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relations He sustains to us are such as no man can number. Why then should we not seek to know Him? Is He not nigh to us, and even within our hearts? Is He not always to be better known by us in the ever-living, ever - enlarging revelation that comes from Him? grediamur.

Impavidi pro

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CHAPTER III.

RECENT THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION.

THE insufficiency of data in the earliest historic inquiry we can make, with a view of ascertaining the empiric origin or genesis of religion, is now, we think, frankly enough acknowledged, and the need for inferential processes of thought, as to the known and available facts, admitted. This is, of course, a different thing from saying that its origin can be determined by speculation. The philosophical question of the origin of religion is, of course, to be sharply differentiated from the question of its historic appearance or genesis. Beyond the empiric view of its origin-with which the philosophy of religion cannot take to do philosophy concerns itself with its ultimate grounds or bases. It is with the significance of its interior phenomena that the philosophy of religion presses beyond its outward historic forms to deal. It is not meant, of course, in saying this, that the philosophy of religion must not work upon the facts

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of religious history-which are indeed its presupposition or must not educe from them the principles of which they testify. These facts are the staple of the philosophy of religion to be rigorously dealt with apart from preconceived theory, so that the principles which inhere in them shall be construed, not constructed. It is to be remembered, too, that no uncertainty of ethnographical theory, and no crudeness of our knowledge of its origin, can rob religion of its present philosophical value for us. The theistic philosophy, discarding naturalistic explanations of the origin as insufficient and artificial, has more clearly seen what objective reality -even the presence and agency of God Himself must be postulated behind the variant forms and modes of religion as that, in fact, whereby the maintenance of this true, original, personal relation between God and normal man, of which we have already spoken, is indefeasibly secured, no matter how scarce the traces of religion may sometimes be in empirical man. The ghost-theory or ancestral worship of Spencer's 'Sociology'founded on the widespread fact of ancestor-worship -with its failure to discriminate between the form of worship and the religious feeling itself, or, in other words, to account for the genesis of the very category of divinity in which the dead are placed; the animism of Tylor, to which, as one of the earliest, if also most crude, forms of religion, a relative truth may be allowed; and the God

begetting, though hardly man-honouring, fear of Strauss, have all been felt and shown to be notoriously inadequate to explain "the complex feeling of religious devotion." Recent theistic philosophy of religion has been more percipient of how far the origin of religion-with its ideas of responsibility and sin-has been from being found when religion, "dread arbitress of mutable respect," has been ascribed to the fecit timor of Strauss just alluded to, or set down to superstition or the fraudulent inventions of priestcraft, or accounted for by the Schleiermacherian feeling of absolute dependence, or by resolving it, with Jacobi, into a thing of the heart. Theistic thought recognises that such a sense as that of dependence must continue to be an integral part of religion, but it also sees how hypothetical, mysterious, indefinite, and incomplete such state or stage of religious feeling is. May we not say that it has distinctly felt how much greater is man, transcending objects of sense as religious, than any mere sensations or feelings of fear can suffice to show him? Does it not find the real marvel to consist-not in any fear with which man was early inspired but—in the fact that, before the appalling magnitudes of the universe which his eye beheld, he dared declare a faith in his own superior greatness and destiny, which a Pascal ages afterwards has been no more than able fully to utter? May we not say that it has more deeply felt, with Fechner,

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that "the grand fable of God and the life to come" would never have attained the hold or extent it has, "had it been but a fable"?

We claim that it has found all those theories which ascribe the origin of religion on its objective side to a phantom Deity born of ignorance and dread, and on its subjective side to such inferior faculties and feelings as fear, priestcraft, ancestral reverence, sufficiently refuted by the way in which religion not only persists, but becomes clarified in conception and worthier in import, with every advance of knowledge and culture. We, for our part, attach exceedingly little value to the attempts that have been made to set the religious consciousness in its fetichistic, totemistic, atavistic, polytheistic, henotheistic stages in definite and serial order, for they are vain and lacking in reality. We claim that theistic thought has more decidedly repelled the hypothesis that behind the variant forms of crude religion, no objective reality related to them exists, and has more laboriously traced the rise of religion back to the sense of world confusion-shall we say?-and personal nothingness, out of which the religious instinct leads man up through freedom into communion with the Source of his being. And for such an inquiry as the present it seems to us unwise and inexpedient to dwell so much as has often of late been done upon unsatisfactory speculations as to the prehistoric origin of religion in most primitive man, where it appears so difficult to find.

D