immodesty, claim to be put on the same footing as a
Zulu.

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 my 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 excellent clerical and lay gentlemen to discuss, in public meeting
assembled, how much it is desirable to let the congregations of the
faithful know of the results of biblical criticism, is like