and external communication by God to man of truths undiscoverable
by human reason. The divine origin of this communication is proved
by miracles. Miracles are proved by the record of Scripture,
which, in its turn, is attested by the history of the Canon.--This
is certainly the kind of theory which was in favour at the end of
the last century, and found expression in works like Paley's
Evidences. It belongs to a time of vigorous and clear but
mechanical and narrow culture, when the philosophy of religion was
made up of abrupt and violent contrasts; when Christianity
(including under that name the Old Testament as well as the New)
was thought to be simply true and all other religions simply
false; when the revelation of divine truth was thought to be as
sudden and complete as the act of creation; and when the presence
of any local and temporary elements in the Christian documents or
society was ignored.

The world has undergone a great change since then. A new and far-
reaching philosophy is gradually displacing the old. The Christian
sees that evolution is as much a law of religion as of nature. The
Ethnic, or non-Christian, religions are no longer treated as
outside the pale of the Divine government. Each falls into its
place as part of a vast divinely appointed scheme, of the character
of which we are beginning to have some faint glimmerings. Other
religions are seen to be correlated to Christianity much as the
other tentative efforts of nature are correlated to man. A divine
operation, and what from our limited human point of view we should
call a _special_ divine operation, is not excluded but rather implied
in the physical process by which man has been planted on the earth,
and it is still more evidently implied in the corresponding process
of his spiritual enlightenment. The deeper and more comprehensive