On the whole, the persuasion stuck to me, that words had been put into the mouth of Jesus, which he could not possibly have used .-- The impossibility of settling the names of the twelve apostles struck me as a notable fact .-- I farther remembered the numerous difficulties of harmonizing the four gospels; how, when a boy at school, I had tried to incorporate all four into one history, and the dismay with which I had found the insoluble character of the problem,--the endless discrepancies and perpetual uncertainties.

These now began to seem to me inherent in the materials, and not to be ascribable to our want of intelligence.
I had also discerned in the opening of Genesis things which could not be literally received.

The geography of the rivers in Paradise is inexplicable, though it assumes the tone of explanation.

The curse on the serpent, who is to go on his belly--( how else did he go before ?)--and eat dust, is a capricious punishment on a race of brutes, one of whom the Devil chose to use as his instrument.

That the painfulness of childbirth is caused, not by Eve's sin, but by artificial habits and a weakened nervous system, seems to be proved by the twofold fact, that savage women and wild animals suffer but little, and tame cattle often suffer as much as human females .-- About this time also, I had perceived (what I afterwards learned the Germans to have more fully investigated) that the two different accounts of the Creation are distinguished by the appellations given to the divine Creator.