CHAPTER II.

RECENT PHILOSOPHY AND THE NATURE OF RELIGION.

IF God's revelation of Himself has its commencement in nature, it is fitting that we should first notice the tokens of advance afforded by recent philosophy of natural theology. For the history of religion, in which we broadly include its host of recent philosophic thinkers and inquirers in Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Britain, and America, renews for us the method of creation in thus bringing to us first that which is natural, then that which is spiritual. And, as Mozley said, the Christian mind has perhaps no greater satisfaction than that which comes of perceiving that the revealed system is rooted deep in the natural course of things. This, in our view, abides none the less true because of the circumstance that it was Newman's dictum that to deny revelation is the way to deny natural religion, or because the denial of natural religion has been seen, in the case of Ritschl, as it consorts with the magnifying of revelation. Natural theology is pos

sessed of no critical apparatus whereby it is to judge revealed theology. Revealed theology will yet be found reasonable, and none the less so, we believe, because it brings to us the mind of God. In no department of theological science has the need for reconstruction been more deeply felt than in that of natural theology, for just here have former notions been most completely overthrown. Modern theistic philosophy of religion has very rightly felt that it must follow a less mechanical method of inquiry. Knowing that it holds in hand the physical and spiritual worlds, it has wisely not restricted its attention to that religious knowledge or experience which is distinctively Christian, but has turned its scrutiny on the general or universal - "universal," we mean, in the only sense in which modern theism feels any serious interest-religious experience or knowledge. Its sympathetic and systematic study of the ethnic religions has been rewarded by the discovery of the relations they sustain to each other and to Christianity, of which, as their crown and flower, they are taken to be prophecies. The view formerly taken by natural theology of these religions of nature as being unmixedly false-the outcome of credulity and imposture--instead of really grounded in spiritual wants and aspirations common to the race, and developed in accordance with environment as they are now seen by the science of Comparative Religion to be-has been increasingly felt to have been inadequate. At the same time we be

THE NATURE RELIGIONS.

23

lieve the best of recent thought upon the subject to be with Professor P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye in explicitly recognising the insufficiency of purely natural development to explain the phenomena of religion, while yielding to nature what we may call the "yearnings she hath in her own natural kind.” In the light of these nature-religions being thus the natural product of the religious instincts of the race, it has become more fully recognised how

"In even savage bosoms

There are longings, yearnings, strivings,
For the good they comprehend not."

These religions are thus seen to be capsules in
which are hidden seeds of true religious thought.
Indeed it may almost be now said to be more clearly
perceived how the idea of Godhead or a Supreme
Power on which all creatures do depend appears,
whenever we pierce below the psychological pro-
cesses in search of the objective basis, to underlie
and give shaping to all these forms of religion.
This, however, is quite consistent with religion, as
what we may call man's underlying sense of the
Eternal Spirit in all things, being seen to be wider
in its nature, not merely than Christianity, but than
that theistic conception with whose explicit form we
are here concerned. We must indeed postulate for
all human life such a background as religion is.
is not to be supposed that, in this idea of God any-
thing more is implied, on behalf of natural theology,
than the notion at present of a self-existent First

It

Cause-Creator and Ruler-an idea valid enough for the purposes of natural theology, however short of the fulness of theistic conception. From the recent interest in the science of the History of Religions have sprung advances in the study of the theistic bearings of the world's ethnic religions, of which religions the Christian Faith has been always more distinctly seen to be the goal, not the denial, the fulfilment and not the negation. Hence we may say that the significance of such a saying as Hegel's, that the idea of God constitutes the general basis of a people, has, as we take it, come to be more fully appreciated, for we think it cannot be doubted that modern thought has increasingly found the theistic idea to be central and vital in the history of the race, of which the proof lies in the newer forms-now more robust and now more refined-in which it has appeared. At the same time there has been a clearer consciousness that natural religions, no matter how monotheistic may have been supposed their trend, are lacking in moral stability. Their position, at the highest, has been always more conspicuously seen to be one of unstable equilibrium. And so, alike the need for natural theology, with its suggestions at least of the wisdom, power, and unity of the personal God, and the incompleteness of that same theology-the inadequacy of a system of pure theism for the loftier ends of man's life-have been more abundantly acknowledged. This insufficiency of natural theism has been, we think, more fully