Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany. He set out for the priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages and history. He made long sojourn in the East. He spoke of Palestine as having been to him a fifth Gospel. He became Professor of Hebrew in the College de France. He was suspended from his office in 1863, and permitted to read again only in 1871. He had formally separated himself from the Roman Church in 1845. He was a member of the Academy. His diction is unsurpassed. He died in 1894. In his own phrase, he sought to bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people. He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes. He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than the scant records acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.

Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate. This was the fact which, by all these biographies of Jesus, was brought home to men's minds. Keim's book, the most learned of those mentioned, is hardly more than a vast collection of material for the history of Jesus' age, which has now been largely superseded by Schuerer's Geschichte des Judischen Volkes im Zeitalier Jesu Christi, 2 Bde., 1886-1890. There have been again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the great problem. Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the eighties lives of Jesus which, especially the former, are noteworthy in their treatment of the critical material. They do not for a moment face the question of the person of Christ. The same remark might be made, almost without exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in England and America. The best books of recent years are Albert Reville's Jesus de Nazareth, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's Leben Jesu, 1901. So great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic recognition of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here rendered, in a calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling of his theme. Meantime new questions have arisen, questions of the relation of Jesus to Messianism, like those touched upon by Wrede in his Das Messias Geheimniss in den Evangelien, 1901, and questions as to the eschatological trait in Jesus' own teaching. Schweitzer's book, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung, 1906, not merely sets forth this deeply interesting chapter in the history of the thought of modern men, but has also serious interpretative value in itself. For English readers Sanday's Life of Christ in Recent Research, 1907, follows the descriptive aspect, at least, of the same purpose with Schweitzer's book, covering, however, only the last twenty years.

It is characteristic that Ritschl, notwithstanding his emphasis upon the historical Jesus, asserted the impossibility of a biography of Jesus. The understanding of Jesus is through faith. For Wrede, on the other hand, such a biography is impossible because of the nature of our sources. Not alone are they scant, but they are not biographical. They are apologetic, propagandist, interested in everything except those problems which a biographer must raise. The last few years have even conjured up the question whether Jesus ever lived. One may say with all simplicity, that the question has, of course, as much rightfulness as has any other question any man could raise. The somewhat extended discussion has, however, done nothing to make evident how it could arise, save in minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in historical research. The conditions which beset us when we ask for a biography of Jesus that shall answer scientific requirement are not essentially different from those which meet us in the case of any other personage equally remote in point of time, and equally woven about—if any such have been—by the love and devotion of men. Bousset's little book, Was Wissen wir von Jesus? 1904, convinces a quiet mind that we know a good deal. Qualities in the personality of Jesus obviously worked in transcendent measure to call out devotion. No understanding of history is adequate which has no place for the unfathomed in personality. Exactly because we ourselves share this devotion, we could earnestly wish that the situation as to the biography of Jesus were other than it is.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

We have spoken thus far as if the whole biblical-critical problem had been that of the New Testament. In reality the same impulses which had opened up that question to the minds of men had set them working upon the problem of the Old Testament as well. We have seen how the Christians made for themselves a canon of the New Testament. By the force of that conception of the canon, and through the belief that, almost in a literal sense, God was the author of the whole book, the obvious differences among the writings had been obscured. Men forgot the evolution through which the writings had passed. The same thing had happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the rabbis before the Christian movement. When the Christians took over the Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation of the old covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament became a Christian book. Not merely were the Christian facts prophesied in the Old Testament, but its doctrines also were implied. Almost down to modern times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove doctrine and sustain theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference. What we have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic Puritan divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.

The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the one which we have described in reference to the New. Of course, elder scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman Catholic scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the true relation of Judaism to Christianity.

In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss' Leben Jesu saw the light, Wilhelm Vatke published his Religion des Alten Testaments. Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in Berlin in 1830, was professor extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full professorship. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work had caused. Reuss in Strassburg was working on the same lines, but published the main body of his results much later.

The truth for which these scholars and others like them argued, worked its way slowly by force of its own merit. Perhaps it was due to this fact that the development of Old Testament critical views was subject to a fluctuation less marked than that which characterised the case of the New Testament. It is not necessary to describe the earlier stages of the discussion in Vatke's own terms. To his honour be it said that the views which he thus early enunciated were in no small degree identical with those which were in masterful fashion substantiated in Holland by Kuenen about 1870, in Germany by Wellhausen after 1878, and made known to English readers by Robertson Smith In 1881.

Budde has shown in his Kanon des Alten Testaments, 1900, that the Old Testament which lies before us finished and complete, assumed its present form only as the result of the growth of several centuries. At the beginning of this process of the canonisation stands that strange event, the sudden appearance of a holy book of the law under King Josiah, in 621 B.C. The end of the process, through the decisions of the scribes, falls after the destruction of Jerusalem, possibly even in the second century. Lagarde seems to have proved that the rabbis of the second century succeeded in destroying all copies of the Scripture which differed from the standard then set up. This state of things has enormously increased a difficulty which was already great enough, that of the detection and separation of the various elements of which many of the books in this ancient literature are made up. Certain books of the New Testament also present the problem of the discrimination of elements of different ages, which have been wrought together into the documents as we now have them, in a way that almost defies our skill to disengage. The synoptic Gospels are, of course, the great example. The book of the Acts presents a problem of the same kind. But the Pentateuch, or rather Hexateuch, the historical books in less degree, the writings even of some of the prophets, the codes which formulate the law and ritual, are composites which have been whole centuries in the making and remaking. There was no such thing as right of authorship in ancient Israel, little of it in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popular or priestly property. Histories were newly narrated, laws enlarged and rearranged, prophecies attributed to conspicuous persons. All this took place not in deliberate intention to pervert historic truth, but because there was no interest in historic truth and no conception of it. The rewriting of a nation's history from the point of view of its priesthood bore, to the ancient Israelite, beyond question, an aspect altogether different from that which the same transaction would bear to us. The difficulty of the separation of these materials, great in any case, is enhanced by the fact alluded to, that we have none but internal evidence. The success of the achievement, and the unanimity attained with reference to the most significant questions, is one of the marvels of the life of learning of our age.

In the Jewish tradition it had been assumed that the Mosaic law was written down in the wilderness. Then, in the times of the Judges and of the Kings, the historical books took shape, with David's Psalms and the wise words of Solomon. At the end of the period of the Kings we have the prophetic literature and finally Ezra and Nehemiah. De Wette had disputed this order, but Wellhausen in his Prolegomena zur Geshichte Israels, 1883, may be said to have proved that this view was no longer tenable. Men ask, could the law, or even any greater part of it, have been given to nomads in the wilderness? Do not all parts of it assume a settled state of society and an agricultural life? Do the historical books from Judges to the II. Kings know anything about the law? Are the practices of worship which they imply consonant with the supposition that the law was in force? How is it that that law appears both under Josiah and again under Ezra, as something new, thus far unknown, and yet as ruling the religious life of the people from that day forth? It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that only after Josiah's reformation, more completely after the restoration under Ezra, did the religion of the law exist. The centralisation of worship at one point, such as the book of Deuteronomy demands, seems to have been the thing achieved by the reform under Josiah. The establishment of the priestly hierarchy such as the code ordains was the issue of the religious revolution wrought in Ezra's time. To put it differently, the so-called Book of the Covenant, the nucleus of the law-giving, itself implies the multiplicity of the places of worship. Deuteronomy demands the centralisation of the worship as something which is yet to take place. The priestly Code declares that the limitation of worship to one place was a fact already in the time of the journeys of Israel in the wilderness. It is assumed that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared the almost universal worship of the stars. Moses may indeed have concluded a covenant between his people and Jahve, their God, hallowing the judicial and moral life of the people, bringing these into relation to the divine will. Jahve was a holy God whose will was to guide the people coming up out of the degradation of nature-worship. That part of the people held to the old nature-worship is evident in the time of Elijah. The history of Israel is not that of defection from a pure revelation. It is the history of a gradual attainment of purer revelation, of enlargement in the application of it, of discovery of new principles contained in it. It is the history also of the decline of spiritual religion. The zeal of the prophets against the ceremonial worship shows that. Their protest reveals at that early date the beginning of that antithesis which had become so sharp in Jesus' time.

