Excerpt from Some Thoughts on the Scope of Theology and Theological Education: Address Delivered Before the Pastoral Union

It ought to seem impossible for the Christian to take any lower ground. It has been a debasing slavery into which the church has allowed herself to be dragged, in trying to adapt herself to the litera ture and art of the natural man; bowing down to the world-gods in her effort to graft naturalism, classicism, and romanticism upon the Christian stock; striving to regard them as, per se, wholesome and pure products; seeking, through speculative and unscientific expedi ents, especially through the adoption of accommodating principles, - to make herself comprehensive enough to embrace all this alien brood under her wing. Thus she has destroyed her proper and legitimate headship; sometimes in pure fear of Mephistopheles, sometimes herself captivated by the sensuous, she has allowed the world-spirit to reign over her and mold her thought and service as to God and man. The natural man may yield his fruit in all freedom, but his fruit ought not to be baptized as Christian, unless it agree with the absolute and final teaching of Christ. The true church must have her own canons of art, literature, philosophy, science, based on her Lord's supreme doctrine and ethics.

The revolution formally inaugurated for natural science by Bacon, for philosophy by Descartes, by which these pursuits have been liberated from a wrongful thrall to scholasticism, while well intended, was made too broad, by losing sight of the true position of these studies as not handmaidens, but genuine branches of theology, and has resulted in the utter estrangement and independence of all divisions of human learning from their proper divine and ethical relation. They have become, therefore, helpful to doubt and dark ness, and have made themselves aliens from the commonwealth of which they ought to be worthiest citizens. For their emancipation from this equally unjust bondage we desire to labor; but that restora tion cannot be effected in a day or a century; it has taken over two hundred years to foster the intense antagonism. We can hardly expect that the truth in this matter will regain its ground any more rapidly than the kingdom of God itself may advance, and yet the practical recognition of Christ's claim will itself be a powerful motor in forwarding that universal right. Should we fail in attaining the controlling machinery ourselves, we can at least proclaim the battle for the principle, and press it upon academic research and educa tional institutions.

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