Excerpt from A Short History of Our Religion, From Moses to the Present Day The teaching of this subject has, presumably, two closely correlated aims: first, it would seek, on the purely intel lectual level, to give a clear idea of the nature of the Christian religion and its historical development and achievement; secondly, it would seek to create, as a result of this purely intellectual process, a sense of the overwhelming importance of Christianity and its continuous and increasing vitality. The latter aim will not perhaps be pursued directly in the class-room, but its achievement would result spontaneously from the achievement of the former aim. At present neither aim is generally achieved. Many reasons for failure might be suggested, but two in particular fall to be mentioned here since they explain the idea of the present book. In the first place we have, in our Bible teaching, been too much occupied with political, biographical, and geographical details, which, from the standpoint of Christian Divinity, are of secondary importance. For what makes Bible history worth studying at all is the religious history, and the rest is only useful in so far as it explains that. 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.