This determination of the relative positions of law and prophets was the first step in the reconstruction of the history, both of the nation of Israel and of its literature. At the beginning, as in every literature, are songs of war and victory, of praise and grief, hymns, even riddles and phrases of magic. Everywhere poetry precedes prose. Then come myths relating to the worship and tales of the fathers and heroes. Elements of both these sorts are embedded in the simple chronicles which began now to be written, primitive historical works, such as those of the Jahvist and Elohist, of the narrators of the deeds of the judges and of David and of Saul. Perhaps at this point belong the earliest attempts at fixing the tradition of family and clan rights, and of the regulation of personal conduct, as in the Book of the Covenant. Then comes the great outburst of the prophetic spirit, the preaching of an age of great religious revival. Then follows the law, with its minute regulation of all details of life upon which would depend the favour of the God who had brought punishment upon the people in the exile. The prophecy runs on into apocalyptic like that of the book of Daniel. The contact with the outside world makes possible a phase of literature such as that to which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The deepening of the inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms, some of which are credibly assigned to a period so late as that of the Maccabees.

In this which has been said of the literature we have the clue also for the reconstruction of the nation's history. The naive assumption in the writing of all history had once been that one must begin with the beginning. But to Wellhausen, Stade, Eduard Meyer and Kittel and Cornill, it has been clear that the history of the earliest times is the most uncertain. It is the least adapted to furnish a secure point of departure for historical inquiry. There exist for it usually no contemporary authorities, or only such as are of problematical worth. This earliest period constitutes a problem, the solution of which, so far as any solution is possible, can be hoped for only through approach from the side of ascertained facts. We must start from a period which is historically known. For the history of the Hebrews, this is the time of the first prophets of whom we have written records, or from whom we have written prophecies. We get from these, as also from the earliest direct attempts at history writing, only that conception of Israel's pre-historic life which was entertained in prophetic circles in the eighth century. We learn the heroic legends in the interpretation which the prophets put upon them. We have still to seek to interpret them for ourselves. We must begin in the middle and work both backward and forward. Such a view of the history of Israel affords every opportunity for the connecting of the history and religion of Israel with those of the other Semite stocks. Some of these have in recent years been discovered to offer extraordinary parallels to that which the Old Testament relates.

THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE

When speaking of Baur's contribution to New Testament criticism, we alluded to his historical works. He was in a distinct sense a reformer of the method of the writing of church history. To us the notions of the historical and of that which is genetic are identical. Of course, naive religious chronicles do not meet that test. A glance at the histories produced by the age of rationalism will show that these also fall short of it. The perception of the relativity of institutions like the papacy is here wholly wanting. Men and things are brought summarily to the bar of the wisdom of the author's year of grace. They are approved or condemned by this criterion. For Baur, all things had come to pass in the process of the great life of the world. There must have been a rationale of their becoming. It is for the historian with sympathy and imagination to find out what their inherent reason was. One other thing distinguishes Baur as church historian from his predecessors. He realised that before one can delineate one must investigate. One must go to the sources. One must estimate the value of those sources. One must have ground in the sources for every judgment. Baur was himself a great investigator. Yet the movement for the investigation of the sources of biblical and ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has gone on to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the foundations of Baur's own work as precarious, the results at which he arrived as unwarranted. New documents have come to light since his day. Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of learning as to the literature of the Christian origins has been vastly changed. There is still another other thing to say concerning Baur. He was a Hegelian. He has the disposition always to interpret the movements of the religious spirit in the sense of philosophical ideas. He frankly says that without speculation every historical investigation remains but a play upon the surface of things. Baur's fault was that in his search for, or rather in his confident discovery of, the great connecting forces of history, the biographical element, the significance of personality, threatened altogether to disappear. The force in the history was the absolute, the immanent divine will. The method everywhere was that of advance by contrasts and antagonisms. One gets an impression, for example, that the Nicene dogma became what it did by the might of the idea, that it could not by any possibility have had any other issue.

The foil to much of this in Baur's own age was represented in the work of Neander, a converted Jew, professor of church history in Berlin, who exerted great influence upon a generation of English and American scholars. He was not an investigator of sources. He had no talent for the task. He was a delineator, one of the last of the great painters of history, if one may so describe the type. He had imagination, sympathy, a devout spirit. His great trait was his insight into personality. He wrote history with the biographical interest. He almost resolves history into a series of biographical types. He has too little sense for the connexion of things, for the laws of the evolution of the religious spirit. The great dramatic elements tend to disappear behind the emotions of individuals. The old delineators were before the age of investigation. Since that impulse became masterful, some historians have been completely absorbed in the effort to make contribution to this investigation. Others, with a sense of the impossibility of mastering the results of investigation in all fields, have lost the zeal for the writing of church history on a great scale. They have contented themselves with producing monographs upon some particular subject, in which, at the most, they may hope to embody all that is known as to some specific question.

We spoke above of the new conception of the relation of the canonical literature of the New Testament to the extracanonical. We alluded to the new sense of the continuity of the history of the apostolic churches with that of the Church of the succeeding age. The influence of these ideas has been to set all problems here involved in a new light. Until 1886 it might have been said with truth that we had no good history of the apostolic age. In that year Weizsaecker's book, Das Apostolische Zeitalter der Christlichen Kirche, admirably filled the place. A part of the problem of the historian of the apostolic age is difficult for the same reason which was given when we were speaking of the biography of Jesus. Our materials are inadequate. First with the beginning of the activities of Paul have we sources of the first rank. The relation of statements in the Pauline letters to data in the book of the Acts was one of the earliest problems which the Tuebingen school set itself. An attempt to write the biography of Paul reminds us sharply of our limitations. We know almost nothing of Paul prior to his conversion, or subsequent to the enigmatical breaking off of the account of the beginnings of his work at Rome. Harnack's Mission und Ausbreitung des Christenthums, 1902 (translated, Moffatt, 1908), takes up the work of Paul's successors in that cardinal activity. It offers, strange as it may seem, the first discussion of the dissemination of Christianity which has dealt adequately with the sources. It gives also a picture of the world into which the Christian movement went. It emphasises anew the truth which has for a generation past grown in men's apprehension that there is no possibility of understanding Christianity, except against the background of the religious life and thought of the world into which it came. Christianity had vital relation, at every step of its progress, to the religious movements and impulses of the ancient world, especially in those centres of civilisation which Paul singled out for his endeavour and which remained the centres of the Christian growth. It was an age which has often been summarily described as corrupt. Despite its corruption, or possibly because it was corrupt, it gives evidence, however, of religious stirring, of strong ethical reaction, of spiritual endeavour rarely paralleled. In the Roman Empire everything travelled. Religions travelled. In the centres of civilisation there was scarcely a faith of mankind which had not its votaries.

