SCHMIEDEL AND DEROGATORY MYTH From this point onwards, every step in the investigation will be found to convict the Unitarian thesis of absolute nullity. It is indeed, on the face of it, an ignorant pronouncement. The characteristics of "anger, pity, indignation, despondency, exultation," are all present in the myth of Herakles, of whom Diodorus Siculus, expressly distinguishing between mythology and history, declares (i, 2) that "by the confession of all, during his whole life he freely undertook great and continual labours and dangers, in order that by doing good to the race of men he might win immortal fame." Herakles was, in fact, a Saviour who "went about doing good." [22] The historicity of Herakles is not on that score accepted by instructed men; though I have known divinity students no less contemptuous over the description of the cognate Samson saga as a sun myth than is Mr. Sinclair over the denial of the historicity of Jesus. So common a feature of a hundred myths, indeed, is the set of characteristics founded on, that we may at once come to the basis of his argument, a blundering reiteration of the famous thesis of Professor Schmiedel, who is the sole source of Mr. Sinclair's latent erudition. "The line of inquiry here suggested," he explains, "has been worked out in a pamphlet of Schmiedel, which will be found in the Fellowship library." But the dialectic which broadly avails for the Bible class will not serve their instructor here. The essence of the argument which Professor Schmiedel urges with scholarlike sobriety is thus put by Mr. Sinclair with the extravagance natural to his species:-- Many [compare Schmiedel!] of the stories represent him [Jesus] in a light which, from the point of view of conventional hero-worship, is even derogatory; his friends come to seize him as a madman; he is estranged from his own mother; he can do no mighty work in the unsympathetic atmosphere of his own native place.