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Letter 18], the greatest feat of faith. But perhaps you will say, "At all events in St. Mark, the earliest authority for the miracle of the blasting of the fig-tree, there is no mention of forgiveness, and nothing that would indicate that his version of the words of Jesus referred to what you call 'the greatest feat of faith,' i.e. forgiveness." On the contrary, you will find that St. Mark, with some apparent confusion of different thoughts, retains the trace of the original spiritual signification of the words (Mark xi. 22—25): "Have faith in God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass, he shall have it. Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them; And whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any one; that your Father which is in heaven may forgive your trespasses."

I contend that, upon the whole, an impartial critic must come to the conclusion that neither the miracle, nor the reference to the miracle, is historical; and that, in all probability, both the miracle and the reference to it arose from a misunderstanding, without any intention to deceive. We must remember that the "short sayings" of the Lord Jesus—as they are called by some early writer, Justin, I think—must have caused considerable difficulty to the compilers of the earliest Gospels in the attempt to arrange them in order. Pointed, pithy, and brief, pregnant with meaning, sometimes obscured by metaphor, many of these sayings, if taken out of their context, were very liable to be misunderstood. Some compilers might think it best, as the author of St. Matthew's Gospel has done in the Sermon on the Mount, to group a number of these sayings together without connection; others, as the author of St. Luke's Gospel, might object to this arrangement, and might make