Every religion which has been well received by man kind, and has won for itself lasting respect and influence, has claimed to be a vehicle of enlightenment, Its doctrine has been preserved in various ways—in an oral tradition, in a collection of sacred books, in the condensed form of a Creed or Confession, and in theological systems; while it has been propagated through the exercises of worship, by teaching and preaching, and by a multifarious dependent or secondary literature. And an immense amount of thinking has been done about divine things. The ordinary man has thought more about religion, at least until lately, than about any other subject not immediately connected with his occupation or with his domestic and social life. With the saints religious knowledge has usually been a deep and constant preoccupation, second only to the possession of the supreme blessing of union with God which it mirrored and promoted. The converts have also been deeply interested in the doctrines that were bound up with their experience; and the learned class of disciples has shown a tendency to concentrate upon the theoretical aspects of their religion, and to make the pursuit of divine knowledge a substitute for such weightier matters as the forgiveness of their sins, the sanctification of their souls, and the advancement of the Kingdom of God. The intellectual zeal of the disciple has been notable in all schools of religious thought—Brahmanist, Buddhist, Rabbinical, Mo-hammedan, and Christian, but it has its most imposing monument in Christian Theology, which during sixty generations has devoted immeasurable time and labour to the task of understanding, developing and defending the doctrinal inheritance. The dissemination of religious knowledge has also been undertaken with great diligence and perseverance. There have indeed been periods when even the Christian Church has ceased to think it necessary to impart much instruction to the members of its household—the needs of the case being supposed to be met by the administration of sacred rites, and by the submission of mind and will to the voice of ecclesiastical authority. But at least the great ages of Christianity have been marked by a passion for the propagation of the truth, both at home and broad; and the same has held good of Buddhism and Islam, which in their original programme shared with Christianity the insistence on the necessity of instruction, as well as the aggressive missionary note. During the nineteenth century, and as much as has passed of the twentieth, the propagation of Christian teaching has proceeded, in the face of hostility and indifference, on an extending scale, and with no appearance of waning confidence. In Great Britain on one day in every seven there are delivered tens of thousands of sermons and addresses in which it is sought to give some instruction concerning the realities and the powers of an invisible world, and the nature and provisions of salvation, accompanied by rules for the conduct of life which rest on this theoretical basis; while there have been sent forth other thousands of teachers by whom the same theological and ethical as are conveyed to the nations and tribes of every colour and tongue, and of every grade of barbarism and civilisation, which have excited compassion by reason of their ignorance of divine truth, and of the moral and physical evils which their ignorance has brought in its train. And in reflecting on this extraordinary activity it is natural to ask what are the qualifications that man has brought to the task of religious thinking which he has found to be so engrossing, and which he has believed to be of so tremendous importance.

To the modern philosophical schools it has seemed evident that before any attempt is made to set forth a system of truth an investigation should be held with a view to decide what the human mind is fitted to achieve. And this seems the obvious and sensible course. When a person forms a project of any kind—say to build a bridge, or write a novel, or reform his ways—the first question that we ask is whether it is desirable, and the second whether it is within his powers. In the speculative field this inquiry seemed the more necessary in view of the dissonance of the results that had been reached by the seekers after truth, and modern Philosophy therefore became primarily Epistemology. The powers and the scope of the intellectual instrument formed the central interest of the English School in the development from Locke to Hume; and the work was continued by Kant, who set himself ‘to determine the limits of the use of the understanding with a view to ascertain what lies within or without its sphere,’ and ‘whether certain questions are or are not within its horizon.’ Especially when the matter in question has been the existence, the attributes and the predicates of the invisible God, it has naturally been thought that it was a first duty to take stock of the equipment that man possesses for carrying out the enterprise, and that if it could be shown that the instrument is useless or inadequate, it was a dictate both of wisdom and duty to abandon the undertaking. On the other hand, there a familiar train of experience which may make us distrustful of antecedent estimates of human capacity. Common sense warns us not to attempt what is beyond us, but it also has the dictum that we do not know what we can do until we try. Individuals are constantly doing things, and doing them well, which those who Knew them best, including themselves, did not believe to be within their powers. Our forefathers were quite sure that it was impossible for man, unless his human powers were reinforced by calling in the black arts, to flash a message to the other side of the globe, and hear people speaking hundreds of miles away; and the question has been disposed of by the thing being done. Mistakes may be made in two ways as to the limits within which the human intellect can do effective work. The range of the powers which lie open to investigation may be underestimated. And there may be elements of the mental constitution, not immediately patent, which have co-operated with the conscious endeavours of the human subject to reach out and apprehend a world of divine reality. It must therefore be deemed a fortunate circumstance that in earlier times it was the practice of philosophers, as well as of prophets and apostles, to ignore the question of what the mind is fitted to achieve, and rather to make trial of what could be accomplished by attempting to use it. The world is certainly much richer, and doubtless also wiser, because the ancients cultivated Ontology rather than the Theory of Knowledge, and proceeded on the footing that if they proclaimed doctrines which could in some way be recognised and commended as truths, it was unnecessary to make trouble about the competency of the instrument.

In this chapter we shall take stock of the ordinary cognitive powers which have been employed in man’s intellectual relations with the religious objects, an thereafter we shall consider the manifestations of mental life which have been associated with the more intense and elevated forms of spiritual experience.

I

As a religious subject man has obviously applied himself to divine things with the full and undivided use of the recognised constituents of his mental life. His occupation with religion has involved cognition, feeling, and conation. He has had knowledge of God and divine things, he has felt about them, and they have been the object and the spring of aspirations and strivings. On the cognitive side every element has come into play that figures in the psychological inventory—sensation, perception, imagination, memory, and intellection. There has been a use for perception and even for sensation since the realm of the divine has included finite objects and events which reveal the presence and the power, or serve the uses of the Deity—as holy things, holy places, holy persons, and the events of sacred history. By far the most important branch of the intellectual labour, however, is that which has been concerned with the being, the attributes, and the works of God. This has been the business of thinking proper, involving understanding and reason, which Dr. Ward prefers to term intellection. Professor Stout declares his agreement with Brentano, who distinguished three different ways in which consciousness refers to an object—viz. presentation, when we are simply aware of an object as a content of consciousness; judgment or belief, when we affirm or deny the object; and Interest, when we have desire or aversion towards it.1 A good case can also be made out for giving a co-ordinate place to reasoning. Otherwise expressed, we may say that the doings of the intellect are four—by way of comprehension, by way of conviction, by way of appreciation and by way of ratiocination or argumentation. And when the intellect has been addressed to religious thinking it has naturally done its work in these characteristic ways.

