for many of us to retain the faith of our fathers, is, at any rate, sensibly weakened, and must seem little more than individual caprice.

But is it so? What are the facts? I take first M. Goyau's book L'Allemagne Religieuse, which was published originally in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and represents the statement of a hostile witness, who sees in the Liberal theology of Germany one more proof of the inevitable disintegration that awaits all Christian bodies which have separated themselves from the only true and living stock-i.e. the Catholic and Roman Church. M. Goyau, then, tells us that out of seventeen faculties of theology in the German Protestant Universities only four-Rostock, Erlangen, Greifswald, and perhaps Leipzig can be reckoned as orthodox. The remaining thirteen, including names of the highest eminence and distinction, with Dr. Harnack of Berlin at their head, have gone over to the Liberals, for the most part of the school of Ritschl,-in other words, to that alternative view of the historical basis of Christianity for which the plea of my letter was put forward. So serious, indeed, has the matter of the professors' become, that the State has come to the rescue. To the faculties of Bonn and Marburg the Government has itself appointed two orthodox professors, whom the students have at once. dubbed Strafprofessoren,' understanding very well that they had been introduced to keep their heterodox colleagues in check. The measure, which was attacked in the Prussian Chamber, does not seem to have been very successful, and is not likely to be repeated.' Meanwhile, orthodox 'halls' have been provided out of private funds in connexion with one or two of the universities for the training of pastors; and much protest has been raised by the orthodox party and the orthodox newspapers against the teaching now almost universal in the theological faculties. 'The conscience of the students is perverted by the professors'-so runs the cry-' and the doctrines they are taught make them unfit for the Church ministry.' In the great controversy on the use of the Creed in public worship, and on the significance to be attached to it, which was marked by Dr. Harnack's famous lecture in August 1892, the overwhelming mass of expert opinion was on the side of Dr. Harnack. After two years of controversy a revised edition of the Prussian liturgy and ritual was carried through by a commission, and agreed to at the general synod of November 1894. The orthodox party had so far triumphed, that the Creed was still included in the Ordination Service, but as to the objective value to be attached to it, and the degree of faithfulness with which it expressed religious truth, the Liberal school declared, uncontradicted, that the new Agenda' left pastors and congregations equally free; and, in fact, that the freedom exists, and is frequently claimed in spite of the strength of the orthodox

I regret, however, that in the short time at my disposal I have not been able to bring M. Goyau's information on this subject up to date.

party in the synods, no one will deny. Thanks to the scientific effervescence provoked by these long discussions,' says M. Goyau, in the world of students, of candidates in theology, and of the younger clergy, these dogmatic or rather anti-dogmatic novelties had only strengthened their hold.'

'The Professors'-that is to say, the Wissenschaft of the universities-had really won an important advance, which they still maintain. The position of those who support and follow them in the national Church is no doubt a difficult one; for while the universities are Liberal, the Synods, containing as they do numbers of older men reared in the school of Hengstenberg, are, on the whole,, Conservative -though hardly Conservative in our English sense and the Supreme Council of the Prussian Church is divided. But, say the younger generation, the men who are now our superintendents and authorities must before long give way to their juniors.3 The world is governed by the old, but the time will come when this old unbending school will have passed away, and when there will no longer exist even "isolated defenders" of such doctrines as that of literal inspiration. Christ did not say "I am tradition," but he said "I am Truth." We on our side know whence we are, and where we stand; we know also that the future of the Christian religion belongs to us.' Such is the confidence and the enthusiasm of the present Liberal and Ritschlian school. At any rate, such facts show that within the Prussian Church at the present moment the two alternative Christianities do actually exist together, both among the clergy and the laity; that the Christianity which has shaken itself free of miracle, and allied itself with modern philosophy for the creation of a new dogma, has the support of German criticism;' and that the party which upholds it is young, strong, and full of hope.

