204 HUXLEY 



rection, vary irreconcilably. A recent defender of 

 the faith remarks that "the tale of the physical resur- 

 rection of Jesus belongs evidently to the same circle 

 of thought as that of the miraculous birth. It shows a 

 love of the marvellous ; is deeply tinged with material- 

 ism ; and rests on a historical substruction which falls 

 to pieces on a careful examination." * So with the 

 Gadarene story \ so with the story of the feeding of 

 several thousand with a few loaves, with the result that 

 " the quantity of the fragments of the meal left over 

 amounted to much more than the original store " : 

 the reports differ. The explanation, hitherto arrested 

 and darkened by theories of inspiration, is obvious. 

 With the abandonment of those theories, every diffi- 

 culty vanishes. The Gospels are the handiwork of 

 men who lived in an age when any conception of the 

 uniformity of nature was foreign to the mind ; men 

 in whom the critical faculty of weighing of evidence 

 was wholly lacking, and who set down, each in his 

 own fashion, stories of events said to have happened 

 many years before — stories which had therefore filtered 

 through many channels ; fallible hearers repeating 

 them to fallible writers, whose honesty and sincerity 

 are not doubted, but whose competency is questioned. 

 As Dr. Sutherland Black says in his admirably com- 

 pendious article on the " Gospels " in Chambers's 

 1 Exploratio Evangelica, p. 255. 



