“Because it [Christ’s gospel] denounced the rich and commanded them to divest themselves of all their possessions, it attacked the whole sacrificial cult.... A people without possessions could never possibly afford fat bullocks to burn or skins of oil to pour away.... Moreover, because this gospel minimized the importance of learning, and commanded men to keep merely the spirit of the law, it attacked the whole Rabbinical cult.”[167] Again I wonder where Browne obtained these details without having recourse to “legends.” And so he goes on down to the bottom of the page, by which time this same gospel has become “charged with quite devastating heresy.” Devastating, but not inordinate! If Browne’s mind works in this way, so presumably do the minds of his readers. Religion aside, not a few results may be expected from a “modern temper” of this sort--from the fact that there are in this Republic a large number of people incapable of being troubled by equivocations, by the glaring inconsistencies of flatly contradictory statements living at seeming peace in the midst of the same argument, or people incapable of remembering or too careless to remember more than one statement at a time. This “modern temper” makes it possible for men and women who do not accept the supernatural character of Christ to beg His authority for their own notions, no matter how opposed those notions may be to what is said in the New Testament records. In interpreting a statute one is compelled by a rule of law to consider all its parts together. In interpreting the Bible one indulges in the habit of selecting here a jot and there a tittle. Those selected become authority. Those rejected become legendary by the very act of rejection even at the hand of caprice or lack of information. Browne speaks, on page 268, of “the stupid and silly and gross extravagances,” the “pious embellishments and patent falsehoods that clog and confuse the Gospel accounts.” But the method for distinguishing the false from the true seems to be very simple. If a line of Scripture fits in with your preconceptions, it is wise and genuine. If not, it is either a forgery or the author was wrong. The principle of “the economy of hypotheses” is thus conserved. It will be objected that this is what we do with any book, and that one who does not attribute divine authority either to the Bible or to the Church which promulgated it as canonical scripture, is guilty of no intellectual malpractice in using individual judgment.