scouting Hume, from Spinoza to what the Germans call their great generalissimo of unbelief-Strauss. To say nothing of our own Biblical critics from Kennicott to Hartwell Horne, nor of Michaelis, Griesbach, Semler, Bengel, Tholuck, Neander, Kurtz, Hengstenberg, Hävernick, Ewald, De Wette, Bleek, Kuenen, more or less favourable to revelation; the German metaphysicians, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and the rest, have come in to the aid of the long line of sceptical combatants, and trodden the arena of Biblical combat into a mire of destruction to every novelty in this department. And what is the result? Nobody doubts that there are weak places in the ancient narrative of the Bible: nobody supposes that it can be otherwise with the oldest book in the world, whose story ascends many thousand years beyond all written history. Nobody can be ignorant after so long and careful a comparison of statement and counter-statement, that the fabric of Scripture history stands like some ancient palace, time-worn but sound in substance. Its finials may be weather-beaten; its carvings, here and there, may have lost their sharpness; ignorant hands may have interpolated some barbarisms of sculpture, some discordant window-lights, but it stands grand and harmonious as a whole; sound and deep in its foundations, and unshakable in its strength.
And as it regards the miraculous in the Bible-the Author in his work on Germany in 1842 wrote this passage: -Take away the miraculous portion of the Jewish history, and you take away the whole, for it is built entirely on a miraculous foundation. Take away that and you connect its great actors-yes, Christ Himself - with madmen and impostors. There is no halfway-house on this path; and therefore the Catholics find sufficient occasion to say, that