MEDITATIONS AND CEITICISMS 183 



scientific method when he shows so convincingly 

 that the Synoptic Gospels must all have been de- 

 rived from one common source. If these records, 

 he says, were independent accounts of the words 

 and doings of Jesus by the disciples whose names 

 they bear, it is incredible that they should agree so 

 closely in all their details ; the different writers 

 would have witnessed and would have recorded 

 different scenes and events. Only of one thirteenth 

 of the days of the public life of Jesus do we have 

 any record in the Synoptic Gospels. Were these 

 Gospels each an original, or the record of independ- 

 ent witnesses, we should have had the events and 

 the utterances of Jesus on more days, since the apos- 

 tles would not all have been absent and all present 

 at precisely the same time. 



The scientific method can no more be ignored or 

 disputed than can the multiplication table. It is as 

 old as the reason of man and is fallible only as man's 

 reason is fallible. It cannot be applied to matters of 

 religious faith, because we here enter a region where 

 proof or verification is not possible. 



In the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi lay a 

 stone, the Omphalos, or navel stone, supposed to 

 mark the centre of the earth. And sure enough, it 

 did mark the centre of the earth, though not exactly 

 under the conditions the ancients believed. The 

 ancients supposed the earth had one centre, like a 

 plane or any irregular surface, or as the navel is the 