It was an age of religious syncretism, of hospitality to diverse religious ideas, of the commingling of those ideas. These things facilitated the progress of Christianity. They made certain that if the Christian movement had in it the divine vitality which men claimed, it would one day conquer the world. Equally, they made certain that, as the very condition of this conquest, Christianity would be itself transformed. This it is which has happened in the evolution of Christianity from its very earliest stages and in all phases of its life. Of any given rite, opinion or institution, of the many which have passed for almost two millenniums unchallenged under the Christian name, men about us are now asking: But how much of it is Christian? In what measure have we to think of it as derived from some other source, and representing the accommodation and assimilation of Christianity to its environment in process of its work? What is Christianity? Not unnaturally the ancient Church looked with satisfaction upon the great change which passed over Christianity when Constantine suddenly made that which had been the faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the religion of the world. The Fathers can have thought thus only because their minds rested upon that which was outward and spectacular. Not unnaturally the metamorphosis in the inward nature of Christianity which had taken place a century and a quarter earlier was hidden from their eyes. In truth, by that earlier and subtler transformation Christianity had passed permanently beyond the stage in which it had been preponderantly a moral and spiritual enthusiasm, with its centre and authority in the person of Jesus. It became a system and an institution, with a canon of New Testament Scripture, a monarchical organisation and a rule of faith which was formulated in the Apostles' Creed.

To Baur the truth as to the conflict of Paul with the Judaisers had meant much. He thought, therefore, with reference to the rise of priesthood and ritual among the Christians, to the emphasis on Scripture in the fashion of the scribes, to the insistence upon rules and dogmas after the manner of the Pharisees, that they were but the evidence of the decline and defeat of Paul's free spirit and of the resurgence of Judaism in Christianity. He sought to explain the rise of the episcopal organisation by the example of the synagogue. Ritschl in his Entstehung der alt-catholischen Kirche, 1857, had seen that Baur's theory could not be true. Christianity did not fall back into Judaism. It went forward to embrace the Hellenic and Roman world. The institutions, dogmas, practices of that which, after A.D. 200, may with propriety be called the Catholic Church, are the fruit of that embrace. There was here a falling off from primitive and spiritual Christianity. But it was not a falling back into Judaism. There were priests and scribes and Pharisees with other names elsewhere. The phenomenon of the waning of the original enthusiasm of a period of religious revelation has been a frequent one. Christianity on a grand scale illustrated this phenomenon anew. Harnack has elaborated this thesis with unexampled brilliancy and power. He has supported it with a learning in which he has no rival and with a religious interest which not even hostile critics would deny. The phrase, 'the Hellenisation of Christianity,' might almost be taken as the motto of the work to which he owes his fame.

HARNACK

Adolf Harnack was born in 1851 in Dorpat, in one of the Baltic provinces of Russia. His father, Theodosius Harnack, was professor of pastoral theology in the University of Dorpat. Harnack studied in Leipzig and began to teach there in 1874. He was called to the chair of church history in Giessen in 1879. In 1886 he removed to Marburg and in 1889 to Berlin. Harnack's earlier published work was almost entirely in the field of the study of the sources and materials of early church history. His first book, published in 1873, was an inquiry as to the sources for the history of Gnosticism. His Patrum Apostolicorum Opera, 1876, prepared by him jointly with von Gehhardt and Zahn, was in a way only a forecast of the great collection, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschickte der alt-christlichen Literatur, begun in 1882, upon which numbers of scholars have worked together with him. The collection has already more than thirty-five volumes. In his own two works, Die Geschichte der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 1893, and Die Chronologie der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 1897, are deposited the results of his reflexion on the mass of this material. His Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament, 1906, etc., should not be overlooked. He has had the good fortune to be among those who have discovered manuscripts of importance. He has had to do with the Prussian Academy's edition of the Greek Fathers. A list of his published works, which was prepared in connexion with the celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 1911, bears witness to his amazing diligence and fertility. He was for thirty-five years associated with Schurer in the publication of the Theologische Literaturzeitung. He has filled important posts in the Church and under the government. To this must be added an activity as a teacher which has placed a whole generation of students from every portion of the world under undying obligation. One speaks with reserve of the living, but surely no man of our generation has done more to make the history of which we write.

Harnack's epoch-making work was his Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 1886-88, fourth edition, 1910. The book met, almost from the moment of its appearance, with the realisation of the magnitude of that which had been achieved. It rested upon a fresh and independent study of the sources. It departed from the mechanism which had made the old treatises upon the history of doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to the full how many influences other than theological had had part in the development of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and practice, and of external circumstances on the history of thought. His history of doctrine has thus a breadth and human quality never before attained. Philosophy, worship, morals, the development of Church government and of the canon, the common interests and passions of the age and those of the individual participants, are all made tributary to his delineation.

Harnack cannot share Baur's view that the triumph of the Logos-Christology at Nicaea and Chalcedon was inevitable. A certain historic naturalness of the movement he would concede, the world on which Christianity entered being what it was. He is aware, however, that many elements other than Christian have entered into the development. He has phrased his apprehension thus. That Hellenisation of Christianity which Gnosticism represented, and against which, in this, its acute form, the Church contended was, after all, the same thing which, by slower process and more unconsciously, befell the Church itself. That pure moral enthusiasm and inspiration which had been the gist of the Christian movement, in its endeavour to appropriate the world, had been appropriated by the world in far greater measure than its adherents knew. It had taken up its mission to change the world. It had dreamed that while changing the world it had itself remained unchanged. The world was changed, the world of life, of feeling and of thought. But Christianity was also changed. It had conquered the world. It had no perception of the fact that it illustrated the old law that the conquered give laws to the conquerors. It had fused the ancient culture with the flame of its inspiration. It did not appreciate the degree in which the elements of that ancient culture now coloured its far-shining flame. It had been a maker of history. Meantime it had been unmade and remade by its own history. It confidently carried back its canon, dogma, organisation, to Christ and the apostles. It did not realise that the very fact that it could find these things natural and declare them ancient, proved with conclusiveness that it had itself departed from the standard of Christ and the apostles. It esteemed that these were its defences against the world. It little dreamed that they were, by their very existence, the evidence of the fact that the Church had not defended itself against the world. Its dogma was the Hellenisation of its thought. Its organisation was the Romanising of its life. Its canon and ritual were the externalising, and conventionalising of its spirit and enthusiasm. These are positive and constructive statements of Harnack's main position.

