in fact, where the benefit resulting has been owing to the
overruling Providence which brings good out of evil, rather than to any
direct intention on the part of those who have exercised it. Examples are
to be found in those epochs, when some sudden outburst of knowledge
compelled a reconsideration of old truths by the light of new discoveries.
The awakening of the mind in the middle age, the Renaissance, the advance
of modern science, the birth of literary criticism, are instances of such
moments, wherein free inquiry has been a necessity forced on the mind by
outward circumstances, not self-prompted. This attitude of inquiry, this
exercise of a provisional doubt, was not, like that described, called
forth merely by the circumstance that religion had received additions from
error, but must have arisen even if the faith once delivered had been
preserved uncorrupted. For religion being a fixed truth, while truth in
other departments is progressive, it would have been impossible to avoid
the necessity of comparison of it with them from time to time, in those
spheres where it intersected the field occupied by them.

Such examples, indeed, are not restricted to Christian history, but are
general facts of the history of the human mind. The fifth century B.C. was
such an epoch in Greece;(1020) when various causes, social and
intellectual, created a sudden awakening of the human mind to reconsider
its old beliefs, and find a home for the new views of nature and of the
world which were opening. The free thought of the Sophists was the
scepticism of doubt, of distrust; the proposal to surrender, to destroy
the old: the free thought of Socrates was the scepticism of inquiry, the
attempt to reconsider first principles, to rebuild truth anew. In all such
moments, investigation is indirectly the means of stimulating knowledge.
The history of the progress of it, in reference to the difficulties which
have beset the Christian church, shows us that the epochs of doubt have
not generally been produced by unbelief taking the initiative in attacking
old truths without some fresh stimulus, and repeating old objections so as
to exhibit perpetually recurring cycles of unbelief. We have rather seen
that doubt is reawakened by the introduction of new forms of knowledge;
and though old doubts recur, yet that they come arrayed in a new garb,
suggested by different motives, deduced from fresh premises, and
accompanied by doubts of a new kind befo