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PREFACE

this gift of God; it is, on the other, because all around them a world is coming to the birth which, if it is ever to accept the faith, must have it offered through the medium of its own fundamental presuppositions and certainties.

Neither this apologetic inspiration nor this apologetic necessity is a new thing. The Church has always in her moments of vigorous life hastened to appropriate to her high uses the knowledge to which the contemporary habit of thought had given a clear sanction. And she has equally at such moments gone out with unhesitating instinct to recognize and satisfy the genuine claims of contemporary life. She has learned from the world in order that she might teach the world. She has felt, even beyond her own power of analysing the fact, that the Divine revelation was given confusedly in great human