In the symbolic story of the temptation in the desert, Satan says: “Command that these stones be made bread;” he urged Christ to be guilty of a miracle, of the prestidigitation which the ancient prophets had employed so frequently to strike the imagination of the people. But Jesus refused. And on another occasion he said to the people indignantly: If you did not see prodigies and miracles you do not believe, and to the Pharisees: “Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, ... and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” It is by the testimony of our own souls, say the Neo-Christians; it is by our own individual conscience, our own individual reason, that we shall find justice in the word of Christ, and that we shall revere it; and this word is not true because it is divine, it is divine because it is true. [Sidenote: Modern German historical criticism and liberal Protestantism.] Thus understood, liberal Protestantism is a doctrine that merits discussion; only it is sadly in lack of any distinguishing characteristic especially to mark it off from the numerous philosophical sects which, in the course of history, have gathered about the opinions of some man and endeavoured to identify his teachings with the truth and to lend to them an authority more than human. Pythagoras was for his disciples what Jesus is to the liberal Protestant. The traditional respect also of the Epicureans for their master is well known, the sort of worship they rendered him, the authority that they lent to his words.[60] Pythagoras brought to light a great idea, that of the harmony which governs the physical and moral universe; Epicurus, another, that of the happiness which is the true aim of rational conduct, the measure of goodness, and even of truth; and by their disciples these two great ideas came to be looked upon not as parts of the truth but as truth itself in its entirety; they saw no ground for further search. In the same way, in our own times, the Positivists see in Auguste Comte not a profound thinker simply, but one who has laid his finger, so to speak, on the definitive verity, one who has traversed at a dash the whole domain of intelligence and traced out once for all its limits. It is rigorously exact to say that Auguste Comte is a sort of Christ for bigoted Positivists—a Christ a trifle too recent, who did not have the happiness of dying on the cross. Each of these sects reposes on the following belief: Before Pythagoras, Epicurus, or Comte, nobody had seen the truth; after them nobody will ever see it more clearly. Such a creed implicitly denies: 1. Historical continuity, the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius is always more or less the expression of his century and that the honour of his discoveries is not due wholly to himself; 2. Human evolution, the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius cannot be the expression of all the centuries to come—that his point of view must