hich followed the
popularization of the great scientific generalizations, nor ought it to
blind us to the fact that much of this confusion still persists.
Christian theism was more sharply challenged by materialism and
agnosticism than by a frankly confessed atheism. Materialism was the
more aggressive; it built up its own great system, posited matter and
force as the ultimate realities, and then showed to its own satisfaction
how everything that is is just the result of their action and
interaction. Nor did materialism pause upon the threshold of the soul
itself. Consciousness, so conceived, was a by-product of the higher
organization of matter, and we ourselves a spray flung up out of the
infinite ocean of being to sparkle for a moment in the light and then
fall back again into the depths out of which we had been borne.

Those who so defined us made us bond-servants of matter and force from
birth to death though they drew back a little from the consequences of
their own creeds and sought to save a place for moral freedom and
responsibility and a defensible altruism. It is doubtful if they
succeeded. Materialism affected greatly the practical conduct of life.
It offered its own characteristic values; possession and pleasure became
inevitably enough the end of action, and action itself, directed toward
such ends, became the main business of life. Science offered so
fascinating a field for thought as to absorb the general intellectual
energy of the generation under the spell of it; the practical
application of science to mechanism and industry with the consequent
increase in luxury and convenience, absorbed the force of practical men.

It naturally went hard with religion in a world so preoccupied. Its
foundations were assailed, its premises questioned, its conclusions
denied, its interests challenged. The fact that religion came through it
at all is a testimony both to the unconquerable force of faith and the
unquenchable need of the soul for something greater than the scientific
gospel revealed or the achievements of science supplied.

_The Reaction of Biblical Criticism Upon Faith_

The first front along which the older faith met the impact of new forces
was scientific; the second drive was at a more narrow but, as far as
religion goes, an even more strategic front. The Bible had to submit to
those processes of inquiry and criticism which had so greatly altered
the scientific outlook. The Old and New Testaments,