When, however, they are turned about and stated negatively, these statements all convey, more or less, the impression that the advance of Christianity had been its destruction, and the evolution of dogma had been a defection from Christ. This is the aspect of the contention which gave hostile critics opportunity to say that we have before us the history of the loss of Christianity. Harnack himself has many sentences which superficially will bear that construction. Hatch had said in his brilliant book, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1891, that the domestication of Greek philosophy in the Church signified a defection from the Sermon on the Mount. The centre of gravity of the Gospel was changed from life to doctrine, from morals to metaphysics, from goodness to orthodoxy. The change was portentous. The aspect of pessimism is, however, removed when one recognises the inevitableness of some such process, if Christianity was ever to wield an influence in the world at all. Again, one must consider that the process of the recovery of pure Christianity must begin at exactly this point, namely, with the recognition of how much in current Christianity is extraneous. It must begin with the sloughing off of these extraneous elements, with the recovery of the sense for that which original Christianity was. Such a recovery would be the setting free again of the power of the religion itself.

The constant touchstone and point of reference for every stage of the history of the Church must be the gospel of Jesus. But what was the gospel of Jesus? In what way did the very earliest Christians apprehend that gospel? This question is far more difficult for us to answer than it was for those to whom the New Testament was a closed body of literature, externally differentiated from all other, and with a miraculous inspiration extending uniformly to every phrase in any book. These men would have said that they had but to find the proper combination of the sacred phrases. But we acknowledge that the central inspiration was the personality of Jesus. The books possess this inspiration in varying degree. Certain of the books have distinctly begun the fusion of Christian with other elements. They themselves represent the first stages of the history of doctrine. We acknowledge that those utterances of Jesus which have been preserved for us, shaped themselves by the antitheses in which Jesus stood. There is much about them that is palpably incidental, practically relevant and unquestionably only relative. In a large sense, much of the meaning of the gospel has to be gathered out of the evidence of the operation of its spirit in subsequent ages of the Christian Church, and from remoter aspects of the influence of Jesus on the world. Thus the very conception of the gospel of Jesus becomes inevitably more or less subjective. It becomes an ideal construction. The identification of this ideal with the original gospel proclamation becomes precarious. We seem to move in a circle. We derive the ideal from the history, and then judge the history by the ideal.

Is there any escape from this situation, short of the return to the authority of Church or Scripture in the ancient sense? Furthermore, even the men to whom the gospel was in the strictest sense a letter, identified the gospel with their own private interpretation of this letter. Certainly the followers of Ritschl who will acknowledge no traits of the gospel save those of which they find direct witness in the Gospels, thus ignore that the Gospels are themselves interpretations. This undue stress upon the documents which we are fortunate enough to possess, makes us forget the limitations of these documents. We tend thus to exaggerate that which must be only incidental, as, for example, the Jewish element, in the teaching of Jesus. We thus underrate phases of Jesus' teaching which, no doubt, a man like Paul would have apprehended better than did the evangelists themselves. In truth, in Harnack's own delineation of the teaching of Jesus, those elements of it which found their way to expression in Paul, or again in the fourth Gospel, are rather underrated than overstated, in the author's anxiety to exclude elements which are acknowledged to be interpretative in their nature. We are driven, in some measure, to seek to find out what the gospel was from the way in which the earliest Christians took it up. We return ever afresh to questions nearly unanswerable from the materials at hand. What was the central principle in the shaping of the earliest stages of the new community, both as to its thought and life? Was it the longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the striving after the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it the faith of the Messiah, the reverence for the Messiah, directed to the person of Jesus? What word dominated the preaching? Was it that the Kingdom of God was near, that the Son of Man would come? Or was it that in Jesus Messiah has come? What was the demand upon the hearer? Was it, Repent, or was it, Believe on the Lord Jesus, or was it both, and which had the greater emphasis? Was the name of Jesus used in the formulas of worship before the time of Paul? What do we know about prayer in the name of Jesus, or baptism in that name, or miracles in the name of Jesus, or of the Lord's Supper and the conception of the Lord as present with his disciples in the rite? Was this revering of Jesus, which was fast moving toward a worship of him, the inner motive force of the whole construction of the dogma of his person and of the trinity?

In the second volume Harnack treats of the development primarily of the Christological and trinitarian dogma, from the fourth to the seventh centuries. The dramatic interest of the narrative exceeds anything which has been written on this theme. A debate which to most modern men is remote and abstruse almost to the point of unintelligibility, and of which many of the external aspects are disheartening in the extreme, is here brought before us in something of the reasonableness which it must have had for those who took part in it. Tertullian shaped the problem and established the nomenclature for the Christological solution which the Orient two hundred years later made its own. It was he who, from the point of view of the Jurist, rather than of the philosopher, gave the words 'person' and 'substance,' which continually occur in this discussion, the meaning which in the Nicene Creed they bear. Most brilliant is Harnack's characterisation of Arius and Athanasius. In Arius the notion of the Son of God is altogether done away. Only the name remains. The victory of Arianism would have resolved Christianity into cosmology and formal ethics. It would have destroyed it as religion. Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce controversy had drifted cannot be better illustrated than by one undisputed fact. Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character as a religion of the living communion of God with man, is yet the theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared. The purpose of the redemption is to bring men into community of life with God. But Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and from above, of a divine nature. He subordinated everything to this idea. The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His incarnation, his manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous endowment. The Christ, who was God, lifts men up to godhood. They become God. These phrases are of course capable of ethical and intelligible meaning. The development of the doctrine, however, threw the emphasis upon the metaphysical and miraculous aspects of the work. It gloried in the fact that the presence of divine and human, two natures in one person forever, was unintelligible. In the end it came to pass that the enthusiastic assent to that which defied explanation became the very mark of a humble and submissive faith. One reads the so-called Athanasian Creed, and hears the ring of its determination to exact assent. It had long since been clear to these Catholics and churchmen that, with the mere authority of Scripture, it was not possible to defend Christianity against the heretics. The heresies read their heresies out of the Bible. The orthodox read orthodoxy from the same page. Marcion had proved that, in the very days when the canon took its shape. There must be an authority to define the interpretation of the Scripture. Those who would share the benefits which the Church dispensed must assent unconditionally to the terms of membership.

All these questions were veiled for the early Christians behind the question of the kind of Christ in whom their hearts believed. With all that we have said about the reprehensible admixture of the metaphysical element in the dogma, with all the accusation which we bring concerning acute or gradual Hellenisation, secularisation and defection from the Christ, we ought not to hide from ourselves that in this gigantic struggle there were real religious interests at stake, and that for the men of both parties. Dimly, or perhaps vividly, the man of either party felt that the conception of the Christ which he was fighting for was congruous with the conception of religion which he had, or felt that he must have. It is this religious issue, everywhere present, which gives dignity to a struggle which otherwise does often sadly lack it. There are two religious views of the person of Christ which have stood, from the beginning, the one over against the other.[5] The one saw in Jesus of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special calling as the Messianic King, endued with special powers, lifted above all men ever known, yet a man, completely subject to God in faith, obedience and prayer. This view is surely sustained by many of Jesus' own words and deeds. It shines through the testimony of the men who followed him. Even the belief in his resurrection and his second coming did not altogether do away with it. The other view saw in him a new God who, descending from God, brought mysterious powers for the redemption of mankind into the world, and after short obscuring of his glory, returned to the abode of God, where he had been before. From this belief come all the hymns and prayers to Jesus as to God, all miracles and exorcisms in his name.

[Footnote 5: Wernle, Einfzhrung in das Theologische Studium, 1908, v. 204.]

