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THE REV. A. R. WHATELY, M.A.^ D.D._, ON 



must awaken fully. We must meet the contemporary mind in 

 the spirit that seeks to penetrate to its inwardness. We cannot 

 merely attack Modernism, for to handle it effectually we must 

 understand it, and to understand it is to be modern. 



One supreme pre-requisite, therefore; of the Christian 

 philosopher is that his mind should go forth to meet the mind of 

 his age : that he should seek not only to keep up with it but 

 even to help its advance : that he should take an interest in 

 many of its problems, even apart from their bearings on religion : 

 that in religion itself he should so hold on to the old that he 

 need fear no flood of light from the new. 



This last remark brings us to the other side of the matter : 

 we pass from Heraclitus to Parmenides. So far our main 

 point has been almost a commonplace, though I have tried to 

 set it in a new light and to illustrate the law of mental progress 

 by a definite example. But the complementary proposition 

 provokes more subtle questions, because we are now faced with 

 the need of adjusting it to the former. If we pursued this 

 topic, it would of course take us over a wide field. All balanced 

 religious thinkers admit, in some form or another, that there is 

 a principle of stability to be set against the principle 

 of flux. Even the strange theory that religion is concerned 

 only with feeling implies that there are certain steady currents 

 of feeling underlying the changes, and expressive of what is 

 highest and most lasting in man. Others again — the rationalists 

 in the strict sense — for whom religion is essentially based on 

 philosophical ideas, w^ould admit, or even press, the authority 

 of certain supreme axioms of thought as eternal truths. 



But we need more than all this. If religion is, as the Christian 

 holds, not mere theory, or feeling, or moral rules, but the citizen- 

 ship of the Heavenly City — a sphere of life and thought, a point 

 of vantage from which the world can be surveyed with all its 

 aims, its ideas, its meaning, in the light of God — if so, then the 

 Christian must think as such. He must hold, with a grip that 

 is not merely intellectual, but moral, spiritual, vital in the 

 deepest biological sense, those great realities for which he lives. 

 He must knoio those realities, and to know means not merely 

 to feel but, in some measure, to understand. 



But to understand means to bring into relation with our ideas 

 in general. How can this be done if our creed is not to run the 

 risk of being caught — as it is with so many — in the flux, and drift- 

 ing helpless down stream, perhaps even to be wrecked in the 

 cataract ? Now to answer his question, let us begin with 

 an affirmation which to me, I confess, is axiomatic. Keligious 



