The Collapse of the Faith [pp. 339-360]

THE COLLAPSE OF FAIETH.
for Christ and Christianity on naturalistic principles. These ex pedients have demonstrated their own unsatisfactory and violent
character by their uniform failure to satisfy a single generation
or school of critics. In some instances, as is well known, they
have been abandoned by their own originators. The naturalistic
theory of Paulus, the mythical theory of Strauss, the tendency
theory of Baur, the romantic theory of Renan, and the various
mosaics or rather kaleidoscopic pictures made up of parts of
each, have all failed permanently to answer the questions which
the new criticism has forced upon the attention of men as never
before. They have failed altogether to account for the origina tion and first triumphs of the gospel story on the supposition
that the supernatural in it was false. It would seem as tho the
entire round of possible negative hypotheses had been traversed
by adventurous critics, to say nothing of sundry amazing aerial
flights by manifest romancers, and in vain, and as tho nothing
was left for the rejecters of supernatural Christianity except to
select some one of the many paths which inevitably return upon
themselves and end in disappointment and disgust.
We are fully aware that very many of the rejecters of the
supernatural in the Christian history remain unconvinced, not withstanding the confessed failures of these manifold negative
theories. We know too well that incredulity in respect to the
truth of the gospel history-if it should not rather be called
the extreme of credulity-has become a fixed fashion or
affectation in many cultivated circles. But we find no special
strength, certainly no special novelty, in the arguments which
they urge. Their attitude is not so much an attitude of conviction as of uncritical dogmatism which savors quite as much of
scornful self-assertion as of docile and open-minded readiness to
revise the fashionable opinions of a coterie, or to rouse themselves to fresh and earnest investigation. If to be willing to
revise one's creed is a test of the truth-loving and liberal spirit,
the anti-supernaturalist critics are generally sadly deficient in
this important indication.
The relations of the new criticism to the supernatural element
in the Jewish history differ somewhat from those to the gospel
story, for the reason that the materials and data are relatively
scanty, inaccessible, and uncertain. Sundry important questions
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