Excerpt from Studies of Christianity: Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers; A Series of Papers
Amid lesser varieties, critical or logical, I indulge the hope that no breach of moral continuity will be found; but the same desire, at the end as at the beginning, to harmonise the outer and the inner, the natural and the supernatural witness of Divine truth and good.
Two or three of the following papers, while disquisitional in substance, are controversial in form. Though defending, under certain aspects, a Unitarian interpretation of Christianity, they make no pretension to a representative character, but express purely personal convictions. I am anxious that no one, for whom they may concede too much, or claim too little, should be compromised by them. To define to himself, and, at proper times, explain to others, with unreserved distinctness and simplicity, the nature and grounds of the faith in which he lives, is the indispensable duty of every Christian teacher, and the natural impulse of every earnest man. But in this task of exposition I have never been able, or indeed, anxious - to suppress a certain secondary sympathy with the very beliefs from which I dissent - a perception that they, too, catch by side-lights an aspect of the infinite truth. No one possessed with this feeling can dare unconditionally to identify his own conviction with the absolute truth which it represents. He will look for ultimate unity, not from the world's coming round to him while he stands still, but from a converging movement of thought, affecting all faithful men, towards a centre of repose as yet invisible. The present Volume, mainly produced under the influence of such a hope, goes forth to trace for a little way, should the privilege be allowed it, one of these lines of Christian approximation.
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