In lectures the charm of which his students will never forget, Dr. C. C. Everett used to speak of Schopenhauer as the most brilliant of the profound philosophers. This German thinker is perhaps little read in England, and still less in America, where the levels of culture are low, and the primitive life-instincts still fresh and strong. But among old and reflective peoples the case is bound to be different; so far as he is known at all, he is certain of a hearing—and a not unsympathetic one, whatever the final verdict. He has already ploughed deep in German thought, and his influence in France and Italy is considerable. Perhaps he is (or would be) most easily understood in India, his doctrine, in capital points, being parallel to the Buddhist philosophical writings. As we in America get further on, in age and in reflective habits, he will probably be more and more read here; and one of the crucial problems of philosophical thought may come to be, how Schopenhauer shall be disposed of.

By the old theology we mean the type of theology which, whatever its date, ignores the modern scientific movement and is unaffected in method by the results of that movement. By the new theology, conversely, we mean the type of theology whose method is determined by the modern scientific movement and which is hospitable to its results. The purpose of this article is to ask what is the relation of the two, what they have in common, wherein they differ, and what ought to be the attitude of the representatives of the one to the other.

During the past year a prolonged stay in Italy gave me occasion to visit most of the larger cities between Naples and the Alps, and supplied the opportunity of personal contact with many of the men who are now at the helm of Italian social, religious, and philosophical movements, while at the same time I was able to obtain first-hand acquaintance with the thoughts and desires of the Italian laborer. I soon became aware of the variety, intensity, and complexity of the issues which are now agitating Italian public life. It is true that Latin blood warms more rapidly, and reaches a higher temperature in controversy, than that of the Anglo-Saxon. But no superficial grievances are those over which conflict now rages; both in politics and in religion the contending parties feel that the joust of the tournament-field has become a battle for existence.

Of the eminent writers who are the exponents of the spiritual movement of the nineteenth century, those whose influence is most widely acknowledged—Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Emerson—have two notable characteristics: first, they either give a very subordinate place to dogma or reject it altogether; secondly, they lay great stress on truths which from remote antiquity have most deeply impressed the Oriental mind and have been uttered with the greatest power in the East. The influence of Wordsworth as a spiritual teacher will ever be felt, in spite of the “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” to lie, not in his championship of orthodox Christianity, but in his awakening men to a sense of the Infinite revealed in the finite and to a consciousness of the immanence of the divine Spirit in the outer and the inner world. These are the truths which inspire some of Shelley's noblest lines. They find utterance in Carlyle's wisest words. And they occupy the foremost place in Emerson's message to an unspiritual world. Hence the power with which Wordsworth and Emerson appeal to the Oriental mind. They translate into the language of modern culture what was uttered by the sages of ancient India in the loftiest strains. They breathe a new life into our old faith, and they assure its stability and progress by incorporating with it precious truths revealed or brought into prominence by the wider intellectual and ethical outlook of the modern spirit. Before I dwell at any length on the spiritual affinity between the teachings of the East and the mind of Emerson, it will be convenient to consider some of his intellectual traits, which give us a key to the right interpretation of his faith.

Many times during the past half-century the question raised by Strauss, “Are we still Christian?” has been asked by other persons. The vast changes in thought which have taken place within this period have led to this. The difference between the ancient and modern thought-worlds are numerous, far-reaching, and now acutely felt. We live in a universe infinite in extent, eternal in duration, dynamic in all its elements, law-abiding in all its forces and areas, developing through an immanent process of evolution by resident forces, and moving on to a far-off divine event when the purposes of God will be realized in a perfected humanity.

Our fathers, on the other hand, lived in a world recent in the date of its origin, small in extent, and made by fiat; its laws statutes to be set aside at the pleasure of its maker; its nature deranged by the sin of man; the historic process degenerative; and its end catastrophic.

It is these differences in world-view which have made many persons ask the question, “Are we still Christian?”

It was once remarked with much truth that the non-fulfilment of the expectation of the Parousia was the principal factor in the development of early Christianity. This is all the more important, because it was not the custom of the first Christians to speak of the “second” coming—that is a modern point of view—but of the “coming” of the Messiah. To them the Son of Man, Jesus, had come, and the resurrection proved that he was now the Messiah in heaven, but, as Professor Burkitt has recently pointed out, “Son of Man” does not mean “Messiah” in the full sense, but is rather the description given of the predestined and pre-existent Messiah, before he actually came as Messiah in function. The Parousia of the triumphant Messiah whom they expected was as much future for Christians as it was for Jews, and on this point the main difference between the two was that the former believed that they knew who the Messiah was.

