That has been under revision for a hundred and fifty years, with an outlay of labour that is appalling to think of, in view of the utter futility of the search--or, let us say, the labour in proportion to the result, for toil even upon false clues has yielded some knowledge that avails for rectification. But the labour has meant a steadily dwindling confidence in a dwindling residuum of supposed fact; though every shortening of the line of defence has evoked furious outcry from the unthinking faithful. The first pious framers of "harmonies" of the gospels were indignantly told by the more stupid pious that there was no strife to harmonize: the Schmiedels and Loisys of to-day, striving their hardest to save something by rational methods from the rational advance, are execrated by those who believe more than they. The more instructed believers are as warm in their resentment of the latest and coolest negative criticism as were their fathers towards the contemptuous exposure of the contradictions of "inspiration." Anger, it would seem, always leaps to the help of shaken confidence. Let the believer perpend. It is not orthodoxy that is to-day fighting the case of the historicity of Jesus. Orthodoxy is committed to the miraculous, to Revelation, to the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and, if it would be consistent, to the Ascension, which is on the same plane of belief. Upon such assumptions, there can be no critical defence worthy of the name. The defence is being conducted mainly by the avowed or non-avowed Neo-Unitarians of the various churches and countries; and these are simply standing either at the position taken up fifty years ago by Renan, whose "biography" of Jesus was received with a far more widespread and no less violent storm of censure than that now being turned upon the myth-theory; or at the more nearly negative position of Strauss, which was still more fiercely censured. Renan's position, or Strauss's, is now the position of the mass of "moderate" scholars and students. Those who have thus seen a denounced heresy become the standpoint of ordinary scholarly belief should be slow to conclude that a newer heresy will not in time find similar acceptance. CHAPTER II THE CENTRAL MYTH § 1. The Ground of Conflict