PROFESSOR CAIRD'S GIFFORD LECTURES.* Wu have found in these volumes
of Professor Caird's, a deeply interesting and thoughtful study of the philosophic aspect of religion. The form of lectures in which they are east, and the intrinsic fascination of the subject, combine to make them, in our opinion, more readable than any of their author's previous writings. And though Professor Caird apologises in his preface for the loss of precision which a popular treat- ment, with its necessary avoidance of the technical language of philosophy, entails, we are not sure that philosophers, especially if they are of the Hegelian school, do not greatly overestimate the value of a scientific terminology. In dealing with the subject of religion, at all events, the losses which attend the employment of such an instrument seem to us quite equal to the gains. A special terminology tends inevit- ably to deaden thinking and obscure insight; the philosopher is apt to believe that he has solved a difficulty when he has only translated it into his own peculiar dialect, and precision is dearly bought at the price of substituting words for real, living, concrete thought.
The object of the work is not so much to give any detailed and systematic account of the historic movement as, starting from "the great reconciling principle of development," to formulate a philosophy of religion, and then to illustrate the conception thus arrived at by applying it to the chief stages of religious history. Professor Caird is careful, in the first instance, to deal—and, on the whole, we think he deals suc- cessfully—with a difficulty which will be felt by many who could hardly give it articulate expression. To many it will seem that the attempt to find order and sequence in the succession of religions is really an attempt to derive all reli- gion from a natural, as opposed to a supernatural, source. This view really rests on a misapprehension, though a misappre- hension which is so common that it is at the root of half the arrogance of science and half the timidity of ortho- doxy. As our author puts it, " the phenomena of the beginning of a life are not to be regarded as the causes of the phenomena that follow." The history of reli- gion is not the history of a process by which the human mind has gradually evolved the conception of God from its own vain imaginings, but the history of the process by which God has "at sundry times and in divers manners" revealed himself to man ; and what is here called the " evolution of religion " might have equally well been called the " revelation of religion," if the word " revelation " were not already appro- priated—and very rightly so—to what is infinitely the most important phase of religious history. With this preliminary difficulty out of the way, we proceed to the main argument of * Tho Evolution of Religion. The Gifford Lectures delivered before the Uni- versity of St. Andrews in Sessions 1890.51 and 1891-92. By Edward Caird, LL.D., D.Q.L. Glasgow; idaelehose and Sons. 1893. the book. Religion, according to Professor Caird, takes its rise in the very nature of our conscious life. In every act of consciousness three primary elements are implied,—" the idea of the object or not-self, the idea of the subject or self, and the idea of the unity which is presupposed in the difference of the self and the not-self, and within which they act and react on each other." In less metaphysical language, there are three factors presupposed in all our knowledge,—the world, the self, and God. And according as one or other of these three factors is emphasised, we get three several types of religion which may be used as a key to the development of the religious consciousness in history. The earliest form of religion is objective, God being thought of as an object among other • objects, a merely external power. Such a conception of God can only exist where the consciousness of self is still very in- distinct and rudimentary, though of course it must be re- membered that the notion of personality can never be wholly absent, but throughout this stage of development is gaining in depth and precision and reacting with increasing force on the nature of man's religious belief, drawing it at once up- ward and inward. The best example of an objective re- ligion in a matured and coherent form is the religion of the Vedic hymns ; as a further step in advance, and at the point of transition to an altogether higher type, we have the anthropomorphic religion of Greece in which the idea of the divine, though still limited by the things of sense, is at least associated with the highest of earthly objects, while at the same time it is purified and ennobled, and the sensuous limi- tations which still enthral it are half-hidden by the spiritual. ising agency of art and the poetical imagination. The lectures, we may remark in passing, in which our author deals with the moral and religious basis that underlay the art and poetry of Greece, and generally, with the connection between imagi- nation and religious truth, are among the most successful of the series. We come now to the second or subjective stage of development. When at last man becomes fully conscious of his freedom and independence, he turns from the outward to the inward, and for a time the newly-born consciousness of self dominates his conception of God. God no longer speaks to him through the things of outward nature, but through the inward life of the individual soul. And in the first recoil from the crudeness of objective religion, wo find the inde- pendence of this inward life so exaggerated, and its con- nection with the outward life which nurtures and sustains it so completely severed, that the conceptions both of God and of the human soul lose all their fullness and meaning. In this way the religion of the Vedas develops into Buddhism, whose ideal is simple nothingness and extinction. And Professor Caird sees the same movement of recoil, though in a modified form, in the process by which Greek speculation, starting from a naturalistic religion, culminated in the philosophical creed of the Stoics. And just as Hellenism formed a link between the first and second stages of religions development, so the religion of Israel, which, though predominantly sub- jective, still leaves a place for an outer world, and contains within itself the germ of Christianity, supplies a similar link between the second stage and the third.