A quarter of a century has now elapsed since the foundation of Toynbee Hall in the east of London inaugurated the “University Settlement” movement in the vast and then almost inchoate capital of the British Empire; and the present time seems therefore appropriate for an attempt to form some estimate of the past results and future possibilities of the movement, which soon spread to other towns of England and Scotland. Yet such an undertaking is beset with serious difficulties. Throughout the whole history of the settlements there is indeed apparent an essential identity of purpose, an underlying uniformity of motive; but the individual institutions have been the outcome of the action of various bodies of persons whose aims, as formally expressed, seem often very diverse; different groups have laid the main emphasis on different objects and methods, and what has been counted as triumphant success by one group has been deemed of relatively small importance by another. Further, the wide range of the activities of the settlements, the multifarious nature of their interests and work, render it practically impossible for any one observer to comprehend the whole in his single survey; and the selection which he must needs make tends almost inevitably to be determined, and it may be even unfairly biassed, by his own personal predilections. Within this narrower range, moreover, there is no certain standard by which to measure success or failure; the value of the work accomplished by a settlement is not to be judged solely, or even chiefly, by the statistics of its classes and clubs. If it has realized its objects, however imperfectly, it has exercised upon the surrounding community, in conjunction with all other institutions that in any way and by any means make for good, a subtle and permeating influence which has resulted in a progressive amelioration of social life; but, for the very reason that this achievement is the result of a number of co-operating forces, the share of the settlement therein cannot be isolated or defined with any exactitude.

To the very title of this paper, or at any rate to the idea implied in it, the average religious thinker might conceivably make more objections than one. He might in the first place inquire whether any meaning can be found in the term “rational mysticism”; and, examining it either from the standpoint of reason or from that of mysticism, might complain that it attempts to bring together two quite incompatible things. Reason has usually held mysticism in scorn, looking upon it as a sort of quack method, if the word may pass, of accomplishing, or of pretending to accomplish, what reason accomplishes in the professional and only legitimate way. Mysticism, from the other side, has been ready enough to repay scorn with scorn: it has claimed to find its way to the secret places of truth by a subtle process far more efficacious than that laborious following of the trail which reason practises; and its independence of reason, its irreconcilability with reason, it has always taken as its glory rather than its shame. What—the average religious man might say—what can “rational mysticism” mean? How, indeed, can such a thing exist at all? And in the next place, even supposing you could manufacture the curious compound that “rational mysticism” would be, and could link the two seeming incompatibles together, how are you going to make any connection between your newly created rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity? Rational, indeed, New Testament Christianity is, or claims to be; and to show its harmony with reason (provided that the thing be not pushed too far) is one of the chief objects that Christian apologetics may well keep in view.

Systematic Theology used to be the acknowledged Queen of the Sciences, exacting allegiance and tribute in every district of human thought. By one of those cataclysmic upheavals of thought that now and then disturb society, the situation has been radically altered. The queen has been dethroned. Surveying this wrecked glory and these emblems of departed power, the faithful speak of a rebellion; the philosopher thinks of it as a revolution; the man of science calls it evolution.

In successive discussions of the title Son of God, which seems to have been Jesus' own self-designation, and Son of Man, which would seem to have been applied to him after his death by the primitive Aramaic-speaking community of believers in his second coming, we have sought to disentangle primitive from secondary tradition. We have particularly emphasized the fact that in its distinctive principles Jesus' own teaching attaches itself to the primitive form of the messianic ideal—Israel as Yahweh's son; not the later theocratic—the Davidic heir to the throne as Son of God; nor the still later apocalyptic—the supernatural deliverer coming on the clouds of heaven as the fulfilment of the promise. In agreement with this view of the teaching of Jesus, our earliest documents, the Pauline epistles, make sonship in the ethical and religious sense the essence of the glad tidings. Since the publication of our argument our conclusions have been confirmed by the important newly-discovered document, the Odes of Solomon. The confirmation is especially strong if the view of Harnack be taken, that the Odes in their original form are Jewish, rather than the view of their discoverer, J. Rendel Harris, who regards them as Christian. The Odes give irrefutable evidence of the existence in first-century Judaism, or at least in primitive Christian circles, of a doctrine of sonship in the ethical and religious sense closely in line with what we have urged as the distinctive element in the messianic consciousness of Jesus. The ideal of the odist for Israel is an ideal of spiritual sonship. By the knowledge and love of the Beloved, “the Most High and Merciful,” Israel is guaranteed not only sonship to God, but immortality, an eternal dwelling in God's presence.