In the long run, the simpler view did not maintain itself. If false gods and demons were expelled, it was the God Jesus who expelled them. The more modest faith believed that in the man Jesus, being such an one as he was, men had received the greatest gift which the love of God had to bestow. In turn the believer felt the assurance that he also was a child of God, and in the spirit of Jesus was to realise that sonship. Syncretist religions suggested other thoughts. We see that already even in the synoptic tradition the calling upon the name of Jesus had found place. One wonders whether that first apprehension ever stood alone in its purity. The Gentile Churches founded by Paul, at all events, had no such simple trust. Equally, the second form of faith seems never to have been able to stand alone in its peculiar quality. Some of the gnostic sects had it. Marcion again is our example. The new God Jesus had nothing to do with the cruel God of the Old Testament. He supplanted the old God and became the only God. In the Church the new God, come down from heaven, must be set in relation with the long-known God of Israel. No less, must he stand in relation to the simple hero of the Gospels with his human traits. The problem of theological reflexion was to find the right middle course, to keep the divine Christ in harmony, on the one side, with monotheism, and on the other, with the picture which the Gospels gave. Belief knew nothing of these contradictions. The same simple soul thanked God for Jesus with his sorrows and his sympathy, as man's guide and helper, and again prayed to Jesus because he seemed too wonderful to be a man. The same kind of faith achieves the same wondering and touching combination to-day, after two thousand years. With thought comes trouble. Reflexion wears itself out upon the insoluble difficulty, the impossible combination, the flat contradiction, which the two views present, so soon as they are clearly seen.

In the earliest Christian writings the fruit of this reflexion lies before us in this form:—The Creator of worlds, the mediator, the lord of angels and demons, the Logos which was God and is our Saviour, was yet a humble son of man, undergoing suffering and death, having laid aside his divine glory. This picture is made with materials which the canonical writings themselves afford. Theological study had henceforth nothing to do but to avoid extremes and seek to make this image, which reflexion upon two polar opposites had yielded, as nearly thinkable as possible. It has been said that the trinitarian doctrine is not in the New Testament, that it was later elaborated by a different kind of mind. This is not true. But the inference is precisely the contrary of that which defenders of the dogma would formerly have drawn from this concession. The same kind of mind, or rather the same two kinds of mind, are at work in the New Testament. Both of the religious elements above suggested are in the Gospels and Epistles. The New Testament presents attempts at their combination. Either form may be found in the literature of the later age. If we ask ourselves, What is that in Jesus which gives us the sense of redemption, surely we should answer, It is his glad and confident resting in the love of God the Father. It is his courage, his faith in men, which becomes our faith in ourselves. It is his wonderful mingling of purity and love of righteousness with love of those who have sinned. You may find this in the ancient literature, as the Fathers describe that to which their souls cling. But this is not the point of view from which the dogma is organised. The Nicene Christology is not to be understood from this approach. The cry of a dying civilisation after power and light and life, the feeling that these might come to it, streaming down as it were, from above, as a physical, a mechanical, a magical deliverance, this is the frame within which is set what is here said of the help and redemption wrought by Christ. The resurrection and the incarnation are the points at which this streaming in of the divine light and power upon a darkened world is felt.

That religion seemed the highest, that interpretation of Christianity the truest, the absolute one, which could boast that it possessed the power of the Almighty through his physical union with men. He who contended that Jesus was God, contended therewith for a power which could come upon men and make them in some sense one with God. This is the view which has been almost exclusively held in the Greek Church. It is the view which has run under and through and around the other conception in the Roman and Protestant Churches. The sense that salvation is inward, moral, spiritual, has rarely indeed been absent from Christendom. It would be preposterous to allege that it had. Yet this sense has been overlaid and underrun and shot through with that other and disparate idea of salvation, as of a pure bestowment, something achieved apart from us, or, if one may so say, some alteration of ourselves upon other than moral and spiritual terms. The conception of the person Christ shows the same uncertainty. Or rather, with a given view of the nature of religion and salvation, the corresponding view of Christ is certain. In the age-long and world-wide contest over the trinitarian formula, with all that is saddening in the struggle and all that was misleading in the issue, it is because we see men struggling to come into the clear as to these two meanings of religion, that the contest has such absorbing interest. Men have been right in declining to call that religion in which a man saves himself. They have been wrong in esteeming that they were then only saved of God or Christ when they were saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened when one no longer holds that God and men are mutually exclusive conceptions. It is God working within us who saves, the God who in Jesus worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the world has never seen.



CHAPTER V

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

By the middle of the nineteenth century the empirical sciences had undergone vast expansion in the study of detail and in the discovery of principles. Men felt the necessity of some adequate discussion of the relation of these sciences one to another and of their unity. There was need of the organisation of the mass of knowledge, largely new and ever increasing, which the sciences furnished. It lay in the logic of the case that some of these attempts should advance the bold claim to deal with all knowledge whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a whole. Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages, had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great metaphysical systems had offered theories of the universe as a whole. Both had professed to include all facts. Notoriously both theology and metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate fashion with the material world, in the study of which the sciences were now achieving great results. Indeed, the methods current and authoritative with theologians and metaphysicians had actually prevented study of the physical universe. Both of these had invaded areas of fact to which their methods had no application and uttered dicta which had no relation to truth. The very life of the sciences depended upon deliverance from this bondage. The record of that deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment which long oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming victory had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin. There was with some a disposition to deny that there exists an area of knowledge to which the methods of metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This was Comte's contention. Others conceded that there might be such an area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that, concerning the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for example, God and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method of the physical sciences would give. They fell back upon Kant's distinction of the two reasons and two worlds. They exaggerated the sharpness of that distinction. They learned that the claim of agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure. Indeed, if one may take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this was not the intent of some of the scientists in their strong assertion of agnosticism. Spencer's later work reveals that he had no disposition to deny that there are foundations for belief in a world lying behind the phenomenal, and from which the latter gets its meaning.

Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested. This was the great development of the social sciences. Every aspect of the life of man, including religion itself, has been drawn within the area of the social sciences. To all these subjects, including religion, there have been applied empirical methods which have the closest analogy with those which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of consciousness are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and classify the phenomena of the religious life of the race in all lands and in all ages. A science of religions is taking its place among the other sciences. It is as purely an inductive science as is any other. The history of religions and the philosophy of religion are being rewritten from this point of view.

In the first lines of this chapter we spoke of the empirical sciences, meaning the sciences of the material world. It is clear, however, that the sciences of mind, of morals and of religion have now become empirical sciences. They have their basis in experience, the experience of individuals and the experience of masses of men, of ages of observable human life. They all proceed by the method of observation and inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is a unity of method as between the natural and social and psychical sciences, the reach of which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the psychical is a vanishing distinction. Science comes nearer to offering an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs of this chapter would imply. But it does so by including religion, not by excluding it. No one would any longer think of citing Kant's distinction of two reasons and two worlds in the sense of establishing a city of refuge into which the persecuted might flee. Kant rendered incomparable service by making clear two poles of thought. Yet we must realise how the space between is filled with the gradations of an absolute continuity of activity. Man has but one reason. This may conceivably operate upon appropriate material in one or the other of these polar fashions. It does operate in infinite variations of degree, in unity with itself, after both fashions, at all times and upon all materials.

