It is significant that in the same year there appeared Schleiermacher’s lectures on the Life of Jesus, which had not seen the light for forty years, because, as Strauss himself remarked in his criticism of the resurrected work, it had neither anodyne nor dressing for the wounds which his first Life of Jesus had made.(125) The wounds, however, had cicatrised in the meantime. It is true Strauss is a just judge, and makes ample acknowledgment of the greatness of Schleiermacher’s achievement.(126) He blames Schleiermacher for setting up his “presuppositions in regard to Christ” as an historical canon, and considering it a proof that a statement is unhistorical if it does not square with those presuppositions. But does not the purely human, but to a certain extent unhistorical, man, who is to be the ultimate product of the process of eliminating myth, serve Strauss as his “theoretic Christ” who determines the presentment of his historical Jesus? Does he not share with Schleiermacher the erroneous, artificial, “double” construction of the consciousness of Jesus? And what about their views of Mark? What fundamental difference is there, when all is said, between Schleiermacher’s de‐rationalised Life of Jesus and Strauss’s? Certainly this second Life of Jesus would not have frightened Schleiermacher’s away into hiding for thirty years. So Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus might now safely venture forth into the light. There was no reason why it should feel itself a stranger at this period, and it had no need to be ashamed of itself. Its rationalistic birth‐marks were concealed by its brilliant dialectic.(127) And the only real advance in the meantime was the general recognition that the Life of Jesus was not to be interpreted on rationalistic, but on historical lines. All other, more definite, historical results had proved more or less illusory; there is no vitality in them. The works of Renan, Strauss, Schenkel, Weizsäcker, and Keim are in essence only different ways of carrying out a single ground‐plan. To read them one after another is to be simply appalled at the stereotyped uniformity of the world of thought in which they move. You feel that you have read exactly the same thing in the others, almost in identical phrases. To obtain the works of Schenkel and Weizsäcker you only need to weaken down in Strauss the sharp discrimination between John and the Synoptists so far as to allow of the Fourth Gospel being used to some extent as an historical source “in the higher sense,” and to put the hypothesis of the priority of Mark in place of the Tübingen view adopted by Strauss. The latter is an external operation and does not essentially modify the view of the Life of Jesus, since by admitting the Johannine scheme the Marcan plan is again disturbed, and Strauss’s arbitrary spiritualisation of the Synoptics comes to something not very different from the acceptance of that “in a higher sense historical Gospel” alongside of them.