I felt myself more at liberty to follow a natural bent in confining
myself pretty closely to the internal aspect of the enquiry. My object
has been chiefly to test in detail the alleged quotations from our
Gospels, while Dr. Lightfoot has taken a wider sweep in collecting
and bringing to bear the collateral matter of which his unrivalled
knowledge of the early Christian literature gave him such command.
It will be seen that in some cases, as notably in regard to the
evidence of Papias, the external and the internal methods have
led to an opposite result; and I shall look forward with much
interest to the further discussion of this subject.

I should be sorry to ignore the debt I am under to the author of
'Supernatural Religion' for the copious materials he has supplied
to criticism. I have also to thank him for his courtesy in sending
me a copy of the sixth edition of his work. My obligations to
other writers I hope will be found duly acknowledged. If I were to
single out the one book to which I owed most, it would probably be
Credner's 'Beitrage zur Einleitung in die Biblischen Schriften,'
of which I have spoken somewhat fully in an early chapter. I have
used a certain amount of discretion and economy in avoiding as a
rule the works of previous apologists (such as Semisch, Riggenbach,
Norton, Hofstede de Groot) and consulting rather those of an opposite
school in such representatives as Hilgenfeld and Volkmar. In this
way, though I may very possibly have omitted some arguments which
may be sound, I hope I shall have put forward few that have been
already tried and found wanting.

As I have made rather large use of the argument supplied by text-
criticism, I should perhaps say that to the best of my belief my
attention was first drawn to its importance by a note in Dr. Lightfoot's