228 THE RT. REV. BISHOP J. E. C. WELLDOX, D.D., ON 



as credible authorities disappear, and the Person of our Lord, as 

 the Church has beheved and adored Him, vanishes. So com- 

 petent a judge of history and so impartial a judge of Christian 

 history as the late Sir John Seeley has declared, in Ecce HomOy 

 that, if the miraculous element in the life of our Lord is expunged 

 from the Gospels, He becomes a person no less mythical than 

 Hercules. But if the Jesus Christ of the Gospels is destroyed, 

 who and what remains? I think I may claim to have read 

 every or almost every life of Jesus Christ which has been written 

 in the last hundred years; and there is not one of them which, 

 if it is naturalistic, is to my mind, satisfactory. For if it is. 

 possible to criticise the Gospels, it is possible to disbelieve them; 

 but the one thing which is a sheer impossibility is to re-write 

 them. 



It is one of the paradoxes which were accepted in European 

 life before the great war that the Germans were tacitly, if not 

 expressly, acknowledged to be the intellectual leaders of Europe. 

 Germany advertised itself ; Germany eulogised itself ; and, be- 

 cause the Germans had three times proved themselves to be 

 efficient in the art of war, they were assumed to be efficient in all 

 other arts. But the Germans, although they are industrious,, 

 have never been a very clever people. A comparison between 

 France and Germany, whether in literature or art or science or 

 even in spirituality, will at once demonstrate the superiority of 

 the French. Yet certain schools of English divines seemed to 

 hang with breathless suspense upon the pronouncements of 

 German theology. When Dr. Harnack published his book upon 

 the authorship of the Acts of the x\postles, a book not containing, 

 I think, a single argument which had not been advanced by 

 English writers before him, his admission that the author was 

 a medical man, and that medical man St. Luke, was acclaimed' 

 as a triumph of orthodoxy. But German theologians are 

 strangely ignorant of all such critical or exegetical work as has 

 been done outside Germany. What is to be said of Professor 

 Julicher, who can discuss the commentators upon the fourth 

 Gospel without mentioning Bishop Westcott ; or the commentators 

 upon St. Paul's Epistles without mentioning Bishop Lightfoof^ 

 Nay, in the field of Christian apologetics so great a name as. 

 Bishop Butler's is practically unknown to Germany. 



But the circumstances of intellectual and still more of academi- 

 cal life in Germany have tended in a remarkable degree to the- 

 production of heretical, and I may say extravagant, writings. 

 Whenever freedom of thought is prohibited in politics, it tends 

 to run riot elsewhere. It is pretty sure to be guilty of excess in 

 literature, above all in theology. Before the war it was a capital 

 offence to say a word against the Kaiser; but any one who was 



