But that which we scribes and pharisees, priests and Levites, cannot really accept is the fact that this infinite Creator--this tremendous God, who sustains the universe and who flings blazing suns and planets by the handful through the heavens--that this omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Divinity should actually have become finitely incarnate upon this earth. It is still more impossible for us to believe with our reason that the humble wife of a common carpenter should have given Him birth as a little, whimpering, helpless babe among the cattle of a stable in Palestine. Our caste has been compelled by the force of circumstances to accept this as a dogma, but we cannot believe it in our hearts. Consequently we build for ourselves an ideal Christ who is so different from the actual Christ that, were the real Christ to appear to-day, we would crucify Him exactly as we did nineteen hundred years ago. It is, indeed, the crowning truth of the ages that Jehovah did enter finitely into the flesh of a man; that He was miraculously conceived; that He was born in a stable in Bethlehem, and that His mother was the wife of a journeyman carpenter, who had a carpenter-shop in Nazareth. But that truth is not for us; consequently we either become sadducees and deny the resurrection of the soul, or else we are pharisees who, with a helpless hypocrisy, try to cause ourselves, by some _hocus-pocus_ of inverted reasoning, to believe that which we do not believe. We do not really believe that the actual laws of nature were ever so preposterously violated as the Scriptures tell us. No rational pharisee ever really believed that water, at a touch, can be actually transmuted into wine; or that dead and gangrenous flesh ever was, at a touch, actually transformed into healthy tissues; or that eyes organically imperfect ever were, at a touch, made to receive the light like healthy orbs. Either we falsify ourselves by saying that we believe these things, or else we benumb our reasoning so as not to think about them at all. Many of us would fain expurgate those miraculous narratives from the divine word, retaining only such spiritual and intangible ideas as are believable because they have no foundation in fact. Others of us give up the task as hopeless, and declare frankly that we do not know whether they are true or not, but that we are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. These things of divine truth are so preposterous to the common sense that only the ignorant can believe them. Wherefore the Scriptures are given into the hands of the ignorant for preservation, lest we, intelligent pharisees, should alter and amend them to fit our own ideas--in the which case they would inevitably perish.