Welsh Journals

ment must always be within a community, and there is a sense in which the collective religious experience of Christians is more authoritative than that of the ordinary individual, whatever may be said of the genius. Securus judicat orbis terrarum. A Synthesis of complementary truths is required here again. (iv.) With a view to a full religious life that shall be adequate to meet our modern need, we want to combine the deep de- votional piety of the great Catholic saints with the ethical zeal of the Protestant tradition. Intense love and adoration of God, such as the great mediaeval mystics knew, must be wedded to that eager desire to serve God in the dusty ways of ordinary life, which has been the main- spring of the Protestant impulse towards progress. (v.) The claims of Mysticism must be reconciled with a due regard for the worth of historical Christianity. We cannot be ever starting anew as if the whole tradition of the Christian centuries were of no abiding significance, but on the other hand we cannot live merely by contemplating a hoary tradition. In each generation, and in every individual, the Christian experience must be born anew unto fresh life, but it must be continuous with the long experience of the past if it is to be in very deed, the Christian experience. Ex- perience of God, personal and intimate in our own souls, we must have as the mystics (and the myriad students of mysti- cism) tell us, but it must be the Christian God that we have commerce with, and He is mediated to us, in some degree at least, through Christian history and by contact with the Christian society. Here we have the old obstinate problem how to do justice to the past by recognizing rever- ently, but not slavishly, its worth and authority, and also to the inspiration of the present, by securing adequate liberty for the individual to express the fresh revelation that comes to the world by his new vision. (vi.) The older Idealism with its in- tellectualist bias needs to be corrected by the recent protests of Pragmatism, Activism and Vitalism. We are not sent into the world merely to solve a number of puzzles set for our intellect by life, but rather to live, which includes acting and furthering certain great ends. We are essentially designed for action (other than mere thinking), for we are moral beings, and the perfection of moral beings is only to be attained through the moral struggle to realize great far-reaching ends, which include the welfare of the indi- vidual in the common good for which he strives. We are not to be mere spec- tators of life's pageant, like Plato's philo- sopher who is the spectator of all time; we are to find our place in a world which is an arena, where great moral issues are being fought out. We don't merely sit to contemplate; we move in ordered march towards a goal. This emphasis of the active side of our human life was a needed corrective to the dominant idealism of the Hegelian type. We have to do not only with puzzles, but also and still more, with tasks. In Theology the older intellectualism was reflected in the view that salvation was by orthodoxy, and that all our works, even the best, were of no worth in God's eyes. Salvation was a reward for accepting certain unintelli- gible metaphysical distinctions between persons and natures, and certain theories as to the way in which human redemption was wrought. It was opinion not practice that seemed to matter. Happily the intellectualist bias is being corrected here also, by an emphasis of the Kingdom of God as the goal of our endeavour, and of