Embued with the conviction that we have the means adequate to the high ends here proposed in these very records—well understood and properly carried out—we have ventured upon these high themes in disregard of the imputation to which we may be subjected, with some plausibility, of overstating our cause. We say with some plausibility, only as merging our feelings for the moment in the superficial view ordinarily taken of the _real character_ of the religious element—a view altogether ignored by the history of our race, and the peculiar phenomena of the times. We may add, it is unmistakably at variance with the consciousness of almost every individual in Christendom, to whom it is no secret that religious questions—unless the interest has been neutralized by long neglect, or quashed by desperate violence—exert a strange and engrossing power over his soul. In whatever way we look at it, it is a _power_, and in this view may even be perverted to evil. “Suppose ye,” says Christ, “that I am come to send peace upon earth? I tell you, Nay, but rather division.” {37a} In deep sympathy with these words, and in corroboration of the prophetic spirit by which they are marked, are the following observations of Stanley, when summing up his reminiscences of the Lake of Galilee—the toiling all night and catching nothing—the great multitude of fishes, so that the net broke—the casting a hook for the first fish that came up—the net cast into the sea, and gathering of every kind: “all these,” says he, “are images which could occur nowhere else in Palestine but in this one spot, and which, from that one spot, have now passed into the religious language of the civilized world, _and in their remotest applications_, _or even misapplications_, _have converted the nations_, _and shaken the thrones of Europe_.” {37b}