Positivism was a system. Agnosticism was at least a phase of thought. The broadening of the conception of science and the invasion of every area of life by a science thus broadly conceived, has been an influence less tangible than those others but not, therefore, less effective. Positivism was bitterly hostile to Christianity, though, in the mind of Comte himself and of a few others, it produced a curious substitute, possessing many of the marks of Roman Catholicism. The name 'agnostic' was so loosely used that one must say that the contention was hostile to religion in the minds of some and not of others. The new movement for an inclusive science is not hostile to religion. Yet it will transform current conceptions of religion as those others never did. In proportion as it is scientific, it cannot be hostile. It may at most be indifferent. Nevertheless, in the long run, few will choose the theme of religion for the scientific labour of life who have not some interest in religion. Men of these three classes have accepted the doctrine of evolution. Comte thought he had discovered it. Spencer and those for whom we have taken him as type, did service in the elaboration of it. To the men of our third group, the truth of evolution seems no longer debatable. Here too, in the word 'evolution,' we have a term which has been used with laxity. It corresponds to a notion which has only gradually been evolved. Its implications were at first by no means understood. It was associated with a mechanical view of the universe which was diametrically opposed to its truth. Still, there could not be a doubt that the doctrine contravened those ideas as to the origin of the world, and more particularly of man, of the relations of species, and especially of the human species to other forms of animal life, which had immemorially prevailed in Christian circles and which had the witness of the Scriptures on their behalf. If we were to attempt, with acknowledged latitude, to name a book whose import might be said to be cardinal for the whole movement treated of in this chapter, that book would be Darwin's Origin of Species, which was published in 1859.

Long before Darwin the creation legend had been recognised as such. The astronomy of the seventeenth century had removed the earth from its central position. The geology of the eighteenth had shown how long must have been the ages of the laying down of the earth's strata. The question of the descent of man, however, brought home the significance of evolution for religion more forcibly than any other aspect of the debate had done. There were scientific men of distinction who were not convinced of the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis. To most Christian men the theory seemed to leave no unique distinction or spiritual quality for man. It seemed to render impossible faith in the Scriptures as revelation. To many it seemed that the whole issue as between a spiritual and a purely materialistic view of the universe was involved. Particularly was this true of the English-speaking peoples.

One other factor in the transformation of the Christian view needs to be dwelt upon. It is less theoretical than those upon which we have dwelt. It is the influence of socialism, taking that word in its largest sense. An industrial civilisation has developed both the good and the evil of individualism in incredible degree. The unity of society which the feudal system and the Church gave to Europe in the Middle Age had been destroyed. The individualism and democracy which were essential to Protestantism notoriously aided the civil and social revolution, but the centrifugal forces were too great. Initiative has been wonderful, but cohesion is lacking. Democracy is yet far from being realised. The civil liberations which were the great crises of the western world from 1640 to 1830 appear now to many as deprived of their fruit. Governments undertake on behalf of subjects that which formerly no government would have dreamed of doing. The demand is that the Church, too, become a factor in the furtherance of the outward and present welfare of mankind. If that meant the call to love and charity it would be an old refrain. That is exactly what it does not mean. It means the attack upon evils which make charity necessary. It means the taking up into the idealisation of religion the endeavour to redress all wrongs, to do away with all evils, to confer all goods, to create a new world and not, as heretofore, mainly at least, a new soul in the midst of the old world. No one can deny either the magnitude of the evils which it is sought to remedy, or the greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion. The volume of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social questions is immense. It is revolutionary in its effect. For, after all, the very gist of religion has been held to be that it deals primarily with the inner life and the transcendent world. That it has dealt with the problem of the inner life and transcendent world in such a manner as to retard, or even only not to further, the other aspects of man's life is indeed a grave indictment. That it should, however, see ends in the outer life and present world as ends fully sufficient in themselves, that it should cease to set these in the light of the eternal, is that it should cease to be religion. The physical and social sciences have given to men an outward setting in the world, a basis of power and happiness such as men never have enjoyed. Yet the tragic failure of our civilisation to give to vast multitudes that power and happiness, is the proof that something more than the outward basis is needed. The success of our civilisation is its failure.

This is by no means a recurrence to the old antithesis of religion and civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements. On the contrary, it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics are not two worlds, but merely different aspects of the same world. Therewith it is not alleged that religion has not a specific contribution to make.

POSITIVISM

The permanent influence of that phase of thought which called itself Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which numbered among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, Coura de Philosophie Positive, appeared between the years 1830 and 1842. Littre was his chief French interpreter. But the history of the positivist movement belongs to the history of English philosophical and religious thought, rather than to that of France.

Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents, dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific discovery. He came under the influence of Madame Vaux, whom, after her death, he idolised even more than before. For the problem which, in the earlier portion of his work, he set himself, that namely, of the organising of the sciences into a compact body of doctrine, he possessed extraordinary gifts. Later, he took on rather the air of a high priest of humanity, legislating concerning a new religion. It is but fair to say that at this point Littre and many others parted company with Comte. He developed a habit and practice ascetic in its rigour and mystic in its devotion to the positivists' religion—the worship of humanity. He was the friend and counsellor of working-men and agitators, of little children, of the poor and miserable. He ended his rather pathetic and turbulent career in 1857, gathering a few disciples about his bed as he remembered that Socrates had done.

Comte begins with the natural sciences and postulates the doctrine of evolution. To the definition of this doctrine he makes some interesting approaches. The discussion of the order and arrangement of the various sciences and of their characteristic differences is wonderful in its insight and suggestiveness. He asserts that in the study of nature we are concerned solely with the facts before us and the relations which connect those facts. We have nothing to do with the supposed essence or hidden nature and meaning of those facts. Facts and the invariable laws which govern them are the only legitimate objects of pursuit. Comte infers that because we can know, in this sense, only phenomena and their relations, we should in consequence guard against illusions which creep in again if we so much as use the words principle, or cause, or will, or force. By phenomena must be understood objects of perception, to the exclusion, for example, of psychological changes reputed to be known in self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that there is no knowing except by perception—this is ever reiterated as self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By invincible necessity the human mind can observe all phenomena except its own. Commenting upon this, James Martineau observed: 'We have had in the history of thought numerous forms of idealism which construed all outward phenomena as mere appearances within the mind. We have hitherto had no strictly corresponding materialism, which claimed certainty for the outer world precisely because it was foreign to ourselves.' Man is the highest product of nature, the highest stage of nature's most mature and complex form. Man as individual is nothing more. Physiology gives us not merely his external constitution and one set of relations. It is the whole science of man. There is no study of mind in which its actions and states can be contemplated apart from the physical basis in conjunction with which mind exists.

Thus far man has been treated only biologically, as individual. We must advance to man in society. Almost one half of Comte's bulky work is devoted to this side of the inquiry. Social phenomena are a class complex beyond any which have yet been investigated. So much is this the case and so difficult is the problem presented, that Comte felt constrained in some degree to change his method. We proceed from experience, from data in fact, as before. But the facts are not mere illustrations of the so called laws of individual human nature. Social facts are the results also of situations which represent the accumulated influence of past generations. In this, as against Bentham, for example, with his endless recurrence to human nature, as he called it, Comte was right. Comte thus first gave the study of history its place in sociology. In this study of history and sociology, the collective phenomena are more accessible to us and better known by us, than are the parts of which they are composed. We therefore proceed here from the general to the particular, not from the particular to the general, as in research of the kinds previously named. The state of every part of the social organisation is ultimately connected with the contemporaneous state of all the other parts. Philosophy, science, the fine arts, commerce, navigation, government, are all in close mutual dependence. When any considerable change takes place in one, we may know that a parallel change has preceded or will follow in the others. The progress of society is not the aggregate of partial changes, but the product of a single impulse acting through all the partial agencies. It can therefore be most easily traced by studying all together. These are the main principles of sociological investigation as set forth by Comte, some of them as they have been phrased by Mill.

