of fundamental principles." Man, being rational, longs to know the ultimate source of the forces he observes energizing in the world around him. He longs to discover "the last thought respecting what is, whence it is, and why it is." He investigates, analyzes, systematizes. If one ultimate principle can be discovered embracing and in all, then the universe can be deduced from that. If he finds this impossible, then the differing principles discovered, or thought to be, must be placed in their proper positions and relations, and the inferences proper to be derived from them systematized. And the whole must be brought to the test of reason, that is, it must be the product of reason, and in all its parts meet the requirements of reason. Man, with his finite limitations, may never be able to form a unity of thought concerning the ultimate principle of the universe, believed everywhere and by all thinking men. But the struggle to get a full conception of the universe as rational will never cease as long as man remains man. He can never rest long in what seems to him an essentially irrational, or non-moral conception of the relations between himself and all the universe external to himself. He energizes to get a thoroughly thought through and rationally unified theory of the universe and of human life. when man begins to ask How? Whence? Why? Whither? he is beginning to philosophize.

Now the relation of a rational philosophy to preaching is seen in the fact that in all declaration of religious truth a philosophy is implicit, whether the preacher is conscious of this or not. Whether the preacher's theology is characterized as "new" or "old," "broad" or narrow," it rests upon and strikes its roots down into a Philosophy of God, Man and the World, already possessing the mind. It may be a well investigated and thoroughly reasoned philosophy, or a very irrational philosophy, but in either case it is there. And so necessarily intimate is the relation between philosophy and theology that we can say, without fear of contradiction, that nothing will ultimately be found true in theology which is false in philosophy.

And again, however spontaneous may be man's religious consciousness and belief, or however good a Christian he may be as the result of his spiritual experience in the knowledge of God in Christ, as he advances in reflection and intellectual unfolding he is necessitated to ask himself why he thus holds to the Christian truths, and he must philosophically interpret and vindicate them to himself as rational beliefs. In this transitition from beliefs received by acquiescence

from early teachings to thoroughly reflective and reasoned beliefs, there is a peril of shipwreck of faith. But the rescue will be found not in the refusal to investigate and reason, but in still deeper investigations and profounder reasonings. Some of the most fundamental questions that ever engaged the powers of human thought lie hidden in the commonest affirmations of our Christian faith. For instance, one cannot reasonably justify himself for being a Christian without first raising and settling the previous question of why he is a theist. And this question, once raised, will force him steadily back to the most fundamental questions of philosophy. He will be obliged to ask concerning the ultimate principle of the universe, or worldground, its existence, nature, and unity. Among the questions that will require his best intellectual energies are those concerning the possibility of genuine knowledge of reality; can we know anything as to the real nature of ultimate substance? Has man capacity to really know God, or must he rest in universal atheism or agnosticism? "Suppose," says Knight, "that after the most exhaustive and extended study of the universe that surrounds us, - of all that appeals to our senses, and of the forces working around us and within, the only thing we can say of the ever changing spectacle, is, that the whole of the phenomena have been evolved out of the antecedent conditions, but that we are quite unable to rise above the stream of occurrences, and apprehend the principle working within it, or to get beyond the whole series, to what is substantial, in-working, and permanent," then we are inevitably landed in a philosophy of knowledge which will forever preclude our knowing the Power working within as a personal Spirit to whom, as personal spirits, we are related and with whom we may hold spiritual communion. But, on the other hand, "if we are able to discern and know something more than the mutable world of mere appearance; and if, in consequence of this, we may validly interpret the things of sense as the types, the shadows, and the symbols of realities, viz., those archetypes which are not visible, nor audible, nor tangible, but which are disclosed to reason by the aid of sense, and which illumine the realm of sensation," then we are landed in quite another philosophy of knowledge which makes gloriously possible and real an immediate knowledge of God and personal communion with him. And whether we have genuine knowledge of ultimate reality or not, is primarily a question of philosophy which has the most direct connection with our theology. For, if we truly cannot know

the Power within phenomena, this conclusion, when worked through to its rational consequences, leaves the mind in hopeless scepticism. The fundamental question in all forms of atheistic or agnostic conclusions is ultimately the question of the reality of human knowledge.

Once more, the relation of philosophy to Christian preaching is seen in the fact that all forms of unbelief that have any valid claim to be reasoned forms are founded not primarily on unchristian, but upon previous anti-theistic theory, or philosophy of the universe. Philosophical prepossessions hold the mind. And with such forms of unbelief, and much of the scepticism of our generation is located here, the battle is to be fought out, not, in the first place, on the "evidences of Christianity," but on the previous ground of a rational philosophy.

