popular speech is evidence of this fact.  To many minds it appeared as if one could not be an adherent both of reason and of faith.  That was a contradiction which Kant, first of all in his own experience, and then through his system of thought, did much to transcend.  The deliverance which he wrought has been compared to the deliverance which Luther in his time achieved for those who had been in bondage to scholasticism in the Roman Church.  Although Kant has been dead a hundred years, both the defence of religion and the assertion of the right of reason are still, with many, on the ancient lines.  There is no such strife between rationality and belief as has been supposed.  But the confidence of that fact is still far from being shared by all Christians at the beginning of the twentieth century.  The course in reinterpretation and readjustment of Christianity, which that calm conviction would imply, is still far from being the one taken by all of those who bear the Christian name.  If it is permissible in the writing of a book like this to have an aim besides that of the most objective delineation, the author may perhaps be permitted to say that he writes with the earnest hope that in some measure he may contribute also to the establishment of an understanding upon which so much both for the Church and the world depends.

We should say a word at this point as to the general relation of religion and philosophy.  We realise the evil which Kant first in clearness pointed out.  It was the evil of an apprehension which made the study of religion a department of metaphysics.  The tendency of that apprehension was to do but scant justice to the historical content of Christianity.  Religion is an historical phenomenon.  Especially is this true of Christianity.  It is a fact, or rather, a vast complex of facts.  It is a positive religion.  It is connected with personalities, above all with one transcendent personality, that of Jesus.  It sprang out of another religion which had already emerged into the light of world-history.  It has been associated for two thousand years with portions of the race which have made achievements in culture and left record of those achievements.  It is the function of speculation to interpret this phenomenon.  When speculation is tempted to spin by its own processes something which it would set beside this historic magnitude or put in place of it, and still call that Christianity, we must disallow the claim.  It was the licence of its speculative endeavour, and the identification of these endeavours with Christianity, which finally discredited Hegelianism with religious men.  Nor can it be denied that theologians themselves have been sinners in this respect.  The disposition to regard Christianity as a revealed and divinely authoritative metaphysic began early and continued long.  When the theologians also set out to interpret Christianity and end in offering us a substitute, which, if it were acknowledged as absolute truth, would do away with Christianity as historic fact, as little can we allow the claim.