PREFACE.

This book was not made; it has grown.

When three years ago I left the pulpit to engage in literary work and took my seat among the laity in the pews, I found that many ecclesiastical and religious subjects presented a different aspect from that which they had presented when I saw them from the pulpit.  I commenced in the Christian Union, in a series of “Letters from a Layman,” to discuss from my new point of view some questions which are generally discussed from the clerical point of view alone.  The letters were kindly received by the public.  To some of the characters introduced I became personally attached.  And the series of letters, commenced with the expectation that they might last through six or eight weeks, extended over a period of more than a year and a half—­might perhaps have extended to the present it other duties had not usurped my time and thoughts.

This was the beginning.

But after a time thoughts and characters which presented themselves in isolated forms, and so were photographed for the columns of the newspaper, began to gather in groups.  The single threads that had been spun for the weekly issue, wove themselves together in my imagination into the pattern of a simple story, true as to every substantial fact, yet fictitious in all its dress and form.  And so out of Letters of Layman grew, I myself hardly know how, this simple story of a layman’s life in a country parish.

I cannot dismiss this book from my table without adding that I am conscious that the deepest problem it discusses is but barely touched upon.  This has obtruded itself upon the pattern in the weaving.  It was intended for a single thread; but it has given color and character to all the rest.  How shall Christian faith meet the current rationalism of the day?  Not by argument; this is the thought I hope may be taught, or at least suggested, by the story of Mr. Gear’s experience,—­and it is a true not a fictitious story, except as all here is fictitious, i.e. in the external dress in which it is clothed.  The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest.  Grant this, as too often our controversial theology does grant it, and the battle is yielded before it is begun.  Whether that rationalism leads to orthodox or heterodox conclusions, whether it issues in a Westminster Assembly’s Confession of faith or a Positivist Primer is a matter of secondary importance.  Religion is not a conclusion of the reason.  The reason is not the lord of the spiritual domain.  There is a world which it never sees and with which it is wholly incompetent to deal.  And Christian faith wins its victories only when by its own—­heart life it gives some glimpse of this hidden world and sends the rationalist, Columbus-like, on an unknown sea to search for this unknown continent.