The time may appear to many persons inopportune for the launching of a Journal of Theology. The tide of theological interest may seem to have ebbed so low as to leave no channel for such a venture; the profession of the ministry fails to win recruits; the queen of the sciences is deposed from her throne; critics are announcing the rout of the theological schools. The machinery of the churches, it is true, revolves with energy, but it does not seem to be geared into the wheels of the working world; and the deliberations of the theologians are frankly regarded by great numbers of people with indifference, if not with contempt. A distinguished railway president, on being informed that a promising youth had undertaken the study of theology, remarked, “Why does not so gifted a man devote himself to something that is real?”

Modern ideas of God are many and various, but all of them, so far as they are not mere reproductions of traditional views handed down from the past, are dominated by one or the other of two independent tendencies, which took their rise respectively from Spinoza and from Kant. In this article it is impossible to follow the various ramifications of these tendencies. They are often found together in the same theologian in curious and even inconsistent combinations. I desire to distinguish them sharply the one from the other, and to study them separately as they appear in a few of their most notable and consistent representatives. The former tendency, as I have said, took its rise from Spinoza. Despised and neglected by the leaders of European thought for nearly a hundred years after his death, he finally came to his rights, and was speedily a dominant force in Germany, which was about to assume again the intellectual leadership of Europe held in the eighteenth century successively by England and France. The time was ripe for Spinoza's philosophy. Reaction against the extreme individualism and superficial rationalism of the period was growing rapidly, and the profound and massive monism of the great Jewish sage was fitted to appeal to the imagination of the new age. The first important utterance was Herder's little work entitled Gott, which appeared in 1787 and had wide influence. In this book Herder interprets Spinoza in the light of Leibnitz's dynamic conception of the universe, and so supplements his unity of substance with an all-pervasive unity of force.

There are two classes of people who have an interest in the question which we have proposed for discussion. It may be asked by those who believe that in historic Protestantism we have the true and final form of religion, and who therefore view with alarm any radical departure from the position of the earlier Reformers. In this case the question whether our Protestantism is still Protestant will mean the inquiry whether our modern liberal Christianity has so far departed from the fundamental principles of the Reformation that its title to the name of evangelical Christianity may rightly be called in question. On the other hand, the inquiry may be made by those who believe that historic Protestantism represents a stage of religious development which the world is destined to outgrow. In the latter case the meaning of the question will be whether the process of theological reconstruction has gone so far that the new type of religious thought and life which is expected to supersede the old can at last be clearly differentiated from its predecessor.

Christianity as not only a world-religion, but pre-eminently the world-religion, can be rationally appreciated only in the light of its origins. The nineteenth century, therefore, to which nothing was understood that had not been understood genetically, devoted its newly won methods of historical criticism to a comparison of the contemporary documents, the Pauline Epistles, with Acts, the earliest embodiment of the tradition, that it might learn the facts of the great evolution of the Church from the Synagogue. But inquiry into the story of the second founder of our faith was, from the nature of the case, a mere preliminary to the deeper inquiry into the story of its first Founder.

While recent discovery in Palestine has added much to our knowledge of the peoples who lived there, it must be admitted that the results are, in comparison with those obtained in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, disappointingly meagre. Some of the reasons for this are clear. Palestine was not, like the countries named, the seat of a great empire, with splendid palaces temples and tombs, with boundless wealth and luxury built on the tribute of the nations, with nourishing centres of art and literature. Much of the best that was produced in Palestine has been destroyed by the wars which have so often devastated the country. Still further, the sites where most might be expected, at least for the Hebrew period, yet await investigation—Jerusalem and Samaria. The former, being almost entirely built over, is likely to remain a sealed book. The latter, owing to its great size, would be an expensive undertaking, but not otherwise difficult. The whole mound might be explored, save the eastern end with its village and cemetery.

Whatever else it may mean in art or morals, there is no doubt whatever that in economics the word value means power in exchange and nothing more. It is the power which an article possesses of commanding other desirable things in peaceful and voluntary exchange. Why a thing has this power is the first problem in economic value.

The belief in a doctrine of Providence, at least in some sense of the word, is inseparable from theism. Let a man once assume a good God or a righteous universe, and he thereby also assumes that all events must be directed, or at least overruled, for good. Perhaps, however, it is a little easier to declare what one means when he says, “there is a God,” than to explain what one means by “the divine Providence.” Do we believe in a special Providence, that enters into each particular act or moment, so that, for example, it is literally true that not a sparrow “shall fall to the ground without your Father”? Do we think that the infinite Power carries every individual life in its thought, and even plans, and cares what each man does, suffers, or enjoys? Or do we think of Providence as merely a general guiding agency, like the intelligence that steers a ship in safety without any special responsibility for the conduct or the pleasure of the passengers? Do we think that a man can interfere, by the exercise of his little will, with the working of divine Providence? Or does Providence also enter into and direct the motion of every individual will, as it may be conceived to enter into the motion of the sands on the beach?