I recall to the reader the very convenient form of Mr. N.'s book for administering doses of infidelity: as he is merely recounting the course of his own mind, he can give a conviction as it formed itself, without the least proof. Thus he has a "high sense of the lucid force with which he [Strauss] unanswerably shows that the fourth gospel is no faithful exhibition of the discourses of Jesus." (Phases, p. 174.) What has produced this conviction we are left to imagine; of course it is supposed to be something. Before this, however, Mr. Ν. says, "It had become quite certain to me that the secret colloquy with Nicodemus, and the splendid testimony of the Baptist to the Father and the Son, were wholly modeled out of John's own imagination." (Phases, p. 174.) How did it "become quite certain?" It is left to be supposed because it is "quite certain." One can only, to such kind of assertions, answer in the negative-that it is not " quite certain."
Such assertions have this immense difficulty standing in the way:-that it is a "splendid testimony" on subjects which Alexandrian philosophers have essayed to teach-that this testimony contains the holiest and truest teaching on man's real condition, and what he needed-the profoundest knowledge and application of the Old Testament, and the connection between the universal principles it contains and the particular application in which a Jewish doctor ought to have understood them-and yet the clear distinction as to how, in their universality as applied by God in grace, they would reach to all (besides the positive revelation of what introduced the heavenly development of the character to which these general spiritual principles lead), and that connected with what we know to be historically true, and prophetically announced, though contrary to all Jewish thoughts, and in its actual form only discoverable in prophecy by the key which the person of Christ gave to it-yet, with that key, as simple as possible. All this, and much more than this, in the compass of a few verses (and such is John 3), we are told, is the invention of an impostor, and quite certainly such. It is a pity Mr. N. does not tell us why. If imposture be such, and so true, and has such a stamp of divine knowledge on it, what is truth? And what must the original living witness and exhibition of this truth have been? And besides, however profound, nothing can be simpler. There is nothing obscure and mythically mysterious about it.