More than a quarter of a century has elapsed since a letter, written by a passenger on an English railway train as he sat on the bank beside the track waiting for a broken-down engine to be repaired, resulted in the founding of the first Social Settlement. The writer was the Reverend Canon Samuel A. Barnett, then Vicar of St. Jude's Church, Whitechapel, in East London, and the settlement was Toynbee Hall. Mrs. Barnett has recently published an interesting account of the steps that led to the realization of the settlement idea. She describes the lack of knowledge of the poor on the part of earnest, thinking men, when she and her husband took up their work at St. Jude's, and tells of the visits they made to Oxford from time to time to talk to little groups of cultivated, serious young college men to get them to care about the poor and their problems. Some of these men came to Whitechapel for a visit, to see for themselves the conditions of poverty, and occasionally some would take lodgings in East London, when they left the university to begin their lifework. In this way a connection was established between Whitechapel and the university, and discerning spirits were able to see that each side had contributions of value to make to the other.

Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar Jewish sect; a single leaf of a second manuscript, in part parallel to the first, in part supplementing it, was also discovered. These texts Professor Schechter has now published, with a translation and commentary, in the first volume of his Documents of Jewish Sectaries. The longer and older of the manuscripts (A) is, in the opinion of the editor, probably of the tenth century; the other (B), of the eleventh or twelfth.

To an increasing number of people the idea that a religion which means to be something more than an heroic moral idealism has any significant place in the modern world seems open to grave doubts. Moreover, a large body of traditional metaphysical doctrines and systems are being subjected to much the same sort of criticism which religion is called upon to face. Three general arguments are used to show that both traditional religion and traditional metaphysics are no longer able to do what clear thinking and enlightened practice demand.

Each generation and each century seems to have its own peculiar danger and its own peculiar genius. The Christian church, for example, was confronted in the early centuries with the dangerous and subtle opposition of Greek thought; and the genius of the church victoriously faced this opposition with that spiritual interpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus which we find in the Fourth Gospel. Later, in the sixteenth century, the danger appeared in a materialistic church, and the genius of the Reformation was unmistakably present in the religion of the spirit and the liberty of the individual. In the eighteenth century the peril was seen in dogma, or irreligion, or a tepid morality; and the opposition developed Pietism in Germany, Methodism in England, and the Great Awakening in New England. Every century appears to be led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil in some new guise, and is compelled to find the apt, victorious text in Scripture.

And yet, whatever be the temptation and whatever be the triumphant reply, the issues are always the same,—sin and salvation. In the Greek myth of Proteus, when that old man of the sea was grappled with, he assumed most horrible and terrifying forms. Now he was a fire, now a wild stag, now a screaming seabird, now a three-headed dog, now a serpent. Sin is always protean, and presents to the wrestling centuries new and terrible aspects. What, then, we ask, seem to be the principalities and protean powers against which we are compelled to wrestle? I venture to think they may be suggested in one word, Materialism.

In present theological conditions, one who is called upon to discourse concerning “natural religion as it is commonly called and understood by divines and learned men” finds himself embarrassed at the outset by the difficulty of defining his subject in accordance with the requirement, since the term is variously understood by “divines and learned men.” In a recent issue of the Harvard Theological Review Professor Knight of Tufts College described three specific uses of the correlative terms “nature” and “supernatural,” each of which, moreover, comprises many subordinate varieties. The late Dr. C. C. Everett, to whom, by the way, Professor Knight does not refer, defined the natural as “the universe considered as a composite whole,” the world of cause and effect, one might say, in which the laws of Haeckel's “Substance” prevail, or the natura naturata of Spinoza, and the supernatural as the non-composite unity, Spinoza's natura naturans, which manifests itself in and through the natural. If this use be accepted, and with it Dr. Everett's definition of religion corresponding to the stage in the development of the discussion where the terms first appear, namely, as “feeling towards the supernatural,” it is difficult to find any meaning for the term natural religion save as it may denote religion awakened by contemplation of nature. Otherwise, it becomes a contradiction in terms, the adjective cancelling the noun or vice versa. In substantial agreement with these definitions is the habit of regarding the supernatural as covering the realm of free personality, both human and divine, while the world of things, in which law uniformly and inexorably rules, is styled nature. Here too, since religion resides in personality and, at least among those who employ this terminology, involves a relation to personality, natural religion becomes meaningless.

