[197] yesterday.  The birth of religions is always enveloped in legend, and the miraculous thing would be, as M. Salomon Reinach has observed, if the story of the birth of Christianity were pure history.

Another disturbing result of unprejudiced examination of the first three Gospels is that, if you take the recorded words of Jesus to be genuine tradition, he had no idea of founding a new religion.  And he was fully persuaded that the end of the world was at hand.  At present, the chief problem of advanced criticism seems to be whether his entire teaching was not determined by this delusive conviction.

It may be said that the advance of knowledge has thrown no light on one of the most important beliefs that we are asked to accept on authority, the doctrine of immortality.  Physiology and psychology have indeed emphasized the difficulties of conceiving a thinking mind without a nervous system.  Some are sanguine enough to think that, by scientific examination of psychical phenomena, we may possibly come to know whether the “spirits” of dead people exist.  If the existence of such a world of spirits were ever established, it would possibly be the greatest blow ever sustained by Christianity.  For the great appeal of this and of some other religions

[198] lies in the promise of a future life of which otherwise we should have no knowledge.  If existence after death were proved and became a scientific fact like the law of gravitation, a revealed religion might lose its power.  For the whole point of a revealed religion is that it is not based on scientific facts.  So far as I know, those who are convinced, by spiritualistic experiments, that they have actual converse with spirits of the dead, and for whom this converse, however delusive the evidence may be, is a fact proved by experience, cease to feel any interest in religion.  They possess knowledge and can dispense with faith.

The havoc which science and historical criticism have wrought among orthodox beliefs during the last hundred years was not tamely submitted to, and controversy was not the only weapon employed.  Strauss was deprived of his professorship at Tuebingen, and his career was ruined.  Renan, whose sensational Life of Jesus also rejected the supernatural, lost his chair in the College de France.  Buechner was driven from Tuebingen (1855) for his book on Force and Matter, which, appealing to the general public, set forth the futility of supernatural explanations of the universe.  An attempt was made to chase Haeckel from Jena.  In recent years,

[199] a French Catholic, the Abbe Loisy, has made notable contributions to the study of the New Testament and he was rewarded by major excommunication in 1907.