1. (a) The comprehending mind, or the understanding, has manipulated the materials in its characteristic fashion. The data of the sacred realm have been laid hold of by the same methods as the data of other fields, and have been subjected to the same processes of noetic synthesis. Every system of theological ideas—the simplest as well as the most elaborate—is found to have been built up by the use of the categories of the understanding. It is true that the conviction has been repeatedly expressed from the religious side that we have no categories at our disposal, or at least none that are adequate, for the definition of the Divine Being; but in the case of the crudest as well as of the most etherealised faiths there has always been some theoretical material which it has been found possible and necessary to cast in the moulds of the comprehending mind. The theistic doctrine of God reveals an extensive use of the ideas or principles of the understanding which are enumerated in Kant’s scheme of the categories. The definition of the Divine Being as the infinite involves the use of the category of negation, by which it is denied that He is subject to limitations and defects. The affirmation that God is necessarily existent involves the use of a category of modality. In declaring that God is one the theist employs the category of unity, while the polytheist applies the category of plurality. The elements of the divine attributes, as was taught by the Scholastics, are on the one hand things which are known in experience—notably power, wisdom, goodness—and on the other principles of the understanding—notably the principles of eminency or absolute perfection, negation, and causality, by means of which we are enabled to rise to some apprehension of the divine perfections. The application to the Divine Being of the category of causality further yields the conception of God as the Creator, the Preserver, and the Governor of the world.

The forms of the understanding have necessarily been used to some extent by every type of the religious subject. The prophetic personality, whatever might be the range of his vision and the source of his experiences, had still to make use of the intellectual mechanism of human nature; and he had also, if his gospel was not to return unto him void, to address himself to the understanding of his fellow-men. The learned classes of the converts have conspicuously set them selves to satisfy the demands of the understanding. It is by them that Theology, as distinguished from religion, has been cultivated; and Theology, while it has remembered that it had a duty of edification, has on the whole been the creation of the kind of mind which is bent on the comprehension of thing. Christian Theology has largely done its work with the aim of satisfying intellectual aspirations, and has followed the same lines in which intellectual satisfaction has been sought in the investigation of other fields. It undertook to satisfy the demand for full knowledge—and this it did on the one hand by drawing out additional truths which were found to be implicit in the accepted deposit of doctrine, on the other by supplying explanations of momentous truths, such as the sinfulness and misery of man’s estate, or the great redemptive facts of the Incarnation and the Atonement. It further aimed at furnishing accurate knowledge; and this was accomplished by formulating the capital dogmas, and also the particular subordinate doctrines, with the highest degree of precision that Could be attained by the employment of scientific modes of thought and expression. The need was also felt for articulated knowledge, and the doctrines of very branch of the Church have been systematised by he use either of the synthetic or of the analytic principle of arrangement, and with careful consideration of the elation of each doctrine to the cognate articles, and to the system as a whole.

(b) Conviction or belief has shown peculiar features in the transactions of the mind with religious objects, and the need has been felt of some distinctive nomenclature. The affirmative judgment as to the reality of the objects has a special name in many languages, and is known in our tongue as faith. The negative judgment has been described by terms which, like scepticism and infidelity, have carried with them a suggestion of the gravity of the denial, and also of the popular disfavour with which it has been regarded. Yet while it has been agreed to give the name of faith to the affirming attitude of the religious subject, it has not been found easy to say wherein precisely faith differs from knowledge. The two are sometimes conceived as merely representing different degrees of certainty. When we know, some would say, we are sure; when we have faith we are not quite sure. But it is clearly not an essential of faith to be lacking in confidence: its characteristic utterance is not, ‘I think it likely,’ but rather, ‘I am persuaded.’ They have also been distinguished as concerned with different classes of objects: faith directed, it is said, to things unseen, knowledge to the things which are apprehended through the senses. But there are objects of faith which have been manifestations of God in the world of sense and time—e.g. the miracles and the resurrection of Christ; and there are matters of scientific knowledge—e.g. the atom, the electron, and the world-ether—which lie outside the range of sense-perception. They have been distinguished, again, by reference to the grounds on which the conviction rests, or on which the reality of the object is affirmed. Faith, it used to be held, depends on testimony, while knowledge is supported by first-hand observation or experience. But the spiritual man declares that his faith is verified by, and even that it is rooted in, his personal experience, and on the other hand by far the greater part of the knowledge which men are assured that they possess has been derived from the testimony of others. It has often been maintained that knowledge consists of propositions which can be proved, while faith dispenses with grounds and reasons—being essentially of the nature of an irrational venture. But faith always rests on some definable foundation, and there is one form of faith which consciously rests on a foundation of reasoning. Pratt has distinguished three leading types of faith—the servile faith, often called primitive credulity, whose reason for believing is that it is so required by authority and custom; the emotional faith which draws its strength from the field of vital feeling; and as a third type ‘intellectual or reasoned belief.’2 The most distinctive feature of faith seems to be the blending of a volitional element with the intellectual element. When the object of faith is a person the assent of the intellect, as was emphasised by the Reformers, deepens into trust. When the object is a truth, the true believer identifies himself with it in a special way, and maintains it with an emphasis similar to that which accompanies his guardianship of his other personal possessions.

(c) The appreciative attitude which is inspired by Interest or liking has been strongly fostered by the objects that are proposed to the mind by religion. In support of this observation it is sufficient to refer to what has already been said of the blessings promised in religion, and of the manifoldness of the instincts to which its appeal has been addressed. Since the most constant undertaking of religion has been to protect and advance the most vital interests of the individual and of the race, and since in addition it has made demands upon man in the name of duty, has shown him divine beings that claimed his love, and has stirred his curiosity, it is not surprising that the whole field should have been found to be full of interest, and that religious indifference should have been an exceptional and transitory phenomenon. There are other circumstances which have made it seem of special interest to particular classes: aesthetic natures have been attracted to religion as a realm of heavenly beauties and sublimities, and parents have valued it as the most effectual means in sight for forming the character of their children, and safeguarding them against the worst of the perils of the world.

