fruitful parent
of intellectual difficulties.

Such an appeal to the affections is really outside the province of
theological science and belongs rather to the rhetorician, the poet, or
the prophet. Yet it was a work at all times needful for the extension
and maintenance of the faith, in even a greater degree than the more
dispensable preparation of the intellect. For the great multitude of men
who are innocent of any really independent thought, who professedly or
unconsciously take all their beliefs from some individual or society,
there is really no need of scientific apologetic--the sole need being to
win or maintain their confidence, their loyalty, their reverence, in
regard to some teacher or leader, to Christ or the Church.

It was only towards the close of last century when scepticism was
beginning to reach the very root from which the Christian apologetic
sprang, and the former philosophic methods had themselves fallen in
disrepute, that the necessity of accommodating the remedy to the disease
began to be recognized here and there, and of framing an argument that
would appeal to the perverse and erratic mind of the day, rather than to
an abstract and perfectly normal mind, which, if it existed, would "need
no repentance." That a given medicine is the best, avails nothing if it
be not also one which the patient is willing to take. If a man has
closed his teeth against everything that savours of scholasticism, we
must either abandon him or else see if there be any among the methods he
will submit to, which may in any wise serve our purpose. And, indeed,
among the jangle of philosophies there is surely in all something that
is a common heritage of the human mind, a unity which a little skill can
detect lurking under that diversity of form which unfortunately it is
the delight of most men to emphasize. To suppose that Christianity is
pledged to more than this common substratum which none deny, except
through verbal confusion, that there is no road to faith but through
what is peculiar to scholasticism, or that my first step in converting a
man to Christ must be to convert him to Aristotle, is about as
intelligent as to suppose that because the Church has adopted Latin as
her official language she means to discredit every other.

It was then with a view of meeting the exigencies of the world as it is,
not as it might or ought to have been, that such a work as the _Genie du
Christianisme_ strove to find an apologeti