Observe, when we become honestly pure agnostics the whole scene changes by the change in our point of view.  We may then read the records impartially, or on their own merits, without any antecedent conviction that they must be false.  It is then an open question whether they are not true as history.

There is so much to be said in objective evidence for Christianity that were the central doctrines thus testified to anything short of miraculous, no one would doubt.  But we are not competent judges a priori of what a revelation should be.  If our agnosticism be pure, we have no right to pre-judge the case on prima facie grounds.

One of the strongest pieces of objective evidence in favour of Christianity is not sufficiently enforced by apologists.  Indeed, I am not aware that I have ever seen it mentioned.  It is the absence from the biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth of human knowledge—­whether in natural science, ethics, political economy, or elsewhere—­has had to discount.  This negative argument is really almost as strong as is the positive one from what Christ did teach.  For when we consider what a large number of sayings are recorded of—­or at least attributed to—­Him, it becomes most remarkable that in literal truth there is no reason why any of His words should ever pass away in the sense of becoming obsolete.  ‘Not even now could it be easy,’ says John Stuart Mill, ’even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life[63].’  Contrast Jesus Christ in this respect with other thinkers of like antiquity.  Even Plato, who, though some 400 years B.C. in point of time, was greatly in advance of Him in respect of philosophic thought—­not only because Athens then presented the extraordinary phenomenon which it did of genius in all directions never since equalled, but also because he, following Socrates, was, so to speak, the greatest representative of human reason in the direction of spirituality—­even Plato, I say, is nowhere in this respect as compared with Christ.  Read the dialogues, and see how enormous is the contrast with the Gospels in respect of errors of all kinds—­reaching even to absurdity in respect of reason, and to sayings shocking to the moral sense.  Yet this is confessedly the highest level of human reason on the lines of spirituality, when unaided by alleged revelation.

Two things may be said in reply.  First, that the Jews (Rabbis) of Christ’s period had enunciated most of Christ’s ethical sayings.  But, even so far as this is true, the sayings were confessedly extracted or deduced from the Old Testament, and so ex hypothesi due to original inspiration.  Again, it is not very far true, because, as Ecce Homo says, the ethical sayings of Christ, even when anticipated by Rabbis and the Old Testament, were selected by Him.