direction of truly liberal Christianity which has been so potent
during the last twenty years? As it was, the freedom with which the
Dean wrote was the cause of no inconsiderable scandal. Or, again, he
may not have been fully conscious of his own position: few men are;
he had taken the right one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct
than by conscious and deliberate exercise of his intellectual
faculties. Finally, compromise is not a matter of good policy only,
it is a solemn duty in the interests of Christian peace, and this not
in minor matters only--we can all do this much--but in those
concerning which we feel most strongly, for here the sacrifice is
greatest and most acceptable to God. There are, of course, limits to
this, and Dean Alford may have carried compromise too far in the
present instance, but it is very transparent. The narrowness which
leads the author of The Jesus of History to strain at such a gnat is
the secret of his inability to accept the divinity and miracles of
our Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis of
the life and death of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion."

It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally have
shown himself so little able to apply his own principles. He seems
to have been alternately under the influence of two conflicting
spirits--at one time writing as though there were nothing precious
under the sun except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathing
fire and smoke against even very trifling deviations from the path of
exact criticism--at another, leading the reader almost to believe
that he disregarded the value of any objective truth, and speaking of
endeavour after accuracy in terms that are positively contemptuous.
Whenever he was in the one mood he seemed to forget the possibility
of any other; so much so that I have sometimes thought that he did
this deliberately and for the same reasons as those which led Adam