So common a feature of a hundred myths, indeed, is the set of characteristics founded on, that we may at once come to the basis of his argument, a blundering reiteration of the famous thesis of Professor Schmiedel, who is the sole source of Mr. Sinclair's latent erudition. "The line of inquiry here suggested," he explains, "has been worked out in a pamphlet of Schmiedel, which will be found in the Fellowship library." But the dialectic which broadly avails for the Bible class will not serve their instructor here. The essence of the argument which Professor Schmiedel urges with scholarlike sobriety is thus put by Mr. Sinclair with the extravagance natural to his species:--
Many [compare Schmiedel!] of the stories represent him [Jesus] in a light which, from the point of view of conventional hero-worship, is even derogatory; his friends come to seize him as a madman; he is estranged from his own mother; he can do no mighty work in the unsympathetic atmosphere of his own native place.
The traditionalist is here unconsciously substituting a new and different argument for the first. Hitherto the thesis has been that of the "vividness" of the record, the "human touches," the "speaking and feeling like a real man," the "freedom and variety of life." Apparently he has had a shadow of misgiving over these simple criteria. If, indeed, he had given an hour to the perusal of Albert Kalthoff's Rise of Christianity, instead of proceeding to vilipend a literature of which he had read nothing, he would have learned that his preliminary thesis is there anticipated and demolished. Kalthoff meets it by the simple observation that the books of Ruth and Jonah supply "human touches" and "freedom and variety of life" to a far greater degree than does the Gospel story considered as a life of Jesus; though practically all scholars are now agreed that both of the former books are deliberately planned fictions, or early "novels with a purpose." Ruth is skilfully framed to contend against the Jewish bigotry of race; and Jonah to substitute a humane ideal for the ferocious one embalmed in so much of the sacred literature. Yet so "vividly" are the central personages portrayed that down till the other day all the generations of Christendom, educated and uneducated alike, accepted them unquestioningly as real records, whatever might be thought by the judicious few of the miracle element in Jonah.