In the Laws of Manu it is enjoined on the Brahman that when his hair is white, and his skin is wrinkled, and he has looked on his son’s sons, he shall turn his back on his home and his secular avocations, and, withdrawing to the forest, devote the remainder of his days to meditation on the nature of the Infinite Being, and to the consummation of his deliverance by absorption in God.1 In the West there has not been the same sense of the sacred vocation of old age, and it has even come to be the common opinion that the man is wisest who goes on with his accustomed work as if he were destined to live for ever, and happiest who is surprised by death when engrossed in his worldly concerns. It is, notwithstanding, a tenable view that nothing better beseems an old man than that he should become philosophical according to his capacity, reflect on the meaning of the dramatic experience which has been vouchsafed him as a denizen of this planet, and endeavour to clarify, amend, or enrich his ideas about the nature and the author of the scheme of things of which his life has been an interesting though infinitesimal part. In order to further this inclination, Lord Gifford framed a Deed which has in view those who roughly correspond to the Brahman caste, and who usually are in the third or even the fourth stage of their pilgrimage, and which provides for an invitation to contemplate the world in which they have done their work from the standpoint of eternity, and declare what they have come to know, or to know that they do not know, concerning ‘the Infinite, the First Cause, the one and only Substance.’ But again we are reminded that the West is not the East, as we compare the provisions of the Laws of Manu with those of the Gifford Foundation; for, firstly, the oriental rule imposed upon the sage the duty of ‘wandering about absolutely silent,’ while the Gifford rule is that he shall deliver a series of at least twenty ‘public and popular lectures,’ and secondly, while the Brahman was called on to renounce everything, ‘living without a fire, without a house, subsisting on roots and fruit,’ Lord Gifford attached to his lectureship a very handsome endowment. In one of these particulars, it may be thought, the Eastern regulation is on the higher plane, as it makes the plausible assumption that meditation on the greatest themes is likely to be marked by deeper insight when carried on in the spirit of utter self-abnegation in which money is rated as dross, and honour is no more coveted than wealth. On the other hand, if something was gained, much must have been lost to India by the prescription of silence, which implied that the wisdom of the sage would perish with him; and it is a service of the Gifford Trust that it has insisted that some should declare their mind whom their generation eagerly desired to hear on the great questions, but who might otherwise have passed from them with sealed lips, and that it has elicited out of their wisdom, in compensation for many words that have been spoken to little purpose, some things that will remain a possession for ever.

It is, in truth, a momentous debate which, on the initiative of a senator of the College of Justice, has been proceeding in Scotland during the last thirty years; for it has served, not merely as a revelation of the inner mind of our time in its wrestlings with the fundamental problems of existence, but also as a many-sided discussion of the central religious doctrine which combines the maximum of speculative interest with the most far-reaching practical consequences. There was a fitness in the choice of Scotland as the arena of the discussion, since it had itself produced classic examples of the chief types of mind that have left their mark on theistic thought. The extreme right was represented by John Knox, arch-dogmatist, of the succession of the Hebrew prophets, who on the ground of his religious experiences, the inner witness of his spirit, and a sense of the providential ordering of events, was as sure of God and of His eternal purposes as he was of himself and of his reforming policy; and on the extreme left was David Hume, arch-sceptic, as little sure of God as of the substantial existence of his own soul, the most acute and ruthless of the critics of the defences which man has thrown up around the citadel of his religious faith, to whose influence more than any other it was due, not only that Philosophy was forced to re-examine its foundations, but that the creed of many who have only heard echoes and catchwords of the collisions of metaphysical speculation has shrunk to a ‘perhaps’ and a ‘perhaps not.’ The third typical figure was Thomas Reid, of the Chairs of Logic and Moral Philosophy, who in addition to his personal interest in the religious issue had the professional duty of surveying and pronouncing on the developments of modern Philosophy, and also the responsibility of aiding in the formation of the principles and the character of the academic youth. In addition there has been a goodly audience drawn from all classes for which nothing was too deep in Theology or Philosophy.

