With regard to the miracles being natural events supernaturally interpreted--that is an explanation familiar to the biblical critic, and one which the psychologist of to-day is ready to support with numberless proofs and analyses. How much this poem owes to hints derived from Strauss's book is further illustrated by the "Glossa of Theotypas," which is borrowed from Origen, whose theory is referred to by Strauss in his Introduction as follows: "Origen attributes a threefold meaning to the Scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into three parts, the liberal sense answering to the body, the moral to the soul, and the mystical to the spirit." On the whole, the poem appears to be influenced more by the actual contents of Strauss's book than to be deliberately directed against his thought, for John's own reasoning when his feelings are in abeyance might be deduced from more than one passage in this work wherein are passed in review the conclusions of divers critics of the naturalist and rationalist schools of thought. The poem "An Epistle" purports to give a nearly contemporary opinion by an Arab physician upon the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. We have here, on the one hand, the Arab's natural explanation of the miracle as an epileptic trance prolonged some three days, and Lazarus's interpretation of his cure as a supernatural event. Though absolutely skeptical, the Arab cannot but be impressed with the beliefs of Lazarus, because of their revelation of God as a God of Love. Thus Browning brings out the power of the truth in the underlying ideas of Christianity, whatever skepticism may be felt as to the letter of it. The effect of the trance upon the nature of Lazarus is paralleled to-day by accounts, given by various persons, of their sensations when they have sunk into unconsciousness nigh unto death. I remember reading of a case in which a man described his feeling of entire indifference as to the relations of life, his joy in a sense of freedom and ineffable beauty toward which he seemed to be flying through space, and his disinclination to be resuscitated, a process which his spirit was watching from its heights with fear lest his friends should bring him back to earth. This higher sort of consciousness seems to have evolved in some people to-day without the intervention of such an experience as that of Lazarus or one such as that of the above subject of the Society for Psychical Research.