RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 259 



cedure and circuit of these relations is in terms of 

 this freedom, and by means of it. 



With such a conception as this, the Method of 

 Authority as a method with reUgion is profoundly 

 at war. I do not say it may not have its uses in 

 the vast course of the external history of religion, 

 just as we find the principle of police, of the rein- 

 forcement of statutes by punishments and rewards, 

 has its uses in the struggling history through which 

 the moral life of man shows itself in the w^orld. 

 But we cannot allot to it any but a minor and very 

 transient office, and its nature must be to check the 

 development of the Christian ideal of religion, as 

 we have now seen this to be. The principle of 

 Authority is not only foreign to the " mind that was 

 in Christ," but is antagonistic to it. If we reject the 

 principle, as we saw we must, on the ground of its 

 self-contradictions and its fatal illusoriness, all the 

 more should we as professed Christians reject it, 

 since it conflicts so directly with the central ideas 

 that our Founder introduced into religion. 



At the core, what Jesus did was to reform the con- 

 ception of God in the interest of the absolute reality 

 and the moral freedom of men. With this what can 

 be more discordant, what more hostile to it, than 

 the attempt to establisli by an appeal to declarative 

 authority doctrines that either contradict the human 

 reason or have no witness from it .-* For let us 



