Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I ANOTHER ATTEMPT TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM NEEDED—THE METHOD OF REASONING TO BE EMPLOYED We have seen in the first part of this little book that two solutions of the problem of religion have been propounded, and furthermore that while each solution has found wide and long acceptance, yet when examined neither is satisfactory to the critical intelligence. And here we must remark that hitherto one method only of investigation has been pursued in this branch of human enquiry. Men have retired within themselves, have revolved the question in the light of their own minds and the warmth of their own affections, and have sought and have supposed that they have received revelation from on high. Any other mode of prosecuting the enquiry would be, we are told, sacrilegious. Such is the dictum to which we have hitherto bowed— ought we still to bow to it ? This at least is certain : that in no other department of research does this hold true. Man has been placed in this world naked and ignorant. Whatever advance he has achieved from that state has been won by the strenuous exercise of the faculties which he possesses. Revelation has not aided him in his slow and difficult ascent of the path of knowledge. Why that should have been so ordered we know not, but we know that it has been thus with us and not otherwise. It is assumed, however, that religion is a solitary exception to this general rule. It is assumed that in this instance we can expect to learn nothing except by revelation. If that assumption be correct, is it not strange that in the course of so many centuries so little has been accomplished, and that revelation, even when vouchsafed, utters a different message in every country and every age; and that, after thousands of years, it leaves us as ignorant on th...