A Spiritual force incarnate and commingling with the material movement and flux of history. Beneath the phenomena a fact—the concreted result of a supreme revelation of the spiritual in space and time. That is the tremendous historic reality of the Religion of Jesus Christ. A hundred questions at once press forward to be uttered. This fact which the whole world recognizes, can it be defined, fixed, interpreted? Can the categories of the human mind enfold it adequately, or at all? What is the relation between defined doctrine and formulated thing, between the affirmation of faith and the reflection of theology, miracle and truth testified? What are our criteria and how are they to be applied to history? What is history for faith?

Less than a century ago there was a relatively limited number of answers. The human mind was comparatively insular—confined to its individual expressions in this man and that man and this and that class, country and creed. For protestant and papist, liberal and agnostic, there was a well-spread assortment of “cumulative” arguments. Each, being insulated, could afford to mix his own apologetic panacea (they still exist), and his position of stable equilibrium was chiefly determined by the ingredients he chose. Looked at from the angle of the isolated subject on his intellectual desert-island each position was curiously compelling.