THE PRE-REQUISITES OF A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 231 



knowledge is, at the root, experiential. Even the religious man 

 may not always recognize this : for even our moments of direct 

 contact with reality so often elude us when we attempt intro- 

 spection ; but he must come to recognize it if he is to be a 

 sound Christian philosopher. The truth that he must accept is 

 that to know about God we must know Grod. 



But this is not, of course, a complete answer to the question. 

 How shall we bridge the gap between direct knowledge — - 

 acquaintance — and theoretical, or doctrinal, knowledge ? How 

 can we express tlie inwardness of our communion with God in 

 human language, even to ourselves, and, if we cannot, how can 

 we put it into the form of ideas and bring these ideas into 

 connexion with our ideas in general ? 



We shall get near the answer to this question if we consider 

 the relation of our thoughts to our feelings. Xot that I admit 

 that intuition is mere feeling, but we can call it so for the 

 present. iSTow let us apply this statement of the problem directly 

 to religion. What is the relation of our theology to our worship, 

 of our doctrines about God to our sense of His reality, presence, 

 and dealings with us ? Surely the one feeds the other. Surely 

 the worship of a Christian differs as such from that of a Pantheist. 

 Surely the shocks our theology receive, however wholesome in 

 the end, are at the time harmful to our devotions ; and does not 

 fresh light upon Divine truth make more vivid the Divine 

 presence ? 



Then conversely. We shall probably agree that direct 

 devotions stimulate devout thought. But I think that there is 

 more than stimulation : that the personal revelation of God is 

 not merely a glow of light before the eyes of the soul, but an 

 illumination that penetrates within. It may not directly take 

 the form of expressible thought, but it works as it were at the 

 back of our thoughts ; feeds and directs them, enlarges their 

 scope, deepens their insight. It is not easy to express, in a form 

 that will escape criticism, how our gains in worship become 

 intellectual gains, but the main point should not be obscure. It 

 is simply this : that however hard it may be to utilize God's 

 self-revelation to our souls in the form of explicit teaching, or 

 even clear thought, there is a passage to and fro between worship 

 on the one hand and theology on the other. This does not, of 

 course, make our theology infallible, but it tends towards truth 

 — the truth that we need individuality for ourselves and for our 

 work. 



And this consideration both justifies doctrine and helps us to see 

 how it may be kept living and fresh. If it be really true — and 



