Instead of making vain and pedantic endeavors to invent them outside of it, what we have to do is to help, so far as we can, towards their continuing to be found inside of it by honest and sane people, who would be glad to find them there if they can accomplish it without playing tricks with their understanding; to help them to accomplish this, and to remove obstacles out of the way of their doing so. Far from having anything to gain by being timid and reticent, or else vague and rhetorical in treating of the miraculous element in the Bible, he who would help men will probably now do most good by treating this element with entire unreserve. Let him frankly say, that miracle narrated in the Bible is as legendary as miracle narrated anywhere else and not more to be taken as having actually happened. If he calls it symbolical, let him be careful to mark that the narrators did not mean it for symbol, but delivered it as having actually happened, and in so delivering it were mistaken. Let him say that we can still use it as poetry, and that in so using it we use it better than those who used it as matter of fact; but let him not leave in any uncertainty the point that it is as poetry that we do use it. Let no difficulties be slurred over or eluded. Undoubtedly a period of transition in religious belief, such as the period in which we are now living, presents many grave difficulties. Undoubtedly the reliance on miracles is not lost without some danger; but the thing to consider is that it _must_ be lost, and that the danger must be met, and, as it can be, counteracted. If men say, as some men are likely enough to say, that they altogether give up Christian miracles and cannot do otherwise, but that then they give up Christian morals too, the answer is, that they do this at their own risk and peril; that they need not do it, that they are wrong in doing it, and will have to rue their error. But for my part, I prefer at present to say this simply and barely, not to give any rhetorical development to it. Springs of interest for the emotions and feelings this reality possesses in abundance, and hereafter these springs may and will most beneficially be used by the clergy and teachers of religion, who are the best persons to turn them to account. As they have habitually and powerfully used the springs of emotion contained in the Christian legend, so they will with time come to use the springs of emotion contained in the reality. But there has been so much vagueness, and so much rhetoric, and so much license of affirmation, and so much treatment of what cannot be known as if it were well known, and of what is poetry and legend as if it were essential solid fact, and of what is investment and dress of the matter as if it were the heart of the matter, that for the present, and when we are just at the commencement of a new departure, I prefer, I say, to put forward a plain, strict statement of the essential facts and truths consecrated