same time. The Dean takes very good care that he shall not appear to
do this, for it is perfectly plain to any careful reader that he must
really believe that one or both narratives are inaccurate, inasmuch
as the differences between them are too great to allow of
reconciliation by a supposed suppression of detail.

"This, though not said so clearly as it should have been, is yet
virtually implied in the admission that no sort of fact which could
by any possibility be admitted as reconciling them had ever occurred
to human ingenuity; what, then, Dean Alford must have really felt was
that the spiritual value of each account was no less precious for not
being in strict accordance with the other; that the objective truth
lies somewhere between them, and is of very little importance, being
long dead and buried, and living in its results only, in comparison
with the subjective truth conveyed by both the narratives, which
lives in our hearts independently of precise knowledge concerning the
actual facts. Moreover, that though both accounts may perhaps be
inaccurate, yet that A VERY LITTLE natural inaccuracy on the part of
each writer would throw them apparently very wide asunder, that such
inaccuracies are easily to be accounted for, and would, in fact, be
inevitable in the sixty years of oral communication which elapsed
between the birth of our Lord and the writing of the first Gospel,
and again in the eighty or ninety years prior to the third, so that
the details of the facts connected with the conception, birth,
genealogy, and earliest history of our Saviour are irrecoverable--a
general impression being alone possible, or indeed desirable.

"It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford had
expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who would
have read his book? Where would have been that influence in the