And here I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by
the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earth was
flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and,
if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, "Look
at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising
a wholesome scepticism. The modern man who believes that the earth
is round is grossly credulous. Flat Earth men drive him to fury by
confuting him with the greatest ease when he tries to argue about it.
Confront him with a theory that the earth is cylindrical, or annular,
or hour-glass shaped, and he is lost. The thing he believes may be
true, but that is not why he believes it: he believes it because in
some mysterious way it appeals to his imagination. If you ask him why
he believes that the sun is ninety-odd million miles off, either he will
have to confess that he doesn't know, or he will say that Newton proved
it. But he has not read the treatise in which Newton proved it, and
does not even know that it was written in Latin. If you press an Ulster
Protestant as to why he regards Newton as an infallible authority, and
St. Thomas Aquinas or the Pope as superstitious liars whom, after his
death, he will have the pleasure of watching from his place in heaven
whilst they roast in eternal flame, or if you ask me why I take into
serious consideration Colonel Sir Almroth Wright's estimates of the
number of streptococci contained in a given volume of serum whilst I can
only laugh at the earlier estimates of the number of angels that can be
accommodated on the point of a needle, no reasonable reply is possible
except that somehow sevens and angels are out of fashion, and billions
and streptococci are all the rage. I simply cannot tell you why Bacon,
Montaigne, and Cervantes had a quite different fashion of credulity and
incredulity from the Venerable Bede and Piers Plowman and the divine
doctors of the Aquinas-Aristotle school, who were certainly no stupider,
and had the same facts before them. Still less can I explain why, if we
assume that these leaders of thought had all reasoned out their beliefs,
their authority seemed conclusive to one generation and blasphemous to
another, neither generation having followed the reasoning or gone into
the facts of the matter for itself at all.
It is therefore idle to begin disputing with the reader as to what he
should believe in the gospels and what he should disbelieve. He will
believe what he can, and disbelieve what he must. If he draws any lines
at all, they will be quite arbitrary ones. St. John tells us that when
Jesus explicitly claimed divine honors by the sacrament of his body and
blood, so many of his disciples left him that their number was reduced
to twelve. Many modern readers will not hold out so long: they will give
in at the first miracle. Others will discriminate. They will accept the
healing miracles, and reject the feeding of the multitude. To some the
walking on the water will be a legendary exaggeration of a swim, ending
in an ordinary rescue of Peter; and the raising of Lazarus will be only
a similar glorification of a commonplace feat of artificial respiration,
whilst others will scoff at it as a planned imposture in which Lazarus
acted as a confederate. Between the rejection of the stories as wholly
fabulous and the acceptance of them as the evangelists themselves meant
them to be accepted, there will be many shades of belief and disbelief,
of sympathy and derision. It is not a question of being a Christian or
not. A Mahometan Arab will accept literally and without question parts
of the narrative which an English Archbishop has to reject or explain
away; and many Theosophists and lovers of the wisdom of India, who never
enter a Christian Church except as sightseers, will revel in parts of
John's gospel which mean nothing to a pious matter-of-fact Bradford
manufacturer. Every reader takes from the Bible what he can get. In
submitting a precis of the gospel narratives I have not implied any
estimate either of their credibility or of their truth. I have simply
informed him or reminded him, as the case may be, of what those
narratives tell us about their hero.