Old Faiths In New Light

1879 - PREFACE - JOHN BUSKIN has said that for the words, good and bad, we might allnost substitute the words, malrers and destroyers. While writing this book, I have seen worknlen tearing clovn portions of the walls of a church whose beauty had vanished, like a dream, in the flaines of an hour but they tore down only so far as was necessary, in ordel to find firm points from which to hild up again the cruillbling arches. I have had thus, in a daily figure, before me the true object of any destructive criticism of old faiths. lve ai8e justified in pulling down as me cherish the purpose of building up. If to any my vorlr shall seem at points to unsettle traditional beliefs hich have beconle sacred in their eyes, I vould ask them to read on, and wait to see ihetlier, upon the old foundations, a better home for our religious faiths is not to be built up by t, he Christian scholarship of to-day. I do not, as a rule, find dint I want ill the books where I ilatutally seek it so a friend writes to me, whose words I may per- haps be permitted to quote, a3 one sign among others of the failure of many cultivated and sincere minds to find what their faith craves in the standard treatises or stereotyped meth- ods of religious thought. Modern research has gathered many truths which the people need for n living faith, but which lie scattered through nuulerous articles in reviews, or are Iiicldeo in philosophical phraseology, or remain inaccessible to most readers in voluminous German books. It has been my aim to meet what I believe to be, z growing need of intelli- gent people, by gathering materials of faith which have been quarried by many specialists in their own departments of biblical study orscientific research, but which, to a large extent, have been left by then1 in a disconnected and fragmentary state and by eudeavoring to put these esults of recent scholarship together, according to one leadillg idea, in a modern construction of old faiths. The science by vlvllich the works of the specialists are to he arrnilged in one order and harmony, is n science which needs now-a-days to be advanced and honored. Building firmly, on the one hand, upon the facts of nature and history, and, on the other, upon the illoral and reli- gious experience of -the soul, its high office and endeavor is to spring from either side the arch which shall at last bring together the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, in one continuous and rounded whole of knowledge. The accomplishment of that task-the ultimate philosophy-seems in- deed beyond the pow.er of human reason, but we may at least pursue it as an ideal. My object, then, has been to make more popularly knolvn results already gained in this direction by the labors of the learned, as well as to offer sollle contribution to this growing science of the sciences. I would read the old faiths, which I still believe, in the light of modern thought to which I cannot be blind. 1 wonld help others, if possible, walk still in the old ways which prophets and apostles have trod, but in the light of to-clay. The modern idea which seems to reopen old questions of faith, and the spirit in which re- newed religious inquiries should be prosecuted, form the subject of the opening chapter...