also to his heavenly Father. From the first an enthusiastic reverence
for its Founder has been an essential part of the Christian Religion
amid all the variety of the phases which it has assumed. The doctrine
of the Christian Church was in its origin an attempt to express in the
philosophical language of the time its sense of this supreme value of
Christ for the religious and moral life of man. As to the historical
success and the present usefulness of these attempts, I shall have a
word to say next time. Meanwhile, I would leave with you this one
thought. The claim of Christianity to be the supreme, the universal,
in a sense the final Religion, must rest mainly, in the last resort,
upon the appeal which Christ and his Religion make to the moral and
religious consciousness of the present.

LITERATURE

See the works mentioned at the end of the next Lecture, to which, as
dealing more specially with the subject of Lecture v., may be added
Professor Sanday's _Inspiration_, and Professor Wendt's _Revelation and
Christianity_.

[1] Throughout his writings, but pre-eminently in the _Theoetetus_.

[2] If it be said that Judaism or any other Religion does now teach
these truths as fully as Christianity, this may possibly apply to the
creed of individual members of these Religions, but it can hardly be
claimed for the historical Religions themselves. I should certainly be
prepared to contend that even such individuals lose something by not
placing in the centre of their Religion the personality of him by whom
they were first taught, and the communities which have been the great
transmitters of them. But in this course of lectures I am chiefly
concerned with giving reasons why Christians should remain Christians,
rather than with giving reasons why others who are not so should become
Christians.

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LECTURE VI

CHRISTIANITY

In my last lecture I tried to effect a transition from the idea of
religious truth as something believed by the individual, and accepted
by him on the evidence of his own Reason and Conscience to the idea of
a Religion considered as a body of religious truth handed down by
tradition in an organized society. The higher Religions--those which
have passed beyond the stage of merely tribal or national Religion--are
based upon the idea that religious truth of enduring value has been
from time to time revealed to particular persons, the Founders or
Apostles or Reformers of such rel