The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist. Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes and subjects. {142} I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of God upon the destinies of Mankind. {143} In proportion to the vigour with which these events have developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy. What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person, he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know, cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself, to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him imperfectly,--where he attempts to carry the torch of human science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action? {144} I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.