When I wrote the preceding treatise [the Candid Examination], I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of human nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in any enquiry touching Theism.  But since then I have seriously studied anthropology (including the science of comparative religions), psychology and metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing that human nature is the most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the theory of Theism.  This I ought to have anticipated on merely a priori grounds, and no doubt should have perceived, had I not been too much immersed in merely physical research.

Moreover, in those days, I took it for granted that Christianity was played out, and never considered it at all as having any rational bearing on the question of Theism.  And, though this was doubtless inexcusable, I still think that the rational standing of Christianity has materially improved since then.  For then it seemed that Christianity was destined to succumb as a rational system before the double assault of Darwin from without and the negative school of criticism from within.  Not only the book of organic nature, but likewise its own sacred documents, seemed to be declaring against it.  But now all this has been very materially changed.  We have all more or less grown to see that Darwinism is like Copernicanism, &c., in this respect[59]; while the outcome of the great textual battle[60] is impartially considered a signal victory for Christianity.  Prior to the new [Biblical] science, there was really no rational basis in thoughtful minds, either for the date of any one of the New Testament books, or, consequently, for the historical truth of any one of the events narrated in them.  Gospels, Acts and Epistles were all alike shrouded in this uncertainty.  Hence the validity of the eighteenth-century scepticism.  But now all this kind of scepticism has been rendered obsolete, and for ever impossible; while the certainty of enough of St. Paul’s writings for the practical purpose of displaying the belief of the apostles has been established, as well as the certainty of the publication of the Synoptics within the first century.  An enormous gain has thus accrued to the objective evidences of Christianity.  It is most important that the expert investigator should be exact, and, as in any other science, the lay public must take on authority as trustworthy only what both sides are agreed upon.  But, as in any other science, experts are apt to lose sight of the importance of the main results agreed upon, in their fighting over lesser points still in dispute.  Now it is enough for us that the Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians, have been agreed upon as genuine, and that the same is true of the Synoptics so far as concerns the main doctrine of Christ Himself.

The extraordinary candour of Christ’s biographers must not be forgotten[61].  Notice also such sentences as ‘but some doubted,’ and (in the account of Pentecost) ‘these men are full of new wine[62].’  Such observations are wonderfully true to human nature; but no less wonderfully opposed to any ‘accretion’ theory.