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These carry their truth stamped upon their face, and that truth is reflected back upon the miracles. It is on the internal investigation of the Gospels that the real issue lies. And this is one main reason why the belief of mankind so little depends upon formal apologetics. We can all feel the self- evidential force of the Gospel story; but who shall present it adequately in words?
At this the entire community felt as the pious reader can understand, recognizing that the royal authority had been trampled under foot and outraged and the more so, that some persons who promptly came to him for absolution were required to swear upon the holy gospels that they would never aid in the banishment, exile, or imprisonment of an ecclesiastic, even though this be ordered by the king himself, in person.
In order to bring out a point of importance I have indicated by a letter in the left margin the presence in the Clementine quotations of some of the peculiarities of our present Gospels.
He was astonished, in going over such conversations afterwards, to discover that her questions and his efforts to answer them in other than theological terms were both illuminating and stimulating. Sayings in the Gospels leaped out in his mind, fired with new meanings; so simple, once perceived, that he was amazed not to have seen them before.
We have to widen our conceptions, if we have thought of our Jesus only as love, and have thought of love as shallow, as most men do. We are sometimes told that these two pictures, that of the Christ of the Gospels and that of the Christ of the Apocalypse, are incapable of being fused together in one original. But they can be stereoscoped, if we may say so.
Criticism which seeks to discredit the gospels, for instance most recently Réville in his "Jésus de Nazareth," discovers two separate and mutually exclusive lines of tradition, one telling of appearances in Galilee, represented by Mark and the last chapter in John, the other telling of appearances in or near Jerusalem, and found in Luke and the twentieth chapter of John.
And this is the ground upon which the exception stands. But what is still more material to observe is, that this Gospel, in the main, agreed with our present Gospel of Saint Matthew. Now if, with this account of the apocryphal Gospels, we compare what we have read concerning the canonical Scriptures in the preceding sections; or even recollect that general but well-founded assertion of Dr.
Thus considered, the kinds of marvellous events recorded in the Gospels, for example, are no longer to be dismissed on a priori grounds as 'mythical. We cannot now discard evidence as necessarily false because it clashes with our present ideas of the possible, when we have to acknowledge that the very same evidence may safely convey to us facts which clashed with our fathers' notions of what is possible, but which are now accepted.
"Several of them gathered in a secluded spot to cultivate the lands that had been laid waste and were abandoned since the conquest. They were plain and good men, faithful to the recollections of old Gaul and to the precepts of the gospels. Those monks lived in celibacy, but took no vows. They remained lay, and had no clerical character.
If supposing the accounts to have the two foregoing qualifications, we still may suspect them to be false; if, in the time when, and in the place where, they took their rise, they might be suffered to pass without examination, we have still less reason to believe the gospels.
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