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AUTHORITY

THE FUNCTION OF AUTHORITY IN LIFE

AND ITS RELATION TO LEGALISM

IN ETHICS AND RELIGION

A. V. C. P. HUIZINGA

Author of ''Belief in a Personal God * ' The American Philosophy Pragmatism '• The Authority of Might and Right," etc

" Without authority— the objective norm of truth and value — and faith — repose in it as our immediate standard — life could not well be lived. Is it not strange, therefore, that those vi^ho are willing: slaves to the idols of our day should clamor for free- dom from all restraint, and raise an outcry against all legitimate authority ?"

BOSTON

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY

1911

Copyright, 1911 Sherman, French &• Company

TO

DR. FRANCIS L. PATTON

PRINCETON'S ABLE AND INSPIRING DEFENDER OF THE CALVINISTIC FAITH

THESE PAGES ARE GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED

PREFACE

In the following pages is presented a general survey of the subject of authority. The author has gone afield to bring out authority's func- tion in life with special reference to legalism in ethics and religion. Law brooks no interfer- ence. Though God's law needs no vindication by the evidence of impending penalties and re- wards, its vindication is written upon the heart of man with unmistakable anticipations. Hu- man law and prevailing custom require con- formity by force. This outward conformity, however, pre-supposes at least the capacity, and the law aims at a willingness of the individual to follow its prescribed course or rule. This is done on authority, in faith. We believe in the thing prescribed, recommended, enjoined. The community as a whole endorses the regula- tions in force over its individuals or members. It is not a matter which is reasoned out, or ra- tionally justified. It is done for us, we accept its right, recognize its authority, we believe, we exercise faith.

This is individual activity, operating in so- ciety, it has metaphysical implications, and its

PREFACE

highest sanctions are found in the theological sphere. In the first part of this volume are especially treated the psychological and socio- logical; in the second part, the metaphysical and theological aspect of authority.

The discussion, moreover, has special refer- ence to the present trend of theological opinion. Quotations are numerous, though they are used as illustrations rather than as authority. Still, the weight of expert opinion, of course, may be used as corroborative evidence in argument. If this essay does not convince, it may at least clarify some notions regarding the subject; or, better still, it may occasion abler scholars to give it deserved attention. For one thing is certain: Authority must become the most vital question for an age which — rightly or wrongly — tends to challenge its established forms.

A. V. C. P. HUIZINGA.

CONTENTS

PART I PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECT

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Authority and Liberty i

II. Church and State 12

III. Moral Authority 38

IV. Moral Obligation 49

V. The Personal Element in Law ... 55

VI. Roman Catholicism and Freedom of

Conscience 62

VII. Legalism in Morals and Religion . . 71

VIII. Individual Will 83

IX. Authority and Philosophy .... 89 X. Philosophies of the Day and Revealed

Authority 96

PART II

METAPHYSICAL AND THEOLOGICAL ASPECT

XI. Individualism and Legalism .... 107 XII. Sabatier's View of Authority . . .113

XIII. Hegel's Doctrine of the State and Au-

thority 124

XIV. Authority and Fact 136

XV. Bible Authority 143

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

XVI. An Objective Source of Authority . 167

XVII. Pragmatism and Authority . . . .177

XVIII. Faith and Authority 186

XIX. Kant on Authority 195

XX. Materialistic Tendencies and Ritsch-

LIANISM 201

XXI. Science and Faith 212

XXII. Pragmatism Subversive of Authority . 221

XXIII. Subjectivism and Truth 233

XXIV. Needs and Utility 245

XXV. The Source and Guarantee of Au- thority 261

PART I

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECT

CHAPTER I AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY

It was quite characteristic of our age, and cer- tainly of the gathering assembled, when Dr. George A. Gordon raised a storm of approving applause at the International Congress of Re- ligious Liberals held in Boston, September 22-27, 1907, with the remark "The loss sustained by the Christian world through the reign of author- ity is incalculable." It is said on every hand that for a true development of the inner life, one may not be subject to any outward restraint. We must strike out along our own lines, — not walk by chalk-marks, but according to our own nature. We are to be true to our own selves. Inasmuch as we ourselves are the acting party in all things, we are not to be determined by arbi- trary directions. The very idea of personality, of responsibility, of private initiative, of indi- vidual significance, the entire personal equation, opposes itself to any pressure of external re- straints.

In ethical theories this individualism is repre- sented in the pleas for self-realization. The vague notion of self-realization, however, can

2 AUTHORITY

hardly become the basis of social relations and morals, if conceived according to the phrase which proclaims "society versus the individual," and always insists that corporate society is to a large extent incommensurable with personal in- dividuality. There is no allowance made for in- ter-determination, that the individual may be de- termined as well extrinsically as intrinsically; and again that these determinations sustain the closest relation each to the other is left out of ac- count. The atomistic conception of the indi- vidual is insisted upon. It has been said that this "mere individual" is an abstraction of logic, with which philosophy has burdened the world. It is, however, more correct to maintain that the notion of the isolated, separate individual has become persistently prominent in popular views. Professor James H. Tuft says in "The Indi- vidual and His Relation to Law and Institu- tions": "It is the merit of Hobbes to have set the individual in the forefront of discussion, and to have used him as the indispensable agency for the authorization of power." Hobbes' self, how- ever, is the self of war in which interests are ex- clusive, not the self of commerce in which they are mutual. Thus his self is not bound to the fellow individuals by anything except the civil authority, which by its police-duty calls out our individualistic ethics in conformity with it.

AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY 3

There is, however, an essentially social setting of the individual life. However much the abso- lutely personal element is centered in every in- dividual, however unique and one's own, yet each man realizes his personality among men as a so- cial being. The ethical and rehgious contents of man's life have been developed and have taken form historically in social relations. Saint Simon says: "Humanity is a collective be- ing which develops. It has grown from gener- ation to generation as a single man grows in successive years." (L'humanite est un etre col- lectif qui se developpe. Cet etre a grandi de generations en generations comme un seul homme grandit dans la succession des annees.) Condorcet expresses the same thought when he says: "The material and moral evolution of so- cieties forms a long and indissoluble chain to which the successive generations incessantly add links." (L'evolution materielle et morale des societes forme une longue et indissoluble chaine a la laquelle les generations successives ajoutent sans cesse des anneaux.")

In modern literature the individual claims are prominently brought forward, and their indul- gence advocated at the expense of traditional so- cial restraints. "Self-realization" figures large as a motto in modern realism. Love overrides law. Even the passions should know no re-

4 AUTHORITY

straint. Insistently is dwelt on things as they are. With the Christian in weakness is strength; in realism its strength is its weakness, in that its passion for reality discards idealism to the extent of leaving us in a mass of dis- ordered, conflicting facts, the most faithful por- trayal of which will create only the most jarring discord. Whatever claims, therefore, the realis- tic schools may make as representative of an aes- thetic appreciation of life, it must be firmly maintained that they fail of that harmony which is required bj^ the beautiful, just as they fail in that right proportion and emphasis which is re- quired by the truth.

Authority always involves a ruhng principle which subjects the individual to its regulations, though this need not necessarily involve the sup- pression of his natural functions.

Liberty is a negative idea which denotes the absence of restraint. It cannot, therefore, be an aim in itself. It may be fully realized in the experience of the individual when he finds him- self entirely in accord with the codified, larger experience of society. Such a condition would exclude the possibility of conflict, and legislation ah extra would be superfluous. But this is prac- tically inconceivable either in single cases or among any people in general. On this account the dreams of anarchistic societies, which would

AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY 5

dispense with all laws, are purely ideal and could be realized only at the very end of social prog- ress. As an attainable social state, they are indeed "diablement ideal."

It is equally evident, however, that neither laws nor governing bodies can be considered as ends in themselves, since they are simply a kind of tangible, objective medium of adjustment be- tween the single, individual life and the corpo- rate wisdom of longer and larger experience. As Fichte well remarked:

"The state will ultimately end as will all human insti- tutions which are merely means ; the aim of all govern- ment is to make government superfluous." ("Der Staat geht, wie alle menschliche Institute, die blosse Mittel sind, auf seine eigene Vernichtung aus ; es ist der Zweck aller Regierung, die Regierung iiberfliissig zu machen.")

The alleged antithesis between individual life and social authority is as unwarranted as are the extreme claims for, and emphasis on their re- spective positions. The customary antitheses that we meet in every-day life tend to cause a certain one-sidedness which emphasizes one view at the expense of the other. The reaction from the old conception of "mankind in general," to which corresponded a "typical man," has left us only an aggregate of individuals. From the

6 AUTHORITY

fact that we do know social morality as an ob- jective code of observance (as public opinion, etc.) only from the individuals which constitute society, it has been wrongly inferred that the single individual by himself exemplifies the func- tions of man as in society; for, as Enrico Ferri says, "in psychological phenomena the union of several individuals never yields a result like that which one would expect from the sum of them severally."

In a time of thorough sociological and psycho- logical study the capitalized and transmitted ex- periences and their unceasing re-actions upon the individual life are investigated. Thus we make use of such expressions as "social mind," "col- lective consciousness," "national spirit," "Zeit- geist," "public opinion," "conventionality," "folk-psychology," all of which are metaphors; pregnant meanings which cannot be explained by the phenomena of individual psychology. Of course the individual's consciousness is affected by the relation he bears to others. Pro- fessor Baldwin observes rightly, "Modern psychology as well as studies in religion and so- ciology demonstrate the interdependence of in- dividual and society," but "in ethical (and re- ligious) judgments the social sanction is admin- istered by the individual conscience." Mental Development, Chap. X. Although, therefore,

J

AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY 7

in Professor Baldwin's study in psychology the growth of the individual soul is traced in genetic method till all the essential features of the moral and religious man have appeared, he leaves the moral issues with the individual. Thus his valu- able prize essay, while clearing away the opposi- tion between society and the individual, vindi- cates a personal responsibility.

It has often been asserted that there is no such thing as individual morality, and Roman Catho- lic scholars have charged against the Protestant position an extreme individualism, which is not held by the evangelical churches of Protestant- ism. The content of a strictly individual mor- ality or religion is indeed quite inconceivable. The content and form of moral and religious life are derived from the relations in which individ- uals are placed. The tendency, however, to seek the origin of the moral and rehgious life in the social relations under which it develops, is faulty. Scholars holding very different points of view agree that the moral sentiment, and therefore the religious impulse, is unanalyzable, not reducible to social effects. And though such genetic theories have often been supported by a large array of alleged facts, they have never proved to be convincing.

The question is like the transferring of the emphasis in the Lord's command: "Thou shalt

8 AUTHORITY

love thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself" (Luke x, 27). The modern socializing tendency has shifted the emphasis from the first command, which is basal, and wliich in a sense includes the second. It begs the question by the conclusion that the resulting social morality is to be identi- fied with the loving of God, because it is the way in which to express itself.

Professor H. Visscher gives expression to this idea in a recent work on comparative rehgion, "Religie en Gemeenschap by de natuurvolken" (Utrecht, 1907). AVhile recognizing that our age rightly, to some extent, approaches religion as an organic development, especially in the field of comparative religion, he observes that most social facts that are codified expressions of social life, such as language, law, and customs, as well as the forms of religion, are 7iot made by man, but have rather grown to be what thej^ are.

The analogy between the physical and psychi- cal, between matter and spirit, can never lead to an identification of the genetic processes of the two spheres, especially when there is an evi- dent inclination to subsume the spiritual under the material. The complex expression of re- ligious life is a result of the social life, and regu- lates the individual, who is, however, autono-

AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY 9

mous neither in language, law, morality, nor religion. All these expressions of social life go back to the psychic life of the individuals that compose society. Religio subjectiva concerns primarily man as man; it assumes social forms simply because man Hves in society and thus fits in an organic whole. But it is a wholly wrong view that endeavors to explain religion and mor- ality in themselves as an outgrowth of social forms. If man is incurably religious, then we can hardly make religion and morality in its es- sence an epiphenomenon of social life. They rather cement and control social life. And this is the meaning which a Frenchman expressed in the words: "Le Saint Esprit c'est Dieu social." Even Spencer, though championing the cause of individualism under the phrase "man versus the state," freely admits the organic relation and natural interplay between the individual and the milieu in the midst of which he has grown up. In his "Principles of Psychology" (sects. 208, 216) he says: "The individual cannot sunder a conjunction thus deeply rooted in the organiza- tion of the race"; hence, he is born into the world with those psychical connections which form the substrata of "necessary truths." In his "First Principles" (sect. 53), he says: "Absolute uni- formities of experience generate absolute uni- formities of thought." Thus it may be seen

10 AUTHORITY

that, however much the absolutely personal ele- ment is centered in every individual, however en- tirely unique and one's own, yet each realizes his personality among men as a social being. The ethical and religious contents of man's hfe have been developed and have taken form historically in social relations.

The individual finds a standard for compari- son, and material to assimilate, in the terms of life as expressed in the personal experiences and judgments around him. And these principles, often authoritative, influence his unconscious ap- plication, as he strives consciously to realize his ethical ideals and religious life under the stimu- lus of personal relations. The importance of the individual standpoint is thus brought out, and the claims for personality are rendered significant, because of the prime factor of indi- vidual life in social life. But we must also per- ceive that the authority of society is fraught with life-experiences akin to those known to the indi- vidual, and this renders the social, ethical, and religious codes less external as regulative law. Professor Giddings made a contribution to the study of societary phenomena in his conception of "consciousness of kind," but failed to give it a proper setting in social life. It is plain that the question whether authority should be lodged with the individual, or with the legal construe-

AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY 11

tions of larger experience, cannot be treated in categorical fashion. We must rather inquire how the individual is related to the "stored-up, codified racial experience." Professor James says : "The legal tradition enters the mind of the vast majority of citizens in a vague way at best. It is clearly conscious in the thought of a special class only, which, however, may be regarded as the social organ of that particular function of the collective mind." That this relation, how- ever, is an essential and real one, is assumed in all educational efforts, which aim so to adapt the individual to his surroundings that he may fit in the social setting with the least waste of mental energy. Dr. G. E. Vincent says in an essay entitled "The Social Mind and Education": "Education sets before itself the task of relating the individual intrinsically to the social tradition so that he may become an organic part of so- ciety." This question as to the relation of the state to the individual raises the problem of reconciling authority and liberty, law and indi- vidualism, and as such constitutes the social as- pect of our inquiry.

CHAPTER II CHURCH AND STATE

The need of this ultimate authorization has been felt by both church and state alike in the ex- ercise of earthly power. The church ruling over the corporate body of believers who give assent to her order and doctrine does not need to estab- lish her claims. But what is her authority over those who are outside? Some have answered, It is to "go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in," forgetting that, in view of her mission, the compulsion of the church cannot be one of outward restraint. The church endeavors to win people: the state controls people. There is thus a wide chasm between church and state. To the church belongs the higher, more definite sanction, but to the state the wider range. To the church is given a posi- tive commission to fulfill, to the state mainly the vindication of its laws. The state therefore re- mains always more impersonal in its regulations than the church, and, having power of fact, may vindicate its authority by a rational rule of its subjects. A difficult question is raised as whether the state shall rule the church, or the

12

CHURCH AND STATE 13

church the state. May the admittedly more im- personal rule of the state be allowed authority over the church, which claims a more personal relation with the Source of all authority? Or may the church, including only the believers, ex- tend her rules, naturally more specific, over the M^hole of society. A practical, working solution has, of course, been found by allowing state and church to some extent their own respective spheres, even where either of them sways su- perior power. A practical merger of the two functions is the true solution, — all the secular, governmental functions sanctioned and per- meated by Christian belief and principle.

Phillips Brooks discusses tliis in gingerly fashion in his address on "The Influence of Jesus on the Social Life of Man."

"I know that here is the essence of what most men, as they look at history, are apt to dread to-day, of a theocracy, of a religious state and of a state religion. If this which I have said be true, if the state and its machineries be valuable to the Christian patriot, as his state was valuable to Jesus, because of the spiritual interests which they enshrine, because of the family life of man with God which they represent, then why should he not ask that the state should manifest its spiritual function to the fullest degree by becoming dis- tinctively and openly the minister of Christ? Why should he not ask that Christianity, as he conceives it,

14 AUTHORITY

and as it seems to him to be unspeakably important, should be taught in the state schools? Nay, why should he not ask that only men distinctively and posi- tively Christian in belief and life should be entrusted with the conduct of the nation? How can he live, how can he be a patriot, in any land which is as purely sec- ular in its administration as all our lands are growing more and more to be? It is an urgent question. We can only find its answer, I think, in two considerations which no man can ignore. One is that the ideas and methods of spiritual men and even of Christian men, are so divergent from one another that it is only on the broadest basis of the most general purposes of spiritual life that they can meet, not in their special methods of their special creeds, but only in the de- gree and assertion of righteousness and truth to which all their methods and their creeds belong. The other consideration is that, even were all spiritual men at one, they well might doubt whether it would be well to make the government of their land the agent and maintainer of their faith. Any machinery of govern- ment which men have yet devised is too coarse and clumsy for so delicate a task as the inculcation and en- couragement of faith. Government works by compul- sion ; faith by inspirations. Government lays its hands on actions ; faith nestles into unseen aflfections. Government estimates appearances ; faith looks only at realities. And so government, though all the land were unanimously and harmoniously Christian, would still be a poor minister of Christianity. These are the considerations which make the Christian man consent

CHURCH AND STATE 15

to live in a state whose chosen policy is secular, and yet lets him feel that there are unowned spiritual in- fluences and powers in her to which he may rejoice to lend his aid. Let these considerations pass away, let all the spiritual desire and aspiration of the land be fused into a perfect unanimity of thought and action, and let some new finer machinery of governmental ac- tion be devised or developed which shall be capable of spiritual uses and then theocracy, a religious state, a state religion, a national creed, a Christian public edu- cation, a divine responsibility in every officer — all these would be not merely conceivable, they would be the only methods which the Christianized state could think of for a moment. There would be nothing secular in such a heavenly community as that. Only it would be al- tered utterly from what we see now. It would be the New Jerusalem for which we hope, and not the old earthly city which we know so well. At present we can only keep it constantly before our eyes and always proclaim it as the true ideal. We can, and I think we ought to, earnestly assert, when men praise it most loudly, that secularism, however we may accept it cheerfully as the only expedient for the present time, is not the highest nor the eternal type of government. We may strive, by that devotion to the spiritual ele- ment in national life which even pure secularity of public methods still leaves possible, to hasten the day, which must come if Christ be what we know he is, when the idea of Jesus shall be the shaping and moving power of the Christian state; and among the happy sons of God the son of God shall evidently reign, as

16 AUTHORITY

the old phrase describes, 'King of nations as king of saints.' " (Bohlen Lectures, 1870.)

We remind here of the fact, that "Black- stone's Commentaries" give explicitly as the au- thoritative source of legislation God's will and revelation. We quote: Section II of the "Na- ture of Laws in General."

"Law defined:

"Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action ; and is applied indiscrimi- nately to all kinds of action, whether animate or inani- mate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is a rule of action which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey. But laws, in their more confined sense, denote the rules, not of action in general, but of human action or conduct; that is the precepts by which man, a creature endowed with both reason and free will, is commanded to make use of those faculties in the general regulation of his be- havior.

"Here follows a discussion of the law of nature which is stated to be the will of God, such as that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to everyone his dues. This law of nature is superior in obligation to any other. In consequence of the de- fects of human reason by which we endeavor to know the will of God, there is made necessary the revealed

CHURCH AND STATE 17

or divine law found only in the holy scriptures. Upon the law of nature and the law of revelation depend all human laws." (Sprague's Abridgment.)

Charles Zueblin gives in "The Religion of a Democrat" his opinion not only in favor of the separation of Church and State, but of the sub- ordination of church to the state, the church be- ing really one of the state functions to provide for the religious needs of society.

"The state must be supreme; the church must be subordinate ; and religion can only be free in the state. Our minds have been so befogged by the conflict be- tween church and state that we have grown unable to see the harmony of religion and society. When it is recognized that every individual must have his own re- ligion, regardless of the ecclesiastical authority to which he may hold allegiance, then it will be seen that only the state can facilitate this. The conflict between state and church in France seems to throw light upon our problem. The state is trying to assert its su- premacy over the church; the church, so far as it is conscientious in its activities, argues that it is univer- sal and therefore superior to the state. If it were, if they had such a national church, if it could make its claims to universalism good, would it not be loyal to the interests of society as a whole, and how can so- ciety as a whole be served except through the state.'' The present organization of the state may be as im- perfect as the present organization of the church, but

18 AUTHORITY

the state is the only organization which represents so- ciety. The church is the very imperfect, highly spe- cialized organization of one of society's functions, and if it actually moralized all human wants, it could still serve society fully only as an instrumentality of the state. That the church has sometimes seemed superior to the state only means that churchmen have sometimes been superior to statesmen in their capacity for under- standing the interests of society as a whole." (pp. 118fF.)

It is interesting to note, however, that the re- ligious democracy or democratic rehgion of Pro- fessor Zueblin runs into individualism. He de- clares ;

"Whatever the imperfections of contemporary life, it must not be forgotten that the state is organized society, and that its weaknesses are due to the delega- tion of some of its functions to un-co-ordinated insti- tutions. There can be no moral stability until it is recognized that the individual is sovereign, not subject. Industry lacks efficiency, the church lacks spirituality, and the state lacks solidarity, when the individual is not sovereign. He must be master of his occupation, of his faith and of his citizenship, or these are empty names. In a deep and real sense, democracy is the only moral- ity, but democracy must mean the sovereignty of the people in all human relationships."

If Professor Zueblin goes deep enough, he

CHURCH AND STATE 19

will need Christianity to guarantee this concep- tion of democracy! All things are ours when we are Christ's!

Dr. David Jayne Hill, late United States am- bassador to Germany, expressed in a course of lectures before Columbia University a truly popular conception of government as a kind of public business-management of the different de- partments that society wants discharged. Thus he may well put aside any higher authority, and on such a basis scoff at the affirmation by Em- peror William of a beUef in the divine right to govern.

"The state can no longer speak or act irre- sponsibly in the name of Deity or clothe itself in the garb of super-human attributes or divine supremacy," says Dr. Hill, evidently overlook- ing the fact that a state thus speaking or acting is bound by the highest responsibility, and an admittedly stronger obligation than where "vox populi is vox Dei." The abuses of popular au- thority have demonstrated sufficiently that brute force comes to displace right under whatever great phrases the politicians may work their schemes with the authorizing populus. And it is undeniable that force comes to be looked upon as a controlling and authorizing power under such a regime. "In order to fulfill its mission as the guardian of human rights and the protago-

20 AUTHORITY

nist of law," — Dr. Hill asserts — "the state must be entrusted with sufficient organized force to repress wrong-doing and maintain in all emer- gencies public order, but we must not overlook the fact that we have invested it with powers vastly more enormous than it has ever before possessed. There is, without doubt, a great danger in the omnipotence of the state. Dur- ing the greater part of human history govern- ment has been arbitrary, and it has enshrouded its right to be so in some halo of sanctity. The helplessness, dependence, and ignorance of men have rendered them powerless to resist its as- sumptions. Looking up to it as the highest earthly authority they have been taught to re- gard it as possessing a divine prerogative. It has usually, and not unnaturally, intrenched its pretensions in what was most sacred in their sen- timents and consciences, and when it could not dominate them by superior force it has rendered them passive through an appeal to their religious obligations." Has, indeed, government been arbitrary during the greater part of human his- tory, and is the statement impartial, that it has enshrouded its right to be so in some halo of sanctity? Have people been specially "taught" to regard it as possessing a divine prerogative, without regarding it so themselves? We take occasion to remind Dr. Hill that a great number

CHURCH AND STATE 21

of people — not the helpless, dependent and ignorant — would maintain with the German Em- peror that nothing less than a divine right to govern constitutes in the end a rightful claim to authority over the people.

It is on account of this business point of view that reverence for the law is a desideratum in the United States.

The Duke of Harcourt in an able work, "Quelques reflexions sur les lois sociales," might bring to Dr. Hill's notice the pervasive influence and power of religion in society, and incidentally claim its consequent rights. He observes (Chapitre II Le Sentiment religieux) :

"Les lois humaines se proposent le bonheur d'une societe, la religion se propose le bonheur de I'individu; par la elle ne s'accorde pas avec les conceptions de I'homme d'etat. Les lois humaines ont tou jours sacrifie certains individus aux necessites sociales. La religion, faite pour I'individu, ne sacrifie personne." In opening this part of his work he says: "II est de mode aujourd'hui parmi certains hommes, surtout parmi ceux que le courant de notre temps a portes dans les fonctions publiques, de con- siderer la religion, quelle qu' elle soit, comme un accessoire dans la vie d'une societe. lis la re- gardent comme un vieux debris fait pour plaire aux esprits faibles, et pour lequel, en leur faveur,

22 AUTHORITY

on peut consentir peut-etre a quelques sacrifices, mais a la condition que ce ne soit pour I'etat ni une depense ni un embarras." The learned duke concludes his work: "les sentiments religieux;, mis systematiquement par nos hommes politiques en dehors de leurs etudes, restent tou jours la veritable sauvegarde de la societe; les assemblees politiques, quels que soient les merites de leurs membres, sont des etres de creations humaines, des mecanismes, tres utilles sans doute, mais irre- sponsables par leur essence meme, et incapables des qualites pu'on s'obstine a leur demander . . . de ces diverses propositions, les hommes d'etat ne tireront-ils aucune consequence? Je le laisse a leur sagacite." (p. 275) .

Anatole Leroy — Beaulieu makes an emphatic protest against this disregard for religion in governmental functions.

"L'Etat modeme, I'etat, athee, I'etat franc-ma9on, I'etat nouveau, issu de la democratie, nous I'avons vu plus d'une fois ne laissant de liberte qu a ce que le Saint- Siege appelle le mal et ne reconnaitre de droits qu a ce que I'eglise nomme I'erreur . . . Meconnals- sant son incompetence doctrinale, I'etat democratique (dans I'espece, la republique de 1892) se laisse volon- tiers aller a dogmatiser . . . II se fait a I'occasion son Credo et son Catechisme qu'il enseigne au peuple par des catechistes a lui; il tend a s'arroger le droit qu'il denie a Veglise le droit de fondre les esprits dans un

CHURCH AND STATE 23

moule et de fa9onner les generations a sa guise." (La papaute it la democratie, p. 369 Revue des deux MoTides, Jan., 1892.)

"The modern state, the atheistic state, the state of free-masons, the new state as issued forth from the democracy, we have seen it more than once, leaves only liberty for what the Holy See calls evil and recog- nizes only as rights what the church considers error. Failing to recognize its incompetence in re- gard to doctrines, the democratic state (specially the republic of 1892) starts readily to dogmatise. It provides occasionally Creed and catechism which it teaches to the people by its own catechisers. It is in- clined to arrogate to itself the right which it denies the church, the right to mould and fashion the mind of the people." (The Papacy and Democracy.)

The Catholic standpoint in regard to this mat- ter is presented eloquently and in forceful po- lemic strain by Monseigneur J. Fevre, vicar general of Gap and Amiens whose able pen pro- duced a great number of apologetic and polemic works in defense of the Roman Catholic Church. In "La separation de I'eglise et de I'etat," he con- cludes that of right the sovereign church inde- pendent in her sphere, in union with the state (as before the Concordat) ought to stand over the secular power of state, but as of fact he accepts the "regime concordataire" as ratified by the church. Special notice deserves in this connec-

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tion the emphasis laid upon the distinct and separate spheres of the activity of church and state, whilst it is nevertheless argued with fervor that a separation of church and society would be fatal.

"La confusion et I'erreur proviennent ici de I'idee etrange qu'on se fait de I'eglise et de sa constitution. L'eglise, pense-t-on, n'est qu' une societe ordinaire, une classe d'hommes soumis comme les autres, au controle de I'etat. La societe civile entraine cette classe dans le cercle de ses attributions comme le soleil entraine, dans son orbite, une planete de second ordre. L'etat ab- sorbe tous les services ; de lui decoulent toutes les fonc- tions, toutes les lois, toutes les grandeurs. Cette cen- tralization est le fruit du progres moderne. N'est ce pas plutot la glorification de la matiere.'* une monstrueuse apotheose de la force? la resurrection du cesarisme paien? Dans tous les cas, c'est une concep- tion fausse, absurde, de la nature de I'eglise et de son role surnaturel dans le monde; c'est un melange batard des traditions paiennes et des conceptions heretiques qui consacrent, meme dans I'ordre religieux, la supre- matie de I'etat.

"Non, I'eglise dans sa sphere propre, ne depend pas de vous ; non I'eglise n'est pas une subalterne ou une infirme qui a besoin de votre pouvoir pour s'ouvrir la scene du monde. Le monde entier lui appartient. Dieu I'a chargee de le diriger, de le redresser et de le maintenir sous sa loi. Quand I'eglise remplit ce de- voir, elle n'usurpe personne; elle ne fait qu' user du

CHURCH AND STATE 25

pouvoir qu'elle a re9u de Dieu. Euntes, docete, man- dantes servare omnia. A I'eglise soit tout ce qui est de I'eglise." (p. 174 ff.)

James Bryce, British ambassador to the United States, gives us in his famous discussion, "The American Commonwealth," such a saga- cious and careful description of the Church and State in America, that it seems well to conclude with his impartial observations.

" 'The abstention of the state from interference in matters of faith and worship may be advocated on two principles, which may be called the political and the religious. The former sets out from the principles of liberty and equality. It holds any attempt at com- pulsion by the civil power to be an infringement on liberty and thought, as well as on liberty of action, which could be justified only when a practice claiming to be religious is so obviously anti-social or immoral as to threaten the well-being of the community. Re- ligious persecution, even in its milder forms, such as disqualifying the members of a particular sect for public office, is, it conceives, inconsistent with the con- ception of individual freedom and the respect due to the primordial rights of the citizen which modern thought has embraced. Even if state action stops short of the imposition of disabilities, and confines itself to favoring a particular church, whether by grants of money or by giving special immunities to its clergy, this is an infringement on equality,' putting one man

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at a disadvantage compared with others in respect of matters which are not fit subjects for state cognizance. (The question of course follows, what are the matters fit for state cognizance? but into this I do not enter, as I am not attempting to argue these intricate ques- tions, but merely to indicate the general aspect they take in current discussion.)

"The second principle, embodying the more purely religious view of the question, starts from the conception of the church as a spiritual body existing for spiritual purposes, and moving along spiritual paths. It is an assemblage of men who are united by their devotion to an unseen Being, their memory of a past divine life, their belief in the possibility of imitating that life, so far as human frailty allows, their hopes for an illimita- ble future. Compulsion of any kind is contrary to the nature of such a body, which lives by love and rever- ence, not by law. It desires no state help, feeling that its strength comes from above, and that its kingdom it not of this world. It does not seek for exclusive privileges, conceiving that these would not only create bitterness between itself and other religious bodies, but might attract persons who did not really share its sentiments, while corrupting the simplicity of those who are already its members. Least of all can it submit to be controlled by the state, for the state, in such a world as the present, means persons many or most of whom are alien to its beliefs and cold to its emotions. The conclusion follows that the church as a spiritual entity will be happiest and strongest when it is left absolutely to itself, not patronized by the civil power,

CHURCH AND STATE 27

not restrained by law except when and in so far as it may attempt to quit its proper sphere and intermeddle in secular affairs.

"Of these two views it is the former much more than the latter that has moved the American mind. The latter would doubtless be more generally accepted by religious people. But when the question arose in a practical shape in the earlier days of the Republic, arguments of the former or political order were found amply sufficient to settle it, and no practical purpose has since then compelled men either to examine the spiritual basis of the church, or to inspire by the light of history how far state action has during fifteen cen- turies helped or marred her usefulness. There has, however, been another cause at work, I mean the com- paratively limited conception of the state itself which Americans have formed. The state is not to them, as to Germans or Frenchmen, and even to some English thinkers, an ideal moral power, charged with the duty of forming the characters and guiding the lives of its subjects. It is more like a commercial company, or perhaps a huge municipality created for the manage- ment of certain business in which all who reside within its bounds are interested, levying contributions and ex- pending them on this business of common interest, but for the most part leaving the shareholders or burgesses to themselves. That an organization of this kind should trouble itself, otherwise than as matters of po- lice, with the opinions or conduct of its members would be as unnatural as for a railway company to inquire how many of the shareholders were total abstainers.

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Accordingly it never occurs to the average American that there is any reason why state churches should ex- ist, and he stands amazed at the warmth of European feeling on the matter. Just because these questions have been long since disposed of, and excite no present passion, and perhaps also because the Americans are more practically easy-going than pedantically exact, the National government and the State governments do give to Christianity a species of recognition incon- sistent with the view that civil government should be absolutely neutral in religious matters. Each House of Congress has a chaplain, and opens its proceedings each day with prayers. The President annually after the end of harvest issues a proclamation ordering a general thanksgiving, and occasionally appoints a day of fasting and humiliation. So prayers are offered in the State legislatures (though Michigan and Oregon forbid any appropriation of State funds for days of religious observance). Congress in the crisis of the Civil War (July, 1863) requested the President to ap- point a day for humiliation and prayer. In the army and navy provision is made for religious services, con- ducted by chaplains of various denominations, and no difficulty seems to have been found in reconciling their claims. In most States there exist laws punishing blasphemy or profane swearing by the name of God (laws which, however, are in some places openly trans- gressed and in few or none enforced, laws restricting or forbidding trade or labor on the Sabbath, as well as laws protecting assemblages for religious purposes, such as camp-meetings or religious processions, from

CHURCH AND STATE 29

being disturbed. The Bible is read in the public State- supported schools, and though controversies have arisen on this head, the practice is evidently in accord with the general sentiment of the people. The whole mat- ter may, I think, be summed up by saying that Chris- tianity is in fact understood to be, though not the legally established religion, yet the national religion. (It has often been said that Christianity is a part of the common law of the States, as it has been said to be of the common law of England, but on this point there have been discrepant judicial opinions, nor can it be said to find any specific practical application. A discussion of it may be found in Justice Story's opinion in the famous Girard will case.) So far from think- ing their commonwealth godless, the Americans con- ceive that the religious character of a government con- sists in nothing but the religious belief of the indi- vidual citizens, and the conformity of their conduct to that belief. They deem the general acceptance of Christianity to be one of the main sources of their nat- ural prosperity, and their nation a special object of the Divine favor.

