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Letter 17] miracle" (John x. 41). But whether I am right or not in this conjecture, it is quite certain that the attitude of the Christians towards the mere forerunner of the Messiah—about whom the Prophets had simply predicted that he would "turn the hearts of the children to the fathers"— would not be such as to render likely any imputations of miracles to him. At Ephesus, in the days of St. Paul, there were some quasi-Christians who had received none but "John's Baptism," and had "not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Ghost." That gives us a much stronger impression of the Prophet's influence, and a much weaker impression of the prevalence of the doctrine about the Holy Spirit in the earliest Christian teaching, than we should have inferred from what we read in the Fourth Gospel: was it likely, when the Baptist's influence seemed to the contemporaries of St. Paul still so powerful (perhaps too powerful) that they would be tempted unconsciously to magnify it by casting round him that halo of miraculous action which naturally gathered around the life of Christ?

Does it seem to you very hard, and almost cruelly unnatural, that the life of the Baptist—in whom the world takes comparatively little interest—should be handed down with historical accuracy (at least so far as miracles are concerned) while the life of Christ, the centre of the hopes and fears of the civilized world, has been permitted by Providence to become a nucleus for illusion and superstition as well as for the righteous faith and love of mankind? It is hard; it is not unnatural.

What does Shakespeare mean by this except to exemplify the universal, and natural, but illusive belief, that whatever affects the greatest man must also affect material