Some seem prepared to stake all on such a teaching as the parable of the Good Samaritan, which actually teaches that a man of the religiously despised race could humanely succour one of the despising race when religious men of the same race passed him by. Is the parable then assimilated by those who stress it? Can they conceive that a Samaritan could so act? If yes, why cannot they conceive that a Samaritan, or another Jew than one, could put forth such a doctrine? Here is a story of actual human-kindness, paralleled in a hundred tales and romances of later times, a story which, appealing as it does to every reader, may reasonably be believed to have been enacted a thousand times by simple human beings who never heard of the Gospels. Yet we are asked to believe that only one Jewish or Gentile mind in the age of Virgil was capable of drawing the moral that the kindly and helpful soul is the true neighbour, and that the good man will be neighbourly to all; so rebuking the tribalism of the average Jew. When, fifteen years ago, I wrote of "the moderate ethical height of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is partly precedented in Old Testament teaching [Deut. xxiii, 7--an interpolation; cp. the Book of Ruth]," Dr. J. E. Carpenter indignantly replied: "The field of Greek literature is open; will Mr. Robertson take the Good Samaritan and from Plato to Plotinus find his match?" And the Rev. Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., in his later work Jesus the Christ: Historical or Mythical? (1912), wrote (p. 68):-- Dr. Estlin Carpenter has invited (we believe, in vain!) Mr. Robertson to produce an equal to this same parable out of the whole range of Greek literature, which undoubtedly contains the choicest teaching of the ancient world. Dr. Thorburn in his bibliography cited the first and second (1912) editions of Pagan Christs; he thoughtfully omitted, in launching his "we believe, in vain!", to ascertain whether there had been a second edition of Christianity and Mythology, in which any reply I might have to make to Dr. Carpenter might naturally be expected to appear, that critic having challenged the proposition as put in the first edition. A second edition had appeared, in 1910, and there I had duly given the simple answer which the two learned Doctors of Divinity, so conscious of knowing all Greek literature from Plato to Plotinus, were unable to think of for themselves. The field of Greek literature, as Dr. Carpenter justly observes, is open; and it would have been fitting on his part to perambulate a little therein. The demanded instance lay to the hand of unlearned people in so familiar an author as Plutarch--in the tale of Lycurgus and Alcander. As Dr. Thorburn and Dr. Carpenter, however, must be supposed to have been ignorant of that story, it may be well to tell it briefly here.