"The legal position of a Christian church is in the United States simply that of a voluntary association, or group of associations, corporate or unincorporate, under the ordinary law. There is no such thing as a special ecclesiastical law; all questions, not only of property but of church discipline and jurisdiction, are, if brought before the courts of the land, dealt with as questions of contract (or otherwise as questions of pri- vate civil law. Actions for damages are sometimes

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brought against ecclesiastical authorities by persons deeming themselves to have been improperly accused or disciplined or deprived of the enjoyment of property). And the court, where it is obliged to examine a ques- tion of theology, as for instance, whether a clergyman had advanced opinions inconsistent with any creed or formula to which he has bound himself — for it will pre- fer, if possible, to leave such matters to the proper ec- clesiastical authority — will treat the point as one of pure legal interpretation, neither assuming to itself theological knowledge, nor suffering considerations of policy to intervene. (The Emperor Aurelian decided in a like neutral spirit a question that had arisen be- tween two Christian churches.)

"As a rule, every religious body can organize itself in any way it pleases. The State does not require its leave to be asked, but permits any form of church gov- ernment, any ecclesiastical order, to be created and en- dowed, any method to be adopted of vesting church property, either simply in trustees or in corporate bodies formed either under the general law of the State or under some special statute. Sometimes a limit is imposed on the amount of property, or of real estate, which an ecclesiastical corporation can hold; but, on the whole, it may be said that the civil power manifests no jealousy of the spiritual, but allows the latter a perfectly free field for expansion. Of course if any ecclesiastical authority were to become formidable either by its wealth or by its control over the members of its body, this easy tolerance would disappear ; all I observe is that the difficulties often experienced, and

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still more often feared, in Europe, from the growth of organizations exercising tremendous spiritual powers, have in America never proved serious. Religious bodies are in so far the objects of special favor that their property is in most States exempt from taxation. (In his message of 1881 the Governor of Washington Territory recommends the legislature to exempt church property from taxation, not only on the ground that 'churches and schoolhouses are the temples of educa- tion, and alike conduce to the cultivation of peace, hap- piness and prosperity,' but also because 'churches enhance the value of contiguous property, which, were they abolished, would be of less value and return less revenue.' And this is reconciled to theory by argu- ment that they are serviceable as moral agencies, and diminish the expenses incurred in respect of police administration. Two or three States impose restric- tions on the creation of religious corporations, and one, Maryland, requires the sanction of the legislature to dispositions of property to religious uses. But speak- ing generally, religious bodies are the objects of legis- lative favor. (New Hampshire has lately taxed churches on the value of their real estate exceeding ten thousand dollars.)" (Second Volume, pp. 647-652.)

The struggle for authority between secular and ecclesiastical power has found its classic ex- pression in the rivalry of Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII for supremacy in earthly matters. The great success of von Wilden- bruch's work, "Heinrich und Heinrich's Gesch-

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lecht," may be accounted for largely, apart from its merits, by the interest felt in the theme. The Germans of our day went through a renewal of the same struggle in the Kulturkainpf with Bis- marck and Windhorst as respective champions. Bismarck's words in the Reichstag, "Nach Ca- nossa gehn wir nicht," are characteristic.

The present illustrious ruler has reconciled considerably this conflict, recognizing that Ro- man Catholicism should be judged more desir- able than the secularizing tendencies which (as illustrated most plainly in France, though other nations show the same trend) exemplify an atheistic and revolutionary spirit under the dis- guise of culture and progress. That with the Emperor this does not mean a special indulgence towards papal policy, however, is shown by a very recent warning to the Vatican by Chancel- lor von Bethmann-HoUweg, admonishing the Curia of issuing various decrees without that con- sideration for German conditions which was in- dispensable in maintaining a friendly status. The Kaiser said on the occasion of the inspection of a crucifix which he had presented to the Bene- dictine monastery at Beuron:

"I offer you my heartfelt thanks for the kind words with which you have received me, and am glad to have the opportunity of paying you a visit and expressing

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to you my sincere good-will. From the beginning of my reign it was a particular pleasure to me to support the Benedictines in their efforts, since I had noticed that wherever they had worked they had not only en- deavored to maintain and strengthen religion, but had also distinguished themselves as promoters of culture in the field of church-music, in art, in science and in other ways, thus rendering services which should not be under-estimated. What I expect from you is that you will continue working in the paths of your fore- fathers and support me in my efforts to maintain the people's religion. This is all the more important be- cause the twentieth century has liberated ideas which can only be successfully combated with the aid of re- ligion and the support of Heaven. This is my firm conviction. The crown which I wear can only guaran- tee success here if it is based on the word and person- ality of our Lord. As a symbol of this I have pre- sented the crucifix to this church in order, as I said in my letter, to prove that the governments of the Chris- tian princes can only be carried on in the spirit of our Lord, and that they shall help to strengthen the reli- gious feeling which is innate in the Germanic races, and increase respect for altar and throne. Both these go together, and must not be separated. Therefore I pro- mote with my whole heart the aims which you are pur- suing, and in the future as in the past, will grant you my favor and my protection."

It might be observed in this connection that by an alliance with the Catholics the gifted Dutch

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Premier, Abraham Kuyper, combated success- fully and finally overthrew the liberal regime, which for over half a century exercised its baneful influence in the Netherlands.

Gregory's letter, sent in 1075, upbraiding Henry for neglect of papal decrees, was headed : "Bishop Gregory, servant of the servants of God, to King Henry, greeting and apostolic ben- ediction:— that is, if he be obedient to the apos- tolic chair as beseems a Christian king. "To this, Henry replied the next year by a letter, begin- ning, "Henry, King not by usurpation but by holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, now no pope, but false monk," and ending: "I, Henry, King by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say unto thee, 'Come down to be damned throughout all eternity.' " Later, when in 1107 at Chalons the questions of investi- ture were discussed, the Pope declared by the Bishop of Piacenza: "To invest with the ring and the staff, since these belong to the altar, is to usurp the powers of God Himself. For a priest to place his hands, sanctified by the body and blood of the Lord, in the blood-stained hands of a layman, as a pledge, is to dishonor his order and holy consecration." It has often been observed that this quarrel occasioned the phrase "by the grace of God" to be attached to the proc- lamation of rulers. So it did, but it is a super-

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ficial inference to argue that with the phrase was originated the belief or meaning which it ex- presses. The struggle was too keen, too passion- ate, to have sprung out of a newly invented be- lief, to which the phrase might have given rise. When Germany's gifted monarch, William the Great, voiced this deep religious conviction in his Konigsberg speech, liberahsm and radical elements misconstrued and misrepresented his words in a wholly unwarranted agitation. The Emperor said: "My grandfather by his own right placed the Prussian crown upon his head and again proclaimed it to be bestowed upon him by God's grace alone and not by Parlia- ments, assemblages of the people, or revolutions of the people, and he saw himself the chosen in- strument of heaven, and as such regarded his duty as regent and ruler. Considering myself as the instrument of the Master, regardless of passing views and opinions, I go my way, which is solely devoted to the prosperity and peaceful develop- ment of our Fatherland." In the same hall the Kaiser said in May, 1890: "We Hohenzollerns take our crown from heaven alone; and in 1894 William II, quoting the words of his grand- father William I, about ruling by divine right, added: "So, too, do I take my kingdom by God's grace." To construe this utterance of "divine right" as a declaration of absolutism and under-

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estimation of the people and the people's repre- sentatives is a flimsy and paltry pretext indeed! for those sowing the discontent on which social- ism feeds.

What His Majesty proclaimed and has made actual in his conduct as ruler is simply, that his sense of duty rests on religious grounds. As Hegel dignified the laws of the land by conceiv- ing the sovereignty of the state as vested with the authority of the Absolute Idea, so Emperor William feels in it the sanction and expression of God. The German agitators should remember that in spite of this alleged "divine right" by which the Kaiser claims to rule, the Emperor in- deed adheres to the same attitude which Prince von Buelow expressed in the Reichstag July 20, 1908: "Not a single case can be adduced where the Kaiser has placed himself in opposition to the constitution." In many a republic without attempt at, or sentiment of justification in Divine authority, constitutional or popular rights have often been disregarded. In fact, only a firm re- liance on supreme authority and right guaran- tees the right of the nation, and is capable of vindicating it. Consider for a moment the superficial, harmful and impious no- tions of a journalist-preacher on "The Spirit of Democracy" and you will doubtlessly recognize the superiority of the man — be he ruler or offi-

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cial — who feels himself responsible in his con- science to God over him whose horizon limits it- self to an outlook upon the crowd of voters. Such a viewpoint, however, is maintained by Lyman Abbot in the "Outlook":

"The state of nature is the ideal state; let us go back to it. In a state of nature every man is free to live his own life, direct his own energies, carve out his own destiny. Every impediment upon this freedom is an injury to humanity. All government is such an impediment. A little government is absolutely neces- sary to protect the weak from the strong, but govern- ment is a necessary evil, and the less we have of it the better. Humanity has simply consented to it in order to protect itself. It should constrain only to free from constraint. On this consent of the governed govern- ment is founded. This is the basis of all authority. The ultimate appeal is to the people ; for the voice of the people is the voice of God — that is, if there is a God. Whether there be one or not it is not material to in- quire; for the voice of the people is final. A just gov- ernment is a government carried on in accordance with the will of the majority; an unjust government is one carried on not in accordance with that will."

CHAPTER III

MORAL AUTHORITY

When the objective norm, the legal code, con- ventional morality and new religious formulas are framed in keeping with the changes of con- temporary opinion, they become liable to error, and must be subject to subsequent correction. Thus they cannot well claim the confident sub- mission of the individual as possessing rightful or reasonable authority. Yet the tendency to- day is to regard the sanction of society as final, both in ethics and in religion. Both morality and religion are becoming more and more con- ventional. In this the extreme conclusions of sociological theories run into a pantheistic phi- losophy that does not allow of an "otherness" in the verdict, to which, however, consciousness un- mistakably testifies, and which thus destroys an objective sanction. Martineau describes in his "Types of Ethical Theory" eloquently this au- thority and sanction of conscience :

"Conscience speaks with authority. The authority is a simple feeling, admitting of little analysis or ex- planation. But it is not simply subjective, not of my

38

MORAL AUTHORITY 39

own making, not a mere self-assertion of my own will to which my own will is the first to bend in homage. The authority which reveals itself within us reports itself, not only as underived from our will, but as in- dependent of our idiosyncrasies altogether. If the sense of authority means anything, it means the dis- cernment of something higher than we, no mere part of ourself, but transcending our personality. It is more than part and parcel of myself, it is communion of God's life and guiding love entering and abiding with an apprehensive capacity in myself. Here we encounter an objective authority without quitting our own center of consciousness. A man is a law unto himself, not by autonomy of the individual, but by self- communication of the Infinite Spirit to the soul and the law itself, the idea of an absolute 'should be' is au- thoritative with conscience, because it is the deliver- ance of the eternal perfection to a mind that has to grow and is imposed, therefore, by the Infinite upon the finite."

Professor Ladd truly remarks, in his "Theory of Reality": "Man's conception of Reality must be derived from his cognitive experience with concrete realities — subjected to reflection." And again: "Cognitive experience with concrete things contains at its roots, if anywhere it is to be found, the beginnings to a true answer of the metaphysical problem." In the face of the "personal equation," the saying that there is no greater tyranny than an equality forced upon

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those who are not equal, is perfectly true. Mon- taigne in the time of the "discovery of man" spoke the pregnant words: "Everyone must have 'an inner touchstone' (un patron au dedans) by which to judge his actions." Fouillee rightly remarks in his "Psychologic des peuples euro- peens": "M. Guyau and M. Tarde have strongly insisted that we are under the dominion of con- tinual suggestion, coming from the environment in which we live. . . . We disagree with those who reduce the whole of sociolog}^ to a study of these forms, and we believe that the study of its psychological foundation is essential to sociology." Dr. Philip Fogel brought out in an able essay in the American Journal of Soci- ology the metaphysical element involved in soci- ology, which is ignored by Professor Giddings. Durkheim makes of man driftwood on the eddying tides of the social currents. He says in "Les regies de la methode sociologique" :

"Not only are these types of conduct or of thought external to the individual, but they are endowed with commanding and compelling force in virtue of which they lay hold of him whether he wishes it or not." ("Non seulement ces types de conduite ou de pensee sont exterieurs a I'individu, mais ils sont doues d'une puissance imperative et coercive en vertu de laquelle ils s'imposent a lui, qu'il le veuille on non.")

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This view results from the advocacy of social forms as the prime influence in life, thus laying the basis of moral life with its norms and sanc- tions outside of itself, although logically even these sanctions are rendered superfluous with Durkheim. It is natural that in France this school counts many followers, especially since France is in some sense "la nation la plus so- cialisee, ou les elements sociaux ont fini par dominer le plus les elements ethniques et meme psychiques" (the most socialized nation where the social elements dominate in the highest degree the ethnic and even the psychic factors). The German conception remains less bare, even when irreligious, as Sudermann expresses this view in Der Katzensteg:

"Es ist gut, dass in diesem Chaos, wo Gut und Bose, Recht and Unrecht, Ehre und Schmach wirr durchei- mander taumeln, und wo selbst der alte Gott im Himmel dahinschwindet, ein fester Pol uns iibrig bleibt, um den sich alles aufs neue ordnen rausz, ein Fels, an den wir Ertrinkenden uns klammern konnen, und an dem es zu scheitem selbst noch Wollust ist — das Vaterland !"

After the materialistic movement in the "Naturforschersammlung" of 1854 had excluded spiritual factors from its interpretations, the need of subjective reference announced itself again in the cry; "Back to Kant." After the

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excesses of the left-wing Hegelians, carrying the master's panlogism into materialistic channels, the individual soul claimed attention once more. The views in literature corresponding to those of the naturalistic school, broke down, because, as the literary critic Rene Doumic expresses it: "People have come to recognize that man has a soul" (On s'est avise qu' on a une ame). Au- gustine's strong affirmation that the home of truth is in man, thus finds its recognition.

We shall now consider the "subjective refer- ence" or "personal element" in the ethical and re- ligious formulations, not as opposing them to these formulations, but with a view to ascertain- ing the better their individual bearings on legal- ism in ethics and religion, remembering Goethe's words :

"Gern war' ich Ueberliefrung los Und ganz original; Doch ist das Untemehmen gross Und fiihrt in manche Qual. Als Autochthone rechnet' ich Es mir zur hochsten Ehre Wenn ich nicht gar zu wunderlich Selbst Ueberliefrung ware."

and those other, not less important,

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen !"

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In spite of the common elements in environ- ment and the kinship of human personality, no two hmnan lives could ever express each other's individual experiences and views. Even if the surroundings were entirely the same, the reacting individuals would be different. Pantheistic sys- tems make a fundamentally false step in slight- ing this fact of the uniqueness of each human personality. This results from the assumption that personality is in itself what it is for others. This approach from without, however, will never yield the essential meaning of personality. The own knowledge of each self is never quite the same as the most exhaustive knowledge about oneself. Pantheism proceeds on the assumption that feeHng and will can be left out of account. But even on the basis of thought alone, two in- dividual consciousnesses could never overlap completely. Mr. Hastings Rashdall makes a pointed criticism of Professor Royce's "The World and the Individual," in an article entitled, "Personality: Human and Divine." He says: — (Personal Idealism, p. 382 footnote) :

"It is admitted that two such spirits might have like but not identical experiences (i.e., experience in which there was some identity but some difference) with- out ceasing to be two. Let us suppose the content of the consciousness of each to become gradually more

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and more like that of the other, including all the time the knowledge of the other's existence. Can it be seri- ously contended that as the last remaining difference disappeared, that consciousness in A of not being B would suddenly disappear too? Of course it may be said that the consciousness of not being B is part of the content of A's consciousness. If so, of course, the case supposed could not possibly arise, and the difficulty disappears. But still the difference between A and B would be absolutely unrecognizable and in- describable for any other consciousness, although such a consciousness might know there were two beings with such contents of consciousness identical but for the knowledge by each that he was not the other."

Alice in Wonderland may instruct us with her questioning:

"If I'm not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle! I'm sure I'm not Ada, for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at all ; and I am sure I can't be Mable, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh ! she knows such a very little ! Besides, she's she, and I'm I, and — oh dear, how puzzling it all is !"

James describes this as follows: "That un- sharable feeling which one has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it

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is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places — they are strung upon it as so many beads." He declares that "the altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of crea- tion which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a psychological fact." It is ex- actly this individual factor all its own, which cannot be wholly described because of its unique- ness, but leaves a residuum that constitutes the disturbing element which battles with the regu- larity of law. All the more is this true since with this factor hes the issue of obedience to, and maintenance of, the law in society. Each per- son's gaze is fixed upon a particular bit of reality, directly observed in his own way. There is not merely a barrier around the individual soul-life preventing his fellow-creatures from observing this inner life; but intrinsically, from the nature of the case, no outsider can enter into the business transactions of the individual self. There is something of awfulness about the thought of the lonely pursuit of each individu- ality, facing the issue of life singly, seeing through one's own eyes, and accepting the re- sponsibility for its own life. Indeed if life is our own in the last instance, we cannot live it by proxy, cannot resolve it into a mere component

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part of social life. The pinch of individuality is with us, and with the "I" goes a conscience which is more than a social verdict. It is something which concerns me directly, to which I must make a personal response and thus incur re- sponsibility. Guy de Maupassant felt this fact in a morbid and painful exaggeration, and Mathew Arnold utters this weird lament in "Poems to Marguerite":

"In the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild. We mortal millions live alone."

How finely is this sentiment portrayed by Dickens in "A Tale of Two Cities" at the open- ing of the chapter "The Night Shadows":

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret ; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it ! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and

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vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depth of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should be shut with a spring, forever and forever, when I had but read a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbor is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead ; it is the inexorable con- solidation and perpetuation of the secret that was al- ways in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them.'"'

All the endeavors to make conscience a result- ing inner response to external environment, whether in social interpretation, or legal ex- planation, or evolutionary^ analysis, fail to ac- count for its authoritative, apodictive com- mands. Conscience neither seeks its authority from the things of the world, nor endeavors to justify its laws by them. For one surely does not reason one's self into an obligation which re- quires sacrifice even unto death. To be sure, the actual ethical responses are considered primarily, or at least mainly, emotional, but this does not

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account for the strong sentiment of the objec- tiveness of obligation, and sanction of duty and ought. But more than this, the social self is always transcended by the ideal self. As Pro- fessor Bald^vin remarks :

"The social influence which determines the develop- ment of conscience almost entirely in its earlier stages is itself transcended, in the rational or self-conscious organization of the moral life; so that the conscience becomes not merely a social self, but an ideal self."

CHAPTER IV MORAL OBLIGATIOX

The subjective activity in the assimilating of the ethical verdicts under criticism and compari- son has been widely discussed in recent studies in the analysis or development of conscience. The existence of heterogeneous codes is no longer considered a valid argument against the validity of conscience, since we find the authori- tative claim in the personal application of every form. Although the individual moral norm is one's o\\Ti construction out of the available ethi- cal judgments to which the person turns, this standard exercises absolute authority. On the validity of its unconditioned demands, the indi- vidual ^\all stake his life. " Belief," says Pro- fessor Baldwin, "is the personal endorsement of reality." Pascal's dictum, "Verite en de^a des Pyrenees, erreur au dela," loses its force upon close observation, and Benthan's remark, "Con- science is a thing of fictitious existence supposed to occupy a seat in the mind," results from the legal conception which regulates the acting ab ecctra.

It is plain that there must be an inner indica-

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tion of outer import, which gives an authorita- tive dictum. On all sides we have primarily the subjective reference, for the moral and religious life announces itself as a private and individual concern in individual experience. The legal command "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not" is to be obeyed only as responded to by the "I ought" or "I ought not" of the individual. The specific application of the right is left with the indi- vidual, and cannot be rigidly controlled by the normative and mandatory legal construction un- der which the personal conscience has developed. Moral, religious, and civil law are to be main- tained, rather than carried out, because the ex- clusive uniqueness of the individual refuses to be completely subsumed under law. And although Kant proclaimed an erring conscience a chimera, his impersonal categorical imperative falls back on the concrete experience of single individuals. When he admits that judgment may err as to the form in a particular duty, he lifts conscience out of the moral judgment as such, and identifies it with the ultimate principles of Practical Reason. This is the will-form as carried by the acting in- dividual, and requires personal application. In our age of enthusiastic social study, those who have not gone to the extreme of lodging author- ity in ethical and religious belief in the "collec- tive consciousness" and its stored-up wisdom of

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custom and tradition, translate the Kantian will of Practical Reason into a social will. Yet, these customs admittedly yield a determination not of an absolute and final, but only of a relative kind. We have the attempt, therefore, to unite subjec- tive will with the impersonal order of social con- tent. And this raises the question again as to the final decision, or the seat of authority. Each man is the child of his age only as to the form of his problems. Maurice in his lecture on casu- istry calls attention to the fact that, in behalf of etliical and religious improvement, appeals are made to public opinion to enforce the claims of the individual conscience on the one hand, and on the other to the individual conscience to bear up public opinion; showing, thus, that the point of leverage is with the individual, embodied in so- cial ethics.

The worth and authority of the individual agent is assumed to be derived from, and sus- tained by, the community in the evolutionary views, though it is admitted that "natural selec- tion" has been overemphasized in its dual opera- tion with "the struggle for existence" or "adap- tation to environment." How are these func- tions related? How does the struggling indi- vidual find his place in this unfinished world, ac- cording to the plan of the whole? Is it to be computed, or is the world's explanation to be

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apprehended only by faith? Spencer's evolu- tionary definition of conscience as being "the control of the less evolved feelings by the more evolved ones" projects from without those princi- ples that we must find within. Moreover the decision as to which is the more evolved feeling is to be made by this individual, reacting rather than acting.

Evolution has been the watchword of the "en- lightment" of the latter half of the nineteenth century. It has been trumpeted about as a neverfailing explanation for any and all prob- lems. The much- famed theory is just now be- ing modified and broken down in the biological field from which it boldly invaded the domain of philosophy and theology. Darwin himself wrote to the biologist, Ernest Haeckel: "Your bold- ness makes me shudder," when he perceived the daring assumptions to which his own hypothesis had given rise. The discussion of the evolution of organic life was soon carried into every field, till daring logical minds declared God Himself to be in the process of evolution. This more- over was an easy step to take for the age under the influence of the prevailing pantheistic phi- losophy. The famous Dutch botanist, Hugo De Vries, however, in his "Mutationstheorie" comes to a conclusion the very opposite of Darwin's,

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concerning the origin of species. We quote (p.

22):

"Quite universally the doctrine of selection is con- sidered inadequate, the species cannot have arisen through fargoing individual or fluctuating variation by means of selection in indetermined directions. Species do not originate, but disappear through the struggle for existence and through natural selection."

Numerous attacks are being made on the evolutionary dogma, now that its spell is broken. We mention: Professor Dr. A. Pauly: "Wahres und falsches, in Darwin's Lehre"; Prof. Dr. Kassowitz; "Die Krisis des Darwinismus" ; Dr. Dennert; "Vom Sterbelager des Darwinismus, etc.

We are concerned here only with bearings of evolution on human personality under authority. Dr. P. T. Forsyth, in an able article entitled "Some Christian Aspects of Evolution," in the London Quarterly Review, October, 1905, dwells on this point. He says:

"The doctrine of evolution substitutes process for effort. We are caught in a tendency which, we are taught, no effort can control. We are borne along on a tide against which we cannot swim. We learn the fruitlessness of moral struggle against these age-long

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forces that have submerged so many of the best moral attempts. We climb a climbing wave. We are crea- tures of the time and the world. We lose the moral vigor which resists a majority, the public or the priest, and the moral sympathy which helps to its feet the in- ferior race or the struggling right. We learn to dis- trust truth itself. It is all relative only, something in the making, and something which we can make. And it is all over with truth when man feels himself its crea- tor. His truth is not worth martyrdom then, for it is too changing to be an object of faith; and it is hardly worth propagandism, for it will change ere he can con- vert an audience, to say nothing of a generation. Real- ity gives way under our feet, and standards vanish like stars falling from heaven. Growth, it comes to be thought, does not issue from being, but being from growth. Man becomes his own maker and he has a moral fool for his product."

CHAPTER V THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN LAW

In France "social morality" has largely sup- planted "individual morality." Individual re- sponsibilities for ethical behavior are pooled in a national morahty ''sans obligation ni sanction" as Guyau tries to show. According to the gen- eral verdict, however, this morality lacks, exactly the strength of sincere, personal endorsement. The utilitarian conception is but little better, for the main reason that the estimate of worth and utility can never attain more than relative im- portance. There is no ndu aroi from which to compute the greatest happiness of the great- est number. There must be an internal indica- tion of outer import, which gives an authorita- tive dictum. On all sides we have primarily the subjective reference, for the moral and re- ligious Hfe announces itself as a private and per- sonal concern. The legal command, "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not" is to be obeyed only as responded to by the "I ought," or "I ought not" of the individual. The specific applica- tion of the right is left with the individual and cannot be rigidly controlled by the normative and

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mandatory legal construction under which the personal conscience has developed. Moral, re- ligious, and civil law are to be maintained, rather than carried out, because of a marginal lib- erty left to the exclusive uniqueness of the indi- vidual which cannot be approached ab extra.

The common law of the Anglo-Saxon nations shows a superior wisdom, and more practical dealing with individual life, than the Roman law. For, in approaching individual cases ac- cording to precedents, the common law is en- abled to do more justice to the individual than can the Roman law since it subsumes the cases under its code. It should, however, be observed that extenuating and aggravating circumstances are modifying the rigidity of the theoretic con- ception of the Roman code. It is to be noted, also, that many jurists give the application of Roman law a psychological turn, whilst there is a disposition throughout with sane judges and legislators to avoid detailed prescriptions. ''De minimis non curat lex." Similarly in medicine, education, etc., the general, theoretic rule can- not be applied without reference to the indi- vidual case. Not a disease but a case is treated.

HofFding well observes in his "Problems of Philosophy" :

"The law, the demand, must be differentiated ac-

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cording to the different individuals if it is really to be identical for all. Each one should be taxed according to his ability. There must be a thorough-going indi- vidualizing of the ethical demand, lest Ethics itself transgress the dictum that personality is always an end, never a mere means. The ethical demand must be no abstract or external command, but should correspond to the ethical possibilities of the individual person, and be adapted to develop them. Legislation and peda- gogics cannot at this point be absolutely sundered. But in individual cases this makes ethical decisions difficult. Ethical thought can formulate no law that could be ap- plied offhand to all the manifold emergencies of life. Nevertheless, we must assume that in every individual case only a single decision can be the completely right one."

It is felt that the objective code cannot well invade private life too far. Sumptuary laws fall under this condemnation. Ethical be- havior and religious life cannot be built into the legal constraining fabric. Yet, strange to say, in America people have willingly consented to be ruled in these matters to an extent where Europeans would object to the legislation as meddling with private concerns. I refer to cur- few laws, laws against smoking, dress, drinking, etc. In olden time, the so-called "blue-laws" went farther still. It should be remarked, how- ever, that all these compulsory laws were in-

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itiated by a strong ethical interest and concern. But it is also to be remembered that, as any of these ethical endeavors begins to lean on the backing of legal constraint, this is an indication that the ethical interest itself is on the wane. The prohibitionists think that the whole evil of intemperance will be remedied by the removal of the objects of abuse and misuse. Interest is un- duly centered on the milieu and the circumstances under which the moral life manifests itself, and so legal encroachment makes its appearance. But even in law each case should be judged on its own merit within the adumbration of the proper legal regulations. Disintegration of faith in received codes — apart from inner life- experiences which remain primary — may find explanation largely in the conflicts occasioned between difl'erent opinions, morals and religions by the intensified inter-communication of the various parts of the world. Any conflict or com- parison of opinions involves unsettlement, un- less the convictions are deep-rooted, which is fre- quently not the case in ethics, religion, or civic matters.

Ladd says in his "Philosophy of Conduct":

"The authoritative standard leaves the criteria, sanc- tions, and Ideals of conduct just where they ought to be left by all merely descriptive, historical ethics —

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namely in the consciousness of the multitude of the in- dividuals that respond to the stimulus of external con- ditions, with appropriate ethical feelings and ideas."

But Ladd, although conceding the inadequacy of an external criterion for ethical conduct as much as an a priori and impersonal formula, pays profound and eloquent homage to the moral phenomena of human life as disclosing Reality itself.

"There is much, however, in this lofty maintaining of the claims of universal reason to have somewhere hid- den in its depths the eternal truth and unchanging prin- ciples of all morality, which excites the enthusiasm and commands the respect of the reflective mind. The most imchanging truths, we feel, are moral. The profound- est insights into the heart of Reality are born of an eth- ical nature. Man's kinship with the Infinite and the Eternal is most intimate and strong only when he has arrived at the maturity of self-consciousness. Things may be in an unceasing flux, and all the physical struc- tures of human skill may crumble away. Even the ele- ments may melt with fervent heat, and the heavens themselves be rolled up like a parchment-scroll. But the obligations of duty can never be abated, the good of righteous living does not fade ; the moral ideal loses none of its awful beauty, or of its unconditional value. Over and beyond the last dim and fading vision of the things that minister to a sensuous good, there rises the spiritual vision of a good that is lasting and supreme.

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And in this good virtue is not the least, but rather the most important, factor; for it is the Ideal which lures on and encourages and commands the moral conscious- ness of humanity."

We must now face more clearly the issue, that in the last analysis we stand individually before this spiritual ideal in the forms of, and in co- operation with, others through our social milieu. We must, therefore, not attach too much impor- tance to the forms and surroundings, since the purport of social phenomena is to be interpreted always and responded to by the acting subject. Paulsen has well expressed the secondary im- portance of legalism. He says :

"The legal order may be brought in as a mechanism in the service of the good whose function is to harmon- ize many individual forces, with the least expenditure of energy, or to balance many partially crossing spheres of interest. But the legal system can never realize this end, for in acting mechanically it does not act accord- ing to the requirements of a particular case. In legal systems we see the same thing, individual cases are de- cided according to general rules even when deciding specific cases by themselves ; the method of procedure is to subsume the individual case under a general rule to ascertain the right."

One may say, therefore, that the law is ex-

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tremely useful in sustaining the public con- science, if there be only due reverence for the law, and if the law is not too rigidly applied in its uniformity, but so as to leave room for indi- vidual variety in subsumed cases.

Fouillee remarks: "In the French idea of liberty the notion of society is never absent, lib- erty is conceived of as a social power in the sense that it is limited and regulated by society, and that the liberty of the one implies the same liberty for others. Liberty appears then as a solidarity of individual activities in society. This circum- stance gave occasion for accusing the French, not without reason, of thinking rather of equality than of liberty, and of not showing in practice that individual initiative, indifferent to others, which is so frequent among other races where the sentiment of 'self is more developed." Fouillee feels that the claims of this subjective reference are to be admitted when he continues a little further on: "The equality is then not the mechanical equalization of those who are un- equal, rather is it the same liberty of manifest- ing these inequalities in the bosom of society."

CHAPTER VI

ROMAN CATHOLICISM AND FREE- DOM OF CONSCIENCE

We have remarked in reference to French so- ciologists that they especially minimize or elimi- nate the individual reference, not only because of the prevaiHng strong social sentiments, but also because of the Roman Catholic tradition with its emphatic legal morality of injunctions and good works and no private conscience. Desmoulins in considering the question, "a quoi tient la superiorite des Anglo-Saxons?" finds this superiority in the individuality, the personal initiative and the supremacy of the conscience which go naturally with the reformed religion. The apologists of the confession invariably come as near to the protestant position on the freedom of conscience as they possibly can. "The priest does not ask. It is you who confess your sins in his presence. That is between you and God." Yet, who would deny that this violates the pri- vate conscience, and challenges the watchword of the great Orange in the struggle of the refor- mation: "Conscience is God's province." It is natural that by disregard for individual con-

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science the zealous Jesuits could emphasize and cultivate obedience to an unusual degree. As some military ideas would have it : "Loyal to the commander, but dead to the issue !" "My coun- try right or wrong, my country!" The main- spring of man's finer sensibilities asserts itself, however, in the end. Even Sir James Turner with his checkered military career writes :

"I had swallowed without chewing, in Germanie, a very dangerous maxime, which militarie men there too much follow; which was, that so we serve our master honnestlie, it is no matter what master we serve; so, without examination of the justice of the quarrell, or regard of my duetie to either prince or countrey, I re- solved to goe with that ship I first rencounterd."

Unless, however, a man is aflame with the issue, his loyalty to the commander sustained in the task undertaken, no real, faithful service can be rendered, because our conduct must come home to us individually. Lowell brings this out well in the sentiments of a disbehever in war :

" Es fer war, I call it murder, —

There you hev it plain an' flat ; I don't want to go no furder

Than my Testyment fer that; God hez sed so plump an' fairly,

It's ez long ez it is broad, An' you've gut to git up airly

Ef you want to take in God.

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" 'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers

Make the thing a grain more right; 'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers

Will excuse ye in His sight ; Ef you take a sword an' dror it,

An' go stick a feller thru, Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,

God'll send the bill to you."