This result, then, has been obtained by the Universities and by the pressure of the scientific theology which they develop. If, therefore, German criticism,' as Lord Halifax tells us, is really a force in aid of traditional belief, it is clear that it has had no such effect in the country of its birth, and that the Germans themselves understand it in a totally different sense.

But it would be disingenuous to leave Lord Halifax's statement here the last thing one would wish to be, in dealing with SO sincere and ardent an antagonist. What he really means, I think, is that, whereas the Tübingen school had raised a great many presumptions against the received date and authorship of

This passage is condensed from a very interesting paper in the Preussische Jahrbücher for November 1893, by a member of the school of Ritschl, on 'Geboren von der Jungfrau.'

May I refer my courteous critic, Mr. W. H. Sotheby, who wrote an answer to my letter in the Times, on the 9th of September, to the facts collected by M. Goyau as to the double vérité, the two points of view, at present existing side by side in the Prussian Church?

many of the New Testament documents, which for a time disturbed the Christian mind, the tendency of criticism of late has been to put back those dates which Tübingen had pushed forward, and to overrule some of its presumptions. He is referring probably to Dr. Harnack's latest volume, Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, which, together with the recent works of Professor Ramsay and Professor Blass, has been very warmly received by English orthodox opinion.

In the very remarkable preface to the Chronologie Dr. Harnack indeed says:

As regards the criticism of the sources for the oldest Christianity, we stand unquestionably in a movement of return towards tradition. The chronological framework in which tradition set the earliest documents is to be henceforth accepted in its main outlines. The good faith of early Christianity becomes more and more evident to us. There is but one pseudonymous document, properly so called, in the New Testament-the Second Epistle of Peter'-(one document, that is to say, in which the author deliberately assumes another's personality).

In many respects, indeed, tradition has worked ignorantly and intrusively.

One has only to remember the following facts: the correction made in the address of the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians, the ascription of one letter to Peter (First Epistle of Peter), of another to James, of a third to Jude, a fourth to Barnabas, of the Epistle to the Hebrews to Paul, of the Johannine writings to John the son of Zebedee, and finally the interpolations made in the Gospels, especially in their conclusions, in order to recognise that there did exist a disfiguring action of tradition in the second century, which has to some extent affected the texts.

But in its main chronological outlines the early tradition is now seen to be more trustworthy than the scholars of the forties and fifties allowed. The same phenomenon has shown itself in several other historical fields, and the Tübingen hypotheses were none the less fertile and profitable in their day because in the processes of historical inquiry they have had to yield to later conceptions 'richer in historical points of view.'

What are these conceptions? Dr. Harnack tells us that a Dutch scholar disputing his conclusions made the remark that, if the tradition was to stand, a natural explanation of early Christianity was impossible. 'Why?' asks Dr. Harnack. 'Why should not thirty to forty years have been sufficient to produce the historical deposit with regard to the words and deeds of Jesus that we find in the Synoptic Gospels? Why should we require sixty to seventy? Why must the height on which the Fourth Evangelist stands have been climbed first seventy to eighty years after Paul? Why are not thirty to forty enough?' We shall have to recognise that by the time of Trajan all that is fundamental in Christian traditions, doctrine, preaching, and institutions was already developed-with the exception of the New Testament as a collection-in preparation for the growth of 'Catholicism' as a system, which took place between Trajan and

Commodus. Why not? What we are too apt to forget, apart from the native energy and fruitfulness of the Christian message, is the 'extraordinary spiritual and intellectual wealth of the century' in which the young Christianity developed.

Whoever persists in regarding Christianity as an isolated fact, a force self-begotten and self-begetting, must indeed require either a miracle or more time than the evidence justly allows him to account for its early development. But the historical criticism of to-day is able to show us the sources of the first Christianity, and the rich multiplicity of the conditions under which it arose, with a fulness never before attained; and history and law have only possessed themselves the more strongly and satisfactorily of a subject that it no longer takes a revelation to explain.

