Justin Martyr, our next chief witness (giving the earliest surviving account of the Mass), stood to those contemporaries as a man just old enough to have fought in the Great War stands to those who had fought as subalterns in the Crimea or as a young American of to-day stands to Lincoln. St. Irenæus, with his explicit witness to St. John and to orthodoxy, stood to that generation of eye-witnesses much as a child born in the last year or two will stand to the mid Victorians. That is the kind of thing which the school Mr. Wells follows has got to get over. Such proximity may not be evidence as to the _truth_ of what the contemporaries of Our Lord said they had heard from His Own lips, but it is excellent evidence that they _heard_ it. You may ridicule the story that Peary reached the North Pole, but if you deny that he said he did and that companions of his believed him it is yourself you are making ridiculous. The great anti-Christian scholars of a past generation knew all that. Mr. Wells doesn’t. He follows them simply, in the innocence of his heart, because he thinks it is all plain sailing with no snags. He knows no better. But the more a serious student appreciates the character of the Roman Empire in the first century, and the actual limits of time involved, the more certain he becomes that the main Christian dogmas, true or false, belong to the very origins. The idea of a complete change in doctrine and method and tone within the known dates of the process becomes impossible to him in proportion to his historical knowledge. This argument applies, of course, with special strength to the tottering tale that St. Paul invented the Church. If you accept even some main part of what are traditionally St. Paul’s writings as authentic, you can discover him insisting to distant converts that he is adding nothing, that he has imagined nothing, that he is but conveying and spreading a doctrine which he had received. Again—to develop a point I have but mentioned—if St. Paul was making up a fantastic new scheme of his own, why was there no resistance? Why is there no hint or tradition or echo of universal indignation against such monstrous innovations? It is no good saying that the evidence for any such resistance has been destroyed. In the first place, it could not in the nature of things have wholly disappeared. There would have been a violent quarrel affecting the whole story of the early Church. And in the next place the most emphatic testimony is allowed to survive of a very grave difference of opinion—to wit, whether the Church should include Gentiles or not, whether the converts should conform to Judaic ceremonial laws.