Readers of the popular scientific magazines and papers of today are often confronted with the statement of the downfall of evolution; and, though this statement is usually not made in a way that carries conviction, there is a growing feeling among the educated public that behind all this smoke there is some fire. It is the object of this article to make clear the real grounds for this suspicion, and at the same time to give a brief survey of the present state of the theory of organic evolution.

The unknown apostle who wrote the wholesome letter to Titus, “his own son after the common faith,” re-enforces his general doctrine of Christian ethics by a special application to the circumstances in which Titus finds himself at Crete. The Christian life, the apostle writes, is practicable even there. The Cretans, where Titus had been left “to set in order the things that are wanting,” were, as one of themselves had said, “liars, beasts, and gluttoners.” “This witness,” the writer agrees, “is true”; but this truth is precisely what gives an opportunity for Titus to teach the Cretans a “sound” or “healthful” doctrine of chastity, discretion, and gravity. “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared unto all men.” Crete was a good place for a Christian “to adorn the doctrine of God.” The problem of the Christian life was not to run away from a bad place, but to serve it and save it. We should live “soberly, righteously, and godly,” not in a world of our own choosing, but “in this present world.” Soberly as concerns one's self, righteously as concerns one's neighbor, piously in one's relation to God,—these three laws made, according to the Apostle, a practicable rule of conduct for a young man of the first century in a vicious and pleasure-loving world.

To attempt in these days a definition of religion may seem like taking a wanton risk of intellectual confusion. Even a rough classification of religions is difficult. The mass of data is so vast, the varieties of religion so manifold, that no sooner has a scheme of classification established itself than it begins to sag under the weight of material thrown upon it. The old schemes which hinged on a fixed distinction between the religion of the Bible and all religions outside the pale of Biblical revelation, succeeded by dint of excluding a large part of the phenomena. But, as things are with us, no classification is better than a working hypothesis into which, as a constituent element, enters the knowledge of its own mortality.

The following memorial, which I publish with the approval of the Prussian Minister of Worship and Education, is to inform the public at large of the establishment of an American Library of Theology at the University of Marburg. The scientific aims of this Library have the full approval not only of the Prussian government, but also of the theological Faculty of the University, of which I am a member. Thanks to a well-wisher, a German living in America, whose generosity made possible the founding of the Library, the Prussian government was in a position at the beginning of this year to call it actually into being, and to establish it at the University of Marburg as an official institution.

What the supernatural is depends on what nature is. And nature is regarded from two widely different points of view. The first of these is shown in Richard Watson Gilder's sonnet:—

THE CELESTIAL PASSION

O white and midnight sky! O starry bath!

Wash me in thy pure, heavenly, crystal flood;

Cleanse me, ye stars, from earthly soil and scath;

Let not one taint remain in spirit or blood!

Receive my soul, ye burning, awful deeps;

Touch and baptize me with the mighty power

That in ye thrills, while the dark planet sleeps;

Make me all yours for one blest secret hour!

O glittering host! O high angelic choir!

Silence each tone that with thy music jars;

Fill me even as an urn with thy white fire

Till all I am is kindred to the stars!

Make me thy child, thou infinite, holy night—

So shall my days be full of heavenly light!

The second attitude is expressed in Matthew Arnold's

IN HARMONY WITH NATURE

To a Preacher

“In harmony with Nature?” Restless fool,

Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee,

When true, the last impossibility—

To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool!

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,

And in that more lie all his hopes of good,

Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;

Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore;

Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;

Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave;

Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;

Nature and man can never be fast friends.

Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!

