Accept my best thanks for "The First Three Gospels", which strikes me as an admirable exposition of the case, full, clear, and calm. Indeed the latter quality gives it here and there a touch of humour. You say the most damaging things in a way so gentle that the orthodox reader must feel like the eels who were skinned by the fair Molly--lost between pain and admiration. I am certainly glad to see that the book has reached a second edition; it will do yeoman's service to the cause of right reason. A friend of mine was in the habit of sending me his proofs, and I sometimes wrote on them "no objection except to the whole"; and I am afraid that you will think what I am about to say comes to pretty much the same thing--at least if I am right in the supposition that a passage in your first preface (page 7) states your fundamental position, and that you conceive that when criticism has done its uttermost there still remains evidence that the personality of Jesus was the leading cause--the conditio sine qua non--of the evolution of Christianity from Judaism. I long thought so, and having a strong dislike to belittle the heroic figures of history, I held by the notion as long as I could, but I find it melting away. I cannot see that the moral and religious ideal of early Christianity is new--on the other hand, it seems to me to be implicitly and explicitly contained in the early prophetic Judaism and the later Hellenised Judaism; and though it is quite true that the new vitality of the old ideal manifested in early Christianity demands "an adequate historic cause," I would suggest that the word "cause" may mislead if it is not carefully defined. Medical philosophy draws a most useful and necessary distinction between "exciting" and "predisposing" causes--and nowhere is it more needful to keep this distinction in mind than in history--and especially in estimating the action of individuals on the course of human affairs. Platonic and Stoical philosophy--prophetic liberalism--the strong democratic socialism of the Jewish political system--the existence of innumerable sodalities for religious and social purposes--had thrown the ancient world into a state of unstable equilibrium. With such predisposing causes at work, the exciting cause of enormous changes might be relatively insignificant. The powder was there--a child might throw the match which should blow up the whole concern. I do not want to seem irreverent, still less depreciatory, of noble men, but it strikes me that in the present case the Nazarenes were the match and Paul the child. An ingrained habit of trying to explain the unknown by the known leads me to find the key to Nazarenism in Quakerism. It is impossible to read the early history of the Friends without seeing that George Fox was a person who exerted extraordinary influence over the men with whom he came in contact; and it is equally impossible (at least for me) to discover in his copious remains an original thought.