The contrast which so many are drawing between the present and the past
is not a little exaggerated. There have been few periods in which
Christianity has not been the {10} object of animadversion and attack,
in which its speedy downfall has not been confidently predicted. It
was two hundred years ago that Dean Swift wrote _An Argument to prove
that the Abolishing of Christianity in England may, as things now
stand, be attended with some Inconveniences, and perhaps not produce
those many good effects proposed thereby_': the Dean, with scathing
sarcasm, ridiculing at once the conventional customs by which
Christianity was misrepresented, and the supercilious ignorance which
assumed that it was extinct.[10] It was about a quarter of a century
later that Bishop Butler, in the advertisement to his _Analogy of
Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature_, stated, 'It is
come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that
Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is
now, at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they
treat it as if, {11} in the present age, this were an agreed point
among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up
as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of
reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the
world.' And the Bishop drily gave as the aim of the _Analogy_: 'Thus
much, at least, will be here found, not taken for granted but proved,
that any reasonable man who will thoroughly consider the matter, may be
as much assured as he is of his own being, that it is not, however, so
clear a case that there is nothing in it.'
The assumption that Christianity is a thing of the past can hardly be
more prevalent now than it was then; and the groundlessness of the
assumption then may lead to the conclusion that the assumption is
equally groundless now. Since the days of Butler or of Swift, the
progress of Christianity has not ceased: its developments of thought
and {12} life have been among the most remarkable in its whole career.
The exultation over its decay in the twentieth century may possibly be
found as premature and as vain as the exultation over its decay in the
eighteenth century, or in any of the centuries which have gone before.