The fact is that the argument against the traditional view was never so strong as it is to-day, because history was never before able to present so cogent and convincing an alternative. A point of view,' said Amiel, 'is never overcome till it has been supplanted.' And that is what is happening with the orthodox theory, the traditional explanations of the Christian faith. We now know that Christianity as a system of ideas was more than half in existence before the Lord lived and taught that its distinctive doctrines of the Kingdom, the Son of man, heaven and hell, angels and devils, resurrection, soul and spirit, were the familiar furniture of the minds amid which it arose. The interest of the problem has really very much shifted from the two hundred years after the Crucifixion to the two hundred years before it. The doctrine of a pre-existent Messiah, the elements for the doctrine of a suffering Messiah, the 'heavenly man' of St. Paul, the whole rich and varied conception of the afterlife and its conditions, with its attendant ideas of angels and devilsto say nothing of that whole 'theosophy trembling on the verge of becoming a religion,' as it has been called, which the thought of Philo produced on Hellenistic ground-all these were already in existence either long before the Galilean ministry or before the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. What is popular speculation, the adaptation of Babylonian and Persian ideas, or theosophic philosophising, from a Greek or Palestinian basis, in the generations preceding Christianity, 'cannot immediately become inspiration in the Apostles -as Dr. Hausrath says. The mere competent editing of such a series of books belonging to Jewish apocalyptic, as Professor Charles has lately carried through, has thrown a flood of light on the conditions under which the earliest Christian ideas were formed. The mere final confirmation of the pre-Christian date of the 'Similitudes' in the Book of Enoch is more illuminating than the whole tendency-theory of Baur. Mankind could hardly have trembled for centuries under the eschatology of the Christian Church, if the educated portion of it at least had clearly understood that

Heaven, Hell, and Judgment-as Dante and Orcagna portrayed them -were the product of the later Jewish imagination, elaborated through a series of extra-canonical books, the popular literature of Palestine during the youth of Jesus Christ.

So that while one explanation, after provoking an immense amount of profitable work, has been, to a large extent, absorbed in and rendered unnecessary by the results of later research, the explanation, the rational re-thinking and reconception of the whole matter -under a great variety of converging influences-has made enormous progress during the last twenty years. The effective presentation of the data which have been accumulating, the re-interpretation of the fundamental documents in the light of much new knowledge, the carrying forward of Synoptic criticism, which, as Canon Armitage Robinson reminded us at the Church Congress of last year, is still in its infancy-these are the tasks now before us. Questions of date and authorship are now of secondary importance; it is the elucidation of the historical matter itself that lies in the scientific foreground. How to distinguish primary from secondary material, the legendary from the historical, and the more primitive and historical form of the Lord's preaching from the later additions and transformations which it inevitably suffered in its passage through minds steeped in various forms of contemporary theology and philosophy; and, in general, how to appreciate more accurately the human and psychological reality behind the primitive Christian documents, which are but a pale and broken reflection of it-it is to questions of this kind that German criticism' is now devoting itself, with those results on the Church and the Universities which we have described. It is hardly possible that German criticism' should be engaged at one and the same time in transforming the orthodoxy of its own country, and in propping up the orthodoxy of England; so that it must seem to many of us that Lord Halifax is mistaken, and that in making the statement I have quoted, he is really concentrating his attention on a few books and lines of investigation, taken out of their proper context and perspective, and giving them a meaning they will not bear-a meaning, moreover, which, in some cases at any rate, their authors would be the first to disavow.

These, however, are generalities. And as what I am anxious for in this paper is not at all to win a controversial victory, but to state a point of view and plead a practical cause, perhaps it will now be best to pass from the general position to some of those illustrative details which show most forcibly what are the difficulties now pressing upon the mind at once educated and religious. I have tried to prove by various practical tests that the general effect of German criticism' cannot be what Lord Halifax supposes it to be; but now let us follow its particular effect upon those clauses of the Creed which my letter chose as exemplifying the present historical case.