The Henson Journals

[473]

Tuesday, November 2nd, 1915.

456th day

I read through Percy Gardner's "The Ephesian Gospel", which forms the latest volume of the Crown Theological Library. It is extraordinarily interesting & provocative. Not that the writer is ever, in the ordinary controversial sense, aggressive, but that he fills his pages with assertions & assumption which seem to clamour for criticism! As an indication of the march of opinion in such matters, it is notable that he never even deigns to mention, still less to refute, the elaborate argument by which Bishop Westcott demonstrated the Apostolic origin of the Fourth Gospel, & was generally supposed in England to have ended that famous controversy in an orthodox triumph! The really anxious questions are two viz: (1) Is this way of presenting the Life of Jesus reasonable in itself? (2) If so, can it properly and permanently serve as the historic substructure of the Christian Religion? For awhile it might do so, for the logical process will be partly arrested & partly concealed by the accumulated emotions & habitudes of the older Faith: but permanently? I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that the Religion will not ultimately survive the 'History'.

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