The champions of the traditional view of the Gospels are the truly negative teachers: they insist to the last that the records represent either a supernatural or a supernormal exhibition of moral greatness; that it needed either a God or a man beyond all compare to give forth such teachings ; they imply that only by such moral cataclysms has humanity ever been bettered; and they further imply that there is either no chance or little chance of comparable betterment in the future. It is such teaching as this that peculiarly deserves to be branded as perniciously negative, in that it negates the moral faculty of all mankind. To apply the phraseology of the Christians of past time, it is a blasphemy against Man. It has cast a glamour of mystery round some ancient portions of men's handicraft, and has so taught later men to despair of their own powers. If our negation ' be just, it establishes the momentous affirmation that as Man is the maker of all Gods, so is he the maker of all Christs.