This arbitrary acceptance and rejection of parts of the gospel is not
peculiar to the Secularist view. We have seen Luke and John reject
Matthew's story of the massacre of the innocents and the flight into
Egypt without ceremony. The notion that Matthew's manuscript is a
literal and infallible record of facts, not subject to the errors that
beset all earthly chroniclers, would have made John stare, being as it
is a comparatively modern fancy of intellectually untrained people who
keep the Bible on the same shelf, with Napoleon's Book of Fate, Old
Moore's Almanack, and handbooks of therapeutic herbalism. You may be a
fanatical Salvationist and reject more miracle stories than Huxley did;
and you may utterly repudiate Jesus as the Savior and yet cite him as
a historical witness to the possession by men of the most marvellous
thaumaturgical powers. "Christ Scientist" and Jesus the Mahatma are
preached by people whom Peter would have struck dead as worse infidels
than Simon Magus; and the Atonement; is preached by Baptist and
Congregationalist ministers whose views of the miracles are those of
Ingersoll and Bradlaugh. Luther, who made a clean sweep of all the
saints with their million miracles, and reduced the Blessed Virgin
herself to the status of an idol, concentrated Salvationism to a point
at which the most execrable murderer who believes in it when the rope
is round his neck, flies straight to the arms of Jesus, whilst Tom Paine
and Shelley fall into the bottomless pit to burn there to all eternity.
And sceptical physicists like Sir William Crookes demonstrate by
laboratory experiments that "mediums" like Douglas Home can make
the pointer of a spring-balance go round without touching the weight
suspended from it.