We know nothing of the objective act on God's part by which
he reconciled the world to himself, the very description of it being a
figure of speech. Conversion is not in accordance with the claims of
orthodoxy, for while there were conversions in the early Church, there
is no possibility of establishing a harmony between them and those which
are now said to occur. The conversions of the first Christians were
marked by ecstatic and unusual phenomena, whole multitudes were
simultaneously affected, and the changes wrought were permanent; but the
subjects were chiefly ignorant people, who no doubt did many things
which would have been distasteful to us as men of education.[170]
The most noteworthy work of the Critical Rationalists is the _Essays and
Reviews_ (1861), a volume which consists of broad generalizations
against the authority of the Bible as a standard of faith.
I. THE EDUCATION OF THE WORLD. By Frederic Temple, D. D. There is a
radical difference between man and inanimate nature. The latter is
passive, and subject to the workings of the vast physical machinery, but
man is at no time stationary, for he develops from age to age, and
concentrates in his history the results and achievements of all
previous history.
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