There will probably be some points in every science which will never be cleared up to the end of time.

The affirmation of the antiquity of Marcion's Gospel rests upon the simple axiom that every event must have a cause, and that in order to produce complicated phenomena the interaction of complicated causes is necessary.

Such an assumption involves time, and I think it is a safe proposition to assert that, in order to bring the text of Marcion's Gospel into the state in which we find it, there must have been a long previous history, and the manuscripts through which it was conveyed must have parted far from the parent stem.
The only way in which the inference drawn from the text of Marcion's Gospel can be really met would be by showing that the text of the Latin and Syriac translations is older and more original than that which is universally adopted by text-critics.

I should hardly suppose that the author of 'Supernatural Religion' will be prepared to maintain this.

If he does, the subject can then be argued.