8. It should never be forgotten that human nature is a very subtle and complex thing—usually far more subtle and complex than any picture of it that we are likely to form for ourselves. Hence it is improbable that the enumeration of motives by the critical historian will really exhaust the possibilities of the case. Many seeming inconsistencies, whether of character or of statement, are really less than they seem, and quite capable of conjunction in the same person. 9. Where a simple cause suffices to explain a group, especially a large group, of facts, it is better not to assume a cause that is highly exceptional and complicated. This rule seems to apply to the indications of an eye-witness in the Fourth Gospel. 10. Such indications do not in the least exclude the natural effect of lapse of time and the unconscious action of experience and reflection on the mind of a writer who sets down late in life a narrative of events that had happened long before. 11. In studying a narrative of this kind we should bear in mind, as well as we can, the whole career of the writer: we should divide it into its successive stages, and we should be constantly asking ourselves which stage of his experience is reflected in the shape that each portion of the narrative takes. If the conception which results as a whole appears to be such as naturally starts from direct contact with the facts, that will supply us with a much easier explanation than any which involves the wholesale use of fiction. 12. There are different kinds of portraiture; and it does not at all follow that a portrait to be real must be full of movement and action. There are some minds that, from peculiarity of mental habit, although they preserve what they once saw or heard with great distinctness and fidelity, nevertheless easily travel away from these recollections of observed fact and glide into a train of reflection which is almost soliloquy. The author of the Fourth Gospel appears to be a writer of this kind. 13. He himself lays so much stress upon ocular testimony that we must give him credit for such testimony, even where it is not altogether easy for us to follow him. 14. This applies particularly to his reports of miracle. But in judging of these reports, we must before all things bear in mind that the personal disciples of Jesus and the whole first generation of Christians certainly believed that they were living in the midst of miracle, and certainly held that belief to be an important constituent in their conception of Christ. 15. If we would form an adequate idea of what we call ‘the supernatural’ in the dealings of God with men, we must not begin by ruling out all that transcends our common experience. We must keep it in our minds even where we feel that there are features of it that we do but imperfectly understand. More light may be given to us by degrees.