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consequences, and will take from us much to which we are accustomed, and
that has become near and dear, even sacred, to us. But it has this
advantage, that we feel we are candid and honest in our faith, to which we
may add that we are never forced in dealing with human hypotheses to give
our assent blindly, but may follow our own judgment. We may adopt or
reject the view that in the development of the gospel story much must be
ascribed to popular tradition, and I can readily believe that many who do
not know, either through the study of legends or their own experience, the
transforming influence which school and family traditions exercise on the
form of historical narratives, find it incredible that such a carbonising
process could have taken place also in the evangelical tradition as
related by the men of the next generation. They must then content
themselves with the alternative, that the laws of nature, which they
themselves ascribe to the Deity, must have been abrogated by their own
founder in order that the truth of the teaching of Christ might gain a
certain probability in the eyes of the people by so-called miracles.

Let us take an example in order to see what we shall gain on the one side
and lose on the other. The original meaning of making the blind see, Jesus
has himself told us (John ix. 39), "For judgment I am come into this
world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be
made blind." This refers to spiritual, not physical blindness, and which
is the more difficult to heal, the spiritual or the physical? But when
Jesus was repeatedly said to have healed this spiritual blindness, to have
opened the eyes of the blind and unbelieving, how was it possible that the
masses, especially the children, should not misunderstand such cures, and
interpret and repeat them as cures of physical blindness? Certainly such
an idea carries us a long way. We must then, for instance, explain such an
expression as that placed in the mouths of the Pharisees (John x. 21),
"Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?" as a further extension of a
popular notion already in the field. Nor can it be denied that cures of
the physically blind have this in their favour, that so exceptional a
personality as Jesus may also have possessed an exceptional healing power.
It then depends only on the character of the blindness, whether it was
curable or incurable, and the solution of this question we may be content
to lea