Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/539

Rh. From my "point of view"—not from Mr. Gladstone's apparently—the little discrepancy between the facts and Mr. Gladstone's carefully offensive travesty of them is "probably" (only "probably") material. However, as Mr. Gladstone concludes with an official expression of regret for his error, it is my business to return an equally official expression of gratitude for the attenuated reparation with which I am favored.

Having cleared this specimen of Mr. Gladstone's controversial method out of the way, I may proceed to the next assault, that on a passage in an article on Agnosticism (Nineteenth Century, February, 1889), published two years ago. I there said, in referring to the Gadarene story, "Everything I know of law and justice convinces me that the wanton destruction of other people's property is a misdemeanor of evil example." On this, Mr. Gladstone, continuing his candid and urbane observations, remarks (Impregnable Rock, p. 273) that, "exercising his rapid judgment on the text," and "not inquiring what anybody else had known or said about it," I had missed a point in support of that "accusation against our Lord" which he has now been constrained to admit I never made.

The "point" in question is that "Gadara was a city of Greeks rather than of Jews, from whence it might be inferred that to keep swine was innocent and lawful." I conceive that I have abundantly proved that Gadara answered exactly to the description here given of it; and I shall show, by and by, that Mr. Gladstone has used language which, to my mind, involves the admission that the authorities of the city were not Jews. But I have also taken a good deal of pains to show that the question thus raised is of no importance in relation to the main issue, If Gadara was, as I maintain it was, a city of the Decapolis, Hellenistic in constitution and containing a predominantly Gentile population, my case is superabundantly fortified. On the other hand, if the hypothesis that Gadara was under Jewish government, which Mr. Gladstone seems sometimes to defend and sometimes to give up, were accepted, my case would be nowise weakened. At any rate, Gadara was not included within the jurisdiction of the tetrarch of Galilee; if it had been, the Galileans who crossed over the lake to Gadara had no official status; and they had