CHRISTIANITY AND NATURAL RELIGION. 465 in his Lectures and other Theological Papers,' it has then seen that "Christianity is founded upon certain great primary wants and affections of the human soul, which it meets, to which it corresponds, and of which it furnishes the proper objects and satisfactions." Among the things it has most plainly seen have been that "there is the feeling after a God; there is the instinct of prayer; there is conscience and the sense of sin; there is the longing for and dim expectation of immortality." And it has more carefully observed how "Christianity supplies the counterpart of these affections and wants of the soul," and how it is "as supplying this counterpart that it recommends itself in the first instance to us"-the religion of redemption. The religion of redemption it is seen, κατ' ἐξοχήν, το be, for very different in source and centre and progressive principle it is from Buddhism or any other suggested redemptive parallels. This is none the less truly the case, if it be even so that "the new gospel of self-redemption through resignation and self-annihilation finds among the representatives of modern culture more reverent hearers than the Gospel - ancient yet ever young-of redemption through Jesus Christ." The Christian philosophy of religion has, as we think, more patiently viewed the negative aspect or form of redemption whereby it appears in the desire merely to escape the world. The positive form it has more explicitly treated as it shows itself in realised and harmonious union with the Divine or Absolute Life, in the sphere where nought avails but the faith that works through love. For it knows that such new and larger consciousness of God, as springs out of this redemptive indwelling of God in man, it was the design of the redemptive work of Christ to create. "But the sacred happiness of a heart which knows it is known of God, is not derived from approving its own attainments, but from the very acting of its insatiable desires, and from its sympathy with the sources of life and joy. Its outcry is after Perfection. It longs after God's own holiness: for this it would give earth and heaven. It no It no sooner effects one conquest than it aspires after another." Yes, and it is to be added that “the consciousness of this infinite longing to be more and more like to the Only Perfect One seems to be the essence of a good conscience." It is just these deep redemptive needs which the Spirit of Jesus is here to satisfy, to meet in most real and actual manner. But it will be in the case of those whose needs are so real, and who do not empty of real spiritual content such factors as sin, repentance, moral responsibility, and freedom, that such redemptive process will have its most glorious and perfect result. Further, we dare to say that if any one can persuade himself that such perfect issue is capable of attainment through any Hegelian theories of immanence and unity 'twixt God and man, he is simply hugging to THE REDEMPTIVE PROCESS REAL. 467 himself a fond philosophic delusion. Fearless and thoroughgoing must be our method here, and room for dallying there is none. The interests of truth and spiritual reality are before all names, even the greatest. The redemptive vocation and perfect redemption that await man have therefore been more justly and largely presented in our time in their relation to man's free unswerving effort after a spiritual ideal, the redemptive process being crowned at last by recovery of such nature as God designed, and by such spiritual consummation as the angel-song of Faust presents "Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den können wir erlösen." "Who ever strives forward, with unswerving will, In order to the accomplishment of this great end, we are with Pfleiderer when he lately said. that the reverse side of universal sin and need of redemption "is found in the universal ability of all men to be redeemed, which is based on the indestructible essence of the Divine Image that is in every man, and, even amidst the thornthicket of sin and worldly lust, never becomes entirely extinct, but remains the living germ of a better future, of a new man in God." Yet, not as effected by natural power of our own, is the redemptive result in its positive aspects to be conceived, but only as requiring the highest concur rence of the self-surrendered will with the working of the Divine Spirit of Jesus Christ. We may freely allow that the moral senses, inward bearings, hygienic and educational aspects of redemption, have of late been much more properly emphasised, without going so far as those who Pfleiderer, for example in their stress on the ethical conception of education, clearly seem to us to fail at least of setting our self-sacrifice and voluntary obedience in their proper relation of dependence, for their practical power and real spiritual efficacy, on the one sacrifice of Jesus and the virtue that flows therefrom. Even a Schopenhauer has been able to see clearly enough the utter inability of man to achieve his own redemption or work out salvation for himself in such a way. To a Christianly theistic philosophy of religion the revelation of God given in Christianity is not a revelation for revelation's sake or instruction's sake alone, but is also, and much more, a revelation of love, a revelation designed towards redemptive ends. Conditioned as salvation may be by man's will, man is yet unable to restore the rent bond of fellowship betwixt himself and God. If it depended on him alone, he must remain without redemption. God is working unchangeably for the fulfilment of those spiritual ends which are dearer to Him than any other. All things are mediated by Christ, but God is to be thought of as ceaselessly active. As Amiel has said,—“To win THE REDEMPTIVE PROCESS REAL. 469 true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and sustained by supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in order with God and the universe." Yea, and though severe words have been lately written as to what science may say concerning the mediatorial and priestly functions of Jesus, it will possibly be time enough to resolve these into superfluities and profanities when we have become rid of such sense of sin and guilt as are still left to us in this time. We still expect science to proceed in a scientific manner, and include the most real facts and demands of the religious interest and conscience in its consideration. That is to say, in so far as such matters come within the scope of its inquiry at all. We certainly do not believe that the spiritually enlightened consciousness of man will be able to remain long without postulating redemptive provision in a deeper sense than subjective change in the sinner himself merely would imply even in that true sense in which a real change of relation betwixt the sinner and Deity is effected by the strong Son of God; for, unless we are prepared to turn our backs upon the unequivocal testimony of the collective experience of the Christian centuries, nothing can be plainer than that the purest, saintliest, and most spiritually illumined souls still crave, always have craved-in more or less conscious ways-such an objective ground of pardon, such an outer spring |