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significant, than those of mere reason. Man is not merely demonstrating and logically inferring mind, but moral, aesthetic, and religious soul. These aspects of his being are really the most vital parts of his nature, and they have their own peculiar interests and peculiar truths. They have a right to their own body of ideas and postulates, so far as these ideas and postulates do not involve contradiction. To this extent they are subordinate to reason. We cannot believe in any idea, or make any postulate, that is rationally inconsistent, or involves contradiction. But beyond this we are justified in holding to those ideas and principles which are the very conditions of moral, aesthetic and religious development. Man is just as constitutionally moral, aesthetic, and religious as rational. Life in all its complexity must go on, and life, it must be remembered, comprehends more than the life of pure reason. Certain beliefs and postulates are absolutely necessary if life thus understood is to progress. In default of disproof these may be accepted-indeed, must be accepted. What more vital than our moral interests? Without them life could hardly preserve its unity. Yet our moral ideals and postulates defy logical demonstration or proof. Man is a religious being also. Religion is one of the oldest, as well as one of the most powerful, manifestations of the human spirit. It colors the whole life of the individual, and is reckoned one of the most vital forces in his attainment of moral good. But its ideals and beliefs also defy logical proof. Man is by nature aesthetic, and what a tremendous factor the Beautiful is in human life! But who will attempt to establish its ideals and ultimate truths by the formal processes of the rational intellect? We do not live by logical reason alone, nor can we live by it alone. We lay hold upon certain fundamentals necessary for living and progressing, and our warrant for so doing is this very necessity itself.

Now religion, morals, and aesthetics are not alone in this. Science does the same thing. Much of theoretical science has not the warrant of strict logic. It is adhered to indeed! in the face of much that makes against it. Often it has more of an aesthetic than a logical warrant. We cannot prove a world of universal law. We cannot logically establish a cosmos; yet the scientist will not throw these conceptions overboard. They are necessary for the very life of

science, and on this ground they are ultimately affirmed. Professor Bowne has cogently urged this position. He says:

The mind is not a disinterested logic-machine, but a living organism, with manifold interests and tendencies. These outline its development, and furnish the driving power. The implicit aim in mental development is to recognize these interests, and make room for them, so that each shall have its proper field and object. In this way a series of ideals arise in our mental life. As cognitive, we assume that the universe is rational. Many of its elements are opaque, and utterly unmanageable by us at present, but we assume spontaneously and unconsciously that at the center all is order, and that there all is crystalline and transparent to intelligence.

....

But we are moral beings also, and our moral interests must be recognized. Hence arises a moral ideal, which we join to the cognitive. The universe must not only be rational, but righteous at root. Here too we set aside the facts which make against our faith as something not yet understood. . .

Finally, we are religious, and our entire nature works together to construct the religious ideal. . . . . Here, as in previous cases, we do not ignore the facts which make against the view, but we set them aside as things to be explained, but which must not in any way be allowed to weaken our faith. All of these ideals are, primarily, alike subjective.3

These rational, moral, and religious ideals are not demonstrable, but, so far as they do not involve contradiction, they are affirmed on the ground of necessity. They are essential to the soul's progress.

So that, while faith concedes to reason the authority to judge of the rational consistency of such ideals, and all that they imply, and the right to reject them if they imply contradiction; in default of this, the warrant for their acceptance is the living soul itself—in all of its manifold and vital interests. The final court of appeal is life-the life of the human spirit.

In this sense, then, there is a realm of reality and truth that is above and beyond reason, and faith may move forward confidently and complacently. It has the warrant of the living soul for its truths. In this sense too, life is the final test of religious truth-the supreme court to which ultimate appeals must be made. But this is far from an appeal to external authority.

To sum up: In his controversy with the Catholic, let the Protestant insist upon the right of private judgment; because the Catholic can only vindicate the authority of the church by an appeal to the rational

3 Philosophy of Theism (New York, 1887), pp. 19–21.

spirit, and by means of rational argument; because, also, of the inalienable right of the human spirit to seek truth for itself.