The Scottish Church took a large share in the intellectual travail which was caused by the re-opening of the debate on Theism. It was in fact the Church, as represented by the distinguished figures of Chalmers, Tulloch, John Caird, and Flint,2 which down to the end of last century made the most important contributions, constructive as well as polemical, to the theistic discussion. They had been frankly warned off the philosophical ground in the passage in Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, in which Cleanthes observes that Theology has elected to ally itself now with a positive, now with a critical and sceptical metaphysic, and Philo draws the moral that this varying attitude had its explanation in the changing exigencies of priestcraft. ‘Sceptics in one age,’ says Philo, ‘dogmatists in another, whichever best suits the purposes of those reverend gentlemen in giving them an ascendant over mankind, they are sure to make it their favourite principle and established tenet.’3 On the initial question of historical fact it was a hasty and inaccurate generalisation that the theologians were agreed to decry and discredit reason in the illiterate centuries, and that in the modern age of enlightenment they have covenanted to seek its help and patronage. In every epoch there have been theologians who have distrusted reason and who, so far as they philosophised, have proposed ‘to erect religious faith on philosophical scepticism.’ Their general position was that the human intellect, in view of its inherent weakness, and especially of its enfeeblement and obscuration by sin, is unable to penetrate to the ultimate truth of things, and this tenet necessarily involved a measure of philosophic doubt which was often professed in very unqualified terms. Tertullian of the Fathers, and Luther among the Reformers, used strong language about the imbecility of reason. Some of the later Scholastics sheltered radical doubts and denials under the formula that what was true in Theology could be false in Philosophy. In modern times the attitude was reproduced by Dean Mansel in the Bampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought, which made it appear that, in the absence of Christianity, Agnosticism would have been the reasonable creed; while the Ritschlian School, whose contemptuous treatment of Natural Theology is one of its constant marks, must be held to be committed to the view that the light of nature only serves to discover to man that God is unknown and unknowable.4 But in every epoch also there have been theologians for whom reason was the candle of the Lord. In fact, the normal view has been that there is a general revelation in nature and history which reason is competent to grasp, and from which it has been able to extract the essential truths concerning God, the self, and the world, as well as the chief heads of duty. This was the standpoint of the Greek Fathers and of the great Scholastics, and it has received the imprimatur of the Roman Catholic Church. It has equally been distinctive of the Reformed branch of the Protestant Church that, in contrast with the wavering attitude of the Lutheran schools, it has held that the light of nature guarantees a knowledge of the fundamental truths of religion and morality. And it is this attitude which—apart from an early divagation of Chalmers—was reproduced by the Scottish theologians of last century. In support of the position Calvin had given the grim reason that it must be possible to attain some knowledge of God and His laws unless sinners were to be left with some excuse for their guilt; while his successors have rather urged that if there be no way of establishing the existence of God as a truth of reason, it must be difficult, if not impossible, to authenticate the claims of a special revelation. As a fact, it is not natural, and may even be thought a psychological anomaly, that the same mind should be able to oscillate between the doubts of the sceptical philosopher and the childlike trustfulness of the humble believer. There is also a palpable incongruity in saying—to use a formula which has been current in Germany—‘If I were not a Christian I should be an atheist.’ To say that in the strength of my Christian faith I believe that there is a God, almighty, all-wise, and all-good, the Creator and the Governor of the world, and to go on to declare that nothing of these truths—but rather contrary errors—can be collected from an examination of the arrangements of the universe, the constitution of man, and the course of history, seems to be to pay to God the poor compliment of likening Him to one of His earthly children who should be told that he had a lofty genius which unfortunately his writings did not reveal, or a noble character which was belied by all the details of his conduct.

What is to be said of the paradoxical fact that a strain of philosophical free-thinking is traceable throughout the history of Christian Theology? It was certainly not due to priestcraft. The ingenious Philo, if arguing in another connection, and with another adversary, would surely have delighted to point a different moral. He would have begun by observing that the theologians had embarked on a very natural investigation when, in the Scholastic period, they raised the question as to what measure of truth man would have attained if he had been left to the unaided exercise of his natural powers. He would have gone on to argue that in conducting the discussion on this hypothetical footing the Schools of Divinity had compassed an intellectual freedom which left little to be desired. It was these divines, notwithstanding their bondage to Creed and Confession, and not the philosophers with their vaunted liberty of thought, who down to modern times had been able to undertake the most candid examination of the rational arguments for the existence of God and the doctrine of immortality. For while the theologian, believing that he possessed in revelation an additional source of knowledge which was clear and trustworthy, was not afraid to yield to logic when the rational case broke down, the philosopher, Locke for example, was tempted to manipulate the evidence and palm off bad arguments on himself and others—being in the plight that if his reason drove him to scepticism there was nothing on which he could fall back to save his name from obloquy, and his soul from the desolating negations. The Church, besides, by granting a permit for tearless free-thinking on philosophical lines, had made a useful provision against the world being overawed by the authority of the philosophical masters, and infected by the credulity of their disciples.

The interest of Scottish Philosophy in Theism was quickened, now by continental influences, now by the revelations made by the Science of the nineteenth century, and by the revolutions which were threatened in its name. And in each generation it was the badge of the school as a whole that it followed Reid in offering a reasoned justification of the fundamental convictions which are common property, and in particular that it took under its protection the fundamental article of the religious creed. It is true that there was no sustained agreement as to the rational grounds of faith in God, nor, it may be added, had the arguments of the Scottish School any marked originality. The contention of Reid that the existence of God is a principle of common sense was a modification of the doctrine of the innate idea; the supplementary reasoning of Dugald Stewart and Brown from the frame of nature was a reproduction of the cosmological and teleological arguments; Ferrier followed Berkeley in maintaining that the theory of knowing implies an infinite mind which gives its reality to the universe, and rescues finite things from the incredible fate of ceasing to exist on ceasing to be perceived; Hamilton reproduced the practical faith along with the theoretical Agnosticism of Kant; Campbell Fraser leaned on Jacobi as well as on Berkeley; and Calderwood reaffirmed the position that the reality of the divine existence is a truth so plain that it needs no proof. Edward Caird gave new life, light, and persuasiveness to the Hegelian doctrine of the Infinite Spirit; Sir Henry Jones preached the love of God as the sum of all the theologies that could be justified to an inquiring faith; and Professor W. L. Davidson was an early exponent of the argument from human needs to the divine Provider. A reaction was represented by the Positivism of Bain, and also by the unsympathetic detachment of Adamson, as illustrated in his discussion of the theological elements of the systems of Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley.5 It may, however, be said that, throughout a century of unexampled storm and stress, there was in Scotland a consensus sapientium which gave a considered judgment in support of the rationality of the religious idea which from of old had been the unquestioned presupposition of the higher life of the Scottish people, and the inspiration of the most notable passages of its history.

