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1849.] First View of the Relations of Faith and Philosophy. 689

of death, and of eternity, and he would fain know more; for here are inquiries in comparison with which all the secrets of nature are not only insignificant but patent to our gaze. Now it is the grand claim of the Christian revelation that it answers these vital questions, that it solves all the great moral problems of human destiny. For each enigma, so dark to reason, it has a definite and an authoritative response; for all the great moral problems of our destiny it offers a solution; and the solutions are given in the person and work of Christ; they all meet in the same radiant centre, in whom the revelation converges, in whom the believer finds his blessedness, and to whom all subsequent history has brought its loyal tribute.

This, then, is the primary aspect in which the Christian faith is to be viewed as an historical reality, confirmed by experience, influencing history, and professing to solve the greatest questions of our destiny, and all concentering in Jesus Christ, a personal object of faith and love, the very manifestation of God here upon the earth.

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This being so, what is the attitude which philosophy from its very nature, if we have correctly described it, must take towards the Christian faith? Philosophy can annul no fact; it must bow to all realities properly attested. It may strive to undermine the basis of faith by historical criticism; to prove that the experience of believers is contrary to right reason; to show that history may be otherwise interpreted than as centering in Christ and that there are other and better solutions of the problems of our destiny than those which Christianity offers it may strive to expel Christ from the human heart and from human history. Should it succeed in throwing doubt upon the evidences, there remains the experience; should it make the experience seem a delirium, there remains the history; should it cast suspicion on the history, there still remains the broad ground that to all the great problems of our destiny, philosophy cannot furnish a better decision than that which faith bears on her lips, one more consonant with man's best hopes, more elevating to his whole nature, more rational in itself. So that until philosophy can overthrow the pillars of our revelation, and prove our inmost life to be all a delusion; until it can find some other centre of convergence and divergence for the whole history of our race than the city of Jerusalem, and the middle cross on Calvary; until it can resolve the questions of our fate with a higher argument than Christianity presents: it is obliged to leave to faith all the vantage ground, all the supremacy, which an historic and experienced reality may confer.

And here, under God, is the hiding place of the strength of faith. Its is the majesty of a revealed economy; the profoundest experience

of the human heart is with it; the might of history testifies unto it; it, and it alone, gives the key which unlocks the mysteries of our moral being. These are the things which make it stronger than any excogitated system. Thus it is intertwined, as no mere speculation can be, with education, with the family, with human institutions, with the organic structure of society, with the deepest wants of the human heart, with its most permanent convictions. And thus is the Christian revelation, considered as a grand, historic, experienced economy, centering in one person, distinct from all other pretended revelations; and here do we find our warrant for drawing the distinction broad and clear. As soon as a revelation is resolved, as by some recent writers, into intuitions, so soon does faith lose its strongest means of defence against the assaults of philosophy.

Human reason may indeed inquire whether the voice which speaks be delusive or divine; it may test the truth of revelation on historical grounds; it may ask whether its doctrines be in harmony with, or contradictory to moral truth, to our essential ideas and necessary convictions; it may inquire whether the problems it proposes to solve be real or only imaginary; but having answered such preliminary inquiries, it has no shadow of a right to go to this revelation, and dictate to it what it shall tell us of God's nature, or what shall be the method of the revelation or of the redemption, any more than it has a right to go to that other reality, nature, and prescribe its laws and limit its elements. In both cases man is to study and to learn. Viewless as the life of nature, Christianity, like that life, is a diffusive, penetrating, and shaping agency; it moves majestically according to its divine laws, and knows not the control of human reason. It is simple as is light to the eye of the child, it is profound as is light to the eye of the sage, it is blessed as is light to all, it is darkness only to those who see not the light.

2. The statements we have thus far made upon the relative claims of faith and philosophy rest on the assumption that both parties admit the existence of a personal God, and the possibility of a revelation. The relation of the two is entirely different, when philosophy would undermine these cardinal points on which revelation rests. And here is where philosophy can be met only by philosophy. It is as unphilosophical for faith to be dogmatic here, as it is for philosophy to be dogmatic in the face of a recognized reality. If we cannot construct the foundations and the outworks of the Christian system, on impreg nable grounds; if we cannot show the possibility of miracles and of a revelation; if we cannot prove, absolutely prove the existence of a wise, intelligent, personal and providential Ruler of all things, then we

1849.] Second Aspect of the Relations of Faith and Philosophy. 691

are merged in infidelity, or given over to an unfounded faith. If we cannot settle these points on the field of open discussion, we cannot settle them at all.

The way of meeting sceptical positions on these questions is not by saying that they are repugnant to faith, but by showing that they are opposed to sound reason; is not by saying that they are German and transcendental, but by being very bold and yet more wise, and claiming that they are not only German but radically unsound; not only transcendental, but essentially unphilosophical. And if one cannot conscientiously say this, he had better say nothing at all about it.

