The main outline of the Preface will be remembered. Looking back over the period from which Science was just beginning to emerge, the writer characterized it as one in which all the early Christian literature including the New Testament had been treated as a tissue of illusions and falsifications. That time, he went on to say, was past. For Science it had only been an episode, during which much had been learnt and after which much had to be forgotten. His own researches, Harnack explained, would be found to go in a reactionary direction even beyond the middle position of current criticism. The results might be summed up by saying that the oldest literature of the Church, in its main points and in most of its details, from the point of view of literary history, was veracious and trustworthy. In the whole New Testament there was probably only a single writing that could be called pseudonymous in the strict sense of the term, the so-called Second Epistle of St. Peter; and, apart from the Gnostic fictions, the whole number of pseudonymous writings down to Irenaeus was very small, and in one case (the Acts of Thecla) the production of such a work was expressly condemned. In like manner the amount of interpolation was also far less than had been supposed; and the tradition relating to this early period might in the main, and with some reservations, be trusted. Baur and his school had thought themselves compelled, in order to give an intelligible account of the rise of Christianity, to throw over both the statements in the writings themselves and those of tradition about them, and to post-date their composition by several decades. They were driven to do this by mistaken premises. Starting with the assumption that all these writings were composed with a definite purpose, to commend some sectional view of Christianity, they were constantly on the watch for traces of that purpose, and they found them in the most unexpected places. The views of Baur and his followers had been generally given up; but the tendencies set on foot by them remained. The Christian writings were still approached in an attitude of suspicion; they were cross-examined in the spirit of a hostile attorney; or else they were treated after the manner of a _petit maître_, fastening upon all sorts of small details, and arguing from them in the face of clear and decisive indications. Baur thought that everything had a motive, and an interested motive. But, whereas he sought for the motive on broad lines, his more recent successors either gave themselves up to the search for minor incidental motives, or for interpolations on a large scale, or else they gave way to a thorough-going scepticism which confused together probabilities and improbabilities as though they were all the same.