e our endeavour to speak.

We know how it has happened to us over and over again in our own
individual experiences to have been made conscious of a gradual
modification of our opinions as new evidence has reached us, and we
have had time to relate it to our previous understanding and knowledge.
We have had our first thoughts, and our second thoughts, and then there
have come third thoughts, which were the ripest {11} and soundest of
all. Just such a process of which we can mark the stages in ourselves
is to be seen on a larger scale--in bigger print, as it were--in the
thought movements of an age. In the case of the period which we are to
review, the three stages have been more than commonly clear, as we
shall aim to shew in the survey we are to make.

We shall begin with the First thoughts, which were those of what may be
termed the older orthodoxy. These were very generally accepted;
indeed, they were regarded as for the most part beyond the reach of
serious contradiction. Then we shall pass to the Second thoughts,
which were forced upon an astonished and bewildered generation by the
onslaughts upon traditional views that were made from the side of
physical science. For fifty years or more the debate went on, with
challenge and counter-challenge, and much noise and dust of
controversy. They were great days, and in them great men fought with
great courage in great issues. We shall seek to do justice to both
sides, to those who dared to proclaim and suffer for the new, and to
those who shewed an equal courage in their resolute determination to be
loyal to what they held to be the truth of the old.

Then, finally, it will be our difficult task to discriminate between
the surging thoughts of that {12} second period and those of the Third
stage, through which we are advancing, and to shew what can already be
made out of a common ground of agreement and co-operation, now much
more likely to be reached than could at one time have been foreseen by
the most optimistic imagination.

{13}

CHAPTER I

THE OLDER ORTHODOXY

Never had there been greater unanimity of opinion in England in regard
to the religious interpretation of the world than that which prevailed
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The excesses on the
Continent which had accompanied the advocacy of free thought had
disposed men's mind to fall back upon authority, and most of all in
matters that affected the basis on which the continua