It is an interesting subject to consider the sphere of official and private assumption of an- other's responsibility in matters of moral obliga- tion. In Roman law the agent is in some in- stances dangerously near being considered a mere means. This matter appears again with big concerns in regard to the private initiative to be left to their employees. Individual authority, its private initiative and responsibility have to be reconciled in co-operating manner with the efficiency of the whole. In all these matters it becomes strikingly apparent how strong a ground the Calvinistic principle has in its vindication of the individual domain of conscience and indi- viduality.

The Roman Catholic view of an Infallible Church implies the subordination of the indi- vidual conscience and private judgment to the universally valid supervision of the authoritative priesthood. This prevailing legal tendency is frankly admitted by the Church. There is no

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quest for a final authority. The Church mounts guard with absolute security over the private ap- prehension of moral and religious truth. Even Abbe Loisy, recently dismissed from that church claims that he does not question the Church's teachings, but only the possibility of demonstrat- ing them from the Gospels according to the re- ceived principles and methods of scientific criti- cism. Thus he claimed rights as a critic and the- ologian, which the Church, in direct control over the apologetic problems which these studies may raise, does not allow. The Vatican canon says: "De Fide et ratione: Si quis dixerit: disci- plinas humanas ea cum libertate tractandus esse, ut earum assertiones, etsi doctrinae revelatae ad- versentur tamquam verae retineri, neque ab Ecclesia proscribi possint — anathema sit." Re- nan quotes the encyclical of Gregory XVI in an essay on "Lamenais," who raised the far-reach- ing disturbing individual-investigation and pri- vate-judgment for the Church whose uniformity submerges all individual life as independent fac- tors: "Atque ex hoc putidissimo indifferentis- simi fonte absurda ilia fluit ac erronea sententia, seu potius deliramentum, asserendam esse ac vin- dicandum cuilibet libertatem conscientiae." In the same encyclical Augustine's words are quoted: "At quae pejor mors animae quam lib- ertas erroris." Renan also quotes a letter from

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Cardinal Pacca to Lamenais, relative to the en- cyclical: "The Holy Father disapproves also and even rejects the doctrines relating to the liberty of cults and civil and political liberty." When, therefore, Cardinal Gibbons says in "The Faith of our Fathers": "It should be borne in mind that neither God nor His Church forces anyone's conscience. To all he says by the mouth of His prophet : 'Behold I set before you the way of life and the way of death' ( Jer. xxi, 8) . The choice rest with yourselves," he is addressing only the non-Roman Catholic. For as a Roman Catho- lic bishop wrote to a Calvinistic friend of mine: "The Catholics," it has been said, "rely on the inspired men, not on an inspired book." And the canonicity of the Holy Scriptures is held to rest solely on the authority of the Roman Catho- lic Church. Rehgious authority in Protestant- ism, however, rests upon the sanction of inward conviction in her creed ; the Bible and the church are norms from which the individual starts in his own interpretation.

Cardinal Gibbons discusses this standpoint in the following manner:

"Let us see whether an infallible Bible is sufficient for you. Either you are infallibly certain that your inter- pretation of the Bible is correct or you are not. If you are infallibly certain, then you assert for yourself.

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and of course for every reader of the Scripture, a per- sonal infallibility which you deny to the Pope, and which we claim only for him. You make every man his own Pope. If you are not infallibly certain that you understand the true meaning of the whole Bible — and this is a privilege you do not claim — then, I ask, of what use to you is the objective infallibility of the Bible with- out an infallible interpreter!"

The argument requires no refutation, but is adduced as another concrete instance of the neg- lect of the essential subjective reference in indi- vidual interpretation. Truth, morality, religion, art, ideals have to become subjective to be of any avail to us. This Protestant assertion of indi- vidualism is well expressed in the words of a critic quoted by Fouillee:

"An eminent critic has said that Protestantism was the protest of the individual against the social charac- ter of Catholicism. That is not, to be sure, a complete or adequate definition of the Reformation, but one may concede that the Reformation was a revolt of individu- alism, moreover a just exaltation of the individual con- science, individual faith and individual religion, too much stifled under the forms, the works — and the col- lective organization of Catholicism."

We fall back, then, on the old evangelical position in which the soul finds satisfaction in its

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personal effort to reach the transcendent ideal. The sphere of Conduct moreover is not con- ceived as the mere fact of behavior but as re- lated to a transcendent ideal and is also elevated into the concreteness of personality, giving it re- ligious significance. And this religious signifi- cance sustains "mere morality" with God; and for the solitary soul, the one supreme concern of each man, religion discloses duty as personal re- sponsibility to divine commands, not, however, in the Kantian sense "as if," but "because of the impress of God." As Riickert says in his beau- tiful epigram:

" Before every one stands the picture of what he should become, As long as he has not attained unto it, his peace is not complete." ("Vor jedem steht ein Bild des das er werden soil So lang er das nicht ist, ist nicht sein Frieden voll.")

Luther, laying hold upon the inner conviction of his own soul, declares it inadvisable to under- take anything against his conscience, even in the face of an august assembly, which represented both the ecclesiastical and worldly power. When we remember that any individual claims deviat- ing from the iron-bound scholastic system of the middle ages were at once met with the awful obloquy and opprobrium of heresy, this act of

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the Protestant leader was as heroic a stand as was ever taken by any hero in the course of his- tory. If Luther seized upon the principle which takes hold of Reality, then he was right, in spite of the resulting schisms, in breaking the legisla- tive codes before the variegated inner life of the multitude. The whole historic structure of the Catholic Church, identifying the invisible within with the expressed visibility, is a legalistic pro- cedure, the expression of something in its essence never wholly expressed, but hidden in the hearts of the "collective Christ," the invisible church of believers. Dr. A. Kuyper says in his "Lectures on Calvinism":

"Rome perceived clearly how liberty of conscience must loosen the foundations of the unity of the visible church, and therefore she opposed it. But on the other hand it must be admitted that Calvinism, by praising aloud liberty of conscience, has in principle abandoned every absolute characteristic of the visible church. As soon as in the bosom of one and the same people the conscience of one half witnessed against that of the other half, the breach has been accomplished, and pla- cards were no longer of any avail. As early as 1649 it was declared that persecution, for faith's sake, was * a spiritual murder, an assassination of the soul, a rage against God himself, the most horrible of sins.' "

Maurice couples "liberty of conscience" with

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the expression "conscience of liberty" to explain its individualistic meaning. The expression of individual life is the strongest where the objec- tive norm has a less predominating influence. Wherever conscience of liberty is, there also the cry for liberty of conscience is raised against a ruling code which dictates from without. Dr. Kuyper says again in his "Lectures on Calvin- ism" :

"I maintain the sovereignty of conscience, as the pal- ladium of all personal liberty, in this sense — that con- science is never subject to man but always and ever to God Almighty. This need of the personal liberty of conscience, however, does not immediately assert itself. It does not express itself with emphasis in the child, but only in the mature man ; and in the same way it mostly slumbers among undeveloped peoples, and is irresist- ible only among highly developed nations. A man of ripe and rich development will rather become a volun- tary exile, will rather suffer imprisonment, nay even sacrifice life itself than suffer constraint in the forum of his conscience. And the deeply rooted repugnance against the Inquisition, which for three long centuries would not be assuaged, grew up from the conviction that its practices violated and assaulted human life in man."

CHAPTER VII

LEGALISM IN MORALS AND RELIGION

Prof. Palmer observes in "The Field of Ethics":

"The law is inadequate to the moral demand because it is too objective. By the law the moral agent is not regarded primarily in himself, subjectively, i.e., with reference to the effects which his conduct may produce on his own growth and welfare. He is regarded ob- jectively, i.e., in relation to others, and is accounted good or bad according as he damages or protects other members of his community. And this objectivity of the law will oblige us to look elsewhere for a full ex- hibit of the moral life."

The law fixes only a minimum requirement and as a mandatory norm addresses itself always more or less to the individual ab extra, although it is incorporated in his social life and tradition. If we are to eke out the legal deficiency, we must enter the recesses of the heart and ask whether the individual is good in himself? Conformity to outward demands is not a sufficient evidence of positive virtue; the individual as personality

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is a vital factor. Schiirer in his work, "The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ," after the exposition of the legal practices of the Pharisees in the Chapter, "The Life Under the Law," concludes:

"The examples brought forward will have made suffi- ciently evident the manner in which the moral and reli- gious life was conceived of and regulated from the ju- ristic point of view. In all questions everything de- pended only upon settling what was according to law, and that with the utmost possible care, that so the sub- ject might have certain directions for every individual case. In a word: ethics and theology were swallowed up in jurisprudence. The evil results of this external view on practical matters are very evident. And such results were its necessary consequence. Even in that most favorable case of juristic casuistry, moving on the whole in morally correct paths, it was in Itself a poisoning of the moral principle, and could not but have a paralyzing and benumbing effect upon the vig- orous pulsation of the moral life. But this favorable case by no means occurred. When once the question was started: 'What have I to do to fulfil the law?' the temptation was obvious, that a composition with the letter would be chiefly aimed at, at the cost of the real demands of morality, nay of the proper Intention of the law Itself."

Pollock's definition touching the regulative norm made mandatory to an aggregate may

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show how naturally the external emphasis in ethics and religion results in clubbing together the content of individual experiences into a legis- lative dictum for the aggregate. Pollock says in his "Jurisprudence": "Law may be regarded, in its essence analytically, as a command from a superior to an inferior; or historically, as a rule judicially declared to be entitled to general ob- servance, and therefore obligatory." It is at once evident that law is the rule of govermnent- action, declared or created by competent au- thority. This rightly established authority, which has become law on sufficient grounds in the social life, furthers the inroad of legalism in the field of ethics. Men want a definite, au- thoritative expression of the inner law, and tend to lean on this as its standard. There is thus a tendency to look upon a code of morals as regulative, as a rule of conduct apart from that which the individual formulates for his guidance in the private pathway of life. He does not cross the bridge till he gets to it, but thinks at least of the mode of procedure, the method or rule by which it is to be done.

Holland is perhaps still more specific in bringing out the formal, external aspect of law. He says in his "Jurisprudence":

"Any particular law, properly so-called, is a general

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rule of human action taking cognizance only of exter- nal acts enforced by a determinate authority, which au- thority is human and among human authorities that which is paramount in political society."

In this definition the terms "general rule of human action," the "cognizance of external acts" only, and the enforcement "by a determinate authority" show that we have gotten away from exclusively personal subjectivity of ethics in the attempt to find a principle independent of the subjective changes in the individuals who constitute the social organization. The definite code was unwritten law long before it became recognized law, but the rule of life and action has been sufficiently externalized by public and gen- eral recognition so as to exercise authority as well ab extra as from within. The feeling of obligation with reference to this established law has not the directness of the inner witness. The "I ought" has been projected without, and stands reflected in the embodiment of an ex- ternal "Thou shalt."

History, however, gives distinct warning that the preceptive or prescriptive rule is not enough in itself; the personal equation cannot be elimi- nated with impunity. Law is fixed and not plastic; deals with defined, measured duties, not with the infinite obligation; approaches the sub-

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ject from without, not from within; is based on an established moral nature rather than the genetic morahty of the individual; is exacting, — and therefore, without close reference to the per- son addressed, — not spontaneously urging in in- timate relationships. For all these reasons legal practices are only props of ethical and re- ligious life, because authority in matters of con- science must remain with the individual. The Roman Catholic Church, feeling this, has applied the general rules of morality to specific cases; and the historyl of casuistry shows in consequence the bad excesses of legal practices in the ethical domain. Where the conscience is not sensitive, the moral personality not vigorous, the social, conventional, legal morality is much in evidence. This is the case in a country like France with its passion for logical systems, to which even facts must yield. A country where the absolute rule has prevailed for centuries, where the king asserted "L'etat c'est moi" and signed "Tel est notre plaisir," where an abbot deplored the facts, because they did not conform to his system, where the "Prinzipienreiterei" shouted "perisse le monde, vivent les principes!" a country of cut-and-dried theories, which abohshed by decree religion and established a cult of reason instead, a land of which the cold-blooded Jolin Stuart Mill says that its people take logical co-

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herence for proof and dispense with the control of facts. In this nation, dominated by the phrase, carried by the whirls of contemporary opinions, the legalistic inroads have fairly extin- guished individual, moral, and religious Hfe. Here we hear of a religion of honor, of human- ity, of patriotism, of science, etc., as the prevailing notions of the day in their social world will have it. In France where solid, strong personalities are shelved by a frivolous majority as a "genre ennuyeux qui n'est pas bon" the people have suffered irreparably from the curse of legalism. Hugo pleads this point in "Les Miserables," showing how destructive the rigid, mechanical conception of the law is to the individual life. Honore de Balzac says in "Pere Goriot": He (Eugene de Rastignac) had seen the three great expressions of human society: Obedience, Struggle and Revolt ; or the Family, the World and Vautrin (the convict) . He dared ally himself with neither. Obedience was weari- some. Revolt, impossible, and Struggle, uncer- tain.

We quote Hugo's eloquent words against French legalism:

"Javert had certainly always had the intention of re- turning Jean Valjean to the law, of which Jean Valjean was the captiz^e, and of which he, Javert, was the slave.

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That, however, J avert and Jean Vol jean, the man made to he severe, the man made to he submissive, that these two men, who were each the thing of the law, should have come to this point of setting themselves hoth above the law, was not this terrible? Jean Valjean was the weight on Javert's mind. His supreme anguish was the loss of all certainty. He felt that he was uprooted. The code was now but a stump in his hand. He had to do with scruples of an unknown species. There was in him a revelation of feeling entirely distinct from the declaration of the law, his only standard hitherto. An entire order of unexpected facts arose and subjugated him. An entire new world appeared to his soul, favor accepted and returned; devotion, compassion, indul- gence, acts of violence committed by pity upon auster- ity, respect of persons, the possibility of a tear in the eye of the law, a mysterious justice, according to God, going counter to justice of men. He perceived in the darkness the fearful rising of an unknown moral sun, he was horrified and blinded by it. An owl compelled to an eagle's gaze. He said to himself that it was true, then, that there were exceptions, that authority might be put out of countenance ; that rule might stop before a fact; that everything was not framed in the text of the code.

"To feel your fingers suddenly open ! To lose your hold, appalling thing! The projectile man no longer knowing his road, and recoiling! To be obliged to acknowledge this : infallibility is not infallible ; there may be an error in the dogma ; all is not perfect ; au- thority is complicate with vacillation; a cracking is

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possible in the immutable ; judges are men ; the law may be deceived ; the tribunals may be mistaken ! What ! the flaw in the cuirass of society could be found by a magnanimous wretch ! What ! a servant of the law could find himself suddenly caught between two crimes — the crime of letting a man escape and the crime of ar- resting him ! All was not certain in the order given by the state to the official. If facts did their duty they would be contented with being the proofs of the law; facts, it is God who sends them."

Although the facts gathered from human ex- perience, elaborated into moral and civic codes have a certain authority, their forms have no au- thority which excludes fallibility. We must therefore refrain from excessive emphasis on the conventional or legal morality. The expressed morality of conformity to moral, religious, and civic rule may be without, or even at the cost of, the inner moraHty from which it sprang. Yet, as observed, the relation between the individual and the social ideal is close, in that the social morality furnishes the material for the construc- tion of the individual ideal in the form of per- sonal experience. But the evil of legahsm is un- due encroachment upon the individual. The in- dividual conscience is weakened when the sub- jective reference of legalism is discarded. Be- sides, conventional, average morality, cultivates simply the negative virtues, the absence of ap-

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parent vices. Thus the idea of morality and re- hgion is conceived prevailingly and naturally as restraint, not as conformity to truth and right, as a life responsive to and expressive of a posi- tive principle within. The apparent opposition between the absolute, positive virtues born in the soul-life, and the ethical endeavors in the sight of men disappears, when we bear in mind their interrelation. For an understanding of our eth- ical life, its social expressions, we must rightly estimate its individual, personal ground and sup- port. An interview as to legitimacy of pleasures, addressed to well-known divines of different denominations, showed this in striking fashion. Bishop D. H. Greer, Dr. B. P. Ray- mond, Dr. Newman Smyth, Dr. C. H. Park- hurst, Dr. J. B. Remensnyder, Dr. R. Stuart Mac Arthur, Dr. E. B. Kephart and Cardinal J. Gibbons all concurred in acknowledging the complexity of the moral life, affirming "that the church should beware of the artificial conscience and the externality and superficiality of the re- ligious hfe wherever that conscience is culti- vated." Under the Gospel men are expected to walk not by chalk lines but by the law of the renewed mind. Morality is not determined by a series of specific directions. The office of the church is to educate the Christian conscience, not to impose prohibitions; to formulate

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a law of comprehension, not a rule of ex- clusion. J. Wesley declared: "The Christian may not do those things which he knows are not for the glory of God." In the General Con- ference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1872, however, the attempt was made to specify required "negative virtues." The IMethodist Church prohibits dancing, card-playing, and theater-going, and practically also smoking and drinking. The leaning on prescriptive, con- crete forms defeats the purpose of the ethical law by weakening the moral fiber. It is apt to culti- vate the kind of people who are outwardly good, because they dare not be bad, religionists for whom this outward conformity, performed in good faith, constitutes religion, and who, there- fore, by fulfilling the legal minimum, incline to a boast possible on this basis, yet never justified. Least of all where the requirements met are mere legal demands as prescribed in social forms. Rather are they upheld by the law of which they allege themselves to be the proud supporters, in- asmuch as in their paraded legal observance of the good they are but the captives of the posi- tive virtue of others, elevated into normative law. This criticism of legal morality applies to all, but it is furthered by the prescriptive virtue of which Methodism seems to be unduly fond. It does not tend to raise positive, strong charac-

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ters, aims at an impossible preservation of inno- cence rather than at moral excellency tested and proved in life's struggle.

The contents and forms of morality and reli- gion are assimilated from stored up tradition and legal codes, — but in varying degree and manner according to the reaction of the appropriating agent. On this account, the detail of judgment in moral action should be left to the individual. He must be the final arbiter in his own case, for motive and intention are known only to him. Fouillee for example admits that the subjective bearings are fundamental in moral and religious life:

"On a voulu faire de I'imitation un phenomene primi- tif fondement de I'ordre social. Nous admettons (et c'est la un des principes de la doctrine des idees-forces), que toute representation intense, repetee, exclusive, tend a se faire action parceque toute representation est ac- compagnee d'un mouvement ; mais I'imitation n'est qu'un corollaire de ce theoreme, non un principe. La tendance innee a la sympathie pour les uns et I'antipathie pour les autres a sans doute son expression objective dans I'imitation des uns et la non-imitation des autres ; mais c'est la seulement une des expressions de la sym- pathie, non la seule, selon nous ni la plus essentielle."

("Some have tried to construe imitation as the prime foundation of our social order. We admit [and this is one of the principles of the idea-forces] that every in-

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tense representation, repeated, exclusive, tends to turn into action, because every representation is accompanied by a motion, but imitation is only a corrollary of this theory, not a principle. The innate tendency has for some sympathy, for others antipathy, and correspond- ingly result its objective expression in the imitation of the former and in the non-imitation of the latter. But this is only one of the expressions of sympathy, and neither the only one, nor the most essential.")

CHAPTER VIII INDIVIDUAL WILL

Professor A. T. Ormond has expounded well the psychological ground in imitation, conscious- ness of kind, and conduct as vitalized social forms, and has shown that they all involve and refer to an inner activity of the subject. In an article on the "Social Individual" he says:

"The touch that makes us kin is an inner touch, while the objective and outer motive that leads to the touch is either an imitative movement or a representa- tion that is rendered capable of a reference to the inner consciousness of another by means of prior association with inner experiences of our own. . . . The in- ternal or appreciative moment of the social life, as re- lated to our fellow-creatures in which sphere the ethical life functions, lies with the individual and this reaction of the individual involves his whole personality."

Again in his "Foundations of Knowledge," Professor Ormond says:

"We are obliged to trace the primary root of the sense of kind to the self in some primary individual na- ture, that in becoming internally conscious becomes also

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the *fontal type' of all ends which it seeks objectively." "The reaction of the subject-consciousness is a re- action as a whole, and self-apprehension will be a func- tion of this mode of reaction. If we are sure of our self-activity, we have that assurance because we grasp it in an act of immediate intuition. It cannot be disputed, then, that we know the fact of our self- activity. ... If in the reactive consciousness, self-activity, and not simply activity that has no label is revealed, then it is clear that we have a qualifica- tion of the content as a whole which renders it not merely a "that," but a "what." The fact that the activity is taking the form of a self shows that it is not formless, but is defining itself as a whole."

Therefore we do not assume a special faculty which assures us of our moral bearings, nor do we arrive at our ethical interpretations mainly through the intellect, but we find our moral obligations vested in our whole personality. We are in touch with the Infinite with our whole personality. Professor Ladd explains this fact by an ontological consciousness.

"Man has an ontological consciousness. Ontological speculation is an essential function of the human race, the necessary forms of thought are insights into the nature of Reality. The human mind seeks after the unity of an explanatory Ground, and finds it, it recog- nizes as the inner and ultimate truth of the world that it is the expression, the manifestation, the realization

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of Absolute Mind. The Absolute so recognized is posi- tive and full; the very opposite of the Unreality, it is the fruitful source of all relations. It is Spirit — i. e., a Will self-active in the realization of ideal ends : this is the innermost essence of all Reality. It is the know- ing Subject, from which issues 'the most fundamental and comprehensive of all relations, that between the knower and what is known.' "

If we conclude with the generally accepted theories that will-psychology once more pre- dominates over the claims of the intellect, we are inclined to give judgment, as such, a secondary place in morals and religion, but the disposition of the heart primary consideration. Even Thomas Aquinus in his Aristotelianized Chris- tian system defined conscience as "the disposi- tion to realize natural law."

So the specific ethical feature is to be lodged rather in the response of the individual than in the content to which the response is made, although as one responds so is one responsible. On the face of it, therefore, the enlightenment through the wisdom of experience represented in tradition, civilization, dogmas, and codes is an immense help. The absolute worth is in the re- sponse; but in view of the close, organic relation between the subjective response and the objec- tive situation, to which the responding effort is directed, the latter is indicative of the subjec-

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tive attitude. In keeping with this, the outside view in "ejective interpretation" infers the inner motive from externalized behavior. As has been shown, this can be only an approximate estimate; whilst the judgment as to its ethical value, which insists that good must be good for something, is always defeated in its computa- tion for the lack of a standing ground; for ethical systems enter upon an infinitely complex field of unending consequences. Moreover, the reaction upon the acting subject cannot be com- puted. The moral and religious features lie pri- marily with the initiative of moral behavior, though inextricably conjoined with the direction and form which takes under given surroundings and circumstances.

Prof. Caldecott remarks in his "Philosophy of Religion" :

"Modem psychologists in their various ways regard mental life as consisting primarily of processes of will directed to the satisfaction of feeling; and making use of intellect as instrumental. In this way they describe much of every individual's experience as due to himself, inasmuch as he has neglected to attend to vast ranges of objects which have only just appeared in the con- fines of his field of view, but killed by neglect, have perished. These have not been taken into experience, therefore, which have been made up of those objects which received a welcome and were attended to by per-

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sonal preference. Thus every man's world is much more his own creation than intellect-psychology had led us to suppose ; much more the product of his own personal choice. It is, in short, personal choice which is the core and pith of the life of the human soul."

Fichte sought to account for this personal element when he defined a volition as the imme- diate consciousness of the activity of any of the powers of Nature within us. But will is a per- son's active power toward a self-chosen end, which mocks rationalistic schemes with the well- known saying: "Who is convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still." It reminds of Tennyson's

"Our wills are ours we know not how Our wills are ours to make them Thine."

The personal equation entering into our knowledge as a result of the grasping of facts with personal bias has received ample treatment in the discussions on "selective thinking" and pragmatism. They coiToborate the position which proclaims responsibility for beliefs, and considers that ignorance of the right is sinful. Reading the damnatory clauses of the Atha- nasian creed in the light of their implication, they might appear less arbitrary than the

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eighteen deans urged upon the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York that they were:

1. Quicumque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est ut teneat catholicum fidem.

2. Quam nisi quis integram inviolatamque servaverit absque dubio in aeternum peri- bit.

3. Fides autem Catholica haec est ut unum Deum in Trinitate, et Trinitatem in Uni- tate veneremur.

The agent is ^fallible and changeable in judgments, whilst the ideal-constructions are made of unreliable material. The "Zeitgeist" is neither sufficient nor final, and the agent selects the materials according to his heart's intent, and this condemns itself in the universal sentiment of deficiency or sin. But it is evident that there is in the mass of codified wisdom an indication of tried experience, an experience of numberless creatures who have lived in touch with the Abso- lute. The claims of private judgments, there- fore, should never go to the extent of tearing away the heritage of the ages, or abolishing the intermediary functions of this embodied larger experience. Individualistic views of ethics stand in strange contrast with actual behavior. If the dogmas and codes do not fit, the fancy and fads of the day are readily espoused as a regulative norm.

CHAPTER IX AUTHORITY IN PHILOSOPHY

Mirabeau thundered out in matchless elo- quence before the convention in his address to the people: "If it be contrary to act against one's conscience, it is none the less so to form one's conscience after false and arbitrary principles. The obligation to form and enlighten one's con- science is anterior to the obligation to follow one's conscience." Hence instruction in mor- ality is of great importance. Professor James said, in an address before the University of CaH- fornia: "The whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action." This, of course, is the reactionary view against theoretic formulations, well defined by Prof. James as "a method for estimating the practical value and results of philosophical conceptions." It involves difficulties in charging that which is made such an extremely inferior affair with a mission too high to fulfill, namely, "the produc- tion of habits of action." The pragmatic method must be elevated into a philosophy, if it is to maintain itself in the world of thought. Philosopliies, however, are rather expressive of

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than productive of the behavior of vohtional hfe. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" (Proverbs xxiii, 7). This reaction is because of the extreme emphasis upon theoretic formula- tions, the logical coherence of which was esteemed of prime importance, without due re- gard to the infinite variety of life, which always left in each system unmanageable residua. Thus systems sometimes forced facts in their effort to secure logical consistency, though em- phasis on certain principles failed to treat all the elements in proper proportion. Yet there is a tendency in man which leads him to strive for a unified whole, a Weltanschauung. And a modern Weltanschauung is much easier held than a time-honored creed. Ex-President Eliot even proposes to make "a judicious selec- tion of behefs" as if they were taken up or dis- carded at our discretion, instead of being grown in the very texture of our inner experiences. The over-emphasis on intellectualism is, how- ever, to be charged in a large measure to those who denounce the credal formulations as "intel- lectual gymnastics and useless logical struc- tures." They make education of the intellect the panacea for all ills, forgetting that this is not the main faculty of personality. It is, however, consistent with the social interpretation that slights the personal factor.

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Attention should be called to the illogical pro- cedure of discarding the codes and systems that constitute the inherited wisdom of the past. Especially is this unwise in an age in which evo- lutionary theories have linked us everywhere in the different phases of our development with the past. To be consistent it should teach that moral and religious codes are to be studied in order that they may teach us with the rich ex- perience of past generations. If Max Miiller's "impassable barrier" between brutes and man as constituted in the essential human capacity to transmit in language the experience of the race from preceding generations to those succeeding is denied in the interest of our kinship with the brutes, still the kinship of man with man must always be even closer and more useful. His in- corporated dogmas and codes may still be re- sorted to as embodying traditional wisdom. In fact the incorporation of life's experiences into codes is the philosophy constructed by man in general, whilst its systematizing and compre- hensive grouping is done by gifted individuals. As Balfour says in his "Foundations of Religious Behef": "Systems are and must be for the few, the majority of mankind are content with a mood or temper of the thought." Balfour speaks of "psychological climates" in which men are formed, and of the effect on their beliefs

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produced by custom, education, public opinions, church, and myriad other silent, unnoticed influ- ences of "local color."

Our inner assent is not an affair of the intel- lect alone; it springs from our whole personality as developed in its surroundings. It is well to observe that the predominance of the volitional element in life, however, does not justify a re- jection of the claims of reason. Such opposi- tion between will and reason may easily be turned into a subjectivism, which will not allow any objective authority. Balfour's "authority" is the influence in the individual which prevails mostly with, often without, sometimes against, intellect in the assent given to certain creeds. The objective element, of course, has to be recognized or the result will be moral and re- ligious anarchy. If the volitional element of personality is set apart from the recognized codes which represent the outcome of reflected, reasoned experience, the individual claims will run riot. An objective criterion is found pro- visionally in the comparison of our life-experi- ences with the outcome of a larger, and longer- tried experience. This provides the co-opera- tion and coherence needed in the growth of civi- lization. To an astonishingly large extent the moral life relies on the verdict of others, on the collective mind and traditional wisdom of the

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past as confirmatory and corroborative. Dr. Stanton remarks truly: "If religious knowledge is to exist objectively at all and not relatively to the individual consciousness alone, the principle of authority must enter, as it does in all kind of knowledge." There is usually with the well-in- formed person an individual decision, a deliber- ate relegation of authority, which proceeds from the individual, but which means to submit by an act of faith to the larger wisdom of codes, dogmas, civil law, unwritten or written statutes, which consensus has established as valid guides for public conduct. And this intermediary function of traditional inheritance in regard to reflected, ordered experience is to be commended to those impatient with all restraint and law. Even when granting this submission to legal au- thority to be intermediary and provisional till it approves itself, such acts of faith are required over the whole field of human activity, and are a prerequisite of all knowledge. That this moral law imposed upon us by authority foreign to our personality should be more than the fallible con- sensus of opinion, which admits of no determi- nation of an absolute and final sort, is admitted. Yet people do lean and have to lean on each other in their advance in moral and religious life as elsewhere. Authority and example lead the world. As Schopenhauer said: "Urteilen

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aus eigenen Mitteln ist das Vorrecht Weniger: die Ubrigen leitet Autoritat und Beispiel." J. S. Mill says in his essay on "Liberty": "In proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose with the implicit trust on the infallibility of 'the world' in general. It was the ductile disposi- tion of Newman which made the writer of 'Lead Thou Me On' repose on the bold assumption of the Romish Church, instead of relying on the solitary witness whose Ariadne-thread winds through the labyrinth of numberless sentiments and situations of our complex life. He wanted his "Grammar of Assent" made out for him. It was lack of faith in the unfortified inwardness of Truth's witness which led him to put his faith in the definite formulations and organizations of Rome's visible church."

"Denn ach, die Gotter leihen keine pfander!" In the changing, multifarious heterogeneity of codes and verdicts, the individual needs confir- mation; and so he is led to legal formulations. But in them he may find — to use the same figure — not the pledge, but the very gods themselves, provided he truly follows the given thread in the conduct of his life — the unanalyzable ought-feel- ing, the simple sentiment of obhgation, his con- science.

Formulated systems may be little known by

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the mass of men, yet all contribute to some ex- tent to the ever-increasing amount of incorpo- rated hfe-experiences as the influences of their lives pass into the sum-total of human civihza- tion. To understand this aright is the phi- losophy of all ages. Adjustment to the world is personal. The Weltanschauung gained from some individual viewpoint must be corrected by the added wisdom of a larger horizon. And this comes from legalism, the creation of the "ob- jective mind" which is the unsystematized philos- ophy of the past generations of men.

Thus becomes philosophic study; do (pdoaoipia d.XXa (ptloao(puv.

CHAPTER X

PHILOSOPHIES OF THE DAY AND REVEALED AUTHORITY

There is no greater blunder than to set oneself against what the past offers as codes of tried experience. The Ritschlian cry of "re- ligion without theology," and its declaration, "I must not theologically affirm what I have not re- ligiously experienced," is an unwarranted asser- tion of lawlessness, which would at once be recognized as absurd in civil law. This protest, however, is made almost exclusively against moral and religious codes. If these doctrines are only men's formulations, yet they are accu- mulated verdicts of the moral and religious ex- perience of vast ranges. Is not the individual rash, therefore, in seeking "emancipation" from the restraint which such codes put upon him? Instead of asserting his unaided views against those codes, he should rather make fair trial of them by personal interpretation with the convic- tion that these codes will be understood better as they are lived. But if they contain the reve- lation of divine truth of supernatural origin, then the incapacity to perceive and receive the doc-

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trine means simply that the age is lacking in moral fiber.

Dr. Swete says: "Faith is in the last analysis the act of the will and not of the intellect, in its essence a moral act." It is the recognition of that which announces itself as foreign, as other than self, to which the will bends as the volitional life is guided in its responses. It is an essentially false verdict of the inner experiences of soul-life to refuse an objective criterion for our moral and religious life on the ground that dogmas are derivative and are not the experi- ences themselves. If immediate experiences an- nounce themselves as having certain causes, we should not interpret them as merely subjective. Just as on the simple testimony of our percep- tive faculty we believe in the existence of object perceived and subject perceiving, so we should also, in our ethical depositions, take the verdicts of the moral sense as veracious. If the artistic, poetical, and religious sentiments disclose a cognitive apprehension of feeling, then we should take account of this in the same way. The phe- nomena of the inner life should be treated in the same way as all other facts, not refused, but used. It is reversing things, to say, though faith projects the reality to which the religious life testifies, that faith is not from God, but postulates Him to unite the valuable with the

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existing. To keep us in a mass of unexplained experiences under an unwarranted assumption of subjectivity, is to force an agnosticism on us for the sake of that moral and religious anarchy which proclaims, De moribus non est disputan- dum. As Dr. Rittelmeyer said: "Choice is free for each individual, for the highest values, as modern ethics maintain, are like the final ideas of a Weltanschauung, a-logical (a-logisch), that is, they cannot be forced upon anyone by argu- ments of the understanding." This involves neither mere subjectivity, nor independence of all objective criteria to its exclusion of intellec- tual verification. It rather means that ration- alism declares its own bankruptcy. In life it- self we find not only the objective norm but also the justification of the moral life. In spite of the assumed subjectivity, reference is always made to the vast deposits of religious and moral life with the imphcit admission of the truthfulness of their contents. The objection that the truth of religious inheritance should not be taught, but experienced, simply assails the deductive method for an exclusive right of the inductive. This analytical temper and inductive spirit makes bold claims in a materialistic atmosphere, but is in a far deeper sense than is usually urged against it incapable of constructive work. Indeed! "Die

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Teile habt Ihr in die Hand. Fehlt Ihnen jedoch das lebendige Band."