(d) Finally, religion has afforded infinite scope for the reasoning processes of intellect. The religious mind has been an indefatigable reasoner. At the same time its reasoning has been mainly of the apologetic and polemical kind. It has followed the procedure of Logic, deductive and inductive, but its presupposition has been that its capital conclusions were antecedently certain, and its ratiocination has been largely directed to finding rational justification or corroboration for positions which were already occupied by faith. That religious reasoning is essentially apologetic is the necessary implication of the fact that it is conducted by persons who have faith. Belief, as Stout points out, involves a limitation of mental activity. ‘In so far as we are left free to think otherwise than we do think, belief is absent; in so far as it is present, the range of subjective selection is confined within definite limits.’3 A faith which was unlimitedly inquiring, and for which everything was an open question, would be as much of a contradiction as a circle which had the properties of a square. For the believing man there may be many open questions in the religious field, but to that extent his faith is put in suspense. The nature of the matters dealt with in religious thought makes it inevitable that the mind should be strongly disposed to apologetic reasoning, and that it should be influenced by what Ribot has called the logic of the sentiments. To demand in Theology the utterly disinterested thinking which has no prepossessions is to require what is known to be a psychological impossibility in other relations in which vital interests are at stake, or in which the affections are deeply engaged. A parent does not form a judicial opinion of the talents and the character of a child; the same holds in friendship; in politics the opinions of the majority seem to be dictated by a combination of interest and sentiment; while in the dealings and wranglings of the nations with one another it would be thought to be unnatural and indeed blameworthy if the judgment of a statesman on a question of culpability, and even on an economic situation, did not reflect his love of his country and his devotion to its interests. And the same influences have inevitably affected the reasoning, and made it apologetic in aim, when a human being has possessed in his God and Saviour an object that was beloved with a love comparable to that for wife or child, when he has believed that in his religion he enjoyed the firstfruits as well as the promise of a salvation which transcended any well-being that can be built up out of the goods of this world, and when a Church has taken its place along with his earthly fatherland in the deepest recesses of his heart. Nor does it follow that because such theological bias is inevitable, the outcome is necessarily misleading—that the logic of the sentiments is a euphemism for sophistical reasoning. It is a very tenable view that man is entitled to do reasoning on the assumption that the true interests of a being made in the image of God have been safeguarded both in time and in eternity, and that in its highest forms love has been given to man, not as a conspirator against reason, but as a forerunner which gives to it guidance and help in laying hold of the truths that are of vital importance for blessedness and destiny. At the same time it is only just to point out that the ratiocinative intellect has acted as a constant check upon the interested and emotional thinking to which faith is predisposed. Of this intellectual censorship two examples may be cited from the history of Christian Theology. In the early Christian centuries it was a widespread tenet that Jesus Christ was the same person as God the Father; but though this bold tenet seemed to promise greater security to the Christian salvation, and also to give greater glory to the Saviour, it was rejected by the Church on the rational grounds that it was inconsistent with the historical evidence, and that it involved insuperable speculative difficulties. In the post-Reformation period Protestant Theology affirmed the mechanical and plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, and this doctrine was commended by the fact that it effectually served the interests of Protestantism in its conflict with Rome, while it also paid the highest conceivable tribute to the sacred book; but the laborious investigations of Biblical scholarship made it appear that the doctrine was contrary to the evidence, and it has come to be generally agreed that, whatever polemical disadvantages it may entail, and whatever pain and concern it may give to devout souls, Theology has to content itself with a Word of God which is a treasure in earthen vessels, and for which absolute inerrancy cannot be claimed. Again, while the mind which has faith cannot but seek to justify its beliefs, an adjoining territory has always been recognised in which the inquiring intellect is entitled to liberty in the pursuit of knowledge. Modern Theology is acquiring all the freedom that can be expected in criticism and speculation unless we are to make the assumption that, abandoning all the presuppositions of faith, it should cease to be Theology and be merged in Philosophy and Science. And even then it would find that it was limited by postulates and expected to defend some foregone conclusions.

The intellect, then, has grappled with religion in its characteristic way, and the question is whether it has an equipment adequate to the task. According to the Empirical School of Philosophy there is nothing, and can be nothing, in the mind except the impressions that are received through the channels of sense, with the various combinations of these that are effected through the association of ideas; and in consistency therewith it has been held that man is debarred from the knowledge, even if such exist, of a supersensible realm. Kant repudiated this account of the genesis of knowledge, and made good the position that, while sense-experience is the occasion of mental activity, the most important contribution to the body of knowledge is that which is made by the mind itself in reacting to the impressions and organising the results. To this, however, Kant added that the competence of the understanding is confined to the phenomenal world, and that any knowledge of transcendental realities which it is supposed to give is illusory. ‘The understanding a priori,’ he says, ‘can never do more than anticipate the form of a possible experience, and since that which is not phenomenon cannot be the object of experience, it can never overstep the limits of sensibility within which alone objects are given. Its principles are merely principles for the exposition of phenomena, and the proud name of an ontology to which it presumes must give way to the modest name of an analytic of the pure understanding.’ When there is no empirical object or content, ‘there can be nothing but a play of the imagination, or the understanding with their respective presentations.’4 On these terms the reasoning by which Natural Theology has sought to rise to God is foredoomed to failure, inasmuch as it largely relies on the principle of causality which has no validity outside the world of space and time. And not only does this vitiate all reasoning which seems to reach God, but all theological thinking is deceptive, since every part of the theistic doctrine, as was seen, involves the use of a category. Though this criticism has been widely accepted as final, one may take courage to think that the reasoning is not entitled to the confidence which has been reposed in it. In substance, the critical argument is that the understanding employs its categories to do useful and necessary work in the phenomenal sphere, and that therefore they are not serviceable for work in the transcendental sphere. But surely this is not convincing. It has analogy against it, for it is written on the face of the story of human development that instruments and powers which were evolved for lower uses have turned out to be available in other and higher capacities. The human intelligence was primarily concerned with hunting, fishing, and fighting, but it turned out to have also a vocation in the pursuit of Science and the cultivation of Philosophy. The human tongue was doubtless evolved to give guidance, protection, and pleasure in the business of eating and drinking, but later on it proved to be capable of serving as the instrument of intelligent speech and of swaying the mind of crowds and nations. In similar fashion the sexual instinct, which came into existence to ensure the propagation of the species under conditions that ensure variety as well as continuity, became the foundation of the virtues and the sanctities of the home, and also of the passion in which the poet and the novelist have found the chiefest examples of romantic and self-sacrificing devotion. And similarly it must be thought not only possible but probable that man, while primarily possessing the categories of the understanding to enable him to take intellectual possession of the objects and forces of the natural world, has found that they could be used to establish similar relations with a world of supersensible realities. The Kantian objection falls to the ground if it can be shown that in any one case the mind has broken through the screen of mere appearance. This seems to have been done in the important matter of knowing our self, which, according to Kant, is, equally with God, beyond the reach of the understanding. And the assertion that God cannot be known because of the limitations of our faculties is directly challenged by the religious conviction that as a matter of fact man knows God even as he is known of God. It is inconceivable that Isaiah or Paul, even if they could have studied the Critique of Pure Reason, would have admitted that they had been mistaken in supposing that their faculties could reach so far as the Divine Being, and could know His purposes of judgment and mercy. And not less may ordinary people think it unreasonable that they should be asked on antecedent grounds to distrust and abandon ideas about the Divine Being of whose truth they feel deeply convinced, and which after being tested in their experience of success and failure, joy and sorrow, and all the mingled glory and terror of human existence, still seem to them to be entirely credible, and even more credible than before they were thus drastically put to the proof.

