nce at what is shallow and profane, mixed, it may be, sometimes,
with an equally passing admiration for what is witty and brilliant.
Even in M. Renan's view, Voltaire has done his work, and is out of
date. Those who now attack Christianity have to attack it under the
disadvantage of the preliminary admission that its essential and
distinguishing elements are, on the whole, in harmony and not in
discordance with the best conceptions of human duty and life, and that
its course and progress have been, at any rate, concurrent with all
that is best and most hopeful in human history. First allowing that as
a fact it contains in it things than which we cannot imagine anything
better, and without which we should never have reached to where we are,
they then have to dispute its divine claims. No man could write
persuasively on religion now, _against_ it any more than _for_ it, who
did not show that he was fully penetrated not only with its august and
beneficent aspect, but with the essential and everlasting truths which,
in however imperfect shapes, or whencesoever derived, are embodied in
it and are ministered by it to society.

That Christianity is, as a matter of fact, a successful and a living
religion, in a degree absolutely without parallel in any other
religion, is the point from which its assailants have now to start.
They have also to take account of the circumstance, to the recognition
of which the whole course of modern thought and inquiry has brought us,
that it has been successful, not by virtue merely of any outward and
accidental favouring circumstances, but of its intrinsic power and of
principles which are inseparable from its substance. This being the
condition of the question, those who deny its claim to a direct Divine
origin have to frame their theory of it so as to account, on principles
supposed to be common to it and other religions, not merely for its
rise and its conquests, but for those broad and startling differences
which separate it, in character and in effects, from all other known
religions. They have to show how that which is instinct with
never-dying truth sprang out of what was false and mistaken, if not
corrupt; how that which alone has revealed God to man's conscience had
no other origin than what in other instances has led men through
enthusiasm and imposture to a barren or a mischievous superstition.

Such an attempt is the work before us--a work destined, probably, both
from its ability a