This paper is but a fragmentary contribution to that study of the “Varieties of Religious Experience” which William James has so significantly brought to the attention of students of human nature. I propose to sketch some personal peculiarities of the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, and in the end to show what place was filled in his life by what may be called his experiences as a mystic. Every one knows that the typical Quakers have made prominent amongst their spiritual exercises what they call “silent worship” as conducted in their meetings, and that they have held that this “silent worship” often brings the worshipper under the direct influence of the movings of the Divine Spirit. I have here no concern with any question as to the truth or as to the ultimate merits of this or of any other tenet of George Fox or of his followers. I intend simply to show the place that the experiences of silent worship occupied in the mental life of Fox himself, and why he found this form of what is technically called mysticism a valuable feature of his religious consciousness. This study will bring us into somewhat closer contact with the mental complications of a remarkable personality—a personality in which the normal and the abnormal were in a very interesting way united. We shall see how certain tendencies that, in another context, would have proved highly dangerous to the sanity of their possessor were so combined in Fox that the ultimate result was prevailingly good, both for himself and for his environment. Religious history contains many instances where men whose mental life showed numerous abnormal traits still were so constituted that they retained their essential self-control and accomplished a great work. The study of Fox presents one more such instance, and may also possess genuine psychological interest.

Since my discussion deals with Fox as a mystic, I shall first have to explain what one technically means by mysticism in religion. Then I shall have to show that Fox had many traits which were not those of the typical mystic. And, finally, I shall try to point out what part Fox's mystical tendencies played in determining certain aspects of his mind and of his career.

Churches in the great religions have been allies of all ancient governments and most modern ones. The Emperor of Japan was believed to have, and in the popular mind still has, intimate relations with the heavenly powers. He used to be held in a seclusion suitable for this peculiar relationship to Deity. The Emperor of China for thousands of years under various dynasties was a high priest, whose offerings and prayers were peculiarly acceptable to Deity, and frequently procured for his people good seedtimes and good harvests, although he sometimes failed to avert pestilences, droughts, floods, and famines. The Indian castes are family clans and trades-unions with strong religious sanctions. The Koran contains the foundations of civil law as well as of ecclesiastical, and the Sultan claims succession to the religious as well as to the civil authority of the Caliphs. Under the feudal system there was a chaplain in every great noble's house, and the king ruled “by the grace of God,” and by the same grace transmitted his office to his son. Both Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the Little claimed as Emperor the support of the Church; but Napoleon the Third never seemed to see the extraordinary pathos in the formula he used so much, “By the grace of God and the national will Emperor of the French.” The French Revolution tried to divorce civil government from religion, but failed to do so. National established churches supported by the state exist all over Europe, although their tenure is frail in several European countries. The American Republic has carried into practice complete religious toleration and complete separation of church and state; but every now and then some one proposes to bridge the gap between church and state by a phrase such as “Vox populi, vox Dei,” or to “recognize” the Divine Immanence by inserting the word God in the Constitution.

One of the things difficult to explain in the world of thought was the sudden and overmastering impetus given to the theory of development by the publication of the works of Charles Darwin. The main idea of that theory, namely, that the higher orders of life had come into being through evolution from lower types, was by no means new; and there is so much among the plainest features of the world's life to suggest the idea, that one can only wonder why, if the scientific mind was waiting for, and wanting, the theory (as it appears to have been doing), it should not have taken it up long before Darwin's time.

Do we live in an intrinsically rent and warring world? or is the schism only apparent, veiling a fundamental and all-pervasive harmony? or is the universe of such a nature as to admit of a conflict which, though it has sprung up within it, is not of it?

These three possibilities offer themselves to the mind that is trying to push through the world of appearances into the world of reality. The first is the conclusion of Dualism. The second is the conclusion of Monism. The third is an undifferentiated, but long prevalent and well-grounded, conviction, sometimes wrongly identified with dualism, sometimes with monism, but in reality independent of both. For want of a better term we may call it the principle of Duality.

