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 at Antioch?  Does the subsequent history of Christianity leave any doubt that, from this time forth, the “little rift within the lute” caused by the new teaching, developed, if not inaugurated, at Antioch, grew wider and wider, until the two types of doctrine irreconcilably diverged?  Did not the primitive Nazarenism, or Ebionism, develop into the Nazarenism, and Ebionism, and Elkasaitism of later ages, and finally die out in obscurity and condemnation, as damnable heresy; while the younger doctrine throve and pushed out its shoots into that endless variety of sects, of which the three strongest survivors are the Roman and Greek Churches and modern Protestantism?

Singular state of things!  If I were to profess the doctrine which was held by “James, the brother of the Lord,” and by every one of the “myriads” of his followers and co-religionists in Jerusalem up to twenty or thirty years after the Crucifixion (and one knows not how much later at Pella), I should be condemned with unanimity, as an ebionising heretic by the Roman, Greek, and Protestant Churches!  And, probably, this hearty and unanimous condemnation of the creed, held by those who were in the closest personal relation with their Lord, is almost the only point upon which they would be cordially of one mind.  On the other hand, though I hardly dare imagine such a thing, I very much fear that the “pillars” of the primitive Hierosolymitan Church would have considered Dr. Wace an infidel.  No one can read the famous second chapter of Galatians and the book of Revelation without seeing how narrow was even Paul’s escape from a similar fate.  And, if ecclesiastical history is to be trusted, the thirty-nine articles, be they right or wrong, diverge from the primitive doctrine of the Nazarenes vastly more than even Pauline Christianity did.