The first kind is that of the man with a hobby. His directly religious acts and his toilsome bread-winning will thus get relieved and alternated by, say, a little Botany or a little Numismatics, or by any other “safe” science, taken in a “safe” dose, in an easy, dilettante fashion, for purposes of such recreation. This kind is already in fairly general operation, and is clearly useful in its degree and way, but it has, of course, no purificatory force at all.
The second kind is that of the man whose profession is some kind of science which has, by now, achieved a more or less secure place alongside of, or even within, religious doctrines and feelings,—such as Astronomy or Greek Archaeology. Here the purification will be in proportion to the loyal thoroughness with which he fully maintains, indeed develops, the special characteristics and autonomy both of these Sciences, as the foreground, part-material and stimulation, and of Religion, as the groundwork, background and ultimate interpreter and moulder of his complete and organized life; and with which he makes each contribute to the development of the other and of the entire personality, its apprehensions and its work. This second kind is still comparatively rare, doubtless, in great part, because of the considerable cost and the lifelong practice and training involved in what readily looks like a deliberate complicating and endangering of things, otherwise, each severally, simple and safe.
And the third kind is that of him whose systematic mental activity is devoted to some science or research, which is still in process of winning full and peaceful recognition by official Theology,—say, Biological Evolution or Biblical Criticism. Here the purification will, for a soul capable of such a strain, be at its fullest, provided such a soul is deeply moved by, and keeps devotedly faithful to, the love of God and of man, of humble labour and of self-renouncing purification, and, within this great ideal and determination, maintains and ameliorates with care the methods, categories and tests special both to these sciences and investigations, and to their ultimate interpretation and utilization in the philosophy and life of religion. For here there will, as yet, be no possibility of so shunting the scientific activity on to one side, or of limiting it to a carefully pegged-out region, as to let Religion and Science energize as forces of the same kind and same level, the same clearness and same finality; but the Science will here have to be passed through, as the surface-level, on the way to Religion as underlying all. What would otherwise readily tend to become, as it were, a mental Geography, would thus here give way to what might be pictured as a spiritual Geology.
8. Historical Science, Religion’s present, but not ultimate, problem.
The reader will have noted that, for each of these three stages, I have taken an Historico-Cultural as well as a Mathematico-Physical Science, though I am well aware of the profound difference between them, both as to their prerequisites and method, and their aim and depth. And, again, I know well that, for the present, the chief intellectual difficulty of Religion, or at least the main conflict or friction between the Sciences and Theology, seems to proceed, not from Physical Science but from Historical Criticism, especially as applied to the New Testament, so that, on this ground also, I ought, apparently, to keep these two types of Science separate.—Yet it is clear, I think, that, however distinct, indeed different, should be the methods of these two sorts of Science, they are in so far alike, if taken as a means of purification for the soul bent upon its own deepening, that both require a slow, orderly, disinterested procedure, capable of fruitfulness only by the recurring sacrifice of endless petty self-seekings and obstinate fancies, and this in face of that natural eagerness and absoluteness of mind which strong religious emotions will, unless they too be disciplined and purified, only tend to increase and stereotype.
The matters brought up by Historical Criticism for the study and readjustment of Theology, and for utilization by Religion, are indeed numerous and in part difficult. Yet the still more general and fundamental alternatives lie not here, but with the questions as to the nature and range of Science taken in its narrower sense,—as concerned with Quantity, Mechanism, and Determinism alone.
If Science of this Thing-type be all that, in any manner or degree, we can apprehend in conformity with reality or can live by fruitfully: then History and Religion of every kind must be capable of a strict assimilation to it, or they must go. But if such Science constitute only one kind, and, though the clearest and most easily transferable, yet the least deep, and the least adequate to the ultimate and spiritual reality, among the chief levels of apprehension and of life which can be truly experienced and fruitfully lived by man; and if the Historical and Spiritual level can be shown to find room for, indeed to require, the Natural and Mechanical level, whilst this latter, taken as ultimate, cannot accommodate, but is forced to crush or to deny, the former: then a refusal to accept more than can be expressed and analyzed by such Physico-Mathematical Science would be an uprooting and a discrowning of the fuller life, and would ignore the complete human personality, from one of whose wants the entire impulse to such Science took its rise.
As a matter of fact, we find the following three alternatives.
Level all down to Mathematico-Physical Science, and you deny the specific constituents of Spirituality, and you render impossible the growth of the Person out of, and at the expense of, the Individual. Proclaim the Person and its Religion, as though they were static substances adequately present from the first, and ignore, evade or thwart that Thing-level and method as far as ever you can, and you will, in so far, keep back the all but simply animal Individual from attaining to his full spiritual Personality. But let grace wake up, in such an Individual, the sense of the specific characteristics of Spirituality and the thirst to become a full and ever fuller Person, and this in contact and conflict with, as well as in recollective abstraction from, the apparently chance contingencies of History and Criticism, and the seemingly fatalistic mechanisms of Physics and Mathematics: and you will be able, by humility, generosity, and an ever-renewed alternation of such outgoing, dispersive efforts and of such incoming recollection and affective prayer, gradually to push out and to fill in the outlines of your better nature, and to reorganize it all according to the Spirit and to Grace, becoming thus a deep man, a true personality.
Once again: take the intermediate, the Thing-level as final, and you yourself sink down more and more into a casual Thing, a soulless Law; Materialism, or, at best, some kind of Pantheism, must become your practice and your creed.—Take the anterior, the Individual-level as final, and you will remain something all but stationary, and if not merely a Thing yet not fully a Person; and if brought face to face with many an Agnostic or Pantheist of the nobler sort, who is in process of purification from such childish self-centredness by means of the persistently frank and vivid apprehension of the Mechanical, Determinist, Thing-and-Fate level of experience and degree of truth, you will, even if you have acquired certain fragmentary convictions and practices of religion, appear strangely less, instead of more, than your adversary, to any one capable of equitably comparing that Agnostic and yourself—you who, if Faith be right, ought surely to be not less but more of a personality than that non-believing soul.