But knowledge is a difficult thing to reach in any sphere of study; and men assumed too quickly that they had attained a sound philosophical account of God.  They over-estimated their actual knowledge of God and did not recognize to the full the importance of their new experience.  This may seem ungenerous to men, who gave life and everything for Jesus Christ, and to whose devotion, to whose love of Jesus, we owe it that we know him—­an ungenerous criticism of their brave thinking, and their independence in a hundred ways of old tradition.  Still it is true that the weakness of much of their Christology—­and of ours—­is that it starts with a borrowed notion of God, which really has very little to do with the Christian religion.  To this we shall return; but in the meantime we may note that here as elsewhere preconceptions have to be lightly held by the serious student.  Huxley once wrote to Charles Kingsley:  “Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth that is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God.  Sit down before the fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever end Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing ....  I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.”  So Huxley wrote about the study of natural science.  In this great inquiry of ours we have to learn to be patient enough—­we might say, ignorant enough—­to do the same.  The Early Church had a faith in Greek philosophy, which stood in its way, brave and splendid as its thinkers were.

Our second group is represented roughly by the Hymn Book.  The evidential value of a good hymn book will stand investigation.  Of course a great many hymns are mere copies, and poor copies; but the Hymn Book at its best is a collection of first-hand records of experience.[33] In the story of the Christian Church doxology comes before dogma.  When the writer of the Apocalypse breaks out at the very beginning:  “Unto him that loved us and washed[34] us from our sins in his own blood . . . be glory and dominion for ever and ever” (Rev. 1:5), he is recording a great experience; and his doxology leads him on to an explanation of what he has felt and known—­to an intellectual judgement and an appreciation of Christ.  The order is experience,—­happiness and song—­and then reflection.  The love and the cleansing, and the joy, supply the materials on which thought has to work.  We have always to remember that thought does not strictly supply its own material, however much it may help us to find it.  Philosophy and theology do not give us our facts.  Their function is to group and interpret them.

Our third group of records is given to us by the men of the Reformation.  We have there two great movements side by side.  There is Bible translation, which means, in plain language, a decision or conviction on the part of scholars and thinkers, that the knowledge of the historical Jesus, and of men’s first experiences of him, is of the highest importance in the Christian life.  The whole Reformation follows, or runs parallel with, that movement.  It is essentially a new exploration of what Jesus Christ can do and of what he can be.