One of the best-known stories about Luther relates that while at Rome in December, 1510, he began climbing on his knees, for the indulgence to be thus acquired, the Scala Santa, but that, before he reached the top he remembered the text, “The just shall live by faith,” and he desisted. If authentic, this anecdote proves that he had thus early attained to the fundamental doctrine of the Reformation. The source of the story is a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul, who says that he heard it from his father when he was eleven years old but did not write it down until thirty-eight years later. Such testimony to any fact is necessarily unreliable at least in details, and now that the same story has been found, in a very different form, in one of Luther's own sermons, Paul's version of it must be abandoned. In 1545 the Reformer relates that, while at Rome, he ascended the Holy Stairs with the purpose of getting the soul of an ancestor out of purgatory, but that when he arrived at the top he thought, “Who knows whether this prayer avails?” As this is assuredly no proof that he had by this time arrived at the sola fides, the only decisive reason for placing his acquisition of that doctrine prior to 1510 disappears, and we are thrown back on the earlier, contemporary sources, which in any case are more trustworthy, to trace the gradual development of that important dogma in his mind.

It is not a little significant that several books have appeared within the last year or two which deal with the subject of New Testament Theology in its whole extent. For a considerable time there has been a shrinking from this large enterprise, and the work of Holtzmann was allowed to maintain its place without serious competition. The attention of younger scholars has been more directed to the literary and historical criticism of the New Testament than to its theology; and while the theology has been by no means neglected, it has been discussed in many separate monographs rather than in works of a comprehensive nature. Now, however, we have the three books of Weinel, Feine, and Schlatter, appearing almost simultaneously, while the monumental work of Holtzmann is being reissued in a fully revised edition.

What is absolute certainty? Where is it to be found? Does it exist? Is there any belief of mankind which can be claimed as absolutely certain?

It is difficult to define an absolute in any kind. One can only say that the absolute is that which wants nothing to make it complete. The absolute does not even want a philosopher to tell the world what the absolute is. So long as it wants a philosopher to expound it, to that extent it is not complete, and is therefore not the absolute.

Spinoza saw this, and made it the corner-stone of his thought. He saw that Perfection must be capable of telling its own story. It cannot at one and the same time be perfect and yet in need of a human spokesman to explain it. A dumb absolute which needs you to give it a tongue, an unintelligible absolute which needs you to make it rational, a dead absolute which needs you to make it live and interesting, would be no absolute at all. So Spinoza begins his great treatise with admirable humility by defining God as the being who defines himself; who, just because he is all-perfect, needs no explainer, being fully competent to explain himself. God asks for no champions; wants no apologist; seeks for no witnesses. If he did, he would not be God. But Spinoza went too far.

In these days of world-wide intercommunication, the hope of unity and demand for it among men are very strong, so strong that the optimistically inclined often think they already see the rosy hues of a dawn heralding the day of universal harmony. Perhaps these good people are right; but in no respect do modifying considerations appear more clearly than in matters of religion and religious thought. In these things racial as well as individual differences exist; and even between nations so near akin as Germany and the United States mutual understanding seems hard to attain. No doubt the average religious man in America looks upon Germany as a hot-bed of religious radicalism, opposed to all those principles of piety which good men wish to see preserved. There is ground for this opinion, in that German theologians have led the way in the application of the critical method to the facts of religion, and it is often still true, though far less than a few decades ago, that the theories advanced contain poison for the springs of pure religion. But this is not the whole of the picture. Besides the forces of stanch conservatism, which are as strong and as active in Germany as elsewhere, there exists also there at present a vigorous and increasing body of men, as much interested in religion as any conservatives, who are attempting to mediate the great truths of religion to the modern man, whose views are no longer in agreement with orthodoxy. To some these teachers may seem radical, but to those who realize that the great crux is the religious life itself and not this or that particular formulation of it, they convey a distinct impression of constructive renewal—renewal, because they reckon with the knowledge and forces of the new day; constructive, because they build upon and further the knowledge which the past has bequeathed and the forces to which man has ever turned for help and strength.

Such a man is Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg, too little known on this side of the Atlantic, but a man to be reckoned with in the future here, as he already is in his own land. That a new school will form itself about him is unlikely; his teaching is too individualistic for that. But many a student is attracted by his powerful reasoning, fearlessly critical of all the prevailing tendencies—orthodox, Ritschlian, Hegelian, pragmatic—and gets from him a deeper hold on the realities of the spiritual life and a stronger faith in Christianity as the permanent expression of that life. It is this broad aspect of Troeltsch's teaching which will interest us here rather than his views concerning the history of Protestant Christianity, which is his special field.

