The interpolation hypothesis, as I said, is easily advanced, but the _onus probandi_ must needs lie heavily against it.

In accepting the text as it stands we simply obey the Baconian maxim _hypotheses non fingimus_, but it is strange, and must be surprising to a philosophic mind, to what an extent the more extreme representatives of the negative criticism have gone back to the most condemned parts of the scholastic method; inconvenient facts are explained away by hypotheses as imaginary and unverifiable as the 'cycles and epicycles' by which the schoolmen used to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies.
'If however,' the author continues, 'the passage 'originally formed part of the text, it is absurd to affirm that it is any proof of the use or existence of the first Gospel.' 'Absurd' is under the circumstances a rather strong word to use; but, granting that it would have been even 'absurd' to allege this passage, if it had stood alone, as a sufficient proof of the use of the Gospel, it does not follow that there can be any objection to the more guarded statement that it invests the use of the Gospel with a certain antecedent probability.

No doubt the quotation _may_ have been made from a lost Gospel, but here again [Greek: eis aphanes ton muthon anenenkas ouk echei elenchon]-- there is no verifying that about which we know nothing.

The critic may multiply Gospels as much as he pleases and an apologist at least will not quarrel with him, but it would be more to the point if he could prove the existence in these lost writings of matter _conflicting_ with that contained in the extant Gospels.

As it is, the only result of these unverifiable hypotheses is to raise up confirmatory documents in a quarter where apologists have not hitherto claimed them.
We are delaying, however, too long upon points of quite secondary importance.