It is only just to confess that the conservatives are already learning to employ some prudential expedients. Met by the challenge to their own nakedly untenable positions, and offered a constructive hypothesis, diversely elaborated from various quarters, they mostly evade the discussion at nearly every point where the impossible tradition is concretely confronted by a thinkable substitute, and spend themselves over the remoter issues of universal mythology. Habitually misrepresenting every argument from comparative mythology as an assertion of a historical sequence in the compared data, they expatiate over questions of etymology, and are loud in their outcry over a suggestion that a given historical sequence may be surmised from data more or less obscure. But to the question how the evangel could possibly have begun as the record represents, or how the consummation could possibly have taken place as described, they either attempt no answer whatever or offer answers which are worse than evasions. One professional disputant, dealing with the proposition that such a judicial and police procedure as the systematic search for witnesses described in the Gospel story of the Trial could not take place by night, "when an Eastern city is as a city of the dead," did not scruple to say that the thesis amounted to saying that in an Eastern city nothing could happen by night. This controversialist is an instructor of youth, and claims to be an instructed scholar. And his is the only answer that I have seen to the challenge with which it professes to deal. Loisy agrees that the challenge cannot be met. To the hypothesis that there was a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus-God, the traditionalist--above all, the Unitarian, who seems to feel the pinch here most acutely--retorts with a volley of indignant contempt. He can see no sign of any such cult. In the mind's eye he can see, as a historic process, twelve Apostles creating a Christian community by simply crying aloud that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, excommunicating for the after life those who will not listen, and all the while assiduously casting out devils. His records baldly tell him that this happened; and "we believe in baptism because we have seen it done." But whereas, in the nature of the case, the reconstruction of the real historic process must be by tentative inference from a variety of data which for the most part the records as a matter of course obscured, he makes loud play with the simple fact that the records lack the required clear mention, and brands as "unsupported conjecture" the theorem offered in place of the plain untruth with which he has so long been satisfied.