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PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.*

On the last page of "Tom Brown at Rugby " there is a vivid and soulful picture of Tom's return, years after his school-days are ended, to the scene of his early scrapes and triumphs. He enters the chapel and once more takes his seat on the lowest bench, in the very place he occupied as a little boy on his first Sunday at Rugby. On the oaken paneling he sees scratched the name of the youngster who sat that day by his side. Upon the great painted window the same shadows of the trees seem dancing that drew his thoughts from service and sermon long ago. The chapel is empty now. No rows of boys fill the benches. The solid English face that burned with such intensity of love for truth and such noble scorn of moral cowardice looks down no longer from the pulpit. "The Doctor," the great Arnold, sleeps now under the stone pavement of the chapel-floor. As Tom Brown meditates, there seem to rise before him the forms of the living and the dead whom he once met there- many of them braver and purer than he, yet scarcely known till now. Now, for the first time, he comprehends his debt to them and to him whose commanding spirit bound them all together. The lofty teachings of that sacred place assume an aspect of ideal grandeur that awes, inspires and rebukes him. Humbled in spirit, and melted to grateful tears, he kneels before the altar, at the grave of Arnold, and renews his vows of consecration to that greater Master to whom Arnold led him.

The day of our return to these haunts of our early learning, brethren of the Alumni, is in like manner a day of mingled sorrow and joy. There is a reverent regard for those at whose feet we sat which makes these scenes sacred to us, though in the presence of the living it finds only a faint expression in words. There is thankfulness of spirit, as we gather from different parts of the great harvest-field and rejoice together over the blessing that has followed our labors. Though the sheaves we bring are not so many nor so large as we had hoped, and "old Adam has proved too strong for young Melancthon," yet there is a confidence within us, which we never could have had without these years of experience, that old Adam is not too strong for Christ. Before us too there rise the faces of some whose work is all complete and whose souls have entered into rest. A little musing, a little forgetfulness of the sights and sounds around us, and

"The forms of the departed
Enter at the open door;

The beloved, the true hearted,
Come to visit us once more.

* An Address before the Alumni of the Rochester Theological Seminary, at their annual meeting, May 20th, 1868, and printed in the Baptist Quarterly, 2: 393 sq.

They, the young and strong, who cherished

Noble longings for the strife,

By the roadside fell and perished,

Weary of the march of life."

In the presence of these memories we are subdued and yet exalted. Our noblest resolves are strengthened by the thought that "such as these have lived and died." But a more than mortal presence is here also. Christ is here the same Christ into whose hands we gave our lives as we went out into the world's great strife. His truth remains the same truth of which we gained glimpses during those early years of preparation, but which now fills a larger arc of our vision. It would seem that the only fitting employment for such an hour as this must be the consideration of some one of those great relations which affect our success as ministers of Christ, and which have to do with the defense and propagation of the faith. I am sure that no preacher who has received his training here will deem me unpractical when I propose as the theme of the evening: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. I ask your attention to three separate divisions of my subject: first, the debt of religion to philosophy; secondly, the dangers of philosophy the dangers of religion also; and thirdly, an impartial philosophy essential to the perfect triumph of religion.

Religion may be viewed in two aspects, according as we look upon its speculative or its practical side. It may exist in the mind of a child, in the shape of reverence, love, and trust towards God, long before the child has given any conscious account to itself of its faith. It may exist, on the other hand, in the mind of the scientific theologian, in the shape of a thoroughly digested doctrinal system, though the system may not yet have melted the heart and run the activities of the life into its moulds. Let it never be forgotten, however, that either one of these sides of religion tends to complete itself by the production of the other. Like positive and negative electricity, the one attracts the other, and without the other cannot be made perfect. The child, for example, grows to maturity of years. Every step of that growing maturity is marked by an increasing habit of introspection. The faith that once seemed intuitive assumes definite form and order to the reason. The truths once held by the intellect in a state of solution are precipitated and crystallized about some centre. As the nebular hypothesis supposes a revolving fire-mist diffused throughout the universe, which condenses as it whirls, until the worlds are thrown off with their harmonious movements and their perfect beauty, so the child's faith, once vague and unreasoning, cannot exist forever in the form of nebula, but turns and seethes and solidifies, until it comes to be a little solar system for interdependence and order. And, in like manner, the student of scientific theology must shut his ears continually to the voices that fill the air of that lofty region of thought, if he would prevent the religion of the intellect from becoming a religion of the heart. Both Chalmers and De Wette were men with whom the scientific interest became at last a practical interest, and who found theology a school-master to lead them to Christ.

