theologians generally after him). The name “theism” makes
that requirement less emphatic (see below).
Another kindred term is “Natural Religion.” We meet with this in the titles of two Latin works[1] by German authors in reply to Lord Herbert of Cherbury. They use it with strong condemnation, from the standpoint of rigorous Christian orthodoxy; but it comes into England within very few years upon the Christian side—religion against Natural Religion. irreligion—in Bishop John Wilkins's Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1678). The author died 1672, and left the book unfinished; but the language of the title occurs in the first sentence; so it is undoubtedly Wilkins’s, as well as sanctioned by his editor and connexion through marriage, Tillotson, afterwards the archbishop. We meet with “Natural Religion” again in Samuel Clarke's works, and notably in Bishop Joseph Butler's Analogy (1756). Thus, as employed by most writers, “Natural Religion” connotes neutrality or even friendliness towards Christianity; just as is the case with theism in sense (2), or with Natural Theology. “Deist,” or sometimes “theist” in sense (1), or Naturalist, is a term of re probation with English 18th-century apologists, but not “Natural Religion.” If there is any difference between “theism” or “Natural Theology” on the one hand, and Natural Religion on the other, it is to be found in the more practical character attaching to natural “religion.” While Romans i. 19 and 20 (yet cf. Acts xiv. 17, xvii. 24, &c.) is the main New Testament passage which seems to recognize a Natural Theology, Rom. ii. 14, 15 may be said to assert Natural Religion. When the expression Natural Theology comes to the front once more with Archdeacon W. Paley (1802), this is a sort of after-birth or anachronism.[2]
Natural Law.—We do not pretend that Law of Nature—the jurist's term, not of course that of inductive science—is strictly a synonym for theism. But it is a cognate conception, of great importance historically, bearing the marks of the Stoic doctrine of “nature,” and helping to turn men's minds towards a “natural” theology. A pantheist Natural Law. may believe in Law of Nature and go no further; a theist who accepts Law of Nature has a large instalment. of natural theology ready made to his hand; including an idealist, or else an intuitionalist, scheme of ethics. Both jus naturale and lex natural is are as early as Cicero, and the jus gentium of the Roman lawyers is earlier still. Ambrose of Milan (Epistles ix. 71) quotes Romans ii. 14. IS—the passage already referred to, under “Natural Religion”—as asserting “Natural Law”; St Paul’s words suggest that form of thought and may conceivably have been suggested by it. J. G. Ritchie's Natural Rights, from the point of view of a very hostile (evolutionary) idealism, sketches the early history of the phrase Natural Law.[3] The philosopher in Abelard's Dialogus inter Judaeum Philosophum et Christianum expects to be saved ex sola lege naturali; here “law of nature” is fully equivalent to Natural Religion, and the word solo sets it in contrast with Christianity. Not to speak of the canoeists, Thomas Aquinas gives natural law an important place; while Melancthon, drawing from Aquinas, gives it an entrance into Protestant thought. Zwingli and Calvin on the other hand prefer the positive view of law as instituted by God far back in history in the days of the Old Covenant; but, when exegesis or controversy puts pressure upon them, they fall into line and reiterate the appeal to a Natural Law. Richard Hooker, again with traces of Aquinas, uses the conception as a weapon against Puritanism, with its aggressive positivism of scriptural precept. Natural Law, he claims, leaves room for discretionary arrangements like episcopacy; Scripture does not mean to supersede the light of reason. It is intelligible that Locke (Treatises of Civil Government) should have a relish in quoting Hooker against the divine right royalism of Sir John Filmer; but in Locke there is already a revival of belief in the (beau-ideal) “state” of nature and a. growing emphasis upon natural rights; ideas which, heralded by Rousseau, echoed round the world in the French, ReVolution. Locke had spent some years in Holland, the country of Grotius, who, with help from other great lawyers, and under a misapprehension as to the meaning of the Roman jus gentium, shaped modern concepts of international law by an appeal to law of nature.[4] This moral ideal rendered considerable services to civilization; we must not forget these, in the offence which the myth of a primitive golden age may offer to our historic sense. The kernel is sound enough though the husk is a poor thing. Finally, it is of some interest to note that Chr. Wolff, in the intervals of his chequered theological career, lectured and wrote as a jurist upon the Law of Nature.
“Philosophy of religion” is the modern term. It again is not exactly a synonym, though more nearly so than the last. The new phrase indicates that we are to approach the thought of God through a study of religious beliefs and practices; “theism” tended to make God a scientific inference from the facts of nature. But “philosophy of religion” can be construed in many different ways. An investigator, pledging himself to no beliefs—even perhaps one who definitely disbelieves and rejects theism—may yet interest himself in tracking out the psychology of religion. Or a philosopher like Hegel, armed with a metaphysical theory, may descend upon the facts of religion and interpret them in its light, till they almost lose their original significance, which we might provisionally define as consisting in this, that the believer in any religion finds himself helped or (as he claims) saved by it. Again, we must not be misled by verbal idiosyncrasies. What James Martineau calls A Study of Religion is really in the main a re-statement of old theistic arguments.[5]
Wallace's Gifford Lecture may be consulted upon this phrase also. He observes with truth that Natural Theology, if you remove from it the idea of subordination to Christianity 'as (claiming to be) a special revelation, tends to pass into a philosophy of religion. But it does not follow that the new standpoint involves what Wallace seems to hint, though he conceals his meaning behind complimentary rhetoric—rejection of church Christianity. A. M. Fairbairn's Phil. of the Christian Religion shows by its very title that an effort is being made to combine great confidence in metaphysics with strong belief in the uniqueness of Christianity; and the effort will be found to characterize all Fairbairn's work. Possibly, fuller study of religions may help theologians to formulate the imperial claims of Christianity more happily than in the dry contrast between what is “revealed” and what is “natural.” But that contrast is traditional; and it is implied in the ordinary theological usage of such phrases as “natural theology” or “natural religion” and almost of “theism.”]
Comparative religion, or, as some call it, history of religion, is yet another modern study, closely akin to the last discussed, although more strictly confined to registering the sequence of religious phenomena and less disposed criticizing religions or towards ranking them an order of merit. We cannot, therefore, call it precisely synonymous with theism. And yet theism—or monotheism—constitutes a special locus in the history of religion. The historian observes and records, in different lands, and ages, the rise or explicit utterance of belief in one God. Some uncertainty may be felt whether pantheism should rank as a theism. Is unity the main point? Or is not personality rather of prime importance, though doubtless presupposing unity? (Usage does not allow us to rank polytheism as a form of theism.) E. Troeltsch, Kultur der Gegenwart, Teil I. Abt. 4, p. 470, finds that the wisdom of the priests, in one land after another, rises to the thought of divine unity. That suggests pantheism, the usual form of such esoteric wisdom. Professor T. W. Rhys Davids (American Lectures, p. 37) sums up that, when the name of an earlier deity is
- ↑ Recorded in J. G. Walch’s Bibliotheca Theologica Selecta (1751).
- ↑ See Wallace's Gifford Lecture.
- ↑ “For the influence of that conception in theology. especially through the medium of Isidore of Seville, see successive chapters in A. J. Carlyle’s Hist. of Mediaeval Political Thought in the West, vol. 1.
- ↑ See (with writers already mentioned) Sir H. Maine’s Ancient Law.
- ↑ See his Introduction.