Prof. Royce in an able discussion on the psychological weakness of Pragmatism shows convincingly that the abuse of deductive reason- ing and the syllogism is largely due to misunder- standing of its nature, and overlooks the im- mense fecundity in life of the syllogism. Rela- tions will continue to play an important part in Hfe. Balfour says: "It is authority rather than reason to which in the main we owe, not religion only, but ethics and politics," He ridicules the idea of a community of which the members should set out to examine deliberately the grounds on which their moral, religious, and civic life rests. This is, however, what people who refuse the instruction of legal and religious codes, practically propose. Not even in exact science does the learner get his information ex- clusively by his own experience, refusing the ex- perience of others, including that of the past. Those who refuse assent to another authority than that which is absolutely final, usuallj^ do not admit such authority, but fall in with fallible authorities. They recognize at least the desir- ability of unconditioned good on which to stake the issues of our life in small and great things, in the wear and tear of daily duties, as in the heroic

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efforts of sacrifice. Since we do not — and can- not— encompass all of life's experiences in our earthly days, it is well to see life, if not wholly, at least as a whole. This is made possible by the constant incorporation of the varied experi- ences of life in the world's civilization. This civilization becomes ever more mingled, fused, and enriched by contributions from private ex- periences molding the appropriated material of social life. Though codified experience, law, dogma, and code are of changing material in time, yet the expression of the Absolute is in them. The question is, how do we stand related to this world of experience? Are we shutting ourselves up in partial views, or do we attempt to take in the fullness of complex life in its true proportions ?

It is significant that, though philosophy as a discipline is not in favor, there is a demand for "integration of studies," whereas we have had heretofore at best only a "correlation of studies." Anything presents every kind of problem; if we follow specific subjects far enough, we become involved in other studies. Our age is productive of studies which are indi- cated by the coupling of branches, formerly always pursued in separateness. We are led from the particular to the whole ; in the study of the particular, we encounter the whole ; we travel

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on every road from the periphery to the center. As in Goethe's poem:

"Willst Du ins Unendliche schreiten, Geh' nur im Endlichen nach alien Seiten ! Willst Du dich am Ganzen erquicken, So miiszt Du das Ganze im Kleinsten erblicken."

or again in his paradox,

"Was ist das Allgemeine? Der einzelne Fall. Was ist das Besondere? Millionen Falle."

This temper of scientific pursuit compensates to some extent for the lack of specific philo- sophic discipline. Flint remarks, in the Princeton Review, 1878: "What has to be viewed in rela- tion to primary and efficient, and ultimate final causes, are the results of all sciences." Andrew Seth says: "It is with the ultimate synthesis that philosophy concerns itself ; it has to show that the subject matter which we are dealing with in de- tail really is a whole, consisting of articulated members." The small philosopher, the detail and retail student of manual and of text book, has created a separation between the different branches of study that threatens seriously the harmonious conception of life. E. Halevy gives a gloomy outlook in his report on philosophy in

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Germany in Revue Internationale de Ven- seignement, 1896.

"No philosophic spirit presides any more over the work in the universities. The result is that through the lack of philosophic discipline, they have fallen vic- tims to a nationalistic and socialistic political economy. Practical materialism, whose highest form is "National- oekonomie," flourishes in the chairs of the universities, laboratories of collectivism. With the students of the German universities one feels sadly the lack of a pre- liminary philosophic training in the secondary schools."

It is not strange that not only Wundt, Eucken, Ziegler, Kapper and Paulsen, but Virchow and even Haeckel call for a revival of the philosophic spirit, which shall unify and articulate the separate branches of learning. This, in order that, in spite of the study of manuals and specialities, the student may cre- ate a harmonious, consistent world-view, instead of staring ignorantly at half-perceived problems which needs must arise behind the mass of facts. For, however grouped, they will come to the in- dividual observer with the insistent demand as to their purport; "what," "whence," "whither." It is the old, old problem of reconciling time and eternity, the many and the one, the changeable and the changeless, the persistent quest of the mind. The intellect may not solve it, but faith

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sees the Eternal in fullness, the One in the many, the Changeless in the changing, the Absolute in the relative. Such authority is not discovered, not arrived at by long disquisition. We were graciously placed in the midst of the Absolute Ideal, dissolving all legal questions or vacilla- tions by the assurance, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." In the midst of disin- tegrating, unmoral legalism, which becomes skeptical of its sanctions, we confidently appeal to this revelation of Absolute Truth, as once de- livered unto the saints, and over which the church stands guardian !

PART II

METAPHYSICAL AND THEOLOGICAL ASPECT

CHAPTER XI

INDIVIDUALISM AND LEGALISM

The inquiry how to reconcile the strictly per- sonal, individual life-elements with the claims to authority of those universal elements incor- porated in tradition, in social institutions, in written and unwritten law, is in order in an age of individual assertions and claims, of disruption of systems, of cries of "no dog- mas," of subjectivity, of pragmatism, of "Um- wertung aller Werte," of the disintegration of all things wliich claim binding authority save that of the ego; in an age which, disregarding the old New England consideration of all things "with reference to eternity," has come to sug- gest, at least professedly, all things to the final judgment of the self-important ego; in an age of individual pretensions which clamor loudly against the impotent, wornout, false, mystical, hundredfold-cursed superstitions of former days that cumber the ground over which progress is to march on to higher and better things. In such an age it must be worth our while to re- flect on the situation, to find out whether indi- vidual sovereignty, personal integrity, cannot be

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maintained together with the authority of incor- porate law.

This would bring, if not a solution, at least a reconciliation in the sense of Montesquieu's definition of liberty as "the freedom to do what the law permits" (Esprit des Lois, Bk. II, ch. 3). This view is indicated also in the title of Sterrett's recent book "The Freedom of Au- thority," which attempts reconciliation rather than solution. Lavaleye inchnes to the side of authority when he thus defines liberty:

"La liberte est le pouvoir de faire tout de qui n'est pas contraire au droit, en pratique tant ce qui n'est pas contraire aux lois." (Le Gouvern- ement dans la democratic, p. 131.)

On either side, strong claims are made; in be- half of legal authority as well as for individual rights, though the temper and tenor of our age favor the individualistic interpretation of life.

In a valuable article of the Yale Review of February, 1907, by Professor Garner, of IIH- nois University, it is stated that the legislative guarantee for individual liberty is a compara- tively late appearance. Along with attention to the individual goes, however, "the tendency since the middle of the nineteenth century, among the states of the civilized world, to push the lines of government farther into the field which the individual under the former con-

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ditions would have a right to claim as be- longing to liberty." This theme is ably treated in a recent inaugural address by Pro- fessor H. Krabbe, of Leyden University; "De idee der persoonlykheid in de staatsleer."

Especially is individualism strong in our Re- pubhc, founded under the spirit of revolutionary ideas, through sudden break of historic relations practically without tradition, with much of that "assertive democracy" which will recognize no superiors, where the citizen is possessed of a spirit.

"That bids him flout the law he makes, That bids him make the law he flouts."

Morality and religion are of all things asserted to be primarily personal, individual concerns, "Privatsache." And yet, it is exactly in this sphere that legalism is most often complained of as enlisted in the suppression of the individual Hfe by the majority-rule. Legalism, with its outward dictates, has at all times encroached upon the domain of ethical and religious life, though — as Maurice remarks — the conscience is intimately bound up with the "I." If codi- fied standards become rules for individual Hfe, appearances come to play a large part in life. Legalism has a bad flavor, especially because of those consistent, law-abiding moralists and re- ligionists, the pharisees.

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The remarkable development of tliis legalistic religion is finely portrayed in Schiirer's "Geschichte des Jiidischen Volkes in Zeitalter Jesu Christi." ( See chapter wliich treats, "Life under the Law.")

On the other hand, the proclamation of the utter independence of the individual, in his free- dom from all restraint, is meeting with opposi- tion. Nietzsche, the gifted disclaimer of all bonds and laws, has certainly given a shocking picture in the unlimited, individual pretension of his "Herrenmoral."

( See Jenseits von Gut, und Bose. Nietzsche's Werke. Band VII.)

The movement for a return to nature and the individualism of the "Sturm und Drang" period ran its course without much approval. Rous- seau's prize essay on the question: "Have the Sci- ences Contributed to Purify or to Corrupt the Morality of Mankind?" aimed to establish the lat- ter point with more passion and eloquence than calm reasoning. After the appearance of many treatises on the limitation of the authority of the law and of the state, have come discussions as to the "limits of individual liberty."

Montague's "Limits of Individual Liberty," Lacy's "Liberty and Law," and Ritchie's "Princi- ples of State Interference" are fruitful discus- sions in this field. J. S. Mill, in his famous

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treatise, feels that individual liberty must be limited to actions of a "self-regarding class," however difficult they are to define.

Schiller, in a distich on the Werther-like sceptic of passion, who aims at the realization of unlimited autonomy of the inborn "I," without any outward restraints whatever, characterized fitly its prototype : "For every character has the right of existence; only inconsistency is not al- lowed." "Denn Recht hat jeder Character, es giebt kein Unrecht als der Widerspruch."

Rousseau, declaring the individual a sovereign law unto himself, does not allow any supposed submission of personal interest to the general welfare of mankind. His motto is: "The indi- vidual above society." The regulations of so- ciety are to be burst asunder, and an abrupt re- turn to nature is proclaimed as the cure for all evils. Such a naive conception of individualism makes him ignore the historic development of society and raise the cry to repeal the "social contract." This anarchistic self-rule, however, has likewise been turned to ridicule and held up for opprobrium. "Anarchy is the permanent liberty of change, it is the elevation of change into law as need or caprice will have it," is the definition given in an anarchistic periodical. Or, as someone has said, "Anarchism is the acute outbreak of individualism."

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In learning to understand both view-points, the one desiring to regulate the life of the indi- vidual by an expressed, outward authority or law, the other claiming for the individual au- tonomy on the ground of individual sovereignty, we find a common ground on which to meet the problems involved in the conflict. For where conflicts rage, problems are involved. Instead of arguing, therefore, one case at the cost of the other, we shall attempt a solution of the difficulty by a close interpretation of each view, endeavor- ing to find a universal element in the individual and an individual element in the universal. If legalism be the expression in society of a multi- ple individual experience, made regulative for the individual, we shall need to inquire into the organic relation between the two elements, viz., the personal equation and the larger experi- ence of racial wisdom, which assumes the right of regulative law over the single life in its moral and religious functions. In the analysis of this question, light may be thrown on the nature of legalism. Legalism functions instrumentally in the moral life of man. Accumulated, congealed morality, objectified deposits from most vari- egated single sources, it is the historic object- lesson by which man learns to discern the Au- thority of all authority.

CHAPTER XII SABATIER'S VIEW OF AUTHORITY

In the recognition of the forms of authority the exercise of faith is involved. However reasonable, however natural, however inevitable, therefore, the recognition of the forms of au- thority may be, reason can never render an ex- haustive account of life's "grammar of assent." Sabatier in his able discussion, "Religions of Authority," assumes that this can be done. But he can do this only because his final authority is humanity, the last sanction of morality and re- ligion being found in humanity, the source from which it springs, and its final aim. This view is characteristic of France. It is Comte's cult of humanity re\dved in a disguised form. And this is the fatal fault under which this valuable treatise labors. For Sabatier is right in not recognizing on such a presupposition any final or absolute authority. There is no absolute and final authority when we do not touch somehow in its forms the Absolute from which all au- thority is derived. When the ontological impli- cations of the moral and religious life are dis- carded, the rejection of the metaphysical aspect

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of religion necessarily follows. This position undermines religion by disowning the real, ob- jective authority lying back of all faith. Saba- tier therefore always remains in the sphere of hu- man or derived authority. He expresses him- self in his Introduction as follows :

"Authority is a necessary function of the species, and for very self-preservation it watches over that offspring in whom its life is prolonged. . . . Social au- thority and individual autonomy are not more hostile, and can no more legitimately be opposed to one another, than the final destiny of man and of humanity. And yet authority is never other than a power of fact. This is to say that it cannot be the philosophic explana- tion nor the ultimate reason of anything. Whether willingly or unwillingly, authority must own the control of reason. . . . An established au- thority, however great its antiquity or its power, never carries its justification in itself."

This is exactly where Sabatier's and all ration- alistic explanations of faith are at fault. They rest on a false psychology of faith. Authority is power of fact, and never owns the control of reason. Though reason functions in the giving of assent, authority carries its own justification for the person who recognizes it.

Indeed no authority is legitimate which relates to our minds so as to stultify or bar the exercise

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of reason. Though reason does not create truth, it always weighs, assimilates and applies the data which experience places before its consideration. Butler well said in his "Analogy": "Reason is the only faculty we have wherewith to judge con- cerning anything, even revelation itself." When Reville says that in accepting authority we do so on grounds of reason, so that it is the adhesion of our mind that gives authority its xveight, he identifies the mind's assent to author- ity's claim to be valid with the establishing of that authority. As Dr. Francis J. Hall observes in "Authority, Ecclesiastical and Biblical": "It is because authority is valid prior to our reasoning that it is discovered to be credible by reason ; and it is this prior validity that reason discovers, thus establishing the rationality of our dependence upon authority. Authority presents truth to the mind, and does so none the less really whether it is rightly understood or not" ; or even, we may add, rejected. The attitude towards authority is not to believe blindly, or at command as is sometimes mistakenly and incongruously argued, but rather to make an intelligent use of the most trustworthy means available for extending the range of our knowledge. In this function veri- fication has a larger meaning than the cure of doubt. Rather does it enrich the truths already accepted. For, as Sir William Hamilton says:

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"The original data of reason do not rest upon reason, but are necessarily accepted by reason on the authority of what is beyond itself. These data are, therefore, in rigid propriety, beliefs or trusts." It is an unfortunate circumstance that against the authority of historic Christianity always is asserted that it is at variance with reason. Christian dogmatism is an emphasis on truth, and such a mental attitude in regard to truth should never be regarded as an enemy to intellectual freedom. Chesterton, the master of paradox, expresses this well in the concluding re- marks on "Importance of Orthodoxy": "The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the break- ing of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the cast- ing away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a con- tradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. . . . If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the con-

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struction of a definite pliilosopliy of life. And that philosophy of life must be right and the other philosophies wrong." (P. 283 if. "Heretics," Chapter xx.) Moberly rightly ob- serves in "Lux Mundi," pp. 222 and 223: "There is no proper antithesis between believing in deference to authority, and believing in defer- ence to reason, unless it be understood that the authority believed in was accepted at first as au- thority without reason, or maintained in spite of the subsequent refusal of reason to give con- firmatory witness to its assertions." Neither should it be represented that grace subverts our reason or replaces it, rather is the gift of grace, an endowment of our reason, a supernatural as- sistance which clarifies reason without altering or subverting its laws. In conversion with the affected will and purified emotions com.es also as the work of grace the reason enriched from its creative source, to assimilate it to its perfect archetype. Another circumstance which has given cause to much confusion in regard to au- thority is referred to by Dr. Hall in liis work on Authority, where he says: "Absolute trust- worthiness of an authority is one thing, the de- gree of subjective certainty which can be gained in relation to its claim and teaching is another. We may not confuse infallible authority with in- fallible guidance, for the success of guidance

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depends on subjective conditions in individual and fallible men. The certainty of faith may be so full as to exclude doubt; but in human beings both certainty and doubt are subjective qualities of fallible understanding." Significant in this regard is the conclusion of the Vth article of the Westminster Confession of Faith: "Notwith- standing, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts."

Now, as Sabatier goes on to say:

"Being essentially progressive, and far removed from the state of perfection, neither authority nor au- tonomy may be posited as absolute. . . . Au- thority, in its true conception, is and can be no other than relative. . . . This theory of the national genesis and social function of authority will easily be granted for the ordinary course of human things in general. . . . But when the question is of religion, men stop and protest."

Sabatier fails to understand this protest, be- cause all objects of faith must needs become for him merely mediating forms, designed as method. Intrinsic, real authority does not ob- tain in this sublunary world. He will not abide in the absolute authority which faith proclaims. Truly, the question is not whetherl the pope is in-

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fallible, but whether he must be infallible. But the latter proposition does not get a hearing from Sabatier. Behind and beyond all sovereignty of fact, rises for him a sovereignty of right ; and on the strength of this he protests against the exer- cise of faith, disallowing authority to any and all forms of authority. Yet, strangely inconsistent, this, his last appeal and final authority to deny any and all its forms, is proclaimed relative. He does not discern in the manifestations of truth, the Truth itself. For Sabatier, the immanent does not involve the transcendent. Metaphysics is professedly disowned. He fails to realize the import of a passage like Hebrews xi. 3. "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear"; or of Romans i. 20. "For the invisi- ble things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and God- head." On Scripture authority, therefore, it would appear that though truth is neither of man, nor by man, it is yet for man, here and everywhere, and at all times. This argument, of course, applies only to those who admit the au- thority of the Bible. Yet, let me quote in this connection the admirable words of Professor An- drew Seth:

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"Rightly agnostic though we are regarding the na- ture of the Absolute as such, no shadow of doubt need fall on the truth of our experience as a true revelation of the Absolute for us. Hegel was right in seeking the Absolute with inexperience and finding it, too ; for certainly we can neither seek it nor find it anywhere else. The truth is hardly likely to be the final truth; it may be taken up and superseded in a wider and fuller truth. And in this way we might pass, in suc- cessive cycles of finite existence, from sphere to sphere of experience, from orb to orb of truth; and even the highest would still remain a finite truth, and fall in- finitely short of the truth of God. But such a doctrine of relativity in no way invalidates the truth of revela- tion at any given stage. The fact that the truth I reach is the truth for me, does not make it on that account less true. It is true, so far as it goes, and if my experience can carry me no further, I am justified in treating it as ultimate until it is superseded. Should it ever be superseded, I shall then see both how it is modified by being comprehended in a higher truth, and also how it, and no other statement of the truth, could have been true at my former standpoint. But before that higher standpoint is reached, to seek to discredit our present insight by the general reflection that its truth is partial and requires correction, is a perfectly empty truth, which in its bearing upon human life, must also certainly have the effect of an untruth."

In the same essay Professor Seth emphatically declares :

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"God is revealed to us alike in the face of nature and in our own self-conscious life, — in the common sense which binds mankind together and in the ideals which light us on our upward path. God is not far from any one of us. Within us and around us, here or no- where, God is to be found."

This, indeed, deserves special emphasis. On the one hand, knowledge is discounted and ren- dered unreliable, because it is treated as relative, inadequate in scope and in nature, whilst even truth itself is considered a fluctuating total of which subjective experiences render inadequate account inasmuch as they play a formative part in it. The extreme tendency in this direction leaves us in subjectivism. On the other hand, the Absolute is lifted out of the reach of the finite, following out Kant's view that thoughts stand between us and things, so that we are shut off from the laiowledge of "things in them- selves." The "negative theologies" represent this line of thought, so ably expounded in Brad- ley's work "Appearance and Reality." The Truth, the Absolute, the Infinite, Reality, is con- ceived of as necessarily unrelated and undiffer- entiated substance. It is the pure Being of the Eleatic school. It is strongly insisted upon by Dean Mansel in his Bampton lectures and gave rise to the well-known controversy with Maurice. But it amounts practically to the same thing.

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whether the Absolute be elevated into such pure Being that it is essentially unrelated and undif- ferentiated, or whether it is held to have no in- dependent objective existence. In either case, or even in Hegelian panlogism or Spinozan ma- terialism, the Absolute is so pure an abstraction that truth becomes a fiction. It is therefore a pointed wit which called Bradley's book: "The disappearance of Reality." Maurice is right when he says of this view in "Sequel to What is Revelation" (p. 10) :

"No real knowledge of the Eternal is possible; our conceptions are bounded by the finite and the visible. My answer is : If that is the reason, no knowledge of the temporal is possible. Slavery to our conceptions, as the teacher of experimental science has shown us, is the hindrance to any real, solid acquaintance with the mysteries of Nature. When we try to bind her with the forms of our intellect, she will give us no faithful an- swers ; she will only return an echo to our voices. Here is another proof of the analogy between the things sensible and spiritual. The same enemy blocks the en- trance into both regions. The determination to meas- ure all things by ourselves, to bring everything under the conditions of our intellect, makes us exiles from the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of earth."

Hegel's system may teach both these errors. For, inasmuch as it equates the Absolute with

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human experience, it leaves no room for the in- dependence, the transcendent objectivity of the Absolute, — unless it be at the expense of indi- vidual personahty, in which case that which figures as such, is only the Absolute as subject of thought. Yet, it teaches also that we can only determine the Absolute by predicates drawn from experience, attributes which experi- ence indeed furnishes in its ever-increasing rich and various forms. These characteristics and determinations are legitimately "thrown out to a vast Reality" as Matthew Arnold terms it; — legitimately thrown out, because found and recognized in the forms of life as appearing in the things that are seen.

CHAPTER XIII

HEGEL'S DOCTRINE OF THE STATE AND AUTHORITY

Hegel assumed the knowing of the coming into existence of this worldorder and plan, but rendered the task consequent upon his bold as- sumption easy by the identifying thought and matter, — which may mean metaphysical idealism or materialistic pantheism, but in either case strict monism. A world is treated in each in- stance as a negligible quantity.

Hegel's system of the objective mind as the receptacle of the multifarious individual contri- butions, to the extent that these are intrinsic parts of the social structure, leads necessarily to the consideration of man as a social unit. We are not only fed on the breasts of society, but are part and parcel with it in a panlogistic system. Over against Kant's categorical imperative, He- gel's demand, keeping in close touch with the milieu in the midst of which the individual lives, enjoins: "Observe your station and its duties!" But Hegel solves the possible discrepancy be- tween the subjective and objective mind, indi- vidual and normative law, by a slighting of the

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first, and by an unwarranted assumption in be- half of the latter. In his "Phenomenology of the Spirit" he reduces the many to the one on the assumption of the identity of thought and being, which makes the laws of thought the law of things. The well-known watchword is: "Whatever is real is rational and whatever is rational is real." He says in his "Logic" : "Phi- losophy of the Absolute is a representation of God as He was in his eternal essence before the creation of the world or of a finite spirit; as all things were made by Him, and He is before all things and by Him all things consist." The procedure of tracing out the logical processes of his "Immanent Dialectic" has been characterized as a generalizing away of God's personality and of human personality in the Absolute Idea, be- cause thought is stripped of individuality and made abstract and universal. Schopenhauer said:

"Hegel's system briefly expressed teaches that the world is a crystallized syllogism." The lead- ing theme, briefly stated, is: Sein hat Dasein. Being has existence {eoc-sistere) , stands out in determination. We see the process in mind, think God's thoughts after Him. All predica- tion is trichotomy. The judgment A is B con- tradicts A, involving as it does that A is no longer A, but is B. A new synthesis conse-

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quently is involved. Thus the great march of Hegel's Pure Being or Absolute in its self- realization is pregnant with all the world's con- tent and destiny. Hegel thus naturally em- phasized the immanence of God. In this con- nection, his exposition of cause and effect is worthy of notice, as well as his insistence, — con- trary to the attempts of naturalistic theories — that a developing series is to be understood in its highest term, for development does not mean ad- dition. He says in his "Logic," "God is the abso- lute Person, as self-conscious, he is not the end of an evolution, but all things created find their reality in Him." (Wallace's translation, pp. 89- 91.) Caird is therefore correct when he says that "the advance from mere being is a deepen- ing of being in itself whereby its inner nature is laid bare, rather than an issuing of the more per- fect from the less perfect." ("Hegel," p. 218.)

Hegel should not be charged with explaining the generation of God, man, and nature out of pure Being which equals non-being. He rather catches Pure Being in the world-process on its way toward self-realization. Keying the proc- ess with that of which it consists, thought, he seeks to trace its development. On this account the terms "abstract" and "concrete" exchange meanings with Hegel.

This short sketch will suffice to show the bear-

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ing of Hegel's main position on the subject of authority. Professor Dyde of Queen's College, who has given us an excellent translation of He- gel's "Rechtslehre," remarks :

"Since Hegel treats in the 'Philosophy of Right' of an essential stage in the evolution of spirit, whose whole nature is unfolded scene by scene in the 'Encyclopedia,' it is not accurate to speak of Hegel's ethical principles as based upon his logic. The more concrete categories of the 'Philosophy of Right' are related each to the next in the same way as are the more abstract cate- gories treated in the Logic. But the relation of the ethics to the logic is not that of superstructure to foundation or of application to principle, but of the more concrete to the less concrete stage of evolution. One single life runs through the whole organism of the work."

Dr. Gans, one of the editors of the Complete Edition of Hegel's books, also remarks that He- gel's "Philosophy of Right and Doctrine of the State" is as much as any other an essential part of his philosophy.

The transcendent part of the Absolute is not very clear in Hegel's system. It may serve to meet Trendelenburg's pointed criticism that He- gel bridges unwarrantably the chasm between "pure being" and "becoming." To endow pure, undifferentiated being with the first attribute or

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quality in order to start it on its process of self- realization, requires a cause, which is not recog- nized in the system. We can give no other meaning to Sterret's statement in his able work, "Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion," when he says: — "In Hegel's whole Logic, which contains his system or method in pure sci- entific form as extending to all his philosophical views, God seems to me to be immanent in the actuality and order of the world, and transcen- dent as its efficient cause." Of the transcendent part in Hegel's Absolute, we are not convinced by seeing "pure Being" narrowed down to the ceaselessly evolving series of events on this planet, where everything appears only as a "mo- ment in the process." The dogmas of the Church appear of course also as "moments in the process," and become mere symbols of reality. But for this "abbreviated knowledge of faith" the believer insists on corresponding reality. We cannot help feeling that Hegel at the end of his three volumes on "Philosophy of Religion" has but increasingly felt this disi-uption between historic Christianity and the symbols of faith of his philosophic speculation. He practically de- spairs of a possible solution when he says that it is not the immediate affair and concern of phi- losophy, although he always made much of the theological bearings of his philosophy. Dr.

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Marheineke who edited Hegel's "Philosophy of Religion" styles it "the highest bloom of Hegel's philosophy."

Inasmuch as with Hegel, individual, family, and community have their truth and ground in the state, no claims of the individual against the state are admissible. Fries and Krause, who emphasized individualism, objected that Hegel made "the objective mind" the absolute criterion and everything subservient to it. The pivotal maxim, "Whatever is real is rational, and what- ever is rational is real," was partially construed, and only the first part seized upon in argument. Menzel therefore does Hegel here, as in many other respects, scant justice when he remarks: — "The notorious proposition of Hegel, 'AH that is real is rational,' is made use of to show that the present condition of things is absolutely the most rational, and that it is not merely revolutionary, but eminently stupid, foolish, and unphilosophi- cal to take exceptions to it." When in Hegel's system individual claims of selfhood are shat- tered before the sovereignty of the state and its institutions, and the notion of the "divine right of kings" stalks around again, it should be borne in mind in fairness to Hegel that for him the sovereignty of the state is actualized in the liv- ing monarch and reconciled with the privilege of the individual citizen who obeys only the laws of

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which he perceives and approves the ground. In Hegel's system, the individual citizen is not sup- posed to be at variance with the state. He says :

"Epicurus, it is said, believed that the world should be given over to each individual's opinions and whims ; and the ethical fabric should be treated in the same way. By this old wives' concoction, which consists in found- ing upon the feelings what has been for many centuries the labor of reason and understanding, we no longer need the guidance of any ruling conception."

Individualistic schemes, on the other hand, lie open to criticism by opposing the individual and his interests to the interests of the state. It should also be understood that where Hegel in- sists on the sovereignty of the law, of the state over the individual, it is the Idea which is the norm and ideal to which the subject is to be sub- ject, and without which he is not a proper sub- ject. Unfortunately, however, the Idea remains impersonal, in despite of all assertions of neo- Hegelians. The individual citizen does not move in personal relationship with this absolute authority of the state which he is to obey. It remains outward restraint, legal power of fact. Hegel seems to recognize this fact fully in re- taining Kant's distinction between the legal and the moral, the impersonal law subjecting per- sons, and impersonal law subjectified by persons.

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The sphere of right demanding conformity to law, though without regard to the individual per- son, subjects him to ethical powers, and is there- fore not a limitation of freedom but rather its reality, as it is only the arbitrary will which is limited. That such a profound view of the au- thority of the state as the goal of all existence should demand obedient recognition of all, need not cause surprise. This view is removed by a whole diameter from the popular notion of a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," though the two conceptions ap- proach each other when rightly interpreted, ex- cept that Hegel's governmental view with its sovereignty of state and ruler inclines to a par- ental attitude, whilst democracy as voiced by Lincoln tends to stimulate initiative. Both men are typical representatives of their views.

It is hardly duly appreciated that Hegel's views strongly counteracted the tendency of law- lessness of the period of "Sturm und Drang" of which "Wilhelm Meister" is the classic expres- sion. They exercised a wholesome influence on that lawless individualism of emotional roman- ticism in which the sentimental gush of Rous- seau was combined with the bold claims of Fichte for individual assertion against established law and order. Hegel lent dignity to the law by conceiving so profoundly of the sovereignty of

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the state as to vest it with the authority of the Absolute Idea.

Thus the law is taken out of the hands of the individuals or political group (the machine) and lifted over and above all, regulating all alike so that the chief executive of the nation is as much under the law he wields as the meanest citizen. To break this law is treason indeed! It is like lifting a puny, wanton hand against the very framework of God Himself.

As all governments are historic, ethnic, tradi- tional flowerings of the idea of the specific na- tion, it is wholly beside the mark when critics assert that Hegel would force a rigid, hide- bound Prussian bureaucracy upon a nation like ours, — plastic, young, and new — meeting occa- sions as they come, and rising equal to deal with them. Of course we do not always deal with new situations in the best way, but we are making more valuable political experiments than are possible under the Hegelian conception of law which tends to bind individual initiative under the yoke of bureaucratic routine. Still we must remember that Hegel thinks that every un- sophisticated consciousness stands upon the con- viction that the rational is real, and conversely. From this circumstance proceeds the view that the spiritual universe is the natural. To quote Hegel :

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"When reflection, feeling, or whatever other form the subjective consciousness may assume, regards the pres- ent as vanity, and thinks itself to be beyond it and wiser, it finds itself in emptiness, and, as it has actuality only in the present, it is vanity throughout. Against the doctrine that the idea is a mere idea, figment or opinion, philosophy preserves the more profound view that nothing is real except the idea. Hence arises the eff'ort to recognize in the temporal and transient the substance, which is immanent, and the eternal, which is present. The rational is synonymous with the idea, because in realizing itself it passes into eternal exist- ence. It thus appears in an endless wealth of forms, figures, and phenomena. It wraps its kernel round with a robe of many colors, in which consciousness finds itself at home. Through this varied husk, the con- ception first of all penetrates in order to touch the pulse, and then feel it throbbing in its external mani- festations."

The critics who represent Hegel as the cham- pion of the baldest conservatism in defense of all actual conditions whatever they be, leave out of account his conception that all rationality of the real has only a relative and partial value. Its value — though never lost — must be tran- scended, overcome, and make room for another phase. The necessity of the "moments of the process" in the stage of development of pure thought constitutes lasting truth and its justify-

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ing value. There is a certain ambiguity in He- gel's doctrine according as one approaches the phases of development. If one lays hold of the viewpoint that all our institutions, all our inheri- tance of the past, all the tradition of former days upon which we now stand and to which we are vitally related, must go and make place for the better things to come — JLe meilleur est Vennemi du bien — then Hegel may be regarded as the proclaimer of an evolution which is ever urging the progress of the principles that throb in na- tional life and its institutions. And truly in Hegel's system there is nothing to offset this, inasmuch as there is no permanent element in the change. Josiah Royce might well exclaim "The conception of the eternity of the forms of things is historically considered by far the most significant opponent that the philosophic doctrine of evolution has had or ever can have," especially when the changing time-elements are interpreted in materialistic fashion. This interpretation has been put upon his doctrine by the left-wing He- gelians, and the fact that they were the most pro- gressive in politics and religion is sufficient refu- tation of the charge that Hegel advocated the acme of conservatism. He was conservative, but his system does not necessarily involve it. He- gel himself emphasized the conservative aspect of his system, but the writings of Feuerbach,

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Bruno, Baur, Strauss, and Karl Marx show that the most radical progress could be read into his system. As Professor Bowen has well said: — "The baldest infidelity and red-republicanism went under the name and garb of Hegehan phi- losophy." Although this point has been a much controverted question in the Hegelian schools and among their critics, it is plain that those are wrong who place the Hegelian maxim, "What- ever is real is rational," alongside of Pope's ver- sion, "Whatever is is right," of the Leibnitzian optimism, which proclaims tliis the best of the possible worlds. Pope's "Essay on Man" is no more admissible in Hegel's system than is the scathing and vulgar satire of Voltaire's "Can- dide," which it called forth.

CHAPTER XIV AUTHORITY AND FACT

We should accept the fact that objective ex- istence is known in our experience, not only from epistemological considerations, but also from the admission of the necessary function of authority, unreservedly made by those who yet disclaim the meaning of fact. For is not objective authority the mediating agency for the individual, because it constitutes direct, first-hand witness to inde- pendent facts, which we are not able to verify ourselves? The whole function of authority falls to the ground, unless it implies this witness to objective, independent fact. Of course, this functional authority in its most varied forms, to which conscience and reason make their appeal in justification of belief, relates to the objective source of authority, without which these indi- vidual witnesses would not constitute authority.

