An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant Part 9

Byron's contribution to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a negative sort. It was destructive rather than constructive. Among the conventions and hypocrisies of society there were none which he more utterly despised than those of religion and the Church as he saw these.

There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks. But there is a difference. Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current religion. Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.

Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron thought he had none.

Posterity has felt that he had much. His attack was made in a reckless bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the truth of many things which he said is now overwhelmingly obvious. Sh.e.l.ley began with being what he called an atheist. He ended with being what we call an agnostic, whose pure poetic spirit carried him far into the realm of the highest idealism. The existence of a conscious will within the universe is not quite thinkable. Yet immortal love pervades the whole. Immortality is improbable, but his highest flights continually imply it. He is sure that when any theology violates the primary human affections, it tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become good. The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss later called 'the old faith and the new,' or, as Arnold phrased it, were 'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,' found their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough. From the time of the opening of Tennyson's work, the poets, not by destruction but by construction, not in opposition to religion but in harmony with it, have built up new doctrines of G.o.d and man and aided incalculably in preparing the way for a new and n.o.bler theology. In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in England who did more to read all of the vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher faith, and to fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of knowledge, than did Browning. Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a little of the n.o.blest conviction of the age. And what shall one say of Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who have spoken, often with consummate power and beauty, that which one never says at all without faith and rarely says well without art?

COLERIDGE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at his father's vicarage, Ottery St. Mary's, Devons.h.i.+re. He was the tenth child of his parents, weak in frame, always suffering much. He was a student at Christ's Hospital, London, where he was properly bullied, then at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he did not take his degree. For some happy years he lived in the Lake region and was the friend of Wordsworth and Southey.

He studied in Gottingen, a thing almost unheard of in his time. The years 1798 to 1813 were indeed spent in utter misery, through the opium habit which he had contracted while seeking relief from rheumatic pain.

He wrote and taught and talked in Highgate from 1814 to 1834. He had planned great works which never took shape. For a brief period he severed his connexion with the English Church, coming under Unitarian influence. He then reverted to the relation in which his ecclesiastical instincts were satisfied. We read his _Aids to Reflection_ and his _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, and wonder how they can ever have exerted a great influence. Nevertheless, they were fresh and stimulating in their time. That Coleridge was a power, we have testimony from men differing among themselves so widely as do Hare, Sterling, Newman and John Stuart Mill. He was a master of style. He had insight and breadth.

Tulloch says of the _Aids_, that it is a book which none but a thinker upon divine things will ever like. Not all even of these have liked it.

Inexcusably fragmentary it sometimes seems. One is fain to ask: What right has any man to publish a sc.r.a.p-book of his musings? Coleridge had the ambition to lay anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. The _Aids_ were but of the nature of prolegomena. For substance his philosophy went back to Locke and Hume and to the Cambridge Platonists.

He had learned of Kant and Schleiermacher as well. He was no metaphysician, but a keen interpreter of spiritual facts, who himself had been quickened by a particularly painful experience. He saw in Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of our spiritual being and the remedy for its disorder. The evangelical tradition brought religion to a man from without. It took no account of man's spiritual const.i.tution, beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of h.e.l.l. Coleridge set out, not from sin alone, but from the whole deep basis of spiritual capacity and responsibility upon which sin rests. He a.s.serts experience. We are as sure of the capacity for the good and of the experience of the good as we can be of the evil. The case is similar as to the truth. There are aspects of truth which transcend our powers. We use words without meaning when we talk of the plans of a being who is neither an object for our senses nor a part of our self-consciousness. All truth must be capable of being rendered into words conformable to reason. Theologians had declared their doctrines true or false without reference to the subjective standard of judgment.

Coleridge contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data, but upon inward experience. The authority of Scripture is in its truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human reason and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The doctrine of an atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too comes within the range of spiritual experience. The apostolic language took colour from the traditions concerning sacrifice. Much has been taken by the Church as literal dogmatic statement which should be taken as more figure of speech, borrowed from Jewish sources.

Coleridge feared that his thoughts concerning Scripture might, if published, do more harm than good. They were printed first in 1840.

