These very attempts, naturally, are constantly made the objects of still more hasty counter-attack. Every form of the myth-theory with which I am acquainted, whatever its defects, has been the result of much labour, and even if astray can be fairly pronounced "hasty" only in the sense that it proves to be inadequate. It is not so with most of the counter-criticism. The reader may rest assured that it is not possible for any exposition of the new theory to be as "hasty" as is usually its rejection. [1] Professional theologians who cast that epithet are in general recognizably men who believed their hereditary creed before they were able to think, and have at no later stage made good the first inevitable omission. Myth-theories, sound or unsound, are the attempts of students who find the record incredible as history to think out, in the light of the documents and of comparative mythology and hierology, the process by which it came to be produced; and even as all myth is but a form of traditionary error, so any attempt to trace its growth runs the risk of error. It is one thing to show, for instance, that the Pentateuch cannot have been written by "Moses," seen to be a non-historical figure: it is another thing to settle how the books were really made. In such cases, the "something in the place" of the tradition is to be ascertained only after long and patient investigation and counter-criticism. So with the investigation of the fabulous history of early Rome. After several scholars had set forth grounded doubts, the problem was ably and systematically handled by the French freethinker Louis de Beaufort in 1738. Early in the nineteenth century, Niebuhr, confidently undertaking "with the help of God" to get at the truth, and falsely disparaging Beaufort's work as wholly "sceptical," effected a reconstruction which has since been found to be in large measure unsound, though long acquiesced in by English students. [2] In such matters there is really no finality. If well-documented history must in every age be rewritten, no less inevitable is the re-writing of that which is reached only by processes of inference. And the gospel problem is the hardest of all. Still more than in the case of the Pentateuch problem, many revisions will probably be needed before a generally satisfactory solution is reached. There is nothing for it but to trace and retrace, consider and reconsider, the inferrible historic process. Met as he is by alternate charges of reckless iconoclasm and "hasty" construction, the proper course for the holder of the myth-theory is to repeat with dispassionate vigilance both of his processes--to show first that the progressive effort to extract from the gospels a tenable biography has ended in complete critical collapse, revealing only a tissue of myth; and then to attempt to indicate how the pseudo-history came to be compiled: in other words, how the myth arose. Such has been my procedure in the preceding volume and in this.