Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death, A chorus-ending from Euripides— And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature’s self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul. There is a movement perhaps on a large scale, like the Bentham period in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, or the sceptical and deistical period a hundred years earlier, and it seems as though everything were to be made clear and intelligible, and the conscience and soul of men were not to be troubled by phantoms any more. And then there come ‘Lake Poets,’ or an ‘Oxford Movement,’ and the other world, the old world, all comes back again; and the forces that try to restrain it are snapped like Samson’s withes. The reason appears to be that these very clear outlines are always obtained by omissions or suppressions that are artificial, and do not do justice to the wonderful richness and subtlety either of the human mind or of the powers that work upon it. 4. Interpretation of these Relations between the Synoptic Gospels, St. Paul and St. John: Alternative Constructions. These comparisons that we have just been instituting between the Synoptic Gospels, St. Paul, and St. John raise a very large question, a question involving nothing less than our whole construction of the history of the Apostolic Age. It is becoming more and more the custom with the left wing of critical writers to make the most fundamental part of Christianity, the pivot teaching of the New Testament, an invention of St. Paul’s. St. John is only the chief of his disciples. According to these writers primitive Christianity, the genuine Christianity, loses itself in the sands, or is represented, let us say, deducting the stress on the Mosaic Law, by the sect of the Ebionites. It is St. Paul who strikes out the new road; and the writer whom we call St. John follows him in it. The attempt of this later writer to supply a historical basis for Paulinism, holds good only in appearance. The teaching which it puts into the mouth of Jesus is in no sense an antecedent of the teaching of St. Paul, but a product of it. Here, for instance, is a trenchant statement of the position.