t. I am surprised that this demand should be made by the same person
who penned certain sentences in _Supernatural Religion_. I am not a
little perplexed to understand what canons of controversial etiquette he
would lay down; for, while I have merely accused him, in somewhat blunt
language, of great carelessness, he has not scrupled to charge others
with 'wilful and deliberate evasion,' with 'unpardonable calculation
upon the ignorance of his readers,' with 'a deliberate falsification,'
with 'disingenuousness' [134:1] and other grave moral offences of the
same kind. Now I have been brought up in the belief that offences of
this class are incomparably more heinous than the worst scholarship or
the grossest inaccuracy; and I am therefore obliged to ask whether he is
not imposing far stricter rules on others than he is prepared to observe
himself, when he objects to what I have said. Nevertheless I will
apologize; but I cannot do so without reluctance, for he is asking me to
withdraw an explanation which seemed to me to place his mode of
proceeding in the most favourable light, and to substitute for it
another which I should not have ventured to suggest. When I saw in his
text the unqualified statement, 'It is admitted that there was no such
place,' [134:2] and found in one of his footnotes on the same page a
reference to an article by an eminent Hebraist devoted to showing that
such a place is mentioned several times in the Talmud, I could draw no
other conclusion than that he had not read the article in question, or
(as I might have added), having read it, had forgotten its contents. The
manner in which references are given elsewhere in this work, as I have
shown in my article on the Ignatian Epistles, seemed to justify this
inference. His own explanation however is quite different.--

My statement is, that it is admitted that there was no such place
as Sychar--I ought to have added, 'except by apologists, who never
admit anything'--but I thought that in saying, 'and apologetic
ingenuity is severely taxed to explain the difficulty,' I had
sufficiently excepted apologists, and indicated that many
assertions and conjectures are advanced by them for that purpose.

Certainly this qualifying sentence needed to be added; for no reader
could have supposed that the author intended his broad statement to be
understood with this all-important reservation. Unfortunately however
this explanation is not