Now while the supernatural only rarely meets us in the most ancient Buddhist productions, where we would naturally have expected it to have predominated, it meets us in the very earliest writings of Christianity, where we would not have expected it at all. Christ to His first disciples and apostles was a miraculous being. The claim formulated in St. John’s Gospel, which is probably the latest book in the New Testament, is that advanced for Christ by St. Paul in his earliest extant letter to the churches. The Christ of St. John is not a new Person, but the same Divine Being of whom St. Paul says, “He being in the form of God” was “found on earth in fashion as a man.” He may have been all wrong as to the ground of his belief; he may have been an epileptic, a visionary, a man subject to trances, whose intense spiritual affinities disqualified him from judging calmly of matters of history; but there is no mistake as to his own belief and that of the other evangelists and writers of the New Testament. The teaching of St. Paul and St. John concerning Christ is set forth in St. Matthew with a clearness which no language can improve upon.[165] St. Mark dwells primarily upon the humanity of Jesus, a most important fact, presenting a historic basis without which Christian truth would have been little more than a mystic speculation; but even in St. Mark that humanity is not described as unfolding under conditions which are merely normal.[166] The life to which he testifies is not just that of Jesus of Nazareth, but of the Christ of God, who speaks with more than human authority. The development which is traceable in the theology of the Epistles is the expansion of the significance of the events recorded in the Gospels. The latest writings may more fully interpret the teaching of the earlier ones, but in them we find no other Gospels, but only anathemas pronounced on those who pretend to have them. In them a larger domain is seen expanding beneath our gaze, but it is visible only in the light of the central figure that meets us in the first. Plainly, therefore, while the earliest Buddhist witnesses account for their master and his teaching in the ordinary ways, and while their successors much later on in their attempts to embellish his portrait have produced quite a different person from the man of whom they first testified, the very earliest Christian writers could not account for Christ in any other way than by regarding Him as a supernatural being, who did not come into the world and did not leave it in the way of all other men. It is possible that they may all have been deluded, but if so, they vouched for their sincerity by their martyrdoms. The delusion, moreover, was at least universally and most consistently maintained, and it is the first instance in the history of mankind where a delusion has produced intellectual activity and expansion so wonderful as to have changed the current of history, and originated the great throbbing ever-enlarging