56 REV. A. R. WHATELY, D.D., ON THE DEMAND 



the good. What is lacking may be easier to feel than to define. 

 As a thinker he holds truth ; as a worshipper and worker he is 

 held by it. The Christian faith has not for him that same 

 commanding and determinative position on the plane of 

 reflection as it holds on the plane of emotion and activity. In 

 this latter sphere the Ego has found its cosmocentric point ; in 

 the sphere of the higher thought, the shadow of his own 

 subjectivity haunts him on the clearest uplands where all 

 other shadows are left behind. 



Surely there is something wanting here. Though we have 

 been thinking only of a small part of the Christian world, and 

 of only a certain section of the life of each individual that 

 belongs to it, yet we must remember that neither is the 

 individual divided into " water-tight compartments," nor yet 

 the Church. The Christian philosophy of any given age must 

 be related by action and reaction with the whole of life, and 

 with the life of the Whole. 



I have said "Christian philosophy." But Professor Sorley 

 speaks, in this connection, not merely of Christian philosophy 

 in that general sense in which it must always exist while 

 Christianity itself exists, but of a philosophy specifically 

 Christian, a system of thought embodying as such the central 

 specific affirmafcions of the Christian creed. I think he would 

 admit such an interpretation of his words ; but it cannot be 

 taken for granted that he would go the whole length with Dr. 

 Garvie in his pronouncement that " Theology need not adopt 

 any metaphysics, for it can beget its own." And again, " Christ 

 has made such a difference, that Christianity cannot borrow, 

 but must create its own metaphysics. None of the philosophical 

 systems which, within the Christian era, have come into being 

 with more or less conscious dependence on Christianity, seems 

 to him (the writer) to be so thoroughly Christian as to justify 

 the dependence of Christian theology upon it."* 



These remarks, I think, are absolutely sound ; and they may 

 be accepted as such without in the least underrating the value 

 of the work which the great philosophers have done, or the 

 large amount of truth in their systems. Indeed, a Christian 

 philosophy, if such there is to be, must occupy not an isolated, 

 but a central, place among other systems, and thus be better 

 able to do justice to them than they to each other. 



The subject before us is of course an immense one, and 



* The Ritschlian Theology, pp. 69 and 393. 



