When we look up from these detailed enquiries and lift up our eyes to a wider horizon we shall be able to relegate them to their true place.  The really imposing witness to the truth of Christianity is that which is supplied by history on the one hand, and its own internal attractiveness and conformity to human nature on the other.  Strictly speaking, perhaps, these are but two sides of the same thing.  It is in history that the laws of human nature assume a concrete shape and expression.  The fact that Christianity has held its ground in the face of such long-continued and hostile criticism is a proof that it must have some deeply-seated fitness and appropriateness for man.  And this goes a long way towards saying that it is true.  It is a theory of things that is being constantly tested by experience.  But the results of experience are often expressed unconsciously.  They include many a subtle indication that the mind has followed but cannot reproduce to itself in set terms.  All the reasons that go to form a judge’s decision do not appear in his charge.  Yet there we have a select and highly-trained mind working upon matter that presents no very great degree of complexity.  When we come to a question so wide, so subtle and complex as Christianity, the individual mind ceases to be competent to sit in judgment upon it.  It becomes necessary to appeal to a much more extended tribunal, and the verdict of that tribunal will be given rather by acts than in words.  Thus there seems to have always been a sort of half-conscious feeling in men’s minds that there was more in Christianity than the arguments for it were able to bring out.  In looking back over the course that apologetics have taken, we cannot help being struck by a disproportion between the controversial aspect and the practical.  It will probably on the whole be admitted that the balance of argument has in the past been usually somewhat on the side of the apologists; but the argumentative victory has seldom if ever been so decisive as quite to account for the comparatively undisturbed continuity of the religious life.  It was in the height of the Deist controversy that Wesley and Whitfield began to preach, and they made more converts by appealing to the emotions than probably Butler did by appealing to the reason.

A true philosophy must take account of these phenomena.  Beliefs which issue in that peculiarly fine and chastened and tender spirit which is the proper note of Christianity, cannot, under any circumstances, be dismissed as ‘delusion.’  Surely if any product of humanity is true and genuine, it is to be found here.  There are indeed truths which find a response in our hearts without apparently going through any logical process, not because they are illogical, but because the scales of logic are not delicate and sensitive enough to weigh them.