It was extremely easy for me to prove, as I did in the pages of this Review last December, that, under the most favourable interpretation, this amazing declaration must be ascribed to extreme confusion of thought.  And, by bringing an abundance of good-will to the consideration of the subject, I have now convinced myself that it is right for me to admit that a person of Mr. Gladstone’s intellectual acuteness really did mistake the reprobation of the course of conduct ascribed to Jesus, in a story of which I expressly say I do not believe a word, for an attack on his character and a declaration that he was “no better than a law-breaker, and an evil-doer.”  At any rate, so far as I can see, this is what Mr. Gladstone wished to be believed when he wrote the following passage:—­

I must, however, in passing, make the confession that I did not state with accuracy, as I ought to have done, the precise form of the accusation.  I treated it as an imputation on the action of our Lord; he replies that it is only an imputation on the narrative of three evangelists respecting Him.  The difference, from his point of view, is probably material, and I therefore regret that I overlooked it.[107]

Considering the gravity of the error which is here admitted, the fashion of the withdrawal appears more singular than admirable.  From my “point of view”—­not from Mr. Gladstone’s apparently—­the little discrepancy between the facts and Mr. Gladstone’s carefully offensive travesty of them is “probably” (only “probably”) material.  However, as Mr. Gladstone concludes with an official expression of regret for his error, it is my business to return an equally official expression of gratitude for the attenuated reparation with which I am favoured.

Having cleared this specimen of Mr. Gladstone’s controversial method out of the way, I may proceed to the next assault, that on a passage in an article on Agnosticism ("Nineteenth Century,” February 1889), published two years ago.  I there said, in referring to the Gadarene story, “Everything I know of law and justice convinces me that the wanton destruction of other people’s property is a misdemeanour of evil example.”  On this, Mr. Gladstone, continuing his candid and urbane observations, remarks ("Impregnable Rock,” p. 273) that, “Exercising his rapid judgment on the text,” and “not inquiring what anybody else had known or said about it,” I had missed a point in support of that “accusation against our Lord” which he has now been constrained to admit I never made.

The “point” in question is that “Gadara was a city of Greeks rather than of Jews, from whence it might be inferred that to keep swine was innocent and lawful.”  I conceive that I have abundantly proved that Gadara answered exactly to the description here given of it; and I shall show, by and by, that Mr. Gladstone has used language which, to my mind, involves the admission that the authorities of the city were not Jews.  But I have also taken a good