PREFACE

THE main objects of this volume are threefold. Firstly, to vindicate for religious Faith its true dignity as a normal and healthy part of human nature. Next, to insist that Faith demands the actual reality of its objects, and can never be content with a God who is only an ideal. Lastly, to show in detail how most of the errors and defects in religious belief have been due to a tendency to arrest the development of Faith prematurely, by annexing it to some one faculty to the exclusion of others, or by resting on given authority. The true goal is an unified experience which will make authority no longer external. This scheme has compelled me to state, far too briefly and dogmatically, my grounds of disagreement with certain religious opinions which are widely held, such as the infallibility of the living voice of the Church,' and the finality of the appeal to Holy Scripture, and also with those religious philosophies which make religion exclusively an affair of the will, or the intellect, or the æsthetic sense. My criticisms of these various theories are all intended to show the errors which result from a premature synthesis. Faith claims the whole man, and all that God's grace can make of him. If any part of ourselves is left outside our religion, our theory of Faith is sure to be partly vitiated by the omission; and conversely, an inadequate theory of Faith is likely to be reflected in one-sided or distorted practice.

When we try to analyse the contents of Faith, after claiming for it this very comprehensive range, we must

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be prepared for the criticism that we have given only bare outlines, or else that we have left rival constructions side by side in the form of patent inconsistencies. For we cannot hope to understand and co-ordinate all the highest experiences of the human spirit. And our own generation, it seems to me, is not called upon even to attempt any ambitious construction. We must be content to clear the site for a new building, and to get the materials ready. The wise master-builder is not yet among us. 'Revivals' are only a stop-gap; they create nothing. They recover for us parts of our spiritual heritage which were in danger of being lost, and having achieved this, they have done their work. The words Catholic and Protestant are much like the words Whig and Tory in politics. They are the names of obsolescent distinctions, survivals of old-world struggles. When the next constructive period comes, it will be seen that the spiritual Latin empire and the Teutonic revolt against it belong to past history. Already the crucial question is, not whether Europe shall be Catholic or Protestant, but whether Christianity can come to terms with the awakening self-consciousness of modern civilisation, equipped with a vast mass of new scientific knowledge, and animated for the first time by ideals which are not borrowed from classical and Hebrew antiquity.

The great danger in our path, I venture to think, comes from the democratisation of thought, which has affected religion, ethics, philosophy, and sociology-in fact, almost every department of mental activity except natural science. We see its results in hysterical sentimentalism, which is the great obstacle in the way of using organised effort for social amelioration. We see them in the frank adoption of materialistic standards, such as the pleasure and pain calculus, as soon as we leave the region of abstract speculation. And in philosophy it is impossible to miss the connection between the new empiricism, with its

blatant contempt for idealism, whether of the ancient or modern type, and the democratic claim to decide all things in heaven and earth by popular vote. It is possible to sympathise thoroughly with the spread of education, and yet to be aware of the enormous dangers to civilisation which the false theory of natural equality brings with it. It has bred a dislike of intellectual superiority, and a reluctance to allow reason and knowledge to arbitrate on burning questions. Everywhere we find the praises of feeling or instinct sung, and the dangers of intellectualism exposed. Now instinct is the tendency in humanity to persistence, reason is the tendency to variation. Most variations, we are reminded, fail to establish themselves; instinct is therefore the safer guide. But the tendency to variation is just what has raised man above the lower animals; it is the condition of progress. And in civilised man reason has largely displaced instinct, which is no longer so trustworthy as in the brutes. Since this process is certain to go further, distrust of reason is suicidal, and to exclude it from matters of Faith must be disastrous. I believe that the Kantian antithesis between the speculative and practical reason is wholly fallacious, a residuum of the dualism which Kant found dominant in philosophy and failed to overcome. If this dualism is abandoned, the contrast between Faith and knowledge falls with it. And yet the temptation to heal slightly' the wounds of religion by reverting to this separation of Faith from fact has proved irresistible to very many, and I believe that it is a main source of the notorious inefficacy of our apologetics. The intellectual difficulties raised by science are not popular, and we are tempted to override them because the masses are still ignorant and superstitious; but I believe that here is still our great problem, and that we shall do well to agree with our adversary quickly, while we are in the way with him.

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This is not the kind of intellectualism which paralyses

action. To escape this, it is only necessary to remember that, in the life of man, thought and action are equally important. The normal course of all experience is expansion followed by concentration. Ideals are painted by imaginative thought, but realised only in action. Character is consolidated thought. Action and contemplation must act and react upon each other; otherwise our actions will have no soul, and our thoughts no body. This is the great truth which the higher religions express in their sacraments. A sacrament is more than a symbol. The perception of symbols leads us from the many to the one, from the transitory to the permanent, but not from appearance to reality. This belongs to the sacramental experience, which is symbolism retranslating itself into concrete action, returning to the outer world and to mundane interests; but in how different a manner from our earlier superficial experience! The formula 'From symbol to sacrament' completes and Christianises the Platonic (or Plotinian) scheme, and gives the mystic a rule of life. 'Are we not here to make the transitory permanent?' asks Goethe. This we can only do if we know how to value both.' There are two essential movements in the spiritual life: one which finds God in the world, mainly through thought and feeling; the other which re-finds the world in God, mainly through moral action. The former reaches permanence through change, the latter change through permanence. So the spiral goes on, in ever-diminishing circles (gyrans gyrando vadit Spiritus), till in heaven, we may be sure, the disharmony between thought and action is finally attuned.

NOTE. This book is an expansion of ten lectures which were delivered in London on the Jowett Foundation, in the early months of this year. For this reason, the form of lectures has been adhered to throughout.