’Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’  ’I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him:  Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.’  ’Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’  The plummet of science—­physical or metaphysical, moral or critical—­has never sounded so deep as sayings such as these.  We may pass them over unnoticed in our Bibles, or let them slip glibly and thoughtlessly from the tongue; but when they once really come home, there is nothing to do but to bow the head and cover the face and exclaim with the Apostle, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’

And yet there is that other side of the question which is represented in ‘Supernatural Religion,’ and this too must have justice done to it.  There is an intellectual, as well as a moral and spiritual, synthesis of things.  Only it should be remembered that this synthesis has to cover an immense number of facts of the most varied and intricate kind, and that at present the nature of the facts themselves is in many cases very far from being accurately ascertained.  We are constantly reminded in reading ‘Supernatural Religion,’ able and vigorous as it is, how much of its force depends rather upon our ignorance than our knowledge.  It supplies us with many opportunities of seeing how easily the whole course and tenour of an argument may be changed by the introduction of a new element.  For instance, I imagine that if the author had given a little deeper study to the seemingly minute and secondary subject of text-criticism, it would have aroused in him very considerable misgivings as to the results at which he seemed to have arrived.  There is a solidarity in all the different departments of human knowledge and research, especially among those that are allied in subject.  These are continually sending out offshoots and projections into the neighbouring regions, and the conclusions of one science very often have to depend upon those of another.  The course of enquiry that has been taken in ‘Supernatural Religion’ is peculiarly unfortunate.  It starts from the wrong end.  It begins with propositions into which a priori considerations largely enter, and, from the standpoint given by these, it proceeds to dictate terms in a field that can only be trodden by patient and unprejudiced study.  A far more hopeful and scientific process would have been to begin upon ground where dogmatic questions do not enter, or enter only in a remote degree, and where there is a sufficient number of solid ascertainable facts to go upon, and then to work the way steadily and cautiously upwards to higher generalisations.