156 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [isl 



and began to justify itself to itself much more than to the 

 world without by constantly reiterating the evidences 

 of Christianity. For what clearer proof could be given 

 that the Church had forgotten itself, had come to look 

 upon Christianity as only a doctrine, not a life, or as a 

 body of past history, not as the kernel of all history, and 

 so as something quite external to be accepted on the 

 authority of the miraculousness of its form, not to be 

 fed on and assimilated in virtue of the divineness of its 

 substance ? 



It is no accident that the age of the supremacy of 

 &quot; The Christian Evidences &quot; is also the age of moderatism 

 in which the truest spiritual life, the deepest Christian 

 thought, is forced to be unchurchly, and therefore too 

 often sinks into sectarianism and heterodoxy. 



But not only is the apologetic way of starting in 

 theology perverse and unchurchly it is also inconsistent 

 with itself. For to show that Christianity bears in its 

 outer form previous to any realisation of its substance 

 infallible marks of divine authority is only possible when 

 it is agreed what manner of marks these must be. On 

 this point, it is clear, no appeal to natural reason can 

 suffice. The Deist of the old type saw the sure marks 

 of deception in the very miracles which to his opponent 

 proved Christianity to be from God. In short, the 

 Christian even in his so-called natural theology reasons 

 from a conception of God a consciousness of the relation 

 of God to man which is not merely natural because 

 not shared by honest antagonists, which is in a word 

 specifically Christian, though not supporting itself by an 

 appeal to the authority of Scripture. The sure proof 

 that natural theology is not the scientific basis of re 

 vealed theology lies in the fact, which the history of the 

 Deistic controversy made abundantly plain, that natural 

 theology, as a knowledge of God true as far as it goes, is, 

 apart from Christianity, an absolute fiction. 



If now it appears that even the doctrines which were 



