of Jesus which we possess.  There is every evidence of the purity of Jesus’ consciousness.  There is no evidence of the consciousness of sin.  There is a passage in the Discourses, in which Schleiermacher himself declared that the identification of the fundamental idea of religion with the historical fact in which that religion had its rise, was a mistake.  Surely it is exactly this mistake which Schleiermacher has here made.

It will be evident from all that has been said that to Schleiermacher the Scripture was not the foundation of faith.  As such it was almost universally regarded in his time.  The New Testament, he declared, is itself but a product of the Christian consciousness.  It is a record of the Christian experience of the men of the earlier time.  To us it is a means of grace because it is the vivid and original register of that experience.  The Scriptures can be regarded as the work of the Holy Spirit only in so far as this was this common spirit of the early Church.  This spirit has borne witness to Christ in these writings not essentially otherwise than in later writings, only more at first hand, more under the impression of intercourse with Jesus.  Least of all may we base the authority of Scripture upon a theory of inspiration such as that generally current in Schleiermacher’s time.  It is the personality of Jesus which is the inspiration of the New Testament.  Christian faith, including the faith in the Scriptures, can rest only upon the total impression of the character of Jesus.

In the same manner Schleiermacher speaks of miracles.  These cannot be regarded in the conventional manner as supports of religion, for the simplest of all reasons.  They presuppose religion and faith and must be understood by means of those.  The accounts of external miracles contained in the Gospels are matters for unhesitating criticism.  The Christian finds, for moral reasons and because of the response of his own heart, the highest revelation of God in Jesus Christ.  Extraordinary events may be expected in Jesus’ career.  Yet these can be called miracles only relatively, as containing something extraordinary for contemporary knowledge.  They may remain to us events wholly inexplicable, illustrating a law higher than any which we yet know.  Therewith they are not taken out of the realm of the orderly phenomena of nature.  In other words, the notion of the miraculous is purely subjective.  What is a miracle for one age may be no miracle in the view of the next.  Whatever the deeds of Jesus may have been, however inexplicable all ages may find them, we can but regard them as merely natural consequences of the personality of Jesus, unique because he was unique.  ’In the interests of religion the necessity can never arise of regarding an event as taken out of its connection with nature, in consequence of its dependence upon God.’