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!
(b) It has also been made clear that the New Testament deity is
altogether different from the Mosaic, and that the various conceptions
with reference to the supernatural claims of Jesus are of heathen
(i.e., non-Mosaic) origin. A woman conceiving a child through direct
intercourse with the deity, that child brought up as the reputed son
of her husband, the tale of the star-gazing wise men of the East, the
spirit of the Eternal appearing in a bodily shape like a dove, the
ordinance of baptism, the arch-fiend Satan and his subject demons, the
heaven and hell of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, his
subsequent appearances, his ascension, the doctrine of a future life,
all, it has been found, corresponded to the prominent religious beliefs
of the various Gentile nations, and were wholly opposed to or ignored
by Mosaic teaching. The claim of Christianity, therefore, to be the
representative of the Mosaic deity is thus destroyed, and the alleged
fulfilment of Jewish prophecy in the events of the life of Jesus is also
seen, on careful examination of the details, to be altogether without
foundation. There is thus no ground for that conscience-satisfying
belief which might otherwise have rested on valid evidence of the power,
and wonder-working, and special revelations, and faithfully fulfilled
predictions of _one and the same being_ continued down through many
generations of men.
2. What, then, is left to those who had cherished these beliefs, and
rested on them, when their fond faith and hope are overthrown by fairly
prosecuted inquiry? What, rather, is _not_ left? Their own life on
earth; their fellow-men in their various relations; the good earth on
which man holds the highest position and subdues to his own use; the
knowledge and understanding of the material and moral laws of the
universe and its harmony and order; the application of these laws, so
far as they affect the well-being of man, to the alleviation of misery,
to the diffusion of comfort, and to general progress, physical,
moral, and intellectual,--all these remain,--sources of rejoicing and
thankfulness, objects of affection, of solicitude, of admiration--ample
scope for the exercise of every useful and loving and noble quality of
the race. So, then, may we be taught to number the days of our brief
life "that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."