340 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



spite of strong and even violent prejudices. This is not a witness 

 to be put aside in Prof. Huxley's off-hand manner. 



But the strangest part of Prof. Huxley's article remains to he 

 noticed ; and, so far as the main point at issue between us is con- 

 cerned, I need hardly have noticed anything else. He proceeds 

 to a long and intricate discussion, quite needless, as I think, for 

 his main object, respecting the relations between the Nazarenes, 

 Ebionites, Jewish and Gentile Christians, first in the time of Jus- 

 tin Martyr and then of St. Paul. Into this discussion, in the 

 course of which he makes assumptions which, as Holtzmann will 

 tell him, are as much questioned by the German criticism on 

 which he relies as by English theologians, it is unnecessary for 

 me to follow him. The object of it is to establish a conclusion, 

 which is all with which I am concerned. That conclusion is 

 that " if the primitive Nazarenes of whom the Acts speak were 

 orthodox Jews, what sort of probability can there be that Jesus 

 was anything else ? " * But what more is necessary for the pur- 

 pose of my argument ? To say, indeed, that this a priori proba- 

 bility places us "in a position to form a safe judgment of the 

 limits within which the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth must have 

 •been confined," is to beg a great question, for it assumes that 

 our Lord could not have transcended those limits unless his dis- 

 ciples transcended them simultaneously with him. But if our 

 Lord's beliefs were those of an orthodox Jew, we certainly know 

 enough of them to be quite sure that they involved a denial of 

 Prof. Huxley's agnosticism. An orthodox Jew certainly believed 

 in God, and in his responsibility to God, and in a divine revela- 

 tion and a divine law. It is, says Prof. Huxley, " extremely prob- 

 able" that he appealed "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." But, if so, 

 his first principles involved the assertion of religious realities 

 which an agnostic refuses to acknowledge. Prof. Huxley has, in 

 fact, dragged his readers through this thorny question of Jewish 

 and Gentile Christianity in order to establish, at the end of it, 

 and, as it seems, quite unconsciously, an essential part of the very 

 allegation which I originally made. I said that a person who 

 " knows nothing " of God asserts the belief of Jesus of Nazareth 

 to have been unfounded, repudiates his example, and denies his 

 authority. Prof. Huxley, in order to answer this contention, 

 offers to prove, with great elaboration, that Jesus was an ortho- 

 dox Jew, and consequently that his belief did involve what an 

 agnostic rejects. How much beyond these elementary truths 

 Jesus taught is a further and a distinct question. What I was 

 concerned to maintain is that a man can not be an agnostic with 



* "Popular Science Monthly" for June, 1889, p. 184. 



