of roundness and completeness in the creeds of those who either accept everything or deny everything:  though, even here, there is, I think we may say, always, some little loophole left of belief or of denial, which will inevitably expand until it splits and destroys the whole structure.  But the moment we begin to meet both parties half way, there comes in that crucial question:  Why do you accept just so much and no more?  Why do you deny just so much and no more? [Endnote 354:1]

It must, in candour, be confessed that the synthetic formula for the middle party in opinion has not yet been found.  Other parties have their formulae, but none that will really bear examination. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, would do excellently if there was any belief that had been held ‘always, everywhere, and by all,’ if no discoveries had been made as to the facts, and if there had been no advance in the methods of knowledge.  The ultimate universality and the absolute uniformity of physical antecedents has a plausible appearance until it is seen that logically carried out it reduces men to machines, annihilates responsibility, and involves conclusions on the assumption of the truth of which society could not hold together for a single day.  If we abandon these Macedonian methods for unloosing the Gordian knot of things and keep to the slow and laborious way of gradual induction, then I think it will be clear that all opinions must be held on the most provisional tenure.  A vast number of problems will need to be worked out before any can be said to be established with a pretence to finality.  And the course which the inductive process is taking supplies one of the chief ‘grounds of hope’ to those who wish to hold that middle position of which I have been speaking.  The extreme theories which from time to time have been advanced have not been able to hold their ground.  No doubt they may have done the good that extreme theories usually do, in bringing out either positively or negatively one side or another of the truth; but in themselves they have been rejected as at once inadequate and unreal solutions of the facts.  First we had the Rationalism (properly so called) of Paulus, then the Mythical hypothesis of Strauss, and after that the ‘Tendenz-kritik’ of Baur.  But what candid person does not feel that each and all of these contained exaggerations more incredible than the difficulties which they sought to remove?  There has been on each of the points raised a more or less definite ebb in the tide.  The moderate conclusion is seen to be also the reasonable conclusion.  And not least is this the case with the enquiry on which we have been just engaged.  The author of ‘Supernatural Religion’ has overshot the mark very much indeed.  There is, as we have seen, a certain truth in some things that he has said, but the whole sum of truth is very far from bearing out his conclusions.