PREFACE. XIX 



definite time against the skeptics, allowing them also their own time 

 for doubting. If God permits them leisure, why should we feel hound 

 to hurry them ? But then they must be equally patient with us. 



The same also is the justification of causes and missions. For 

 these are to action what theories and hypotheses are to science. 

 And every man is not only justified, but bound, to plead his reli- 

 gion; and if it contains that force, to send it forth over the world. 

 He is trying this scientific problem on the practical side. 



The same again is a criticism upon criticism. For in a working 

 science, we do not desire to know what a priori probabilities or im- 

 probabilities may attach to our hypothesis, excepting in so far as 

 they determine our choice of it at first; after this we have simply to 

 apply it, and to test it in all convenient ways. There is only one 

 objection which not only slays but buries principles; which is, that 

 they break down in fair practice, and are disowned by the nature of 

 things : other objections are impertinences, which may, or may not, 

 be true. For this reason, the modern criticisms upon Scripture 

 have nothing to do with the question : whether miracles are likely 

 or unlikely, possible or impossible; whether God would have dic- 

 tated a Book which contradicts itself; whether the attribution 

 of human passions to Deity is consistent; whether Christ as God 

 could have died upon the cross ; whether the Gospels were written 

 in the first century or the third ; whether Christendom be not a 

 wide mistake of which Chapmandom is the correction : — all these 

 are matters which we postpone, from our extreme inability to do 

 two things at once. If it be found that Christianity is the theory of 

 the world; that the Divine Man is Lord of the sciences; that the 

 biblical Revelation is the truth of truths, which opens a Shekinah 

 of light to the later races more than to the first ; that the Gospel alone 

 can rule the nations with a rod of iron; then the finding of this from 

 age to age will sufficiently conserve the text against the stings of the 

 Straussian school. The more so, because if their principle of criticism 

 first, and faith afterwards, were admitted, the result must be athe- 

 istic confusion. For if, on account of what contradicts our notions 

 of convenience in Scripture, the Bible be untrue, then for the same 

 reason, nature, being full of contradictory essences, tigers and lambs, 

 men and vermin, is no work of God ; but a single flea is enough to 



