If I had written that, I should doubtless be told that I regarded the oral hypothesis as "new." Dr. Schmiedel, it is to be hoped, may escape the aspersive method of my critic. In point of fact, a return to the oral hypothesis was inevitable in view of the insufficiency of the other. Unfortunately it has been made on the old and fatal presupposition of the historicity of the myth; but, as made by Dr. Wright, it seemed well worth critical consideration. My critic disparages that and other propaganda as "commanding no large measure of assent anywhere." My testimony, I fear, will not help Dr. Wright; but I will say that I found him an honest and extremely interesting writer, admirably free from theological malice, and above all exhibiting a thoroughly independent hold of his thesis. What amount of assent he has secured is an irrelevant issue. I can only say that I found him very readable. The scholarly and intellectual status of Dr. Flinders Petrie, again, is such as perhaps to make it unnecessary to say--as against similar disparagement in his case--that a thesis seriously and vigorously embraced by him as superseding the older documentary and oral hypotheses alike, seemed to me well entitled to consideration.] The examination of the recent positions of independent writers seeking to construct a documentary theory has, I think, sufficed to safeguard the honest lay student of the myth-theory against the kind of spurious rebuttal set up by those who, themselves innocent of all original research, pretend that the fundamental historicity of the gospels is established by a "consensus of scholarship." There is no consensus of scholarship. I observe that M. Loisy, to whom I devoted special study, is journalistically disparaged by the Very Rev. Dean Inge. That disparagement--which, I also observe, I have the undeserved honour to share--will not impose upon serious students, who will realize that Dean Inge, himself transparently unorthodox, has no resource in such matters but to disparage all who labour with any measure of rational purpose to put concrete conclusions where church dignitaries inevitably prefer to maintain rhetorical mystification. For the purposes of serious students, M. Loisy is an important investigator, Dean Inge a negligible essayist.