the Rev. W. Russell Bowie, D.D.,
of St. Paul's Church, Richmond, Va., who kindly read over the
manuscript.

CONTENTS

Introduction--Some Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century Which
Have Affected Christian Beliefs 1

Chapter 1. Religion 23

Chapter 2. The Bible 49

Chapter 3. Jesus Christ 78

Chapter 4. God 118

Chapter 5. The Cross 140

Chapter 6. The New Life--Individual and Social 160

Chapter 7. The Church 181

Chapter 8. The Christian Life Everlasting 205

SOME CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS

INTRODUCTION

SOME MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WHICH HAVE AFFECTED
CHRISTIAN BELIEFS

When King Solomon's Temple was a-building, we are told that the stone
was made ready at the quarry, "and there was neither hammer nor axe nor
any tool of iron heard in the house." The structures of intellectual
beliefs which Christians have reared in the various centuries to house
their religious faith have been built, for the most part, out of
materials they found already prepared by other movements of the human
mind. It has been so in our own day, and a brief glance at some of the
quarries and the blocks they have yielded may help us to understand the
construction of the forms of Christian convictions as they appear in
many minds. Some of the quarries named have been worked for more than a
century; but they were rich to begin with, and they have not yet been
exhausted. Some will not seem distinctive veins of rock, but new
openings into the old bed. Many blocks in their present form cannot be
certainly assigned to a specific quarry; they no longer bear an
identifying mark. Nor can we hope to mention more than a very few of the
principal sources whence the materials have been taken. The plan of the
temple and the arrangement of the stones are the work of the Spirit of
the Christian Faith, which always erects a dwelling of its own out of
the thought of each age.

_Romanticism_ has been one rich source of material. This literary
movement that swept over Germany, Britain, France and Scandinavia at the
opening of the Nineteenth Century, itself influenced to some degree by
the religious revival of the German Pietists and the English
Evangelicals, was a release of the emotions, and ga