In this connection we may call attention to the essentially unscientific procedure of the present Bible-critics in employing the narratives of the original, direct witnesses to Christ, in or- der to "reconstruct" a Christ and a Gospel as they conceive of them, but independent of the

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authority of the Bible-stories. One can readily understand the resulting diversity in the recon- struction and appreciate Kalthoif 's remark that every school in modern times has its University- Christ. Similarly the modern theorists of this school, in spite of their cry "Back to Christ" re- main from the nature of the case "standing stiff in the stocks." They go neither back nor for- ward to Christ, but contemplate themselves in Christ-images projected rather than found in faith.

Goethe's sarcasm comes to them with full force :

"Wie einer ist, so ist sein Gott ; Darum ward Gott so oft zu Spott."

It is again Luther's declaration: "Machet ihm jedermann Zum Gott, darzu ihm sein Herz trug."

At the bottom of this procedure lurks Feuer- bach's bald assertion, contrasted with the affirma- tion, of Christian faith: "God did not create man in His image, but man created God (or Gods) in his image." This theory, especially regard- ing Christianity, is historically false, because it reverses the true causal relation.

Professor G. T. Ladd takes up this view in his "Philosophy of Religion" in a somewhat con-

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cessive mood. Accepting the statement that "man made God in his own image," he finds the other statement that "God first made man in His image" to be only a religious interpretation of the first {Vol. I. Ch. xiv). "God himself," he says in another place (p. 146), "as at first the Ideal of power and majesty and afterwards of justice, truth, and spiritual perfection, is the construct of the quenchless desire and growing aptitude for the realization of the Ideal." I am aware that Professor Ladd's ontological con- sciousness strenuously safeguards at least the reality of the truth that appears in historic re- ligions, but his explanation seems rather arbi- trary.

Professor Schmiedel furnishes another typi- cal illustration of this view in his article on the "Resurrection" in the "Encyclopedia Biblica." After arguing with much elaborateness and abil- ity in favor of the vision theory he says: "The disciples believed they saw Jesus, because they were already persuaded He was alive."

Examples might be multiplied in which the decision whether Christ made Christianity or Christianity made Christ has been made from theory, rather than in accordance with the re- sults of a strictly historical method of investiga- tion. But in the scientific study of history, as in strict legal procedure, original witnesses are

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not easily displaced by the most ingenious theory. The question is not what might have been the case, but what are the facts. Truth is our first concern, — truth in the Old-English meaning of the word "treow" which is "faithful- ness," or "appeal to facts" (cf. the German Treue, Dutch trouw) . We must be faithful to facts. Theories and explanations are subservi- ent and secondary to fact. They are mere at- tempts to explain them. But facts require recognition, whether we are able to explain them or not. The irreversible facts are themselves ex- planations as passive witnesses in service of truth. Magna est Veritas et praevalebit.

The nature and importance of original au- thorities is maintained by all historians. Pro- fessor E. A. Freeman, in his "Methods of His- torical Study" (Lectures IV and V), says:

"The kernel of all sound teaching in historical mat- ters is the doctrine that no historical study is of any value which does not take in a knowledge of original authorities. Let no one mistake this saying, as if I were laying down a rule that no knowledge of any his- torical matter can be of any value which does not come straight from an original authority.

"The fact is that Livy, Plutarch, and a crowd of others, though they are not original authorities in themselves, are original authorities to us. That is to say, we can for the most part get no further than what

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they tell us. We know that they copied earlier writers ; we often know what earlier writers they copied. But those earlier writers are for the most part lost ; to us Livy and Plutarch are their representatives. For a large part of their story we have no appeal from them except either to internal evidence or to any fragmentary authorities of other kinds that may be left to us. There is no counter-narrative.

"If, then, we are to define original authorities, we might perhaps define them as those writers from whom we have no appeal, except to other writers of the same class.

"We must remember that even the best contemporary writer is commonly a primary authority for a part only of his subject. Though living at the time of which he writes, though often an actor in the scenes of which he writes, still he cannot always write from personal knowledge ; he cannot have seen everything with his own eyes ; he must constantly write only what he has been told by others ; only he is able to judge of what is told him by others in a way that a later writer cannot do. And besides his narrative, there is often other contem- porary evidence which for some purposes may be of higher authority than his narrative. The text of a proclamation or a treaty is, within its own range, of higher authority than the very best contemporary nar- rative. I say within its own range, because the official document, while it always proves a great deal, does not always prove everything.

"The later writers are by no means to be cast aside ; it is often very important to see how they looked at

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the events of earlier times. The point to be under- stood is that they are not authorities, that they are not witnesses, that a statement made by a contemporary gains nothing in inherent value because it is copied over and over again by a hundred writers who are not con- temporaries. Whenever a man at any date has spe- cial means of knowledge, he becomes so far an au- thority ; a local writer or a man who has specially studied some particular class of subjects may be in this sense an authority, that is the nearest approach to an authority that we can get, even for times long before his own."

In literature the same rule applies. Authori- ties are the standards by which to regulate, but which, after the testing of the times, cannot themselves be subjected to other standards in their authoritative element. Sainte-Beuve, in his "Causeries du Lundi," gives certain defini- tions which may be adduced here by way of illus- tration :

"A classic is, according to the ordinary definition, an author who is already established in the admiration of the people and who figures as authority in his field. The word 'classic' appears first in this sense with the Romans. With them not all the citizens of the differ- ent classes were called 'classic,' but only those of the first class who possessed at least a certain fixed income.

"All those who possessed an income below that were designated as 'infra classem,' below the class par ex- cellence. Figuratively the word 'classicus' is found

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used by Aulus Gellius, and applied to authors ; an au- thor of value and distinction, 'classicus assiduusque scriptor,' an author who counts, who possesses some- thing and is not to be confounded with the mass of proletarians. Such an expression, therefore, presup- poses an age sufficient to have given opportunity for criticism and classification in literature.

"The idea 'classic' implies something of a regular con- sistent character which forms a whole and has tradi- tion. It grows, spreads, yet endures.

"The first Dictionary of the Academy (1694) defined a classic author simply as an ancient author very much approved, one who is authority in the subject-matter with which he deals. The Dictionary of the Academy of 1835 presses this definition further and renders it more precise and specific. It defines 'classic authors' as those who have become models in any languge. In the articles which follow recur continually expressions such as : models, established rules for composition and style, strict rules for art to which one must conform."

CHAPTER XV

BIBLE AUTHORITY

Subjectivism, pragmatism, and pluralism, as much as agnosticism, logically rule authority out of court. The current attempts to save a kind of authority for the Bible by those who refuse to admit its objective authority are interesting. At the best they simply vest Scripture with their own endorsement, holding that the Bible is not the Word of God, but that the word of God is in the Bible. The authentication of the Word of God, however, is left to the individual. Dr. Forsyth, in an able article in the Contemporary Review, advocates the view that the Bible as such is not the word of God, but derives its authority from the Word of God, of which it is part. This con- ception is not unlike the view of the authority of the Bible held by the Roman Catholic Church, in which the church is set over the Bible, but the Roman view retains at least some objective norm. As Cardinal Gibbons says in "The Faith of Our Fathers": "The canonicity of the Holy Scriptures rests solely on the authority of the Catholic Church, which proclaimed them in- spired." Dr. Forsyth, on the other hand, de-

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rives the authority of the Bible from its function in the service of the Gospel. If Dr. Forsyth means to leave any intrinsic authority to the Bible in its necessary relation to the functioning of the gospel among men, then his conception of authority is at fault. For authority is not a de- rived power, beliind which those to whom its appeal is made, may go.

There is no inquiry more momentous, more fraught with influences that bear directly upon our ethical life than that which seeks to place before us in authority a reliable, regulative standard for conduct. It can be shown from statistics that in all periods of unsettlement and of social and economic transition, the ethical life is agitated and powerfully affected. Crime in- creases proportionately as the unsettled condi- tion becomes more complete. The facts observed make it evident that, where the restraints of au- thority are less felt, they exercise less influence. Is this restraining influence upon the will the whole content of the concept of authority? Or must we necessarily raise questions regarding that before which the will bows in submission? Evidently this latter question must be raised ; for the authority can not be entirely of the indi- vidual who bends in homage before the dictates of such authority. It is in us, but not of us. Indeed, "liberty of conscience" itself points to a

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"conscience of liberty." And this would mean that we are mated by our susceptibilities with an unestrangeable witness throughout all the activi- ties of life ; matched by our inner nature with an outward standard. Thus it becomes e\adent that there is always implied, when we consider au- thority, first of all an objective reference. Of course, in its very dictates and efficacy, this au- thority is determined and conditioned by the ethical nature of him to whom its decrees are issued. This disposes at once of the superficial remark which is often made on the strength of this circumstance f. i. by Professor Perry in "The Moral Economy" p. 34.

"There is a phrase, 'liberty of conscience,' which well expresses the modem conception of moral obligation. It recognizes that duty in the last analysis is imposed upon the individual neither by society nor even by God, but by himself; that there is no authority in moral matters more ultimate than a man's own rational con- viction of what is best."

Precisely, this circumstance, this binding obli- gation is a personal expression of personal re- sponsibility to God in the definite social forms and specific individual experience. Philosophi- cal inquiry seeks to define the objective nature of authority. After authority has been estab- lished, the man of daily doings has something to

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go by, if he can only rely on his given standard. This practical necessity accounts for the codi- fication of the various and rich contents of the religious and ethical life. We thus find always codes, rules, dogmas, external authorities. Our very sense of authority is their guarantee.

Where more is at stake in the risks of life, as in the religious sphere, the guarantee is propor- tionately stronger. In this light we may see the importance of a subjective belief in an "in- fallible" church, in the Bible as "the perfect rule of faith and practice," in Christ as "very God of very God and very man of very man" in His re- deeming work.

Within the sphere of faith the creeds are established, and the guarantee accepted for the personal endorsement of belief, but the skeptical inquiry which does not by faith lay hold of these codes, dogmas and securities on the market of life, clamors loudly for demonstration of their right to be authoritative.

The place assigned to faith in the Bible and by Christianity as fundamental and supreme, underlying and conditioning all human knowl- edge and action is an acknowledged fact. And if faith then must function in all the activities of life, then the only question is which form it takes, for some form it must take. We therefore raise the question: Are the objects of faith adequate

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and justified, when looked at without the eyes of faith? The multitudes require demonstration from the "faithful" — i. e., those who have the faith — if they are to be induced to stake life's values on the same principles. We are to verify our credal formulations and beliefs before the men of the world. We are all fighting our battles in this same impartial world. God is no respecter of persons. Will the world yield us the best by conducting life's campaign along the plan of obedience to Christian teachings and be- liefs. This is to be made plain to the world. Is there justification in suspense of assent to the old Christian authority. Not if faith is an essen- tial function in life as actually lived. In life we have to take chances. We, free moral agents, act in God's vast domain at our own peril. A valuation of conduct, a posteriori by others, does not concern me in the brunt of life's battles, face to face with temptations. I must decide now, how to steer. The pilot with chart and compass must be brought on board of my storm- tossed hulk.

Nor is the proposal that one should wait until the facts are all in, resting in the assurance that the results will vindicate the reasonableness of the faith, any more satisfactory. To wait till all the facts are in! Can the plummet of my finite intellect fathom the depths of life's ocean?

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You bid me to suspend judgment, not to decide for the things that have power over me. I must be scientific by committing myself to the infin- itely vague possibility, as over against the con- crete, urgent facts that are upon me. Profes- sor James has shown well, in his "Will to Be- lieve," that what you demand is a psychological impossibility. Suspension of assent is impos- sible, whatever academic, would-be scientific ac- curacy may decide in its theory.

In actual life there are no dead issues; life is replete with conflicts. Life is a battlefield; I must fight. Therefore only hving issues have a chance of being taken up. They are those which approach, and can be carried into, actual life.

If faith is the surrender to an acknowledged authority, then it would follow that authority of some sort is involved in the conduct of life. The pragmatic! attitude towards life, a disguised utili- tarianism without approximate guarantee for my actions by a computation of results, is either, (1) a tremendously vast faith in the ra- tionality of the universe, matching as it does, my reason, my instincts, my all, in complete har- mony with all about me; or (2) it is a flat re- fusal to accept authority over, and restraint upon, my rebellious nature.

I believe it is the latter. For, first, conscience

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does not allow us to say that our natures com- port so well with the world's intrinsic arrange- ment that our actions upon it yield us its essen- tial meaning. We are out of joint with the Universe, with God. The feeling of sin is uni- versal. Secondly, the real tendency of pragma- tism in religion is too clearly manifest to leave us in doubt as to the fact of its opposition to any and all doctrine.

We must have a "working faith," and it is ipso facto impossible to proceed upon anything with a principle to which I can give sanction only after having seen how it "does work."

(3) It must be remembered, however, that irrespective of all argumentation or rational proofs, whether logically adequate or inadequate, the Bible still presses upon all men the old alternative of life or death conditioned on imme- diate practical surrender to its requirements. As Calvin observes in his "Institutes": "Scripture, carrying its own evidence along ^vith it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with wliich we ought to re- ceive it to the testimony of the spirit." Or in the words of Athanasius: "The holy and divinely inspired Scriptures are sufficient of themselves, aurapxeii; for the declaration of truth."

The Bible everywhere assumes sovereign right to authority over man — every man everywhere

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and always — to command belief and obedience. This is where the skepticism of this age — and of all ages — takes issue with it. Some theologian has aptly remarked that what our age objects to in the realm of religion and morality is au- thority, and in the intellectual sphere the miracle. Is choice of attitude categorical in this issue? Are the contrasts, which Christ constantly puts before us in his teachings, not to be avoided? Are we to face one way or another; give our al- legiance either to good or to evil ?

In view of the issue at stake — the soul's end- less destiny — the man who is brought to face it is impelled to ask, just what are the Biblical re- quirements to M'hich it demands my conformity with such sanctions?

As this question is put, we approach the sub- ject of authority as consisting in a set of prop- ositions, dogmas, codes, to which our assent is required. Such a situation results in the ra- tional formulation and statement of what is in- volved in this authoritative Biblical claim, if any genuine inquirer is to attain to intellectual satis- faction. Hence the normative standard of our creeds, doctrines, codes, and Bible. Yea! re- ligion has been to some extent justly classed by the impious mind as a "police force" in the life of the average believer. It is external, rather than positive and inward; constraint instead of

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moving principle. It must be observed, how- ever, that the very conception of authority im- plies this restraint. Its dictates are not at our discretion; though in us, they are not of us, but refer beyond us.

We must also remember that the objective as- pect, of what is too readily called "and external creed," has its corresponding subjective refer- ence. The Old Testament, by addressing the Israelites in progressive etliical commands, may illustrate this. To consider all creeds only from the subjective standpoint, as formulations of be- lief, is to cut asunder the bond of Christian fel- lowship and union, and refuse any objective cri- terion. These tendencies run high in mystic and emotional types of religion. But while in this case piety often guarantees the essential features of rehgious life and thus its convictions, even if no insistence is put upon their formulation, it be- comes quite another question, when a skeptical age and tendency raises the cry, "Religion with- out theology." That is irrational and impossi- ble. There are over our life objective standards to which we must conform.

But to admit the authority of a Book as "the perfect rule of faith and practice" is an admis- sion which it is hard for the skeptical mind to make, when it does not find itself in these regu- lative standards. Here is the rub. For the

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solution of the difficulty, we do no better than repeat the well-known "Credo ut intelligam" ; and this is begging the question, so far as there is concerned a compelling of assent where it is not given. Yet, where the inquiry sincerely comes, "If thou canst do anything, have pity on us and help us," there is also in order, and does also follow, the confession: "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!"

Dr. Forsyth, in an article entitled "The Evangelical Churches and the Higher Criti- cism," in the October number of the Contempo- rary Review for 1906, discusses the fact of au- thority, and does it as one whose strong and wholesome evangelical conviction in the authority of the Gospel evokes enthusiastic response. But it must be remarked, nevertheless, that he does not argue the vexed question as to the seat of authority, in his helpful confession of faith in God's redeeming grace in Christ. It is, indeed, true, that faith in the Gospel is the sine qua non which illumines the Bible, which makes us read it religiously, renders it authoritative for us. But unless there first be granted the authority, un- less faith be first exercised in regard to Bible, creed or Church, we cannot experience that sense of authority that awes souls because God reaches man. It must remain a reaching out of man after God.

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Dr. Forsyth's view is popularly reported by Rev. Monroe Smith in "Christian Faith and Doctrine Series"; "The Inspiration and Au- thority of Holy Scriptures" to which Principal Forsyth wrote the introduction. Rev. Smith confuses infallible guidance for the individual soul (which would do away with freedom) with the infallibility of the inspired record, and de- nies the latter on an argument against the former.

It is maintained by the advocates of the Bible, that its Authority can be vindicated at the bar of reason, not that it can be established.

The historical fact at the foundation is: that God gave the Bible through His prophets and apostles as the Christian Code. The Christian contention is : that the grounds for believing that the Bible is a revelation from God are of such cogency that they should command the assent of every reasonable man. The self-evident duty of the Christian Church, in an age of skepti- cism like the present, is to confront the doubt with the most powerful presentation and enforcement of the rational grounds for be- lief.

We consider briefly a single phase of the gen- eral argument — that from the Unity of the Scriptures — as treated by Dr. Forsyth.

(2) The Unity of the Scriptures has been

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recently urged with special emphasis as an argu- ment for their Authority or Infallibility.

We are glad that Dr. Forsyth has directed at- tention to it, in the paper already referred to. It is certainly a most remarkable fact, that a Book, made up of many books, written in dif- ferent ages, in different environments, in dif- ferent languages, by men of all varieties of tem- perament and degrees of culture, should yet have such wholeness, such unity, as to be clearly recognizable as One Book, — a fact best ex- plained by its own claim, that God entered into its production, superintending the human agents and agencies.

Dr. Forsyth urges, that, in order to the full impression of this argument, the Bible should be read as a whole, made up of consentient and co- herent parts. But this insistence, as requiring breadth and persistence of mental vision, bids us pause for thought.

To say, "We must read the Bible as a whole," is to assume the organic unity; considering its composition, it is to give it a unique value. Against those who, whilst maintaining that God's word is in the Bible, feel yet at liberty to handle its contents and compositions so freely as to treat it practically Hke any other book, it is not strictly an argument to estabhsh this authority of the Bible as "God's redeeming Word in Christ's

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Cross," to say : "It is not the Bible that contains God's Word, so much as God's Word that con- tains the Bible"; unless, indeed, the Bible is made an integral part of God's Word.

And then we dare not be so concessive as to say, "The Bible is not a voucher but a preacher." For we remember the Bible's ovm. warning: "I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto them, God shall add unto him the plagues which are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book." Unless we feel sure that we do find both corroboration and correction in our Christian experiences; unless we can turn to the Bible religiously, not critically; unless it is an infallible guide whose face value will be sus- tained by those who read it religiously — and those who do not read it thus give it no such value — unless, I say, the Bible not only proves an infallible guide, but is believed to be such, its authority will not distill the spirit of devotion. The devout attitude, upon which Dr. Forsyth himself insists, in the reading of the Bible, pre- supposes behef in the so much depreciated "Biblicism" which says: "The Bible says, there- fore God says."

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But Dr. Forsyth emphasizes the recognition of the Unity given to the Bible by God's Pur- pose of Redemption running through it.

Dr. Forsyth is very explicit about this. He says:

"The unity of the Bible Is organic, total, vital, evangelical ; it is not merely harmonious, balanced, statuesque. It is not the form of symmetry but the spirit of reconciliation. Strike a fragment from a statue and you ruin it. Its unity is mere symmetry of the kind that is ruined so. But the unity of the Bible is like the unity of Nature. It has a living power always to repair loss and transcend lesion. The Bible unity is given it by the unity of a Historic Gospel de- veloping, dominant, not detailed. . . . If we are to take the Bible as Christ did, we may not feel com- pelled to take the whole Bible, but we must take the Bible as a whole. . . . The unity and power of the Bible is sacramental; it is not mechanical."

Views and arguments hke those just quoted, touching the unity of the Bible — containing much of wholesome truth and yet involving or implying something of serious error — appear so frequently and are so generally prevalent that they require close attention.

It is evident that the notion of unity, as held here, is looked upon as brought to the Bible from without. It may be granted that the regnant

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Gospel of a Gracious God as moral Redeemer makes the Bible speak with that authority which lays hold of the believer; but the Bible appear- ing as a whole, as a vital unity, being a sacramen- tal Scripture, it must be, indeed, the adequate medium of this Gospel of Christ. By what au- thority is this unity, this wholeness guaranteed? It would seem only an unjustified assumption, unless we concede an intrinsic, objective harmony and unity, which makes the Bible indeed God's Word inspired as believed of old.

The recognition of the presence of this in- trinsic harmony and unity in God's World gave birth to Modern Science — true Science being im- possible until the scientific investigator was will- ing to proceed upon the postulate that "every part of the universe is constructed on principles that will yield clear meaning to his search for unity, law, and order." The beginning of the recognition of a similar objective harmony and unity in God's Word — wliich like God's World is a complete Whole — which prepares a way for carrying the same scientific postulate into the study of the Bible — foreshadows and indeed in- troduces a new era in Biblical investigation. The current view of Biblical unity — as something brought to the Bible from without — must needs be supplemented by this conception; which like- wise furnishes a direction and a caution touching

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the way in which the Scriptures should be criti- cally handled.

Is it sound reasoning to try to justify muti- lations of the form of the living original, in how- ever small degree, when we admit that the or- ganism as a whole is essential to the individual life, and that this whole is dependent upon its component parts? To say that it mil survive, that it has not the "mere symmetry of a statue," is pleading indulgence for a wanton act, which is felt to require defense. But the justification of acts of mutilation on this ground can be noth- ing less than to show an improvement. If this could be shown — as it is not shown — it would destroy both infallibility and real "wholeness" or unity. It is admitted that by striking parts from a statue it is ruined. Yet, does a statue, as a representation, exact copy and true imita- tion of life, include superfluous or cumbersome elements, which the living original has not?

It seems strange that men who admittedly value the Bible as expressive of God's revelation, in some way yet God's book and unique, will, on the other hand, labor under this unwarranted contrast between the Bible as we have it, and what they have called the Bible of the Bible, or God's Word in the Bible. If our terms are, however, to mean anything, it is evident that, either God's revelation is adequate, and then au-

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thoritative; or we have to proclaim our so-called unassisted reason authority over the Scriptures. And, in the latter case, I do not see why we should specially need a Bible at all. Your choice is between alternatives; you are to submit to its authority, if the Book is to guide you in any real sense; or you may discriminate as to the very validity of the Book and its contents, but in that case it is an illusion to fancy yourself guided at all. If you are to be led, you must learn the "grammar of assent" to your leader and to what he is to lead you. You do not under- stand all; there are difficulties, mysteries, per- plexing things in it, — as indeed there are in God's World. As you cannot establish your own infallible authority, it has to come to you. Perhaps you do not fully understand it all, but "God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain."

It should be further noted that the issue as to the authority or infallibility of the Bible does not involve taking all the parts of it as of equal value. I know of no believer in the infallibility of the Scriptures who means to maintain that he therefore does, or must, value every part of it alike, or claim to understand every particular. Most believers feed with preference upon those sections which find them, which speak to them most potently. Some limit themselves almost

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exclusively to specific portions of Scripture, with- out having even so much as raised the question that this might imply inferiority of other parts, or even render them superfluous to the Bible. The principle at issue is the authority of the Bible as God's Book.

As to the use of analogy, suggested by Dr. Forsyth — which is intended for concession to those who discard this Biblical authority — we would ask: Though its unity is not mere sym- metry or statuesque, any more than is that of any living organism, does that justify at all the claim to mutilate the organism, the whole? If there be a whole at all, the parts must in some way function harmoniously in this whole; relate to it in some subservient, tributary way. We can survive the loss of some parts of our body; the loss of some parts, whose functioning is not known, would not perceptibly change the work- ing of our organism. If this principle is not to be applied so as to mutilate the structure of the living, bodily organism, neither should it be applied to the Bible, if such a unity or whole- ness is granted in it. And this expression, the Unity of the Bible — just as its being "God's Book," "Divine Revelation," "Holy Writ," etc., — would mean simply that its Truth stands ob- jectively real, over man with authority.

Revelations, claiming supernatural origin,

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are understood to arise not from human experi- ence, but to have been projected by God into human Hfe as normative and infallible stand- ards, i. e., possess Divine authority. A distinc- tion between direct and indirect revelation rests upon a false psychology, since it involves the idea of unmediated revelation. Revelation to be revelation at all must, from the nature of the case, be mediated by some form to the recipient. We cannot even conceive of consciousness with- out an implied content. The subject-conscious- ness involves an object. The customary dis- tinction aims, however, rather at a difference be- tween original or final and derived authority. The first, being self -revelation, finds man while man finds the latter only after the first is estab- lished, and as corroborative evidence. Of course, all derived social authority, relative in form and emphasi^, is in the end warranted by Divine Authority; but social life as a whole does not go to the source of this final authority. That Divine revelation has to come in the same way as all other knowledge affords no sufficient reason for classing it with other knowledge. This is indeed neglected by those who treat Christianity as mere historic fact and the Bible as mere literature. When historical Christianity and the historical revelation of the Bible become merely descriptive terms, then both may be con-

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ceived of as made of a piece with all other his- toric events, as purely human product. If such a procedure be adopted, it should be borne in mind that the claim of supernatural origin for both has been dismissed at the start, inasmuch as these events are presumed to be brought wholly within the limits of the historic past. Where the inadequacy of historic explanation is perceived, while this procedure is still insisted upon, resort is taken to allowing traditional inspiration in a merely nominal sense, in order to bolster up the fact of revelation. To keep the closed circle of historic events in which we may trace how men successively conceived of God, not without his divine impulses, and jet to affirm a self -reve- lation of God to man as an impact which either had no result at all, or resulted in the same faulty human products, seems an illogical device. It is difficult to see the help or need of a Divine in- spiration the outcome of which is just as faulty as all other mere human knowledge. And yet such is the logic of that view which retains a be- lief in inspired men, but not in an inspired book. One may go the whole length with the Roman Catholic Church and vest the Church (i. e. the clergy) with this authority. In that case the authority of the Bible is subordinate to the in- spired priest; but another priest is another Clirist! We are not now concerned with the

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question whether these claims of super-natural origin can be vindicated in the face of modern criticism. We admit the point urged by an im- patient unbeliever against the clinging to an au- thority which is admittedly no more acknowl- edged. Bargy compares this procedure to "the retreat of an army in covering which all the members fall one by one. It arrives at last in an inaccessible place of refuge. The army has no more men, but is safe. . . . Little by little parts of the Bible were given up, one by one, without counting they were surrendered to the scientists, but the sanctity of the whole was maintained." ("Religion in Society in the United States.")

McPeeters cautions wisely in regard to these problems of the higher criticism. He says in an article in the Princeton Theological Review :

"We should not be misled by current contempt for ^authority.' Let us rather hope that this is merely a passing phase of intellectual bumptiousness and con- fused thought. To say that the problem of the Higher criticism cannot be settled by 'authority' is either to say that there are no persons who are competent to settle them in the use of internal evidence or otherwise; or it is to say that for the great majority of man- kind they cannot be settled at all. For, whatever the process employed to solve the problems of Higher Criticism, provided it really solves them, he who is mas-

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ter of that process is in a position authoritatively to solve those problems, for any and all others. Else why do we hear so much about the 'assured results' of a cer- tain school of critics? This label so conspicuously in evidence upon their goods would seem to have but one possible object, namely, to beget in the public the con- viction that there are those who are competent to settle these vexing questions for them. But, if so, then these questions can be settled by authority. And if they can be settled by authority, who shall say that they may not be settled upon the authority of our Lord and His apostles? What, if our Lord assumes the ability and the right to settle them? Shall we repudiate his au- thority at this point? After all, for most persons, so far as these problems are concerned, it is simply a question as to whether they will accept their solution of these from Christ and His apostles, or from certain modern scholars who, quoad hoc, affect to be better in- formed and safer guides than Christ Himself." ("The Determination of Religious Value the Ultimate Problem of the Higher Criticism." July, 1908.)

All that concerns us at present is whether the authority of Christianity and of the Bible can be retained along with the invalidation of these claims. It will be readily seen that we face here again the same problem of causal connection. Did Christ and the Bible come to be recognized as authoritative because of inherent original au- thority, or is this recognition the projection of

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a faith-state which made authoritative what was not so in itself, and even elaborated a theory of Divine origin and inspiration in its defense? It would leave us to explain, whence this strong sense of authority.

If the Bible is its own authority, it is well to read the Bible itself rather than to read about it. There has been so much talking about the Bible that it is only fair to let it now speak for itself. For it is surprising to find how little fa- miliar the average church member, or even the modern preacher, is with the Bible! This cir- cumstance appears so significant in this connec- tion that it may well give us pause to reflect, and repeat the locus classical: "Every Scripture in- spired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for consideration which is in righteous- ness, that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work."

It has also been suggested that, though one might concede the whole of the Bible to be true, and therefore authoritative, this need not bind us now, inasmuch as some parts were true and needed at one time, but are no longer applicable or even desirable as norms. These are, indeed, rightfully in the Bible, because they were re- quired in the developmnt of Christianity. This view, however, needs little consideration, as it resolves truth and authority into a merely func-

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tional fitness of the organ. The authority of truth is incompatible with the notion of expedi- ency. The concession is meaningless and the view of truth thoroughly pragmatic. The seri- ous-minded theologian is concerned with truth and adheres to the semper uhique ah omnibus. He is therefore disinclined to dismiss or discount any truth, so far as ascertained, because of its incompleteness, nor will he entertain the idea of truth — if it be truth at all — ever becoming obso- lete. The term "new truth," which is so much in the air, is a misnomer as opposed to "old truth," for all truth is one. The term may be freely admitted in the sense of additional truth. Fortunately, however, it seems usually to mean alleged truths that are destined to remain essen- tially new, inasmuch as they have not enough au- thority in them ever to grow old, not being au- thorized by the Truth they ignore, i. e., the tran- scendent, everlasting source of all truth and au- thority. For the theologian, as for every truth- seeker, the word of Clough expresses a deep conviction :

"It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so."

CHAPTER XVI

AN OBJECTIVE SOURCE OF AUTHORITY

Authority means recognized, established power, witness, statement, command, etc., ac- cepted and obeyed without any questioning. It implies the sentiment of Don Diegue in Le Cid of Corneille :

"On doit ce respect au pouvoir absolu De n'examiner rien quand un roi a voulu."

It is experienced, felt, and taken with the sense of objective validity. It exists (ex- sistere), it stands out before us, independent of us or of our conception. Though its efficacy for us be largely determined by our relation to it, the authority as generally received is only its subjective aspect, its recognition by men. A source of information, or a duly accredited fact, is considered sufficient to give authority to a state- ment, as, viz., an authoritative witness. But it must be borne in mind that this acceptance of au- thority, the power derived from opinion, respect or esteem, is the resulting influence of authority it- self. Dr. Forsyth in conceding to the Bible only

167

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this kind of authority is reasoning in a circle when he tries to authorize the Gospel conception by the Bible. Authority, as objectively resid- ing in the forms of life, and in historic develop- ment, refers to the inherent truth of these forms ; it has self-evident justification. It is the same, when in daily intercourse the utterance is heard: Who or what is your authority? This is a char- acteristic inquiry inasmuch as it asks for a guar- antee to establish the reliability of that to which assent is given. This authorization is not always exhaustively established for those who thus ques- tion, nor do they require this. It is sufficient when subjective needs and required guarantees are met in such a way as to produce acknowledg- ment of the truth. The question calls forth an authority beyond the first alleged authority. The subsequent endeavor aims to have this au- thority acknowledged as objective fact, thus af- fecting the personal witness by meeting and sub- duing the individual authority residing in the verdicts of conscience and reason. It would seem that this is putting objective authority out of court by bringing it before the bar of individual approval. Yet, in leaving the defendant to es- tablish his claim, recourse must needs be taken to authority of some sort in the procedure to establish the recognition of some form of author- ity before the critical mind.

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This yielding to final authority seldom re- quires exhaustive verification on the ground of imphcit reliance on self-evident truth — the au- thority of authority. In the exercise of faith, we accept as a final authority those facts and forms which function creditably in accordance with in- dividual requirements in regard to truth. Thus a scholar, who presents his subject exhaustively, is considered an authority on his subject. He gives first hand evidences which are recognized as such. Consequently his statements made from original, direct, personal contact with facts, as first hand evidence, are received and recognized as authoritative by others. This is strikingly illustrated in the concluding remark of the Gospel of Matthew, which at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, observes in regard to Christ's teaching: "And after Jesus had ended these sayings the people were astonished at his doctrine for he taught as one having authority and not as the scribes."

The word used is, i^oo(Tca= out of (His) being, i. e., as direct first hand witness to truth. He, the law in living figure, the Way, the Truth and the Life Himself came to bear witness to the truth in a unique way as contrasted with scribal book-lore about the law.

Indeed, very few things, even in our daily life, though of trivial importance, are verifiable by

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each individual. So we constantly believe, speak and act on authority. This being the case in the daily intercourse of our common life in which we depend upon the detailed and penetrating study of experts, it is from the nature of the case much more so in questions relating to ulti- mate causes beyond which we cannot go, as, viz., God's Revelation in His Word. Wherever its verification is excluded, assent is required by the exercise of faith, which accepts its affirmation at face value, that is, on authority. Reason recognizes its own limits. It simply accepts, but does not establish the trustworthiness of our senses, that the world has objective existence, that the laws of thought yield truth, that there is correspondence between thought and being, between subject and object, spirit and matter.

