ii. The evidence of the Gospels is not quite equal in quality to that of

the Epistles. It is the evidence of men reporting what they or others had seen, not (so far as appears) that of men who had felt the current of miraculous energy actually thrill through themselves. St. Paul had felt this; it was part of the experience on which he looked back, and which he felt to be intimately bound up with the whole success of his mission.

And yet we have to remember that the miracles of St. Paul and his companions and contemporaries are secondary, whereas those of the Gospels are primary. They are like the waves caused by an earthquake, but they are not themselves the earthquake. If Christ had not come first and done the things that never man did, there would have been no Day of Pentecost, no outpouring of the Spirit, no overmastering impulse that carried men like St. Paul from one end of the Mediterranean to the other ‘in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Holy Ghost’ (Rom. xv. 19).

iii. The argument is therefore _a fortiori_. The disciple is not above his master, or the servant above his lord. All these subordinate manifestations, though we have in some ways better evidence for them, do but point back to the one supreme manifestation, the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must never forget that behind the alleged miracles of the Gospels we have the absolutely greatest spiritual force that the world has ever known. If our knowledge is as yet very imperfect of the influence of spirit upon matter in general, it is inevitably still more imperfect of this crowning instance of the spirit-world in contact with the material. When we argue upwards from the analogy of the known to the unknown, we must always leave a large margin for the interval between the point at which our common experience, and even higher extraordinary experience, ends, and the point at which this highest of all human experiences begins. Even a strictly scientific method should be conscious of its own limitations; when it has done all that it can do, it should be aware that its ladders are still too short to scale the height that has to be scaled; it must leave room for a venture of faith beyond the furthest horizon of sight.