sticks closely to his preconceived formula about progress as always from
the simple to the complex, he can lead us astray. Again, almost all
great prophetic announcements are ahead of their time. They seem out of
place at the date of their first utterance--interruptions,
interjections hard to fit into an orderly historic scheme. Or suppose
the critic to be a student of the scientific school which will not allow
for the play of any forces excepting as they openly reveal themselves,
the school that will not allow for backgrounds of thought or for
atmospheres which surround conceptions. Such a student is very apt to
maintain, for example, that Paul knew only so much of the life of Jesus
as he mentions in the epistles. Such a student cannot assume that Paul
ever took anything for granted. We can see at once that a method so
professedly exact as this may be dangerously out of touch with the human
processes of the life of individuals and of societies. Or suppose still
further that the biblical student holds a set of scientific assumptions
which are extremely naturalistic; that is to say, suppose that he
assumes that nothing has ever happened which in any way departs from the
natural order. We have only to remind ourselves that the natural order
of a particular time is the order as that time conceives it; but it is
manifestly hazardous to limit events in the world of matter to the
scientific conceptions of any one day. To take a single illustration,
the radical student of the life of Jesus of a generation ago cast out
forthwith from the Gospel accounts everything which suggested the
miraculous. The conceptions of the order of nature which obtained a
generation ago did not allow even for works of healing of the sort
recorded in the Gospels. At the present time radical biblical criticism
makes considerable allowance for such works. Discovery of the power of
mental suggestion and of the influence of mind over body has opened the
door to the return of some of the wonders wrought by Jesus to a place
among historic facts. This does not mean that the radical student is any