So far as the treatment of the supernatural has been made a ground of objection to the Gospel, I think we may take a warning from critical experience in another field. I quoted in the second Lecture several instances in which criticism has distinctly changed its mind and come back to a view far more in accordance with tradition than that which at one time prevailed. One of these instances was taken from the literature of the beginnings of Monasticism, and more particularly from the _Vita Antonii_ ascribed to St. Athanasius. I pointed out how the whole class of literature to which this treatise belongs has been definitely set upon its feet again. After being at one time very radically treated, it is now widely accepted as in great part resting upon good first-hand authority. One of the arguments alleged against the Athanasian treatise turned upon the miracles contained in it. But at the present time that argument would be differently stated. Whereas it used to run, This treatise contains miracles of a kind that must be unhistorical, and therefore it cannot be the genuine work of St. Athanasius; now it would run, This treatise is certainly a genuine work of St. Athanasius, and therefore we must make of the miracles what we can: a judicious estimate of them is given by Dom Cuthbert Butler in his _Lausiac History of Palladius_ (1898), pp. 192-6. In like manner I should like to reverse the objection that is often brought against the Fourth Gospel and to say, that there is strong reason for regarding it as a first-hand authority, and that the recognition of this should be a postulate of any examination of its bearing upon the question of the supernatural. I observe that at the Church Congress recently held at Liverpool, in the discussion on New Testament Criticism, Mr. F. C. Burkitt made use of an argument very similar to this, and that exception was taken to it at the end of the debate by the Bishop of Salisbury, on the ground that the miracles in the Gospels and in the _Historia Lausiaca_ are too different to be compared. Of course I perfectly acknowledge the difference. I would not for a moment wish to press the argument for more than it is worth. At the same time, it seems to me that we must not despise the day of small things; we must not reject an analogy simply because it is incomplete. It rarely happens that an analogy entirely covers that with which it is compared. Many an argument is employed _a minori ad maius_; and I do not doubt that it was in that sense that Mr. Burkitt wished his words to be taken, as I should wish mine. Footnote 54: _Theol. Literaturzeitung_, 1893, col. 181 ff. LECTURE VI THE DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS, AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE GOSPEL