DISCOURSE OF DR. J. C. WELLING. 201 



learn of which he is not yet aware. There must needs be ferment- 

 ation in new thought as in new wine, but the vintage of the brain, 

 like the vintage of the grape, is only the better for a process which 

 brings impurities to the surface where they may be scummed off, 

 and settles the lees at the bottom, where they ought to be. It is 

 under the figure of a vintage that Bacon describes the crowning 

 result of a successful inductive process. When this process has 

 been completed in any direction, it remains for a wider critical and 

 reconciling philosophy to bring the other departments of knowl- 

 edge into logical relation and correspondence with the new outlook 

 that has been gained on nature and its phenomena. 



Erasmus tells us in his Praise of Folly, mingling satire with 

 the truth of his criticism, that in order to understand the scholastic 

 theology of his day, it was necessary to spend six-and -thirty years 

 in the study of Aristotle's physics and of the doctrines of the 

 Scotists. What a purification of method has been wrought in 

 theology since the times of Erasmus! And for that purification 

 the Church is largely indebted to the methodology of modern sci- 

 ence, in clearing up the thoughts and rationalizing the intellectual 

 processes of men. The gain for sound theology is here unspeaka- 

 ble, and amply repays her for the heavy baggage she has dropped 

 by the way at the challenge of science baggage which only im- 

 peded her march without reinforcing her artillery. 



Hence, as a Christian philosopher, Professor Henry never found 

 it necessary to lower the scientific flag in order to conciliate an ob- 

 scurantist theology, and he never lowered the Christian flag in 

 order to conciliate those who would erect the scientific standard 

 over more territory than they have conquered. He had none of 

 that spirit which would rather be wrong with Plato than right 

 with anybody else. He wanted to follow wherever truth was in 

 the van. But better than most men I think he knew how to dis- 

 criminate between what a British scholar calls the duty of "follow- 

 ing truth wherever it leads us, and the duty of yielding to the 

 immediate pressure of an argument." He saw, as the same writer 

 adds, that for whole generations "the victory of argument may 

 sway backward and forward, like the fortune of single battles," 

 but the victory of truth brings in peace, and a peace which comes 



