rs in this respect.
The disposition to regard Christianity as a revealed and divinely
authoritative metaphysic began early and continued long. When the
theologians also set out to interpret Christianity and end in offering
us a substitute, which, if it were acknowledged as absolute truth, would
do away with Christianity as historic fact, as little can we allow the
claim.

Again, Christianity exists not merely as a matter of history. It exists
also as a fact in living consciousness. It is the function of psychology
to investigate that consciousness. We must say that, accurately
speaking, there is no such thing as Christian philosophy. There are
philosophies, good or bad, current or obsolete. These are Christian only
in being applied to the history of Christianity and the content of the
Christian consciousness. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as
Christian consciousness. There is the human consciousness, operating
with and operated upon by the impulse of Christianity. It is the great
human experience from which we single out for investigation that part
which is concerned with religion, and call that the religious
experience. It is essential, therefore, that those general
investigations of human consciousness and experience, as such, which are
being carried on all about us should be reckoned with, if our Christian
life and thought are not altogether to fall out of touch with advancing
knowledge. For this reason we have misgiving about the position of some
followers of Ritschl. Their opinion, pushed to the limit, seems to mean
that we have nothing to do with philosophy, or with the advance of
science. Religion is a feeling of which he alone who possesses it can
give account. He alone who has it can appreciate such an account when
given. We acknowledge that religion is in part a feeling. But that
feeling must have rational justification. It must also have rational
guidance if it is to be saved from degenerating into fanaticism.

To say that we have nothing to do with philosophy ends in our having to
do with a bad philosophy. In that case we have a philosophy with which
we operate without having investigated it, instead of having one with
which we operate because we have investigated it. The philosophy of
which we are aware we have. The philosophy of which we are not aware has
us. No doubt, we may have religion without philosophy, but we cannot
formulate it even in the rudest way to ourselves, we cannot communicate