iv. A Patristic Parallel.
So far as the treatment of the supernatural has been made a ground of objection to the Gospel, I think we may take a warning from critical experience in another field. I quoted in the second Lecture several instances in which criticism has distinctly changed its mind and come back to a view far more in accordance with tradition than that which at one time prevailed. One of these instances was taken from the literature of the beginnings of Monasticism, and more particularly from the Vita Antonii ascribed to St. Athanasius. I pointed out how the whole class of literature to which this treatise belongs has been definitely set upon its feet again. After being at one time very radically treated, it is now widely accepted as in great part resting upon good first-hand authority. One of the arguments alleged against the Athanasian treatise turned upon the miracles contained in it. But at the present time that argument would be differently stated. Whereas it used to run, This treatise contains miracles of a kind that must be unhistorical, and therefore it cannot be the genuine work of St. Athanasius; now it would run, This treatise is certainly a genuine work of St. Athanasius, and therefore we must make of the miracles what we can: a judicious estimate of them is given by Dom Cuthbert Butler in his Lausiac History of Palladius (1898), pp. 192-6. In like manner I should like to reverse the objection that is often brought against the Fourth Gospel and to say, that there is strong reason for regarding it as a first-hand authority, and that the recognition of this should be a postulate of any examination of its bearing upon the question of the supernatural.
I observe that at the Church Congress recently held at Liverpool, in the discussion on New Testament Criticism, Mr. F. C. Burkitt made use of an argument very similar to this, and that exception was taken to it at the end of the debate by the Bishop of Salisbury, on the ground that the miracles in the Gospels and in the Historia Lausiaca are too different to be compared. Of course I perfectly acknowledge the difference. I would not for a moment wish to press the argument for more than it is worth. At the same time, it seems to me that we must not despise the day of small things; we must not reject an analogy simply because it is incomplete. It rarely happens that an analogy entirely covers that with which it is compared. Many an argument is employed a minori ad maius; and I do not doubt that it was in that sense that Mr. Burkitt wished his words to be taken, as I should wish mine.
LECTURE VI
THE DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS, AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE GOSPEL
The Fourth Gospel is like one of those great Egyptian temples which we may see to this day at Dendera or Edfu or Karnak—and we remember that the Temple on Mount Zion itself was of the same general type—the sanctuary proper is approached through a pylon, a massive structure overtopping it in height and outflanking it on both sides. The pylon of the Fourth Gospel is of course the Prologue; and this raises at the outset two important questions: I. What are the affinities of its leading thought; or, in other words, what is its place in the history of thought and the history of religion? and II. In what relation does the prologue stand to the rest of the Gospel? I need not say that both these points have been, and are being still, actively debated.