steps of language in the search for causes or divine agents. All this occupied me far more than the age of the Fourth Gospel and its position by the side of the Synoptic Gospels. I had talked with Schelling and Schopenhauer, and little as I appreciated or understood all their teachings, there were certain aspirations left in my mind which led me far away beyond the historical foundations of Christianity. What can we know? was the question which I often opposed to Renan at the very beginning of our conversations and controversies. That there were great truths in the teaching and preaching of Christ, Renan was always ready to admit, but while it interested me how the truths proclaimed by Christ could have sprung up in His mind and at that time in the history of the human race, Renan’s eyes were always directed to the evidence, and to what we could still know of the early history of Christianity and its Founder. I could not deny that, historically speaking, we knew very little of the life, the work, and the teachings of Christ; but for that very reason I doubted our being justified in giving our interpretation and reconstruction to the fragments left to us of the real history of the life and teaching of Christ. To this opinion I remained true through life. I claimed for each man the liberty of believing in his own Christ, but I objected to Renan’s idyllic Christ as I objected to Niebuhr’s filling the canvas of ancient Roman history with the figures of his own imagination. Naturally, when I came to Oxford, I thought these things were familiar to all, however much they might admit of careful correction. Nor have I any doubt that to some of my friends who were great theologians, they were better known than to a young Oriental scholar like myself. But unless engaged in conversation on these subjects, and this was chiefly the case with my friends of the Stanley party, I did not feel called upon to preach what, as I thought, every serious student knew quite as well and probably much better than myself, though he might for some reason or other prefer to keep silence thereon.