Their writing goes back into the period long before the conflict raised by Strauss. There is not much here that one might not have learned from Herder and Lessing. Utterances of Whately and Arnold showed that minds in England were waking. But Coleridge's utterances rest consistently upon the philosophy of religion and theory of dogma which have been above implied. They are more significant than are mere flashes of generous insight, like those of the men named. The notion of verbal inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures could not possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had made itself felt. The rabbinical idea was bound to disappear. A truer sense of the conditions attending the origins and progress of civilisation and of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, brought of necessity a changed idea of the nature of Scripture and revelation. Its literature must be read as literature, its history as history. For the answer in our hearts to the spirit in the Book, Coleridge used the phrase: 'It finds me.' 'Whatever finds me bears witness to itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Ghost. In the Bible there is more that finds me than in all the other books which I have read.' Still, there is much in the Bible that does not find me. It is full of contradictions, both moral and historical. Are we to regard these as all equally inspired? The Scripture itself does not claim that.

Besides, what good would it do us to claim that the original doc.u.ments were inerrant, unless we could claim also that they had been inerrantly transmitted? Apparently Coleridge thought that no one would ever claim that. Coleridge wrote also concerning the Church. His volume on _The Const.i.tution of Church and State_ appeared in 1830. It is the least satisfactory of his works. The vacillation of Coleridge's own course showed that upon this point his mind was never clear. Arnold also, though in a somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. If Thomas Arnold's moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save this theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be expected from Coleridge.

THE ORIEL SCHOOL

It has often happened in the history of the English universities that a given college has become, through its body of tutors and students, through its common-room talk and literary work, the centre, for the time, of a movement of thought which gives leaders.h.i.+p to the college. In this manner it has been customary to speak of the group of men who, before the rise of the Oxford Movement, gathered at Oriel College, as the Oriel School. Newman and Keble were both Oriel tutors. The Oriel men were of distinctly liberal tendency. There were men of note among them.

There was Whately, Archbishop of Dublin after 1831, and Copleston, from whom both Keble and Newman owned that they learned much. There was Arnold, subsequently Headmaster of Rugby. There was Hampden, Professor of Divinity after 1836. The school was called from its liberalism the Noetic school. Whether this epithet contained more of satire or of complacency it is difficult to say. These men arrested attention and filled some of the older academic and ecclesiastical heads with alarm.

Without disrespect one may say that it is difficult now to understand the commotion which they made. Arnold had a truly beautiful character.

What he might have done as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford was never revealed, for he died in 1842. Whately, viewed as a noetic, appears commonplace.

Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was Hampden.

In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the t.i.tle of _The Scholastic Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology_, he a.s.sailed what had long been the very bulwark of traditionalism. His idea was to show how the vast fabric of scholastic theology had grown up, particularly what contributions had been made to it in the Middle Age.

The traditional dogma is a structure reared upon the logical terminology of the patristic and mediaeval schools. It has little foundation in Scripture and no response in the religious consciousness. We have here the application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were not wrong in saying that his method would dissolve, not merely that particular system of theology, but all creeds and theologies whatsoever.

Patristic, mediaeval Catholic theology and scholastic Protestantism, no less, would go down before it. A pamphlet attributed to Newman, published in 1836, precipitated a discussion which, for bitterness, has rarely been surpa.s.sed in the melancholy history of theological dispute.

The excitement went to almost unheard of lengths. In the controversy the Archbishop, Dr. Howley, made but a poor figure. The Duke of Wellington did not add to his fame. Wilberforce and Newman never cleared themselves of the suspicion of indirectness. This was, however, after the opening of the Oxford Movement.

