in a literary but a quasi-scientific manner, and have then proceeded to draw strict inferences from them. But in doing this they have not only acted in the way of unwarrantable assumption: they have often produced what St. Paul termed the vain janglings of a science falsely so called, have enslaved the Divine to their own puny conceptions, and have provoked violent revolt.
Suppose that a similar process had been applied to the greatest of moral powers, that of love. Suppose that men had upheld the importance of love by saying love is supreme, spontaneous, disinterested, and had written treatises to "prove" these statements, and had made deductions from them with little aid from experience; suppose that others had contradicted some of these statements and deductions, saying that love depends upon circumstances, upon juxtaposition, or upon prudential considerations, and that we have power over it, that it is a duty. Then suppose that each side had invoked poetry, proverbs, or historical records to "prove" his own theory, and had insisted that every verse or line that was quoted involved a certain proposition or dogma about love, and that, unless such a proposition was admitted, neither thought nor feeling nor action in the subject had any meaning or validity, so that the only question was which theory was correct. Suppose, further, that a physicist came in among them and said: "All this is quite unreal; love is a function of the bodily organization, and depends upon age and health, upon the state of the nerves, the heart, and the liver"; should we think that any of these processes was reasonable, or that any of them exalted our estimate of love? Should we not sweep them all away, and welcome one bright saying, one little idyl, one embrace, as having more meaning and bringing us more to the root of the matter than all of them?
In religious matters abstract reasoning is not our best mode of reaching truth. The objects we are dealing with are too great and too distant. We approach them from various sides, and say what we can and what appears true; but it is often by metaphor, and parable, and poetry, and by the experience which gives us the actual dealings convey to others any theological truth. This does not imply that we abandon a constructive theology, but that we must so speak of God with men rather than by direct statements, that we can perceive and as not to narrow down the true sense of the divine which we wish to receive and impart, that we must take account of all the conditions, that we must constantly appeal to experience; and, lastly, that the systems which we form must be understood to be a response to the intellectual need of our own day, necessarily imperfect, and always liable to revision.
1. As regards God. Instead of asserting a priori, or taking ready-made from the Scriptures abstract statements, such as those alluded to above, theologians must accept as their task the attempt to give a true account of the totality of things which is also a unity impelled by a
