An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

discussion of the relation of these sciences one to another and of their unity. There was need of the organisation of the mass of knowledge, largely new and ever increasing, which the science

ge. The record of that deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment which long oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming victory had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin. There was with some a disposition to deny that there exists an area of knowledge to which the methods of metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This was Comte's contention. Others conceded that there might be such an area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that, concerning the magnitudes in which they were most inter

gion, there have been applied empirical methods which have the closest analogy with those which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the same kind of investigation to

ences, the reach of which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the psychical is a vanishing distinction. Science comes nearer to offering an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs of this chapter would imply. But it does so by including religion, not by excluding it. No one would any longer think of citing Kant's distinction of two reasons a

tions of religion as those others never did. In proportion as it is scientific, it cannot be hostile. It may at most be indifferent. Nevertheless, in the long run, few will choose the theme of religion for the scientific labour of life who have not some interest in religion. Men of these three classes have accepted the doctrine of evolution. Comte thought he had discovered it. Spencer and those for whom we have taken him as type, did service in the elaboration of it. To the men of our third group, the truth of evolution seems no longer debatable. Here too, in the word 'evolution,' we have a term which has been used with laxity. It corresponds to a notion which has only gradually been evolved. Its implications w

t of man, however, brought home the significance of evolution for religion more forcibly than any other aspect of the debate had done. There were scientific men of distinction who were not convinced of the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis. To most Christian men the theory seemed to leave no uni

which formerly no government would have dreamed of doing. The demand is that the Church, too, become a factor in the furtherance of the outward and present welfare of mankind. If that meant the call to love and charity it would be an old refrain. That is exactly what it does not mean. It means the attack upon evils which make charity necessary. It means the taking up into the idealisation of religion the endeavour to redress all wrongs, to do away with all evils, to confer all goods, to create a new world and not, as heretofore, mainly at least, a new soul in the midst of the old world. No one can deny either the magnitude of the evils which it is sought to remedy, or the greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion. The volume of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social questions is immense. It is revolutionary in its effect. For, after all, t

nts. On the contrary, it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics are not two worlds, but merel

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rison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, Coura de Phi

ked. He did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific discovery. He came under the influence of Madame Vaux, whom, after her death, he idolised even more than before. For the problem which, in the earlier portion of his work, he set himself, that namely, of the organising of the sciences into a compact body of doctrine, he possessed extraordinary gifts. Later, he took on rather th

ns which creep in again if we so much as use the words principle, or cause, or will, or force. By phenomena must be understood objects of perception, to the exclusion, for example, of psychological changes reputed to be known in self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that there is no knowing except by perception-this is ever reiterated as self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By invincible necessity the human mind can observe a

ated influence of past generations. In this, as against Bentham, for example, with his endless recurrence to human nature, as he called it, Comte was right. Comte thus first gave the study of history its place in sociology. In this study of history and sociology, the collective phenomena are more accessible to us and better known by us, than are the parts of which they are composed. We therefore proceed here from the general to the particular, not from the particular to the general, as in research of the kinds previously named. The state of every part of the social organisation is ultimately connected with th

prevail in their place. The advance of science having once begun, there is no possibility but that it will ultimately possess itself of all. One hears the echo of this confidence in Haeckel also. There is a persistence about the denial of any knowledge whatsoever that goes beyond external facts, which ill comports with the pretensions of positivism to be a philosophy. For its final claim is not that it is content to rest in experimental science. On the contrary, it would transform this science into a homogeneous doctrine which is able to explain everything in the universe. This is but a tour de force. The promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of everything which science cannot explain. Comte was n

r orders of resemblance, co-existence and succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply that

avoids by a mere play on words. He is not without a God. Humanity is God. Mankind is the positivist's Supreme. Altruism takes the place of devotion. The devotion so long wasted upon a mere creature of the imagination, to whom it could do no good, he would now give to men who sorely need it and can obviously profit by

y, the authority of the truth and of the right. There is no such abstraction as the truth, coming to various manifestations. There is no such thing as right, apart from relatively right concrete measures. There is no larger being indwelling in men. Society, humanity in its collective capacity, must, if need be, override the individual. Yet Comte despises

yer or of the desire of immortality which rises before Comte's mind as the thing to be escaped. For this caricature religious men, both Catholic and Protestant, without doubt, gave him cause. There were to be seven sacraments, corresponding to seven significant epochs in a man's career. There were to be priests for the performance of these sacraments and for the inculcation of the doctrines of positivism. There were to be temples of humanity, affording opportunity for and reminder of this worship. In each temple there was to

