Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. REMARKS ON OTHER THEORIES. If the Gospels be genuine, if the essential facts which I have stated in " The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels " be not erroneously stated, which no one, I believe, will pretend, and if the reasoning upon them be not fallacious, of which every one may judge for himself, the theory of Strauss is wholly excluded; there is no ground on which it can stand. It becomes evident that it is only one of those many theories which hang in the cloudy region of German speculation, — ovTe yjj? ovre ovpavov aTTTo/j.eva, — unconnected with anything on earth or in heaven. If the Gospels were written by Apostles and by those who received their accounts immediately from Apostles, the mythical theory of their having proceeded from men who innocently and unconsciously originated and propagated marvellous stories respecting our Lord must vanish at once into air. Nothing remains for the disbeliever in the historicalfacts concerning the origin of our religion, but to fall back on the forlorn hypothesis, that the history of Jesus is throughout fictitious, and that, of all intentional falsifiers, the Apostles were the most shameless and the most successful, — shameless and successful in so marvellous a manner, that no account whatever can be given of it. If, then, the views which have been taken of the theory of Strauss be correct, nothing can be added, which will exhibit more clearly its incoherent and dreamlike character, or its utter insufficiency to explain either the origin of Christianity, or any one essential fact connected with the origin of Christianity. I pass over, therefore, many other considerations respecting it, which to my own mind seem equally decisive as to its character, and will only make a few remarks on this in common with oth...