The positive and constructive attitude has also been generally characteristic of the company of thinkers, representing many lands and the most diverse intellectual interests, who, on the footing that they might be ‘of any religion or of none,’ were summoned into council by the Gifford Trustees. It may be thought that there were some Gifford Lecturers who, like Simonides, found that the longer they meditated on the great question that had been proposed to them, the more obscure did it become; but that, unlike Simonides, who solved the difficulty in the end by begging to be relieved of his task, they evaded it by going on to discourse of other topics on which their opinion had not been expected. In general, however, it can be said that, even when they made no attempt to contribute to theological thought, the majority of the lecturers at least contributed materials that fall to be considered, interpreted, and utilised in any comprehensive system of Natural Theology. In an informing and judicious survey of the Gifford literature Professor Davidson has brought out the very wide range of the discussions, classified the books in accordance with their special subject-matter or aim, and expounded and examined the contributions of leading representatives of the principal types of Religious Philosophy. Premising that living thought cannot be strictly confined in compartments, he classifies the literature according to the following table:

A. Origin of the idea of God, and the growth of religious beliefs.

B. Philosophical development of religion.

1. Rationality of religion.

2. Religious philosophy among ancient peoples.

C. Philosophy and ultimate reality.

D. Philosophy and Theism.

1. With Theism as general theme.

2. Special aspects of Theism.

3. Theism and Science.6

Those who have dealt with the fundamental issues have been in general agreement in maintaining the spiritual or idealistic standpoint. The claims of Materialism have scarcely been thought to merit the compliment of a refutation. Naturalism and Agnosticism, though it had been proclaimed from the housetops that they were the culmination of the wisdom of this world, have so far found no advocate to attempt a reply to the trenchant indictment of Dr. James Ward. Dr. Lloyd Morgan, it is true, makes a profession of Naturalism, but it is very materially qualified by his attachment to the doctrine of Pan-psychism, and by his reservation of the right to utilise his highest categories in his speculations as to the nature of the Supreme Being whose power is manifest in the universe. Professor Alexander stands for the type of Agnosticism which mediates between Naturalism and Idealism. Deity exists, but it is essentially unknowable. All that can be said of its nature is that it is the nisus towards a divine quality which pervades and persists in the infinite world. This deity of a sort, in contrast with the eternal God, gradually comes into being as a product of time, and as it is always ‘the quality in front’ it falls from the rank of deity after it appears and knows itself.7 The great majority of the lecturers have stood on the common ground of a spiritual philosophy, but this is also the meeting-ground of diverse theological creeds—especially the theistic and the pantheistic—and different systems have been in evidence. The great majority have occupied and defended the theistic position. Those who adequately grappled with the great questions fell into two main groups—an Anglo-Hegelian and an Anglo-Kantian, which differ to some extent in their conception of the content of the idea of the Divine Being, and most distinctively in their view of the rational foundation on which religious faith ought to rest. One school believes in the Absolute who in a certain point of view may be called God, the other believes in God who in a certain point of view may be called the Absolute. One proves the existence of the Absolute on ontological lines supplemented by the modern argument based on the nature of knowledge and the contradictions of finitude. The other, notably represented by Professor Pringle-Pattison’s Idea of God, and Professor Sorley’s Moral Values and the Idea of God, varied and developed Kant’s moral argument, at the same time that it has guarded itself against being identified with a purely pragmatical mode of reasoning. In both schools the scheme of doctrine has shrunk to modest proportions as compared with the pre-Kantian systems of Natural Theology, in which Clarke and Wolf, after demonstrating the divine existence, proceeded to the systematic exposition of the being, the attributes and the works of God. Anglo-Hegelian Theology wavers between Theism and Pantheism, and any attempt to separate the contributions into the two classes would be precarious and controversial. For over a century it has been matter of debate whether Hegel was to be reckoned a theist or a pantheist, and the same ambiguity has continued to cling to the position of some of his most influential disciples. When Dr. Bosanquet compares the universe as it exists in the Absolute to the plot and the characters of the Divine Comedy as they lived in the mind of Dante, this would seem to imply that the Absolute has the theistic note of a true personal existence, inasmuch as the author of a poem is naturally credited with the self-consciousness which is the mark of personality; but when he goes on to declare emphatically that the Absolute cannot be credited with purpose, and by consequence cannot be a good or a loving will, he negates an element which is no less vital than self-consciousness to the conception of personality and to the theistic creed.8 The modern Pluralism which is chiefly associated with the name of William James has a theological side that has been a good deal discussed. In the Varieties of Religious Experience, however, James elected to devote himself to the investigation of the phenomena of religious experience; and though at the close he made a slight incursion into the transcendental realm, he did not use the occasion to develop his own ‘over-beliefs’ as to the nature of the powers of the spiritual world which, as he believed, make some response through the channel of the subconscious to the appeals of prayer.