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ost part, the common trait that they professed agnosticism as to all that lay beyond the reach of the natural-scientific methods, in which the authors were adept. Both Ward and Boutroux accept Spencer as such a type. Agnosticism for o

one great common principle which they all illustrate, the doctrine of evolution, as this had taken shape since the time of Darwin. Since 1904 we have an autobiography of Herbert Spencer, which, to be sure, seems largely to have been written prior to 1889. The book is interesting, as well in the light which it throws upon the expansion of

among the most notable men and women of his age. So early as 1855 he was the victim of a disease of the heart which never left him. It was on his recovery from his first grave attack that he shaped the plan which henceforth held him, of organising the modern sciences and incorporating them into what he called a synthetic philosophy. There was immense increase in actual knowledge and in the power of his reflection on that knowledge, as the years went by. A generation elapsed between the publication of his First Principles and the conclusion of his more

e is unknowable, is to be taken with considerable qualification. It is only a relative unknowableness which he predicates. Moreover, before Spencer's death, the doctrine of evolution had made itself pro

that every addition to its surface does but bring us into more extensive contact with surrounding nescience. Even upon this illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading. The continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of ignorance. It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of ignorance. The author of Ecce Coelu

owledge not arrived at in those ways. It was the working of these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth century so prevailingly th

owed itself unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. I

ative is known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that the phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances, without which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified with that ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists. Religion itself is a phenomenon, and the source and secret of most complex and interesting phenomena. It has always been of the greatest importance in the history of mankind. It has been able to hold its own in face of the attacks of science. It must contain an element of truth. All religions, however, assert that their God is for us not altogether cognisable, that God is a great mystery. The higher their rank, the more do they acknowledge this. It is by the flippant invasion of this mystery that the popular religiosity offends. It talks of God as if he were a man in the nex

would be mind and will. The doctrine of evolution would harmonise perfectly with these inferences. But it would have to become idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead of materialistic, as in Comte. We are obliged, Spencer owns, to refer the phenomenal world of law and order to a first cause. He says that this first cause is incomprehensible. Yet he further says, when the question of attributing personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not between personality and something lower. It is between personality and something higher. To this may belong a mode of being as much transcending

we know of that spirit over whose threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen, except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter. He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an idea

ution for God, it was once confidently assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of myth-making and fetish worship-the homage to the fetish of law. Even the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,' says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language of rational beings, laws of nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and independent of the phenomena which they are said to govern, such language must be merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak of the civil law. We say the law does that which we know the executive does. But the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as the last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of the movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined that the planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had supposed that this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this wo

d, Naturalism and Agnos

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ations of the doctrine and deeper insight into its meaning have done away with this misunderstanding. Evolution, as originally understood, was as far as possible from suggesting anything mechanical. By the term was meant primarily the gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic beginning to its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the force of some vital or ideal principle sha

d. It is dissolved again as heat is absorbed and the watery particles evaporate. Spencer esteems this an analogue of the appearance of the universe itself, according to the nebular hypothesis. Yet assuredly, as the cloud presupposes vapours which had previously condensed, and the vapour clouds that had previously evaporated, and as clouds dissolve in one place even at the moment that they are forming in another, so we are told of nebul? which are in every phase of advance or of decline. To ask which was first, solid ma

evolution takes, for the permanence of that direction once it has been taken, so that the sequence of forms is a progression, the explication of a latent nature-of all this, the mere law of the persistence of force gives us no explanation whatever. The change at random from one form of manifestation to another might be a striking illustration of the law of the persistence of force, but

uous quality at the beginning, because we find it necessary at the end, is, to say the least, na?ve. To deny that we have put it in, to insist that in the marvellous sequence we have only an illustration of mechanism and of conservation of force, is perverse. We passed through an era in which some said that they did not believe in God; everything was accounted for by evolution. In so far as they meant that they did not believe in the God of deism and of much traditional theology, they did not stand alone in this claim. In so far as they meant by evolu

peal to biology and organic life. Both had the sense that they used a great figure of speech when they spoke of society as an organism, and compared the working of institutions to biological functions. This is indeed the question. It is a question over which Spencer sets himself lightly. He passes back and forth between organic evolution and the ethical, economic, and social movements which are described by the same term, as if we were in possession of a perfectly safe analogy, or rather as if we were assured of an identical principle. Much that is already archaic in Spencer's economic and social, his historical and ethical, not to s

