But the true church must take the people seriously, steadily refuse mere entertainment, and lift the congregation into the full and radiant joy of the realization of God. The preacher who faces a congregation on Sunday morning must perceive his problem before he can solve it. On the one hand he has some rare advantages such as no other speaker can expect. He speaks on a day set apart for such speaking. The store and the mill and the office have been closed that the prophet may be heard. The congregation is never hostile, but is usually in sympathy with the preacher before the first word is spoken. The place is rich with associations, the time is one of expectation, the hush of the world's noises gives rare opportunity, while limitation of voluntary movement, due to stiff clothing and immovable pews, makes the assembly susceptible to any sort of suggestion. On the other hand the preacher is hindered by the monotony of ritual, by the deadening effect of long-continued worship in the same spot, and by the popular familiarity with his theme. He is hindered by the heterogeneousness of an assembly embracing the veteran and the stripling, the clerk and the millionaire, the college professor and the bricklayer. Can he speak so vitally and sincerely as to pierce through decorous apathy and touch the springs of life? Can he address the universal need in a universal language? Can he melt those various and opposing interests into one supreme concern, unite all those petty wills in one eternal will, and banish fear and care and pain in the sense of the immediate divine plenitude?

He certainly cannot do this by a fragmentary and provincial service by mere formulation of ideas, or mere sensuous appeal, or mere ethical discussion. He has a right to summon to his service all that makes appeal to the entire nature of man. It is impossible that any one form of worship should be equally effective for all men. The varieties of denominational expression are due to temperamental differences rather than to victories in debate. But the time has now come when each church may learn from all others, and when we may see beneath the theological and liturgical variations the common psychological need. To one temperament prayer is most real when the worshiper is kneeling, gazing at a picture of Christ; to another when all symbols are banished and the heart cries out in need; to another laborare est orare and the "cup of cold water" is a communion

chalice. But the aim of all these modes of approach is to attain to the experience of a present God. The church should rejoice in the many gates through which men enter the celestial city. It should encourage architecture, painting, and sculpture as servants of the religious feeling. It should utilize universal literature, supplementing Thomas à Kempis and Baxter with Carlyle and Browning. It should welcome scientific research as simply the fulfilment of the demand of religion: "Handle me and see that it is I myself." It should avail itself of all significant symbols, as often succeeding where other language fails. The church that is to render service to all humanity must regard the realization and experience of an immanent God as its supreme gift, and steadily use all art, literature, science, and symbolism, to make that experience credible and alluring.

THE ULTIMATE TEST OF RELIGIOUS TRUTH: IS IT HISTORICAL OR PHILOSOPHICAL ?1

I

JAMES HAYDEN TUFTS, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; EUGENE W. LYMAN, D.D., BANGOR THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY; AND PROFESSOR E. HERSHEY SNEATH, PH.D., YALE UNIVERSITY

Truth in any sphere implies two things: On the one hand we have some experience, some immediately sensed or felt reality, and on the other hand we bring some other experience to put with it, some meaning, some idea, some purpose or emotion. If we select for our meaning some other partial aspect of experience, then we have the various kinds of knowledge used in common life, or, if more highly defined, that of the sciences. If we try to look at our part in the light of the whole, we have philosophy.

It is by this process of enlarging our impulses that we rise from the life of an animal or infant, to the life of the man who looks before and after, to the life of the scientist who, by selecting the aspects of experience that he will consider, is able to describe and predict, to the enhanced thought values of beauty, and finally to the life of the moral person who shapes his conduct by the ideas and meanings he sets up.

No mental or moral life is possible except with both these factorsthe immediate experience on the one hand, the meaning or purpose which interprets it for science or shapes it for conduct on the other.

