Of the three modes of criticism just indicated, importance attaches only to the third, which has been broadly designated as the mythical theory. The fraud-theory seems - as even Strauss admits - psychologically so incompatible with admitted facts as regards the early Disciples and the Church, and it does such violence to the first requirements of historical enquiry, as to make it - at least to me - difficult to understand how any thoughtful student could be swayed by objections which too often are merely an appeal to the vulgar, intellectually and morally, in us. For - to take the historical view of the question - even if every concession were made to negative criticism, sufficient would still be left in the Christian documents to establish a consensus of the earliest belief as to all the great facts of the Gospel-History, on which both the preaching of the Apostles and the primitive Church have been historically based. And with this consensus at least, and its practical outcome, historical enquiry has to reckon. And here I may take leave to point out the infinite importance, as regards the very foundation of our faith, attaching to the historical Church - truly in this also the ekklesia theou zontos, stulos kai hedraioma[columna et fulcrum] tes aletheias (the Church of the Living God, the pillar and stay [support] of the truth).
As regards the second class of interpretation - the rationalistic - it is altogether so superficial, shadowy and unreal that it can at most be only regarded as a passing phase of light-minded attempts to set aside felt difficulties.
But the third mode of explanation, commonly, though perhaps not always quite fairly, designated as the mythical, deserves and demands, at least in its sober presentation, the serious consideration of the historical student. Happily it is also that which, in the nature of it, is most capable of being subjected to the test of historical examination. For, as previously stated, we possess ample materials for ascertaining the state of thought, belief, and expectancy in the time of Christ, and of His Apostles. And to this aspect of objections to the Gospels the main line of argumentation in this book has been addressed. For, if the historical analysis here attempted has any logical force, it leads up to this conclusion, that Jesus Christ was, alike in the fundamental direction of His teaching and work, and in its details, antithetic to the Synagogue in its doctrine, practice, and expectancies.
But even so, one difficulty - we all feel it - remaineth. It is that connected with miracles, or rather with the miraculous, since the designation, and the difficulty to which it points, must not be limited to outward and tangible phenomena. But herein, I venture to say, lies also its solution, at least so far as such is possible - since the difficulty itself, the miraculous, is of the very essence of our thinking about the Divine, and therefore one of the conditions of it: at least, in all religions of which the origin is not from within us, subjective, but from without us, objective, or, if I may so say, in all that claim to be universal religions (catholic thinking). But, to my mind, the evidential value of miracles (as frequently set forth in these volumes) lies not in what, without intending offence, I may call their barely super-naturalistic aspect, but in this, that they are the manifestations of the miraculous, in the widest sense, as the essential element in revealed religion. Miracles are of chief evidential value, not in themselves, but as instances and proof of the direct communication between Heaven and earth. And such direct communication is, at least, the postulate and first position in all religions. They all present to the worshipper some medium of personal communication from Heaven to earth - some prophet or other channel of the Divine - and some medium for our communication with Heaven. And this is the fundamental principle of the miraculous as the essential postulate in all religion that purposes again to bind man to God. It proceeds on the twofold principle that communication must first come to man from Heaven, and then that it does so come. Rather, perhaps, let us say, that all religion turns on these two great factors of our inner experience: man's felt need and (as implied in it, if we are God's creatures) his felt expectancy. And in the Christian Church this is not merely matter of the past - it has attained its fullest reality, and is a constant present in the indwelling of the Paraclete.