For the rest, I can conceive that some will say the second year of the World War is no time for the discussion even of a great problem of religious history. I answer that the War has actually been made the pretext for endless religious discussions of the most futile kind, ranging between medieval miracle-mongering and the lowest forms of journalistic charlatanism, with chronic debates on theism and on the military value of faith and prayer. The newspaper discussions on theism, in particular, reveal a degree of philosophic naïveté on the theistic side which seems to indicate that that view of the universe has of late years been abandoned by most men capable of understanding the logical problem. When dispute plays thus uselessly at the bidding of emotion there must be some seniors, or others withheld from war service, who in workless hours would as lief face soberly an inquiry which digs towards the roots of the organized religion of Europe. If the end of the search should be the conviction that that system took shape as naturally as any other cult of the ancient world, and that the sacrosanct records of its origin are but products of the mythopoeic faculty of man, the time of war, with its soul-shaking challenge to the sense of reality, may not be the most unfit for the experience. THE HISTORICAL JESUS CHAPTER I THE SNARE OF PRESUPPOSITION He who would approach with an alert mind such a question as that of the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus would do well to weigh a preliminary warning. Though after four hundred years of chronic scientific discovery all men are supposed to know the intellectual danger of a confident and foregone rejection of new theories, it is scarcely likely that the vogue of such error is at an end. After all, apart from the special experience in question, and from the general effect of the spread of "science," the average psychosis of men is not profoundly different from what it was in the two centuries which passed before the doctrines of Copernicus found general acceptance. Not many modern novelties of thought can so reasonably be met with derision as was the proposition that the earth moves round the sun.