FOR A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 



57 



certainly I shall make no attempt even to outline such a 

 philosophy as I have indicated. It will be enough to put 

 before you a few considerations, first as to its necessity, and 

 secondly as to the direction in which it will have to look for 

 its material. These questions are so intimately connected that 

 we will not attempt to discuss them apart. They may be 

 combined in one formula : the relation of philosophy to the 

 Christian Gospel. 



Let us glance at the phenomena which normal and naive 

 Christianity, not yet worked over by speculation or accommo- 

 dating theories, presents. We have tw^o starting-points before us, 

 the individual and the historic or social ; and at both we find 

 what clanns to be a definite experience of Divine action or 

 intervention. Speaking from the point of view of those who 

 accept this experience as real — as I shall throughout — we have 

 to ask whether or no such are to be called upon to translate, if 

 they can, the doctrines which for them most directly express 

 their faith into general abstract principles, and base them upon, 

 or prop them against, speculative explanations of the universe. 

 And if not, may we claim that faith, brought face to face with 

 intellectual problems, will itself develop its own intellectual 

 resources ? 



Christianity certainly came into the world as a message, a 

 Gospel, a proclamation ; and it is most significant that the 

 Church should have so long held the pagan philosophy at arm's 

 length, and have used abstract reasoning under protest and for 

 the purpose merely of defining itself against the heresies. So 

 far as this was so — and I think this is the essential truth of the 

 matter — Christian philosophy may be said to have come into 

 being just as the background of a geometrical pattern forms 

 itself into a correlative pattern without the artist specially 

 observing it, through its being defined against the design he 

 draws upon it. Tiie unauthorized teachers together defined and 

 systematized the ecclesiastical doctrine in defining their own 

 positions and pressing them upon the notice of the orthodox 

 theologians. 



Now the experience of the reality of the saving grace of God 

 in those who recognise the reality of that experience, gives the 

 key to the interpretation of the history. As a simple matter 

 of fact, it is not the human greatness of Christ that lastingly 

 stamped itself on the mind of the Church, but the divine ; not 

 His witness to the Divine sonship of all men, but the sense of 

 the uniqueness of His own. When the individual Christian 

 finds an objective experience the very centre and foundation of 



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