Yet the investigator of American history is possessed of an abundance of material and deals with a time for which printing existed. The language in which these documents are written is his own or else a well-known one. The student of comparative religions has none of these advantages. For the ancient world, the inscriptions are archaic and condensed. In the case of the biblical literature, he may be dealing with accounts edited from older manuscripts in other languages. These narratives conflict among themselves and contain surprisingly little information on important points. Hence, the investigator is almost overwhelmed by the difficulty of his task and the fewness of his certain results. The ordinary confessing Christian, on the contrary, is blissfully unaware of these problems. He opens his English translation and reads the familiar words in the light of inherited dogmas which blind his eyes to all contradictions and discrepancies. The truth is, that he is mentally unprepared to compare passages and to see problems which stare the trained man in the face. He reads subjectively for edification. The ecclesiastical atmosphere is such that his spiritual advisors have either desired to keep modern critical work from his notice, or have been afraid to arouse the bigotry of their keepers, or have themselves lacked a modern education. The consequence is that the average Christian has the most naive notions in regard to the authorship and authenticity of the gospels and of the real meaning of many of the verses. Palestine is conceived in terms of the color-prints which illustrate his bible, while the mental {67} atmosphere of the Year One is that of the present day in America with, perhaps, an exotic touch here and there. Let us glance over some of the facts which investigation is making ever clearer and which are not as generally known as they deserve to be. What is said here should be read with remembrance of the results of the previous chapters. Such a bird's eye view of the forces at work in later Hellenistic and Roman times will be the best preparation for a sane conception of the origin and trend of Christianity.