If it be admitted--and who will considerately deny it?--that the moral progress of mankind is made in virtue of recognition of the law of reciprocity, the case for the general moral influence of Christianity is disposed of, once for all. If the affirmation be still made, let it confront the challenge of rational sociology, [459] founded on the survey of all history--and the World War. Professor Schmiedel's large affirmation is vain in the face of all that. His real psychic basis, which in my judgment determines his critical presuppositions, lies in the phrase: "warms my heart." And that phrase is a tacit confession of religious partisanship, the result of his Christian training. [460] The more the moral teaching of the gospels is comparatively studied, as apart from their myths of action and dogma, the more clear becomes its entire dependence on previous lore, [461] and its failure even to maintain the level of the best of that. The Sermon on the Mount is wholly pre-Christian. [462] It is a Christian scholar who points out that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is fully set forth in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a century before the Christian era. In his view, those verses [463] "contain the most remarkable statement on the subject of forgiveness in all ancient literature." [464] Why then does it not warm the heart of Professor Schmiedel equally with the doctrine of the gospels? Simply because he was brought up to assign pre-eminence to the teaching of Jesus--God or Man. And here we have, in its fundamental form, that unchecked assumption of "uniqueness" which secretly dictates the bulk of the denials of the myth-theory. Canon Charles explicitly traces the Jesuine teaching to the verses in question: That our Lord was acquainted with them, and that His teaching presupposes them, we must infer from the fact that the parallel is so perfect in thought and so close in diction between them and Luke xvii, 3; Matt. xvii, 15. [465] The meaning of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to us.... One puts with diffidence the challenge, Was it then high and noble for the Teacher to give out as his own the teaching of another, instead of acknowledging it? Is it not incomparably more likely, on every aspect of the case, that the older teaching was thus appropriated by gospel-makers bent at once on giving the Divine One a high message and on securing acceptance for it by putting it in his mouth? Is not this the strict critical verdict, apart from any other issue?