struggle for existence. Instead of the old single movement, as in Spencer, straight from the nebula to the saint, Huxley has place for suffering. Suffering is most intense in man precisely under conditions most essential to the evolution of his nobler powers. The loss of ease or money may be gain in character. The cosmical process is not only full of pain. It is full of mercilessn

tter reaches far down into the levels of what we call brute life. Its divinest reach is only the fulfilment of the real nature of humanity. It is the living with men which develops the moral in man. The prolongation of infancy in the higher species has had to do with the development of moral nature. So

of militarism into industrialism. The struggle in industrialism is fiercer than ever. Reason affects the animal nature of man for the worse. Clearly conscious of what he is doing, man objects to sacrificing himself for his family or tribe. Instinct might lead an ape to do that. Intelligence warns a man against it. Reason is cruel beyond anything dreamed of in the beast. That portion of the communi

f trade, of social life and institutions, of culture and civilisation in every aspect. This elaboration and reiteration of the doctrine of evolution sometimes wearies us. It is but the unwearied following of the main clue to the riddle of the universe which the age has given us. It is nothing more and nothing less than the end

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of the word, once seemed the bulwark of positive religion, the distinction between the man who was satisfied with a naturalistic explanation of the universe and one whose devout soul asked for something more. On the other hand, the contention against the miracle appeared to be a necessary corollary of the notion of a law and order which are inviolable throughout the universe. Furthermore, many men have come of themselves to the conclusion for which Schleiermacher long ago contended. Whatever may be theoretically determined concerning miracles, yet the miracle can never again be regarded as among the foundations of faith. This is for the simplest of r

he miraculous, according to which it is the essence of arbitrariness and the negation of law. It is not that he has less sense for the divine life of the world, or for the quality of Christianity as revelation. On the other hand, we have a book like Percy Gardner's Exploratio Evangelica, 1899. With the most searching criticism of the narratives of some miracles, there is reverent confession, on the author's part, that he is baffled by the reports of others. There is recognition of unknown possibilities in the case of a character like that of Jesus. It is not that Gardner has a less stringent sense of fact and of the inexorableness of law than has Mackintosh or an ardent physicist. The problem is reduced to that of the ch

nd ourselves in the universe and interpret the world of fact to ourselves. Yet in the other sequence lies the essence of religion. The two sequences may perfectly well coexist in the same mind. Out of the attempt to combine them nothing clear or satisfying can issue. If one should be, to-day, brought face to face with a fact which was alleged to be a miracle, his instinctive effort would be, nevertheless, to seek to find

n used to do, we, with equal simplicity and no less devoutness, conceive that same event as only an illustration of a connexion in nature which we do not understand. There is no inherent reason why we may not understand it. When we do understand it, there will be nothing more about it that is conceivably m

re they also far readier to assume the immediate forthputting of the power of God. This was true not merely of the uneducated. It is difficult, or even impossible, for us to find out what the event was. Fact and apprehension are inextricably interwoven. That which really happened is concealed from us by the tale which had intended to reveal it. In the third place, there are many cases in the history of Jesus, and some in that of the apostles and prophets, in which that which is related moves in the borderland between body and soul, spirit and matter, the region of the influence of will, one's own or that of another, over physical conditions. Concerning such cases we are disposed, far more than were men even a few years ago, to concede that there is much that is by no means yet investigated, and the soundest judgment we can form is far from being sure. Even if we recognise to the full the lamentable resurgence of outworn superstitions and stupidities, which again pass current among us for an unhappy moment, if we detect the questionable or manifestly evil consequences of certain uses made or alleged of psychic influence, yet still we are no

atthew Arnold: 'The trouble with miracles is that they never happen.' We do not know enough to say that. To stake all on the assertion of the impossibility of so-called miracles is as foolish as to stake much on the affirmation of their actuality. The connexion of nature is only an induction. This can never be complete. The real question is both more complex and also more simple. The question is whet

show how we might subordinate this event in the connexion of nature which we assume. We should feel that we knew more, and not less, of God, if we should succeed. And if our effort should prove altogether futile, we should be no less sure that such natural connexion exists. This is because nature is for us the revelation of the divine. The divine, we assume, has a natural order of working. Its inviol

s true that it has, apparently, been easier for men to think of God as outside and above his world, and of themselves as separated from their fellows by his special providence. It is more difficult, through glad and intelligent subjection to all laws of nature and of history, to achieve the education of one's spirit, to make good one's inner deliverance from the world, to aid others in the same struggle and to set them on their way to God. Men grow uncertain within themselves, because they say that traditional religion has apprehended the matter in a different way. This is true. It is also misleading. Whatever miracles Jesus may ha

ere is meaning. Men of this mind make earnest with the thought that God cares for them. Without that thought there is no religion. They have been taught to find the evidence of God's love and care in the unusual. They are quite logical. It has been a weak point of the traditional belief that men h

leave it to other men to become altogether scientific if they wish. For themselves they prefer to remain religious. What a revival of ancient superstitions they have brought to pass, is obvious. Still we shall never get beyond such adventurous and preposterous endeavours to rescue that which is inestimably precious in religion, until the false antithesis between reason and faith, the lying contradiction between the providence of God and the or

