Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sessed of no critical apparatus whereby it is to judge revealed theology. Revealed theology will yet be found reasonable, and none the less so, we believe, because it brings to us the mind of God. In no department of theological science has the need for reconstruction been more deeply felt than in that of natural theology, for just here have former notions been most completely overthrown. Modern theistic philosophy of religion has very rightly felt that it must follow a less mechanical method of inquiry. Knowing that it holds in hand the physical and spiritual worlds, it has wisely not restricted its attention to that religious knowledge or experience which is distinctively Christian, but has turned its scrutiny on the general or universal ? universal, we mean, in the only sense in which modern theism feels any serious interest?religious experience or knowledge. Its sympathetic and systematic study of the ethnic religions has been rewarded by the discovery of the relations they sustain to each other and to Christianity, of which, as their crown and flower, they are taken to be prophecies. The view formerly taken by natural theology of these religions of nature as being unmixedly false?the outcome of credulity and imposture?instead of really grounded in spiritual wants and aspirations common to the race, and developed in accordance with environment?as they are now seen by the science of Comparative Religion to be?-has been increasingly felt to have been inadequate. At the same time we believe the best of recent thought upon the subject to be with Professor P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye in explicitly recognising the insufficiency of purely natural development to explain the phenomena of religion, while yielding to nature what we may call the
yearnings she hath in her own natura…