With such warnings from the past before our eyes, I think we should be inclined to scrutinize rather closely arguments of a like kind when they meet us in the course of our present investigation. iii. Examples of Mistaken Method as applied to the Fourth Gospel. At this point we may go back to Harnack’s Preface. And here I cannot help expressing my regret that it has not had more of the influence that it deserved to have, both in the country of its author and elsewhere. I am even tempted to go a little further, and express my regret that it has not had more influence upon the author himself. I will henceforward confine myself more strictly to the Fourth Gospel. And it seems to me that, in his incidental treatment of this, Harnack has more than once forgotten his own precepts. He expends endless ingenuity in trying to prove that there was a confusion, in the minds of the Christian writers of the second century, between the Apostle St. John and a certain ‘Presbyter’ of the same name, who really lived, as the Apostle was supposed to have lived, at Ephesus in the Roman province of Asia. An important difficulty in the way of this proof is the explicit testimony of Irenaeus. To meet this difficulty, the attempt is made to show that Irenaeus derived all his knowledge, or supposed knowledge, about St. John and his surroundings from two sources, a very brief intercourse in early youth with Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and the book of Papias, called _Expositions of the Oracles of the Lord_. It is like Nero wishing that Rome had one neck, in order that it might be cut at a single stroke. By reducing the channels through which Irenaeus received his knowledge to these two, it became more possible that if they happened in any way to lend themselves to the confusion, that confusion should really take hold of his mind and express itself in his writings. The learning and ingenuity and skill displayed are admirable. But how futile, from the very first, to suppose that all the information Irenaeus possessed about the greatest leader of the Church of his own home came only through these two channels and no others; indeed, that he was like the princess in the fairy tale, shut up in a tower and cut off from all communication with the outer world. We know that two at least of his companions in the Gallic churches of Vienne and Lyons came from the same region as himself. It is commonly supposed that these churches had as a nucleus a little colony from Asia Minor. In his Fourth Book Irenaeus often refers to a certain Presbyter, whom Harnack rightly shows to have been not a direct hearer of the Apostles, but at one degree removed from them, a disciple of those who had heard from the Apostles. It is natural, with Lightfoot, to identify this Presbyter with Pothinus, Irenaeus’ own predecessor in his see, who had passed the age of ninety when he died in the persecution of the year 177. In any case, Pothinus must have been a store-house of traditions