If the miracles of the Fourth Gospel were facts there was some point in the constant appeals that the Gospel makes to them; but there would be no point if these appeals were to a set of didactic fictions. Within the last few months a monograph has appeared, which from its general tendency may be ranged with the works of which we have been speaking, though in its method it rather stands by itself, E. Schwartz, _Ueber den Tod der Söhne Zebedaei_ (Berlin, 1904). Dr. Schwartz is the editor of Eusebius in the Berlin series, and his point of view is primarily philological. He writes in a disagreeable spirit, at once carping and supercilious. The only generous words in his paper are a few in reference to the Church historian. He exemplifies copiously most of the procedure specially deprecated in these lectures. His monograph has, however, a value of its own, from the precise and careful way in which he has collected and discusses the material bearing upon the history of the Evangelist and of the Gospel in the first and earlier part of the second century. 5. Recent Reaction. Far as I conceive that all these writers have travelled away from the truth, they followed each other in such quick succession that it would have been strange if public opinion had not been affected by them. To one who himself firmly believed in St. John’s authorship of the Gospel, and in its value as a record of the beginning of Christianity, the outlook last autumn seemed as, I said, very black. A single book dispelled the clouds and cleared the air. Dr. Drummond’s _Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel_ is of special value to the defenders of the Gospel for two reasons: (1) because it is the work of one who cannot in any case be accused of dogmatic prepossessions, as it would to all appearance be more favourable to his general position that the Gospel should not be genuine or authentic; and (2) because the whole work is something more than a defence of the Gospel; it is a striking application to a particular problem of principles of criticism in many respects differing from those at present in vogue, and at the same time, as I cannot but think, a marked improvement on them. To these points must be added the inherent qualities of the book itself—the thorough knowledge with which it is written, its evident sincerity and effort to get at realities, its nervous directness and force of style, its judicial habit of weighing all that is to be said on both sides. Perhaps the most important and the most far-reaching of all the corrections of current practice is a passage in the text with the note appended to it upon the _argument from silence_. The text is dealing with the common assumption that because Justin quotes less freely from the Fourth Gospel than from the other three, therefore he must have ascribed to it a lower degree of authority.