r, in his preface to his "Life of Christ," quotes
from Niebuhr what he calls "the golden words of one of the greatest
minds of modern times." "The man," says Niebuhr, "who does not hold
Christ's earthly life, with all its miracles, to be as properly and
really historical as any event in the sphere of history, and who
does not receive all points in the Apostles' Creed with the fullest
conviction, I do not conceive to be a Protestant Christian. As for
that Christianity which is such according to the fashion of the
modern philosophers and pantheists,--without a personal God, without
immortality, without an individuality of man, without historical
faith,--it may be a very subtle _philosophy_, but it is no
Christianity at all. Again and again have I said that I know not what
to do with a metaphysical God, and that I will have no other but the
God of the Bible, who is _heart to heart_."]

But before Christianity can be destroyed, it is absolutely necessary
to destroy the evidences of those historical facts on which it rests.
This, as I have said, is no easy task. There are many high walls, many
encircling lines of defence around the old fortress, each and all of
which must be taken, ere the citadel itself can be reached and laid
in ruins. _Now this has never yet been done_. The enemy has made many
attacks during the last eighteen centuries, and on several occasions
the last grand assault which was to decide the long campaign has been
threatened. Every method has been adopted which critical skill could
apply, which the most subtle genius could invent, and the most
untiring perseverance execute; but, in spite of all, "the strong
city," with "salvation for walls and bulwarks," still remains strong
as ever. For, to drop all metaphor, in whatever way we may account for
it, the fact is undeniable, that Christianity, in the form of supreme
love to Jesus Christ as the Son of God, not only survives, but in no
age of the world's past history has it been so strongly rooted in the
convictions and affections of so many men, nor has it ever been given
such promise of filling the whole earth.

Let us suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that by some
process hitherto undiscovered, Christianity, as the religion of
supreme love to this living Person, Jesus Christ, is at last proved to
be a fiction; that the millennium of infidelity has arrived; that the
religion taught by Christ and His apostles has become as dead to the
world as that