Religion is naturally the most conservative thing in the world and even when we think ourselves to have utterly changed our point of view something deeper than mere intellectual acceptance protests and will not be dismissed. We pathetically cling to that to which we, at the same time, say good-bye. The average man somewhat affected by the modern scientific spirit is greatly perplexed by the miraculous elements in the Bible and yet he still believes the Bible the word of God with an authority nothing else possesses. In fact, by a contradiction easy enough to understand, what puzzles him most seems to him the clearest evidence of the supernatural character of the narrative itself. His religion is not so much the interpretation of what he does understand as the explanation of what he does not understand. If he gives up the supernatural his faith goes with it, and yet the other side of him--the scientifically tempered side--balks at the supernatural. It is hard to know what to do with such a temper. Indeed, just this confused temper of believing and doubting, with miracles for the storm center, has offered a rich field for those interpretations of the miraculous, particularly in the New Testament, in terms of faith and mental healing, to which Christian Science and New Thought are so much given. We may conclude in a sentence by saying that since the infallibility of the Bible was one of the flying buttresses which upheld the inherited structure of religion, those changes and confusions which have grown out of two generations of Biblical criticism have greatly affected the popular faith. _The New Psychology Both a Constructive and Disturbing Influence_