Now religion, as a scientific system, rests upon a basis of philosophy. The inevitable tendency of the mind to form to itself a definite and connected scheme of knowledge impels it, not only to bring its religious beliefs into connection and order, but to search for the foundations of those beliefs.

It cannot content itself with theology proper. Besides giving to the truths of revelation a scientific form, it desires to know what are the proofs of revelation, and what are the evidences that a God exists from whom a revelation might come. There can be no peace to the logical understanding until these questions are answered; but the answer to them is impossible without philosophy. For, this is the difference between theology and philosophy : Theology begins with the revelation of God and the consciousness of God, and from these, by a synthetic method, constructs her system. Philosophy, on the other hand, begins with those underlying facts of mind and matter from which we argue the existence of a God, and the authority of revelation. Pursuing an analytic method, it asks whether we have any real knowledge of these facts; it seeks to give an accurate and complete account of these facts; it aims to determine whether these facts warrant the erection upon them of so vast a superstructure. Any one who has traveled in Holland will remember those marvelous cities that have risen from the beds of ancient marshes, supported upon myriads of piles driven into the yielding soil. Many a church is towerless there, because the foundations cannot be trusted to bear a greater weight. Many a wall on private streets is cracked from top to bottom by the settling of the piles beneath it. Many a grain-merchant, with tons of golden corn stored in his granary, passes his days and nights in fear, lest some unusual weight may reveal a weakness in the supports beneath. Let it be whispered that the foundations of the Town-Hall of Amsterdam are sinking, and there is no quieting the town until men of experience have examined those foundations, and found them sure. Now

it is a most serious question whether religion, so far as it is a scientific system, is like one of those immense structures in the Netherlands that are built upon the sand, and may, some years from now, give way and tumble to the ground; or whether, like St. Peter's at Rome, its foundations go down to the everlasting rock. And philosophy is the science of foundations. It busies itself with the examination of the grounds of faith. It seeks to determine whether religion has a safe basis and support in the facts of consciousness.

So

There is still another service which philosophy renders to religion, namely, that of defining and correlating the great primary conceptions of revelation. The ideas of conscience, virtue, liberty, providence, God, are given to us by revelation in the concrete. Philosophy seeks either to analyze them or to show that they are incapable of analysis, and having ascertained their intrinsic significance, aims to set them in reconciliation with the remaining facts of our mental constitution, and with our observation of the world. far as theology argues from the mental constitution of man, indeed, she must get her facts from philosophy. Her doctrine of the will, and her determination of the limits of the human faculties, her application of realism to the unity of the race, and her theory of the true end of being, must all be ultimately given her by the prior philosophy with which she sets out in her investigations. Both in her account of the universe and in her account of God, theology is obliged to combine with the facts of revelation the facts of consciousness, since only through consciousness have we any personal knowledge of either. We stand between God and the world. We must interpret matter by mind, and God by mind, and that interpretation is

impossible without a philosophy of mind. Upon the front of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, Plutarch declares that the two Greek letters Epsilon Iota were inscribed. It was the word "Thou art !"— and this, John Howe, in his preface to the "Living Temple," interprets to be an assertion of the eternal existence of the god. But upon that same temple-front, according to an old tradition, was another inscription,-this namely: "Know thyself!" May it not be that the Puritan divine gave the Epsilon Iota a wrong interpretation, and that both the inscriptions had one common object — to admonish him who entered the sacred fane that all knowledge of divinity must proceed from self-knowledge? "Thou art, O soul! Know then thyself! Understand first thine own existence and attributes, so shalt thou best know the divine, of which thou art the image." So at the gate of the temple of Theology the inscription might well be placed: "Thou art! Know thyself!" for a true knowledge of mind is indispensable to a scientific exposition of religion.

