uzzles him most seems to him the clearest
evidence of the supernatural character of the narrative itself. His
religion is not so much the interpretation of what he does understand as
the explanation of what he does not understand. If he gives up the
supernatural his faith goes with it, and yet the other side of him--the
scientifically tempered side--balks at the supernatural.

It is hard to know what to do with such a temper. Indeed, just this
confused temper of believing and doubting, with miracles for the storm
center, has offered a rich field for those interpretations of the
miraculous, particularly in the New Testament, in terms of faith and
mental healing, to which Christian Science and New Thought are so much
given. We may conclude in a sentence by saying that since the
infallibility of the Bible was one of the flying buttresses which upheld
the inherited structure of religion, those changes and confusions which
have grown out of two generations of Biblical criticism have greatly
affected the popular faith.

_The New Psychology Both a Constructive and Disturbing Influence_

A third influence tending to break up the stability of the old order has
been the new psychology. So general a statement as this needs also to be
qualified, for, suggestively enough, the new psychology has not so much
preceded as followed the modern multiplication of what, using James'
phrase, we may call the "Varieties of Religious Experience." It has
been, in part, a widening of our conclusions as to the mind and its
processes to make room for the puzzling play of personality which has
revealed itself in many of these experiences. Hypnotism necessarily
antedated the interest of psychology in the hypnotic state; it compelled
psychology to take account of it and for the explaining of hypnotism
psychology has been compelled to make a new study of personality and its
more obscure states. The psychologists have been far more hospitable to
the phenomena of mental healing than have the faculties of medicine.
They took them seriously before the average doctor would even admit that
they existed. Their study led them to a pretty thoroughgoing
consideration of the power of suggestion upon bodily states, and
eventually to formulate, as they have been able, both the laws of
suggestion and the secret of its power. Telepathy and psychic phenomena
generally have also offered a rich field to the student of the abnormal
and psychology has broadened its inv