No field of theological study surpasses in interest or in importance the history of the Christian Church. Here is a great complex of institutions and beliefs. Where have these come from? What was it that gave them birth? What is the secret of their persistence and power? What are they worth to mankind? Is there to be found beneath the variant, shifting forms of institution and life, of organization and creed, as they appear in Christian history, any underlying, unifying principle, which can account for their rise and explain their right to be? These questions must be answered. They involve the fundamental problems of the unity of Christian history and of the rationality and worth of institutions and confessions and rituals, which, unless they can thus justify themselves, cannot permanently survive.

It is the purpose of this article to show that there is such a unifying principle of interpretation, and that this principle is to be found in the reality of the Christian experience itself. Behind every movement in the history of the church, behind every institution which she has developed for the expression and perpetuation of her life, behind every doctrine and creed, there stands a human soul which has met God, and in the great silence, unbroken save by the cry of penitence or the exultant note of spiritual conquest, has found the path to peace.

The question about the whence and whither of the drift of our cosmic weather is an old one and cannot be lightly brushed aside. It is both a forced and a momentous issue. It is a forced issue, because we cannot help taking an attitude towards it, whether we make it explicit to ourselves or not. It is momentous, because such an attitude is a serious index of our deepest practical faith as regards the value of life, and cannot help determining our conduct. There have been three distinct types of theory in the past as regards this drift—Mechanism, Finalism, and Vitalism.

For the modern theologian there is an all-encompassing bond of perfectness in the New Testament in the doctrine of the Logos, found in the Johannine gospel and epistles. It links together the christology of the Synoptic writings, Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts, and that of the epistles. It combines the primitive doctrine of Jesus the faithful “Servant” of God, glorified and exalted to God's right hand—a doctrine of “apotheosis,” as Baur called it—with the Pauline doctrine of “incarnation,”—Christ a pre-existent being, agent of creation, in the form and likeness of God, but self-emptied and abased, made for a little while lower than the angels, that for the suffering of death he might be made eternally higher than they, heir and lord of the creation. In the one—the Petrine christology, as we may call it because it is mainly represented in the speeches of Peter in Acts 2–5—the residence in heaven is an episode. God has taken up his faithful Servant for a short interval to his own right hand, delivering him out of the power of death, that, when his people have repented of their wicked rejection of him, he may send him again as the Christ, to restore the kingdom to Israel and reign forever on the throne of David in the renewed and glorified Jerusalem. In the other christology—the Pauline—the residence on earth is the episode. The drama's beginning and ending is in heaven. Viewed thus “under the aspect of the eternal” the brief period of abasement, poverty, and suffering, undertaken for the “reconciliation” of the animate world, is scarcely a moment of time. For our sakes the eternal Son of God “became poor,” he emptied himself and took upon him the form of a slave, and became obedient unto death, yea, even the (slave's) death of the cross; but therefore also “God highly exalted him and gave him the Name which is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The current conception divides religious from scientific belief, so that it seems almost as if religious belief supplied our emotional needs and scientific belief did not. Put into crude terms, this is the sense in which all maintainers of old creeds, who are not merely obscurantist, oppose the dismemberment of tradition. They even say that it is not the mere sentiment which attaches to an inheritance from the past that makes an old creed seem necessary to an intelligent man. For this intelligent man must have in his life a glamor such as science can never give, and the glamor comes from the religious creed. On this ground the mysticism which has always accompanied and exalted intellectual views of the universe must be sought from our traditional creeds, for it can never arise from science and history.