2. The religious mind, while it has been bent on understanding things, has also made large use of the imagination. This has been exemplified in general by its preference for concrete as distinguished from abstract conceptions. Though its interest centres in a world of super-sensible realities, it has been impelled to do its thinking in terms of a world replete with shape, colour and movement. It prefers the image or the Anschauung, as Hegel puts it, to the notion or the Begriff; and even when its thinking has been most earnest and profound it has been disposed to avail itself of the imaginative forms. This predilection for concrete conceptions has been common to the lower and the higher types of the religious subject. The strength of heathenism has lain largely in the fascination exercised by the idol and the sacrifice, which give the divine a manifestation and a footing in the world of sensible realities. It is a familiar theme of apologetics that Christianity made the perfect provision for the satisfaction of a universally felt need when ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.’ When the event of the divine life on earth grew remote in time as well as in space, Roman Catholicism made a further provision for bringing the divine object within the sphere of the seen and temporal by the use of the image and the crucifix, and especially by the sacred rite which it interprets as a repetition of the Incarnation and of the sacrifice that was offered on Calvary. Protestantism condemned images, but found it was impossible to dispense with their mental equivalents; and the great evangelical doctrines became popular in the form in which redemption was thought of in terms of the Cross and of the sacrificial blood, and the Christ enthroned in bodily form was worshipped as God. Preachers expound and argue, Vinet declared, because they cannot narrate, or at least because they have not imitated the method of the God of the Christian Revelation who, knowing what is in man, gave the gospel to the world in the form of a history. Nor may it be said that religious thinking ceases to be profound when it is concrete. Plato took for granted that poetry was the proper vehicle in which to discourse of God and divine things: he thought that the choice lay between the hymn, the epic, and the drama, and he himself laid aside his dialectic for the mythos when he touched on the deeper problems of existence and destiny. The saints have as a rule had the imaginative cast of mind. The mystics have commended an ideal of self-emptying which involved the purgation of the mind from sensuous representations of every kind, and its reduction to a condition of utter darkness and silence, but normally they thought and wrote as belonging to the intellectual order of the poets. The poetic way of thinking has also been characteristic of the founders and the chief apostles of the ethical religions. When the prophetic personality has been apprehended by a vision of God, and by a lofty ideal of piety and virtue, it would appear as if, owing to some mystic affinity between truth and beauty, he was at the same time put in command of the aesthetic power which enabled him both to embody his message in worthy form, and to bespeak for it an abundant entrance into the popular mind and heart. Certain at least it is that the religious genius has commonly been associated with the literary genius which found for ideas the arresting and memorable form. The sacred literature of India contains many a poetic gem. The Koran contains not a few passages of signal vividness and sublimity. The Bible, and especially the teaching of Jesus, is a striking illustration of the law under which the beautiful and effective form has been put at the disposal of the divine message, and it is noteworthy that, in the case of the English Bible, the virtue of the contents has been able to ensure even to a translation the form of a literary classic of supreme rank.

Religious thought has borne in a marked degree the stamp of the creative imagination. Each of the great religions has supplied a picture of the universe, and its principalities and powers, and also a conception of the condition, the origin and the destiny of man, which have the character of an impressive dramatic construction. The collective mind of the natural community showed imaginative powers of a high order in the development of the myths and cosmogonies of the polytheistic stage. The Olympian gods of Greece came under censure before the moral tribunal, but they have held their place as remarkable aesthetic creations. The Scandinavian mythology—with its universe made up of Asgard, Midgard and Uitgard, and bound together by the oak Igdrasil, the girdle of the ocean-stream and the bridge Bifrost, with its wonderful character-sketches of the mighty but boyish Thor, the enigmatical Loki and Balder the beautiful, and above all with its conception of the cosmic drama that issued in Armageddon, the twilight of the gods, and the coming of a better world—this may well be thought to have been the work of a mind that had a good share of the genius that was dispensed to Dante and Milton. When Polytheism was dispossessed by higher religions its vision of the universe was replaced by others which, while they penetrated further into eternity and infinity, and had far greater intellectual and moral depth, had still an imaginative aspect. The Christian scheme of existence, salvation and destiny is entitled, apart from the sovereign question of truth, to rank as supreme among the poems that have been composed on the greatest of all known themes—the drama of cosmical and terrestrial existence, and the place of mankind in the story.

II

There has been a widespread impression, which has been formulated in many different ways, that the natural equipment which man possesses for religious thinking includes some exceptional powers and capacities. We have already referred to one form in which this has been recognised—viz., the theory of a religious instinct. On the cognitive side, it has been held, the religious instinct involves at the least a haunting sense of the existence, and also the rich promise, of a world of divine reality. And religious experience is closely bound up with the sense of the presence of a Divine Being. This conviction is witnessed to by the very existence of the temple or house of God, which has been generally revered as the place in which the worshipper meets with God, or in which he is conscious of a peculiar presence and nearness. It was observed by Kant as well as by Chalmers, that the sense of a divine presence is commonly associated with the deepest experiences of the moral life: there is a consciousness of a Lawgiver behind the law, the temptation is accompanied by the feeling, ‘Thou God seest me,’ and in the mood of penitence the characteristic self-reproach is, not so much that the sinner has done what he ought not to have done, as that he has offended and grieved a holy and loving God. The spiritual experiences of conversion and sanctification are associated with the conviction that God approaches and dwells in the soul by a special presence and power.

The existence of an exceptional factor in religious thinking has been asserted in the form that man is in possession of an innate idea of God. ‘The presumption that God exists,’ says Calvin, ‘inheres tenaciously in the bowels of us all,’ and he accounts for it by the fact that ‘the human mind has been naturally endowed with a knowledge of God.’5 The doctrine was also a commonplace of the older philosophical schools. The theory was rejected by Locke—mainly on the ground that men entertain conflicting ideas about the Divine Being, and since Locke it has been generally admitted that there is no inherited stock of theological ideas.6 Yet the principle of the theory has continued to be maintained in other settings. It was held by members of the Scottish School that man has an immediate apprehension or intuition of God, or at least that when the doctrine is explained to him it strikes him with the force of self-evidencing truth. The operation of a special principle may be said to have been recognised by Kant in his description of the idea of God as a necessary idea of reason. The idea was not, in his view, innate in the sense that it is found ready-made in the mind, but at least it was an idea which reason could not but bring forth when it got to work upon its data, and thought things out in accordance with its governing principles. It is true that Kant, after describing the steps by which reason reaches the idea of God, declared that it had made use of fallacious argument and illegitimate personification 3—from which it would appear that the work which man’s noble instrument is compelled to do, and on which it does its best, is done badly. But this must be thought unlikely.

