yet been ascending during the whole time of his doing so: such a
person finds himself upon the same side as at first, but upon a
greatly higher level. The peaks which had seemed the most important
when he was in the valley were now dwarfed to their true proportions
by colossal cloud-capped masses whose very existence could not have
been suspected from beneath: and again, other points which had
seemed among the lowest turned out to be the very highest of all--as
the Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the centre of the
Bernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till one is high and
far off.

Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the New
Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means
accurate records of the events which they profess to chronicle.
This, which few English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to
him so much of an axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound
theological structure raised until it was universally recognised.

And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advanced
thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, he
stood alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels in
having ordained the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergencies
of doctrine and character which we find assigned to Christ in the
Gospels, and as finding his faith confirmed, not by the supposition
that both the portraits drawn of Christ are objectively true, but
THAT BOTH ARE OBJECTIVELY INACCURATE, AND THAT THE ALMIGHTY INTENDED
THEY SHOULD BE INACCURATE, inasmuch as the true spiritual conception
in the mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by a
strife, a warring, a clashing, so to speak, of versions, all of them
distorting slightly some one or other of the features of the