On the other hand, if we turn to what I have called the special source or sources of St. Luke, how vividly do they bring home to us the incompleteness of the whole previous record! St. Mark apparently tried to collect parables as well as miracles; so also did the _Logia_. And yet neither of these documents has any trace of the Prodigal Son, or the Good Samaritan, or the Pharisee and the Publican, or the Rich Man and Lazarus, or the Rich Man cut off before he could enjoy his wealth, or the Importunate Widow, or the Unrighteous Steward. We should have thought it incredible beforehand that any one who professed to make collections with a view to a Life of Christ at all could have omitted, I will not say all, but any two or three of gems like these. And yet we have two considerable works, both including a collection of parables, and yet in neither of them is there a vestige of any one of the group I have mentioned. Even the conspicuous example of the Raising of Lazarus does not shake me in my distrust of the argument from silence. ii. Method of approaching the Question of Miracle. And yet I can well understand the reluctance to accept narratives of miracle. I can well understand a nineteenth or twentieth-century reader taking up the Fourth Gospel and saying at once and off-hand, ‘The writer of this cannot have been an eye-witness of the events he describes.’ I have little doubt that it is the same sort of off-hand impression which is really at work in the minds of many of the critics. They acquire the impression in the course of a rapid perusal; or rather it attaches itself to the recollection that they bring with them of what they learnt in their childhood. They do not try to shake it off; it is always there at the back of their minds; and it colours, and I must needs think discolours, all the elaborate and learned study that they make of the Gospels in maturer years. This question of miracles has been occupying my mind for some time; and I think that at once the most candid and the best procedure that I can follow in regard to it will be just to lay before you the provisional conclusions that I have reached as provisional, as a stage in the investigation of a subject that does not at all profess to be final, but that I hope contains something of truth and something that may be helpful to others as it has been to myself. The one main principle in the treatment of miracle that I should like to urge would be the importance of keeping as distinct as we can two things, the attitude of mind in regard to miracles of the contemporaries—those before whom they are said to have happened and on whose testimony they have come down to us—and our own attitude now in the twentieth century. It seems to me that our difficulties are much increased, and that we are prevented from realizing the full strength of the case for miracles, by confusing these two things.