Thoughts on Ultimate Problems: Being a Series of Short Studies on Theological and Metaphysical Subjects (Chiefly on Specially Controverted Points)

From the PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION THIS little volume comprises a selection from the author's studies on philosophical and religious subjects, those studies having - in some cases - been chosen by preference which have been most helpful to himself individually in enabling him, amid the spiritual unrest of the closing nineteenth and opening twentieth century, to regain and hold fast (even it, to a large extent, only in the attitude of "hope") the essentials of the Christian - and even a great part of the Catholic - Faith. Where a writer is to so enormous an extent as the present one, indebted to the thoughts of greater contemporary - or nearly contemporary - minds, it becomes his duty to express this indebtedness specifically so far as he is able. This the writer has endeavoured to do. But it may not be out of place to indicate here that the studies with regard to which he can claim least originality are the two which relate (a) to the Infancy-Stories of our first and third canonical gospels, and (b) to the eschatological teaching of the New Testament. The ground-idea of the last-named study has been derived by the present writer, with deep and especial thankfulness, from a remarkable personality who is best known as initiator of the most daring and one of the most successful sociological experiments recorded in modem history: and the writer's originality is confined to the reconciliation of this ground-idea (which at first sight seems to involve "physical miracle" on a stupendous scale) with his strictly naturalistic and indeed (in the narrowest sense) "physiological" theory of spiritual crisis and destinies - a theory which he hopes will make eschatological teachings credible to the twentieth century student. It is an open secret that these teachings, especially as put in the mouth of the Founder of Christianity Himself, have been acutely felt as a stumbling-block and a perplexity by Christian thinkers in quite recent times. Even as the writer pens this preface he has before him the current number of the " Guardian," which includes, in its full text of Dr. Armitage Robinson's lecture of the previous Saturday in Westminster Abbey, the following words: - "The whole subject of Eschatology, or the Doctrine of the Last Things, has come suddenly to the front in recent days, being pressed forward by a school of German critics who now seek to reconstruct the Gospel history in accordance with the theory that our Lord believed that the world was about to come to an immediate end." The perplexity created by this problem has been voiced at the last Church Congress (in Cambridge), the subject having been reopened largely as a result of the critical speculations of Dr. Schweitzer alluded to by the Dean of Westminster in the sentence just quoted, and it therefore seemed that the time was perhaps specially opportune for presenting a Preterist theory of the "Parousia" (as the- largely catastrophic and spectacular - end of an age, but by no means of the world) which harmonizes the evangelical anticipations of impending crisis with those other and equally unmistakable sayings, like the parables of the " mustard-seed " and the " leaven," which seem to predict just the sort of slow evolution and progress which we know to have taken place. The other studies of the volume are less in need of apology. Those who have followed recent philosophical and religious controversies will recognise their appositeness, even if they utterly disagree with the writer's conclusions. Neither does the writer make any apology for the "annotative" literary form in which so large a part of these Studies is presented, and for which he has been exonerated in a press-notice which appears on page 95 herein. That literary form has been necessitated by lack, until recently, of health and leisure during the many years of a very busy life....