world of Christendom which confronts us now. Another significant contrast between the two sets of writings is found in the fact that while we can dissociate the miraculous elements from the Buddhist Pitakas without detriment to their other contents, we find it impossible to apply the same process with the like results to the New Testament. No one questions that primitive Buddhism is improved by being freed from the portents which subsequently gathered around it, for primitive Buddhism is an intellectual and moral system, a theory of the universe more likely to be obscured than elucidated by an appeal to the supernatural. Christianity, however, while appealing both to intellect and conscience, does so as the revelation of a life which, as a new thing, might break through all men’s conceptions of what was ordinary or necessary. The first appearance of life on this planet as an unwonted phenomenon would be accompanied by manifestations miraculous to all who only judged by experience of what had already been. So would be the first appearance of man to those who judged of things by what was possible to the actual animal world. That the manifestation of One who had come that men might have life, and have it more abundantly, should be accompanied with phenomena new and strange to mankind might have been expected. Christ, as revealing an ideal of excellence to which things as they are in nature, and men as they now are in society, do not conform, will in truth contradict the present working of both. This at least is the impression inevitably produced by the reading of the New Testament. Its teaching is throughout founded upon, and it would be quite unintelligible without reference to, the supernatural. To dissociate the miraculous portions from the rest of its contents would be not only to mutilate but to destroy it.[167] Not the theological and metaphysical elements only, but even “the ethical, are so interwoven into one fibre with the supernatural in the New Testament that it is impossible to detach them without destroying the whole fabric.”[168] Verily a Gospel without the miracles and all that accounts for them would be a very strange book.