Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... handled, examined, criticized, classified, explained without thought of its latent power to stir the soul. Thus criticism and inspiration do not move in the same plane, and can never meet or interfere with one another, and the notion that they do so is due to a confusion of thought, from which the more polemical partisans of neither are quite free. In one case, indeed, this mistake may command our sympathy, though not our approval; in the case of the really religious man, who has come to associate spiritual truth with the particular form of thought, or words, in which it has habitually come home to himself, and sensitively shrinks from any severance of the two, as from the disruption of his very soul. Yet, however natural, this is a weakness, and a weakness. in whose conquest the essence of spiritual progress oftentimes consists. Meanwhile, the existence of such men is a cloke for the far larger and less earnest class, whose religion consists in holding fast the form of sound words without its substance; the religious materialists of all time, who, knowing nothing of the interior life of the spirit, imagine that in grasping its externals they grasp all; and are proportionably alarmed at the very notion of examining what, with only too sure an instinct, they call the grounds of their belief. These men in turn play into the hands of the open opponents of all inspiration, by so intimately amalgamating the letter and the spirit that every criticism of the one shall seem a disparagement of the other, and thus enabling the results--the legitimate results of critical science--to be adroitly and plausibly misused for an illegitimate end. The result of this misapplication of criticism on the one side, and of the nervous alarm which at once dreads...
