302 AGNOSTICISM I A REJOINDER viil 



its work of driving Christianity farther and farther 

 away from Judaism, until " meats offered to idols " 

 might be eaten without scruple, while the 

 Nazarene methods of observing even the Sabbath, 

 or the Passover, were branded with the mark of 

 Judaising heresy. 



But if the primitive Nazarenes of whom the 

 Acts speaks were orthodox Jews, what sort of 

 probability can there be that Jesus was anything 

 else? How can he have founded the universal 

 religion which was not heard of till twenty years 

 after his death ? l That Jesus possessed, in a rare 

 degree, the gift of attaching men to his person and 

 to his fortunes ; that lie was the author of many 

 a striking saying, and the advocate of equity, of 

 love, and of humility ; that . he may have dis- 

 regarded the subtleties of the bigots for legal 

 observance, and appealed rather to those noble 

 conceptions of religion which constituted the pith 

 and kernel of the teaching of the great prophets 

 of his nation seven hundred years earlier ; and 

 that, in the last scenes of his career, he may have 

 embodied the ideal sufferer of Isaiah, may be, as 

 I think it is, extremely probable. But all this 

 involves not a step beyond the borders of orthodox 



1 Dr. Harnack, in the lately-published second edition of his 

 Dogmengeschichte, says (p. 39), "Jesus Christ brought forward 

 no new doctrine ; " and again (p. 65), " It is not difficult to set 

 against every portion of the utterances of Jesus an observation 

 which deprives him of originality." See also Zusatz 4, on the 

 same page. 



