So then our author has stumbled over that little word 'nur,' and his
German has gone the way of his Greek and his Latin [19:3]. But the error
is instructive from another point of view. This argument happens to be a
commonplace of 'apologists.' How comes it then, that he was not set
right by one or other of these many writers, even if he could not
construe Credner's German? Clearly this cannot be the work which the
reviewers credit with an 'exhaustive' knowledge of the literature of the
subject. I may be asked indeed to explain how, on this theory of
mistaken identity which I here put forward, the work reviewed by the
critics came to be displaced by the work before me, so that no traces of
the original remain. But this I altogether decline to do, and I plead
authority for refusing. 'The merely negative evidence that our actual
[_Supernatural Religion_] is not the work described by [the Reviewers]
is sufficient for our purpose.' [20:1]

3. But the argument is strengthened when we come to consider a third
point. 'The author's discussions,' writes our first reviewer, 'are
conducted in a judicial method.' 'He has the critical faculty in union
with a calm spirit.' 'Calm and judicial in tone,' is the verdict of our
second reviewer. The opinion of our third and fourth reviewers on this
part may be gathered not so much from what they say as from what they
leave unsaid. A fifth reviewer however, who seems certainly to have had
our _Supernatural Religion_ before him, holds different language. He
rebukes the author--with wonderful gentleness, considering the gravity
of the offence--for 'now and then losing patience.'

Now whether calmness of tone can be said to distinguish a work which
bristles with such epithets as 'monstrous,' 'impossible,' 'audacious,'
'preposterous,' 'absurd;' whether the habit of reiterating as axiomatic
truths what at the very best are highly precarious hypotheses--as, for