I began by saying that the nearer past, the last three or four years, has been distinguished by the successive appearance of a number of prominent books on the criticism of the Fourth Gospel, which have been all on the negative side. Those I mentioned are not only negative, but they have taken the more extreme form of negation. Not content with denying that the author of the Gospel was the Apostle St. John, they insist at once that the true author is entirely unknown, and that whoever he was he stood in no direct relation to the Apostle. It has been the special characteristic of the last few years, as compared with the preceding period, that this more extreme position has been held by writers of note and influence. If we take the period from 1889 to 1900—or even if we go further back, say, from 1870 to 1900, the dominant tendency had been different. Opinion had seemed to gravitate more and more towards a sort of middle position, in which the two sides in the debate could almost reach hands to each other. There was a distinct recognition on the critical side of an element in the Gospel of genuine and authentic history. And, on the other hand, there was an equally clear recognition among conservative writers that the discourses of our Lord in particular were reported with a certain amount of freedom, not as they had been actually spoken but as they came back to the memory of the Apostle after a considerable lapse of time. While the critics could not bring themselves to accept the composition of the Gospel by the son of Zebedee himself, they seemed increasingly disposed to admit that it might be the work of a near disciple of the Apostle, such as the supposed second John, commonly known as ‘the Presbyter.’ If this was the state of things six or seven years ago, and if this description might be given of the general tendency of research in the decade or two preceding, the same can be said no longer. The threads that seemed to be drawing together have again sprung asunder. The sharp antitheses, that seemed in the way to be softened down and harmonized, have asserted themselves again in all their old abruptness. The alternatives are once more not so much between stricter and less strict history as between history and downright fiction, not so much between the Apostle and a disciple or younger contemporary of the Apostle as between a member of the Apostolic generation and one who was in no connexion with it.