To-day it can hardly be said that there is any serious defence of New Testament supernaturalism. Some years ago a large number of Anglican clerics signed a memorial calling for a liberal attitude towards all historical criticism of the texts, and this was followed by an appeal to the Bishop of London asking that belief in the Virgin Birth should no longer be required of candidates for holy orders. The appeal was of course refused; but no competent inquirer doubts that hundreds of clergymen of the orthodox Churches are Unitarian in their beliefs. Living controversy now turns, not on the supernaturalism of the gospels, but on the purely historical question as to whether the Gospel Jesus ever lived; and over this issue Unitarians are found to be as resentful as Trinitarians ever were on the Unitarian issue. In Germany the debate has gone far, some of the more open-minded theologians admitting that the old lines of defence must be abandoned as inadequate. In England all critical processes take place more slowly, but there is now accumulating a defensive literature which tells of widespread unsettlement. The method of confident bluster is found not to avail in an age which has seen the rapid abandonment of so many vital positions, all in their time maintained with the same contemptuous confidence. The average layman has of course not yet been reached by such a problem as that of the Historicity of Jesus; but he has long been well accustomed to the defensive attitude in matters of faith. Down to the time of Colenso the "sensations" of the controversy were over the books which attacked. For a generation past the attack has been so general that the new "sensations" were those set up by new attempts at defence or counter-attack. Such books as the late Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World, Mr. Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution, and Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief, in their turn elicited an amount of excitement which told chiefly of eagerness for weapons of defence against the rationalist invasion. None of the works named will bear any critical scrutiny. Drummond's was repented of by its author, as it well might; and the irrationalism of Mr. Kidd and Mr. Balfour soon ceased to comfort the clergy who hastily hailed it as a means of stablishing the faith. What subsists is the mass of mainly conventional, formal, and uncritical orthodoxy, the custom of the majority, which stands for the same mental inertia as preserved ancient paganism substantially intact for five hundred years after Socrates, and enabled its traditional polytheism to overgrow early Christianity. And the professional defence to-day is at many points singularly like that put forward for pagan polytheism by the Platonists and Neo-Platonists. At its best it is certainly not more philosophical than the performance of Plotinus; at its worst not more hollow than the performance of Cicero. CHAPTER III POPULAR ACCEPTANCE § 1. Catholic Christianity