THE TEACHING OF THEOLOGY 313 



and Catholic, were made and imposed prior to the philosophical re- 

 construction of the idea of religion, and under a state of deficient 

 knowledge of the non-Christian world. They rest upon a world- view 

 now, in many important particulars, abandoned. They contain no 

 adequate provision for elements in Oriental religious experience that 

 have now become a part of ascertained knowledge. The East is 

 opening its reserves of intellectual and material power before the 

 eyes of an astonished West. It is unfolding a capacity for heroic 

 devotion, a depth of religious insight undreamed of by those who 

 constructed theological symbols founded on erroneous assumptions 

 concerning the non-European races. 



If truth be homogeneous, and incapable of self-contradiction, there 

 must be an interpretation of Christianity as the absolute religion, 

 made in the light of the ascertained religious experience of the world, 

 if the function of Christianity in the world and its message to the 

 ethnic faiths are to be conceived and stated adequately. To demand 

 that this shall be done in schools controlled by ecclesiastical authority 

 is to demand relatively an impossibility. Where the conscience of 

 the ecclesiastical court is in honor bound to enforce the terms of a 

 theological interpretation incompatible with later knowledge of 

 psychology and history, the schools within its jurisdiction are in 

 honor pledged to conformity in their teaching. 



The pathway to relief points to the university affiliation of the 

 teaching of theology. To those who, as the students and apologists 

 of Christianity, have touched with a mind in spiritual sympathy 

 the higher religious thinking of India and the Far East, nothing is 

 more impressive than the readiness with which the fundamental 

 conceptions of the religion of Jesus Christ lend themselves to the 

 thought-forms and commend themselves to the aspirations of the 

 most lofty and prophetic spirits of the Orient. But it cannot be 

 hoped, perhaps it need not be hoped, that the East, in order to be- 

 come Christian, shall assimilate remote and alien theological form- 

 ulas and bow to Western ecclesiastical authority. There is, indeed, a 

 letter without the spirit, w T hich is dead. Is there not also a spirit 

 and essence of the absolute religion of Christ, which, if it be without 

 the letter of the Western mode, nevertheless is life and peace for the 

 common heart of the race? To interpret to the world the religion 

 of the Son of God in terms of this spirit and essence, and, while honor- 

 ing the sects, to rise above them into the undivided inheritance of 

 Christian truth, this, and more than this, is involved in the teaching 

 of theology in an atmosphere exempt from ecclesiastical tests. 



