1890 LETTER TO CARPENTER 169 



I am certainly glad to see that the book has reached a 

 second edition ; it will do yeoman's service to the cause 

 of right reason. 



A friend of mine was in the habit of sending me his 

 proofs, and I sometimes wrote on them "no objection 

 except to the whole " ; and I am afraid that you will 

 think what I am about to say comes to pretty much the 

 same thing — at least if I am right in the supposition that 

 a passage in your first preface (p. vii.) states your funda- 

 mental position, and that you conceive that when 

 criticism has done its uttermost there still remains 

 evidence that the personality of Jesus was the leading 

 cause— the conditio sine qua nan — of the evolution of 

 Christianity from Judaism. 



I long thought so, and having a strong dislike to 

 belittle the heroic figures of history, I held by the notion 

 as long as I could, but I find it melting away. 



I cannot see that the moral and religious ideal of early 

 Christianity is new — on the other hand, it seems to me 

 to be implicitly and explicitly contained in the early 

 prophetic Judaism and the later Hellenised Judaism ; 

 and though it is quite true that the new vitality of the 

 old ideal manifested in early Christianity demands "an 

 adequate historic cause," I would suggest that the word 

 " cause " may mislead if it is not carefully defined. 



Medical philosophy draws a most useful and necessary 

 distinction between " exciting " and " predisposing " causes 

 — and nowhere is it more needful to keep this distinction 

 in mind than in history — and especially in estimating 

 the action of individuals on the course of human afi"airs. 

 Platonic and Stoical philosophy — prophetic liberalism— 

 the strong democratic socialism of the Jewish political 

 system — the existence of innumerable sodalities for 

 religious and social purposes — had thrown the ancient 

 world into a state of unstable equilibrium. With such 

 predisposing causes at work, the exciting cause of enormous 

 changes might be relatively insignificant. The powder 



