FOR A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 



69 



of Christian people dispersed throughout the world "), while not 

 amounting to a formal philosophy, still embodies the essentials of 

 such a philosophy, with all its associations centred in " a specific 

 Divine event," and with its " inward sense of solidarity and 

 continuity," as was, I fancy, seen long ago by Pascal, who was a man 

 of science as well as a thinker in the fields of Eeligion and Philoso- 

 phy. To construct a theory of the New Testament without recog- 

 nising the centrality of doctrine of the God-Man, would be about as 

 scientific as to attempt to construct a system of mechanics without 

 taking into account the fundamental law of Gravitation. " One 

 centre we have " (wrote Archbishop Benson), " but the approaches 

 to it from without, the radii of thought, are infinite." 

 Mr. John Schwartz said : — 



A strenuous business career has left me no time to study the 

 intricate philosophical systems so ably described by our learned 

 lecturer and these I cannot discuss. 



My few remarks will be from the common sense standpoint of 

 one who, during hours of retreat, has tried to follow the trend of 

 modern thought. I do not concur in the quotation from Professor 

 Sorley at the Church Congress, "There does not exist at the 

 present time any living systematized body of Christian philosophy," 

 for, alas dogmatic theology seems to me to have been such an 

 attempt, which has acted disastrously on the spiritual religion taught 

 by Christ, which it has defaced almost beyond recognition. This 

 fact has been driven home by the eloquence of Ruskin, Carlyle, 

 Tolstoy, Matthew Arnold, and many Broad Church divines. I 

 illustrate with a few extracts from Matthew Arnold's "Religion is 

 morality touched by emotion." The real essence of the New Testa- 

 ment is " Follow Jesus," " its natural fruits, joy, and life have been 

 taken to flow from the ecclesiastical dogma held along with it. Let 

 us treat popular religion tenderly. Learned religion, however, the 

 pseudo-science of dogmatic theology, merits no such indulgence. It 

 is a separable accretion which never had any business to be attached 

 to Christianity, never did it any good, and now does it great 

 harm." I contend that Christ appealed to the heart, not the intellect, 

 both by His teaching and His ideal personality. Our intuitions of 

 the good, like those of the beautiful, cannot be argued about, but 

 are as certain to us as those of natural phenomena on which 

 physical science is based. 



