AN APOLOGY FOR THE CHURCH's PERSECUTION OF SCIENCE 187 



accepted them. It will then proceed to show how science and phi- 

 losophy rendered these ideas obsolete, while the practical convictions 

 which they connoted remained; and how this process was repeated 

 over and over again and is still going on. It will be a moving tale of 

 pain and triumph on both sides, a tale in which the noblest and the 

 most ignoble sides of human nature play alternate parts and ofttimes 

 are intertwined. 



It will be a tale worth the teUing. For science will never be free 

 from ecclesiastical opposition and the church will never have a well- 

 grounded assurance of the finaHty of her teaching until that tale is 

 adequately told and its lessons learned. There is great need of a new 

 theology, new perhaps not so much in its content as in its method. 

 Theology must learn to renounce once for all the task of gathering 

 together traditional reUgious ideas as if these disjecta membra were her 

 finalities. She must set herself to analyze the needs of the human 

 soul and set forth the convictions which are eternally necessary, if 

 these needs are to be satisfied. Those convictions the theologian does 

 not need to invent; for the needs of the human soul have been satis- 

 fied. Few wiU deny that the Christian faith, whenever it has been 

 genuinely held by a man in its purity and hved out, has satisfied that 

 man's deepest needs. But it is necessary that the theologian should 

 clearly perceive and never forget what the Christian faith is. The 

 Christian faith is nothing more nor less than the postulates of the 

 Christian fife, those convictions upon which Christian character is 

 founded, the assumptions which are necessary to make Christian con- 

 duct and Christian serenity rational. What those postulates are the 

 theologian can learn only from the historian. Only the historian can 

 place the historic creeds and doctrines of Christianity in their original 

 setting and thus reveal their practical import. The practical import 

 of a rehgious doctrine is its essence. It is that alone which is perma- 

 nently valid. The meaning and permanent essence of the belief that 

 Father Euphrates always seeks the sea comes out only as we watch 

 primitive man acting on that belief. So likewise we can never discern 

 the essence of the primitive Christian faith until we determine how 

 it differed from other contemporary ideas and what support it lent 