Even if, in the ordinary departments of so- cial, civil, and religious life, the impossible proposition that we go back for authorization to those primordial truths without which the argu- mentation in justification of any specific form of authoritative truth would be impossible, should be insisted upon; or if the critical disposition should take for granted only a few propositions as established and immune from critical investi- gation; in either case, the acceptance of some prima facie evidence must enter in. It is there- fore an amazingly superficial assumption that

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modern writers make when they say, "We want truth for authority, not authority for truth." The first is what we are in search of; we cannot claim to have it already; and it is safe to say that we shall not get it, if we follow the method proposed in the latter part of this motto. We feel, therefore, constrained to repeat the greater wisdom of old "credo ut intelligam." As a mat- ter of fact, authority is in full force in all depart- ments of hfe.

Professor James touches upon this subject in his essay, "The Will to Believe." He says:

"We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary, or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let the truth take its chance."

I suppose — as Professor James himself sug- gests— that of these two alternatives we have only a Hobson's choice. Giving the "first and great commandment to would-be knowers": We must know the truth; and we must avoid error, he insists that these "are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two sepa- rate laws." And affain:

*&•

"Although it may indeed happen that when we be- lieve the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence

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from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other false- hoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A."

It is strange that tliis statement should occur in the essay which so ably sets forth the influence of "temperamental atmosphere" and character upon our intellectual beliefs. It simply shows how the views of a candid, empiric philosopher are vitiated by his pluralistic belief. It appears sufficiently evident that a suspense of belief — whatever its possibility in specific cases — as a rule of conduct at least, is impossible. There is, then, really only one rule: We must know the truth, which incidentally implies that we are to avoid error. It is the sense of the latter injunc- tion that raises the query, "What is your au- thority?" It is the negative safeguard to give assent only to duly accredited facts, to yield to the right of authority, to truth. Now, it would seem that Professor James, in speaking so forci- bly about Clifford's adverse disposition towards Christianity, should have seen that there is no danger of his choosing any form of it. The specific forms, the cases presented to us, appeal to us, or fail to do so, according as we have fashioned and molded our character. It is not,

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therefore, a question at all of putting the choice. We start out with the positive injunction, im- plying the negative aspect of rejecting that which does not stand on the rightful authority of truth. Nor is tliis "enfant terrible," Clifford, urging suspense of judgment because of choice, but rather on account of "insufficient evidence," on the plea that every asset is unwarranted un- til the evidence is complete. Just as James him- self assures us, — "Evidently, then, our non-in- tellectual nature does influence our convictions." . . . As a rule we disbelieve all facts and the- ories for which we have no use. For Clifford Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start (consequently excluded from the choice which Professor James proposes). So truth may be- come a dead issue for one by constantly running into error, and error lose its insidious tempta- tions for him whose candor sincerely makes for truth.

It should be noticed that Professor James in- sists on limiting to the subjective attitude meta- physical implications. The psychologist gets the better of the metaphysician. In his Pragma- tism the whole of metaphysics is let down prac- tically into the sphere of psychology. The great physicist, Du Bois Reymond, also makes an un- warranted inference in his famous address: "Uber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens" with

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the same subjectivistic bias. He says: "Dass es in Wirklichkeit keine Qualitaten geibt, folgt aus der Zergliederung unserer Sinneswahrneh- mungen. . . . Eigenschaftlos, wie sie aus der subjectiven Zergliederung hervorgeht, ist die Welt auch fiir die durch objective Betrach- tung gewonnene mechanische Anschauung, welche statt Schall und Licht nur Schwingungen eines eigenschaftslosen, dort als wagbare hier als scheinbar unwagbare INIaterie sich darbieten- den Urstoff es kennt." From the fact that sensa- tions are conditioned in their reception, it does not follow that the differentiation is wholly an affair of the receiving agent in response to the activity of a property-less sub-stratum of undif- ferentiated substance. As there is no meta- psychic, we must leave sensations their represen- tative meaning.

Our belief in truth, that there is a truth, and that our minds are made for it, would stand, even if our social system did not confirm it. Our hearts respond to the authoritative announce- ment that we were created in the image of God, as it says in Gen. i. 27, "And God created man in his owTi image, in the image of God created he him." This belief is not the result of desire and instinct, but is anterior and basal to them.

God has left his witness in the heart, and if we are walking in rectitude of will, the Spirit of

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truth will lead us into all truth. We find cor- roboration of this everywhere. For truth is in- deed one, as God is one. But Prof. James dis- owns this, until demonstrably verified to the in- tellect. Yet, Prof. James, in another brilliant essay on "The Sentiment of Rationality," says: "The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition, — the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that it follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the inter- est of recognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it." As Helmholtz says: "Hier gilt nur der eine Rath; vertraue und handle." And Professor Bain urges: "Our only error is in proposing to give any reason or justi- fication of the postulate, or to treat it as other- wise than begged at the very outset." Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. In "Reflect Action and Theism"

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James says : "I will only remind you that each one of us is entitled either to doubt or to believe, he does alike on his personal responsibility and risk." He quotes with approval the lines:

("Du musst glauben, du musst wagen Denn die Gotter leihn kein Pfand, Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen In das schone Wunderland.")

"Believe jou must, and risk. For Gods ne'er lend a pledge. A miracle alone can bear Into the beauty of that wondrous land."

But, in spite of this. Professor James ought to be reminded that there is no metapsychic, and that we can find the home of truth within. And whether we can demonstrate their objective validity or not, we must take the primordial ver- dicts of conscience and reason on authority and as having objective reference.

CHAPTER XVII PRAGMATISM AND AUTHORITY

Professor James has made overmuch of the subjective aspect. In "The Will to Believe" he wrote: "The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence," and so it is in innumerable other cases. "Faith in a fact can help create a fact." "There are cases where faith creates its own verification," etc. This subjective aspect is not to be over- looked, and selective thinking, the personal equa- tion in the grouping and viewing of facts needs to be taken in account. Yet, not with disre- gard to objective truth. In fact, what does it matter if all knowledge is subjective? One may then well ask with Pilate in indiiferent scorn that greatest of questions: "What is truth?"

Since, then. Professor James espoused more pronouncedly the pragmatic attitude in disregard of objective reference of truth, he is left not only with things unrelated, but with a world of pure experience, which is unrelated.

This pragmatism does make successful prac- tice the very essence of truth, and substitutes for the view of truth as "accordance of our ideas

17T

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with reality," a valuation by the individual. This individual valuation is emphasized in the pragmatic school in proportion as the acceptance of truth at face value, i. e., as true representation of reality, is discredited. This shifting of em- phasis from what constitutes truth (treow = faithfulness to fact) to the always inadequate at- tempt at its verification is a hopeless and harm- ful confusion. Indeed, Professor INIacbride Sterrett well says of this school:

"What now is the fundamental principle of this ex- travagantly vaunted new theory that is styled prag- matism? As one reads most of the volumes, he becomes dazed and bewildered and ends with very vague ideas of what the thing really means. First these prag- matists give us to understand that truth as an objective system — truth, the search for which has been the object of all science and philosophy, is a mere cob-web of the intellect. Second, that all our judgments of reality are worth — or value — judgments. What is called truth and reality consists in bare practical effects. In science, for instance, if it serves our practical purposes better to use the Ptolemic instead of the Copernican theory in astronomy, then it is the true and real for us. In morals, if honesty is the best policy, then honesty is the truth. In philosophy, if we can get more out of our moral and religious life by believing in polytheism instead of monotheism, then polytheism is the truth, which is practically the view of Professor Howison and

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Professor James and Professor Schiller. The cui bono scales are to give us the validity of judgments in all spheres. Reasonableness of truth is not a good in it- self. It is an abstraction. There is no truth, no ab- solute system of truth independent of the needs of men. Love of such supposed truth, which has always been the inspiration of thinkers, is rudely taken from us as the worship of a false god. Such truth is useless, and the useless is false. We can say that what is true in prag- matism is not new, and what is new in it — the attempt to substitute value- judgments in all cognition for judg- ments of truth and reality — is not true." ("The Freedom of Authority," p. Sllff.)

Professor Sterrett defines "Authority" as "any power or influence through which one does or believes what he would not do of his own un- aided powers." (p. 6.) If this is understood as a personal dictum, as the command of superior enlarged personality, involving a reliance on, or committal to superior wisdom of wider or deeper experience in which truth is recognized by one's reason, it is quite pointed.

In another essay ("Humanism and Truth," Mind, U. S. 52, p. 463) Professor James says: "Whether experience itself is due to something independent of all possible experience is a ques- tion which pragmatism declines to answer." And in "Pragmatism" he plainly declares : "Our account of truth is as account of truths in the

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plural, of processes of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common, that they pay" (p. 218). In making satisfaction the criterion of truth, in conceiving of "the true as that which gives the maximal combination of satisfactions," Professor James wrongs our in- herent sense of the authority of truth. Espe- cially does he ignore the sense of the moral im- plications of truth as revealed in our hearts.

Would the gifted scientist could have said in a deeper sense than he meant to express when quoting Pascal: "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas!" or have exclaimed with Paul: "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness."

This pragmatic attitude whose bugbear is to give things real objective reference so that our knowledge fits the scheme of things, finds its "enfant terrible" in Mr. E. W. Lyman, who says, in an article "The Influence of Pragma- tism upon the Status of Theologj^" published in "Philosophy and Psychology," a commemorative volume by pupils of Professor Garland:

"Meanwhile the actual absoluteness of Christianity, so far as it can be grounded in religious psychology and religious history, is undiminished by discrediting any artificial supplement that might be constructed through the aid of some supposed metaphysical necessity. The

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recognition of the mere possibility that new values may arise, which may even be discontinuous with the old, does not mean the recognition that there have already arisen needs calling for such values ; it merely asserts the sovereignty of this additional practical need that, when new needs do arise, they should be satisfied by their appropriate values. It is true that the main- tenance of a right proportion in values may require the subordination of the new needs, but at all events they must not be suppressed in advance by a priori reason- ing. This priority of need to values is already an ele- ment in the standard value of Christianity."

Mr. Lyman, in other words, is so pragmatic that he feels warranted in discrediting the au- thority of truth on the basis of his need of pos- sible needs. Yet, he seems to allow an ordering of our needs, which of course involves a rational procedure to maintain a right proportion of values. Strangely enough, the essay concludes with a tribute to faith. Now faith is the recognition of authority, on as reasonable grounds as the person exercising faith has at his disposal. Mr. Lyman, however, objects to au- thority on the strength of need and instinct. Indeed, the manward side of truth is all there is of truth. And this subjective aspect of truth which has come to displace its philosophy, is dominated by the physical functions which made the world of sense loom up large. This world-

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view is practical with reference to the instant need of things ; it keeps a steady eye on the wants of the moment. It constitutes the utilitarian ex- pediency of our world-wise age which discards philosophy. As Schiller says: "Meanwhile till philosophy shall hold together the structure of the world, nature maintains its doings by hunger and by love."

("Einstweilen, bis den Bau der Welt Philosophie zusammenhalt Erhalt sie (die Natur) das Getriebe Durch Hunger und durch Liebe.")

— Die Weltweisen.

The prevailing mode of determining religious and moral life from the sense of need rather than from its content, the attempt to confine all our outlook, our whole Weltanschauung, within the compass of humanity demands investigation. Against such meaningless designations of Christianity as Professor Lyman's declaration: "This priority of needs to values is already an element in the standard value of Christianity," it is gratifying to meet with the insistence on truth as the time-honored test, also for Chris- tianity. Professor Perry says in "The Moral Economy" :

"There is one test of religion which has been uni-

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versally applied by believers and critics alike, a test which, I think, will shortly appear to deserve precedence over all others. I refer to the test of truth. Every religion has been justified to its believers and recom- mended to unbelievers on grounds of evidence. It has been verified in its working, or attested by either obser- vation, reflection, revelation, or authority. In spite of the general assent which this proposition will doubtless command, it is deserving of special emphasis at the present time. Students of religion have latterly shifted attention from its claims to truth to its utility and sub- jective form. This pragmatic and psychological study of religion has created no little confusion of mind con- cerning its real meaning, and obscured that which is after all its essential claim — the claim namely to offer an illumination of life."

Maurice remarks at the conclusion of his work, "The Religions of the World and their Rela- tion to Christianity" (p. 245) :

"In compliance with the directions of Boyle, I sought for that which seemed to be the most prevailing form of unbelief in our day ; and I found it in the tendency to look upon all theology as having its origin in the spiritual nature and faculties of man. This was as- sumed to be the explanation of other systems, why not apply it to Christianity.? The questions we have asked are, *Is it the adequate explanation of any system.'" 'Do not all demand another ground than the human one.f*' 'Is not Christianity the consistent asserter of

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that higher ground?' 'Does it not distinctly and con- sistently refer every human feeling and consciousness to that ground?' 'Is it not for this reason able to in- terpret and reconcile the other religions of the earth?' 'Does it not in this way prove itself to be not a human system, but the Revelation, which human beings re-

quire

p> j>

The question, then, is: Can we reasonably proceed on this presupposition which makes need the criterion of objective, normative truth? It is generally admitted that what is true for me, is not therefore true in itself. Or, as we may put it, our subjective apprehension of truth is not the same as the objective truth. Now, philo- sophic inquiries are made in search of principles by which reason may obtain a true knowledge of things. It is therefore essential that we lay special emphasis upon the presuppositions with which we begin any and all disquisitions. We must have some philosophic principles to begin with in order to give an orderly account and ex- planation of the facts as we see them. And both we and our theories must be judged in the light of our philosophy. It is therefore a wise custom, followed in many treatises, to devote first of all some discussion to the presuppositions with which we approach the subject; for as Bettex well said: "Die ganze Theorie von der Vorausset-

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zungslosigkeit der Wissenschaft beruht auf der grossen, falschen Voraussetzung* dass der Mensch voraussetzungslos sein konne."

We hold that philosophy proceeds on the sup- position that there are no phenomena without some reality, which is their ground, and which appears in them. These phenomena, being forms or expressions of this objective reality, are as such of course not that reality itself. Meta- physics inquires into the nature of this objective reality which lies behind phenomena as their ground, and which in them enters into human experience. It thus endeavors to know phe- nomena in their deepest ground, to see their inner being and truth. This view, however, is wholly discarded by many contemporaries. Yet without first settHng these points, discus- sions between representatives of different meta- physical convictions will prove fruitless. We may, however, fruitfully compare and contrast systems. Such reasoning, of course, does not create conviction, but rather corroborates and establishes views already held. As the recogni- tion of authority is an act of faith, we must not therefore consider faith to be the ground of truth, or the source of knowledge of truth, but rather as a faculty of the soul to perceive and recognize objective truth.

CHAPTER XVIII FAITH AND AUTHORITY

Dr. H. Bavinck observes in "De Zekerheid des Geloofs" (p. 21 ff ) :

"Certitude is something different from truth, though closely related to it. Truth is agreement be- tween thought and reality and expresses the relation between the content of our consciousness and the ob- ject of our knowledge (i. e., fidelity to reality). The assurance of faith, however, does not express a rela- tion, but a quality, a characteristic, a condition of a knowing subject. Assurance of faith obtains when the soul reposes perfectly in the object of knowledge. Ttuth carries this certitude, but not every certitude is proof of truth."

Elsewhere — in "Godsdienst en Godgeleerheid" — he remarks in this connection :

"Troelsch recognized rightly that comparative his- toric studies at best can only demonstrate that Chris- tianity is the highest of the present religions relatively, that there is at present no higher religion than Chris- tianity. Yet it is not susceptible of proof that Chris- tianity is the final (endgiiltige) revelation of God, that

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Christ is the Only begotten of the Father, — that is simply a matter of faith. Nature and history as such do not yield an absolute standard. It is the same in the sphere of right, of morals, or aesthetics, and also in the sphere of religion. The absolute standards which sciences use are derived from faith. This is more and more perceived and recognized in theology. Dr. Visscher's recent essay, 'Geen Theodicee,' treats the futility of logical proofs for the existence of God. Just as formerly the value of historic-apologetic argu- ments was over-rated, they are now in danger of being slighted, and the proof from experience is likely to be considered by many the only argument for the truth of Christianity. This is running to another extreme of one-sidedness and exaggeration. Experience is not conviction, and can never be the ground, standard, and vindication of revelation. But it is nevertheless the way in which the Christian religion is known and recog- nized by us in its absolute character. Rather, the Christian religion as the revelation of God in Christ Jesus His Only Son becomes an absolute certainty for us only by the way of saving faith. If the Christian religion be the absolute one, there can be no other way. And on the other hand, if it had to be demonstrated, it would ipso facto cease to be the absolute religion. From this standpoint, it will not appear strange, but rather quite natural, that the Gospel of Christ does not endeavor to justify itself before the human reason. It witnesses, but does not argue. It claims authority, demands recognition, but renounces all attempts to se- cure approval on the strength of scientific arguments.

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Yea, it freely acknowledges that the cross of Christ must seem foolishness to the prudential wisdom of the world."

This, as Bible students will readily admit, is a prominent note in the Scriptures. This sovereignty of faith, of the recognition of au- thority before the claims of reason in its demand for rational explanation, has ever been and still is the great divide in religious controversies. Rationalism violates faith in the interest of reason, whereas the traditional Christian views have always emphasized faith as supreme over reason. M. Scherer says in "Revue de Stras- bourg," p. 66: "I believe in authority whenever I admit a fact simply on my faith in a witness." And yet liberal tendencies of to-day manifest an increasing disposition to oppose authority in moral matters and to discard the miracles in in- tellectual matters. The resort to subjectivism, Ritschlianism and pragmatism have not im- proved matters. Faith and authority are too closely allied. And it is evident that in subjec- tivism real faith and authority are rendered im- possible. Religion is a metaphysico-psycho- logical fact. Its sphere is the human personal- ity, but this is not its ground, and therefore can- not be its sole explanation, as some writers think. Professors Coe, Starbuck, and James have paid

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almost exclusive attention to experience, without letting objective truth come to its right. They have subsumed metaphysics under psychology. Men, little interested in metaphysical study, la- bor in experimental psychology to reduce religion to its lowest terms, to biological ethics explained by physiological functioning of the organism. Dr. Stanley Hall's endeavor in this direction has been without much success.

It must not be forgotten that revelation and religious experience are correlative, each imply- ing the other. When the unseen is measured by the seen, the ideal brought witliin the compass of the actual, and the ought identified with what is, religious, ethical and spiritual interests lose their ultimate ground.

In this materialism of France this method is predominant. Standing firmly on the facts seen, the facts of greater moment are scoffed at as fiction. Professor Gustave Le Bon utters a wail of sensational alarm over this state of af- fairs. Writing under the title, "Will Civiliza- tion Fade and Die Out," in the New York American of February 24, 1907, he says:

"Science has renewed our ideas and deprived our re- ligious and social conceptions of all authority. Visible decadence seriously threatens the vitality of the ma- jority of the great white nations, and especially of

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those known as the Latin nations, — and really Latin nations, if not as regards their blood, at least as re- gards their traditions and education. Every day they are losing their initiative, their energy, their will and their capacity to act. The satisfaction of perpetually growing material wants tends to become their sole ideal. The family is breaking up ; the social springs are strained. Discontent and unrest are spreading in all classes, from the richest to the poorest.

"Like the ship that has lost its compass and strays as chance and winds direct, the modern man wanders haphazard through the spaces formerly peopled by the gods and rendered a desert by science. He has lost his faith, and with it his hopes. The individual is coming to be solely preoccupied with himself. Consciences are capitulating and morality is deteriorating and dying out."

The McAll Mission describes the situation in France as follows:

"Religiously, at the present moment France is in a condition of 'eclipse of faith.' Of her 38,000,000 not over 8,000,000 or 10,000,000 at the outside remain, in any practical way, attached to the Roman Catholic Church. Clericalism, discredited at the polls, and capitalism, trembling for its property rights, in the presence of socialism, seek, in unnatural alliance, to perpetuate exhausted superstitution, while socialism counts its recruits. Among the working classes, licen- tiousness, alcoholism, and home-life devoid of moral

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training, are rapidly disintegrating the family. Ab- sinthe numbers its victims by the hundred thousands, annually."

The French psychologist portrays in dark colors the condition of his people. What we are concerned with here is to call to mind the "esprit gaulois," the peculiar trait of the French nation, its lack of reverence, — that negative, critical at- titude which mocks, jests and makes cynical sneers at spiritual things. It is this "esprit gaulois," opposing submission to all authority, which dominates the national life of France. It will recognize no restraint, and revolts boldly against an authority which makes appeal to God. Well did La Fontaine express a French senti- ment: "Notre ennemi c'est notre maitre, Je vous le dis en bon fran9ais."

Unbelief thus raises the ultimate question of the supernatural. The issues are clear. On neither side is demonstration or proof possible. The eternal cannot be comprehended within time-limits or fully expressed in temporal forms. To speak in evolutionary fashion of an eternal becoming, is to ignore the fruitless attempts of the Greeks and to show little appreciation of the real problem. The kenotic theories of Thoma- sius, Gess, Ebrard and Martensen endeavored to solve this problem by settling it at the outset.

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Cf. an able and scholarly discussion by H. C. Powell: "Principle of the Incarnation with especial Reference to the Relation between our Lord's Divine Omniscience and His Human Consciousness." It contains an interesting dis- cussion of Kant's view of time and space as the postulates of the inner and outer perception.

After all, change is in the hand that knows no change. We may say that this world alone al- lows of the application of the time-conception inasmuch as with the world's existence time be- came in the world's process. Time is unthink- able without the world, and it is contradictory therefore to imagine a time in which God was without the world. But to say that there is no time thinkable in which the world was not is simply to state that the world had been as long as it has been. Without the Eternal Spirit there would not be any time. Time and change issue forth from eternity and return to it for judg- ment. Eternity holds absolute sway over time and change, and "stands at the heart of all time." This eternity is the source of each mys- terious variation, and it is also the unseen provi- dence which controls and directs all the varia- tions to their collective end. When Ritschl says: "What is Eternity but the power of the spirit over time?" he simply gave expression to the idea that change rises from the changeless.

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Reality is timeless. What really is does not ad- mit of a begimiing or an end. It is therefore begging the question to endeavor to explain eternity in terms of time; — it is a contradiction in terms. Equally contradictory is the effort to explain reality by its appearance in time. The "tertium quid," the undefined and undefinable, does not arise from, else it could not give rise to, the temporal world.

"The rose-seed holds the glory of the rose Within its heart sweet summer fragrance bides. And there each petal's tender blush-tint hides Till June bids nature all her charms disclose.

"The sleeping infant's heart and brain may hold The glorious power that in future years Shall move the listening world to smiles and tears. 'Tis life potential that the days unfold.

"One act of Will divine, and lo ! the seed Of growth was sown in young creation's heart, From Life Eternal hath all life its start. And endless change as changeless law we read."

A true explanation of the world and history is therefore in its nature revelation, to be appre- hended only by faith. No painstaking scrutiny of the facts of reality will ever disclose the truth that stands over it, and pervades it. Levy-

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Briihl says well: "Une science ne peut etre nor- mative en tant que theorique (p. 14 La morale et la science des moeurs) . The eye of faith perceives that higher order in which the facts of nature, our knowledge and ethical norms are reconciled. Professor Dewey in the very at- tempt to argue in his celebrated essay the "Logi- cal Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Mo- rality" admits that the factor of "character" which is to be in reciprocal determination with the "situation judged" is not so evident as is the latter. Both factors, however, involve upon closer analysis psychological and sociological studies which in view of the complexity of the subject as well as of the unanalyzable normative element prove the effort to be utterly futile.

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CHAPTER XIX KANT ON AUTHORITY

Because Kant failed to give the categorical imperative specific form, and because the norma- tive principle of his ethics lacks content, the sage of Konigsberg has been severely criticized by HofFding. The Danish scholar uses this point of the Kantian ethics to attack what is strongest and most true in Kant's ethical teaching, namely, its affirmation of an objective, authori- tative nonn, which alone makes possible a cate- gorical imperative. We are not unmindful here of the fact that Kant in proclaiming the cate- gorical imperative of the practical reason as the final authority of duty thereby declares reason to legislate within the soul by its own right, i. e., proclaimed in ethics autonomy. We, however, feel that the moral law emanated from God, hav- ing its ground in His essential Being. Thus only can we account for the unconditional claim on man's obedience. HofFding says in his "Problems of Philosophy":

"In our estimation of worth and our purposes the inner nature of our feeling and will is revealed. As

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the concept of purpose depends on the concept of worth, so also the concept of the norm depends on the con- cept of purpose. The norm is the rule for the ac- tivity which is necessary to attain the purpose. It was a fatal thing for the treatment of the problem of worth when Immanuel Kant reversed the relation and tried to derive the concept of purpose from the concept of the norm (of law). This is a psychological im- possibility."

It is well after all, that Kant's categorical im- perative remains an impersonal dictum without content, for it has ever been the fatal blunder- ing of casuistry to define specific duties and to enjoin them as obligatory. To the individual is left the application of the ethical law, as he feels it, and as it presents itself to him. Hoff ding, however, makes here the fatal blunder of lapsing onto descriptive science by insisting that the con- cept of purpose cannot be derived from the con- cept of norm (of law). This is to ignore the fact that ethics is a normative, not a descriptive, science. By defining norm "as the rule for the activity necessary to attain the purpose," the normative element becomes a fiction, inasmuch as the norms are severally made dependent on the agents who adopt them merely to reach cer- tain ends which they do pursue. Indeed! not always those which they ought to pursue. This procedure gives a method rather than a normative

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standard. It is psychologically impossible to explain the sentiment of ought from what is. The feeling of ought is an original, unanalyzable fact. The revelation of God at the heart of man is the original source of all religion, and also of the original source of all obligations and duties, of whatever specific content they may be. No strictly rational ethics, therefore, is possible. We cannot, even in theory, be good without God. This, however, is the endeavor of "Ethical Cul- ture." Martensen well observes in this regard: "While religion without morality cannot count upon many advocates, morality without religion finds no lack of such." He remarks that "this abstract autonomic morality only appears at those seasons when there is also religious decay." ("Christian Ethics," p. 15, 17.) The postulate, involved in every ethics, that the individual des- tiny at best coincides with the larger good, and conversely, assumes a theistic basis. And so does the originality of the moral sentiment in its commanding authority. Ethics discloses what is before us and behind us, the moral nature of what bears us and what leads us. What ought to be is felt to be the basis and ground as well as the goal of all that is. In the science of ethics, first and final causes are seen to be one; and thus in the ethical nature the heart of reality is laid bare. It is safe to predict that, in our age

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of indifference towards philosophical discipline, we may expect a re-awakening of metaphysical studies through interest in ethical questions. Only when ethics rests on the religious basis of theistic belief have the English words "duty" and "ought" meaning, in that they bring in the One who is Creator and Judge, to whom is due, to whom is owed, to whom we pray that He "for- give us our debts as we forgive our debtors." Eduard von Hartmann says in "Das Religiose Bewusstsein der Menschheit," "All facts point to the circumstance that the ethical consciousness of man has developed exclusively on the basis of religious conviction, that ethics nowhere has arisen without this, and that in its specific color- ing it has everywhere been conditioned and de- termined by religion." To conceive of the pur- pose for which we are created, "the cliief end of man to glorify God and enjoy Him forever," affords an objective authoritative norm. The impossibility of its psychological explanation only corroborates the fact of its being a pri- mordial rule inherent in the nature of God. But a rule which we form as a consequence of our own desires can never figure as such a norm for such a rule would be merely describing the func- tioning of our desires in our purposes, the record of a subjective, unethical condition of fact. Hoff ding, in common with the general tendency

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of our day to give wide scope to theories of values, inclines to subjective and individualistic views, which logically result in individualistic pleasure-pursuits. Against this tendency, the rigorism of Kant's ethical law stands as a whole- some truth. The ethical life, far from being a primrose way determined by transient pleas- ures, should be accepted as an exacting task under the demands of the Infinite! We are to learn to will our duty, not to shape our duties to our wills, for then what we call duties become simply our desires. Not whatever satisfies de- sire is good. Desire itself is to be brought to a test. As Professor Palmer tentatively puts it: "Pleasure probably is nothing else but the sense that some one of our functions has been appro- priately exercised. Every time, then, that a vohtion has been carried forth in the complex world and there conducted to its mark (and taken its inward effect) a gratified feeling arises." Pleasure, then, should rather be treated as an incident expression of the proper discharge of our function, our duty, "given us by some- thing which we cannot alter, fully estimate, or with damage evade."

Hoffding well declares it a psychological im- possibility to derive the concept of purpose from the concept of law. Instead, however, of at- tempting to subsume the law under its contents.

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which are but its specific expressions, showing the way in which we get this experiential evaluation of the law, he might rather have paused to reflect whether or not the ethical law of right or wrong is unanalyzable because origi- nal, and have recognized that God is the ultimate lawgiver and authority, as of old !

CHAPTER XX

MATERIALISTIC TENDENCIES AND RITSCHLIANISM

Although of late "Christian Science" has had a large following, and although idealistic phi- losophy has found favor with many, yet it is but natural that in an age of material achievements the slighted factor should be the spiritual world. Characteristic in this regard are the titles of the writings of Romanes. "A Candid Examina- tion of Theism," by Physicus, in which descrip- tive science holds him in a hard, grinding, causal mechanism without outlook upon a spiritual power behind, in, and beyond it. "A Candid Examination of Rehgion," by Metaphysicus, in which the facts of the inner Hfe are given full recognition, and in which he feels himself again in possession of a Christian Weltanschauung. These books and the history of Romanes are well known and need no comment. It is also a mat- ter of general knowledge that the consistent atheist Nietzsche did away with "das Seelend- ing" and reduced the inner life to a "Begleiter- scheinung." Yet the most prevalent mode of thought reserves for the spiritual a place only in

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subjectivism. It is indeed a saddening result when modern scholarship is compelled to repeat as Christian what Goethe made Faust exclaim with unspeakable heartache: "The message indeed I hear, but I lack the faith. The miracle is the fa- vorite child of faith." "Die Botschaft hor' ich wohl, allein mir felht der Glaube: Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind."

Loisy, as well as Harnack, distinguishes be- tween the Easter-message and the Easter-faith. The message is the objective, historic fact, an empty tomb : "He is not here," and faith merely concludes, or creates the conviction "He is risen." The risen Christ is an object of faith (objet de foi, in the sense of faith-product, not as lying at the basis of it, and perceived by faith), not a factual reality (realite de fait). The whole believing atmosphere of the early Church, this faith-state as fact appeals again to the faith of others. It is from faith to faith, but without objective ground in historic fact. Loisy's polemic books, "Autour d'un petit Livre," and "L'Evangile et I'Eglise," are able presenta- tions of the current subjective views which at- tempt to explain away the supernatural basis of Christianity. Neither Loisy nor Harnack is an approved representative of Catholic or Protes- tant Christianity. Yet, the excommunicated Abbot retains more ground for authority than

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the able church-historian, whose views lead to individualism.

Exact science will not allow an objective fact which it cannot explain, and the method of ex- act science has been carried over into historical study. If, after all, sidelights have been util- ized and all circumstances bared, history does not explain the Christ as portrayed by the records and by the effects which He produced, then, in- stead of concluding that mere historic facts can- not explain Him, the explanation of the cause of the world's greatest event is sought in a pious fiction. Christ is the explanation of Christianity, and admittedly cannot be explained by circum- stance and earthly surroundings. The very at- tempt to explain His world-transforming power from faith-elements witnesses to the inadequacy of the historic method to explain Him. He is all-encompassing and future-regarding. No record of the past, therefore, will contain any- thing else than an earthly Christ. What a tre- mendous exercise of faith in the mystery of per- sonality is it for Harnack, on the strength of that mystery, to ascribe to Christ the miracle of sinlessness. This is the pious fiction of the "Zeitgeschichtliche Methode." Calvin's word deserves repeating here: "Totus Christus sed non totum quod in eo est." The earthly Christ was not the all of Christ. And even the earthly

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Christ in sinlessness defies classification or ex- planation according to these faithless methods. A record of beginnings does not change the nature of the product, the successive phases of which are described in history, any more than life is explained by the development and func- tioning of a living organism. In biological science, life itself is not subsumed under the ru- bric of development, circumstance or functioning. The elementary cell has its "Eigengestaltsam- keit" which descriptive science simply takes as a fact. No more should Christianity with Christ as its center be identified with its development, the circumstances under which it took rise or its subsequent history. If it is out of time, it will go in time, and will deserve the mephistophelian sneer at earthly things:

"Alles was entsteht 1st werth dass es zu Grunde geht."

It could not inspire faith, it would lack its com- manding authority, it would require verification from the things of this world, instead of ruling at their hearts and center. Christ is in history what a priori elements are in individual experi- ence. When an un- Christian temper through lack of faith in this spiritual principle imperi- ously demands demonstration of the world's spir-

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itual events in terms of the seen, we reply effec- tively, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. xi, 1). This fact has made some historians re- tire into subjectivism; which leads to an individ- ualistic interpretation of Christianity and threat- ens to destroy both tradition and authority.

The Ritschlian school has not been able to stem the tide of subjectivism, but has rather furthered it. In spite of Harnack's tribute to Ritschl as the one who saved Protestantism from this dis- integrating tendency, the process is still going on alarmingly. The popular mind comes to think of the Christian religion as a pious senti- ment, and experience of ethical enthusiasm and moral endeavor, as consecrated good-will in the service of mankind, as faith in the eternal right as the condition for self-realization in disciple- ship of the Christ, in the following of our innate religious instincts. The application of a nor- mative standard to a matter so purely private and individualistic is considered difficult and needless. Should no objective reality corre- spond to our deep-rooted religious experiences, we are nevertheless none the worse for indulging in these pious sentiments. They relax the ten- sion of life's struggle and relieve its grim real- ity. Metaphysics having been denied its place in religion, psychology tries to comfort us with

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a last apologetic word in behalf of the retaining of Christianity.

