Christianity, will exist in his mind so purified from adventitious and accidental matter as to stand the test of strict reasoning. What then is to be done with him, if he is not to remain contented with that purely local conception of moral and religious truth which belongs to him like his cylindrical hat or his swallow-tail coat, as an affair of accepted tradition rather than of reasoned truth? Plainly there is only one course: you must convince him of the insufficiency of his premises for warranting any general conclusion at all; and, then leading him through the whole moral and ecclesiastical experience of the Christian Church, open to him a wide and a sure field of observation from which legitimate inductions {60} with regard to moral and religious ideas comprised in the term Christianity can be made. So that the cross-examination, of which we gave a specimen above, is in reality a process of induction as much as the processes in physical science by which electricity is identified with galvanism, and both with magnetism. But if the ethical idea is to emerge perfectly pure from such an investigation, our young Episcopal philosopher will require to broaden his conception of morality and religion yet further, so as to embrace moral phenomena of an important kind beyond the pale of the term Christianity altogether. No doubt Christianity is to us, and has been to the most favoured races of humanity, for nearly two thousand years, the grand bearer of the deepest moral truth; but the religion of Christ does not exist everywhere,--did not exist certainly when a Pythagoras, a Socrates, and a Plato founded their great schools of moral teaching and training among the Greeks; and thus to bring out the ethical idea strong in the internal identity of all its various Avatars, our young inquirer must launch out into the wide, and in a great measure hitherto unexplored, sea of comparative ethics and comparative theology. A type of this sort of procedure will be found in the late admirable Baron Bunsen’s book entitled _God in History_, a work with regard to which even those who do not accept all its conclusions must admit that it is constructed upon the only scheme on which a large and adequate philosophy of ethical and religious truth can be raised.