If I proceed to offer some criticisms upon German critical methods, I am perfectly well aware that the Germans in turn would have something to criticize in ours. At the present day discussion is not limited to any one country, but is international. It is by scholars of different race and training comparing notes together that mistakes are corrected, methods gradually perfected, and results established. I shall not hesitate therefore to point out where it seems to me that German methods have gone wrong. And I feel that I can do this the more freely when a scholar of Harnack’s high standing has set the example. The faults that we seem to have noticed in German criticism are very much those which he has indicated: it has been too academic, too _doctrinaire_, too artificial, too much made in the study and too little checked by observation of the facts of daily life. The very excellences of the German mind have in some ways contributed to the formation of wrong standards of judgement. More than other people the Germans have the power of sustained abstract thought, of thoroughness in mustering and reviewing all the elements of a problem, of thinking a problem out in such a way as not to leave gaps and inconsistencies. Hence they are too ready to assume that all the rest of the world will do the same, that if an important piece of evidence is omitted in an argument it can only be because it was not known, that carelessness and oversights and inconsistencies are things that need not be reckoned with. And there is also too great a tendency to argue as though men were all made upon one pattern. There is a want of elasticity of conception. And, to sum up many points in one, there is a great tendency to purism or over-strictness in the wrong place, and to over-laxity also in the wrong place, to strain out the gnat and swallow the camel. What one desiderates most is greater simplicity, greater readiness to believe that as a rule, in ancient times as well as modern, people meant what they said and said what they meant, and that more often than not they had some substantial reason for saying it. ii. Instances in which Criticism has corrected itself. These are not merely _a priori_ reflections, but they are based upon experience of the actual course that criticism has taken. By this time criticism has a considerable history behind it. It has corrected some of its mistakes, and is able to look back upon the course by which it came to make them. In this way it should learn some wholesome lessons. I will take three rather conspicuous examples in which criticism has at first gone wrong and has afterwards come to set itself right, in the hope that they may teach us what to avoid in future. I imagine that they may be found to throw some side-light upon the particular problem of the Fourth Gospel.