Certainty of expansion and completion of our present Necessity of immortality to our moral sense and rationality thesis which, in its modern aspects, we seek to present and enforce as against the common but loose assumption - what should be ein überwundener Standpunkt-that theistic philosophy has no more inspiring function than ever-renewed presentation of arguments whose cogency and content remain for ever unchanged-no more and no less. Here, too, in the philosophy of theism, it must be said that the schools have known no lack of commonplace—was uns alle bändigt, unfortunately without feeling it, like Goethe, das Gemeine. Our knowledge of the deeps of Being in God is never A perfect, is always human and progressive, and, while consistent and intelligible, is subject to ever-increasing enlargement as our insight grows into thought of God always more accordant with objective truth. That vast and cumulative proof of the Divine Existence which is but our spiritual exegesis and our intellectual interpretation of the Universe, cannot but be extended with every increase of our knowledge, and heightened by every advance in our insight and purity. We believe that theistic philosophy is still far too scholastic, has come far too little under the modernising spirit of science, and has, in its basis, method, and mode of development, too little followed any course that can be regarded as thoroughly scientific. If, however, as it has been said, "the whole spirit of modern science is towards the extrusion of every theistic interpretation of the world from the domain of scientific knowledge," then assuredly it is time to vindicate a rational, and not merely ethical, theism -to realise to what a chaotic condition thought would become reduced without such vindication of rational theism as a thoroughgoing scientific hypothesis, supported by cosmical evidence no less than by the moral evidence furnished by the nature of man. It becomes the great positive task of philosophy to show that, into whatever conventional disrepute theism may have fallen, the conclusions most in harmony with reason as with feeling are still those which are termed theistic. It must not TASK OF THEISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 3 only set forth for us the Ultimate Ground of all things, but must also show what eternal reason resides in that World-Ground. That Primal Ground does not stand unrevealed and unrelated to our conscious experience, and, when it is revealed, the ground of religion in us is seen to consist not in anything extrinsic. When we think of this Primal Being, we think of Him as always and necessarily related to us, no abstraction of pure thought, no ultimate of simple homogeneous matter, but One in Whom such fulness dwells as makes Him Source of all this diverse universe and Strength of all our conscious experience. When shall theistic philosophy escape the injustice of being viewed as formally defective, simply because it makes God "supramanent" as well as immanent? By what right do men speak of theistic philosophy as viewing God outside of the world, as though that were ever at any moment regarded as His sole or whole relation to it? When are men ever entitled to speak of theism as binding us in a merely external way to God? Surely the theism of to-day never holds us as only so bound, and should not be treated as if it did. We, for our own part, are certainly not to be deterred from undertaking our present task-seeing it is of so great consequence to rational thought, being indeed one of prime living interest-by any possible indifference to it from any side. We have in view, for example, the indifference that leads to the agnostic denial by the Ritschlians of the right of Natural Theology, and also any other that may possibly spring up "Cras ingens iterabimus æquor " in the legitimate endeavour to build up theology on truly Christian basis, freed from metaphysical conceptions which may be alien to it, when we say that the best theological thought of to-day cannot allow, and will not, that the interests of faith and theoretic reason should be sundered. What wisdom can there be in treating the natural pieties with scorn or distrust? What is there to justify either distrust in the processes of reason or disbelief in the voice of conscience? Yes, and what rational justification for the conventional contempt of Natural Religion as a bare and lifeless metaphysical residue? Does a religion, because it happens to have given us its light through natural processes, require to remain as religion in its lowest terms, and be incapable of a most real and spiritual progressiveness? We, for our part, boldly meet Ritschl's disavowal of natural religion by a more sublime faith in its reality and possibilities, for it is the fault of theologians, and not of natural religion, if such a faith cannot be found to justify itself. It seems to us high time for theistic philosophy, if it has any worthy confidence left in itself, to gird itself for the great work of self-justification before it, since it has actually been maintained, from the Ritschlian side, |