outset by a series of a priori prejudices. The most obvious of them is the anti-metaphysical prejudice to which I referred in the last chapter —the refusal to admit the objective and autonomous character of religion and of spiritual reality, and the affirmation that everything in the world is of the same colour, as Renan puts it, and that there is no free spiritual principle in the universe apart from the will of man. Hence it becomes necessary not only to eliminate every supernatural element in the Gospel and in the history of the Church, but, furthermore, to deny the essential originality and spontaneity of Christianity and to explain it away as a composite development derived from elements that were already in existence.
This prejudice has had an incalculable influence on the modern mind, since it could invoke the prestige of ” science,” that is to say, the dogmatic conception of scientific materialism.
But its influence might have been limited to rationalist circles had it not been reinforced by a second prejudice, which was based on religious preconceptions. This was the Protestant conviction that a vital breach had intervened between the Gospel of Jesus and the Faith of the Church. The Reformers, it is true, placed this breach as late as the Middle Ages, but, as we have seen, the growth of historical knowledge 76