fourth Gospel; and if he had, what his share amounted to; are, as
everybody who has attended to these matters knows, questions still
hotly disputed, and with regard to which the extant evidence can
hardly carry an impartial judge beyond the admission of a possibility
this way or that.

Thus, nothing but a balancing of very dubious probabilities is to be
attained by approaching the question from this side. It is otherwise
if we make the documents tell their own story: if we study them, as we
study fossils, to discover internal evidence, of when they arose, and
how they have come to be. That really fruitful line of inquiry has led
to the statement and the discussion of what is known as the _Synoptic
Problem_.

In the Essays (VII.--XI.) which deal with the consequences of the
application of the agnostic principle to Christian Evidences,
contained in this volume, there are several references to the results
of the attempts which have been made, during the last hundred years,
to solve this problem. And, though it has been clearly stated and
discussed, in works accessible to, and intelligible by, every English
reader,[5] it may be well that I should here set forth a very brief
exposition of the matters of fact out of which the problem has arisen;
and of some consequences, which, as I conceive, must be admitted if
the facts are accepted.

These undisputed and, apparently, indisputable data may be thus
stated:

I. The three books of which an ancient, but very questionable,
ecclesiastical tradition asserts Matthew, Mark, and Luke to be the