the other hand, you accept Eginhard’s evidence, why do you laugh at the supposed efficacy of relics and the saint-worship of the modern Romanists?  It cannot be pretended, in the face of all evidence, that the Jews of the year 30 A.D., or thereabouts, were less imbued with the belief in the supernatural than were the Franks of the year 800 A.D.  The same influences were at work in each case, and it is only reasonable to suppose that the results were the same.  If the evidence of Eginhard is insufficient to lead reasonable men to believe in the miracles he relates, a fortiori the evidence afforded by the Gospels and the Acts must be so.[43]

But it may be said that no serious critic denies the genuineness of the four great Pauline Epistles—­Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, and Romans—­and that in three out of these four Paul lays claim to the power of working miracles.[44] Must we suppose, therefore, that the Apostle to the Gentiles has stated that which is false?  But to how much does this so-called claim amount?  It may mean much or little.  Paul nowhere tells us what he did in this direction; and in his sore need to justify his assumption of apostleship against the sneers of his enemies, it is hardly likely that, if he had any very striking cases to bring forward, he would have neglected evidence so well calculated to put them to shame.  And, without the slightest impeachment of Paul’s veracity, we must further remember that his strongly-marked mental characteristics, displayed in unmistakable fashion by these Epistles, are anything but those which would justify us in regarding him as a critical witness respecting matters of fact, or as a trustworthy interpreter of their significance.  When a man testifies to a miracle, he not only states a fact, but he adds an interpretation of the fact.  We may admit his evidence as to the former, and yet think his opinion as to the latter worthless.  If Eginhard’s calm and objective narrative of the historical events of his time is no guarantee for the soundness of his judgment where the supernatural is concerned, the heated rhetoric of the Apostle of the Gentiles, his absolute confidence in the “inner light,” and the extraordinary conceptions of the nature and requirements of logical proof which he betrays, in page after page of his Epistles, afford still less security.

There is a comparatively modern man who shared to the full Paul’s trust in the “inner light,” and who, though widely different from the fiery evangelist of Tarsus in various obvious particulars, yet, if I am not mistaken, shares his deepest characteristics.  I speak of George Pox, who separated himself from the current Protestantism of England, in the seventeenth century, as Paul separated himself from the Judaism of the first century, at the bidding of the “inner light”; who went through persecutions as serious as those which Paul enumerates; who was beaten, stoned, cast out for dead, imprisoned nine times, sometimes