The wise method is to expose the principle which lies at the heart of all this modern infidelity, and to show that the principle is really unphilosophical and incomplete. And that principle may perhaps be said to be, that we have given a rational account of things when we have reduced them to abstract ideas, or great principles; to laws, whether physical or ideal; that physical causes, antecedents and consequents, are the great end of philosophic inquiries; in short, that law and system are sufficient to account for the energy, the order, and the ends of the universe. This is the prime falsehood coiled in the heart of all these infidel schemes; this is the point to be met; and against it we must show that this principle does not answer the most important questions; that it gives only order and system, and does not explain the origin even of that; that it only answers the question, what are the constituents, and what the succession of things; that it does not answer the question, Whence are they? nor the question, How came they so to be? nor yet the question, What is their final cause? And these are as important and as philosophical questions as are those which concern abstract law and fixed succession.

When, for example, an enthusiastic naturalist, who knows something of nature and little of logic, thinks that by means of the fire-mist and an assumed law, he can show how all things are developed out of the mist, up to man and down to his system, and all without a God, shall we deny that there are order, and development, and a vast unfolding series in creation; or, shall we not rather say, conceding the order and development so far as they are verified, that the more the order, and the vaster the development, the greater is the need of an intelligent cause and an omnipotent energy? When modern explorers in history find reason and law and progress in its course, if we deny the reason and the progress, how can we vindicate Providence on any historical grounds: if we accept them, how may we not use them to show, even to the objector, that history has a guiding hand? And even when the pantheist brings forward his boasted system, and asserts that

he has got the primal substance and the universal law, by which all things may be developed, and attempts to exhibit their relations and connections and ends; whether is it wiser to say that reason is proud, that we cannot see relations and make systems, or, granting the reality of harmony, order and law, and the need and use of pointing them out, still to claim that to infer pantheism is philosophically false; that this system, with all its pretensions, accounts fully only for the succession and order of things; not for their rationality, since conscious reason alone is truly rational; nor for their energy, since mind alone is powerful; nor for their origin, since will alone can really bring into being; nor for their wise ends, since reason, power, and will are necessary to bring a rational end out of a blind universe. Philosophy must here show that the idea of a personal Creator, himself uncaused, is most rational, and is the only basis of the unity and energy of the universe.

Thus on the great questions preliminary to a revelation, we claim that philosophy has an exclusive voice, and that this is a point necessary to be insisted on in defining the relations of faith and philosophy.

And here we would not, for a moment, be understood to imply that the actual belief of men in God's existence and government is dependent upon such scientific analysis and proof: it is no more dependent on this, strictly speaking, than is man's belief in an external world on the refutation of idealism. Man was made for God, and all man's powers, in their right use, tend toward their great Author. Here is the actual stronghold of such belief against all sceptical systems. And when the belief is questioned, an argument for it may be derived from these tendencies; yet not hence alone, perhaps not most convincingly, in a, philosophic point of view, as against the sceptic.

3. Having thus stated, in general terms, what we conceive to be the relations of these two powers in respect to the substance and to the foundations of the Christian system, claiming for faith the pri ority in the one, and for philosophy in the other; it becomes necessary to speak of their relations within the precincts of the revelation itself.

For though philosophy must, in the first instance, receive the revelation properly authenticated; yet, by virtue of its office in giving a systematic form to our knowledge, it may still render essential and needed service to faith.

And this is the same thing as saying that we need systematic theology. For systematic theology is the combined result of philosophy and faith; and it is its high office to present the two in their most in

1849.]

Necessity of Systematic Theology.

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timate conjunction and inherent harmony. The whole history of the church gives us, in scientific theology, the best results of the conflict, and examples of the union of the highest faith and the wisest philosophy. In short, systematic theology may be defined, as the substance of the Christian faith in a scientific form. And our whole previous discussion bears upon this point as its culmination and result.

Systematic theology, by our ablest divines, is recognized as a science, both theoretical and practical. It is not a mere arrangement of the facts and doctrines of the Bible in a lucid order; it is the unfolding of them in a scientific order; it is not a series of unconnected doctrines, with the definitions of them, it is the combining of doctrines into a system its parts should not only be coördinate, they should be regularly developed. It should give the whole substance of the Christian faith, starting with its central principle, around which all the members are to be grouped. It must defend the faith and its separate parts against objections, and show that it is congruous with wellestablished truths in ethical and metaphysical science. And in proportion to the philosophical culture of the theologian, to the comprehensiveness of his principles, will be his ability to present the Christian faith in a fitting form. While it is partly true, that he who seeks for theology in philosophy is seeking the living among the dead; it is wholly true, that he who seeks for theology without philosophy is seeking the end without the instruments. We may be well assured that there is a statue somewhere in the block of marble; but the pickaxe, and the drill, and eyes that have no speculation in them, can never find it it needs instruments of the finest temper, a hand of the rarest skill, guided by a mind able to preconceive the symmetry of the perfect shape.

The necessity of systematic theology we put, then, on the broad ground that we need a reconciliation between faith and philosophy. Simple faith might have been sufficient for the first ages of the church, though it was not; we live in an age of controversy, surrounded by minds drenched with objections to orthodoxy, among people who, whatever else they have asked, have always asked a reason; to defend our faith, to commend our faith, we need systematic theology. Let us never cease to pray that the age of perfect faith may come; that it come more speedily, let us arm ourselves for the contest. As well might a general lead a straggling troop of even patriotic men against marshaled and disciplined battalions, as we encounter the closed and firm phalanx of our foes without a compact army of even the sacramental host of God's elect. Systematic theology is necessary so far, and just so far, as there is any meaning in the contest between faith and philosophy; just so far as we have anything to say, con

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