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of spiritual interests. If one judged only by conventional standards, they have much evidence upon their side. Some are seeking to galvanise religious life by recurrence to evangelistic methods successfully operative half a century ago. The outstanding fact is that the age shows immense religious vitality, so soon as one concedes that it must be allowed to show its vitality in its own way. It is the age of the social question. One must be ignorant indeed of the activity of the churches and of the productivity of religious thinkers, if he does not own that in Christian circles also no questions are so rife as these. Whether the panaceas have been all wise or profitable may be questioned. Whether the interest has not been even excessive and one-sided, whether the accusation has not been occasionally unjust and the self-accusation mor

istianity is the farthest possible remove from the changelessness which men love to attribute to religion. It is the most wonderful quality which Christianity possesses. It is precisely because of the recognition of this capacity for change that one may safely argue the continuance of Christianity in the world. Yet also because of this recognition, one is put upon his guard against joining too easily in the clamour that a past apprehension of religion was altogether wrong, or that a new and urgent one, in its exclusive emphasis and its entirety, is right. Our age is haunted by the sense of terrific social a

t from the actual, the eternal in and not after the temporal. Yet with that oscillatory quality which belongs to human movements, especially where old wrongs and errors have come deeply to be felt, a part of the literature of the contention shows marked tendency to extremes. A religion in the body must become a religion of the body. A Christianity of the social state runs risk of being apprehended as merely one more means for compassing outward and material ends. Religion does stand for the inner life and the transcendent world, only not an inner life through the neglect of the outer, or a transcendent world in some far-off star or after an ?on or two. There might be meaning in the argument that, exactly because so many oth

e body of literature produced in recent years, in which it is assumed, sometimes with embitterment, that the centre of gravity of Christianity is outside the Church. Sell, in the very title of his illuminating little book, Christenthum und Weltgeschichte seit der Reformation: das Christenthum in seiner Entwickelung über die Kirche hinaus, 1910, records an impression, which is widespread and true, that the characteristic mark of modern Christianity is that it has transcended the organs and agencies officially created for it. It has become non-ecclesiastical, if not actually hostile to the Church. It has permeated the world in unexpected fashion and does the deeds of Christianity, though rather eager to avoid the name. The anti-clericalism of the Latin countr

t of horizon of which it never dreamed. It has gained a forecast of the future of culture and civilisation which is beyond imagination. The access of comfort makes men at home in the world as they never were at home. There has been set a value on this life which life never had before. The succession of discoveries and applications of discovery makes it seem as if there were to be no end in this direction. From Rousseau to Spencer men have elaborated the view that the historical

uch progress they do not see how they can assume the absolute worth of an activity which is yet the only thing which has any interest to most of them. Under this view one can assign to the individual life a definite significance, only upon the supposition that the individual is the organ of realisation of a part of this progress of mankind. All happiness and suffering, all changes in knowledge and manner of conduct, are supposed to have no worth each for itself or for the sake of the individual, but only for their relation to the movement as a whole. Surely this is an illusion. Exactly that in which the characteristic quality o

in their relation to this tendency to indefinite progress which is supposed to be inherent in civilisation. On this theory we have to say that the suffering of the individual is necessary for the development and perfecting of the whole. As over against the whole the individual has no right to make demands as to welfare or happiness. The bad also becomes only relative. In the movement taken as a whole, it is probably unavoidable. In any case it i

they despise the myth, miracle-mongering on the part of those who have abjured the miracle, nonsense on the part of those who boast that they alone are sane. There is no ultimate source of civilisation but the individual, as there is also no issue of civilisation but in individuals. Men, characters, personalities, are the makers of it. Men are the product which is made. The higher stages and achievements of the life of society have come to pass always and only upon condition that single personalities have recognised the problem, seen their individual duty and known how to inspire others with enthusiasm. Periods of decline are always those in whic

iebeck, Religionsphil