6 INTRODUCTORY. 



seemed to possess too little real faith in the eternal 

 truth of the principles of religion, to admit that 

 their creeds were but human formularies, which, 

 just because they contained divine truth, could only 

 be transitory and impermanent receptacles of the 

 changeless, i.e., could be true only in idea and not 

 in formula. And so, instead of perceiving that in- 

 spiration is as necessary to the successive interpre- 

 tations of divine truth as to its original statement, 

 and that hence it required to be constantly re- 

 modelled and re-stated, in order to take in the new 

 aspects of truth which the progress of the world re- 

 vealed, they have clung to the lifeless letter of their 

 worn-out creeds, until they have driven to despair 

 all who believed that truth was one and indivisible, 

 and that if there was, as alleged, an irreconcilable 

 conflict between faith and. reason, this must be due 

 to the errors of a reason which so unreasonably in- 

 terpreted the demands of faith. 



Philosophers, again, have been too prone to de- 

 clare insoluble problems which they had not yet the 

 data to solve, too much enslaved to a false method 

 to utilize the fresh data offered them by the dis- 

 coveries of science, too ready to profess that they 

 possessed answers where they had none, and could 

 only conceal an arid vacuity of hopeless negation 

 in endless swathings of ambitious and ambiguous 

 phrases. The disgust at such deceptions could not 

 but generate estrangement from philosophy in men's 

 minds, and deliver them over to unauthorized guides, 

 who boldly proclaimed that physical science alone 

 could answer the questions philosophy had aban- 

 doned. But if philosophy was futile, reflection too 

 soon showed that science was helpless and hopeless 

 It depended too obviously upon unproved assumpt 



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