A main feature of Dr. Petrie's inquiry is that, following Professor Blass, he insists on making the predictions of the fall of Jerusalem part of the early documentary matter collected in the "Nucleus" which for him is the equivalent of Weiss's Primitive Gospel. The argument of Blass [48] is drawn from the case of Savonarola, who in 1496 predicted that Rome would be sacked, and that horses would be stabled in the churches, as actually happened in the year 1527. If such a prophecy could be made and fulfilled in one case, urges Blass, it might be in another; hence there can be no rigorous application of the canon, Omne vaticinium post eventum, which has been relied on by the modern school of critical theologians. Dr. Petrie appears to have made no investigation of his own, being content to quote and support Blass; and the point is well worth critical consideration. Let us premise that scientific criticism, which has no concern with Unitarian predilections, stands quite impartially towards the question of Gospel dates. The modern tendency to carry down those dates, either for the whole or for any parts of the Gospels, towards or into the second century, is originally part of the general "liberal" inclination to put a Man in place of a God, though some believers in the God acquiesce as to the lateness of the act of writing. Those who have carried on the movement have always presupposed the general historicity of the Teacher, and have been concerned, however unconsciously, to find a historical solution which saved that presupposition. The rational critic, making only the naturalist presupposition, is committed to no set of documentary dates. And he is not at all committed to the denial that an inductive historic prediction, as distinguished from a supernaturalist prophecy, may be made and fulfilled. Many have been. Much has been said of the "marvellous prescience" of Burke in predicting that the anarchy of the French Revolution would end in a tyranny. He was in fact merely inferring, as he well might, that what had happened in the history of ancient Rome and in the history of England would happen in France. By a similar historical method several French and other writers in the eighteenth century reached the forecast of the revolt of the American colonies from Britain without getting any credit for divine inspiration. And so, perhaps, might Savonarola at the end of the fifteenth century predict a sack of Rome, and a Jew in the first century a sack of Jerusalem.