It is evident that in the world of intelligence and morality it is impossible to divorce these two aspects of truth, but it is convenient to lay emphasis for special purposes on one or the other. If we leave out of account for the moment all conscious reference to meaning and interpretation, to purpose and self, we have an abstraction which we call facts. If we leave out all the immediate, the real, we have another abstraction which we call ideas. We then by another artificial separation which is useful for the division of labor say that we can study each of these abstractions by itself. We assume to A discussion at the Commencement of the Yale Divinity School, May 31, 1909.

study facts and call this history; we assume to study the meanings, the relations, the values of these facts, and call this study science or philosophy. Instead of appealing to one wise Daniel to supply both the dream and the interpretation, modern life finds it more expedient to divide these functions. Historical research or observation tells the dream; reflection or philosophy essays its interpretation. Evidently, however, what we usually call history is three-fourths philosophy. For it speaks of men's purposes and plans not merely as facts, but as though they effected something; it speaks of causes and results, and these are never, and can never be, observed; it approves or condemns; it constructs far more than it records.

Philosophy, it must be confessed, has been more successful in its abstractions. It has at one time seized upon the spatial aspect of things and, forgetting all else, built a world of materialism. Again, fascinated by the power of thought in ignoring the here and now, and framing laws of universal scope, it has built a world sub specie aeternitatis, of eternal ideas, of a timeless, changeless absolute, or of eternal and immutable morality.

Against this abstractness of a rationalistic philosophy there have, indeed, been protests. The empirical Locke and Hume, Mill and Adam Smith, have taken their stand upon what is present and immediate. But they for the most part have made the opposite abstraction. They have failed to read the part in the light of the whole, and so have served rather to brush aside the airy cobwebs spun by the metaphysicians than to build a house for the soul of man.

Religious truth starts with three or perhaps four aspects of immediate experience, perceptions, needs, impulses, emotions. It gives these an interpretation, just as do science and philosophy. In which aspect is that peculiar character which marks the truth off as religious? Is it in the immediate impulse, feeling, sensation, or act on the one hand, as was held by Schleiermacher, and by those who talk of a religious instinct, or is it in the interpretation, on the other, as Hegel thought? Does it belong to history, or to philosophy? Let us postpone this until we notice briefly what these experiences are and what is the interpretation. The facts are of three or four kinds. The interpretation, however it differs in detail, has one common character: it seeks to read the facts in social or personal terms.

1. Simplest and crudest of these experiences, no doubt, but nevertheless the most vital to primitive man, is the bodily life with its urgent needs pointing beyond with the organism. Food supply, involving in most cases attention to the animating and reproductive powers of nature, the avoidance of mysterious dangers, the cure of disease, plays a large rôle. Cults with ritual, prayer, taboos, and magic rites, embody interpretations of these needs. Plenty and famine, rain and harvest, sickness and cure, are explained by divine agency on the one hand, and over against it is conceived a human breath, "double," anima, or ghost, which is only a more tenuous and subtle body. Is our religious element here to be sought in fact, or in interpretation? The facts do indeed signify that man and nature, organism and environment, grow up together, and that it is abstract to consider man by himself. But later religion is apt to turn its back upon these simpler experiences, or assign them to science or to poetry, and to find a more congenial center in other phases of life.

2. The life in groups-clan, family, tribe is both cause and effect of impulses and needs for companionship, sympathy, and protection. These are idealized in terms of Protector, Father, Redeemer, or Next-of-Kin, while the self becomes the group-member, continuing perhaps in the company of ancestral spirits. Here again there is an experience which points beyond itself, but it is only in the interpretation that it gets what can be properly called religious truth.

3. The perceptions of change and movement, of life, of order, and of might in the world awaken wonder and awe. Myths of the growth of creation gradually merge into the declaration that "The heavens declare the glory of God," on the one hand, or into the design arguments of philosophy, on the other, while the soul begins now to be conceived in terms of thought or reason. Decidedly, again, we have an unfolding of consciousness which suggests interpretation in terms of God and self, but the dream without the interpretation is not religion.

4. The moral experiences. These are of two sorts: those of inner life, of conscience and inner struggle, and those of outer act, of making the purpose effective. They are both an overcoming of the world-the world of evil within and without. These experiences are not so primary as the others. They arise as man begins