The most sweeping exemplification of the axiom last alluded to, as to parallel changes, is Comte's so-called law of the three states of civilisation. Under this law, he asserts, the whole historical evolution can be summed up. It is as certain as the law of gravitation. Everything in human society has passed, as has the individual man, through the theological and then through the metaphysical stage, and so arrives at the positive stage. In this last stage of thought nothing either of superstition or of speculation will survive. Theology and metaphysics Comte repeatedly characterises as the two successive stages of nescience, unavoidable as preludes to science. Equally unavoidable is it that science shall ultimately prevail in their place. The advance of science having once begun, there is no possibility but that it will ultimately possess itself of all. One hears the echo of this confidence in Haeckel also. There is a persistence about the denial of any knowledge whatsoever that goes beyond external facts, which ill comports with the pretensions of positivism to be a philosophy. For its final claim is not that it is content to rest in experimental science. On the contrary, it would transform this science into a homogeneous doctrine which is able to explain everything in the universe. This is but a tour de force. The promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of everything which science cannot explain. Comte was never willing to face the fact that the very existence of knowledge has a noumenal as well as a phenomenal side. The reasonableness of the universe is certainly a conception which we bring to the observation of nature. If we did not thus bring it with us, no mere observation of nature would ever give it to us. It is impossible for science to get rid of the conception of force, and ultimately of cause. There can be no phenomenon which is not a manifestation of something. The very nomenclature falls into hopeless confusion without these conceptions. Yet the moment we touch them we transcend science and pass into the realm of philosophy. It is mere juggling with words to say that our science has now become a philosophy.

The adjective 'positive' contains the same fallacy. Apparently Comte meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would limit research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance, co-existence and succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply that the inquiry into causes deals with that which has no reality, is to beg the question. This is not a premise with which he may set out in the evolution of his system.

Comte denied the accusation of materialism and atheism. He did the first only by changing the meaning of the term materialism. Materialism the world has supposed to be the view of man's condition and destiny which makes these to begin and end in nature. That certainly was Comte's view. The accusation of atheism also he avoids by a mere play on words. He is not without a God. Humanity is God. Mankind is the positivist's Supreme. Altruism takes the place of devotion. The devotion so long wasted upon a mere creature of the imagination, to whom it could do no good, he would now give to men who sorely need it and can obviously profit by it. Surely the antithesis between nature and the supernatural, in the form in which Comte argues against it, is now abandoned by thoughtful people. Equally the antithesis of altruism to the service of God is perverse. It arouses one's pity that Comte should not have seen how, in true religion these two things coalesce.

Moreover, this deification of mankind, in so far as it is not a sounding phrase, is an absurdity. When Comte says, for example, that the authority of humanity must take the place of that of God, he has recognised that religion must have authority. Indeed, the whole social order must have authority. However, this is not for him, as we are accustomed to say, the authority of the truth and of the right. There is no such abstraction as the truth, coming to various manifestations. There is no such thing as right, apart from relatively right concrete measures. There is no larger being indwelling in men. Society, humanity in its collective capacity, must, if need be, override the individual. Yet Comte despises the mere rule of majorities. The majority which he would have rule is that of those who have the scientific mind. We may admit that in this he aims at the supremacy of truth. But, in fact, he prepares the way for a doctrinaire tyranny which, of all forms of government, might easily turn out to be the worst which a long-suffering humanity has yet endured.

In the end, we are told, love is to take the place of force. Humanity is present to us first in our mothers, wives and daughters. For these it is present in their fathers, husbands, sons. From this primary circle love widens and worship extends as hearts enlarge. It is the prayer to humanity which first rises above the mere selfishness of the sort to get something out of God. Remembrance in the hearts of those who loved us and owe something to us is the only worthy form of immortality. Clearly it is only the caricature of prayer or of the desire of immortality which rises before Comte's mind as the thing to be escaped. For this caricature religious men, both Catholic and Protestant, without doubt, gave him cause. There were to be seven sacraments, corresponding to seven significant epochs in a man's career. There were to be priests for the performance of these sacraments and for the inculcation of the doctrines of positivism. There were to be temples of humanity, affording opportunity for and reminder of this worship. In each temple there was to be set up the symbol of the positivist religion, a woman of thirty years with her little son in her arms. Littre spoke bitterly of the positivist religion as a lapse of the author into his old aberration. This religion was certainly regarded as negligible by many to whom his system as a whole meant a great deal. At least, it is an interesting example, as is also his transformation of science into a philosophy, of the resurgence of valid elements in life, even in the case of a man who has made it his boast to do away with them.

NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM

We may take Spencer as representative of a group of men who, after the middle of the nineteenth century, laboured enthusiastically to set forth evolutionary and naturalistic theories of the universe. These theories had also, for the most part, the common trait that they professed agnosticism as to all that lay beyond the reach of the natural-scientific methods, in which the authors were adept. Both Ward and Boutroux accept Spencer as such a type. Agnosticism for obvious reasons could be no system. Naturalism is a tendency in interpretation of the universe which has many ramifications. There is no intention of making the reference to one man's work do more than serve as introduction to the field.

Spencer was eager in denial that he had been influenced by Comte. Yet there is a certain reminder of Comte in Spencer's monumental endeavour to systematise the whole mass of modern scientific knowledge, under the general title of 'A Synthetic Philosophy.' He would show the unity of the sciences and their common principles or, rather, the one great common principle which they all illustrate, the doctrine of evolution, as this had taken shape since the time of Darwin. Since 1904 we have an autobiography of Herbert Spencer, which, to be sure, seems largely to have been written prior to 1889. The book is interesting, as well in the light which it throws upon the expansion of the sciences and the development of the doctrine of evolution in those years, as in the revelation of the personal traits of the man himself. Concerning these Tolstoi wrote to a friend, apropos of a gift of the book: 'In autobiographies the most important psychological phenomena are often revealed quite independently of the author's will.'

Spencer was born in 1820 in Derby, the son of a schoolmaster. He came of Nonconformist ancestry of most marked individuality. His early education was irregular and inadequate. Before he reached the age of seventeen his reading had been immense. He worked with an engineer in the period of the building of the railways in the Midlands. He always retained his interest in inventions. He wrote for the newspapers and magazines and definitely launched upon a literary career. At the age of thirty he published his first book, on Social Statics. He made friends among the most notable men and women of his age. So early as 1855 he was the victim of a disease of the heart which never left him. It was on his recovery from his first grave attack that he shaped the plan which henceforth held him, of organising the modern sciences and incorporating them into what he called a synthetic philosophy. There was immense increase in actual knowledge and in the power of his reflection on that knowledge, as the years went by. A generation elapsed between the publication of his First Principles and the conclusion of his more formal literary labours. There is something captivating about a man's life, the energy of which remains so little impaired that he esteems it better to write a new book, covering some untouched portion of his scheme, than to give to an earlier volume the revision which in the light of his matured convictions it may need. His philosophical limitations he never transcended. He does not so naively offer a substitute for philosophy as does Comte. But he was no master in philosophy. There is a reflexion of the consciousness of this fact in his agnosticism.