It is our purpose here to maintain the opposite. We shall endeavor to show how a mysticism may arise from the acceptance of science and history as the only possible intellectual views of the universe. So that what has been the chief argument for the maintenance of inherited creeds will be seen to be false. It does not in fact follow that the highest religious life can only arise from the acceptance of traditional creeds, simply because in the past there has been this connection. We are willing to admit that in the thirteenth century mysticism and deep religious feeling depended upon a belief in the eucharist as the physical body of Christ; but it by no means follows that the intellectual disagreement with such a belief implies a desertion of mysticism. This may seem very obvious; but we mean more. We mean that the highest mysticism does not depend even on the belief in a personal God, for the emotional needs of man are just as completely supplied by science and history as they ever were by any theology.

Human progress depends on the discovery of the forces which are active in the universe and of the way to use them so as to accomplish desired ends. Power is in itself non-moral, and may be used for either moral or immoral purposes. All experience proves that conservatism is an immense power in human nature, and in religion probably more than in any other sphere of human life. It seems strange, then, that more attention has not been given to the nature and source of this power, and to the methods by which it may be so employed as to help and build up rather than obstruct and destroy the spiritual life of men.

The power of conservatism affects doctrine, ethics, ceremonial and liturgical forms, and polity in unequal degrees, although it affects them all very greatly. This essay, however, is concerned only with conservatism in doctrine, and leaves the other fields to other students.

The multiplication of safety appliances for the protection of human life is a marked characteristic of our age. No humane ministry to society is more consistently and forcefully urged than the providing of automatic safety-devices to supplant the older method of reliance upon personal attention and intelligence. “Such accidents will happen until we eliminate the whole human element by means of automatic provisions,” observed a railroad operator after a recent disaster. He followed the statement with an informing discussion concerning the installing of safety-appliances on his own line of road, in response to the demands of the public conscience. There is always a position and a premium for the inventive genius who can substitute for fallible human attention an automatic response that works infallibly. The disabled switchman, the drunken watchman, the recreant employee, can be more and more dispensed with as his services are supplied by the mechanical device which never sleeps nor drinks whiskey, and whose integrity does not call for any subjective processes. Lives of employees and of patrons by the thousands are thus guarded and saved every year. And the principle is so humane and sound that we do not propose to halt while inventive skill is unexhausted or the reluctant employer remains unpunished.

Our object here is not to question the beneficence of these things; we are concerned rather with a by-product. What are the moral consequences of safety devices—their effect upon character? and what are the limitations of mechanical safety in the complex and responsible activities of human achievement? Does the elevator man become a more or a less responsible person when he feels that not his own skill and attention, but an automatic device, stands between his passengers and disaster? Do railway employees, when relieved of personal responsibility, develop the types of character that under the old system fitted them to advance as conductors, engineers, and managing officers? What is the effect upon a board of directors of knowing that they have provided “every device for the safety and comfort of their patrons”? In short, does the movement contribute to responsible character or does it not?

A few great books, for those who know them well, make unnecessary a countless number of lesser books. From the higher point of view, all can be seen that is visible from the lower, and much more. To have carefully studied the works of one of the world's great men is to have immensely widened one's own life. To comprehend the scope of his thought and the variety and extent of his sympathies is to have an essential element of a liberal education. An enthusiastic and undiscriminating discipleship, at least at first, is not to be deplored, for a realization of the limitations of great men and the incompleteness of all systems is sure to come later; but no one understands any view of the world who has never been able to feel its plausibility. There is no delight in life like the companionship of a noble mind. A long comradeship with a great man, one in whom intellectual power, ethical elevation, all-inclusive sympathies, and wholeness and wholesomeness of view are united, is one of the greatest of our human privileges. To it we turn for consolation in our sorrows, for a refuge from the petty irritations and vexations that so constantly beset us, and for help to rise above them to serenity and peace. Through these great souls we are able in some measure to realize the Emersonian ideal of a life of activity and at the same time of poise and power, the hands being in the world of action while the head is above the storm. No service is more real or precious than that which such men have rendered to humanity. By living on the higher planes, they appeal to our latent instincts; they help us to understand our own best selves, and to be what without them we could never be.

Of those who have served our race in this way one of the greatest is Plato.