A religious factor of the intellectual life has also been recognised in the theory of a special religious sense. This theory has had wide currency in a vague popular form, and in a developed form it has recently had a remarkable vogue in Germany, owing to the influential advocacy of Troeltsch and Otto, under the more imposing name of the doctrine of the religious Apriori.7 The Apriori, it is explained, is understood in the wider, not the more specific sense, in which it was affirmed by Kant. ‘In the ethical, the religious, and the teleologico-aesthetic reason,’ says Troeltsch, ‘Kant recognises an Apriori, which in that case naturally signifies, not the synthetic unifying function of scientific comprehension, but the way of judging and regarding the actual under ethical, religious and teleologico-aesthetic points of view, which is a necessity for reason and proceeds in accordance with its own laws.’8 And it is this general conception which has been revived and elaborated in its religious bearings. There is, it is explained, ‘a rational kernel (Vernunftkern), lying behind the stream of the psychical experiences and of their connections, which radiates the Aprioris’9 and it is through this radiation that we are disposed and enabled to discover values in the realm of empirical facts, and to affirm their validity against all criticism and gainsaying. Had man not possessed in his constitution the element of the religious Apriori he would no more have been able to compound religion out of his sense-impressions than he is able to transmute the baser metals into gold or to manufacture something out of nothing; and it is because he still possesses this power that he may hope to seek to disengage real and abiding spiritual values from the flux and the mutations of history. Otto has attempted to define more precisely the nature of the religious Apriori, and to estimate the special contribution which it has made and continues to make at the basis of religious thinking. There is a religious category—that of the holy or the numinous—which is equally rooted in the human constitution with the ethical and the aesthetic categories. It contains rational elements such as necessity, perfection, goodness, as well as mysterious elements which are only realised in confused feeling, and cannot be embraced by the categories of the understanding. But in respect of both moments it is a purely a priori category. ‘The numinous breaks forth out of the deepest ground of the soul itself—certainly not before, and not without mundane and sensuous circumstances and experiences, but within these and among these. The convictions and feelings are different in kind from anything that can be yielded by natural sense-perception. They are not sense-perceptions, but in the first place peculiar interpretations and valuations of sensuous data, and in the second place affirmations of objects and beings which do not belong to the world, but which in thought are added to it or placed over it. And so they point back to a secret and independent source of ideas and feelings—to a pure reason in the deepest sense of the word, which, because of the overwhelming wealth of its content, is to be distinguished as something higher and deeper than Kant’s practical reason.’10

The doctrine of a religious sense has persisted because there are peculiar facts connected with the religious mind and its working which obstinately continue to force themselves on the attention. The point which seems to me to be best established is that man has a religious instinct which in its cognitive aspect is an awareness of the existence of the divine, and in its conative aspect is a Godward impulse, involving a sense of control by the divine. It also seems to be a just observation that he has a capacity for recognising the divine, which he marks off by a distinct category as belonging to the sacred sphere. The awareness of the realm of the divine, further, becomes more definite in religious experience in the sense of the presence of God, which can be deepened into a sense of intimate communion. The question is whether these things represent an integral element or elements of the human constitution, and are not adequately accounted for by early education and discipline. No doubt the impressions of childhood count for much, while every element that has been referred to, and especially the sense of the presence of God, can be cultivated and brought to a much higher pitch. But even if it were true that the individual owed to education the direction given to his sense of reverence, the question would still remain why the family, the religious group, and the national community had thought it necessary to provide such a training, and in the last resort we seem to come back to a constraint that has its source in the depths of human nature.

There is also evidence of an intellectual capacity of a more general kind which has made its influence felt in the processes of religious thought. The mind seems to experience a peculiar satisfaction when it discovers or takes over ideas that are in accord with momentous reality, and on the other hand it seems to be plagued by a certain uncomfortable restlessness when it is wedded to ideas that seriously misfit the scheme of things. Truth, we say, will prevail, but the reason may well be, not merely that in the long run the force of good arguments is recognised and the weakness of bad ones is exposed, but that the mind has a certain intrinsic power of confirmation, and that it receives some kind of corroborative notice when truth has been discovered or appropriated. And this sense of reality or the corroborative sense, it would seem, is peculiarly active when the mind is in contact with God. It is characteristic of religious opinion that it is held with great tenacity, and that when associated with an intense experience the truth which has been apprehended has been welcomed by the mind with a cordiality that has seemed to render other proof superfluous. It was on the ground of this observation that Tertullian described the human soul as naturaliter Christiana, and the Reformers were content to rest the truth of the gospel on an inwardly wrought conviction which was felt to be so deep-rooted and inexpugnable that it was interpreted as a psychological miracle, and was given an important place in the theological system as the testimonium Spiritus Sancti.

III

The powers and capacities which have been referred to are naturally found in all degrees and combinations. Man as man has usually exhibited the servile or mechanical type of faith, reinforced by the impulse of the religious instinct, while on occasion he has broken with it under the influence of what used to be called the vulgar Rationalism. In the primary religious periods the faith of the disciples has been closely bound up with personal experience, while in the second periods, when the convert has been in the main the product of education and discipline, he has tended to base his faith on rational grounds. And the latent intellectual elements have manifested themselves in general correspondence with the depth and intensity of the spiritual life. The most important combinations are those which are met with among the highest members of the spiritual hierarchy, who have been denominated the saints. It was a necessity of the case, as was observed, that religious thinking involved the use of the understanding; and it has to be added that most, if not all, of the great figures of religious history have had a clear title to intellectual greatness. There are, however, features of the intellectual life of the saints which have involved a certain disparagement of the understanding. For one thing, they have often declared that there were experiences, and objects implicated in their experience, for which the understanding provided no categories, and which must be classed as ineffable. Further, they have made little use of the reasoning powers in their own intellectual dealings with God and divine things; for though they could be much in argument for the confutation of unbelievers and the confirmation of believers, they themselves seemed to apprehend the doctrines which made up the intellectual substance of their gospel in purely intuitive fashion. It is they, again, who have borne the clearest and most emphatic testimony to the existence and the influence of the latent intellectual elements of the religious mind. It is the saintly mind which has most strongly asserted the corroborative witness of the spirit to the truth, as in the declaration that ‘though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach any gospel other than that which we preached, let him be anathema’ (Gal. i. 8). And, finally, they have witnessed to modes of contact with the divine in which the intellectual attitude was essentially passive and receptive, and they obtained knowledge which the intellect was able to appreciate but which it was beyond its power to have discovered.

These last extraordinary experiences have their familiar illustrations in the history of Israel and of the Apostolic Age, and Christian Theology has embodied and interpreted them in the doctrines of revelation and inspiration. In popular usage these terms are used indifferently or interchangeably for a divine act by which truths previously unknown have been communicated to a receptive mind. The distinction drawn in the old Protestant Theology was that revelation is the act by which God made divine truth to be known, inspiration the act by which He ensured that it would be accurately recorded. ‘Revelation,’ says Hodge, ‘made a man wiser, inspiration secured him against error in teaching.’11 The relation of the two terms has been better defined, following Rothe, by taking revelation in the general sense of self-disclosure of God, in which we may distinguish two parts—the manifestation of the divine in the events of history, and especially in the sacred history culminating in the life and work of Christ, and the inspiration which enabled prophetic man to interpret the meaning of the manifestations, and to place the substance on record for the benefit of future generations. Psychology has reinvestigated the extraordinary experiences of the kind which are associated with Christianity, collected parallels from other religions as well as from other departments of human life, and proposed to explain them by elements and laws of the human constitution. Professor Coe has analysed the phenomena into four classes:—(1) visions and voices; (2) impressions that something is true; (3) involuntary muscular reactions that give the impression of being controlled by a will other than one’s own; (4) inner revelations of a more general or vague kind.12 Oesterreich has given a more detailed scheme which may be exhibited as follows in tabular form:

A.—Modes of Manifestation.

