It will be hardly necessary for me to say that the Christian Evidence Society is not responsible for the contents of this work, except in so far as may be involved in the original request that I should write it.  I undertook the task at first with some hesitation, and I could not have undertaken it at all without stipulating for entire freedom.  The Society very kindly and liberally granted me this, and I am conscious of having to some extent availed myself of it.  I have not always stayed to consider whether the opinions expressed were in exact accordance with those of the majority of Christians.  It will be enough if they should find points of contact in some minds, and the tentative element in them will perhaps be the more indulgently judged now that the reconciliation of the different branches of knowledge and belief is being so anxiously sought for.

The instrument of the enquiry had to be fashioned as the enquiry itself went on, and I suspect that the consequences of this will be apparent in some inequality and incompleteness in the earlier portions.  For instance, I am afraid that the textual analysis of the quotations in Justin may seem somewhat less satisfactory than that of those in the Clementine Homilies, though Justin’s quotations are the more important of the two.  Still I hope that the treatment of the first may be, for the scale of the book, sufficiently adequate.  There seemed to be a certain advantage in presenting the results of the enquiry in the order in which it was conducted.  If time and strength are allowed me, I hope to be able to carry several of the investigations that are begun in this book some stages further.

I ought perhaps to explain that I was prevented by other engagements from beginning seriously to work upon the subject until the latter end of December in last year.  The first of Dr. Lightfoot’s articles in the Contemporary Review had then appeared.  The next two articles (on the Silence of Eusebius and the Ignatian Epistles) were also in advance of my own treatment of the same topics.  From this point onwards I was usually the first to finish, and I have been compelled merely to allude to the progress of the controversy in notes.  Seeing the turn that Dr. Lightfoot’s review was taking, and knowing how utterly vain it would be for any one else to go over the same ground, 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.