In the course of other inquiries, I have had to do with fossil remains which looked quite plain at a distance, and became more and more indistinct as I tried to define their outline by close inspection.  There was something there—­something which, if I could win assurance about it, might mark a new epoch in the history of the earth; but, study as long as I might, certainty eluded my grasp.  So had it been with me in my efforts to define the grand figure of Jesus as it lies in the primary strata of Christian literature.  Is he the kindly, peaceful Christ depicted in the Catacombs?  Or is he the stern Judge who frowns upon the altar of SS.  Cosmas and Damianus?  Or can he be rightly represented by the bleeding ascetic, broken down by physical pain, of too many mediaeval pictures?  Are we to accept the Jesus of the second, or the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, as the true Jesus?  What did he really say and do; and how much that is attributed to him, in speech and action, is the embroidery of the various parties into which his followers tended to split themselves within twenty years of his death, when even the threefold tradition was only nascent?

If any one will answer these questions for me with something more to the point than feeble talk about the “cowardice of agnosticism,” I shall be deeply his debtor.  Unless and until they are satisfactorily answered, I say of agnosticism in this matter, “J’y suis, et j’y reste.”

But, as we have seen, it is asserted that I have no business to call myself an agnostic; that, if I am not a Christian I am an infidel; and that I ought to call myself by that name of “unpleasant significance.”  Well, I do not care much what I am called by other people, and if I had at my side all those who, since the Christian era, have been called infidels by other folks, I could not desire better company.  If these are my ancestors, I prefer, with the old Frank, to be with them wherever they are.  But there are several points in Dr. Wace’s contention which must be elucidated before I can even think of undertaking to carry out his wishes.  I must, for instance, know what a Christian is.  Now what is a Christian?  By whose authority is the signification of that term defined?  Is there any doubt that the immediate followers of Jesus, the “sect of the Nazarenes,” were strictly orthodox Jews differing from other Jews not more than the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes differed from one another; in fact, only in the belief that the Messiah, for whom the rest of their nation waited, had come?  Was not their chief, “James, the brother of the Lord,” reverenced alike by Sadducee, Pharisee, and Nazarene?  At the famous conference which, according to the Acts, took place at Jerusalem, does not James declare that “myriads” of Jews, who, by that time, had become Nazarenes, were “all zealous for the Law”?  Was not the name of “Christian” first used to denote the converts to the doctrine promulgated by Paul and Barnabas