ERSKINE AND CAMPBELL

The period from 1820 to 1850 was one of religious and intellectual activity in Scotland as well. Tulloch depicts with a Scotsman's patriotism the movement which centres about the names of Erskine and Campbell. Pfleiderer also judges that their contribution was as significant as any made to dogmatic theology in Great Britain in the nineteenth century. They achieved the same reconstruction of the doctrine of salvation which had been effected by Kant and Schleiermacher. At their hands the doctrine was rescued from that forensic externality into which Calvinism had degenerated. It was given again its quality of ethical inwardness, and based directly upon religious experience. High Lutheranism had issued in the same externality in Germany before Kant and Schleiermacher, and the New England theology before Channing and Bushnell. The merits of Christ achieved an external salvation, of which a man became partic.i.p.ant practically upon condition of a.s.sent to certain propositions. Similarly, in the Catholic revival, salvation was conceived as an external and future good, of which a man became partic.i.p.ant through the sacraments applied to him by priests in apostolical succession. In point of externality there was not much to choose between views which were felt to be radically opposed the one to the other.

Erskine was not a man theologically educated. He led a peculiarly secluded life. He was an advocate by profession, but, withdrawing from that career, virtually gave himself up to meditation. Campbell was a minister of the Established Church of Scotland in a remote village, Row, upon the Gare Loch. When he was convicted of heresy and driven from the ministry, he also devoted himself to study and authors.h.i.+p. Both men seem to have come to their results largely from the application of their own sound religious sense to the Scriptures. That the Scottish Church should have rejected the truth for which these men contended was the heaviest blow which it could have inflicted on itself. Thereby it arrested its own healthy development. It perpetuated its traditional view, somewhat as New England orthodoxy was given a new lease of life through the partisans.h.i.+p which the Unitarian schism engendered. The matter was not mended at the time of the great rupture of the Scottish Church in 1843.

That body which broke away from the Establishment, and achieved a purely ecclesiastical control of its own clergy, won, indeed, by this means the name of the Free Church, though, in point of theological opinion, it was far from representing the more free and progressive element. Tulloch pays a beautiful tribute to the character of Erskine, whom he knew.

Quiet, brooding, introspective, he read his Bible and his own soul, and with singular purity of intuition generalised from his own experience.

Therewith is described, however, both the power and the limitation of his work. His first book was ent.i.tled _Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion_, 1820. The t.i.tle itself is suggestive of the revolution through which the mind both of Erskine and of his age was pa.s.sing. His book, _The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel_, appeared in 1828; _The Brazen Serpent_ in 1831. Men have confounded forgiveness and pardon. They have made pardon equivalent to salvation. But salvation is character. Forgiveness is only one of the means of it. Salvation is not a future good. It is a present fellows.h.i.+p with G.o.d. It is sanctification of character by means of our labour and G.o.d's love. The fall was the rise of the spirit of freedom. Fallen man can never be saved except through glad surrender of his childish independence to the truth and goodness of G.o.d. Yet that surrender is the preservation and enlargement of our independence. It is the secret of true self-realisation. The sufferings of Christ reveal G.o.d's holy love.

It is not as if G.o.d's love had been purchased by the sufferings of his Son. On the contrary, it is man who needs to believe in G.o.d's love, and so be reconciled to the G.o.d whom he has feared and hated. Christ overcomes sin by obediently enduring the suffering which sin naturally entails. He endures it in pure love of his brethren. Man must overcome sin in the same way.

Campbell published, so late as 1856, his great work _The Nature of the Atonement and its Relation to the Remission of Sins and Eternal Life_.

It was the matured result of the reflections of a quarter of a century, spent partly in enforced retirement after 1831. Campbell maintains unequivocally that the sacrifice of Christ cannot be understood as a punishment due to man's sin, meted out to Christ in man's stead. Viewed retrospectively, Christ's work in the atonement is but the highest example of a law otherwise universally operative. No man can work redemption for his fellows except by entering into their condition, as if everything in that condition were his own, though much of it may be in no sense his due. It is freely borne by him because of his identification of himself with them. Campbell lingers in the myth of Christ's being the federal head of the humanity. There is something pathetic in the struggle of his mind to save phrases and the paraphernalia of an ancient view which, however, his fundamental principle rendered obsolete, He struggles to save the word satisfaction, though it means nothing in his system save that G.o.d is satisfied as he contemplates the character of Christ. Prospectively considered, the sacrifice of Christ effects salvation by its moral power over men in example and inspiration. Vicarious sacrifice, the result of which was merely imputed, would leave the sinner just where he was before. It is an empty fiction. But the spectacle of suffering freely undertaken for our sakes discovers the treasures of the divine image in man. The love of G.o.d and a man's own resolve make him in the end, in fact, that which he has always been in capacity and destiny, a child of G.o.d, possessed of the secret of a growing righteousness, which is itself salvation.

