The newspaper man, then, begins to feel perhaps that it is necessary for him to undertake the burden of fidelity to human realities--that burden that is often so lightly shrugged off by bishops. Looking at things in the large, or trying to, he strongly suspects that formal religion, as we have known it, is dying; lovelier and greater poetries are pushing in. (There are thousands of years still to come, you know.) The highest honour that he can pay to sacred matters is to regard them as so thrillingly actual that they can be accepted into the great general body of human life. To regard them, indeed, as news, as the word Gospel itself suggests. It would seem fairly obvious that the miracles and parables of the New Testament, like the various creeds themselves, were intended as vivid and stunning apologues. To batter them down to the level of facts seems to degrade them, as it would be degrading to reject Keats’s sonnet because there are no peaks in the isthmus of Darien, and because it wasn’t Cortes. The newspaper man prefers to take his stand with Tolstoy, who said, in that thrilling book “A Confession”: “I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as _necessarily_ inexplicable.” He prefers that when there is an available and mortally recognizable way of understanding things, they should so be understood. Take, for example, the story of the miracle at Cana. To a man trained to observe the delightful ways in which testimony arises and is transmitted, how does that story explain itself? Here is a wedding party, at which appears the amazing stranger. He seems a man more fascinating, more charming, more utterly delightful, than any that those country folk have ever encountered. They are all very merry, the toasts go round, the wine runs short. But the ruler of the feast, turning to the stranger, says, prettily enough, I think, “With _you_ here, water is as good as wine.” Some one else takes it up, echoing the sentiment, seeking to add to it. “Right!” he cries. “Our friend here makes the water into wine. Here’s to you!” And with friendly applause the gathering ratifies the compliment. One of the servants overhears, and carries the incident into the kitchen. How quickly it grows and passes down the village street! “They’ve got some one in there who’s turning water into wine!” Can it be denied that this is the way that human events are reported?