had the immediate assurance of the heart that God was on his side. And
what is that but a judgment of the practical reason, the response of the
heart in man to the spiritual universe? It is given in experience. It is
not mediated by argument. It cannot be destroyed by syllogism. It needs
no confirmation from science. It is capable of combination with any of
the changing interpretations which science may put upon the outward
universe. The Reformation had, however, not held fast to its great
truth. It had gone back to the old scholastic position. It had rested
faith in an essentially rationalistic manner upon supposed facts in
nature and alleged events of history in connection with the revelation.
It had thus jeopardised the whole content of faith, should these
supposed facts of nature or events in history be at any time disproved.
Men had made faith to rest upon statements of Scripture, alleging such
and such acts and events. They did not recognise these as the naïve and
childlike assumptions concerning nature and history which the authors of
Scripture would naturally have. When, therefore, these statements began
with the progress of the sciences to be disproved, the defenders of the
faith presented always the feeble spectacle of being driven from one
form of evidence to another, as the old were in turn destroyed. The
assumption was rife at the end of the eighteenth century that
Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable
men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men
infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the
hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the
ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly
devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They
felt that there is an inexpugnable truth of religion. Still that was
merely an intuition of their hearts. They were right. But they were
unable to prove that they were right, or even to get a hearing with many
of the cultivated of their age. To Kant we owe the debt, that he put an