o be obtained only by the use of the methods of
science, as applied to history and to literature, and it amounts at
present to very little.

THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN RELATION TO JUDAIC CHRISTIANITY
[FROM "AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER," 1889]

The most constant reproach which is launched against persons of my way
of thinking is that it is all very well for us to talk about the
deductions of scientific thought, but what are the poor and the
uneducated to do? Has it ever occurred to those who talk in this
fashion, that their creeds and the articles of their several
confessions, their determination of the exact nature and extent of the
teachings of Jesus, their expositions of the real meaning of that which
is written in the Epistles (to leave aside all questions concerning the
Old Testament), are nothing more than deductions which, at any rate,
profess to be the result of strictly scientific thinking, and which are
not worth attending to unless they really possess that character? If it
is not historically true that such and such things happened in Palestine
eighteen centuries ago, what becomes of Christianity? And what is
historical truth but that of which the evidence bears strict scientific
investigation? I do not call to mind any problem of natural science
which has come under my notice which is more difficult, or more
curiously interesting as a mere problem, than that of the origin of the
Synoptic Gospels and that of the historical value of the narratives
which they contain. The Christianity of the Churches stands or falls by
the results of the purely scientific investigation of these questions.
They were first taken up, in a purely scientific spirit, about a century
ago; they have been studied over and over again by men of vast knowledge
and critical acumen; but he would be a rash man who should assert that
any solution of these problems, as yet formulated, is exhaustive. The
most that can be said is that certain prevalent solutions are certainly
false, while others are more or less probably true.

If I am doing my best to rouse any countrymen out of their dogmatic
slumbers, it is not that they may be amused by seeing who gets the best
of it in a contest between a "scientist" and a theologian. The serious
question is whether theological men of science, or theological special
pleaders, are to have the confidence of the general public; it is the
question whether a country in which it is possible for a body of
ex