gt-wenley sit 3.30-39

PREFACE

STARTING from the facts of human nature and the

laws they reveal to us, as spread out before us in history, can we attain to the existence of God, to Immortality, and to the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the Incarnation?

Hitherto Christianity has leaned, or has been represented as leaning, on authority,-on the authority of an infallible text, or of an inerrable Church. The inadequacy of either support has been repeatedly demonstrated, and as the props have been withdrawn, the faith of many has fallen with a crash. The religious history of the Church exhibits three phases. The first when dogma appealed to men and met with a ready response, the second when dogma was forced on man by an authoritative society, and the third when dogma was insisted on, upon the authority of an infallible text. Men revolted against the Church, opposing the text against it, men revolt now against the text, and on what does dogma stand?

To this question I offer an answer in this volume. Unless Theology can be based on facts anterior to text or society, to facts in our own nature, ever new, but also ever old, it can never be placed in an unassailable position.

For if Christianity be true, it must be true to human nature and to human thought. It must supply that to which both turn, but which they cannot unassisted attain.

"Revelation," says a reviewer of my first volume, in the Edinburgh Courant," could never itself be made available or useful to man unless man were able to test its claims and recognise its adaptability to complete and satisfy the highest aspirations and the deepest longings of our nature. We start from a sense of insufficiency, a feeling that at present we are not what we should be; that our nature desires, and is therefore capable of, fuller development and a higher career. And to every individual man the ultimate test of the Revelation which speaks in him, though external, is just whether or not it will meet this imperfection, whether or not it will supply a positive to the negative in himself, whether it will or will not complement all his deficiencies. Revelation does, or claims to do, this, and Christianity especially does so, by revealing the Infinite as united to the Finite, as one with it in nature, and, therefore, that the home of the Finite only is in the Infinite. The Incarnation brings home this great lesson to human life and human history; and as it only is the Infinite which can meet and prove the sufficient complement of the Finite, so it is by the latter recognizing its essential unity with the former, that all its wants and longings are satisfied, and that the Revelation is seen to be fully adequate, and inexhaustible in its contents."

In the preceding volume we traced the origin of the multitudinous religions of the ancient and modern world to their roots in the soul of man. "All these religions set themselves to respond to some craving of the heart or head of man, to satisfy some instinct, dimly felt and ill read; and however various, however contradictory they were in their expression, they did fulfil their office in some sort, else they would never have lasted a day. They differ, unquestionably, according to the stage of thought-development of the several peoples and nations which embraced them; but their differences ought, if man is progressive, to be capable of arrangement in a series of progressively advancing truths."

It has been made clear that one truth was conspicuous here-say in Mosaism, that another truth was prominent there say in Hellenism; it has been shewn that each religion was imperfect because it was partial, it maintained only one truth or one aspect of the Truth; and it was this partiality which was the ruin of each.

That which mankind wanted, and wants still, is not new truths, but the co-ordination of all aspects of the truth. In every religion of the world is to be found distorted or exaggerated, some great truth, otherwise it would never have obtained foothold; every religious revolution has been the struggle of thought to gain another step in the ladder that reaches to heaven.

That which we ask of Revelation is that it shall take up all these varieties into itself, not that it shall supplant them; and shew how that at which each of them aimed,

however dimly and indistinctly, has its interpretation and realization in the objective truth brought to light by Revelation. Hence, we shall be able to recognize that religion to be the true one, which is the complement and corrective of all the wanderings of the religious instinct in its efforts to provide objects for its own satisfaction.

Starting from the great facts and laws of human nature and the universe, I have shewn that in them is contained the whole scheme of Christianity. I have shewn that the law of the universe is infinite analysis infinitely synthesized. I have shown the existence everywhere of an antinomy. I have argued that evil and error are the negation of one factor in this antinomy; that, for instance, is evil which synthesizes without projecting individualities by careful analysis. In what consisted the error of the ancient religions of the world? In the negation of the opposed facts. In what consists the adaptability of Christianity to the indefinite perfection of humanity? In its conformity to the natural law, by insisting on the co-ordination of all truths, by consecrating at once solidarity and individuality, in maintaining unity in the midst of particularization.

The drowning man may be saved by a plank or a rope, but there are circumstances in which plank or rope can not avail him. How much better for him to have learned that in himself is the principle of buoyancy, and then rope and plank will be serviceable though not indispensable. Scripture and Tradition have been the rope and plank to