more clearly brought out the fact that, in face of the pain, malignity, and waste to be seen in nature, the theism of nature alone is insufficient to carry us out of the region of suspense as to the character of the God with Whom we have to do. It has with very great clearness seen that nothing like adequate or full conception of Him is to be drawn from study of nature alone, but also that the real teachings and true tendency of nature are ours only as that study scientifically deepens. It has more unequivocally declared its belief that religion has had its origin in no mere goings forth of man's finite faculty, but in the upbursting in the soil of the human and finite, of the life and energy of the Infinite Essence-the soul and substance of all things though we are inclined to claim for it that it has not held this belief in any way that should relax the need of the severest intellectual effort to bring under scrutiny the parts played by these two distinctive elements or factors.

It is the appearance of what man has, by his own inward striving and effort, been able to reach, which has led naturalistic writers to go—whither theistic philosophy has not been able, in a naturalistic sense, to accompany them-so far as to maintain that man's whole religious beliefs can be traced back to their origin in the human heart and mind, and can be brought under rigorous laws of evolution like any other product of man's intelligence. May we not say, however, that the tendency of the most recent

GODWARD ASPECT OF ITS GENESIS.

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and reliable Philosophy of Religion has been towards grounding the genesis of religion, not alone in this unaided effort of man, but also, and more deeply, in God and the approach of His self- revealing Spirit? Has it not been with Baader and all who since claim that never without God can we know either God or truly about Him? Has it not rightly felt the need to maintain the creative presence of the Urgrund before the rise of consciousness? "To desire to know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without Him Who is the prime source of knowledge." But theistic

philosophy has not failed to keep in view, amid the historic growth of religion, the non-progressive and even retrogressive, possibilities in the course of the evolution, just as has been done by science in the organic world.

We shall revert to this point when, in our closing chapter, we come to deal with the bearings of evolution on Immortality. Such monotheistic tendency -if not yet theistic philosophy-as the Hebrews reached, they are now more clearly seen to have arrived at in ways that—not without analogy among the heathen races-were increasingly inward, and proceeded from the commandment of the moral imperative in deepened ethical directions. But theism has not forgotten that these historical beginnings, in which we see the rise of the recognition of the immanence of God in the conscience, were antedated by the image of God, in which man had been made.

We are thus brought to allude to those relations of religion and morality which have received so great attention in our time. Theistic inquiry has not failed deeply to recognise the personal and responsible relation we in morality sustain to the truth, and how objectively real and eternal morality must be in the last and deepest view of things. It has not lowered the place of ethical impulse and energy in man, as part and parcel of his true being. Nor has it been betrayed, by the clamourings of those whose espousal of the cause of ethical thought and feeling takes the form of merging religion in ethics, into forgetting that religion has always more conspicuously stood out as radically distinct-distinct in origin and historic basis—and permanently separable from ethics. This need not hinder our claiming the same ultimate and essential basis—a theistic one for religion and morality. It has surely been better seen that to rob religion of its distinctive character in the interest of ethics would be to misconceive their immemorial relations, and to do ethics no good service. It has surely been learned that, essential as morality is to the religious interest, the moral consciousness cannot be completed save in religion. Morality is but the real manifestation of religion, which is ideal. The ideal law revealed in conscience is fully realised only as religion possesses the soul. Religion is the deepest well of ethical inspiration. It may be said that the moral problem is now more clearly

CRITICISM OF DR JAMES KIDD'S POSITION. 63

seen to have its ultimate ground or metaphysical basis in the Absolute. If we say that morality is the deeper term in the sense explained, we should also claim religion as a term higher and more inspiring. At the same time no exclusively religious basis is to be posited for morality, for, while religion may still be the highest sanction of morality, morality must be clearly maintained to possess independent and, so to speak, extra religious sanctions. There seems no real reason why religion, as the highest development of our consciousness, should not be allowed to rest on the certainties of a moral consciousness which is no more at the mercy of religious beliefs. We have no great fault to find when Pfleiderer places the historic genesis of morality in religion, though where such religion is, morality is not generally wanting. But we certainly regard Dr James Kidd's argument on the subject as strained in the religious interest, and as failing to do scientific justice to all that can be urged on the side of the moral consciousness as, when properly apprehended, setting religion on stronger or securer basis.

Again, looking back upon such theism, or too often pantheism, as Greek and Hindu thought attained, we very plainly perceive it to have been developed in ways that still too little found the Divine resident in the course and constitution of the world—from the speculative side which saw God as immanent in Reason or Thought. For

here, in so far as theistic tendency was reached, we apply the words of Schiller, in his "Gods of Greece," to this ethical Hebrew pre-eminence,

"To enrich, amongst the whole, but One,

All this godlike world was doomed to death."

"Einen zu bereichern unter allen,

Musste diese Götterwelt vergehn."

Hebrew history may have been marked by less of "progressive expansion and orderly development" than that of the Hellenes, but there is no doubt as to the richly developed type of the later ethical monotheism of the Jewish religion. Their theism-with the hope in God and coming destiny which it carried-was at least a thing by itself, and without parallel elsewhere. And their theism. was one in which, as Professor Toy, of Harvard, has rightly claimed, the Divine immanence was accentuated, and small tendency shown to anything like metaphysical dualism. And yet may one not ask whether in Judaism God was not too often conceived as existing beside the world? A one-sided transcendence must plainly be said to have found its way into Judaism, even supposing this did not attach to the Old Testament idea of God itself. Its entrance was the result of Israel's opposition to the confounding of God and the world in the nature religions. The distinctive feature in Israel's development we now clearly perceive to have been the fact of Israel's