PREFACE AM aware that all advocacy of Revealed Truth, which does not proceed from the pen of a a layman, will in some quarters, at least, be held to be but prejudiced and valueless. I have accordingly made greater use throughout this work of the statements and testimony of adversaries than of friends to the cause of Christianity. To these I have endeavoured to do justice, "setting down nought in malice;" but rather striving to make my own the honest professions of an honoured name in our Church; whose words, and not my own, I desire may linger in the mind of the reader of these pages. "No man may justly blame me for honour 66 66 ing my spiritual mother, the Church of Eng land, in whose womb I was conceived, at whose "breasts I was nourished, and in whose bosom I 66 hope to die. Bees, by the instinct of nature, do "love their hives, and birds their nests. But, "God is my witness, that according to my utter 66 66 "most talent and poor understanding, I have en"deavoured to set down the naked Truth impartially, without either favour or prejudice, the "two capital enemies of right judgment. The one "of which, like a false mirrour, doth represent things fairer and straighter than they are; the other, like the tongue infected with choler, makes "the sweetest meats to taste bitter. My desire "hath been to have Truth for my chiefest friend, "and no enemy but error."-Bramhall (Works, II. 21). 66 I should be ungrateful, were I not here to acknowledge my obligations to the assistance and sympathy of many old and valued friends, more especially to the Rev. William Ince, Sub-Rector and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford; and to Dr. George Rolleston, Fellow of Merton College, and Linacre Professor of Physiology in the University of Oxford. IN INTRODUCTION 1 N the interval between the delivery of these Lectures and their publication a volume has appeared from the pen of the veteran, D. F. Strauss, which has already run through four editions. No work could better illustrate the double line of attack to which Christian belief is at this time exposed. Commencing with the inquiry,-" Are we still Christians?" and taking the Apostles' Creed as his standard of orthodoxy,' the writer seeks to show in detail not only the unreality of a belief in the Holy Spirit; not only the unhistorical character of all that is Divine in the Person and Life of Jesus Christ; but further, the needlessness and logical imperfection of the very idea of a Creator of the Universe.3 That Universe, he holds, is itself both the term of human inquiry and the basis of all reality. In it and in its manifold developments must be sought the ground of all 1 Der alte und der neue Glaube. Vierte Auflage. Bonn, 1873. 2 See §§ 5-13. 3 See more particularly §§ 5, 36, 38. It was a saying of Kant, "Give me Matter; and I will show you how a world might from it arise." |