i8 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in a literary but a ^wcm-scientific manner, and have then proceeded 

 to draw strict inferences from them. But in doing this they have not 

 only acted in the way of unwarrantable assumption : they have often 

 produced what St. Paul termed the vain janglings of a science falsely 

 so called, have enslaved the Divine to their own puny conceptions, and 

 have provoked violent revolt. 



Suppose that a similar process had been applied to the greatest of 

 moral powers, that of love. Suppose that men had upheld the im- 

 portance of love by saying love is supreme, spontaneous, disinterested, 

 and had written treatises to " prove " these statements, and had made 

 deductions from them with little aid from experience ; suppose that 

 others had contradicted some of these statements and deductions, say- 

 ing that love depends upon circumstances, upon juxtaposition, or upon 

 prudential considerations, and that we have power over it, that it is a 

 duty. Then suppose that each side had invoked poetry, proverbs, or 

 historical records to " prove " his own theory, and had insisted that 

 every verse or line that was quoted involved a certain proposition or 

 dogma about love, and that, unless such a proposition was admitted, 

 neither thought nor feeling nor action in the subject had any meaning 

 or validity, so that the only question was which theory was correct. 

 Suppose, further, that a physicist came in among them and said : " All 

 this is quite unreal ; love is a function of the bodily organization, and 

 depends upon age and health, upon the state of the nerves, the heart, 

 and the liver " ; should we think that any of these processes was reason- 

 able, or that any of them exalted our estimate of love ? Should we not 

 sweep them all away, and welcome one bright saying, one little idyl, 

 one embrace, as having more meaning and bringing us more to the root 

 of the matter than all of them ? 



In religious matters abstract reasoning is not our best mode of 

 reaching truth. The objects we are dealing with are too great and 

 too distant. We approach them from various sides, and say what we 

 can and what appears true ; but it is often by metaphor, and parable, 

 and poetry, and by the experience which gives us the actual dealings 

 of God with men rather than by direct statements, that we can per- 

 ceive and convey to others any theological truth. This does not imply 

 that we abandon a constructive theology, but that we must so speak 

 as not to narrow down the true sense of the divine which we wish to 

 receive and impart, that we must take account of all the conditions, 

 that we must constantly appeal to experience ; and, lastly, that the sys- 

 tems which we form must be understood to be a response to the intel- 

 lectual need of our own day, necessarily imperfect, and always liable 

 to revision. 



1. As regards God. Instead of asserting a priori, or taking ready- 

 made from the Scriptures abstract statements, such as those alluded to 

 above, theologians must accept as their task the attempt to give a true 

 account of the totality of things which is also a unity impelled by a 



