He was not long publishing the doctrine of the New Church concerning the Sacred Scriptures. He knew as well as any modern critic what are the difficulties in the way of accepting the doctrine of verbal inspiration, yet he affirmed it. There is a further difficulty that we feel more acutely than he in the protestant dogma "the Bible and the Bible only." If we are cut off from memory or tradition, and are obliged to form our image of the historical Jesus from the Bible only, it is next to impossible to make that image shine forth with clear, sharp outlines. The difficulty is still further increased when protestantism, pushed to its logical extreme, eliminates the supernatural element, and tries to piece together the character of Jesus from the fragments that remain. The Bible imperiously demands a theory that shall make its heterogeneous contents cohere. The four evangelists presuppose a knowledge of Jesus that they aim at making more perfect. These are difficulties that protestantism was destined to feel acutely from the day it proudly rejected tradition. No doubt, if Providence had so intended, the portrait of Jesus would have been drawn so completely that without the aid of memory we could have gained a knowledge of Him such as we have of no other man that ever lived. But the fact remains that Jesus wrote no book and no letters, and He founded nothing but a handful of illiterate disciples to preach His gospel and perpetuate His memory. These were so confident that Israel would repent and believe the Gospel, and so make possible the immediate return of their Lord, that they never thought of taking to their pens; and it was only when they grew alarmed at the increasing thinness of the apostolic ranks that they committed their memories to wise scribes or to parchment. Thus we owe the Gospel accounts not to the express commands of Jesus, but to the first bitter disappointment of the apostolic band. The simple truth, of course, is that the New Testament Scriptures cannot be understood apart from the Catholic Faith that gave them birth, and therefore when the faith is not confessed a theory must be found to take its place. The history of higher criticism is the history of a succession of theories. Dr Paulus, forgotten father of German critics, supplied a rational one, for which he was obliged to make a super-historical use of the Essenes. It has reappeared in George Moore's _Brook Kerith_.