bestowment,
something achieved apart from us, or, if one may so say, some alteration
of ourselves upon other than moral and spiritual terms. The conception
of the person Christ shows the same uncertainty. Or rather, with a given
view of the nature of religion and salvation, the corresponding view of
Christ is certain. In the age-long and world-wide contest over the
trinitarian formula, with all that is saddening in the struggle and all
that was misleading in the issue, it is because we see men struggling to
come into the clear as to these two meanings of religion, that the
contest has such absorbing interest. Men have been right in declining to
call that religion in which a man saves himself. They have been wrong in
esteeming that they were then only saved of God or Christ when they were
saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened
when one no longer holds that God and men are mutually exclusive
conceptions. It is God working within us who saves, the God who in Jesus
worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the world has
never seen.

CHAPTER V

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

By the middle of the nineteenth century the empirical sciences had
undergone vast expansion in the study of detail and in the discovery of
principles. Men felt the necessity of some adequate discussion of the
relation of these sciences one to another and of their unity. There was
need of the organisation of the mass of knowledge, largely new and ever
increasing, which the sciences furnished. It lay in the logic of the
case that some of these attempts should advance the bold claim to deal
with all knowledge whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a
whole. Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages,
had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great metaphysical
systems had offered theories of the universe as a whole. Both had
professed to include all facts. Notoriously both theology and
metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate fashion with the material
world, in the study of which the sciences were now achieving great
results. Indeed, the methods current and authoritative with theologians
and metaphysicians had actually prevented study of the physical
universe. Both of these had invaded areas of fact to which their methods
had no application and uttered dicta which had no relation to truth. The
very life of the sciences depended upon de