that, either way, it was "all in the good providence of God"! A truly comfortable disposal of such an awkward matter! And "in after times," Dr. Miles continues," the old man used to tell the story with mingled pathos and humor," set off" with smiles of surprise and tears of gratitude"! True, Mary declared she had "not known a man "; but she only meant, "she had not publicly recognized her husband." True, too, Mary is called "a virgin"; but the Greek parthénos does not, uniformly, have the sense modernly attached to the word virgin! How she came to believe that her child was the long expected Messiah, was simple enough. The common expectation in those days, that a Messiah was soon to appear, "led every mother, conscious of coming maternity, to ask,-"Who knows but my child may be the favored one of God?" So Mary said, "Who knows but that God has already, in my virtual wedlock, favored me, and that even I may be chosen to give His Messiah to the world?" She dwelt so much on this thought, that, the persuasion of its truth took possession of her, and she represented it afterwards, (of course innocently,) as an angel that came to her "from the very chief places of heaven"! It would seem that she, too, like her cousin, and husband, was subject to "angel-convictions"! The story of the birth of her child, and the supernatural events attending it, is a sheer fabrication. Only when thoroughly diluted can the truth be perceived. Thus: The "heavenly host" were "some messengers, with torches, going to the shepherds upon the hillsides, and reporting the birth of a son, in the favored line of David, who might possibly fulfil their hopes. They were so rejoiced at this good news, that it seemed to them as if the stars in heaven were shouting sweet words of peace and goodwill!" The "wise men from the east," who came seeking the child, were a company of travelling merchants, who noticed, one evening, a bright, particular star," which they had never seen before to shine so brilliantly." "Passing near to Bethlehem, they heard of the birth of Mary's son, who, they were told, might be the king of the Jews; and they thought it would be wise to do homage to him to propitiate his future protection. In their compliments to the mother, they name the incident of the star; which little story Mary remembered ever after, and treasured among her domestic traditions"! The dream attributed to Joseph, in which he was warned to flee with the child into Egypt, was simply the thought, that came to him in the night, that the life of his child was in danger, and "that he must go where the hand of power could not harm it." Finally, the story of the conception, birth, and early life of Jesus was reduced by some one of the family having literary tendencies, to a "family memoir," and "St. Luke procured it somewhere, and has handed it down to us as a sweet and touching picture; though it was never thought of as any documentary proof until subsequent ages had misinterpreted and misapplied it." We can not help thinking that that "sweet and touching" "family memoir" had better have been suppressed; for it is no credit to Jesus that he came from a family so frightfully given to Munchausenisms! But thus far Dr. Miles; and such the amazing process by which he evolves the Humanitarian thesis. Of course, as we have already said, it is not new. The Germans have wagonloads of this species of criticism, which leave all such brochures as this the most threadbare of commonplaces. As Howitt well says, "There is not a difficulty in the chronology, the statistics, the palæontology, the metaphysics, or the historic statements of the Bible, which has not been siezed upon, hunted down, turned over on all sides, turned inside out, proved, analyzed, and tested in all imaginable ways, by a long line of the acutest mathematicians, logicians, linguists, orientalists, and sharp |