I do not forget, however, that something more than abstract reasoning is needed, to set forth convincingly the debt which religion owes to philosophy. Let me ask you for a moment to look at the matter in the light of history. Have you ever reflected upon the remarkable difference in form that exists between Augustine and Calvin,-between the massy ore of Augustine's theologizing and the stamped and minted coin of Calvin's Institutes? Both held the same great fundamental doctrines, but Calvin has put them into a scientific order and organized them into a comprehensive system which would have been utterly impossible in Augustine's day. No one can fail to see that between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries theology has made a great advance in arrangement, in compactness, in logical force, in practical power. And to what shall we attribute this advance? To nothing more or less than the influence of that Aristotle, whom Luther called "an accursed, mischief-making heathen." It was the study of Aristotle which first made theology a science, and rendered possible a Calvin. That mighty movement of the human mind which we call Scholasticism, with its noble attempts to define and prove every doctrine of religion on principles of reason, and its rich results for modern philosophical theology, was a child of Aristotle's logic. By it, the matter of theology, received from Augustine, and full therefore of his Platonic realism and soaring contempt for matter, was worked up into new shape for the uses of the coming times. Thus both the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, one at heart though different in method, have disciplined the forces of theology and made them available. And their influence is felt the moment we compare Augustine, in whose works the truths of religion lie scattered about like raw recruits bivouacked for the night, with Calvin, who draws up those same truths like soldiers in line of battle, ready on the instant for attack or defense. Men may decry philosophy, but it is only by ignoring what philosophy has wrought. Still those sceptred kings of abstract thought control the minds of living men, and rule us from their Take away the influence of Plato and Aristotle, and you put a scientific theology where John of Damascus found it eleven centuries ago. There is little time to mention the services of modern philosophical thinkers to religion. Who can overestimate the magnificent contribution to our knowledge of the ethical nature of God which Bishop Butler made, when

urns.

he propounded and demonstrated his celebrated doctrine of the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man? What but the works of Coleridge, splendid even in their incompleteness, rescued the theological thinking of England from the slough of utilitarianism and materialism into which Locke and Paley had led it, and by setting it upon the rock of a true spiritual philosophy, gave it a foothold and vantage-ground from which to contend against the incoming flood of German pantheism? The mere mention of these facts is sufficient to show that there is no possibility of understanding the history of theology without a previous study of philosophy. Nor is the effect of philosophy confined simply to the modification of systems of abstract theology. Whatever affects theology comes ultimately to affect the practical experience and working of Christianity. Through its influence on theology, philosophy exercises the most potent influence upon the whole religious life of the church. I find Bancroft, himself no theologian, depicting in these words the influence of Jonathan Edwards' speculations with regard to the nature of virtue and the freedom of the will. "Edwards," he says, "makes a turning-point in the intellectual, or as he would have called it, the spiritual, history of New England. The faith condensed in the symbols of Calvinism demanded to be subjected to free inquiry, and 'without dodging, shuffling, hiding, or turning the back,' to be shown to be in harmony with reason and common sense. In the age following, the influence of Edwards is discernible upon every leading mind. He that will trace the transition of Calvinism from a haughty self-assertion of the doctrine of election against the pride of oppression, to its adoption of love as the central point of its view of creation and the duty of the created, he that will know the workings of the mind of New England in the middle of the last century, and the throbbings of its heart, must give his days and nights to the study of Jonathan Edwards." Thus a single philosophic mind may change for the better the style of religion for a whole generation, or a whole century. The number influenced consciously and directly by him may be few; the great mass of men who come after him, may be quite unaware of his existence; still his power over them is no less sure. There is a slow movement of the glaciers in the Alps by which the snow that fell years ago upon the summit of Mont Blanc or the Jungfrau comes down at last in the shape of solid ice to the valleys far below, and by its melting furnishes a refreshing draught to the tired laborer in the meadows as he throws himself upon the earth for his noonday meal. It is so with the speculations of abstract thinkers. Conceived upon the very mountain-tops of thought they may be, yet by a law as irresistible as that of gravitation they find their way downwards, through subordinate interpreters, and by a thousand channels of the printed page and the spoken word, until they reach the homes and hearts of common men.

I have thus indicated the debt which religion, both as a system and a life, owes to philosophy. It cannot have escaped your notice that the same weapon which has struck such stout blows for Christianity has often been used against her. And this brings me to the second division of my theme, namely this: The dangers of philosophy are the dangers also of religion. I say the dangers of philosophy, for I cannot conceal from myself the fact that through the whole history of speculation there has been a constant tendency to one or the other of two extremes. The great principle, which Robertson so

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