With the German critics religion is no longer a matter of revelation, but of evolution and of science. A German Professor, C. P. Tiele, has recently given a course of lectures in Edinburgh on "The Science of Religion," from which a reviewer quotes the following passage:

      If a theology does not compare its religious system with others, and, above all, test it by the laws of the evolution of religious life which the science of religion alone can reveal, it can neither wholly comprehend nor fully appreciate its own religion.

      According to this, neither Jesus nor Paul wholly comprehended nor fully appreciated their own religion; for they certainly did not "test it by the laws of the evolution of religious life," nor did they study the "science of religion" which alone can reveal these laws. What misfortune for those two men that they died before the modern science of religion was born. Or, to put it in a different form, what a pity that our nineteenth-century higher critics were not evolved in the first century so that they might, by their superior scientific attainments, have saved Jesus and Paul from the mistakes into which they fell. "Lord, give us a good conceit of ourselves." [338]

[SEBC 338]