The Things That Abide

ty, established for life in a position of great usefulness, stakes his Christianity on the reality of the New Testament miracles. Overborne by a mind keener than his own, which had produced a remarkable book on the History of Testimony, he comes to the startling conclusion that miracles do not happen. In the bewilderment of this conviction the whole foundation of the Christian Church seems swept away. His ministry and his life of service are based on falsehood. And so, after a severe struggle, he leaves the church in which he has been nurtured, surrenders his position and work, and goes up to London to find, if he can, a new expression for religion and a new hold on human lives. For Robert Elsmere this new expression turns out to be the New Testament without its miracles, and this new hold on human lives centers in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. The power of the story, we may note in passing, lies in its faithfulness to the storm and stress of a transition which has disturbed other countries perhaps more deeply than our own, yet a storm and stress which no one has wholly escaped. Does its significance for us lie in that History of Testimony, never written indeed, but for which modern scholarship has collected so many materials and which seems so destructive of the time-honored faith? Or is Robert Elsmere the story of one caught in the toils of a painful transition, who died before the conflict was over, and whose solution is as transitory as the conflict... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.