e when the German mind was
creating the science of historical criticism.

Thus, though each branch of science,--physical, metaphysical, and
critical,--offers grounds of hope to the labourer, there is no reason to
fear that sceptical difficulties will be generated by any of them,
distinct in kind from those which now exist. And a similar line of
argument will suggest, that there is little reason to hope, on the other
hand, for enlargement of the grounds of the evidence of natural and
revealed religion. If this be the case, the materials are accordingly
supplied, from which thoughtful students must make up their minds finally
on the questions at issue. Indeed the survey of modern thought which we
have already made, will have shown that men are already taking their place
in hostile array; and will have revealed differences so fundamental in
reference to religion, on subjects where no further evidence can be
offered, that there can be little reason to hope for the alteration of the
state of parties to the end of time. Never was there an age wherein
Christianity had so real, so potent an effect as the present; yet never
was there one which, while so largely moulded by it, was so really hostile
to it.(1026) It is the hostility, not of opposition which regards
Christianity as false, but of the criticism which views it as obsolete,
and considers it to be one phase of the world's religious thought, the
eternal truths of which may be assimilated without the historic and
dogmatic basis under which its originators conceived it. Though the
special forms of doubt that now exist derive their lineage, philosophical
and historical, from the modern German and French sources, which we have
studied in the last two lectures; yet it is in an older age of European
history that the nearest general parallel to the present state of feeling
may perhaps be found; and there is a deep truth in the analogy which the
learned and excellent critic,(1027) who has recently made a special study
of the struggle of classical heathenism against Christianity, has pointed
out, between the feeling of philosophers in the second and third centuries
of the Christian era and in the present time.

Amid very wide differences in tone and learning, there is this fundamental
agreement between the age which was enriched with the accumulated learning
of the old civilization, and the present, enriched with that of the new.
There is the same spirit of naturalism; the same in