l8o UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STXTDIES 



IV 



To return now to our problem. We have determined the logical 

 classification of Christian doctrine, its function, the sense in which it 

 can be said to survive the downfall of scientific systems, and the logical 

 process by which Christian assurance is reached. We. have discovered 

 interesting analogies and interesting contrasts between the teachings 

 of religion and the teachings of science. What light does our study of 

 nature and characteristics of science and religion throw upon the 

 incessant warfare between the two; a warfare, be it remembered, 

 which is not confined to the Christian centuries. Witness the fates 

 of Anaxagoras and Socrates. 



One root of strife we have already laid bare : the fact that science 

 and religion serve quite different interests. We are now in position 

 to discern two others: one a blunder, the other a mutual lack of 

 sympathy. 



I. The church has ever been beset by an insidious confusion of 

 thought. She has ever been tempted to identify her faith with the 

 conceptions in which, for the time being, she pictures its assertions to 

 herself. Theologians have too often entertained a quite impossible 

 notion of the method of revelation. They have thought of revelation 

 as consisting in God's inserting his own ideas into human minds. They 

 have assumed, for example, that the apostles' conceptions of the truths 

 upon which their faith laid hold were identical with the divine con- 

 ceptions. That, however, is impossible. With all reverence be it 

 said, God simply could not convey to man any one of his ideas in its 

 entirety and completeness without conveying all. For the ideas pres- 

 ent at any one time in any mind, human or divine, form an organism. 

 Each is linked with every other. No one can be entertained without 

 the rest. The divine ideas can have meaning only for omniscience. 

 To have expressed the truth which Christians believe God did convey 

 to man when He founded His church, in forms of the divine thought, 

 would have been a futile thing. The message would have had no 

 meaning. It is historically certain that this futile method of revela- 

 tion was not the method God adopted. The conceptions in which the 

 faith was embodied for the apostles were conceptions of their own day. 



