Drummond's Book. xxiii 



present work is to set before the world my newer 

 thoughts on the same class of subjects. 



The best-known contribution to religious philo- 

 sophy that has appeared since the publication of my 

 former work, is Professor Drummond's Natural Law 

 in the Spiritual World : and a considerable part of the 

 present work is occupied with an examination of its 

 theories. 1 I need not here anticipate what is treated 

 of in the following chapters, but I have to remark 

 with wonder on the vast change which must have come, 

 unnoticed, over the religious mind of England and 

 the entire English-speaking people, before Professor 

 Drummond's work could have been received as an 

 orthodox book. I do not refer to his acceptance of 

 those doctrines of Evolution which are currently 

 associated with the name of Darwin; the religious 

 mind was certain to be reconciled to them, as it had 

 already been to the discoveries of astronomy and of 

 geology ; and that it should be so is purely reason 

 for thankfulness. I speak of a far different change. 



There is not one of Drummond's characteristic 

 passages which might not have been written by a 

 denier of the characteristic doctrines of Apostolic and 

 Nicene Christianity ; which, as I understand them, 

 are the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and 

 the Atonement; the doctrine that there is an 

 Eternal, uncreated, Son of God, who is God, united 

 with the Father and the Holy Spirit; who took 



1 It is, however, by merely accidental coincidence that his 

 book and the present one contain each eleven chapters. 



