The report that Jesus was God is equally impossible of verification.
How are we to prove whether or not a certain person was God? Jesus may
have been a wonderful man, but is every wonderful man a God? Jesus may
have claimed to have been a God, but is every one who puts forth such
a claim a God? How, then, are we to decide which of the numerous
candidates for divine honors should be given our votes? And can we by
voting for Jesus make him a God? Observe to what confusion the mere
attempt to follow such a report leads us.

A human Jesus may or may not have existed, but we are as sure as we
can be of anything, that a virgin-born God, named Jesus, such as we
must believe in or be eternally lost, is an impossibility--except to
credulity. But credulity is no evidence at all, even when it is
dignified by the name of _faith_. Let us pause for a moment to
reflect: The final argument for the existence of the miraculous Jesus,
preached in church and Sunday-school, these two thousand years, as the
sole savior of the world, is an appeal to faith--the same to which
Mohammed resorts to establish his claims, and Brigham Young to prove
his revelation. There is no other possible way by which the virgin-
birth or the _godhood_ of a man can be established. And such a faith
is never free, it is always maintained by the sword now, and by
hell-fire hereafter.

Once more, if it had been reported of Abraham Lincoln that he
predicted his own assassination; that he promised some of his friends
they would not die until they saw him coming again upon the clouds of
heaven; that he would give them thrones to sit upon; that they could
safely drink deadly poisons in his name, or that he would grant them
any request which they might make, provided they asked it for his
sake, we would be justified in concluding that such a Lincoln never