FOR A CHEISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 



59 



AVhen Scholasticism, which had constructed its own phi- 

 losophy of the Christian religion, was discredited by the 

 advance of new ideas and secular learning, the human 

 intellect had a task thrown upon it which was bound in 

 due time to disclose both its resources and its limitations. 

 If the dogmatic authority wielded by the Medieval Church 

 had depended more on its appeal to the heart and con- 

 science, or conversely, if the personal spiritual life that it 

 contained had been deep and diffused enough to have captured 

 and utilised the intellectual machinery of her universities and 

 monasteries, then we may assume that theology, even though it 

 drastically reformed itself, would have done so with a greater 

 sense of continuity with the past. The Keformers, especially in 

 England, certainly realised that their task was not merely to 

 destroy, but rather to reconstruct on primitive models : but the 

 Eeformation was but one aspect of a great movement of 

 emancipation of the human intellect, fraught with good and 

 evil. The essence of Intellectualism, as it seems to me, is not 

 its claim to criticise, but its claim to construct. I do not mean 

 to construct truth as such, but to construct systems — systems, 

 that is, of abstract thought which are envisaged as concrete 

 reality. Eeason, when awakened to full consciousness, and 

 seeking to come to its own, is in a mood not merely to 

 scrutinise the theological doctrines transmitted for its accept- 

 ance, but provisionally even to reject them, because they are 

 already the rational construction of other people ; and reason, 

 when suddenly emancipated, seeks to do its own constructive 

 work from the very foundation, and out of the most elementary 

 materials. 



ISTow this could have been wholesomely checked only by a 

 strong sense of spiritual solidarity with the community that 

 transmitted those doctrines. And such spiritual solidarity had 

 been forfeited by the Medieval Church. 



It is significant to note, in this connection, the attitude 

 of Descartes, the father of modern metaphysics, himself a 

 member of the Eoman Church. Describing the process by 

 which his mind extricated itself from mere traditional acqui- 

 escence and attained to an independent standpoint, he tells how 

 he came to place more confidence in the simple inferences of an 

 individual mind than in the systems constructed by many 

 minds, and adds : " And because we have all to pass through a 

 state of infancy to manhood, and have been of necessity, for a 

 length of time, governed by our desires and preceptors (whose 

 dictates were frequently conflicting, while neither perhaps 



