At the beginning of the twentieth century we are quite as sure that both the Iliad and Odyssey were written by the same person and that the separatists were hurried into a contrary decision not a little by the feeling of the sensation that such a contradiction of previously accepted ideas would create. This is a determining factor in many a supposed novel discovery, that it is hard always to discount sufficiently. A thing may be right even though it is old, and most new discoveries, it must not be forgotten, that is, most of those announced with a great blare of trumpets, do not maintain themselves. The simple argument that the separatists would have to find another poet equal to Homer to write the other poem has done more than anything else to bring their opinion into disrepute. It is much easier to explain certain discrepancies, differences of style, and of treatment of subjects, as well as other minor variants, than to supply another great poet. Most of the works of our older literatures have gone through a similar trial during the over-hasty superficially critical nineteenth century. The Nibelungenlied has been attributed to two or three writers instead of one. The Cid, the national epic of Spain, and the Arthur Legends, the first British epic, have been at least supposed to be amenable to the same sort of criticism. In every case, scholars have gone back to the older traditional view of a single author. The phases of literary and historic criticism with regard to Luke's writings are, then, only a repetition of what all our great national classics have gone through from supercilious scholarship during the past hundred years.