What we are faced with to-day is not the destruction of religion but the change in its form and outlook. The permanent thing in the Christian religion, the unique thing, is that it has been the attempt to set forth Jesus of Nazareth. Everything else has been temporal, but that has been permanent. As men look back over history they see that many expressions of that loyalty have become antiquated, and have, without any active hostility on the part of reformers, simply ceased to be. The human mind has no longer regarded them as adequate. The study of a doctrine such as the Atonement is the best of all evidence for the fact. On so great a truth the greatest thinkers of all times have exercised themselves, and the statements made of the doctrine have been made in terms intelligible to the men of the age in which they were made. Books which deal with the subject of the Atonement are invariably stronger on their historical and critical than on their constructive sides. It is easy to understand now the defects of so great and permanent a book as Anselm's _Cur Deus Homo_, or, leaping over many hundreds of years, to question the adequacy of the statements of Robertson of Brighton, or of MacLeod Campbell. Even the greatest writers, when they deal with eternal truth, the Apostle Paul himself being witness, write in the language of their time for the men of their time, and are influenced in their statements by the ideas that are in the air in their time. The truth itself is a matter of Christian experience, whether it be taught by the old women of Bedford to John Bunyan, or by the thoroughly equipped scholar of to-day to a student who has all his senses exercised to receive the truth. But, while mediæval thought has few greater names than that of Anselm, _Cur Deus Homo_ is now studied exactly like Faraday's _Researches_, only as a matter of history. Human thought has left Anselm behind.
To the trained thinker, of course, this position is the merest commonplace. The wine of divine truth is ever new, and it has to be put into new bottles. He does an infinite disservice to faith who strives to tie it indefinitely to particular statements. The heresy of yesterday may be the orthodoxy of to-day, and the orthodoxy of to-day the exhausted formula of to-morrow. The men of this generation read with amazement the attacks of the sixties on Darwin, attacks so full of acerbity, so reckless in their bandying of evil charges and in their ascription of anti-religious motives. And to-day, while the biologist may still debate the particular issue, we know that the conception of continuity and development has been of enormous service in every range of thought. The first debates on the _Origin of Species_ have given place to a general conception. Einstein, in the same way, may influence profoundly not only physical but theological and ethical problems.