This, as we have ventured to express it in our own words, seems to be the writer's position. It is at any rate the effect of his book, to our minds. The inquiry, it must always be remembered, is a preliminary one, dealing, as he says, with the easiest and obvious elements of the problem; and much that seems inadequate and unsatisfactory may be developed hereafter. He starts from what, to those who already have the full belief, must appear a low level. He takes, as it will be seen, the documents as they stand. He takes little more than the first three Gospels, and these as a whole, without asking minute questions about them. The mythical theory he dismisses as false to nature, in dealing with such a Character and such results. He talks in his preface of "critically weighing" the facts; but the expression is misleading. It is true that we may talk of criticism of character; but the words naturally suggest that close cross-questioning of documents and details which has produced such remarkable results in modern investigations; and of this there is none. It is a work in no sense of criticism; it is a work of what he calls the "trained historical imagination"; a work of broad and deep knowledge of human nature and the world it works in and creates about it; a work of steady and large insight into character, and practical judgment on moral likelihoods. He answers Strauss as he answers Renan, by producing the interpretation of a character, so living, so in accordance with all before and after, that it overpowers and sweeps away objections; a picture, an analysis or outline, if he pleases, which justifies itself and is its own evidence, by its originality and internal consistency. Criticism in detail does not affect him. He assumes nothing of the Gospels, except that they are records; neither their inspiration in any theological sense, nor their authorship, nor their immunity from mistake, nor the absolute purity of their texts. But taking them as a whole he discerns in them a Character which, if you accept them at all and on any terms, you cannot mistake. Even if the copy is ever so imperfect, ever so unskilful, ever so blurred and defaced, there is no missing the features any more than a man need miss the principle of a pattern because it is rudely or confusedly traced. He looks at these "biographies" as a geologist might do at a disturbed series of strata; and he feeds his eye upon them till he gets such a view of the coherent whole as will stand independent of the right or wrong disposition of the particular fragments. To the mind which discerns the whole, the regulating principle, the general curves and proportions of the strata may be just as visible after the disturbance as before it. The Gospels bring before us the visible and distinct outlines of a life which, after all efforts to alter the idea of it, remains still the same; they present certain clusters of leading ideas and facts so embedded in their substance that no criticism of