Excerpt from The Open Court, Vol. 38: A Monthly Magazine; March, 1924 We are able to properly understand the present only in the light of the past out of which present things have come. Our conception of God, and of the Bible, and of our religion do not furnish an exception to this rule. The evidence is conclusive that not only the ideas of God we hold today, but also our Bible and our religion have all passed through a gradual process of growth or evolution. In any field of knowledge and experience the views we hold today are quite different from those we held in our childhood, and from those held by the early workers in the same field. In fact. Everything that exists around us, the features of the earth, the forms of its life, our forms of thought, and our ideas of God and His ways of working in the world, are but the last links in the chain of changing events and ideas that extend back a very long distance into the past. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.