Note 1 — Chapter I · THE APPROACH

These very attempts, naturally, are constantly made the objects of still more hasty counter-attack. Every form of the myth-theory with which I am acquainted, whatever its defects, has been the result of much labour, and even if astray can be fairly pronounced “hasty” only in the sense that it proves to be inadequate. It is not so with most of the counter-criticism. The reader may rest assured that it is not possible for any exposition of the new theory to be as “hasty” as is usually its rejection.1 Professional theologians who cast that epithet are in general recognizably men who believed their hereditary creed before they were able to think, and have at no later stage made good the first inevitable omission.