One common form of criticism that may be directed against this book I confess that I should rather deprecate. Even my friend Dr. Cheyne, whose sympathies are so large, allows himself to write: ‘Apologetic considerations are brought in to limit our freedom. The Fourth Gospel must be the work of the Apostle John, and must be in the main historical, because the inherited orthodoxy requires it’ (_Bible Problems_, p. 40 f.). Does he really think that this is our only reason for holding those paradoxical positions? Or rather, I would put my question in another way; Does he really think that ‘the inherited orthodoxy’ is nothing better than a taskmaster that stands over us with a whip, to keep us from straying? Is that his view of the divine meaning in the history and development of nineteen centuries? I have had occasion incidentally to define my attitude on this subject, and I may perhaps refer to the pages on which I have done so (pp. 3-5; comp. pp. 233-235; 262 f.). I hope that this attitude is at least as consistent with an earnest pursuit of truth as that which appears to assume that orthodox or traditional opinions are always wrong. Again, I am not conscious of that ‘paralyzing dread of new facts’ of which my friend speaks. It may be true that new theories perhaps, rather than new facts, have a greater attraction for some of us than for others. But, as far as I am concerned, if I have been silent in public on some of the no doubt important questions raised, the cause has been chiefly want of time. Life is very short, and very crowded, and we are not all rapid workers, or gifted with the power of facing in many directions at once. And yet I have tried to keep pace with the progress of thought; the problems which Dr. Cheyne propounds are not unfamiliar to me; and I am not without more or less deliberate views about them. Dr. Cheyne’s book is enough to convince me that the problems are really urgent; and I shall do my best to say what I have to say upon them as soon as I can. Perhaps it should be explained that the enumeration of books and writers does not profess to be exhaustive. In the main I have confined myself to the more recent, and to what may be called ‘living’ literature. Some few things may have dropped out because they did not happen to fall in with the method of treatment adopted. Of these the various writings of Dr. Edwin A. Abbott are the most important that I can remember. To the older works mentioned on pp. 12-15 there should have been added Archdeacon Watkin’s Bampton Lectures for 1890 as a summary of earlier criticism. The absence of reference to the elaborate work of Dr. Joh. Kreyenbühl (_Das Evangelium der Wahrheit_, vol. i, 1900; vol. ii, 1905) is due in part to the accidental loss of my copy of the first volume. But it would be wrong to suggest that I should have had patience enough to discover what there is of sanity in its learned but fantastic pages.