I

The subject to be treated in these lectures is the material which has been contributed by the history of religion as the staple of a Philosophy of Religion. The view was expressed by Lord Gifford that Natural Theology, the Science of infinite being, should be ‘treated as a strictly natural Science, as astronomy or chemistry.’ It is obvious that Astronomy or Chemistry cannot be a perfect pattern, operating as they do with the methods, and fenced as they are by the limitations, of empirical Science. Natural Theology would on these terms be debarred from even essaying the transcendental task which is of its essence; and the meaning must be that a Religious Philosophy should take as its starting-point a body of observable and verifiable facts, and reach its conclusions through a rational manipulation of this material. The demand is reasonable, it is in fact one with which Rational Theology has generally sought to comply, and the only question has been as to what is the nature and range of the facts lying open to human observation which have most importance and significance as the starting-point of the theological inquest. The choice has lain between two realms or classes of facts—one supplied in the general constitution and course of things on our earth, and in the wider universe of which we have some cognisance, the other consisting of the distinctive class of historical and experiential facts which have been comprehended under the name of religion. There are two ways of forming a judgment about a historical person—one to examine his recorded deeds, and the consequences flowing from them, the other to collect the testimony of those who claimed to know him at first hand and to enjoy his friendship; and this may illustrate the two paths which have been followed by the investigating mind in its approach to God. One path is that taken by Philosophical Theology, which has fastened on certain aspects of the cosmos and of the being of man, and has interpreted them as vouching for the existence and elucidating the nature of the Supreme Being; while the Philosophy of Religion has chosen as its point of departure the experience in which mankind has cultivated communion with a Divine Being or Beings on the basis of definite ideas about their nature and powers, and has given evidence of the issue and the influence of the mystic enterprise in the cast and colour of the life of individuals and families and nations. Though particular thinkers have drawn on both classes of facts, and the two fields to some extent overlap, the distinction is real and substantial, and it is a question as to which procedure may claim priority and promises the richer results.

The method of Philosophical Theology, as has been said, has been to fasten upon certain features of our world which have an extraordinary character that excites wonder, and which are felt to point beyond themselves, and to ask to be interpreted us significant elements or aspects of a more majestic and harmonious whole. The phenomena which have thus Served as the stimuli of thought may be distinguished as general and special. An example of the impressive general phenomenon is the contingency or dependence of things—the circumstance that nothing in space and time can pretend to the status of self-supporting existence, but that everything, and very manifestly the human individual, owes its existence and its continuance in existence to the operation of a power or powers that is outside of itself and was anterior to itself. The grain of sand and the planet, the mountain and the solar system; plant, insect, reptile, bird, and beast; the human individual and the human race as a whole—each of these, following upon a time in which it was lot yet, found itself or was found to have emerged out of non-existence, and attained to the dignity of a cosmic fact amid an immensity of similar cosmic facts, at the same time that each was compelled to recognise itself as a humble product or event which came to be because something else had previously existed. But while the mind may easily accustom itself to the observation that every single object had a cause—finding it as conceivable as that one link of a suspended chain is supported by a superior link—when it was made to appear that this relation of dependency extends throughout an unending series, the whole became as mysterious as a chain of which each link should depend from that immediately above it, but which had no uppermost link that was made fast to anything. It is this bewildering observation which prepared a warm welcome for the idea of God as the First Cause. A kind red feature of the universe is that the objects with which it is stored interact with and influence one another. Commonplace as the fact is, it has when pondered been found to be one of the true marvels of the world, that individual beings, material and spiritual, possess powers which enable them to invade the sphere of other beings, and influence their condition and behaviour, at the same time that they in their turn are exposed to similar incursions which carry with them every possibility of benefit or injury, of pleasure or suffering, of perfection or destruction. The universe in fact is a sphere of intercourse in which not only do beings of the same kind sustain close relations with one another—made still more intimate in the case of man by the use of the mechanism of speech and by the interplay of the higher affections—but in which beings that represent very different modes of existence are to a large extent on visiting terms. This situation Lotze thought to be quite unintelligible and indeed impossible unless there also exists a Supreme Being to which all particular objects stand in a similar relation, which mediates their intercourse with one another, and which is clothed with at least some of the attributes that faith ascribes to God.9 Another impressive aspect of the universe is that it contains innumerable objects which represent an ascending scale of powers and excellences. In the earliest treatise bearing the title of Natural Theology, Raymond of Sabunde distinguished four classes of beings according to their different grades of dignity—those which merely exist, those which live as well as exist, those which are sentient as well as alive, and the human species which in addition is endowed with reason and will.10 When we trace the ascending scale, as manifested on our planet and culminating in man who, recapitulating the characteristics of the creatures beneath him, crowns them with his intellectual and moral powers, it is natural to suppose that the scale is continued upward to heights far exceeding the measure of the human equipment and achievement, and that it reaches a climax in the attributes and perfections of the infinite Spirit of whom and through whom are the varying degrees of perfection that appear in finite things.11 The deepest impression, however, has been made by the observation that the world, whatever be the welter of prodigality and confusion which lies on the surface, is nevertheless at bottom an orderly world in which things can be depended on to behave in ways that can be formulated as laws, and in which, both on the large and on the small scale, ends that commend themselves to man as good are achieved by means which are recognised as appropriate and effective. This is the basis of the teleological proof, described by Kant as ‘the oldest, the clearest and the most suited to the ordinary intelligence.’12

