If, from another point of view, our hypothesis seems a bold venture, we may justly claim that the facts are such as to demand a bold treatment. Nor is it a sufficient objection to say that the theory is complex. Life is a complex thing, and there are few times when we need to remember it so much as when we are thinking of the production of an historical work. Apart from other claims which can be made, our theory has one important, if general, advantage; it takes account of the elementary facts of human composition. Have we given sufficient thought to the fact that a writer like St. Luke may well have turned back to review, and even to alter, in the light of further information, what he had already written? Is not this what nearly every one does who writes or relates anything at all? Is it not indeed rather a rare than a usual proceeding to write a story from start to finish without insertion, omission, and revision? In his “Introduction” Dr. James Moffatt has drawn attention to these things, and especially as they concern St. Luke’s two works. He shows that interpolation may take place “either (_a_) at the hands of the author himself, or (_b_) by subsequent editors of the volume, after the writer’s death, or (_c_) by scribes (or editors) of the text” (p. 36). Under (a) he refers to instances in Aeschylus, Herodotus, Virgil, Juvenal, Martial, and Lucretius. “Several passages in the _De Rerum Natura_ (e.g. ii. 165‐83) are also to be explained most naturally as additions made by Lucretius himself to the original draft, and in the case of the Third Gospel or its sequel it is not unlikely that Luke may have re‐edited ... his work” (p. 37). Dr. Moffatt gives a very interesting modern example in the case of _Northanger Abbey_, which was first composed by Jane Austen in 1798. “In the fifth chapter, however, we have an allusion to Miss Edgeworth’s _Belinda_—a novel which did not appear until 1801. This proves that Miss Austen’s work lies before us in a revised form; the first draft was gone over by the authoress before its final publication some years later” (p. 37).(74) It will scarcely be denied that the possibility of interpolation by an original author has often been overlooked by many critics. They are not slow to find the insertions of later readers and scribes, but often it seems tacitly to be assumed that the original writers must have written with logical and almost unerring precision. Curiously enough, something like the Verbal Inspiration of Scripture is required to justify some of the critical results reached. This is a doctrine long since discredited, but being dead it yet speaks. It will have to be allowed, we think, that mechanical theories of Inspiration have not yet left us free to perceive those ordinary conditions of writing under which the New Testament writers wrote. The aftermath of Verbal Inspiration still blinds us to the commonplaces of composition.