It is remarkable that Professor Schmiedel, who has gone nearly as far as M. Loisy in recognizing in detail the force of the pressures on the historical position, makes the avowal: "My inmost religious convictions would suffer no harm, even if I now felt obliged to conclude that Jesus never lived," [451] though as a critical historian he "sees no prospect of this." He further avows that his religion does not require him "to find in Jesus an absolutely perfect model," and that in effect he does not find him so. [452] And he wrote in 1906 that "for about six years the view that Jesus never really lived has gained an ever-growing number of supporters," [453] adding that "it is no use to ignore it, or to frame resolutions against it." It is accordingly with no kind of polemic motive as against so entirely candid a writer that I suggest certain criticisms of his emotional positions as tending unconsciously to affect his judgment of the critical problem. It is after the avowals above cited that he writes:-- [454] Nor do I ask whether in Jesus' faith and ethical system what he had to offer was new. Was it able to give me something that would warm my heart and strengthen my life?--that is all I ask. What does it matter if one of the ideas of Jesus had been expressed once already in India, another once already in Greece, a third once already, or many times, by the Old Testament prophets, or by the much-praised Jewish Rabbis shortly before the time of Jesus? Such ideas may be found in books: that is all. What we ought to feel grateful to Jesus for, is that he was destined for the first time to make the ideas take effect and influence the lives of mankind in general. It would, I think, be difficult to over-estimate the amount of psychic bias involved in that pronouncement, which contains a theorem no more fitly to be taken for granted than any concrete historic proposition. The Professor, it will be observed, does not specify a single teaching of Jesus as new, while admitting that some were not. What he says is, in effect, that other utterances of Jesuine doctrines do not "warm the heart"; that those of Jesus do; and that they "for the first time" caused certain doctrines to "take effect and influence the lives of mankind in general." What doctrines then are meant, and what effects are posited? And why do other utterances of the doctrines not "warm the heart"?