Adequately to enter into this very interesting question would take us too far beyond the limits of our main subject. It is perhaps not unfair to suggest that Harnack’s long list, as given in pp. 203‐25, is capable of very considerable reduction. There is great force in Ramsay’s remark: “He who reads Luke without applying practical sense and mother‐wit and experience will always misunderstand him”, and in his caution: “When you think you find an ‘inconsistency’ in Luke, you should look carefully whether you have been sufficiently applying these qualities, before you condemn the supposed fault” (_Luke the Physician_, p. 55). Ramsay himself admits, however, that there are inconsistencies which cannot be denied, and holds that they show that “the work never received the final form which Luke intended to give it, but was still incomplete when he died” (ib., p. 24). In his earlier work, _St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen_, Ramsay has made the same suggestion, illustrations of which he finds in Acts xvi. 19, 20 and xx. 4, 5.(75) We may describe the impression which St. Luke, as a writer, makes upon us by saying that, while his work is marked by great literary art, and while it is characterized by many striking instances of historical accuracy, yet, at the same time, the Evangelist shows a certain unconcern in matters of detail (Harnack would call it “a certain literary carelessness”), the results of which would probably have disappeared had he subjected his works to a close final revision. If this view is just there is little weight in the objection that, on the theory we have stated, St. Luke’s reconstruction might have been expected to be more drastic than it is. The inconsistencies he has left are like those which we find elsewhere and are a feature of his works as they stand. (4) Our final argument is of a psychological kind. It rests, as we have said, upon _the difference between an intellectual prepossession and the first effect upon the mind of new information_. The previous argument might seem to point in another direction. Will not the character of St. Luke’s writings sufficiently explain the literary phenomena of Lk. i, ii, on the view that he taught the Virgin Birth from the first? In the light of the discrepancies which occur in the Gospel and the Acts, can we not believe that after all the Virgin Birth is an original element in the Gospel? This contention would be an example of what Harnack has called attempting to gather apologetic figs from sceptical thistles.(76) We do not think that in this case the harvest would realize expectations.