Like the appeal to faith at large, the tendency to conceive faith as emotion may proceed from various motives. In contrast to an arid intellectualism, or with a view to curing practical corruption, it is urged in furtherance of earnest religious experience. This was the case in the pre-reformation and the Reformation age, and again during the revival in the eighteenth century in England. In eras of doubt the faith of feeling is commended as a substitute for the halting processes of reason, with their dubious or negative conclusions. This motive also was active in the era of renascence and reform, and it has markedly influenced the religious development of later modern times. Such motives, moreover, rest upon a basis of truth. The heart has its rights as well as the head, and its deliverances possess an evidential value. In periods of intellectual change the witness of the heart gains special importance as an aid to faith until the reason can adjust itself to the new conditions. The faith which purifies and the faith which inspires is always the faith which is experienced. These principles need emphasis now less than ever before, for there has never been a period in which they have been so often advocated, and with so great authority, as in the last century and a half. In our own time, in part by voices which have only lately ceased to speak to us, they have been urged with a persuasive eloquence that has carried them throughout the civilized world. Formulated in technical fashion, they have entered into the reflection of the age until they have become one of its most characteristic and most significant philosophies of religion.

This presentation is limited to an exposition and estimate of the chief types in which authority has appeared in the church, to which are added one or two fundamental suggestions.

The first type is naturally that of the Roman Catholic church. Authority here was a gradual growth. At the outset no one could have foreseen the ultimate result, yet the claims of a series of bishops of the early church of Rome, not seldom men of the greatest administrative ability, whose assumptions were favored by circumstances, grew at length into the acknowledged supremacy of the Roman see. This supremacy gradually took the place of the state and subordinated every government to its own law and end, and this claim now extends to every interest of every individual whenever and wherever the church sees fit to exercise its prerogative.

Systematic theology is, and of right ought to be, primarily practical. In the first place, true religion is both one of the ends of an ideal human life and, in the long run, an indispensable means to the morality which is most essential to human welfare, inner and outer. In the second place, theology is necessary as an instrument for the proper control of the development and expression of religion—a special case of the function of ideas in the control of life. It follows, therefore, that a sound theology is a human necessity. The purpose of the theologian, whatever else it may or must include, must be to find those religious truths which are essential to the vitality and efficiency of the best type of human religion.

That this has really been the aim of theologians in the great formative periods of the history of Christian doctrine may readily be shown. The prevailing impression with regard to orthodoxy and excluded heresies is that the distinction between them is arbitrary and external. This is indeed to the modern mind true in large measure of the distinction between the old orthodoxy and heresy; but in their own day this distinction was neither arbitrary nor external. Then it was organically related to the most pressing of problems; it was supremely vital, for the issues involved were nothing short of spiritual life and death.

The necessity of moral and religious training in the education of children and the significance of education in matters of religion have in our day become the subject of much discussion. It may be profitable, therefore, to examine a unique institution of early New England by which religion was linked to education, and religious education was given a high place in the life of the churches. It is remarkable that this institution seems never to have received the attention of a single book, pamphlet, or magazine article.

To be able to reflect the mind and sentiment of one's own generation and be the interpreter of its aspirations is a great thing, but to succeed in giving to a noble and enduring ideal of humanity its classic expression, to voice clearly the deepest needs and highest dreams of many centuries, is the supreme performance, which is beyond the power of all but the few geniuses who are large enough to represent our race. Of all the saints, sages, and saviours who have studied the drama of human life, no one has ever surveyed it from a greater height than Plato, nor has any mind surpassed his in comprehensiveness and insight. And his conclusion, his matured conviction, was that humanity's most urgent need is for adequate leadership. The goal of the ideal system of education which is outlined in the Republic was the discovery, selection, and training of what he calls “synoptic-minded men” to be the leaders of the state. The youths to be prepared for this high function were first to be selected from those apparently most promising, and then submitted to a course of physical and mental discipline lasting through the greater part of life. This was a sifting process, and from time to time the failures were dropped. The finer natures continued their elementary studies till the age of twenty, when they were submitted to a new test of their capacity for leadership. Up to that time their manner of study was to be appropriate to youth. Their knowledge, being necessarily a mass of unconnected and unrelated fragments, could not be embraced in a unitary view. But when the synthetic powers ripen, the time arrives to attempt an organization of the mental content, to put together the things that have been, and are being, learned, and comprehensiveness becomes an ideal of the mind.