“I could give you other instances of the way in which John uses other language of philosophers in a non-philosophic sense. But his use of Logos suffices for my purpose. It gives the clue to the whole gospel. This writer adds one more to my list of Christian _retiarii_. The innocent reader, unrolling the book and reading its first words, prepares himself for a Platonic treatise in which he is to ‘follow the Logos’ in accordance with Socratic precept. Then, step by step, he is lured on into regions of non-logic and sentiment, till the net suddenly descends on him, and he finds himself repeating, ‘the Logos became flesh’.” What Scaurus said interested me but did not convince me as to John’s motive. Nor did Scaurus himself adhere to it. He did not always use the epithet “retiarian” in a bad sense. As I have said above, I had come to believe that right “feeling,” rather than right “reason,” may be regarded as revealing the nature of God. So I did not feel that John was beguiling his readers. But Scaurus’s criticism helped me to recognise the extreme skill and tact—as well as the terseness, beauty, and solemnity—with which the evangelist introduces the doctrine of the incarnation. And I could not help agreeing with my friend’s next remark, “The man that wrote the Apocalypse—though he, too, was a prophet and a poet in his line—could no more have written this prologue than Ennius could have written the Æneid.” After some more observations on the difference of style in the Apocalypse and the Gospel, he returned to the criticism of the latter. “Compare,” he said, “the prologue and the conclusion with the rest of this book, and you will see that there is some mystery about its authorship. Under one style it conveys two currents of thought. Sometimes it repeats itself like an old man. Sometimes it is as brief and dark as an oracle. Moreover, some events—such as the expulsion of the tradespeople from the temple—which ought to come at the end—this writer places at the beginning. It has occurred to me that he must have started with the intention of describing nothing but Christ’s acts in Judæa and then changed his mind. Or is it possible that documents arranged Hebrew-fashion—last, first—have been interpreted Greek-fashion and consequently reversed? Allegory is most strangely mixed with fact. There is a wedding in which water is changed into wine. This is allegory. The Bride is the Church. The water of the law is changed into the wine of the gospel. After that, comes a statement that Christ spoke about destroying the temple and building it in three days. This is, according to Mark and Matthew, history. Luke took it as not history and left it out. John took it as history and allegory and put it in. But how differently from Mark and Matthew! Look at the passages. John often does this. I mean, that where Luke differs from Mark, John (who prefers Mark) intervenes to support the latter.”