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 to all these heresies. He contended that Christ was as a root out of dry ground only to the eye of an unbelieving world; and “of Henry Craik I still desire,” he says, “to hope better things than that the Nazarene … would have been ‘as a root out of a dry ground’”. A further complaint was that “where Scripture says, referring to the person of the Christ, God manifest in the flesh, the statement says, ‘his humanity,’”—although as a matter of fact the statement says nothing of the kind. The other italicised words gave rise to painful suspicions, but Wigram still entertained hopes of some satisfactory explanation of them.

Wigram added as a makeweight that he had been told, in a letter from Bristol, that Mr. Craik had “said with great warmth the other day, that J. N. D. and his followers made too much of the humanity of the Lord Jesus, and that he believed if the Lord had not been crucified he would have lived to be a shrivelled old man, and have died a natural death”. Wigram had also heard that Craik had said that “if the Lord had taken arsenic he would have died”.

The first point in Craik’s reply to this attack is as follows: “That Mr. W. wrote the tract while living in the neighbourhood of my house, i.e., half an hour’s walk from Kingsdown; yet never availed himself of the opportunity of personally enquiring as to the fact of certain expressions [having] been employed by me.” (The italics are apparently Craik’s.) Wigram’s answer is one of the curiosities of literature. He knew Craik, he tells us, to be “under a delusion,” and identified with “a system which makes every one in it to be reckless as to truth”. If he abstained from asking questions it was from charity, since Craik might have been “tempted to the sin of evasion and deception”. He further deemed that it