The wonderfulness of the world, in whose general arrangements man is thus involved, has seemed to him to culminate in the marvel of his own estate, and chiefly in his constitution, in which the spiritual blends with the material, and the animal is in the custody of reason and conscience. ‘Many things are uncanny,’ says Sophocles, ‘and none is more uncanny than man.’13 So it may still seem notwithstanding all that Science has made known concerning the immensities of space and time for the revision of human perspectives and the humbling of human pride. Man’s predicament may seem more uncanny than ever to the modern mind. ‘The writer of these lines,’ says Carlyle, has witnessed overhead the infinite deep, with greater and lesser lights, bright-rolling, silent-beaming, hurled forth by the hand of God; around him and under his feet the wonderfullest earth, with her winter snowstorms and her summer spice-airs, and unaccountablest of all himself standing there. He stood in the lapse of time, he saw eternity behind him and before him. Oak trees fell, young acorns sprang, man too, new sent from the unknown, of tiniest size, who waxed into stature, into strength of sinew, passionate fire and light; in other men the light was growing dim, the sinews all feeble; they sank motionless into ashes, into invisibility; returned back to the unknown. O brother, is that what thou callest prosaic; of small interest? Of small interest and for thee? Awake, poor troubled sleeper; shake off thy torpid nightmare-dream; look, see, behold it, the flame image, splendours high as heaven, terrors deep as hell, this is God’s creation, this is man’s life.’14

Man has been the incentive and the support of theological thinking because of two marvels—the wonder of his constitution and the wonder of his history. In meditating on his constitution attention has naturally been riveted on the endowment of reason, and it has usually been thought that the place it has in himself is a reflection of its status in the universe of being. When, further, the contents of the mind are examined there is found among them the idea of an Infinite Being, clothed with all possible perfections of power, wisdom and goodness, and the unique idea has been fastened on as in one way or another the evidence and the guarantee of the existence of the corresponding reality. In recent times it has been increasingly thought that even the royal intellectual endowment is a badge of lesser dignity than the moral nature of man, and that in his ethical life, illumined as it is by lofty ideals of which he acknowledges the authority even in his disloyalty and rebellion, we have our clearest glimpse of the spirit animating the power which underlies the life and movement of the world. Again, the story of the race has been felt to be a fragment which can be fitted into some greater epic, and which requires more for its explanation than the agents and the factors which have served for its secondary causes. Though there is in human history which would seem to be sheer profligacy, much which has the mark of failure and futility, while running through it all there is a deep vein of unspeakable tragedy, it is also incontestable that there is a sum of gains which make up a dazzling achievement of intellect and will, and also a more than respectable history of moral progress; and when it is considered how small is the extent to which the course of events was preceded by human design, and mighty things were accomplished by concerted human action, we may well have the impression that the drama has evolved according to the plan of a higher intelligence understood how to make use of all instruments, even of those which were unconscious, unwilling and hostile, for the gradual accomplishment of deep and vast designs. Thus at many points and in many ways the standing wonders of the order of things have invited and even compelled the venture of a religious view of existence, while they also make it seem probable that any doctrine of a commonplace stamp is false, and that the truth as to the ultimate nature and meaning of the world will turn out to be not less but more sublime than its most heroic metaphysic.

II

The second mode of procedure, as has been indicated, is to take as the starting-point the mass of facts which it has been agreed to group under the name of religion. These include the mythologies and the theologies which have embodied the results of religious thinking, and also the manifold activities of religious communities. They further include the data of subjective religion, or the content of religious experience, with its basis of faith, its accompaniment of varied emotional states, and its expression in ceremonial and moral obedience. And it is this realm of religious facts which would appear to have the strongest claim on the attention of the thinker who is in search of materials for a Theology. As the study of the history of human morals and manners is a prerequisite of the construction of an ethical system, as the study of the history of the Fine Arts is the presupposition of Æsthetics, so may it be confidently maintained that the investigation of the history of religion is the proper and indispensable preliminary to the construction of a system of religious truth. The ideas concerning God, and concerning man in his relations with God, which have emerged and taken root in the mind of the peoples and of religious communities, are entitled to be made the foundation of a discussion of the nature of the ultimate reality; and those ideas and provisions for which it can be reasonably claimed that they represent the highest reach of the apprehending mind in its conjunction with religious experience have a right of possession which is entitled to the fullest respect until and unless the ideas can be discredited by being shown to be self-contradictory, or inconsistent with better authenticated parts of an accepted system of coherent human knowledge.