These ideas easily gain access to the minds of modern preachers. In a recent book, "The Dy- namic of Christianity," by E. M. Chapman, the following remark is made: "The ultimate source of authority is not an objective thing. It has never been fixed, codified, or finished!" Strange confusion of ideas in popular theology! A thing is not objective because it is not fixed, codified, or finished! From the nature of the case it cannot be finished in time, although it re- quires at least some form in which to express it- self in time. The New England pastor, how- ever, fortunately holds to what he calls "that chief practical charisma of the Spirit known as common sense," and believes "the conscience of Chi'istendom, educated by the Bible, by the ex- perience of the Chm-ch, by the partial light issu- ing from the ethnic faiths and applied to specific cases of conduct by human reason acting with a full consciousness of its limitations, cannot go far wrong."

More harmful are the reasonings which would have us discount and repudiate the agencies and manifestations of Christ, i. e., historic Chris- tianity, on the ground that they are not Christ Himself. This is very much like saying that the study of language, in any or all its forms, may

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be discarded because language is only the expres- sion of thought, not thought itself. And yet, without language thought would not be possible. Such a confusing opposition of Christ to Chris- tianity and Bible may be seen in the following passage of Dr. Jacobus, Dean of Hartford Semi- nary for religious workers:

"It is upon Jesus Himself that the authority of life and all its religion rests to-day. There are those who say the authority of religion rests with the church, and that all we can hope to do as workers and teachers in religious things is to represent the church. But there are those who push this matter further back and say the authority of the church rests in the creeds, and that all we need to do is to keep the creeds intelligible to men. But there are still others who go further back and say the authority of the creeds rests with the Bible, and all that we have to do is to keep the Bible taught and preached to men. But you see this simply presses the question back one further step for its final answers, because, when we ask where rests the authority of the Bible, the only answer to this question is, it rests with Jesus Christ whom it contains."

In this typical instance of popular fallacy the church, the creeds, and the Bible are the articu- late members of Christianity which the lecturer desires to push back and out of sight, to get to Christ as the final authority. As if Christ did not buttress Christianity! Why labor to find

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Him different from, and elsewhere than where He admittedly and professedly is to be found? The Christian Church is Christ operating in his- tory, as reflected in the mind of men, "the collec- tive Christ." Christian experience as a witness is formulated in the creeds. Both may be tested by the perfect rule of faith and practice, the Bible, professedly God's book, the only perfect book as Christ is professedly the God-man, the only perfect man. The abuse of that judicial authority, of which every individual is a reposi- tory, in refusing to exercise it in agreement with the Church to which one owes allegiance, on the paltry plea that the experience of Christ is first, only serves to call in question the reality of one's share in such an experience. The vagueness of this position certainly makes Christian experi- ence itself an undefined and meaningless term.

As if for the benefit of this religious dean, the eminent Congregational scholar. Dr. Forsyth, writes in the Contemporary Review :

"It is meaningless to say that Christianity is a life and therefore independent of dogma. The pearl of Christianity is a life hved with Christ in God. But that phrase teems with dogma. Christianity, moreover, was a life introduced under definite conditions of history and thought, and therefore it must have a dogma. It has always existed in such conditions. It is not a life in vacuo. Dogmatic nescience or hostility leaves us with

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little beyond reverie lost in the vague, or skepticism solvent and fatal." (Church, State, Dogma and Edu- cation.)

Indeed, were Dr. Jacobus to formulate his position, though we do not look for theological inclinations in a school for religious workers, he would land in a species of theology, which the dean of Montauban, Emile Doumergue calls "Fideisme." In the essays "Les etapes du fideisme" and "Le dernier mot du fideisme" by Emile Doumergue we are told that INIenegoz as- serts the existence of true faith, saving faith, without any knowledge of Christ, nay! that this true faith involves the decisive rejection of Christ. This religious agnosticism advances also to the position of a denial of the existence of God. It thereby approaches Poulin's proclama- tion: "True religion is to have none. The propagation of the religious idea is at the cost of the acceptance of the idea of the non-existence of God." (Poulin; "Religion and Socialism.") Against this sentimental liberalism we affirm with Liddon :

"Religion to support itself, must rest consciously on its object: the intellectual apprehension of that object as true is an integral element of religion, in other words, religion is practically inseparable from theology." (Divinity of our Lord.)

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It is the object of faith that deserves attention rather than the subject of experience, for the object is basal to the experience which it calls forth. The message of the Church should con- sist in proclaiming its belief rather than in tell- ing of its experience. The Church has in trust the preaching of the Gospel as the objective truth. Indeed, guardian of the truth as once de- livered unto the saints, its message, the truth, is the matter of most importance. And this is guaranteed neither by subjective experience nor by cui bono considerations.

Dr. Francis Hall gives the following texts, bearing either directly or indirectly upon the grounds, nature and limits of the teaching au- thority of the church and her ministers : Matthew 16:16-18; 18:17. Mark 16:15. Luke 10:16. John 14:16; 17:26; 16:13-1,5; 20:21. Acts 1:2, 3; 2:1-4, 14-36; 6:2; 15:28; 16:4; 20:28. Ro- man 12:4-8. I Cor. 4:1-2; 11:23; 12:28, 29; 15:1-3; 16:16. II Cor. 2:9-10; 4:1-3; 10:8. Gal. 1:1, 8-12; 2:6-11. Eph. 1:22-23; 3:2- 11; 4:11-16. Col. 3-16. I Thess. V: 11, 12, 20, 21. I Tim. 1:1, 3, 4; 3:15; 6:3-5, 20. II Tim. 1 :13, 14 ; 2 :2 ; 4 :2. Titus 1 :l-3, 5, 7, 9, 13 ; 2 :15 ; 3 :10, 11. Hebrews 13 :7, 17. I Pet. 5 :l-3. II Pet. 3:2. II John: 10 and Jude 3. The reading of these commissions to the Christian ministry is especially to be commended to our new brand of

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pastors, who devote themselves at the expense of their patent duties to philanthropic, sociological, and political activities. In thus deviating from their ministerial calling by the assumption of the work of social workers their inefficiency in the secular fold becomes manifest by the side of those trained along these lines. By putting a secular demand upon the clergy the preparatory train- ing for the ministry has actually undergone in most secularized institutions an important change. When in Princeton Theological Semi- nary similar demands were urged, the great Princeton Divine, Dr. Francis Landay Patton, fortunately vindicated the Seminary's curricu- lum as designed to prepare ministers "to rightly divide the Word." Indeed, it is a sad outlook for the ministerial profession if, under the influ- ence of hberal teachings, it is allowed to become a dabbling in the range of social activities, ethi- cized by such scant Christian teaching as still sur- vives in these circles.

CHAPTER XXI SCIENCE AND FAITH

No Weltanschauung is complete, no philosophy entirely satisfactory in every detail. The plumb-line of the finite intellect cannot measure the Infinitude in which it finds itself. In the end, therefore, we shall be brought before alter- natives, and we may well face them at the start. Ballard makes prominent the alternatives in- volved in Christian or non- Christian systems, and urges a choice of them in his able apologetic work, "The Miracles of Unbelief."

There is, in fact, no more lamentable disposi- tion than the one which is content to hold by im- plication at least that there may be any number of truths; which is not merely content to hold that there are different aspects of truth, truth differently apprehended; but which holds op- posing views true under the claim that everybody is entitled to his own opinion. Though this be conceded in the abstract, to act upon it betrays an indifference to truth as such that kills all search for it and shows lack of confidence in it. The liberalism which proclaims "laisser aller," "laisser faire," as profound wisdom, reveals not

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only an intellectual but a moral indifference to opinion.

This temper, of course, does not obtain among trained, academic minds. Among these the pre- vailing lines of thought are different. Truth is held to be beyond our reach (in negative theolo- gies) ; or incomplete and inadequate (evolution- ary views) ; or again the limitations (not impos- sibility) of our knowledge is emphasized. Some dwell upon our inabihty to obtain objective certi- tude (subjectivism), and others hold that there are different kinds of truth (plurahsm). The most insiduous and subtle mode of thought, how- ever, is that which enthrones need as the ultimate criterion of truth before which inquiry should be silent. We shall, therefore, treat of this at some length, since it involves the subjective stand- point of the other views, although the values de- termined by the satisfaction of need are held to correspond to objective reality.

The very nomenclature of this mode of thought is suggestive in that it speaks of truth as "cor- responding to objective reality," instead of "re- sulting from objective, disclosed reahty." Pro- fessor James tries with great ingenuity to argue the former, in which circumstance only the dis- pensing of its correspondence is needed in order to leave the freest scope to Pragmatism. He is not quite assured of his point, however. In a

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foot-note on p. 17 in "The Meaning of Truth" he says : "One may easily get lost in verbal mys- teries about the difference between quality of feeling and feeling of quality, between receiving and reconstructing the knowledge of reality." It is evident that a disclosure of reality is always an affair of individual apprehension.

If faith is the recognition of authority, exer- cised reasonably, not instinctively as led by feel- ing, then the question concerning the forms of authority to which we shall give assent must be settled by reason. Much more intricate, how- ever, does the question become, when we put the analogous inquiry concerning the relation of the sense of need to the true, real need of man as man. Orthodox Christianity has always dwelt upon the fact that religion, as a result of the soul's relation to God, is an individual affair, and therefore it has laid stress upon inner experi- ences and has exalted conscience and reason. But it has never gone so far as to make these hu- man experiences the final authority, because if re- ligious knowledge requires content occasioned by some object, much more does the religious senti- ment. Feeling is not creative; it is merely the capacity to receive impressions. There is, there- fore, no guarantee for the religious life, except on the basis of an acknowledged objective norm, in the recognition of God's truth. Apart from

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the impossibility of demonstrating the existence of things without, at least as perfectly as the reality of the psychical representations, an objec- tive norm is required to set in order our experi- ence as rational beings. History has shown hu- man judgment to be, as it is individually felt to be, inadequate, faulty and unreliable. Profes- sor James acknowledges this in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," but only to invite re- turn to it, as residing in, or guided by utility, as this is apprehended by men. He says:

"Origin in immediate intuition, origin in pontifical authority, origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing or unaccountable impression ; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterances generally, — these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The medical mate- rialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way."

And again:

"Not its origin, but the way in which it works on the whole, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of belief. This is our own empiricist criterion, and this criterion the stout- est insisters on supernatural origin have also been

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forced to use in the end." (H. Maudsley, "Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings.")

This is exactly what we do not understand by the final authority, an assent to which is faith. Faith is not born of things seen, authority not recognized after we have seen how expedient its commands are. Those who insist on super- natural origin, are forced to use for verification in apologetic argument the same world-field in time and to abide by the criterion "the way in which it works on the whole." But the convictions were not derived from the survey, not brought about by argument. It is a contradiction in terms to establish one's own authority. After assent has been given, we cannot further accredit the au- thority upon which it rests. All we can do is to find corroboration for the reasonableness of our act of faith. (Cf. "Is Proverbs Utilitarian?" In the January Number of the Bibliotheca Sacra, 1907.)

The suggestive, plain title of Dr. Maudsley's essay reduces the supernatural to seemings, and proclaims the natural only as cause. It goes without saying that on this presupposition no other guarantee is left. But — as we have ob- served— the existence of the natural world is no more proved than is the reality of the represen- tations of our psychic life. As Professor Ru-

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dolph Eucken observes in "Das Wesen der Re- ligion" (p. 5) : "To religion surely belongs the reality of another world, above the one we know through sensuous experience. For an imma- nent religion, that vague and inadequate notion which defies this world, is a pitiful contradic- tion." The logical application of this, both to the sphere of inner experiences and the world of outer experiences, is not only analogical, but true to the experiences themselves. Dr. H. Visscher, in urging this in an inaugural address, "De oorspong der Religie," before the University of Utrecht, 1904, quotes his colleague Ziehen as fol- lows: "Shall we indeed speak soon, not of a tree, but of a tree-sensation, or even some specific part of the tree-sensation? Not at all. Our words denote not things, but sensations and ideas and these complexes of experiences are to be taken as real."

But we wish further to call attention in Pro- fessor James' statement to the view concerning the relation of origin to authority. Professor James takes Httle account of the origin of that which claims authority. Simply because he does not recognize its truly a priori dictum, he in- clines toward the seeming causes which discount supernatural causes, and discards, in much the same way as medical materialists, the question of origin. (Origin employed here in the sense of

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source, not as meaning the procedure of genetic appearance.) But on such presuppositions, it is difficult to come to any true appreciation of faith, which requires independent or final au- thority to be acknowledged, not proved. After all the facts are in, from a posteriori reflection upon the thought, act, or experience, we cannot determine the faith required before the issues. Authority always requires as a priori, what James will recognize only as a posteriori and es- timates with a bias on the basis of its results upon things without us. In his "Will to Be- lieve" Professor James remarks:

"No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, of the systematized experience of the race. Others make the perceptive moment its own test, — Descartes, for in- stance, with his clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God ; Reid with his 'common-sense' ; and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment, a priori. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other, — our standards which, in turn, have been used."

Instead of interpreting these facts as accredi- ted to the circumstance that these are attempts to explain and justify the striking creditude

1

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wherewith first truth was apprehended and au- thority recognized, James insists that "the intel- lect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infalhble signal for knowing whether it be true or no. Here is the point at wliich the dis- cussion has always halted, or — shall we say — really begun. Those whose faith leans upon the verdicts of reason and conscience, treating them as essentially veracious, demand the infallibihty of Absolute truth to back them.

We believe that truth announces itself as much in the forms of life we find, or rather as it finds us in the forms of Ufe. Truth is dogmatic; it has authority and inspires faith. This is truth as we see it, of course. Specific forms which represent truth to us may not do so from another angle, and certainly not to another individual. Yet truth recognized as such carries its own verifica- tion. We have already anticipated the objec- tion that our metaphysical bias runs into theoretic abstraction. But we believe that we are free from the charge, inasmuch as we do not identify truth with the specific forms in which it manifests itself to different individuals at different times, i. e., with reality, knowing that it is larger than any temporal form. Yet, in these forms we must find the truth as we can experience it. On strictly psychological grounds, we know that un- mediated faith is a chimera.

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As Professor Bavinck well says in his Stone Lectures on "Philosophy of Revelation" (p. 82):

"In the knowledge of the truth lies the end of its rev- elation ; reality is an instrument to enable us to find the truth; reality is intended to become truth in our con- sciousness and in our experience. Reality, therefore, does not offer us in the truth a mere copy of itself, so that the world, as pragmatism objects, would be du- plicated. In the truth, reality arises to a higher mode of existence ; having first lain in darkness, it now walks in the light; having once been a riddle, it now finds its solution ; not understood at the beginning, it is now 'declared.' So the truth obtains an independent value of its own. Its standard does not lie in its usefulness for life, for, if usefulness were the criterion of truth, then perfect unanimity ought to prevail in regard to usefulness, and life itself ought to be a value not sub- ject to fluctuation. But in regard to life, what counts is not merely existence, or pleasure, or intensity, but first of all content and quality. And it is precisely by truth that this content and quality are determined. The truth is of more value than empirical life. Christ sacrificed his life for it. None the less, by doing so he regained his life. Truth is worth more than reality ; it belongs to that higher order of things in which physis, and gnosis, and ethos are reconciled, and in which a true philosophy gives full satisfaction both to the demands of the intellect and to the needs of the heart."

CHAPTER XXII

PRAGMATISM SUBVERSIVE OF AUTHORITY

Professor James makes in the dialogue, with which "The Meaning of Truth" closes, the Prag- matist dispense with this hybrid term truth.

"It seems to me that what knowledge knows is the fact itself, the event or whatever the reality may be. Where you see three distinct entities in the field, the reality, the knowing, and the truth, I see only two. Moreover, I can see what each of my two entities is knowiir-as, but when I ask myself what your third entity, the truth, is known-as, I can find nothing distinct from the reality on the one hand, and the ways in which it may be known on the other. Are you not probably mis- led by common language, which has found it conven- ient to introduce a hybrid name, meaning sometimes a kind of knowing and sometimes a reality known, to apply to either of these things interchangeably? And has philosophy anything to gain by perpetuating and consecrating the ambiguity? If you call the object of knowledge 'reality,' and call the manner of its being cognized 'truth,' cognized moreover on particular occa- sions, and variously, by particular human beings who have their various businesses with it, and if you hold

331

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consistently to the nomenclature, it seems to me that you escape all sorts of trouble."

Indeed! Professor James does well to dis- pense with that "hybrid name" truth, if, as on pragmatic basis, there is no normative standard left. H. Heath Bawden hails this new philoso- phy with great acclaim. He declares in "The Principles of Pragmatism": "The new philoso- phy is a pragmatic idealism. Its method is at once intrinsic or immanent, and organic or func- tional" (p. 44). He goes on to say that he means "by saying that its method is immanent that it must be interpreted from within. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience and may define what it is only by working back and forth within the current. We don't know where we're going, but we're on the way." Yesl on the way, admittedly glorying in the ignorance of the course which uncontrolled sovereign experience takes. "Everything that we experience is equally real" (p. 55). The compass is thrown overboard, truth is functional, to be used, nay to be made and subsequently dis- carded. "Truth is a form of value: its value lies in its abihty to mediate other values" (p. 216) floating in a Niagara of experience. "Truth in- volves interaction of means and ends, and since experience is an ever expanding, the standard of

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what is true or adequate grows with this expand- ing life. It is not a question of truth, but of truths, not of validity but of specific validities. There is no single criterion of truth, because there is no single truth" (p. 204). The formal logi- cians have maintained that the validity of thought lies in its reference. Heath Bawden in- forms us that "Truth or falsity involves compari- son of two or more judgments. A judgment becomes true or false only when reflectively scru- tinized and evaluated from the standpoint of a new judgment." In this pragmatic movement as taken up by its average advocates, one cannot help being impressed by the boastful attitude with which they present truisms as important new discoveries to do away with the traditional views, the meaning of which they fail to understand by lack of philosophic insight. In these formulae, convictions and judgments which have controlled the thought of the ages and are still the mainstay of the best minds and judgments, is compressed more valuable experience than the noisy superfi- cial clamorings of the new-fangled truths an- nounce. New thought emphasizes discrepancies in life's situations, toys with the unseen, con- trasts logic and life, ridicules the static, the law, the authority which demands submission. It in- sists: "tant de tetes, tant d'avis," and one is as good as another. Its democracy appeals to the

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crowd by bringing everything exalted within reach of the impious hand. There is no high or low, all is a matter of experience, no standard obtains. The soldier's wish has come true; in philosophy as in morals. Pragmatism is

"Somewheres east of Suez

Where the best Is like the worst, Where there aren't no Ten Commandments, An' a man can raise a thirst."

Of course, with Professor James there are "leadings," and Professor Dewey's "Immediate Empirisism" would caution in the use to be made of his statement that the failure with most men is to set up a standard "authoritatively instead of experimentally." For this eminent scholar, to whom the pragmatists will now look as their leader, is a greater philosopher than the illustri- ous Harvard psychologist, and realizes also the import of Kant's words, that in itself doubt and criticism is not a permanent! resting place for hu- man reason. Its justification is relative, and its function transitional. Still, in this movement "Human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic, as James well declares in "Pragmatism" (p. 57). Though James is per- haps right in maintaining that he means to ac- knowledge in his system an objective correspond-

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ence, by refusing this corresponding reality ac- knowledgment as causal ground which involves a normative, regulative character for experience, he can hardly defend this claim on metaphysical grounds. However, James confessedly always disliked the speculative cobwebs of metaphysics. They restrict life's free flow upon which prag- matism insists. Kant slighted the objective, normative element of the supernatural similarly, when he declared in "Kritik der Urteilskraf t" :

"From nature as object of our senses we have no ground for the belief that things serve one another as means to ends, and nature only by this causality becomes sufficiently intelligible." And "Thus the idea of teleol- ogy in nature must be a necessary postulate for human judgment, a subjective principle of judgment in our reason therefore, which as regulative (not constitutive) is valid as absolutely for human judgment, as if it were an objective principle."

("Dass aber Dinge der Natur einander als Mittel zu Zwecken dienen und ihre Moglichkeit selbt nur durch diese Art von Causalitat hinreichend verstandlich sei, dazu haben wir gar keinen Grund in der allgemeinen Idee der Natur als Inbegriffs der Gegenstande der Sinne." (V § 61.) " So wird der Begriff der Zweck- massigkeit der Natur in ihren produkten ein fiir die menschliche Urteilskraft in Ansehung der Natur not- wendiger BegrifF sein, also ein subjectives Princip der Vernunft fiir die Urteilskraft, welches als regulativ

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[nicht constitutiv] gilt, alsob es sein objectives Princip ware.")

The view that the end in nature may be regulative, but not constitutive, is contradictory, for only then is there a rule when it is truly the expression of nature. It deserves notice that Kant recognizes the force of the regulative ele- ment, but slights this by declaring it subjective in the interest of his mechanical explanation of nature. His aim is "to explain all products and events of nature, even those most fraught with design, as far as possible in a mechanical way." ("alle Produkte and Ereignisse der Natur, selbst die Zweckmassigsten so weit mechanisch zu erklaren, als es nur immer in unserm Vermo- gensteht.") (378.) Pragmatism argues a "cor- respondence," so as not to lack objectivity, but refuses to acknowledge this reality as causal or constitutive, for this would involve regulative norm. Thus, however, cannot be maintained real objectivity. The query rises: Why should there be any correspondence? This is the most pertinent question against James's defense of pragmatism, especially since the most he will al- low is that "We believe our precepts are pos- sessed in common." Subtle psychological so- phistry about the "quality of feeling" and "feel- ing of quality" cannot delude our inner deliver-

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ance, even by the scholar whose ingenious stream- theory tried to dispense with the soul, and whose questioning, "Does consciousness exist?" con- cludes with the declaration of his belief that con- sciousness is but "the faint rumor left behind the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy." Yet, the very same scholar accredited data of spiritualistic seances with the warmth of convic- tion.

In the "Essays philosophical and psychologi- cal in honor of William James by his colleagues at Columbia" is a helpful suggestion in regard to objectivity in the essay "The New Realism" by George Fullerton. Professor Fullerton re- marks (p. 49) :

"They have only to distinguish clearly between the objective order itself and their assumed non-phenome- nal entity, and to use that order as a framework for the ordering of experience as a whole. If they do this they are doing what is done in common life and in sci- ence— they are distinguishing between the existence of things and our perception of them. Without this dis- tinction, we should, indeed, find it hard to get on."

On pp. 33 and 35 he says :

"In answer to the idealistic contention, that there is no experience in the world where there is no sensation, I advance, not a denial, but a complementary statement.

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It is this : There is no sensation, that can be recog- nized as such, where there is no experience of the world. What is a sensation? The word is surely not one to be used at random. No one thinks of employing it as a mere name for anything and everything. When we imagine a tree or a house, we do not admit that we are concerned with sensations. How can we distinguish be- tween sensations and such experiences as these? But one answer to this question can be given. We find in experience an objective order of phenomena. No one who has not senses finds it of course. The phenomena that stand in the objective order are revealed, i.e., that they may be referred to the sense of someone, and in, so far, they are his perception of the objective order, the man is recognized as experiencing sensations. But, al- though we constantly refer phenomena to our senses, this is not our only way of treating them. We relate them to each other directly, abstracting from the rela- tion to sense, and in so far we recognize them as having their place in an objective order. As so considered the phenomena in question are not sensations ; they are qualities of things. That phenomena may have this double relation is evident from the fact one set of sci- ences occupies itself with them in one relation, and an- other busies itself with them as standing in the other. We cannot repudiate all these sciences. A color merely imagined or seen in a dream cannot be treated by phys- ical science as in any sense the property of a thing; it cannot be regarded by psychology as a sensation. He who dwells upon sense-organs, nerves, and messages, gives a meaning to the word sensation; if he subse-

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quently discards this physiological apparatus or subli- mates it into a mere 'projection,' he ought to discard with it all the meaning he has gained, and ought, in jus- tice, to abandon the word. If, by bad luck, he incon- sistently holds on to it he becomes an idealist, a sub- jectivist."

This is to corroborate what Jevons states in "Lessons in Logic" (p. 11): "We cannot sup- pose, and there is no reason to suppose, that by the constitution of the mind we are obliged to think of things differently from the manner in which they are." Logic then, holds still good in spite of the vehement denunciations of the mod- ern mind. Perhaps sometimes speculative flights have been attempted without a strict ob- servation of the facts of life. Practical claims might have been occasionally discarded for theo- retic rules, dogma too exclusively conceived as logical formulation or theory, but it all grew out of life, and regarding life, it was in touch with it, not to stifle it, but to enrich it in leading it out constitutively in its regulations. How pal- try many of these truisms of vital life-interpre- tations sound as set over against imaginary tra- ditional formalism may appear from quoting f. i. the felicitous remarks of Scott Holland in "Logic and Life":

"Faith is not made by argument. It seeks, indeed,

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for a rational solution of life's mysteries ; it grows through gaining hold of them ; 'The depth said, it is not in me.' Not from things without, but from the heart within, Cometh wisdom ; there, in the inner places of the soul, in the secret will with which a man fears the Lord, and departs from evil, is the true place of spiritual un- derstanding. (Preface.)

"Reason is regarded, not in its isolated character, as an engine with which every man starts equipped, ca- pable of doing a certain job whenever required, with a definite and certain mode of action ; but it is taken as a living and pliable process by and in which man brings himself into rational and intelligent relations with his surroundings, with his experience. Reason is the slowly formed power of harmonizing the world of facts ; and its justification lies, not in its deductive certainty as in its capacity to advance. It proves its trustwor- thiness by its power to grow. Reason moves towards its place, its fulfillment, so far as it settles itself into responsive agreement with the facts covered by its ac- tivity. We have to do, more or less, with the actual construction and nature of the reasoning organ itself. This construction is alive, and every instant sees it change: it is no isolated faculty where working can con- tinue, or be watched 'm vacuo,^ as we can watch the movement of a machine even when it has no material to work upon. Rather is it to be held in unbroken con- nection with the facts on which it works, for only in re- lation to them is its success, its truths, obvious, or veri- fiable or intelligible. Everything depends on the char- acter of the facts before him, and on the nature of his

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main experiences. The excellence of a piece of reason- ing lies simply in its adaptive facility, in the response it evokes between those particular new impressions and the mass of older and habitual experiments. Change the facts, or the experience, and its excellence disap- pears,— it becomes unintelligible. Only in intimate and undivided communion with the facts which they express, have the announcements of the reason, on any field of knowledge, any intelligible value; and no one therefore, who does not live, and move, and have his being, in con- stant intercourse with the spirit life can enter into the deep necessities of its laws. I am, of necessity, blind to the force of argument and judgment, as long as I have no corresponding experience, — as long as that body of fact which they make explicable remains to me unverified and unexplored. The reason in man is hu- man ; that is all we mean. It is under a man's impulse that it argues and discusses ; it is part and parcel of his corporate and complex existence. The whole long chain of its syllogisms is never mechanical; it is alive along all its length; mid feels at every joining the throbbing currents of his moving life.'"

It may seem strange that — with the exception of Professor James — by the pragmatists so little attention has been given to the psychology of faith, though they are intent on undermining faith in all its forms. And Professor James, who brings abundant psychological insight to the statement of the pragmatic philosophy, unfor- tunately reaches forth most aggressively in its

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metaphysical formulations, a discipline which he confessedly dislikes. This circumstance brings the psychologist under the criticism of his col- league Royce, who urges rightly that in pragma- tism the importance of the syllogism is over- looked and its nature and the nature of deduc- tive reason not psychologically understood. (Compare the author's "The American philoso- phy Pragmatism.") It is admitted that accord- ing as objective recognition is more clear and un- questioned, the stronger our will-power is as- serted, our determination surer. Faith therefore is also an economic help in life, a veritable assur- ance. Forsooth, no balancing mind, no reflective dreamer like Hamlet does the deed. In this psychological oversight, by refusing objective recognition as guarantee for its action. Pragma- tism defeats its own end of action. Faith and Authority are also supreme in this.

CHAPTER XXIII SUBJECTIVISM AND TRUTH

Professor Rudolf Eucken, in his "Hauptpro- bleme der Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart," remarks :

"The mental life is simply incomprehensible and could never exercise power with us, if it had not inde- pendent reality apart from man, if the life which ap- pears in it did not have reality and were not truly re- lated. Only a real life-whole is capable of evoking the activities of our inner life (p. 16). . . . We may understand quite different things by the true and the good, but none of us would ever strive for them, did we not think of them as superior to human conditions and opinions, as representative of another timeless order of things. The more we comprehend the mental life as a whole and understand it as another phase of reality, the clearer it becomes that in it we see an independent world of eternal truth appear which gives foundation to the change of temporal happenings and human life (p. 54*). . . . That its metaphysical elements prove to be ethical and the ethical metaphysical, is the char- acteristic greatness and lasting dynamic of Christian- ity; former times often make it onesidedly metaphysi- cal; we of the modern age should avoid turning it into a mere ethics " (p. 89).

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An illustration of the use of authority in the sense of witness to objective fact may be seen in a clause of the last will and testament of the late Rev. John Bampton, specifying the purpose of the now famous Bampton lectures:

"Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecturer Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following subjects — to confirm and establish the Chris- tian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics — ^upon the Divine authority of holy Scriptures — upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church — upon the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost — upon the Ar- ticles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds."

From this will it clearly appears that authority is lifted above questionings and inquiries; but justification is sought for it in order to guarantee the rational exercise of faith. The objective witnesses are called upon to justify the authority which is acknowledged. So those in whom espe- cially resides the objective witness to facts, are to render service by bringing about intellectual verification of faith. It is the recognition in Anselm's profound maxim: "Credo ut intelli- gam," — of the ut intelligam as well as of the credo, — expressed in that other famous saying of

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his: "fides quaerit intellectam." In faith, in the recognition of authority, the will is involved ; yet, not the bare will of abstraction according to the former rigid division of our tripartite nature. It is an intelHgent will which is to operate under proper and proportionate sentiment. As Dr. W. Benton Greene, Jr., well said in an address delivered before a conference at Princeton:

"There is no knowledge of the heart. Feeling can give knowledge no more than can excitement. Pro- fessor Bowen said, 'Feeling is a state of mind consequent on the reception of some idea.' Again the head and the heart are not in opposition. They are not, as often represented, rival faculties. Man is not a bunch of separate activities. He is an indivisible unit."

We cannot fruitfully consider will, intellect, or feeling separately, neither should we leave them too much to abstract consideration, but their bearings should be found, as they function, in the concreteness of human life. In life we find man exercising conjointly his volitional, emotional, and intellectual nature. His whole personality comes to play on the scenes of his life under specific forms to which he responds and upon which he reacts in his own, personal way, thus forming a character with its corre- sponding "Weltanschauung." Fichte was right in saying that a man may be known from his phi-

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losophy, as was also the author of Proverbs when he said (IV. 23) : "Keep thy heart with all dili- gence; for out of it are the issues of life."

Are then the forms of authoritative truth on which faith is exercised, such as to warrant the act, are they to be considered final? We must answer. No, unless they carry in themselves the intrinsic power of the truth, unless they are manifestations of God; no derived authority will endure. This, however, is exactly what religion is built on and upon which it rests, as Professor T. Cannegieter has said: ''De taak en methode der wijsbegeerte van den Godsdienst" p. 129.

"Through our indivisible, spiritual nature, we are in personal, direct relation with God. He gives us — He only knows how — ^the impression of His Presence and relation to us. But it follows from this, that when the question is raised as to the reality of these experiences, it never devolves upon the science of religion to prove the existence of God. For the religious man whose experi- ences are real. For him God is the deepest reality. Out of this blossoms forth his religion. The first point in all religion is God, who is known, because he revealed Himself. Whoever tries to explain religion without this presupposition destroys it. In this one primum all is contained. For when God reveals Himself to the soul, then He is known in His absoluteness as the In- finite, who is the ground of all finite things. And every- thing finite is considered as belonging to Him only.

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God revealing Himself is the primordial source of all religion. When did this revelation begin? It coin- cides with creation, it began when man commenced his psychic life equipped for the reception of this revela- tion. As the eye is teleologically fitted for the recep- tion of light, so is the soul of man fitted for the recep- tion of God.

See also his interesting sketch: "De samen- hang van het objectieve en het subjectieve in de dogmatiek."

When Leopold Monod observes in "Le pro- bleme de I'autorite": "I insist that no such re- gime is of divine origin," he practically prede- termines not to recognize any final authority, and thus his conception of the revelation of truth must needs be one that is not only incomplete, but also mixed with error, for it means consist- ently that there is no revealed truth. Yet he presumes to discuss seriously just this point: "We do not dispute the fact of authority in hu- man hfe, nor its relative right, but the absolute right of authority. Are there authorities, or is there an authority, which commands us in abso- lute fashion, so that to withhold from it our thought and action would be to fail in our first duty? Where is this authority? Where speci- fically for the Christian is the authority which he may not deny without ceasing by the very act to be a Christian?"

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This method necessarily keeps M. Monod in the sphere of relativity, for he has precluded the serious admission of any final authority or abso- lute truth. The question concerns the recogni- tion of authority, the receiving of the documenta- tion of God's revelation, not the establishment of it. To argue authority into being, would require a regress ad infinitum. And whenever, or in whatever field, such an attempt is made, it is evi- dent that the recognition of authority has already been refused, that the exercise of faith has been shut out. The confusion of these two totally dif- ferent procedures is in the air and is widespread. It seems to be thought a reasonable procedure to-day in many quarters to hold that estabhshed authority, in the exercise of its function, be it re- ligious or civil, must give an account of itself even to those over whom it rightfully holds claim. This, however, is a hopelessly confusing princi- ple, and is never acted upon in practice, neither indeed could it be. It would require a judge in office to ask for jurisdiction, an officiating priest to request his parishioners to grant him authority for his ministry. It would require approval by the people of the law that is in force over them, and vindication of the Bible while appeal is made to it. There is a normative, objective standard of truth. All the varied forms of truth, how- ever, differently perceived, admit of being

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brought into comparison, inasmuch as all these forms go back to one source, i. e., to human na- ture, which is always essentially the same.

