as an institution
which God founded and man administers. But it is possible to know this
Church only through the thoughts it thinks, the doctrines it holds, the
characters and the persons it forms, the people who are its saints and
embody its ideals of sanctity, the acts it does, which are its
sacraments, and the laws it follows and enforces, which are its polity,
and the young it educates and the nations it directs and controls.
These are the points to be presented in the volumes which follow, which
are all to be occupied with theology or the knowledge of God and His
ways.

A. M. F.
'O.'

{ix}

PREFACE

These Lectures were delivered in Cambridge during the Lent Term of last
year, on the invitation of a Committee presided over by the Master of
Magdalene, before an audience of from three hundred to four hundred
University men, chiefly Under-graduates. They were not then, and they
are not now, intended for philosophers or even for beginners in the
systematic study of philosophy, but as aids to educated men desirous of
thinking out for themselves a reasonable basis for personal Religion.

The Lectures--especially the first three--deal with questions on which
I have already written. I am indebted to the Publisher of _Contentio
Veritatis_ and the other contributors to that volume for raising no
objection to my publishing Lectures which might possibly be regarded as
in part a condensation, in part an expansion of my Essay on 'The
ultimate basis of Theism.' I have dealt more systematically with many
of the problems here discussed in an Essay upon 'Personality in God and
Man' contributed to _Personal Idealism_ (edited by Henry {x} Sturt) and
in my 'Theory of Good and Evil.' Some of the doctrinal questions
touched on in Lecture VI. have been more fully dealt with in my volume
of University Sermons, _Doctrine and Development_.

Questions which were asked at the time and communications which have
since reached me have made me feel, more even than I did when I was
writing the Lectures, how inadequate is the treatment here given to
many great problems. On some matters much fuller explanation and
discussion will naturally be required to convince persons previously
unfamiliar with Metaphysic: on others it is the more advanced student
of Philosophy who will complain that I have only touched upon the
fringe of a vast subject. But I have felt that I could not seriously
expand any part of the Lectures without chan