allowed for by those who in our days attempt to discuss and compare
religions. We are constantly and painfully reminded that the prejudice
of inimical critics, on the one hand, and the furious bigotry of
devotees, on the other, blind men to fact and probability, and lead to
gross injustice. Let me take as an example the mythical biographies of
Jesus. At the time when the Council of Nicea was convened for settling
the quarrels of certain bishops, and for the purpose of examining into
the canonicity of the three hundred more or less apocryphal gospels
that were being read in the Christian churches as inspired writings,
the history of the life of Christ had reached the height of absurd
myth. We may see some specimens in the extant books of the apocryphal
New Testament, but most of them are now lost. What have been retained
in the present Canon may doubtless be regarded as the least
objectionable. And yet we must not hastily adopt even this conclusion,
for you know that Sabina, Bishop of Heracha, himself speaking of the
Council of Nicea, affirms that "except Constantine and Sabinus, Bishop
of Pamphilus, these bishops were a set of illiterate, simple creatures
that understood nothing"; which is as though he had said they were a
pack of fools. And Pappus, in his _Synodicon_ to that Council of
Nicea, lets us into the secret that the Canon was not decided by a
careful comparison of several gospels before them, but by a _lottery_.
Having, he tells us, "promiscuously put all the books that were
referred to the Council for determination under a Communion table in a
church, they (the bishops) besought the Lord that the inspired
writings might get up on the table, while the spurious writings
remained underneath, and _it happened accordingly_".

But letting all this pass and looking only to what is contained in the
present Canon, we see the same tendency to compel all nature to attest
the divinity of the writer's hero. At the nativity a star leaves its