334 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



answers are conceivable, equally reasonable and sufficient. If it 

 was St. Mark's object to record our Lord's acts rather than his 

 teaching, what right has Prof. Huxley, from his purely human 

 point of view, to find fault with him ? If, from a Christian point 

 of view, St. Mark was inspired by a divine guidance to present 

 the most vivid, brief, and effective sketch possible of our Lord's 

 action as a Saviour, and for that purpose to leave to another writer 

 the description of our Lord as a teacher, the phenomenon is not 

 less satisfactorily explained. St. Mark, according to that tradition 

 of the Church which Prof. Huxley believes to be quite worthless, 

 but which his authority Holtzmann does not, was in great meas- 

 ure the mouth-piece of St. Peter. Now, St. Peter is recorded in 

 the Acts of the Apostles, in his address to Cornelius, as summing 

 up our Lord's life in these words : " How God anointed Jesus of 

 Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power, who went about 

 doing good, and healing all who were oppressed of the devil ; for 

 God was with him " ; and this is very much the point of view 

 represented in St. Mark's Gospel. When, in fact, Prof. Huxley 

 asks, in answer to Holtzmann, who is again unfavorable to his 

 views, " What conceivable motive could Mark have for omitting 

 it ? " * the answers that arise are innumerable. Perhaps, as has 

 been suggested, St. Mark was more concerned with acts than 

 words; perhaps he wanted to be brief; perhaps he was writing 

 for persons who wanted one kind of record and not another ; and, 

 above all, perhaps it was not so much a question of " omission " 

 as of selection. It is really astonishing that this latter considera- 

 tion never seems to cross the mind of Prof. Huxley and writers 

 like him. The Gospels are among the briefest biographies in the 

 world. I have sometimes thought that there is evidence of some- 

 thing superhuman about them in the mere fact that, while human 

 biographers labor through volumes in order to give us some idea 

 of their subject, every one of the Gospels, occupying no more than 

 a chapter or two in length of an ordinary biography, nevertheless 

 gives us an image of our Lord sufficiently vivid to have made him 

 the living companion of all subsequent generations. But if " the 

 gospel of Jesus Christ " was to be told within the compass of the 

 sixteen chapters of St. Mark, some selection had to be made out of 

 the mass of our Lord's words and deeds as recorded by the tradi- 

 tion of those "who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and 

 ministers of the word." The very greatness and effectiveness of 

 these four Gospels consist in this wonderful power of selection, 

 like that by which a great artist depicts a character and a figure 

 in half a dozen touches ; and Prof. Huxley may, perhaps, to put 

 the matter on its lowest level, find out a conceivable motive for St. 

 Mark's omissions when he can produce such an effective narrative 



* "Popular Science Monthly" for June, 1889, p. 171. 



