At one time they seemed to shake it to its base; so much so that Bishop Butler wrote in the Advertisement to the first edition of his Analogy that 'it is come to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious.' Yet what do we see after a lapse of a hundred and forty years?
It cannot be said that there is less religious life and activity now than there was then, or that there has been so far any serious breach in the continuity of Christian belief.

An eye that has learnt to watch the larger movements of mankind will not allow itself to be disturbed by local oscillations.

It is natural enough that some of our thinkers and writers should imagine that the last word has been spoken, and that they should be tempted to use the word 'Truth' as if it were their own peculiar possession.

But Truth is really a much vaster and more unattainable thing.

One man sees a fragment of it here and another there; but, as a whole, even in any of its smallest subdivisions, it exists not in the brain of any one individual, but in the gradual, and ever incomplete but ever self-completing, onward movement of the whole.