1. Presentation to the senses—

(a) to the eye—Visions proper, which may be discerned by the outward eye (objective visions), or by the inward eye (imaginative visions).

(b) to the ear—Auditions or voices, which similarly may be addressed to the outward or to the inward ear.

2. Presentation to the understanding—intellectual visions.

B.—Modes of Control.

1. Of the organs of speech—inspired speaking.

2. Of the hand—inspired writing.

3. Of the intellect—inspired thinking.

C.—The mystical union—the inward revelation to the soul.13

A.—1. The sensuous manifestations have been of two kinds, according to the degree of objectivity which they were felt to possess. Sometimes they have been seen and heard in precisely the same way as the sights and sounds which announce the existence of the objects and events of the external world. At other times they have been said to be seen by the inward eye or heard by the inward ear, while yet a kind of reality was ascribed to them other than that which we ascribe to a stream of memory-images or the contents of a reverie. The scene in which a vision was laid could be near or far off, and the time to which it related could be the past, the present, or the future. Visions and voices fill a considerable space in the records of the experiences of the founders and apostles of the great religions. The Temptation of Buddha was depicted as an assault by Mara and his wicked angels, who, it was told, ‘sought to overwhelm him with showers of rocks and darts, which, however, ere they reached him, turned into flowers.’14 When Mohammed was wrestling in the wilderness with his doubts and fears, the angel Gabriel appeared to him in what he believed to be bodily form, and spoke to him with a voice that was as audible as the voice of a man. ‘Mohammed erreth not,’ he said, ‘neither doth he speak of his own will. One mighty in power (the angel Gabriel) taught it him, and he appeared in the highest part of the horizon. Afterwards he approached the prophet, and drew near unto him, until he was at the distance of two bow-lengths from him; and he revealed unto his servant that which he revealed.’15 The subjective vision may be represented by the night journey through the seven heavens, when he again had a vision of the angel. ‘He also saw him another time by the lote-tree which there is on passing, near it is the garden of the eternal abode. When the lote-tree covered that which it covered, his eyesight turned not aside, and he beheld some of the greatest signs of his Lord.’16 He distinguished between the outer and the inner voices. ‘Sometimes Gabriel communicateth the revelation to me, as one man to another, and this is easy. At other times it is like the ringing of a bell, penetrating my very heart and rending me, and this it is which grievously afflicteth me.’ These last were ‘the terrific Suras’ which had ‘hastened his white hairs.’17 The call came to Moses in the vision of the burning bush, and in the account of the revelations of Sinai there is mention of the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words. The Old Testament prophets were known as seers, the men of visions; and their characteristic claim was that the voice of God sounded in their ears—inwardly no doubt, for the most part, but at times also as addressed to the outward ear. Isaiah did much observation, reflection and inference in his capacity of the statesman-prophet, but he records that his call and his message came to him with the vision of the Almighty sitting on His throne, high and lifted up in the midst of the Cherubim, and by a voice which spake to him out of the most excellent glory (vi. i ff.). The Gospels relate that Jesus at His baptism beheld a vision and heard voices, that this was repeated in the Temptation and on the Mount of Transfiguration, and that, as in the Temptation so in the growing darkness of the last days, He was comforted by a ministry of angels (Matt. iv. 11; Luke xxii. 43). The martyred Stephen had a vision of Christ as if rising from His throne to show him sympathy and hasten to his succour (Acts vii. 55). Paul, the representative of learning and dialectic among the apostles, owed his faith and the substance of his gospel to the vision which apprehended him on the way to Damascus.

2. The experience which Oesterreich construes as a manifestation to the intellect, and which he calls the intellectual vision, is rather to be regarded as a quasi-sensuous presentation akin to the manifestations to the eye and the ear. The essential content of the experiences by which he illustrates it is the sense of a divine presence, and the salient feature is that the divine object, though felt to be present, is not seen or heard. He illustrates it from the confessions of St. Theresa: ‘I felt, for I saw nothing either with the eyes of the body or of the soul, but it seemed that Christ stood beside me, and I perceived that it was He who spake with me. I could not sec His form, and yet I had the utmost assurance that all the time He was at my right hand, and the witness of all that I did or left undone. Asked how I knew it was Christ the Lord, I replied that I understood not “how,” but I could not but observe that He stood by me.’18 This experience may be connected with the sense of touch, which has a subjective form that is the counterpart of the perceptions of the inward eye and of the apprehensions of the inward ear. The name of the intellectual vision is better reserved for the presentations to the intellect which are made in connection with the experiences of illumination or inspired thinking.

B.—1. The forms of control which have been enumerated have been made the basis of theological doctrines, and it is agreed by Psychology that they are at least mental facts. There is a species of utterance which may be described in a general way as inspired, inasmuch as the speaker transcends the range of his wonted powers, or delivers a message which seems to have been given to him, and which he does not recognise as his own achievement. Inspired speaking has been a common phenomenon in the Christian Church and in other religious communities, in the form of the rapt utterance, and it has also occurred with some persistency in the special form of speaking with tongues. The commonest type of glossolalia is the ecstatic and incoherent outpouring of the tumultuous soul which St. Paul found in the Church at Corinth, and which he declared to be of little worth in comparison with knowledge, not to speak of charity (1 Cor. xiii.). But it is not so certain as is commonly assumed that the account in Acts of the speaking with tongues at Pentecost, in which it is made to appear that men spoke in foreign languages, is shown to be mistaken by St. Paul’s report of the phenomenon in the Corinthian Church. There are examples from other fields of persons who made use in highly emotional moments of languages which they were unaware that they knew, and also of an apparent language which it was found impossible to identify.

2. Inspired writing has been asserted in two forms. Sometimes the account given of it is that a revelation had been received in the form of a vision, an audition, or an intellectual illumination, and that the recipient thereafter set down the communications as he was able. At other times the writer has felt that he was used as an amanuensis, or even that his hand was mechanically guided. Theology, in framing a doctrine of inspiration, has been disposed to dogmatise in terms of one or other of those experiences. Some of the Fathers held that the biblical writers were as a flute in the hands of the flute-player; and it was the doctrine of the old Protestant school that they had received by inspiration, not only the impulse to write and the suggestion of the matter, but the ipsissima verba of the narrative or the discourse. The modern theologian, on the other hand, conceives that ‘the prophet, the psalmist and the apostle are degraded if they are regarded as the mere mouthpieces or penmen of Deity, and that inspiration does not suspend the powers and faculties of the soul, but raises them to their highest activity.’19 The objective verdict is that there is evidence in the Scriptures as in other religions that writing can be done with the impression either of mechanical or of dynamical control, but that in the Bible the claim of automatic writing is scarcely ever made.

