AGNOSTICISM. 79 



all the weight of the admissions of a hostile witness. No one 

 doubts his familiarity with the whole range of the criticism rep- 

 resented by such names as Strauss and Baur, and no one questions 

 his disposition to give full weight to every objection which that 

 criticism can urge. Even without assuming that he is prejudiced 

 on either one side or the other, it will be admitted on all hands 

 that he is more favorably disposed than otherwise to such criti- 

 cism as Prof. Huxley relies on. When, therefore, with this full 

 knowledge of the literature of the subject, such a writer comes to 

 the conclusion that the criticism in question has entirely failed to 

 make good its case on a point like that of the authorship of St. 

 Luke's Gospel, we are at least justified in concluding that critical 

 objections do not possess the weight which unbelievers or skeptics 

 are wont to assign to them. M. Renan, in a word, is no adequate 

 witness to the Gospels ; but he is a very significant witness as to 

 the value of modern critical objections to them. 



Let us pass to the two other so-called " synoptical " Gospels. 

 With respect to St. Matthew, M. Renan says in the same preface 

 (" Vie de Je'sus," p. lxxxi) : 



To sum up, I admit the four canonical Gospels as serious documents. All go 

 back to the age which followed the death of Jesus ; but their historical value is 

 very diverse. St. Matthew evidently deserves peculiar confidence for the dis- 

 courses. Here are " the oracles," the very notes taken while the memory of the 

 instruction of Jesus was living and definite. A kind of flashing brightness at once 

 sweet and terrible, a divine force, if I may so say, underlies these words, detaches 

 them from the context, and renders them easily recognizable by the critic. 



In respect again to St. Mark, he says (p. lxxxii) : 



The Gospel of St. Mark is the one of the three synoptics which has remained 

 the most ancient, the most original, and to which the least of later additions have 

 been made. The details of fact possess in St. Mark a definiteness which we 

 seek in vain in the other evangelists. He is fond of reporting certain sayings of 

 our Lord in Syro-Chaldaic. He is full of minute observations, proceeding, beyond 

 doubt, from an eye-witness. There is nothing to conflict with the supposition 

 that this eye-witness, who had evidently followed Jesus, who had loved him and 

 watched him in close intimacy, and who had preserved a vivid image of him, was 

 the apostle Peter himself, as Papias has it. 



I call these admissions a " practical surrender " of the adverse 

 case, as stated by critics like Strauss and Baur, who denied that 

 we had in the Gospels contemporary evidence, and I do not think 

 it necessary to define the adjective, in order to please Prof. Hux- 

 ley's appetite for definitions. At the very least it is a direct con- 

 tradiction of Prof. Huxley's statement * that we know " absolutely 

 nothing " of " the originator or originators " of the narratives in 

 the first three Gospels ; and it is an equally direct contradiction 

 of the case, on which his main reply to my paper is based, that we 



* "Popular Science Monthly" for April, 1889, p. 756. 



