III. "It is true that early a sect grew up which....held that Jesus could not have had a body of carnal flesh; but they did not question that he had really lived." According to Dr. Barton, these early Christians did not deny that Jesus had really lived,--they only denied that _Jesus could have had a body of carnal flesh_. We wonder how many kinds of flesh there are according to Dr. Barton. Moreover, does not the bible teach that Jesus was tempted in all things, and was a man of like passions, as ourselves? The good man controls his appetites and passions, but his flesh is not any different from anybody else's. If Jesus did not have a body like ours, then he did not exist as a human being. Our point is, that if the New Testament is reliable, in the time of the apostles themselves, the Gnostics, an influential body of Christians, denied that Jesus was any more than an imaginary existence. "But," pleads the clergyman, "these sects believed that Jesus was real, though not carnal flesh." What kind of flesh was he then? If by _carnal_ the Gnostics meant 'sensual,' then, the apostles in denouncing them for rejecting a carnal Jesus, must have held that Jesus was carnal or sensual. How does the Reverend Barton like the conclusion to which his own reasoning leads him? IV. "It is true that there were literary fictions in the age following the apostles." This admission is in answer to the charge that even in the first centuries the Christians were compelled to resort to forgery to prove the historicity of Jesus. The doctor admits the charge, except that he calls it by another name. The difference between fiction and forgery is this: the former is, what it claims to be; the latter is a lie parading as a truth. Fiction is honest because it does not try to deceive. Forgery is dishonest because its object is to deceive. If the Gospel was a novel, no one would object to its mythology, but pretending to be historical, it must square its claims with the facts, or be branded as a forgery. V. "We may not have the precise words Jesus uttered; the portrait may be colored;....tradition may have had its influence; but Jesus was real." A most remarkable admission from a clerical! It concedes all that higher criticism contends for. We are not sure either of Jesus' words or of his character, intimates the Reverend preacher. Precisely.