Page:Jesus and the Gospel.djvu/24

4 witnesses—is to ask in other words whether the Church's faith to-day is continuous with that of apostolic times; and there can be few Christians who are indifferent to the answer. But though the profession of indifference would be absurd, it is not absurd to aim at sincerity and truth. No one can be more anxious to know the truth than the man to whom it means a great deal that the truth should be thus or thus. It [sic] we could imagine a person to whom it was a matter of indifference whether the Christian Church of to-day understood rightly or wrongly what the New Testament means by Christian faith, or who did not care in the least whether the historical facts about Jesus justified that faith or not, we should have imagined a person not ideally competent but absolutely incompetent to deal with either the one question or the other. The writer does not wish to disguise the fact that he is vitally interested in both, for he is convinced that on no other condition is there any likelihood of the true answer being found. But he disclaims at the same time any 'apologetic' intention. There is no policy in what he has written, either in its manner or its substance. Nothing, so far as he is conscious, is set down for any other reason than that he believes it to be the truth, and nothing is to be discounted or allowed for as though he were mediating or negotiating between the progressive and the stationary elements in a Christian society, and would have said more or less if he had been free to speak without reserve. To the best of his knowledge he speaks without reserve, and has neither more nor less to say. This does not exclude the intention and the hope to say what may be of service to Christian faith and to the Christian Church; all it excludes is the idea that Christian faith or the Christian Church can be served by anything else than simple truth.

The two questions with which we have to deal are