Never has the defence of religion required so many and such excellent qualities of intellect as in the present day. The early apologists who contrasted the sublimity and purity of Christian faith with a corrupt paganism had not a difficult task. In the Middle Age the intellect of the world was on the side of Christ. The controversy which sprang up with the advent of Protestantism was biblical and historical, and its criticism was superficial. The anti-Christian schools of thought of the eighteenth century were literary rather than philosophical, and the objections they urged were founded chiefly upon political and social considerations. In all these discussions the territory in dispute was well defined and relatively small. But into what a different world are not we thrown! These earlier explorers sailed upon rivers whose banks were lined by firm-set rocky cliffs, by the overshadowing boughs of primeval forests, with here and there pleasant slopes of green where they might lie at rest amid the fragrance of wild flowers; but from our Peter's bark we look out upon the dark unfathomed seas towards an unknown world whose margin ever fades and recedes as we seem to draw near the haven of our desire. As in the beginning of the twelfth century the cry, "God wills it!" rang through Europe, and from all her lands armies of mailed knights sprang into battle-array and turned their faces towards the Holy City, resolved to wrench from infidel hands the Sacred Tomb of Christ, so now, from her thousand watch-towers, science sounds her clarion note with quite other intent, urging on to the attack of the citadel of God in the heart of man, renewing upon lower fields the war in which immortal spirits contended with the Almighty "in dubious battle on the plains of heaven, and shook his throne." As "he jests at scars that never felt a wound," so here the lesser knowledge makes the bolder man. Not that difficulties should create doubts, or that objections may not be answered, or that it is necessary to refute each hypothesis that appears and fades like a dissolving view, or to notice each unwarrantable inference from unquestioned facts, or that it is worth while to address ourselves to minds whose nebulous and shifting opinions make it impossible that they should receive correct impressions; but the field upon which attacks upon religion are now made is so vast, the confusion of thought into which new discoveries and speculations have thrown the minds of even educated men is so bewildering, the methods for the ascertainment of truth are so tangled and misapplied, the rushing on of multitudes to discuss problems which have hitherto been left to philosophers, and which they alone can rightly enunciate, is so stupefying, that those who have the clearest perception of the mental state of the modern world, and who are able to take the finest and most comprehensive view of the religious, philosophic, and scientific controversies of the day, seem loath to