This movement has supported with abundant evidence the insight of the philosophers as to the nature of revelation.  It has shown that that which we actually have in the Scriptures is just that which Kant, with his reverence for the freedom of the human mind, had indicated that we must have, if revelation is to be believed in at all.  With this changed view has come an altered attitude toward many statements which devout men had held that they must accept as true, because these were found in Scripture.  With this changed view the whole history, whether of the Jewish people or of Jesus and the origins of the Christian Church, has been set in a new light.

In the third place, we shall have to deal with the influence of the sciences of nature and of society, as these have been developed throughout the whole course of the nineteenth century.  If one must have a date for an outstanding event in this portion of the history, perhaps that of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, 1859, would serve as well as any other.  The principles of these sciences have come to underlie in a great measure all the reflection of cultivated men in our time.  In amazing degree they have percolated, through elementary instruction, through popular literature, and through the newspapers, to the masses of mankind.  They are recognised as the basis of a triumphant material civilisation, which has made everything pertaining to the inner and spiritual life seem remote.  Through the social sciences there has come an impulse to the transfer of emphasis from the individual to society, the disposition to see everything in its social bearing, to do everything in the light of its social antecedents and of its social consequences.  Here again we have to note the profoundest influence upon religious conceptions.  The very notion connected with the words redemption and salvation appears to have been changed.

In the case of each of these particular movements the church, as the organ of Christianity, has passed through a period of antagonism to these influences, of fear of their consequences, of resistance to their progress.  In large portions of the church at the present moment the protest is renewed.  The substance of these modern teachings, which yet seem to be the very warp and woof of the intellectual life of the modern man, is repudiated and denounced.  It is held to imperil the salvation of the soul.  It is pronounced impossible of combination with belief in a divinely revealed truth concerning the universe and a saving faith for men.  In other churches, outside the churches, the forms in which men hold their Christianity have been in large measure adjusted to the results of these great movements of thought.  They have, as these men themselves believe, been immensely strengthened and made sure by those very influences which were once considered dangerous.