MAURICE

Scottish books seem to have been but little read in England in that day.

It was Maurice who first made the substance of Campbell's teaching known in England. Frederick Denison Maurice was the son of a Unitarian minister, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, at a time when it was impossible for a Nonconformist to obtain a degree. He was ordained a priest of the Church of England in 1834, even suffering himself to be baptised again. He was chaplain of Lincoln's Inn and Professor of Theology in King's College, London. After 1866 he was Professor of Moral Philosophy in Cambridge, though his life-work was over. At the heart of Maurice's theology lies the contention to which he gave the name of universal redemption. Christ's work is for every man. Every man is indeed in Christ. Man's unhappiness lies only in the fact that he will not own this fact and live accordingly. Man as man is the child of G.o.d.

He cannot undo that fact or alter that relation if he would. He does not need to become a child of G.o.d, as the phrase has been. He needs only to recognise that he already is such a child. He can never cease to bear this relations.h.i.+p. He can only refuse to fulfil it. With other words Erskine and Coleridge and Schleiermacher had said this same thing.

For the rest, one may speak briefly of Maurice. He was animated by the strongest desire for Church unity, but at the back of his mind lay a conception of the Church and an insistence upon uniformity which made unity impossible. In the light of his own inheritance his ecclesiastical positivism seems strange. Perhaps it was the course of his experience which made this irrational positivism natural. Few men in his generation suffered greater persecutions under the unwarranted supposition on the part of contemporaries that he had a liberal mind. In reality, few men in his generation had less of a quality which, had he possessed it, would have given him peace and joy even in the midst of his persecutions. The casual remark above made concerning Campbell is true in enhanced degree of Maurice. A large part of the industry of a very industrious life was devoted to the effort to convince others and himself that those few really wonderful glimpses of spiritual truth which he had, had no disastrous consequences for an inherited system of thought in which they certainly did not take their rise. His name was connected with the social enthusiasm that inaugurated a new movement in England which will claim attention in another paragraph.

CHANNING

Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology which took place in America also, upon the same general lines which we have seen in Schleiermacher and in Campbell. The typical figure here, the protagonist of the movement, is William Ellery Channing. It may be doubted whether there has ever been a civilisation more completely controlled by its Church and ministers, or a culture more entirely dominated by theology, than were those of New England until the middle of the eighteenth century. There had been indeed a marked decline in religious life. The history of the Great Awakening shows that. Remonstrances against the Great Awakening show also how men's minds were moving away from the theory of the universe which the theology of that movement implied. One cannot say that in the preaching of Hopkins there is an appreciable relaxation of the Edwardsian scheme. Interestingly enough, it was in Newport that Channing was born and with Hopkins that he a.s.sociated until the time of his licensure to preach in 1802. Many thought that Channing would stand with the most stringent of the orthodox. Deism and rationalism had made themselves felt in America after the Revolution.

Channing, during his years in Harvard College, can hardly have failed to come into contact with the criticism of religion from this side. There is no such clear influence of current rationalism upon Channing as, for example, upon Schleiermacher. Yet here in the West, which most Europeans thought of as a wilderness, circ.u.mstances brought about the launching of this man upon the career of a liberal religious thinker, when as yet Schleiermacher had hardly advanced beyond the position of the _Discourses_, when Erskine had not yet written a line and Campbell was still a child. Channing became minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston in 1803. The appointment of Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity in Harvard College took place in 1805. That appointment was the first clear indication of the liberal party's strength. Channing's Baltimore Address was delivered in 1819. He died in 1847.

In the schism among the Congregational Churches in New England, which before 1819 apparently had come to be regarded by both parties as remediless, Channing took the side of the opposition to Calvinistic orthodoxy. He developed qualities as controversialist and leader which the gentler aspect of his early years had hardly led men to suspect.