The chief interest of the work lies in the second volume, where the transition from Judaism to Christianity is ex- plained, and Christianity is exhibited as the third or final type of religion, free from the defects of both the others,— the religion of reconciliation, which rises above the contrast of subject and object, of real and ideal, and yet renders full and perfect justice to each. We cannot attempt, in the brief space at our command, to follow Professor Caird systemati- cally through his argument, but its drift may be summarised in a few sentences, The supremacy and philosophical excel- lence of Christianity are due to this,—that while Christ, no less than Buddha, insisted on the virtue of renunciation and on the subordination of natural to spiritual good, he did not, like Buddha, ascetically refuse to acknowledge any worth in the finite interests of life, but provided for their subsequent re- storation to a place, though a secondary one, in the order of human life. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness ; " but then, "And all these things shall be added unto you." This is what Professor Caird calls " the positive turn of thought which belongs to Christianity both on its practical and on its theoretical side." It is this which has made Christianity, above all other religions, the religion of progress and growth ; and though the early Christians, in the first enthusiasm of a great spiritual revelation, were filled with millenarian dreams, 'Christ him- self, with divine prescience, recognised the necessary slowness of development, and gave it continual expression in his parables, as in that most beautiful one from the Gospel of St. Mark :—" So is the kingdom of heaven, as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep and rise day and night, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how."
Looking at the whole matter from another point of view, the great problem of religion is to explain the existence of evil, or what is the same thing, to interpret the freedom of man in a sense consistent with the infinity of God This problem, according to Professor Caird, is solved in Christianity, and in Christianity alone. The whole spirit of Christ's teaching, he thinks, involves a denial of the absolute character of evil, and leads us to regard it as " good in the making ; " and at the same time the Christian conception of God, in his view, contains in it an element of Pantheism,—not, indeed, the blank and blind Pantheism which effaces all moral distinctions and unites the finite to the infinite by the simple sacrifice of the former, but a Pantheism which is consistent with the personality both of man and of God, and which regards the surrender of his lower self and the following after righteousness as the necessary steps by which man at once realises his own freedom and attains to union and reconcilia- tion with God. And at the same time, even nature is not to be thought of as in utter and irreconcilable opposition to the divine :- " The most general view of the historical succession of religions is sufficient to show that the movement has been towards a con- ception of God as one and not as many ; as manifested both in nature and in spirit, but as reaching a higher and clearer mani- festation in spirit than in nature ; as, indeed, revealing in man's highest intellectual and moral life much that is hid or imperfectly prefigured in nature."
And this is the conception which Professor Caird thinks, rightly or wrongly, is realised in Christianity.
To attempt any adequate and systematic criticism of a work such as this would open up every disputed question of religion and philosophy, and would obviously be impossible within the limits of a notice like the present. We shall content our- selves with one general criticism. A-book on the philosophy of religion is not a book of devotion, and necessarily gives us only one aspect of the truth. The philosopher has to deal so much in analysis that the synthesis which ought to follow can hardly attain to the completeness of the first instinctive view. But with all allowance for this, we still think that Professor Caird makes his analysis too prominent, and deals with religion too much in the measuring and weighing spirit of the ordinary scientific inquirer. He maintains in words the belief in the divinity of Christ, and the belief in the transcendence and personality of God ; but he insists on the humanity of Christ till his divinity passes out of view, and on the immanence of God till his transcendence loses its mean- ing, and even his personality becomes dim and shadowy. A course of Professor Caird sends one with renewed zest to the prophets of Israel :—" For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." That is the note which is conspicuously wanting in the present work, and which yet is of the very essence of religion. But with so much in qualification of our praise, we can well recommend these volumes to all who feel an interest in the subject of religion,—to the orthodox, as sure to give breadth and intelligence to their faith ; and to the sceptical, as well adapted to be the beginning of a revelation of the power and meaning of Christianity.
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