It cannot, indeed, be said that in modern times there has been any lack of interest in the data of the religious sphere, nor on the other hand is there any novelty in the procedure which makes the religious data the basis of a scheme of Religious Philosophy. In truth, the investigation of the facts, historical and experimental, has been undertaken with extraordinary ardour—an ardour not more conspicuous in those to whom it was a labour of piety, than to others to whom it merely appealed as dealing with the most mysterious of the manifestations of the enigmatical spirit of man, or as furnishing an additional opportunity of testing the key of the evolutionary doctrine in the opening of old and obstinate locks. The outcome has been an enormous volume of literature in which a fourfold contribution may be distinguished—the preparatory labour in the collection and sifting of the data supplied by religions of all ages and of every degree of spiritual and intellectual rank, the systematisation of the materials and the classification of religions, the investigation of religion on the subjective side with a view to the construction of a Psychology of Religion, and finally the attempt to discharge the task of genetic explanation by giving an account of the originating cause and the primitive forms of religion, and also by specifying the factors by which, and the laws in accordance with which, the course of religious evolution has been guided. As to these vast labours it may be said in general that on the historical side a large addition has been made to the sum of man’s knowledge of man, and that in description, analysis and classification a notable addition has been made to the accurate and ordered stores of scientific knowledge; but that in the matter of causal explanation there are many ingenious conjectures and ill-supported hypotheses which have been propounded by a precipitate dogmatism and accepted by an unscientific credulity. It is, moreover, a misfortune that none of the acknowledged masters of the Science of Religion has felt it to be his vocation to put his hand to the task which is the sole justification of the immeasurable industry which has been expended on the details—the task, that is, of extracting from the historical data the materials which could serve as the foundation and furnish the staple of an all-embracing system of Religious Philosophy. The attempt to fulfil this crowning task was undertaken in a fashion by thinkers of the Christian Church who constructed systems of Religious Philosophy under the name of Systematic Theology, but who in the older period worked under the limitation that they neither had, nor desired to have, much knowledge of any religion save their own. The most influential and famous of the philosophical attempts to construct a system on the basis of religious history was made by Hegel, who had the merit of bringing the whole field within the sweep of his thought, but who wrote when the religions of the world were as yet imperfectly unveiled, and epitomised them in generalisations which in some cases show brilliant flashes of insight, but in some cases also are paradoxical misrepresentations. With Hegel may also be named Höffding, who in his important Philosophy of Religion embraced the whole religious field in his outlook, but whose work suffered from the fact that his knowledge of Christian Theology was impressionist, and that he had taken little pains to make acquaintance with any other religious systems save Brahmanism and Buddhism. The work of Pfleiderer and Flint had an exceptional interest owing to the fact that each had the threefold wealth of the historian, the Christian theologian, and the philosopher. There seems to be room for a contribution from any whose business it is to know more about Philosophy than is required for the labours of the anthropologist, and more about the history and the doctrines of Christianity than is commonly professed by the philosopher.

III

Regarded from the empirical point of view—as a synthesis of human faith, feeling, and endeavour, religion may well be thought to be the most extra-ordinary phenomenon that is encountered in the world of men. It is part of the penalty that it has paid for taking its place alongside of other social institutions, and becoming embodied in the routine of common life, that it needs an effort to realise how widely it differs in essential conditions from other concerns which engage human interest and stimulate human conduct. It has often been made a reproach to man by his religious monitors that he is a sensebound creature—held in bondage by the things that have colour and melody, sweetness and softness; and it would not have been surprising, in view of his bodily constitution, if the charge had been wholly justified; but there are facts of another order, and one is that he has believed in a being or beings whom he has not seen or heard or touched, has filled the earth with God’s houses or temples in which he has expected to meet with the unseen Lord in a peculiar intimacy, addresses to Him praises, confessions and petitions, offers gifts of various kinds, and believes that in return he receives blessings and guidance apportioned to his needs. There is nothing in the general life of the race which can be compared to the intrepidity, it may even be said the temerity, of the religious enterprise. It is no doubt true that audacity is the special note of human history—it is audacious enough that man, so inconspicuous in size, so short-lived, in some respects so ill-equipped, should have set himself to impose his yoke upon all other terrestrial creatures, impressed into his service the most powerful and also the most subtle of the forces of nature, and organised a kingdom of knowledge that extends from the cell and the atom to the illimitable spaces and the immeasurable objects of the stellar heavens; but even this undertaking may be thought to be eclipsed by the daring of the religious venture in which he has sought, not merely to penetrate to the deepest secrets of existence, and make the Infinite submit to the embrace of his finite mind, but to perfect his human weakness by linking it to divine omnipotence, and to defy death itself by seeking a refuge in the Eternal.

The religious relationship, it is further to be observed, has been valued and cultivated by mankind in general. There is in human nature an element of eccentricity or perversity, and even a capacity of believing a doctrine because it happens to be absurd, and this might have been deemed a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon if religion had only been met with in esoteric coteries of peculiar people, or in the realms of unsubdued barbarism and untutored ignorance; but whatever may prove to be its home and refuge in the future, it is undeniable that in the past and in the present it has been bound up with the interests and aspirations of mankind as a whole, and has been linked with the highest departments of the general life. It is of immemorial antiquity. However far we travel backward in historic ages we can discern the worshipper, the altar and the uplifted hands of prayer; and though the perspective has been indefinitely extended by the illumination of long tracts of prehistoric time, the vestiges show that in the neolithic, and probably also in the palæolithic age, there already existed ideas and practices of a character and complexion which justify the conclusion that man had religious dispositions as long as he has been identifiable as man. Persistent in time, it may also be and to have the notes of ubique et ab omnibus. No doubt there are and always have been irreligious individuals, but so also, as Hegel pointed out, has there always been a certain proportion of blind persons—not to speak of the small minority of human beings who seem to be destitute of moral sense, and the considerable minority for whom music is an unenjoyable pastime and a meaningless noise. It has been asserted that there are and have been tribes destitute of religion, but of late the assertion has been made with lessening confidence, since on a closer scrutiny it has commonly appeared either that the reporter had affirmed the non-existence of religion because he had found no ideas or practices which he deemed worthy of the hallowed name, or else that he had not been allowed to penetrate to the deepest secrets of the tribal life. Among highly civilised peoples religion shows a vast diversity of form and content, but it cannot be said that to be religious is a mark of age or of youth, of manhood or of womanhood, of wealth or of poverty, of intelligence or of stupidity, of learning or of ignorance. In modern societies it cuts across all natural and artificial distinctions; and if none of these distinctions can prevent a person becoming irreligious, neither does any of itself predestine him to unbelief or religious indifference.

