The instances however are rare, where we meet with a chaos of faith, half pantheism, half atheism, such as that which we have just described. The great majority of doubters are persons who not only retain a tenacious grasp over monotheism, but even possess a love for Christianity. Their love is however for a modified form of it, different from that which the apostles taught. They cordially believe that God cares for man, and that He has spoken to man through His Son. They accept the superhuman, perhaps the divine, character of Christ; but they consider his life to be a mere example of unrivalled teaching, and of marvellous self-sacrifice; his death the mere martyrdom that formed the crowning act of majestic self-devotion. God’s gift of His son is accordingly, in their view, to reconcile man to God; to remove the obstacle of distrust which prevented man from coming to God, by showing forth the love which God already bore to the world; not to remove obstacles, known or unknown, which prevented God from showing mercy to man. Christ is accepted as a teacher, and as a king, but not as a priest. His work is viewed as having for its purpose, to inculcate and embody a higher type of morality, not to work out a scheme of redemption. The ethical element of Christianity becomes elevated above the dogmatic. The sermon on the mount is regarded as the very soul of Christ’s teaching. And in looking forward to the future of Christianity, the Christian religion is considered likely to become the religion of the world, merely because it will have ceased to be the religion of form and dogma, and become the highest type of ethics. Views like these are common, and their compatibility with Christianity is defended in different ways:—sometimes by the bold attempt, as in the speculations of the Tübingen school, to prove that primitive Christianity was such a religion as that just described; that the dogmatic Christianity of the early fathers was the addition made by philosophy to the first doctrine, the _idola theatri_, which haunted the minds of the early teachers; and that the books of the New Testament, to which we appeal to prove the contrary, belong to a later date than that usually assigned:—sometimes, with less consistency, admitting the antiquity of the dogmas, by representing that we can penetrate into the philosophy of the apostolic doctrine, and express in modern phrase, more clearly than in the ancient, the meaning which was intended to be conveyed:—at other times, by regarding all truth as relative to its age, and supposing that Christ’s work was seen by the light of the sacrificial and Messianic ideas common in the apostolic times.