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REDEMPTION
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New Faith was concerned, was little better than that of a faithful servant on whom certain powers are conferred by the master. It is true that there is a great deal of what may be termed “mysteries " in the writings of John; but they lack both system and precision of thought, and are but little better than a collection of odds and ends of philosophic lore. One can hardly expect much help from this quarter, under the circumstances. Neither can we rely upon the later biographers; they understood little or nothing of religion and freely wrote what they liked. Add to this the confusion due to the deplorable tendency of an over-zealous mind to clothe the object of its worship in false and exaggerated glory, to add interpolations and passages to his utterances to increase their value, to leave out and remove quotations which seem misplaced, unnecessary, or objectionable, and even to support by testimony that which is either a pure invention of imagination, or has, at best, a very small fragment of truth in it, and the task of building up a theory out of such scanty material becomes immensely difficult.
The next difficulty lies in the mental attitude of the reader. Those who are not of the faith are always ready and eager to believe in anything which can be said against it, without waiting to verify for themselves the truth of the statements made, while those who belong to it generally resent all endeavours to get at the truth, and feel in duty bound to refute every charge bowsoever well-founded. The correct attitude to assume in respect of these matters is that we should all suspend our judgment till we have searched for, and found, the
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