Dr. Charles Tyler Olmstead, Bishop of the di- ocese of Central New York, commending an article of the Reverend Burnett T. Stafford in the Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1907, remarks truly :

"It is certain as anything can be that there is an immovable substratum of truth underlying every Divine manifestation, which the human mind may elucidate and view from different points, but can never change. And it is so that the Christian life and civilization are built up on the unchangeable facts of the Incarnate Life of the Son of God. We may mediate on those facts and see more and more of their wondrous significance, now emphasizing one feature and now another; but to deny their reality and call that 'spiritual interpretation' is to put our vain fancies in the place of God's revelation, and to trick out our belief with a deceptive appearance of faith. It will not do. It destroys the foundations, and leaves us a mere human philosophy in the place of divine religion. No such philosophy ever has been, or ever will be, able to withstand the active resistance and antagonism of human selfishness."

Subjectivism tends to discredit the normative element in authority, because its objective aspect, its metaphysical implication, recedes before the claim of subjective interpretation. This finds

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illustration in a recent volume by Dr. D. W. Forrest entitled, "The Authority of Christ." The author endeavors to enforce Christ's au- thority by enlarging upon the importance of the work of the Holy Spirit. It is a peculiar mode of treatment to affirm at the start: "It appears to me that those who maintain a genuine histori- cal Incarnation of the Son of God have not always sufficiently recognized the limitations in- herent in an Incarnate life, nor how vital is the illumination of the Spirit operating through the best activities of men's minds and hearts, for the discovery of what Christ's authoritative message really is." Dr. Forrest certainly chooses a rather illogical way when he seeks to persuade us of the authority of Christ by declaring His limi- tations according to the kenotic theory to which he adheres, and then subsequently endeavors to establish Christ's authority by appeahng to the activity of the Holy Spirit. He thus comes into line with the current subjective interpretations of Christianity, leaving us without guarantee that the "Zeitgeist" will not assert itself as "Heiliger Geist," when he discards "an objective standard of divine commands, unbounded by any fluctuations or vicissitudes of human thought and life." He says again: "What security is there that mankind will not some day universally re- nounce the Gospel of Christ? Is it merely that

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the Church claims to have a commission to de- clare, "This is the revealed truth?" Certainly not. A claim is nothing unless it can justify it- self to the best judgment of men; and the higher it is the more eagerly will its credentials be scru- tinized. Therefore in the end the one guarantee for the perpetuity of Christianity in the world is its adaptation to human nature" (p. 429).

If the impossible, hypothetical event sug- gested by Dr. Forrest should happen, and man- kind should universally renounce the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel none the less would still be true. Truth does not derive its intrinsic, ob- jective authority either from the needs of human nature or from its appreciation by human nature. Its reception by mankind depends on this sense of need, but to elevate this manward aspect of truth into its criterion is pure pragmatism. The question in point Dr. Forrest dismisses abruptly. The Church does claim to be commissioned to de- clare a revealed truth. For Dr. Forrest to deny these claims because they do not meet the cri- terion which he proposes (though we need hardly mention that in this revealed truth the deepest needs of the human heart are met) — ^is to refuse assent to objective truth, because it does not find its way to the minds which he sets up as judges. With some exaggeration of this statement we might say: Truth which is not popular is a con-

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tradiction in terms. Such a saying, however, would be a most painful mockery of the world's heroic martyrs who have fallen as witnesses to truth, and even of Him who said: "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should' bear witness unto the truth," and who added: "Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice" (John xviii. 38), although there were many who did not hear.

This contention that the claims of Christianity must justify themselves to the individuals who sit in judgment upon them, involves the moral question of beliefs as expressed in Christ's signifi- cant addition. This subjective attitude as pre- requisite for the reception of truth. Dr. Forrest makes practically the whole of Christianity and then elaborates the activity of the Holy Spirit by identifying His work essentially with the best judgment of men, — a procedure which runs either into humanitarianism or into pantheism. He who discusses the authority of Christ should remember that, if mankind derives its final au- thority from its own nature, it acts on its own authority, and further, that though the admission of truth to the hearts of men is subjectively con- ditioned, this circumstance does not decide the question concerning the nature of truth itself. "God is His own interpreter and He will make it plain."

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But again Dr. Forrest says (p. 428) : "We re- pudiate the attempt to impose upon us the ecclesiastical order of patristic or mediaeval times, and claim the right in Christ's service to be true to ourselves and to our appointed place." The question, however, is not whether systems should be imposed upon those who do not find themselves satisfied in the traditional creed of Christianity. This would make hypocrites, not Christians. Those of "the ecclesiastical order of patristic or mediaeval times" were the first to af- firm that human agencies cannot make Chris- tians.

The issue is one which Dr. Forrest either evades or does not perceive, namely, whether simply being true to ourselves constitutes being a Christian, or whether specific and unique char- acteristics belong to Christianity and the Chris- tian Church. We must first determine the na- ture of Christianity and then answer the ques- tion. What constitutes a Christian? Scholars professedly still turn to the Christ as the source and center of Christianity, though the ethnic faiths have occasionally been called upon for elu- cidation, because of a widely current emphasis on human nature. In discussing Loisy's books, "L'Evangile et I'Eglise" and "Autour d'un petit livre," Dr. Forrest quite naturally inclines towards Abbe Loisy's subjectivism, but objects to

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what critics consider Loisy's strongest point, the defense of historic Christianity as the natural and therefore legitimate form by means of which the Church perpetuates itself, declaring that "His- tory knows no instance of religion without a cult."

CHAPTER XXIV

NEEDS AND UTILITY

There is a fallacious use made of the phrase: "Natura exigit, imperat Deus" — what nature de- mands, God enjoins. This has been interpreted to mean that man's deepest needs are God's high- est laws. Hooker tries to safeguard this view by conditional clauses against too free interpreta- tion. He says in his "Ecclesiastical Polity":

"The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all time learned, nature herself must needs have taught, and God being the author of nature, her voice is but his instrument." (I. VIII. 8.)

Also (I. X. 1. 8.)

"Two foundations there are which bear up public so- cieties : the one a natural inclination, whereby all men desire sociable life and fellowship ; the other an order expressly or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their union in living together . . . the lawful power of making laws to command whole political socie- ties of men belongeth so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince or potentate of what kind

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soever on earth to exercise the same of himself, and not either by express commission immediately, personally received from God, or else by authority derived at first from their consent upon whose persons they impose laws, is no better than mere tyranny. Laws they are not therefore, which public approbation has not made so."

Subsequently God's laws have been read in hu- man needs. This fits the modern, democratic conception which evaluates with life as the source and standard of authority. How vague, un- stable and undefined this new democratic au- thority is need not be discussed, but it should be observed that a humanitarian religion with hu- manity as object and source of authority, pre- supposes the higher authority on which all its various manifestations of life are forever de- pendent. Indeed! Christ came that we might have life and have it abundantly, but He de- clared paradoxically: "whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." Though man's deep- est needs are met in the Gospel, it deserves spe- cial notice that Christ always states; he that be- lieveth on me hath life everlasting. This pre- supposed element of faith rules rational interpre- tations regarding life out of court as authority over the same. This rationalistic tendency be- trays itself in "Modernism a Record and Re-

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view," which A. L. Lilley dedicates to George Tyrrell. He says in his epistle dedicatory to Tyrrell, who when young left the Anglican com- munion for the Roman Catholic Church:

"You have not for a moment thought it necessary or even possible to abandon the Church of your delib- erate adoption, even when quite recently you heard the voice of authority raised against you in formal con- demnation. You know too well the nature of a Church and the nature and limits of authority in a Church. For you a Church is a spirtiual fatherland, your due allegiance to which no authority can in the last resort either assess or guarantee. Authority indeed is essen- tial, but it discharges its special function only when it waits upon life and ministers to it. When it attempts to prescribe to life the limits within which it must move and beyond which it must not venture, it has ceased to be ministrant to life and is engaged, whether it knows it or not, in preparing death. Then it becomes a duty to resist it in its own interests, to resist it in order that it may renew its character and methods and become once again an authentic force of direction and control. The limits of coercive power which it may legitimately exer- cise are prescribed for it by the verdicts of life, as to what things have proved in general and continuous ex- perience to be morally hurtful. Yet these are just the things on which authority (perhaps wisely, for even here there may be some shrunken and distorted growth of life) has always borne most lightly; while with the obstinate blindness which has characterized it at many

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a moment of its history it crushes the forces which would renew life and open out to it the way of progress. Au- thority through those who have wielded it has too often identified itself with accidental and temporary forms. At such times it is necessary for it to learn that its forms are of the things that can be shaken and must be shaken in order that the things which cannot be shaken, life and the authority which proceeds from it, may re- main. The rulers of every spiritual society need to learn from secular history the lesson that the best citi- zens of the temporal fatherland have often been those who resisted even to death the unlimited claims of some temporary form of authority arrogating to itself that divine right which was even then, through the chang- ing needs and conditions of life, passing to another form. Both in the temporal and the spiritual spheres authority prcoes its divine right by being limited and ministerial. When it becomes absolute, it has become already denied that right. It is the function of author- ity to keep life dependent upon God, and to that end to reverence and cherish those forward and upward movements of life in which the will of God is gradually declared. It is the temptation of authority to despise life or to ignore it, to identify its momentary will with the ultimate will of God which even inspires man's spir- itual growth and seeks expression through it. You have been condemned as the enemy of religious author- ity, indeed as the enemy of religion itself, because you have sought to recall authority to the sources of its strength and thus to restore to religious unity a world which existing forms and methods have been for long,

«

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and are now ever more and more rapidly, reducing to religious disintegration and decay. You will not be ar- rested in the work of enduring pith and moment to which you have been called, by this fiat of a day. Through you the dawn has at last broken for thousands of wearied souls who have battled all their lives, and battled hopelessly with the spectres of doubt and dark- ness. You have spoken for them the word of hope, so simple and obvious that, till you spoke it with the calm confidence of assured conviction, they dared not believe it to be true: 'The present is older and wiser and better than the past which it incorporates and transcends.^ They will be with you in the long and patient effort, which you will not abandon or relax to save the majestic and glorious tradition of Roman Christianity from the narrow-hearted and ineffectual isolation from the living world to which it would condemn itself."

The expressions in this passage which we ren- dered in italics suffice to bring out our above ob- servation. We wish, however, to make a few re- marks in regard to them. In the statement that "the present is older and wiser and better than the past which it incorporates and transcends" we lack the superficiality of much clamoring liberalism, which is born of a day, in that here the present is knit even constitutionally to the past, "which it incorporates and transcends." Thus the spirit of opposition is obviated. As Tyrrell himself states in "Through Scylla and Charyb- dis":

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"For it is psychologically impossible for any individ- ual to get outside the social process which has made him what he is, as to form a judgment which shall at once be just and yet be contradictory to the social mind. Either he has blundered and misinterpreted the social mind, in which case it is only his liberty of error that is violated ; or he has interpreted it more deeply and truly than the average and official interpreters, in which case he differs from these, but does not contradict them, in- asmuch as his is only a stricter conformity to the same rule as they profess to obey" (p. 60).

There is no reason why the present should transcend, or even necessarily incorporate the past. This on strict psychological grounds is at once quite plain. It is self-evident that one can- not get any conviction that comes from personal experience — and tliis personal and ethical ele- ment figures so largely in the religious sphere — before fulfilling the conditions upon which alone that experience can come, no matter what has gone on before. The social development is not so that means lead mechanically to the ends. Indeed, often the first are last and the last first. But it would seem that the writer thinks of truth's transcendency in time and in saying that the present incorporates and transcends the past, would add that the future will do this much more so. In this is evident the Romish conception which — to use Tyrrell's own words — considers

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"one of the most fundamental and distinctive principles of Catholicism is the subjection of the individual mind, will and sentiment in matters of religion to the collective mind, will, and senti- ment of the community; of the private to the Catholic conscience; in a word, the principle of authority" (p. 58).

Against such a conception of authority we readily see the protest of persons of spiritual ap- prehension, as indeed the greatest in this church have broken through the sacramental ceremonies of the institutions. Augustine, Gottschalk, Savonarola, Pascal, Port-Royal and Jansenism and Calvin witness to a more purely spiritual conception than this visible church holds. Since Felicite de la Mennais the independent search has made some claims for the individual and spirits Hke Loisy and Tyrrell are in the wake of this great publicist. Reverence and piety are theirs, they are not kindred of the host of liberals who nowadays proclaim with cocksure pedantry the progressive "new truths" against the supersti- tions of an old outworn faith. De la Mennais, Loisy and Tyrrell are searching, because the visible church of Rome with her elaborate sacer- dotalism does not satisfy. There is something pathetic in the opening note of "Through Scylla and Charybdis": "What I have here put together might be described as the history of a

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religious, or rather philosophical, opinion. For an opinion, it is, and nothing more. I am much more certain that some other opinions are wrong than that tliis is right; and if anyone will show me a better, he shall be numbered among my benefactors." Anyone may readily observe the difference in temper from those objections against spirituality which President King of Oberlin College discusses in "The Seeming Un- reality of the Spiritual Life," and which he says, "come from an abstract intellectualism, from a crude sensationalism, and from an impossible hypothesizing of laws, and, in general, from a quite unwarrantable exaltation of the mathemati- cal-mechanical view of the world." LiJley con- cedes authority to he essential, hut requires it to wait upon life. Now, as observed above, au- thority only ministers to life when it prescribes to it. Only in controlling it, is authority minis- trant to life. Life does not prescribe to itself its own authority. If it be the function of authority to keep life dependent upon God, then, indeed! this authority must in its forms speak to those whose faith does acknowledge it, with the abso- lute authenticating power of God. That this is not always recognized in the bewildering mass of formal religion is easily seen, especially when the emotional and aesthetic is mainly appealed to at the cost of a spiritual apprehension. "God is a

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spirit and those that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." Yet, in Tyrrell's own words: "Catholicism stands out as a religion of the whole man against the pedantry of a purely reasonable religion that would abolish the luxuriant — doubtless at times too luxuriant — wealth of symbolism in favor of a 'ministry of the word' alone, taking 'word' in its baldest literal sense ; and that would limit the converse between God and man to what can be uttered in spoken or written language." He goes on to say:

"There is, then, no small pedantry of intellectualism in the notion that worship in the spirit and in truth must necessarily be conducted in circumstances of sought-out plainness, and divested of all appeal to the senses, the imagination, and the emotions ; of all sac- raments— and symbols — a worship which would suffer no more of God's message to enter the soul than can find its way through the narrow slit of common sense, and clothe itself in the stiff primness of colorless prose. Of such worship Christ and His apostles — Jews as they were and lovers of the Temple with its soul-stirring symbolism — knew nothing, nor has any religion ever thriven long on such a fallacy of puritanism strictly adhered to. The tendency of puritanism is to reduce Christianity to its lowest terms ; to cast off all that has grown out of, or on to its primitive expression ; to bring it down to the level of the lowest and most uni- versal spiritual capacity; to make it democratic in just what seems to us the wrong and popular sense of the

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term. For it is to favor one section of the church at the expense of another; to starve the higher and rarer capacity in the interests of the lower and commoner; to assume the spiritual equality of God's sons means an equality of gifts and graces ; to forget that the Chris- tian demos includes and needs every grade and kind of spirituality from the lowest to the highest. For this reason as well as for its severe rationality puritanism, in spite of its studied abstract simplicity, has always been the religion of a certain class, and a certain tem- perament, and a certain culture. Whereas Catholicism, in spite of or rather because of its vast complexity, has been, as no other, a religion both of the crowds and masses, and also of the intellectual, the cultivated, the mystical, the aesthetic minority" (p. 32 ff).

Tyrrell proceeds to discuss this theme in con- nection with his impressions of St. Etienne du Mont, the most devotional catholic church in Paris, where I myself was struck with a singular contrast in pious worship to the other cathedrals which offer almost the spectacle of being public monuments, utilized by the church. "Moreover, we find in such a church as St. Etienne the ex- pression, not of individual, but of a collective spirit, world-wide and ancient, of which it is the product. Everything there speaks of com- munion with a great international religious or- ganism ; with the remote past of Catholicism ; and through Catholicism, with the past of those older

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religions out of which it has grown. It (St. Etienne du Mont) is a visuahzed and sensible ex- pression of the religious experience of the best part of humanity, by means of which the re- ligious sense of the individual is wakened, stimu- lated, and informed; and his consciousness of solidarity with the general life of mankind deep- ened and strengthened. Every such renewed consciousness of communion with Catholicism is a sacramental reinforcement of the spiritual and "over-individual" elements of his interior life — an inward grace mediated through an out- ward sign" (p. 37). As he states on page 39: "Religion aims at communicating God to man, at filling the soul with the inexhaustible riches of divine truth and goodness and loveliness. It cannot put the infinite into a nutshell; it cannot put the whole truth into three words. Though it may — and often does — sin against simplicity, both by undue compression and undue diffusive- ness all the language at its disposal is not enough for what it has got to convey." We elaborate somewhat on this ritualism and social setting of service because the Roman Catholic Church pre- sents these claims, even in those who drift away from her accepted standards, as Tyrrell is a case in point, and one well qualified to formulate them. They need, however, no refutation, espe- cially since Tyrrell gives us on p. 49 a striking

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passage in which he discloses a susceptibility to a deeper and spiritual view of Authority. "As for the long and sordid record of clerical scandal that we find in Church history, the persistent recru- descences of avarice, ambition, and licentiousness in the ministers of the sanctuary, it is hard to see what more it can prove against Catholicism than the like phenomena in the ministers of law and government can prove against law and govern- ment. The attempt to deny or mitigate such charges seems to imply the worst of 'sacerdotal- ism'— namely, the right of priests in virtue of their merely official and ecclesiastical superiority to that honor which belongs solely to personal, ethical, and 'charismatic' superiority. It is all-important to keep distinct the invisible — and spiritual hierarchy from the visible — and official hierarchy of the church; to see in the latter but the symbol and servant of the former; to see in the former Christ Himself, vicariously repre- sented by the latter; to distinguish the pre-con- stitutional formless church from the governmen- tal form which it has elaborated for its own apos- tohc needs. Deplorable as they are, the corrup- tions of the official hierarchy keeps this vital dis- tinction clear before the Catholic, and save us from man-worship."

It is evident that the whole question, in spite of all confusion on the subject, turns on a spiritual

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conception. That the whole Romanish machin- ery of sacramental symbolism is pleaded to be needed or helpful for spiritual understanding is an admission of the spiritual poverty of the church, and similarly is it a sign, that the Protestant Churches are at a low ebb where they resort to the ritualistic props of religion. It is all an effort to bolster up the felt unreality of the spiritual life, which Presi- dent King discusses in his popular lectures be- fore Yale Divinity School on "The Seeming Un- reality of the Spiritual Life." He opens with the remark: "Yes, but why has no one ever seen God?" It is Philip's old question: "Show us the father." Does it avail "to mediate an inward grace through an outward sign," to "communi- cate God to man" by all sorts or ritual, and sym- bols, to go into a sanctuary with the cultivated sense that a "collective spirit" world-wide and ancient is expressed in the worship? How in- finitely loftier rings the truth that "God is in His holy temple," and in our worship to stand in His august presence with none other than the High-priest Jesus Christ mounting gTiard over the conscience. Calvinists are not con- trolled by needs, rather would we stand under the authority of God's law, graciously placed in our hearts by the son of His love, Jesus Christ, our Lord. No congregation or church is

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charged with communicating God to man. He is self -revealing through, or in spite of the visible means which we may devise, but surely operates even by the concession of the ritualists in spiritual manner. He is not bound or conditioned in the work of grace, and no respecter of persons. All these familiar truths should shatter forever the assumption of priestly devices, were it not that the Jew is still strong with us. Inward grace may be expressed by outward sign, but the medi- ation of grace is never bound to ritualistic or sacramental practices. The oft-repeated re- mark, that the stern, austere conception of spirituality, which dispenses largely with the aesthetic and emotional as avenues of worship, limits itself "to a certain class, and a certain tem- perament and a certain culture" is wholly false, a historic review of Protestantism is sufficient to reveal the bareness of this assertion. Does a closer examination of this ritualistic, ceremonial procedure in the service of the church not corrob- orate this view?

Lessing asked: "Besteht iiberhaupt etwas das nicht bedeutet?" and Longfellow said in "The harvest moon":

"All things are symbols : the eternal shows Of nature have their image in the mind."

Thus it is that we may speak of "a sympathetic

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fallacy of nature," positing of sentiments, feel- ings and meanings in the world around us. Definite forms of course and the pictorial repre- sentation, the ceremonial acts have a specific af- fective power upon the imagination. We need not decide which it is most with the beholder a reading into, as in "the sympathetic fallacy of nature" or an interpretation of some idea-repre- senting form. This depends largely on the con- creteness of the symbol. In the service of re- ligion, by association as well as by their more definite meaning the symbols, in order to be help- ful to the ends they serve, are more specific and concrete. In the jargon of the modern school, a fixed symbol however, be it in act, or form, or pictorial representation, cannot well be a lasting expression of progressive, expanding, yea! revo- lutionizing thought. And in the nature of the case this attempt at visualizing the unseen does not tend to spirituality. The main issue laid bare in ritual and ceremony is the appeal to the senses, the aesthetic element pressed into service as an avenue for the spiritual life, with an emo- tional response that arouses rather than sustains the Christian responsibility. For this reason — though not as yet in pictorial and ceremonial ap- peal, except such as processions, parades, and meetings of a more or less undesigned, and there- fore incidental sort — revivalist resort to this more

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sensual appeal. In Sunday-schools the banner- class and hundred and one devices to render con- crete our Christian allegiance to the Master grows more and more, and leans stronger upon the outward sign in proportion as inward grace is absent. Yet the outward sign far from being a guarantee for the mediation of inward grace renders us dependent on it in our spiritual as- pirations. Our catholic brethren abuse the ar- gument, the appeal to the senses is not excluded in the puritan service, but God is not sensually- apprehended, an emotional appeal is not dis- carded, but the spiritual understanding means more, the many devices to render concrete the spiritual and unseen are perfectly legitimate when they only serve in furthering spiritual life and spiritual understanding which they mostly fail to do. Moreover we require the catholic brethren and those of the reformed confession with ritualistic and ceremonial tendencies to face squarely the fact that the plea in favor of sym- bolizing the unseen is made in behalf of a de- ficiency in spiritual understanding. If it is not well to give strong meat unto babes, does it fol- low that those who crave meat should be fed on milk? In short, then, needs should not enter the sanctuary to control the service there, leading the worship away from "the ministry of the Word."

CHAPTER XXV

THE SOURCE AND GUARANTEE OF AUTHORITY

Christianity interpreted as a mere historic fact cannot be reduced to a series of events, the signal success of which had its origin in an unimportant cause. When Harnack in his "Die Ausbreitung des Christentums" seeks to explain the spread of Christianity by arguing that it won the world to itself by absorbing all the foreign elements with which it came in contact, he is consistent with his subjective standpoint. But it may readily be seen that this explanation is made at the cost of Christianity itself. It amounts practically to saying that Christianity's conquest of the world is a mere appearance. Real Christianity never ran a historic course. Harnack thus must be at a loss to understand the hysteric accusation of Christianity of Nietzsche for checking the bru- tality of human instincts. Historic Christianity is merely a mixture of different pagan elements on which the cross of the early Christians was set. How this became possible is difficult to un- derstand on Harnack's supposition. One is re- minded of Nietzsche's bitter sneer: "In Wirk-

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lichkweit gab es nur ein Christ und der starb am Kreuz"; and on the other hand of Professor Freeman's remark: "You say, Am I still a be- liever? Certainly. That is, I believe the Chris- tion religion to be from God, in a sense beyond that in which all things are from God. One can- not study history without seeing this. As I said in one of my published lectures : 'For Csesar Au- gustus to be led to worship a crucified Jew was a greater miracle than the cleaving of rocks or the raising of the dead.' "

Dr. Geerhardus Vos, discussing the causes which have been operative in spreading the opin- ion that Christian faith is in its essence independ- ent of historical facts, says: "The aim of modern historical research is to view developments from the inside, to catch the subjective tone and color of the period, to study it pre-eminently from its human point of view. Applying this to Sacred History and the Scriptures leads almost inevi- tably to a wrong distribution of emphasis. In redemption and revelation naturally not the hu- main, subjective side, not the religious views and sentiments of men, stand in the foreground, but the great objective acts and interpositions of God, the history as it is in itself, not as it re- flected itself in the mind of man. Facts, rather than the spirit of times or the consciousness of periods, should be here the primary object of

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investigation." Indeed, though we admit the human factor as determining the forms of Chris- tianity in its historic course, it ought to be clear that unless objective reality is recognized as its ground, yea, Christ as its cause and center. Chris- tian theology will be cast adrift on the eddying tides of human opinion.

Dr. Forsyth argues eloquently for "the Cross as the Final Seat of Authority." {Contempor- ary Review, October, 1899.)

He elaborates the idea that the cross is what God has done, does, and will do in an eternal act of grace for the sin-stricken world. The source and seat of man's final authority is, therefore, God at the heart of man (common grace), espe- cially where man responds by faith to His gra- cious revelation (special grace). His words are a fitting close to the drift and temper of this discussion.

"We must have for these days an authority which is in its nature emancipatory and not repressive, empow- ering and not enfeebling. That authority is the Re- deemer's. The object of human faith must be the source of human freedom, individual or social. Society can only be saved by what saves the soul. The evan- gelical contention is that that object of faith is the Re- deemer, directly and alone. It is the straightness of the Cross, that is the condition of critical, speculative, and social freedom for the world.

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"The real and final seat of authority is Evangelical. It is the cross of Jesus Christ. Neither soul nor society knows anything as a final authority but Him crucified. The sovereign and the cement of society is the Saviour of the soul. That rules man which rules the conscience ; and that rules the conscience which forgives it and re- deems. The conscience is not the ruler, but only the ruler's throne. The center of authority is the world's central moral personality and order. It is the act of redemption. It is not the ideal but the Redeemer of the conscience that is its King. The cross is the seat of moral empire and human unity. There is more una- nimity among the saved about the Cross than there is among the enlightened about truth. The believer has an authority for society that the thinker has not.

"The absolute is the only final authority, and we touch that by the moral of personal faith alone. Man is a free creature even more than the rational; the lower animals are more rational than free. And it must be in the region of his distinctive freedom that his King resides ; it is there he needs and finds his authority. It exists for free will rather than for free thought. For knowledge and thought there may be order and limit, but there is no authority, which, in the real, absolute, and final sense, exists for man as moral not as intel- lectual.

"Something is at once the final victory and the present power; some purpose runs through all things as the truth in all and the crown upon all; some will which turns mere matter into purpose, which elects to proceed in the way of selection, and sustains it in the way of

GUARANTEE OF AUTHORITY 265

communion. We must find the end of living in the living God, the goal of all is the stay of all. And this is a power which we have only in the revelation of the Cross and its foregone conquest. The empirical world is far too vast, complex, and tragical now for any philosophy of history to surmise and the categories of an irresistible ideal imbedded in thought. We must turn for our certainty elsewhere where philosophy fails as a foundation. Our chief knowledge is that whereby we are known. We are cast upon faith, neither as a pis aller, nor as a leap in the dark, upon a faith which finds in the historic work of the super-historic Christ an absolute warrant of the Kingdom of God as the close and crown of all. Glory is but the consummation of grace, and grace arises in the very heart of nature and history though it springs out of neither. The Kingdom of God is to faith the immanent truth of things, their soul and nisus, subtly, slowly supreme on earth, and eternal in the heavens. In Jesus Christ we have the final cause of history, and the incarnation of that King- dom of God, which is the only teleology large enough for the whole world." (London Quarterly/, Oct., 1905.)

INDEX OF AUTHORS

Abbott (Lyman): 37. Anselm (St.) : 234. Aquinus (St. Thomas of) :

85. Arnold (Matthew) : 46, 123. Athanasius: 149. Augustine (St.) : 65.

Bain: 175.

Baldwin (Mark). 6, 48, 49.

Balfour: 52, 99.

Ballard: 212.

Balzac (Honore de) : 76.

Bampton (John) : 234.

Bargy: 163.

Baur: 135.

Bavinck: 186, 220.

Beaulieu (Anatole Leroy) :

22. Bettex: 184. Blackstone (Sir William) :

16. Bowen: 135. Bradley: 121. Brooks (Phillips): 13. Briihl (Levy): 193. Bruno: 135. Bryce (James) : 25. Buelow (Prince von) : 36. Butler: 115.

Caird: 126.

Caldecott: 86. Calvin: 203, 149. Cannegieter: 236. Carol (Lewis): 44. Chapman: 206. Chesterton: 116. Clifford: 173. Clough: 166. Coe: 188. Condorcet: 3. Comte: 113. Corneille: 167.

Darwin: 52. Dennert: 53. Desmoulins: 62. Dewey: 194, 224. Dickens: 46. Doumergue: 209. Doumic: 42. Durkheim: 40. Dyde: 127.

Ebrard: 191.

Eliot: 91.

Eucken: 102, 216, 233.

Ferri: 6.

Feuerback: 134, 137.

Fevre: 23.

Fichte: 5, 87, 131, 235.

Flint: 101.

267

268

INDEX OF AUTHORS

Fogel (Philip): 40.

Forrest: 240.

Forsyth: 53, 143, 152, 156,

167, 208, 263. Fouillee: 61, 67, 81. Freeman: 139, 262. Fries: 129. FuUerton: 227.

Gans: 127.

Garner: 108.

Genesis (1:27): 174.

Gess: 191.

Guy an: 55.

Gibbons: 66, 79, 143.

Giddings: 10.

Goethe: 43, 101, 202, 137.

Gordon (George A.) : 1

Greene, Jr. (W. Brenton) :

235. Greer (Bishop) : 79. Gregory (Pope) : 34.

Haeckel: 102. Halevy: 101. Hall (Francis J.): 115, 117,

216. Hall (Stanley): 189. Hamilton (Sir William )j?:

115. Harcourt (Duke of):21. Harnack: 202, 261. Hartmann (Eduard von) :

198. Heath (Bawden) : 222. Hebrews; (xi:3): 119,

(xi:i): 204.

Hegel: 122, 124, 125, 128,

130, 132. Helmholz: 175. Hill (David Jaynes) : 19. Hoffding: 56, 195, 198, 199. Holland: 73, 229. Hooker: 245. Hugo (Victor): 76.

Jacobus: 207,

James (William): 2, 3, 11, 44, 90, 148, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179, 188, 214, 215, 217, 218, 221, 224.

Jevons: 229.

John (xviii:38): 240.

Kalthoff: 137.

Kant: 121, 124, 199, 225,

226. Kassowitz: 53. Kephart: 79. King: 252, 257. Kapper: 102. Krabbe: 109. Krause: 129. Kuyper (Abraham) : 34,

69, 70.

Lacy: 110.

Ladd: 39, 58, 84, 137, 138.

La Fontaine: 191.

Laval eye: 108.

Le Bon: 189.

Lessing: 258.

Liddon: 209.

INDEX OF AUTHORS

269

Lilley: 247- Lincoln: 131. Loisy: 65, 202, 243. Longfellow: 258. Lowell: 64. Luther: 137. Lyman: 180, 182.

MacArthur (R. Stuart) : 79. McCall Mission: 190. McPheeters: 163. Maurice: 51, 69, 109, 122,

183. Mansel: 121. Martensen: 191, 197. Menzel: 129. Marheineke: 129. Martineau: 38. Marx (Karl): 135. Matthew: 169. Maupassant (Guy de) : 46. Mill (John Stuart) : 94, 110. Mirabeau: 89. Moberly: 117. Monod (Leopold) : 237. Montague: 110. Montesquieu: 108. Miiller (Max): 91.

Newman (John Henry) : 95. Nietzsche: 110, 201.

Olmstead (C. Tyler): 239. Ormond (A. T.) : 83.

Palmer: 71, 199. Parkhurst: 79.

Pascal: 49.

Patton (Francis Landey) :

211. Poulin: 209. Paulsen: 60, 102. Pauly: 53. Perry: 145, 182. Pollock (Sir Frederick) :

72. Pope: 135. Powell: 192. Proverbs (iv:23): 236.

Rashdall (Hastings) : 43.

Raymond (B. P.): 79.

Remensnyder : 79.

Renan: 65.

Reville: 115.

Reymond (Du Bois) : 173.

Ritschie: 110, 192.

Ritschl: 96.

Rittelmeyer: 98.

Romanes: 201.

Romans (i:20): 119.

Rousseau: 110, 111.

Royce (Josiah) : 43, 99, 134,

232. Riickert: 68.

Sabatier: 113, 118. Sainte Beuve: 141. Schmiedel: 138. Schopenhauer: 93, 125. Scherer: 188. Schiller: 111, 182. Schiirer: 72, 110.

270

INDEX OF AUTHORS

Seth (Andrew): 101, 120. Simon (Saint) : 3. Smith (Monroe): 153. Smyth (Newman) : 79. Spencer (Herbert) : 9, 52. Stanton: 93. Starbuck: 188. Sterrett: 108, 128, 178. Strauss: 135. Suderman: 41. Swete: 97.

Tennyson: 87. Thomasius: 191. Trendelenburg: 127. Tuft (James H.) : 2. Turner (Sir James) : 63. Tyrrell: 249, 253.

Vincent (G. E.) : 11. Virchow: 102. Visscher: 8, 217. Vries (Hugo de) : 52. Voltaire: 135. Vos (Geerhardus) : 262.

Wesley (John) : 80.

Westminster Confession : 118.

Wildenbruch (von): 31.

William the Great, Em- peror of Germany: 32, 35.

Wundt: 102.

Ziegler: 102.

Zueblin (Charles): 17.