This American liberal movement had been referred to by Belsham as related to English Unitarianism. After 1815, in this country, by its opponents at least, the movement was consistently called Unitarian.

Channing did with zeal contend against the traditional doctrine of the atonement and of the trinity. On the other hand, he saw in Christ the perfect revelation of G.o.d to humanity and at the same time the ideal of humanity. He believed in Jesus' sinlessness and in his miracles, especially in his resurrection. The keynote of Channing's character and convictions is found in his sense of the inherent greatness of man. Of this feeling his entire system is but the unfolding. It was early and deliberately adopted by him as a fundamental faith. It remained the immovable centre of his reverence and trust amid all the inroads of doubt and sorrow. Political interest was as natural to Channing's earlier manhood as it had been to Fichte in the emergency of the Fatherland. Similarly, in the later years of his life, when evils connected with slavery had made themselves felt, his partic.i.p.ation in the abolitionist agitation showed the same enthusiasm and practical bent. He had his dream of communism, his perception of the evils of our industrial system, his contempt for charity in place of economic remedy.

All was for man, all rested upon supreme faith in man. That man is endowed with knowledge of the right and with the power to realise it, was a fundamental maxim. Hence arose Channing's a.s.sertion of free-will.

The denial of free-will renders the sentiment of duty but illusory. In the conscience there is both a revelation and a type of G.o.d. Its suggestions, by the very authority they carry with them, declare themselves to be G.o.d's law. G.o.d, concurring with our highest nature, present in its action, can be thought of only after the pattern which he gives us in ourselves. Whatever revelation G.o.d makes of himself, he must deal with us as with free beings living under natural laws. Revelation must be merely supplementary to those laws. Everything arbitrary and magical, everything which despairs of us or insults us as moral agents, everything which does not address itself to us through reason and conscience, must be excluded from the intercourse between G.o.d and man.

What the doctrines of salvation and atonement, of the person of Christ and of the influence of the Holy Spirit, as construed from this centre would be, may without difficulty be surmised. The whole of Channing's teaching is bathed in an atmosphere of the reverent love of G.o.d which is the very source of his enthusiasm for man.

BUSHNELL

A very different man was Horace Bushnell, born in the year of Channing's licensure, 1802. He was not bred under the influence of the strict Calvinism of his day. His father was an Arminian. Edwards had made Arminians detested in New England. His mother had been reared in the Episcopal Church. She was of Huguenot origin. When about seventeen, while tending a carding-machine, he wrote a paper in which he endeavoured to bring Calvinism into logical coherence and, in the interest of sound reason, to correct St. Paul's willingness to be accursed for the sake of his brethren. He graduated from Yale College in 1827. He taught there while studying law after 1829. He describes himself at this period as sound in ethics and sceptical in religion, the soundness of his morals being due to nature and training, the scepticism, to the theology in which he was involved. His law studies were complete, yet he turned to the ministry. He had been born on the orthodox side of the great contention in which Channing was a leader of the liberals in the days of which we speak. He never saw any reason to change this relation. His clerical colleagues, for half a life-time, sought to change it for him. In 1833 he was ordained and installed as minister of the North Church in Hartford, a pastorate which he never left. The process of disintegration of the orthodox body was continuing.

There was almost as much rancour between the old and the new orthodoxy as between orthodox and Unitarians themselves. Almost before his career was well begun an incurable disease fastened itself upon him. Not much later, all the severity of theological strife befell him. Between these two we have to think of him doing his work and keeping his sense of humour.

His earliest book of consequence was on _Christian Nurture_, published in 1846. Consistent Calvinism presupposes in its converts mature years.

Even an adult must pa.s.s through waters deep for him. He is not a sinful child of the Father. He is a being totally depraved and d.a.m.ned to everlasting punishment. G.o.d becomes his Father only after he is redeemed. The revivalists' theory Bushnell bitterly opposed. It made of religion a transcendental matter which belonged on the outside of life, a kind of miraculous epidemic. He repudiated the prevailing individualism. He antic.i.p.ated much that is now being said concerning heredity, environment and subconsciousness. He revived the sense of the Church in which Puritanism had been so sadly lacking. The book is a cla.s.sic, one of the rich treasures which the nineteenth century offers to the twentieth.

