Is it necessary to pause here to discuss these objections? I think not; and I persist in believing that the last writer or editor of the Acts is really that disciple of Paul who used the "we" in the concluding chapters. All the discrepancies, however inseparable they may appear, should be at least held in suspense, if not wholly done away with, by the argument resulting from the use of this word "we." It may be added, that in attributing the Acts to a companion of Paul, two peculiarities are explained--the disproportion of the parts of the work, three-fifths of which are devoted to Paul; and the disproportion which may be observed in the biography of Paul, whose first mission is very briefly spoken of, while certain parts of the second and third missions, especially the concluding travels, are related with minute details. A man wholly unfamiliar with the apostolic history would not have practised these inequalities. The general design of the work would have been better conceived. It is this very disproportion that distinguishes history written from documents, from that wholly or in part original. The historian of the closet takes for recital events themselves, but the writer of memoirs avails himself of recollections or personal relations. An ecclesiastical historian, a sort of Eusebius, writing about the year 120, would have left us a book quite differently arranged, after the thirteenth chapter. The eccentric manner in which the _Acts_ at that period leave the orbit in which they had until then revolved, cannot, in my opinion, be explained in any other way than by the particular situation of the author, and his relations with Paul. This view will be naturally confirmed if we find among the co-workers known to Paul, the name of the author to whom tradition attributes the book of Acts.