n of God, Prophet and Teacher of the new and
nobler morality. So there grew up "a personal devotion to Jesus Christ,
who brought the doctrine to His disciples and made a passage for it into
their hearts." And almost immediately after "Aberglaube" regathered; and
devotion to Jesus took the form of an _Extra-belief_ of some future
advent in splendour and terror, the destruction of His enemies, and the
triumphs of His followers. And this process of development, begun while
Christ was still on earth, extended with great rapidity after His death.
"As time went on, and Christianity spread wider and wider among the
multitude, and with less and less of control from the personal influence
of Jesus, Christianity developed more and more its side of miracle and
legend; until to believe Jesus to be the Son of God meant to believe
other points of the legend--His preternatural conception and birth, His
miracles, His bodily resurrection, His ascent into heaven, and His
future triumphant return to judgment. And these and like matters are
what popular religion drew forth from the records of Jesus as the
essentials of belief."

From this account, strangely inadequate indeed, but not positively
offensive, of the origin and development of Christianity, he passes on
to the attempts made by current theology to prove the truth of
Christianity from Prophecy and Miracle. With regard to prophecy, he has
little difficulty in showing that predictions have often miscarried, and
that passages in the Old Testament have been interpreted as relating to
Christ, which probably had no such reference. Thus the first disciples
clearly expected the Second Advent to occur in their own life-time; and
it has not occurred yet. "The Lord said unto my Lord" is better rendered
"The Eternal said unto my lord the King"; and is "a simple promise of
victory to a royal leader." So, in something less than four pages, he
dismisses the proof from Prophecy, and goes on to the proof from
Miracles. "Whether we attack them or whether we defend them, does not
much matter. The human mind, as its experience widens, is turning away
from them. And for this reason: _it sees, as its experience widens, how
they arise_." Our duty, then, if we love Jesus Christ and value the New
Testament, is to make men see that the claim of Christianity to our
allegiance is not based upon Miracles, but rests on quite other grounds,
substantial and indestructible. The good faith of the writers of the New