When David Hume’s housemaid was wroth because somebody chalked up “St David’s” on his house, the philosopher is said to have remarked,—­” Never mind, lassie, better men than I have been made saints of before now.”  And, perhaps, if I had recollected that “better men than I have been made texts of before now,” a slight flavour of wrath which may be perceptible would have vanished from my first letter.  If Dr. Abbott has found any phrase of mine too strong, I beg him to set it against “out and out pessimist” and “Heine’s dragoon,” and let us cry quits.  He is the last person with whom I should wish to quarrel.

[Two interesting criticisms of books follow; one “The First Three Gospels”, by the Reverend Estlin Carpenter; the other on “Use and Disuse”, directed against the doctrine of use-inheritance, by Mr. Platt Ball, who not only sent the book but appealed to him for advice as to his future course in undertaking a larger work on the evolution of man.]

Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 11, 1890.

My dear Mr. Carpenter,

Accept my best thanks for “The First Three Gospels”, which strikes me as an admirable exposition of the case, full, clear, and calm.  Indeed the latter quality gives it here and there a touch of humour.  You say the most damaging things in a way so gentle that the orthodox reader must feel like the eels who were skinned by the fair Molly—­lost between pain and admiration.

I am certainly glad to see that the book has reached a second edition; it will do yeoman’s service to the cause of right reason.

A friend of mine was in the habit of sending me his proofs, and I sometimes wrote on them “no objection except to the whole”; and I am afraid that you will think what I am about to say comes to pretty much the same thing—­at least if I am right in the supposition that a passage in your first preface (page 7) states your fundamental position, and that you conceive that when criticism has done its uttermost there still remains evidence that the personality of Jesus was the leading cause—­the conditio sine qua non—­of the evolution of Christianity from Judaism.

I long thought so, and having a strong dislike to belittle the heroic figures of history, I held by the notion as long as I could, but I find it melting away.

I cannot see that the moral and religious ideal of early Christianity is new—­on the other hand, it seems to me to be implicitly and explicitly contained in the early prophetic Judaism and the later Hellenised Judaism; and though it is quite true that the new vitality of the old ideal manifested in early Christianity demands “an adequate historic cause,” I would suggest that the word “cause” may mislead if it is not carefully defined.