In the second place, let the spirit of man assert its own sovereignty in seeking truth even when called upon to accept certain things on the plea that they are the declarations of the Scriptures, or of the Scriptures as testified to by the Holy Spirit, or even that they are the declarations of the Deity himself. Ultimately considered man's duty is to accept religious truth on the authority of the declaration of his own spirit that it is truth.

In the third place, let us recognize the fact of the limitations of human reason, that there may be truths which do not admit either of proof or of disproof, but are not therefore to be rejected. They have the warrant or guaranty of the living soul. They are necessary for its highest progress, and in this necessity lies the ground of their acceptance. As Tennyson puts it in "The Ancient Sage":

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one.
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal-nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

And cling to Faith, beyond the Forms of Faith!

E. HERSHEY SNEATH

YALE UNIVERSITY

NEW HAVEN, CONN.

THE FIRST GREAT CHRISTIAN CREED

PROFESSOR JOHN ALFRED FAULKNER, D. D.
Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J.

The relation of Jesus Christ the Son to God the Father was a question not fully determined by any common action of the church until the Council of Nicaea, in 325. How to preserve the unity of God, how to be true to Christianity as a monotheistic religion, and yet be true to the universal conscience of the church that in Christ she had a divine Savior and Lord, that was the question. There were different answers to it in that ante-Nicene age. (It is not the intention to give here a history of the doctrine of the Person of Christ in that age, but simply to select a few outstanding men.) There was the answer, for instance, of the Monarchians, sometimes called Unitarians, of whom there were two schools, the Dynamistic and the Modalistic. The chief man of the first school was Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch after 260, an original and fruitful thinker, who might be called in a sense the father of Unitarianism. The Logos and Spirit were not subsistences in God, but simply powers in him, like the mind and reason of man. This reason existed in the man Jesus above all other creatures, and this man remained free from sin owing to the large measure of this indwelling divine reason, so that he conquered sin for the whole race, and became Savior and Lord. There resulted an ethical oneness with God. "In the oneness of the will, in the immutability of love man becomes indissolubly united with Deity, under the influence of the Logos progressively deified." According to Paul of Samosata, Christ was only a man as to his entire nature (though born miraculously), but he became divine through the indwelling divine reason and could be worshiped. Many so-called "liberals" today are the unconscious followers of Paul of Samosata.

The second, or Modalistic, school of Monarchians, sometimes called Patripassians, had as their chief representative Praxeas, who

came to Rome from Asia Minor about 170, and apparently won some of the Roman popes into sympathy with his views. According to the Patripassians there is no God but God the Father. By self-humiliation he became man, so that the Son is the Father veiled in the flesh. There is no God but the one manifested in Christ, a view like that of the Swedenborgians. Here the divinity of Christ is completely preserved, but by the sacrifice of the personal, substantial pre-existence with God. It is interesting to note that both of these Monarchian schools tried to be true in some sense to a real divinity of Jesus. That he was a mere man in the recent Unitarian sense, or that he came into the world by ordinary means, they never thought.

Another answer to this question was that of the Sabellians, which also preserves the divinity of the Savior, though in a startling way. Sabellius was a daring thinker (flourished about 200), who started from the philosophical idea of the divine monad immanent in the world, expanding or contracting for its work in the universe. God unfolds or expands himself into a threefold, successive revelation, first as God the Father in the Old Testament, second as God the Son in the incarnation and redemption, and third as God the Spirit in quickening, enlightening, and saving. The monad thus becomes a triad, which finally returns into the monad state, after the work of salvation is complete. This view makes Christ too divine, if one might so speak; that is, it denies a real incarnation.

At the Council of Nicaea there were two views in mortal conflict—– the Athanasian and the Arian. The Athanasian held that in some mysterious sense Jesus Christ existed as Son or Logos eternally with the Father, and that he came forth for our salvation at the incarnation. This pre-existence was a substantial and, in a sense, a personal one (but not in our modern sense of the word personal). Arius held that Christ had no eternal pre-existence with God, who alone is eternal, unchangeable. God is separated by an infinite chasm from man-a Gnostic and Hindu idea. God cannot create the world directly, but only through an agent, the Logos, who is himself created for the purpose of creating the world. But this creature is before all time and before the world. The Logos is higher than all creatures, is the middle being between God and the world, the image of the Father, his executor, and the creator of the world. He might in a

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