18 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
immediate practical object. Strong partisanship in 
politics or in theology is thus unfavourable to accu- 
racy of statement, and the advocates of sundry social 
reforms are noted for a tendency to “draw the long 
bow.” Since edification is the first desideratum, the 
facts must be squeezed and twisted, if need be, so as 
to furnish it. “ They can bear. it, poor things,” we 
can fancy our preacher saying; “they are used to it.” 
A certain obtuseness, or lack of sensitive perception, 
with regard to truthful accuracy has thus been widely 
prevalent among mankind. At times this has shown 
itself in the production of pseudonymous literature, 
or books bearing the names of other persons than 
their real authors. The two centuries preceding and 
the two centuries following the Christian era were 
especially an age in which pseudonymous literature 
was fashionable, and to this class belong some writings 
of great importance in the early Church. There was 
no dishonesty in this, no intention to deceive the 
public. It was simply one of the crude methods first 
adopted without premeditation when earnest preachers 
of novel doctrines sought to influence communities on 
a wide scale by the written rather than the spoken 
word. Any book that contained ideas known or 
believed to be those of some eminent teacher was 
liable to be ascribed to him as its author. And the 
claim, uncritically made, was uncritically accepted. 
In this connection may be mentioned the common 
practice of ancient historians in inventing speeches. 
When Thucydides, for example, describes the inter- 
esting debate at Sparta that ushered in the Pelo- 
ponnesian War, he makes all the characters talk in 
the first person, —the Corinthian envoys, the envoy 
