metaphysical abstractions and philosophical interpretation.

Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he offered of
the problem which the synoptic Gospels present. His opinions are of no
interest except as showing that he too worked diligently upon a question
which for a long time seemed only to grow in complexity and which has
busied scholars practically from Baur's day to our own. His zeal here
also to discover dogmatic purposes led him astray. The _Tendenzkritik_
had its own tendencies. The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness.
Baur had the kind of ear which hears grass grow. There is much
overstrained acumen. Many radically false conclusions are reached by
prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the last
analysis is that of Hegel. Everything is to be explained on the
principle of antithesis. Again, the assumption of conscious purpose in
everything which men do or write is a grave exaggeration. It is often in
contradiction of that wonderful unconsciousness with which men and
institutions move to the fulfilment of a purpose for the good, the
purpose of God, into which their own life is grandly taken up. To make
each phase of such a movement the contribution of some one man's scheme
or endeavour is, as was once said, to make God act like a professor.

* * * * *

The method of this book is that it seeks to deal only with men who have
inaugurated movements, or marked some turning-point in their course
which has proved of more than usual significance. The compass of the
book demands such a limitation. But by this method whole chapters in the
life of learning are passed over, in which the substance of achievement
has been the carrying out of a plan of which we have been able to note
only the inception. There is a sense in which the carrying out of a plan
is both more difficult and more worthy than the mere setting it in
motion. When one thinks of the labour and patience which have been
expended, for example, upon the problem of the Gospels in the past
seventy years, those truths come home to us. When one reminds himself of
the hypotheses which have been made but to be abandoned, which have yet
had the value that they at least indicated the area within which
solutions do not lie,--when one thinks of the wellnigh immeasurable toil
by which we have been led to large results which now seem secure, one is
made to realise that the conditions of the advance