Let it not be thought that these few remarks are made in a spirit of censoriousness.  They are made by one who is only too conscious of being subject to the very same conditions, and who knows not how far he may need indulgence on the same score himself.  How far his own work is tainted with the spirit of advocacy it is not for him to say.  He knows well that the author whom he has set himself to criticise is at least a writer of remarkable vigour and ability, and that he cannot lay claim to these qualities; but he has confidence in the power of truth—­whatever that truth may be—­ to assert itself in the end.  An open and fair field and full and free criticism are all that is needed to eliminate the effects of individual strength or weakness.  ’The opinions of good men are but knowledge in the making’—­especially where they are based upon a survey of the original facts.  Mistakes will be made and have currency for a time.  But little by little truth emerges; it receives the suffrages of those who are competent to judge; gradually the controversy narrows; parts of it are closed up entirely, and a solid and permanent advance is made.

* * * * *

The author of ‘Supernatural Religion’ starts from a rigid and somewhat antiquated view of Revelation—­Revelation is ’a direct and external communication by God to man of truths undiscoverable by human reason.  The divine origin of this communication is proved by miracles.  Miracles are proved by the record of Scripture, which, in its turn, is attested by the history of the Canon.—­This is certainly the kind of theory which was in favour at the end of the last century, and found expression in works like Paley’s Evidences.  It belongs to a time of vigorous and clear but mechanical and narrow culture, when the philosophy of religion was made up of abrupt and violent contrasts; when Christianity (including under that name the Old Testament as well as the New) was thought to be simply true and all other religions simply false; when the revelation of divine truth was thought to be as sudden and complete as the act of creation; and when the presence of any local and temporary elements in the Christian documents or society was ignored.

The world has undergone a great change since then.  A new and far-reaching philosophy is gradually displacing the old.  The Christian sees that evolution is as much a law of religion as of nature.  The Ethnic, or non-Christian, religions are no longer treated as outside the pale of the Divine government.  Each falls into its place as part of a vast divinely appointed scheme, of the character of which we are beginning to have some faint glimmerings.  Other religions are seen to be correlated to Christianity much as the other tentative efforts of nature are correlated to man.  A divine operation, and what from our limited human point of view we should call a special divine operation, is not excluded but rather implied