After what has been said, I do not think that any sensible man, unless he happen to be angry, will accuse me of “contradicting the Lord and His Apostles” if I reiterate my total disbelief in the whole Gadarene story.  But, if that story is discredited, all the other stories of demoniac possession fall under suspicion.  And if the belief in demons and demoniac possession, which forms the sombre background of the whole picture of primitive Christianity, presented to us in the New Testament, is shaken, what is to be said, in any case, of the uncorroborated testimony of the Gospels with respect to “the unseen world”?

I am not aware that I have been influenced by any more bias in regard to the Gadarene story than I have been in dealing with other cases of like kind the investigation of which has interested me.  I was brought up in the strictest school of evangelical orthodoxy; and when I was old enough to think for myself I started upon my journey of inquiry with little doubt about the general truth of what I had been taught; and with that feeling of the unpleasantness of being called an “infidel” which, we are told, is so right and proper.  Near my journey’s end, I find myself in a condition of something more than mere doubt about these matters.

In the course of other inquiries, I have had to do with fossil remains which looked quite plain at a distance, and became more and more indistinct as I tried to define their outline by close inspection.  There was something there—­something which, if I could win assurance about it, might mark a new epoch in the history of the earth; but, study as long as I might, certainty eluded my grasp.  So has it been with me in my efforts to define the grand figure of Jesus as it lies in the primary strata of Christian literature.  Is he the kindly, peaceful Christ depicted in the Catacombs?  Or is he the stern Judge who frowns above the altar of SS.  Cosmas and Damianus?  Or can he be rightly represented by the bleeding ascetic, broken down by physical pain, of too many mediaeval pictures?  Are we to accept the Jesus of the second, or the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, as the true Jesus?  What did he really say and do; and how much that is attributed to him, in speech and action, is the embroidery of the various parties into which his followers tended to split themselves within twenty years of his death, when even the threefold tradition was only nascent?

If any one will answer these questions for me with something more to the point than feeble talk about the “cowardice of agnosticism,” I shall be deeply his debtor.  Unless and until they are satifactorily answered, I say of agnosticism in this matter, “J’y suis, et j’y reste.”