Religion has also made a deep impression by its accompanying signs of power. That it is at least a power has been agreed, and the only question was whether it has been a power for good, or a power for evil. The indictment of Lucretius was that it had been the inspiration of innumerable and hideous crimes; the eighteenth century reproduced the accusation on the strength of what religion had done in Christian times to engender hatred, to organise persecution, and to provoke wars; and in our own time the doctrine has been disseminated, and has been acted on in Russia, that it is an opiate which hinders the social emancipation of the toiling multitudes. On the other side it has been contended with greater weight of evidence that it is an instrument by which some of the most difficult and most important work in the world has been done. It has been a potent factor in moulding the character of nations by the admixture of ideal and ethical elements with the natural endowment of selfishness and passion. It may be thought that the state of Europe to-day does little credit to the religious authorities that have been responsible for its tuition; but it is still true, as Troeltsch has observed, that there is a higher unity of the European peoples which consists in the possession of a common stock of elevated religious beliefs, sound moral principles, and healthy domestic and social customs, and for this it has been mainly indebted to the educative and leavening influence of organised religion extending through the Christian centuries. The character of the Scottish people has owed much more than it is willing to own to the indoctrination with the fear of God and a recognition of divine laws, which formed a useful counteractive to native tendencies that made somewhat strongly for sensuality and sordidness. Religion has also had no small success in the task of the formation of a good type of individual character, and in the remaking of evil character; while in its elemental strength it has proved capable of detaching the soul from all objects that human nature holds dear, and even disposing it to offer them joyfully as a sacrifice in the name of duty. It may sometimes appear as if this power were a thing of the past—the colossus being in the impotent and humiliating plight of the decrepit giants depicted in the Pilgrim’s Progress; and it is doubtless true that the interest formerly taken in religion has been diverted in considerable measure to Science, to humanitarian philanthropy and above all to political projects. But the most that can be affirmed on the basis of long views of history is that religion has been subject to the law of ebb and flow. In the late eighteenth century the cultured population of Edinburgh was classified as pagan and Christian, and thereafter it was so strongly apprehended by the Evangelical Revival as to forget that it had ever been anything but serious and orthodox—a fact which may be cited as evidence and symbol of the law of the recurring re-awakening and resurrection to which the religious spirit has been made subject.

It may also be confidently said that religion has enhanced the dignity of man. Lucretius saw nothing in worship but the pitiable spectacle of mortals grovelling before their gods; and it was a commonplace of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that priests had invented religion, and kings exploited it, as a means of keeping the peoples in a lucrative bondage of ignorance and fear. But the general effect, at least in Europe, has been to raise man to a higher plane. In teaching the human being to think of himself as made in the image of the Highest, and endowed with the privileges of the offspring and the redeemed of God, Christianity enriched human experience with a religious feeling of the aristocratic order, accompanied by a spirit of noblesse oblige, and it also inspired to heroic ventures, philanthropical and political, and even intellectual, in support of the lofty spiritual status. It is matter of observation that vital religion lifts the soul to a decidedly higher level than that on which the human life naturally runs its course. To follow a trade or carry on a business, and to be much in anxiety about income and expenditure, or much in hope about investments, to marry and beget children, and feel that there is no place like home, to take an interest in casual reading and in politics, to find pleasure in the society of one’s friends, and to fill up what is then lacking to happiness by the recreations of the leisure hour and the holiday, is a programme with which one may get through the allotted span quite reputably, but to which also an important addition of idealistic elements is made when a soul is awakened to the realisation of a spiritual world, and to the acknowledgment of its claims. To possess a satisfying view of existence as a whole, and of its first and final Cause, to make a spiritual valuation of human life, to be haunted by a vision of the divinely beautiful, to revere a moral ideal which towers above custom and convention and to aim at living up to it, to believe in the realisation of the summum bonum—these things, which seem to be a high cultural achievement when stated in scholastic language, have been attained by multitudes of commonplace people in every land upon whom an ethical religion, and notably the Christian religion, has laid its spell.