That the effort of the agnostic contention has been great, and on the whole salutary, few would deny. Spencer's own later work shows that his declaration, that the absolute which lies behind the universe is unknowable, is to be taken with considerable qualification. It is only a relative unknowableness which he predicates. Moreover, before Spencer's death, the doctrine of evolution had made itself profoundly felt in the discussion of all aspects of life, including that of religion. There seemed no longer any reason for the barrier between science and religion which Spencer had once thought requisite.

The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of scientific mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid knowledge made, now by theology and now by speculative philosophy. It is hardly descriptive in any absolute sense. Spencer had coined the rather fortunate illustration which describes science as a gradually increasing sphere, such that every addition to its surface does but bring us into more extensive contact with surrounding nescience. Even upon this illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading. The continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of ignorance. It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of ignorance. The author of Ecce Coelum has declared: 'Things die out under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see, unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient unknown has become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men have a more rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.

They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone secure and solid knowledge may be attained. They have undisguised scepticism as to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways. It was the working of these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth century so prevailingly the aspect of denial, the character which Carlyle described as an everlasting No. This was but a preparatory stage, a retrogression for a new and firmer advance.

In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has administered. It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been guilty of arrant dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of the claim that it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They apprehended more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that there is much ignorance which revelation does not mitigate. Exeunt omnia in mysterium. They are prepared to say concerning many of the dicta of religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has taught us toward all truth whatsoever.

The strictly philosophic term phenomenon, to which science has taken so kindly, is in itself an explicit avowal of something beyond the phenomenal. Spencer is careful to insist upon this relation of the phenomenal to the noumenal. His Synthetic Philosophy opens with an exposition of this non-relative or absolute, without which the relative itself becomes contradictory. It is an essential part of Spencer's doctrine to maintain that our consciousness of the absolute, indefinite as it is, is positive and not negative. 'Though the absolute cannot in any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing, yet we find that its positive existence is a necessary datum of consciousness. The belief which this datum of consciousness constitutes has a higher warrant than any other belief whatsoever.' In short, the absolute or noumenal, according to Spencer, though not known as the phenomenal or relative is known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that the phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances, without which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified with that ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists. Religion itself is a phenomenon, and the source and secret of most complex and interesting phenomena. It has always been of the greatest importance in the history of mankind. It has been able to hold its own in face of the attacks of science. It must contain an element of truth. All religions, however, assert that their God is for us not altogether cognisable, that God is a great mystery. The higher their rank, the more do they acknowledge this. It is by the flippant invasion of this mystery that the popular religiosity offends. It talks of God as if he were a man in the next street. It does not distinguish between merely imaginative fetches into the truth, and presumably accurate definition of that truth. Equally, the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions of the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know and are involved in contradiction with themselves. But the results of modern physics and chemistry reveal, as the constant element in all phenomena, force. This manifests itself in various forms which are interchangeable, while amid all these changes the force remains the same. This latter must be regarded as the reality, and basis of all that is relative and phenomenal. The entire universe is to be explained from the movements of this absolute force. The phenomena of nature and of mental life come under the same general laws of matter, motion, and force.

Spencer's doctrine, as here stated, is not adequate to account for the world of mental life or adapted to serve as the basis of a reconciliation of science and religion. It does not carry us beyond materialism. Spencer's real intention was directed to something higher than that. If the absolute is to be conceived at all, it is as a necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. If we get the idea of force from the experience of our own power of volition, is it not natural to think of mind-force as the prius of physical force, and not the reverse? Accordingly, the absolute force, basis of all specific forces, would be mind and will. The doctrine of evolution would harmonise perfectly with these inferences. But it would have to become idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead of materialistic, as in Comte. We are obliged, Spencer owns, to refer the phenomenal world of law and order to a first cause. He says that this first cause is incomprehensible. Yet he further says, when the question of attributing personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not between personality and something lower. It is between personality and something higher. To this may belong a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion. It is strange, he says, that men should suppose the highest worship to lie in assimilating the object of worship to themselves. And yet, again, in one of the latest of his works he writes: 'Unexpected as it will be to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. The conception to which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is much less that of a universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive.'

Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley. Agnosticism had at first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological. It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical. After all, says Huxley, in one of his essays:—'What do we know of this terrible matter, except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen, except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter. He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an ideal. It is an invention of the mind's own devising. It is not a physical fact. In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had been turned exactly inside out. Instead of the physical world being primary and fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not altogether problematical, the precise converse is true.

Nature, as science regards it, may be described as a system whose parts, be they simple or complex, are wholly governed by universal laws. Knowledge of these laws is an indispensable condition of that control of nature upon which human welfare in so large degree depends. But this reign of law is an hypothesis. It is not an axiom which it would be absurd to deny. It is not an obvious fact, thrust upon us whether we will or no. Experiences are possible without the conception of law and order. The fruit of experience in knowledge is not possible without it. That is only to say that the reason why we assume that nature is a connected system of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the notion of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which we must eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical science perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a glance at the history, and particularly at the popular literature, of science affords the interesting spectacle of the rise of an hallucination, the growth of a habit of mythological speech, which is truly surprising. We begin to hear of self-existent laws which reign supreme and bind nature fast in fact. By this learned substitution for God, it was once confidently assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of myth-making and fetish worship—the homage to the fetish of law. Even the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,' says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language of rational beings, laws of nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and independent of the phenomena which they are said to govern, such language must be merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak of the civil law. We say the law does that which we know the executive does. But the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as the last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of the movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined that the planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had supposed that this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other natural agencies, palpable and ready to hand for the explanation of everything, in the myth-making period of science which living men can still remember, have by this time paled. They have become simply various manifestations of one underlying spiritual energy, which is indeed beyond our perception.[6] When Comte said that the universe could not rest upon will, because then it would be arbitrary, incalculable, subject to caprice, one feels the humour and pathos of it. Comte's experience with will, his own and that of others, had evidently been too largely of that sad sort. Real freedom consists in conformity to what ought to be. In God, whom we conceive as perfect, this conformity is complete. With us it remains an ideal. Were we the creatures of a blind mechanical necessity there could be no talk of ideal standards and no meaning in reason at all.

[Footnote 6: Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. p. 248.]

EVOLUTION

In the progress of the thought of the generation, say, from 1870 to the present day, the conception of evolution has been much changed. The doctrine of evolution has itself been largely evolved within that period. The application of it has become familiar in fields of which there was at first no thought. The bearing of the acceptance of it upon religion has been seen to be quite different from that which was at first supposed. The advocacy of the doctrine was at first associated with the claims of naturalism or positivism. Wider applications of the doctrine and deeper insight into its meaning have done away with this misunderstanding. Evolution, as originally understood, was as far as possible from suggesting anything mechanical. By the term was meant primarily the gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic beginning to its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material and directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied ideal ends controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as prevailingly also with others in the study of the natural sciences, the ideas of end and of cause looked at askance. They are regarded an outside the pale of the natural sciences. In a very definite sense that is true. The logical consequence of this admission should be merely the recognition that the idea of evolution as developed in the natural sciences cannot be the whole idea.