“The Church believes to-day in the Resurrection of Christ, because she has always believed in it.  If all the documents which tell the story of the first Easter Day should disappear, the Church would still shout her Easter praises, and offer her Easter sacrifice of thanksgiving; for she is older than the oldest of her documents, and from father to son all through the centuries she has passed on the message of the first Easter morning—­’The Lord is risen indeed.’  The Church believes in the Resurrection because she is the product of the Resurrection."[52]

But, in spite of varied criticism, Literature and Dogma was well received.  Three editions were published in 1873; a fourth in 1874; a fifth in 1876, and the “popular edition” in 1883.  As usual, he was serenely pleased with his handiwork.  In 1874 he wrote to his sister:  “It will more and more become evident how entirely religious is the work which I have done in Literature and Dogma.  The enemies of religion see this well enough already.”  Ten years later, he wrote from Cincinnati:  “What strikes me in America is the number of friends Literature and Dogma has made me, amongst ministers of religion especially—­and how the effect of the book here is conservative.”

To the various criticisms of the book he began replying in the Contemporary Review for October, 1874.  In November of that year he wrote to Lady de Rothschild:  “You must read my metaphysics in this last Contemporary.  My first and last appearance in the field of metaphysics, where you, I know, are no stranger.”  The completed reply was published as God and the Bible in 1875.  This reply, which contained, as he thought, “the best prose he had ever succeeded in writing,” was a reassertion and development of the previous work, and was written, as the preface said, “for a reader who is more or less conversant with the Bible, who can feel the attraction of the Christian religion, but who has acquired habits of intellectual seriousness, has been revolted by having things presented solemnly to him for his use which will not hold water, and who will start with none of such things even to reach what he values.  Come what may, he will deal with this great matter of religion fairly.  It is the aim of the present volume, as it was the aim of Literature and Dogma, to show to such a man that his honesty will be rewarded....  I write to convince the lover of religion that by following habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so far as religion is concerned, lose anything.”

It was, we must suppose, with the same benign intention that in 1877 he addressed himself to the task of persuading the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution that Bishop Butler was an untrustworthy guide in that mysterious region which lies between Philosophy and Religion.  For this task, as Mr. Gladstone justly observed:  he “was placed, by his own peculiar opinions, in a position far from auspicious with respect to