3. Inspired thinking is the form in which the saintly and prophetic personalities have most constantly and characteristically been conscious of intellectual control by the powers of a higher world. The experience has commonly consisted in an extraordinary illumination in regard to the important truths of existence and of human life, accompanied by a feeling of inexpugnable certitude. The enlightenment of Buddha stood out as the decisive event of his spiritual history, though with his dogmatic presupposition he was debarred from explaining it as a real revelation. The blessed One sat at the foot of the Bodhi-tree, we are told, during seven days, enjoying the bliss of emancipation. ‘Then at the end of these days in the first night-watch he gained a knowledge of all his previous existences, in the second of all present states of being, in the third of the chain of causes and effects, and at the dawn of day he knew all things.’20 The central thing in the intellectual life of Mohammed was, not the occasional communings with the angel, but an apprehension of the world and of duty in the light of the Lord. With the Old Testament prophets the visions and the voices were exceptional, and could become a mere literary form: the constant and dominating characteristic was that they had experienced a mental illumination which gave them an understanding of the nature and the purposes of God, the requirements of His law, the principles of His government, His discipline of the nations, and the appointed goal which was to be reached through His mingled dispensations of judgment and mercy. Among the New Testament writers St. Paul is an impressive witness to the comprehensiveness, clearness, and certitude of the revelation vouchsafed to a prophetic intellect. He found himself in possession of a highly elaborate scheme of thought which embraced a doctrine of God and man, of the person and work of Christ, of the conditions of salvation, and of things to come; and his account of it was that neither did he receive it of man, nor was he taught it, but it came to him through revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. i. 12). Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, God had revealed to him through the Spirit (1 Cor. ii. 9). The mystics speak of an intellectual experience marked by an amazing widening of the horizon, and also by an amazing quickening of the power of apprehension. The founder of the Order of the Jesuits was a very different person from the founder of the sect of the Quakers, but the illumination of Ignatius Loyola closely resembled ‘the openings of George Fox.’ Loyola relates that one day, as he sat beside a stream, his eyes were opened, and though he saw no vision, he understood many spiritual things such as belong to the mysteries of faith and science. ‘His spirit,’ he says, ‘enjoyed an extraordinary enlightenment, so that all the knowledge taken together which, by the help of God, he had gained down to his sixty-second year, was not equal to that which was brought to him in these few moments. It was as if he had become another being and had received a totally different intellect.’21 ‘Now was I come up in spirit,’ writes Fox, ‘through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. The creation was opened to me, and it was shown me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue. The Lord showed me that such as were faithful to Him, in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell, in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof, may be known, through the openings of that divine Word of wisdom and power by which they were made. Great things did the Lord lead me unto, and wonderful depths were opened to me beyond what can by words be declared.’22

C.—The mystical experience, with which we shall be more directly concerned in another connection, may be regarded as the culmination of the series. In it there is a consciousness of something wider and deeper than the communication of knowledge to the mind—to wit, the self-impartation of God Himself to the soul. This experience of union with God may be said to be the highest form of revelation as combining the way of manifestation with the way of control. It represents the highest form of the manifestation of God to the soul, and at the same time the highest form of the control of the soul by God.

The extraordinary phenomena with which religious thinking has thus been bound up, especially in the periods of origins, reformations and revivals, has produced very varying impressions at different times and in different circles. The popular mind has looked on them as quite unique experiences, and has seen in them the hall-mark of the supernatural which invested the communications with heavenly authority. The report from the side of modern Psychology is that they have not been confined to the religious sphere, but are met with in many secular situations marked by emotional excitement;23 and since most of the parallel cases command no respect, being bound up with manifest hallucinations and illusions, the inference has been drawn that instead of lending any support to religious teaching they rather lay it open to suspicion and involve it in discredit. And certainly visions and voices, and the abnormal forms of control, are not of themselves evidences of divine influence and enlightenment. For patristic and medieval Theology it was always an open question, that fell to be settled by higher tests, as to whether the abnormal phenomena were due to divine or to diabolic agency. Modern Theology has not dreamed of basing the truth of Christianity on the fact that the Old Testament prophets sometimes prophesied in an ecstasy, that at Pentecost men spake with tongues, and that St. Paul testified of being caught up into the third heaven, but has regarded these as incidents of a revelation, the reality of which fell to be tested on spiritual and rational grounds. At the most the visions, the auditions, and the kindred phenomena are evidence of the fact that in the deeper religious experiences the soul is stirred to its depths, and is so shaken that it can act after the manner of the disordered or the sorely afflicted soul. And this is only what was to be expected if it may be supposed that a revelation could be given and received—that the finite spirit could come into immediate contact with the living God, and that divine truths should be suddenly flashed on the mind in their native majesty and splendour. The extraordinary experiences have a close affinity with the elements and tendencies which we have recognised as playing some part in ordinary religious thinking, and may be said to show on the whole a quickening and an intensification of these capacities. The manifestation given in the dim awareness that is involved in the religious instinct acquired a concrete definiteness in the sights and sounds of the sensuous presentations. The control exercised in the Godward impulse of the religious instinct, and also in the mind’s sense of truth, was intensified into inspired speaking and writing, and reached its climax in inspired thinking. And finally the sense of the near presence of God, which is an element even of commonplace experience, was raised to its highest power in the mystical experience of union with God.

Of the extraordinary phenomena the most important in the present point of view is the revelation to the comprehending mind which may be called the intuitive vision. The prophetic personality might or might not have at his service the mechanism of visions and auditions, and there have been many degrees as well as many kinds of the experience of control: what was typical and constant was the apprehension of a clearly defined world of spiritual reality, with its threatenings that were gathered up into a message of judgment, and its promises that were condensed into a gospel. And the great question is whether the prophetic way of intuition is a lawful way, and whether it is a way that has led to truth concerning the deep things of God and of the life of man.

The intuitive method of the prophetic mind is favoured by the consideration that it has been paralleled in other fields in which the greatest work has been done. Intuition has been described as an imagined short-cut to truth, and has been scornfully-contrasted with ‘the toilsome methods of scientific enquiry and the still more severe ways of philosophic reflection.’24 But the antithesis does not hold on the highest planes of intellectual achievement. It has been said by many scientists that their generalisations and master-thoughts had flashed upon the mind after the manner of a revelation. It also seems evident that the great philosophers, in surveying the mass of cosmic and human facts that lay before them, had an intuition which gave them the fundamental principles of their system, and that the principles thus grasped were thereafter elaborated, illustrated, and justified by the operations of the reasoning intellect. Spinoza supposed that he proved the truth of his system by a closely-knit series of demonstrations, but the value of the system is seen to depend entirely upon the validity of the axioms and postulates which he had adopted at the outset as self-evident to his mind. This holds even more obviously of the values which form the subject matter of Ethics and Aesthetics. A philosopher may hold with Lotze that ethical values are supreme, and that the ethical principle should inspire and control all metaphysical constructions, but this proposition is one which is only guaranteed by the philosopher’s insight into the structure and value of reality. And above all was it to be expected that those whose minds made the greatest venture, and took the vastest sweep that is possible to thought by thinking of God, and of the universe and men in relation to God, should have had the consciousness that they had not reasoned but seen, and that they had not discovered truth but had been apprehended by the truth.

