“No, Mr. Hodder, I simply can’t see any reason for resorting to a physical miracle in order to explain a spiritual mystery.  I can see why the ancients demanded a sign of divinity as it were.  But for us it has ceased even to be that.  It can’t be proved.  You ask me, in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, to teach my children that the Incarnation depends on it, but when they grow up and go to college and find it discredited they run the risk of losing everything else with it.  And for my part, I fail utterly to see why, if with God all things are possible, it isn’t quite as believable, as we gather from St. Mark’s Gospel, that he incarnated himself in one naturally born.  If you reach the conclusion that Jesus was not a mere individual human person, you reach it through the contemplation of his life and death.”

“Then it isn’t the physical miracle you object to, especially?” he asked.

“It’s the uselessness of it, for this age,” she exclaimed.  “I think clergymen don’t understand the harm it is doing in concentrating the attention on such a vulnerable and non-essential point.  Those of us who are striving to reorganize our beliefs and make them tenable, do not bother our heads about miracles.  They may be true, or may not, or some of them may be.  We are beginning to see that the virgin birth does not add anything to Christ.  We are beginning to see that perfection and individuality are not incompatible,—­one is divine, and the other human.  And isn’t it by his very individuality that we are able to recognize Jesus to-day?”

“You have evidently thought and read a great deal,” Dodder said, genuinely surprised.  “Why didn’t you come to me earlier?”

Eleanor bit her lip.  He smiled a little.

“I think I can answer that for you,” he went on; “you believe we are prejudiced,—­I’ve no doubt many of us are.  You think we are bound to stand up for certain dogmas, or go down, and that our minds are consequently closed.  I am not blaming you,” he added quickly, as she gave a sign of protest, “but I assure you that most of us, so far as my observation has gone, are honestly trying to proclaim the truth as we see it.”

“Insincerity is the last thing I should have accused you of, Mr. Hodder,” she said flushing.  “As I told you, you seem so sure.”

“I don’t pretend to infallibility, except so far as I maintain that the Church is the guardian of certain truths which human experience has verified.  Let me ask you if you have thought out the difference your conception of the Incarnation;—­the lack of a patently divine commission, as it were,—­makes in the doctrine of grace?”

“Yes, I have,” she answered, “a little.  It gives me more hope.  I cannot think I am totally depraved.  I do not believe that God wishes me to think so.  And while I am still aware of the distance between Christ’s perfection and my own imperfection, I feel that the possibility is greater of lessening that distance.  It gives me more self-respect, more self-reliance.  George Bridges says that the logical conclusion of that old doctrine is what philosophers call determinism—­Calvinistic predestination.  I can’t believe in that.  The kind of grace God gives me is the grace to help myself by drawing force from the element of him in my soul.  He gives me the satisfaction of developing.”