I was depressed by this, and eager to pass on to something more satisfactory. So was Scaurus. “I have no desire,” he said, “to dwell on these points. I am interested in the biographies of all great teachers, philosophers, and lawgivers, as well as conquerors—_so far as they are true_. Untruth gives me no pleasure, but disappointment—unmixed except for the slight pleasure one may find in tracking an error to its hole and killing it. “With much greater pleasure shall I turn to Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts of the words and deeds of Christ. Only I will add that, were I a Christian, I should long for a new gospel that would go back to facts, rejecting these additions of Matthew and Luke. Not that I would go back to Mark. By ‘_facts_,’ I do not mean such facts as John the Baptist’s diet of locusts and clothing of camel’s hair. But surely a genuine worshipper of Christ—I can conceive such a thing; for after all, what is more worthy of worship on earth, next to God Himself, than ‘the man that is as righteous as possible,’ concerning whom Socrates says that there is ‘nothing more like God’?—I say a genuine Christian, if he were also a philosopher, might surely find it possible to state in a few simple words his conviction that, whereas John the son of Zachariah was sent by the Logos, and contained only a portion of the Logos, Jesus the son of Joseph was actually the Logos incarnate. I wholly reject such a notion myself, partly because I am not sure that I believe that there is any divine Logos at all—having, in fact, given up speculating on these matters. But if I were as sure on that point as your Epictetus is, and if I were a Christian to boot, I am not sure that I should have any great difficulty in believing that some one man might exist—might be ‘sent into the world,’ I suppose, a Christian would say—as different from ordinary possessors of the Logos as steam is from water—after all, steam is water—superior to Numa the Roman, superior to Lycurgus the Spartan, to Solon the Athenian, yes, superior to Moses the Hebrew.