It is an important observation that the religious thinking which has been done by the prophetic personalities has been found, after being tested in various ways, to be of extraordinary value. While the phenomena of visions and abnormal control have been associated in some other fields with indubitable hallucinations, and have issued in nothing with any respectable title to be regarded as truth or utility, the ideas for which religious inspiration has been impressively claimed have been greeted by mankind with extraordinary warmth, and have made the deepest mark on its intellectual history. What the millions of Asia are thinking about this world and the next, and about salvation and duty, was largely determined by what passed many centuries ago in the minds of Gautama and Mohammed. Similarly, the ideas that nourish the religious life and inspire the higher moral life of the millions of Europe and of the two Americas go back in the main to the teaching of the Old Testament prophets, and of Jesus Christ and His apostles. The school of the prophets was mysteriously recruited during several generations by a call which disregarded all outward advantages, and could be addressed to the herdsman as well as to the king and the priest; most of the apostles were fishermen; the greatest of the prophetic succession, with whom it also ended, was the Carpenter of Nazareth; and it is these who were accepted by the nations that have built up the edifice of modern civilisation as their teachers and guides in regard to the nature, attributes and purposes of the Supreme Being, and the duty and the destiny of man. The only feasible explanation is that these ideas have been tested by the criteria which man has at his disposal for appraising the higher values which are submitted to his inspection, and that they triumphantly stood the test. And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the situation is that the ratiocinative mind, with its profession of disinterested thinking, has gone so far in adding its imprimatur. Ideas which, as judged by certain accompaniments and the account given of them by their authors, were non-rational in their origin, were found to be capable of a rational justification, and were proclaimed by the representatives of philosophical thought to be worthy of reason at its highest stretch. The Alexandrian school of patristic Theology advocated the Christian doctrines as the divinely revealed system of philosophy, and defended this position against the champions of the wisdom of classical antiquity; and according to the general judgment of the ancient world it was successful in establishing the claim. The idea of God which was derived from Jewish and Christian sources was appropriated, if with some accretions from Platonism and Neoplatonism, by philosophical thinkers, who justified it by various forms of theistic proof; and it continued to be accepted in its essential elements as the foundation or crown of the metaphysical system until it was challenged in the modern period by the pantheistic doctrine, and also the principles of the empirical school. And the same remark applies in a measure to other fundamental Christian dogmas. Kant defended what he took to be the specifically Christian doctrines, while Hegel and Fichte found in the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation an anticipation of the most important of all known and knowable metaphysical truths. It was also found, when the world took up the Philosophy of History, that no ideas on the subject were marked by such depth and insight as those of the Old Testament prophets. In the recent period, no doubt, Christian Theology has been treated in some quarters with scant respect; but it remains an important and significant fact that, in the ages when the human mind was supposed to be capable of transactions with transcendental truth, and in the circles in which its competency is still believed in, the work done in religious thinking by the ratiocinative mind has consisted to no small extent in appropriating and elaborating ideas which had been transmitted to the world through prophetic channels, and in putting forward fresh arguments in defence of their rationality.

It is indeed somewhat disconcerting that in part the results of the intuitive thinking that has been done in the prophetic religions are inconsistent and irreconcilable. The warring theologies, said James, cancel one another, and this seems to discredit their alleged principle of knowledge. But there is another view which makes it possible to draw a different inference, and which I believe to be as sound as it can be honestly held. It is that the religions of the world differ, not in respect of being true or false, but in respect of their degrees of perfection. Every system of religious ideas which has apprehended a prophetic mind, and which has been welcomed as the truth by a nation or race, has been so apprehended and welcomed because it contained elements of truth and goodness which obtained some endorsement from reason and conscience, and which evoked the confirmatory witness to reality that arises out of the hidden depths of the mind. Because of these elements of truth and goodness it was possible to find some satisfaction, and to feel some confidence, even in a very imperfect religion; and it is observable that as the religions of the world have risen in dignity, when tested by the rational and ethical standard, they have been accompanied by a proportionate increase in the strength and the tenacity of the corroborative witness that is borne by the mind. It may be thought that this criterion is unfavourable to Christianity, as the modern Christian does not appear to be as strongly assured of the truth of his religion as the Hindoo or the Mohammedan. But while there is no religion from which it is so easy to fall away as Christianity, provided one is ignorant of it or has not lived by it, it is no less true that when it has been intelligently grasped and earnestly lived it has been accompanied by an assurance which is the very type of certitude.

• 1.

  Analytical Psychology, 1896, i. p. 40.

• 2.

  The Psychology of Religious Belief, 1907, p. 40. These practically coincide with the three types distinguished by Delacroix: la foi implicite, la foi confiance, la foi raisonnante. La Religion el la Foi, 1922, livre i.

• 3.

  Op. cit., p. 239.

• 4.

  Werke, Bd. iii. (Berl. Ausg.), 1904, p. 205 ff.

• 5.

  Institutio, i. 3.

• 6.

  An Essay concerning Human Understanding, i. 2, 4.

• 7.

  Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ‘The Transcendental Ideal.’

• 8.

  Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, 1913, Bd. ii. pp. 754 ff. ‘Zur Frage des religiösen A priori,’ Otto, Das Heilige, 1923, chaps. xv., xviii.

• 9.

  Op. cit., ii, p. 758.

• 10.

  Op. cit., p. 755.

• 11.

  Das Heilige, pp. 140–2.

• 12.

  Systematic Theology, 1878, i. 8.

• 13.

  Psychology of Religion, 1921, pp. 193 ff.

• 14.

  Einführung in die Religionspsychologie, 1917, pp. 21 ff.

• 15.

  Rhys Davids, Buddhism, 1903, p. 37.

• 16.

  The Koran, I. iii.

• 17.

  Tradition quoted by Muir, Life of Mahomet, 1858, ii. p. 88.

• 18.

  Op. cit., p. 47. For other examples see James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 1903, Lect. iii.

• 19.

  Strahan, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, art. ‘Inspiration.’

• 20.

  A somewhat different version is given in the Mahavagga, S.B.E., xiii. 73 ff.

• 21.

  The Confessions of Ignatius Loyola, quoted by Oesterreich, op. cit., p. 76.

• 22.

  George Fox’s Journal, ³, 1765, p. 17.

• 23.

  Leuba, The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion, 1909, and other works. Coe, op. cit., p. 199.

• 24.

  Jones, A Faith that Inquires, 1922, p. 20.