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 naive 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 end to this state of things.  He made the real evidence for religion that of the moral sense, of the nonscience and hearts of men themselves.  The real ground of religious conviction is the religious experience.  He thus set free both science and religion from an embarrassment under which both laboured, and by which both had been injured.

Kant parted company with the empirical philosophy which had held that all knowledge arises from without, comes from experienced sensations, is essentially perception.  This theory had not been able to explain the fact that human experience always conforms to certain laws.  On the other hand, the philosophy of so-called innate ideas had sought to derive all knowledge from the constitution of the mind itself.  It left out of consideration the dependence of the mind upon experience.  It tended to confound the creations of its own speculation with reality, or rather, to claim correspondence with fact for statements which had no warrant in experience.  There was no limit to which this speculative process might not be pushed.  By this process the medieval theologians, with all gravity, propounded the most absurd speculations concerning nature.  By this process men made the most astonishing declarations upon the basis, as they supposed, of revelation.  They made allegations concerning history and the religious experience which the most rudimentary knowledge of history or reflection upon consciousness proved to be quite contrary to fact.