Finally, it may be observed, and the present course of lectures will be largely concerned with sustaining and developing the thesis, that religion has made a many-sided appeal to man, and has laid hold of human nature in the multiplicity and manifoldness of its interests and principles of action. Not only has the realm of God and divine things been accepted as equally real with the world of nature, but mankind has been stirred and moved by it, and has reacted to it, in the same characteristic ways. On a general view of human striving it appears that there arc five principal ways in which man has responded to the visible world which serves him for his dwelling-place and workshop, and to the objects with which it has been stored, enriched and beautified. First and chiefly, he has sought to use it or exploit it for the satisfaction of his wants, and the increase of his comfort and well-being; and to this end he has engaged in hunting and fishing, in the care of flocks and herds and the tillage of the soil, in mining and seafaring, in industry and commerce. Secondly, he has found that it threatened him at many points and in many ways with pain and damage and even destruction, and he has devised protective measures of many sorts—against the beasts, against the wasting forces of nature, against sickness and disease, against the rapacity and the cruelty of his own human kind. Thirdly, it became plain that there was a sense in which his world imperiously required him to obey it—that it had physical laws to which he must conform his behaviour if he was not to be injured and crushed, and that there were moral laws which visited upon the children of disobedience, it might be less palpable, but even graver and more lasting penalties. Fourthly, this same world was found by him to contain many things that are lovable—trees and flowers, rivers and mountains and the glories of the heavens, birds and animals of many species, especially those that seem to cling to him instinctively, and, above all, his human kinsfolk with the charmed circle of friendship, and of the home that is transfigured by the sanctities of the love of man and wife and of parent and child. And lastly, he has sought to understand his world—primarily, no doubt, that he might the more effectually benefit by it and defend himself against it; but also and increasingly because there was set in his heart the desire to know the nature, the behaviour and the causes of things—the harvest from the long-drawn labour being the hierarchy of the Sciences, which now far transcend the power of any finite mind to survey them in the whole scope of their achievements, and the succession of the Philosophies which have sought to grasp the totality of existence, and to penetrate to its ground.

And it is with the same breadth of interest, and in the same ways, that man has reacted to a higher realm of divine things—dimly as this has loomed upon him by comparison, and confused as have been his testimonies as to what he has found it to contain. In the famous attempts that have been made to define the deepest intention of religion man’s concern with it has usually been limited to a single aspect—theoretical, emotional or practical—but on a survey of the whole evidence it does not seem doubtful that God, or the world of the divine objects, has laid a spell on human nature in the entirety of its interests, and has summoned into action the whole range of its aspirations and capacities. As in the dealings with the world, the primary and most constant endeavour has been to possess God, and by possessing God to be assured of the attainment and retention of all that enters into the idea of a chief good. Along with this there has run through the history of religion the felt need for protection against the unseen powers—and that either because they are by their nature dangerous to the worshipper, or because they have been moved to wrath and threatenings by human neglect and transgression. Again, the world of the divine, equally with the visible world of nature, has been recognised as a realm of laws which insist on being reverenced and obeyed. Once more, man has encountered in his religion, and increasingly on the level of the higher faiths, divine objects which he could love, which he could not help loving, and which it was possible to go on to love with an all-consuming passion. And finally, the spiritual world has challenged the human being to endeavour to understand it. It has claimed his attention by making its power felt in the experience both of nations and of individuals, by laying on him the burden of mysteries which he could neither ignore nor explain, and also of problems which he felt he could aspire to solve. At this task of understanding and interpretation he has laboured through all known centuries, and never more unweariedly than during the last hundred years, when, even if faith has weakened as to what may be known of God and His ways, the mysteries of existence have not ceased to engender wonder and foster speculation, while curiosity has only deepened as to what man believed in the past that he knew about God, what he hoped to receive at the hand of God, and what he sought to do and to be as the condition of enjoying communion with God, of being assimilated to the divine life, and of attaining to immortality.

• 1.

  Sacred Books of the East, 1886, vol. xxv. chap. vi.

• 2.

  Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1838–42, vol. ii.; Tulloch, Theism, 1855; Caird, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1880; Flint, Theism, 1877, Anti-Theistic Theories, 1879, Agnosticism, 1903.

• 3.

  Treatise of Human Nature, etc. (Ed. Green and Grose), 1898, ii. p. 389.

• 4.

  Hume cites Pierre Huet as a learned Roman prelate who ‘reproduced all the cavils of the boldest and most determined Pyrrhonism.’ In the Demonstratio Evangelica, 1679, Huet observes that there are two avenues of knowledge—one, sense and reason, the other, faith, and that the way of reason is obscure, doubtful and unsafe, being blocked by infinite philosophical rubbish. But to say that a road was difficult and dangerous was not to say that it led nowhere. The Censura Philosofthtae Cartesianae, 1690, does not justify Hume’s extreme language. Huet’s main charge against Descartes was, not that he had confidence in reason, but that he reasoned badly.

• 5.

  The Development of Modern Philosophy, 1903.

• 6.

  Recent Theistic Discussion, 1921, Chap. vii.

• 7.

  Space, Time, and Deity, 1920, ii. pp. 341 ff.

• 8.

  Individuality and Destiny, 1912, pp. 391 ft.

• 9.

  Lotze, Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion (Eng. tr.), 1885, pp. 25 ff.

• 10.

  Theologia Naturalis, Venice, 1581.

• 11.

  Augustine, De Civitate Dei, viii. 6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. I. q. 2. 3.

• 12.

  Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Werke (Berl. Ausgabe), Bd. iii., 1904, p. 415.

• 13.

  Antigone, 1. 332.

• 14.

  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ‘The Diamond Necklace.’