Bushnell, so far as one can judge, had no knowledge of Kant. He is, nevertheless, dealing with Kant's own problem, of the theory of knowledge, in his rather diffuse 'Dissertation on Language,' which is prefixed to the volume which bears the t.i.tle _G.o.d in Christ_, 1849. He was following his living principle, the reference of doctrine to conscience. G.o.d must be a 'right G.o.d.' Dogma must make no a.s.sertion concerning G.o.d which will not stand this test. Not alone does the dogma make such a.s.sertions. The Scripture makes them as well. How can this be?

What is the relation of language to thought and of thought to fact? How can the language of Scripture be explained, and yet the reality of the revelation not be explained away? There is a touching interest which attaches to this Hartford minister, working out, alone and clumsily, a problem the solution of which the greatest minds of the age had been gradually bringing to perfection for three-quarters of a century.

In the year 1848 Bushnell was invited to give addresses at the Commencements of three divinity schools: that at Harvard, then unqualifiedly Unitarian; that at Andover, where the battle with Unitarianism had been fought; and that at Yale, where Bushnell had been trained. The address at Cambridge was on the subject of _the Atonement_; the one at New Haven on _the Divinity of Christ_, including Bushnell's doctrine of the trinity; the one at Andover on _Dogma and Spirit_, a plea for the cessation of strife. He says squarely of the old school theories of the atonement, which represent Christ as suffering the penalty of the law in our stead: 'They are capable, one and all of them, of no light in which they do not offend some right sentiment of our moral being. If the great Redeemer, in the excess of his goodness, consents to receive the penal woes of the world in his person, and if that offer is accepted, what does it signify, save that G.o.d will have his modic.u.m of suffering somehow; and if he lets the guilty go he will yet satisfy himself out of the innocent?' The vicariousness of love, the identification of the sufferer with the sinner, in the sense that the Saviour is involved by his desire to help us in the woes which naturally follow sin, this Bushnell mightily affirmed. Yet there is no pretence that he used vicariousness or satisfaction in the same sense in which his adversaries did. He is magnificently free from all such indirection.

In the New Haven address there is this same combination of fire and light. The chief theological value of the doctrine of the trinity, as maintained by the New England Calvinistic teachers, had been to furnish the _dramatis personae_ for the doctrine of the atonement. In the speculation as to the negotiation of this subst.i.tutionary transaction, the language of the theologians had degenerated into stark tritheism.

Edwards, describing the councils of the trinity, spoke of the three persons as 'they.' Bushnell saw that any proper view of the unity of G.o.d made the forensic idea of the atonement incredible. He sought to replace the ontological notion of the trinity by that of a trinity of revelation, which held for him the practical truths by which his faith was nourished, and yet avoided the contradictions which the other doctrine presented both to reason and faith. Bushnell would have been far from claiming that he was the first to make this fight. The American Unitarians had been making it for more than a generation. The Unitarian protest was wholesome. It was magnificent. It was providential, but it paused in negation. It never advanced to construction. Bushnell's significance is not that he fought this battle, but that he fought it from the ranks of the orthodox Church. He fought it with a personal equipment which Channing had not had. He was decades later in his work.

He took up the central religious problem when Channing's successors were following either Emerson or Parker.

The Andover address consisted in the statement of Bushnell's views of the causes which had led to the schism in the New England Church. A single quotation may give the key-note of the discourse:--'We had on our side an article of the creed which a.s.serted a metaphysical trinity. That made the a.s.sertion of the metaphysical unity inevitable and desirable.

We had theories of atonement, of depravity, of original sin, which required the appearance of antagonistic theories. On our side, theological culture was so limited that we took what was really only our own opinion for the unalterable truth of G.o.d. On the other side, it was so limited that men, perceiving the insufficiency of dogma, took the opposite contention with the same seriousness and totality of conviction. They a.s.serted liberty, as indeed they must, to vindicate their revolt. They produced, meantime, the most intensely human and, in that sense, the most intensely opinionated religion ever invented.'

THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL