Introductory Statement THE author of these Chapters desires to remain anonymous, having no purpose to serve by their publication beyond a desire to be helpful to earnest seekers after truth who find themselves at variance with existing religious organisations. A layman in his status, he is willing, for the better comprehension of what he has written, to allow the following information to be prefixed. He is by profession a scientific man and a Fellow of more than one of the learned Societies. Born into a family of simpleminded, intensely devout, educated evangelical Christians, he was attracted for a time to Anglican worship as practised with dignity and restraint in the cathedrals of England. Then, driven towards agnosticism by the pretensions of clerics and their bigotry towards science, but never ceasing either from frequenting public worship or from the study of the Scriptures and other religious writings, the author has come slowly, and with twenty years of heart-searching to the convictions here set down. With one completed There has The various Chapters have been written at different times during the last ten years. exception (Chapter XXI.), they were before the outbreak of the Great War. been no attempt to weave them into an organic fabric. Doubtless the objection will be raised that the book does not present a consistent whole, but is xi made up of fragments: that there is no connected system, no unifying theological basis. This is precisely so; the Chapters are merely aperçus, and do not claim to be other. A grievous error for centuries past has been that the theologians-wellintentioned, learned, and pious men-have tried to weave a consistent whole out of imperfect aperçus, some historical, some traditional, some speculative; and, having framed a system of logical consistency on this defective basis, forthwith have branded as heresy any view of truth that did not fit in with their system. The Fathers, the Councils, the Doctors, the Scholastics, the Reformers, have all had their day. The Fathers seized the salient points, which the Councils and the Doctors formulated and welded together. The Scholastics sought to fortify the system with irresistible logic, and indeed so successfully that the Reformers, while breaking away politically, remained more than ever the slaves of abstract theology. The logic of the Scholastics came in, in fact, too soon, before men had realised how imperfect were the available records of religious history, and how much of that which had passed for historic fact was only sacred folk-lore. Hence it is that the logical consistency of abstract theology is its greatest condemnation. It bars out the progressive revelations of truth, and imposes on the twentieth century notions which were evolved in the third and fourth. Christianity is thus to-day constrained in the swaddling bands of its childhood. As to the objection that the present work possesses no unifying theological basis, let it be plainly realised, once for all, that theology is not the basis of religion; it is, on the contrary, its product; or, rather, it is |