Christianity was founded by an historical person who lived in comparatively recent times. Few of us have not seen one or other of our grandparents; some doubtless have looked upon the faces of their great-grandparents. Now Jesus of Nazareth lived, and people were first called Christians, no longer ago than about twenty-five such periods of time as separate a man from his great-grandfather. We speak sometimes of the ‘evolution of Christianity,’ as if Christianity were something coeval with the geologic periods. But the fact is that though there has been a great deal of activity in theological speculation under the name of Christianity, there has been very little evolution of Christianity itself since the days of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus. However that may be, we need to realize that Christianity appeared in the full light of comparatively recent historical times, and was founded by an historical person of whom we have fairly definite records and under conditions that we may pretend to understand. And if there are some things about the origin of Christianity that we do not know or understand, it is not because of the remoteness of the times, but because of the obscurity and the literary insignificance of its beginnings. The men who launched it were plain men, and we cannot know what they failed to observe and in after years omitted to set down. Yet they set down enough to enable us to study intelligently the circumstances and conditions under which Christianity arose and to which in so large part owed its rise.

An Impressive thing is happening in these days. We are observing the Tercentenary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The common verdict has been for a long time rather against the Puritans. Their civil administration is declared to have been at times tyrannical, their ecclesiastical order prejudiced, even bigoted. Individuals among them appear to us fanatical. Such accusations have become almost traditional. At the present moment however the mind of our country and in some measure of the world has turned again to the contemplation of the Puritan history. We recall their deeds and suffering. It is realized how one-sided is the judgment alluded to. There is a disposition to recognize how great was their service to our country and to modern men. This is the mind of some who by no means share the solemn earnestness, the rigidity, the zealotry of the typical Puritan character. Perhaps no generation of our countrymen has ever been further removed than is our own from Puritan standards. Yet there is this widespread feeling that justice is not always done them. We may owe to them something of the larger liberty and more comfortable existence which, coming generations after them, we now enjoy and which apparently we might not have enjoyed had we lived among them.

The publication of Professor Dewey’s Gifford Lectures, under the title “The Quest for Certainty,” affords a new opportunity for a study of the main emphases in the work of our leading American philosopher, and also for the clarification of the relations of his thought to the fundamental postulates of religion. A large part of the book is given over to an analysis of the conditions under which knowledge is attained. This paper will attempt a statement and criticism of the more important parts of the argument.

Of what value is a pure conjecture, unverified, perhaps unverifiable? In the face of possible disparagement we answer, Much every way. A conjecture is the most concrete and tangible form of the working hypothesis. When directed at some important yet knotty point of criticism it coördinates and articulates the data, narrowing the question down to sharply definable points. It is the oxyacetylene blowpipe of historical inquiry. It may be misdirected, but if so is promptly quenched. If rightly applied it goes to the heart of the matter. Criticism in this form laughs at the epithet ‘destructive’. Discarding the defensive armor of negative propositions it comes boldly forth into the open, flinging down its challenge of pointed affirmation and defying disproof. As long as its challenge remains unanswered it serves to rouse debate from the lethargy of stagnation. Accepted or rejected, it stimulates to new energy the forces of liberalism and conservatism alike. In the end it works inevitably for the truth. Against the truth it can do nothing.