Some of us might be content to stop at this point; we might be content to accept a belief that has been so ingrained in the mind of man and so important in its effects and associations simply as it stands. But the curiosity of science is not easily satisfied, and in the present day especially it goes on to press the further question, After all, what was it that really happened? We can see clearly enough what St. Paul (e. g.) believed to have happened, but how far did this belief of his correspond to the fact? Were these miracles that he assumes real miracles? When we ask these questions, it is well to remember that we are still in the region of relative ideas; we do not mean so much What is the absolute reality of what happened? as How should we describe it—we, with our twentieth-century habits of thought and improved scientific categories? It is here that we get on to the really difficult ground. It is ground that by the nature of the case must be difficult, because it means that we have to put a twentieth-century construction upon first-century records. It is as if a present-day physician were dependent for his diagnosis of the facts upon Galen or Hippocrates; or rather, the real state of the case is worse still, for that would be at least comparing science with science, the science of one century with the science of another, whereas the data that we have to go upon are not scientific (in the sense of proceeding from experts), but rather represent popular ideas and popular assumptions. i. In spite of these difficulties there are still, I cannot but think, some general considerations that may help us. The first is that the cause must be in some degree commensurate with the effects. Christianity is in any case a very stupendous fact; and it will not do to explain it as arising out of a series of trivial misunderstandings. ii. The evidence of the Gospels is not quite equal in quality to that of the Epistles. It is the evidence of men reporting what they or others had seen, not (so far as appears) that of men who had felt the current of miraculous energy actually thrill through themselves. St. Paul had felt this; it was part of the experience on which he looked back, and which he felt to be intimately bound up with the whole success of his mission. And yet we have to remember that the miracles of St. Paul and his companions and contemporaries are secondary, whereas those of the Gospels are primary. They are like the waves caused by an earthquake, but they are not themselves the earthquake. If Christ had not come first and done the things that never man did, there would have been no Day of Pentecost, no outpouring of the Spirit, no overmastering impulse that carried men like St. Paul from one end of the Mediterranean to the other ‘in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Holy Ghost’ (Rom. xv. 19).