If a conjecture may be hazarded here, we should be inclined to say that the Christian narrative largely presents, in picturesque and symbolic form, the subjective experiences and doubts of Jesus--whether these were of internal origin merely, or were suggested externally by some malignant spiritual being--as to His capacities and power for the great work which He had undertaken. The thoroughly orthodox, it would appear, must still be catered for, albeit only by the concession of the possibility of "some" malignant spiritual being, which seems a gratuitous slight to the canonical Satan, whose moral dignity had immediately before been acclaimed. But, after expressly insisting on the elements of "temptation" and "ambition" in the story, with the apparent implication that the young Teacher may have had a passing ambition to become a world conqueror, our exegete, in conclusion, collapses to the position of the German exegetes who, the other day, were still debating on the spiritual interpretation of what they could not perceive to be a pure myth of art. At this stage of enlightenment we hear allusions to "psychology," though I have not yet met with any explicit pretence that the traditionalist scholars know anything about psychology that is not known to the rest of us. In any case, the suggestion may be hazarded that the first researches they make into psychology might usefully be directed to their own, which is a distressing illustration of the survival of the intellectual methods of the ancient apologists for the Vedas and for the mythology of the Greeks. A severe scrutiny of psychic processes is indeed highly necessary in this as in so many other disputes in which the affections wrestle with the reason. Such a process of analysis gives us the real causation of the testimony borne by Mill, which is so widely typical. For non-religious as for religious minds the conception they form of the Gospel Jesus is commonly a resultant of a few dominant impressions, varying in each case but all cognate. Jesus is figured first to the recipient spirit as a blessed babe in the arms of an idealized mother, and last as dying on the cross, cruelly tortured for no crime--the supreme example of the martyred philanthropist. In the interim he figures as commanding his dull disciples to "Suffer little children to come unto me," and as "going about doing good," all the while preaching forgiveness and brotherly love. No knowledge of the impossibility of most of the particularized cures will withhold even instructed men from soothing their sensibilities by crediting the favourite figure with some vague "healing power" and talking of the possibilities of "faith healing," even as they loosely accredit some elevating quality, some practical purport, to the visionary evangel, so absolutely mythical that the Gospel writers can tell us not a word of its matter.