Our Christianity, too, like other systems of religion, has its philosophical presuppositions. It has its characteristic assumptions and ways of thinking concerning God, man, and the world, and their relations to each other; and this is only another way of saying that our Christian faith has its distinctive philosophy of the universe. Among the presuppositions of Christianity are the existence of God; that he is both immanent in the world and transcends it; that he stands to the world in the relation of a Creator, only creation is now going on; that he is a spiritual, personal being, using the word personal in substantially the same sense as when we apply it to men, the only way in which we can use it. To Christian faith God is not a mere mechanic who stands related to the world as a machine which he has constructed and set a going by the power of certain resident, "secondary forces," which occasionally act too intensely or not intensely enough, and to correct the consequent aberration God rushes in with a miracle to set it right, something as a clock-maker has a provision in his timepiece for making it run slower or faster as he desires. But rather is the world an organism of which God is the living personal soul, manifesting himself through the world somewhat as the personal being, man, reveals himself through the organism of his body. And these manifestations, so regularly occurring and methodically that we call them the laws of nature, are always and everywhere the result of continuous divine agency. The Christian philosopher holds that to man God has given a special selfhood of his own, a will conferred upon him that he may freely bring it into harmony with the Divine will; while, there

fore, there is nothing in the whole realm of impersonal nature capable of frustrating the divine purpose, in the will of man there is a possible barrier to the realization of the holy purpose of God in Christ; he holds, that this giving to man of a free human will, and therefore a capacity for achieving moral character, was no necessary limitation of the Infinite, but was "that he might have a realm in which he could reign by holy love, and not by mere omnipotent force, as in the lower animate and impersonal spheres of being." He believes that God cannot give existence to a being with moral character, but only with a moral nature — with the capacity for moral character; for a moral character is, by every distinction of morals, a self-achievement, and must always be so.

Now these, as examples of many more not mentioned, are among the speculative assumptions of Christianity. Our faith necessarily pushes its roots down into the soil of philosophy, and from a thoroughly reasoned point of view not a step can we go in theology until we have worked our way through to rational conclusions concerning previous questions of philosophy. So is it that theology is based upon philosophy, and because of this intimate relation there is always deep need for a rational philosophy by the preacher.

Opposed to Christian ways of thinking about God, man, and the world are other ways of thinking about the same realities, which, if valid, make it impossible for us to hold our Christian system as true, for we cannot defend it in the court of reason, nor make it ethically workable. For instance, there is the pantheistic way of thinking about God, man, and the world. It is that way which affirms that God is All, and All is God; that Deity is every being, and every being is Deity; that God, man, and the world "are conterminous and identical." It denies to God any being distinct from the world, and to the world any being distinct from God. This philosophy of the universe really denies all the fundamental Christian affirmations, - the personality of God, the creation by God, the real moral freedom of man, the reality of sin as springing from the voluntary perversion of man's power of self-determination — and in pantheism no personal immortality for man in the Christian sense is possible. Thus the pantheistic philosophy of the universe is deadly to Christian theism at every fundamental point. If pantheism be true, then we shall all ultimately lose our souls in God, because we are a portion of God. Most of us prefer to be left in possession of our own souls rather than be absorbed into God as a drop of water slips into and mingles with sea,- lost in it forever.

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There are still other ways of thinking about the everlasting realities of God, man, and the world, which I need do nothing more than mention. There is the materialistic way of trying rationally to account for the universe as man apprehends it; there is the Deistical way of approach to the great problems of God and the world; there is the modern "Agnosticism," which is the result of a previously adopted philosophy of human knowledge with which we must first come to conclusions before we can touch the great Christian views of God and man. But in all these ways of approach for solution of the great realities of the universe, of which man himself is one, the main contention of this paper is abundantly verified, that there is the most intimate and necessary relation between the preaching of Christian truth and speculative or philosophical presuppositions; and that the Gospel itself, as a great historic movement of God in earthly history, for the redemption of the race, must be able in the last analysis to philosophically interpret and vindicate itself to the intellectual nature of man as a rational system, or it cannot hold the adherence of the world in the end. For what is finally found philosophically untrue will prove to be theologically indefensible.

The first philosophical presupposition by which a rational Christian conception of God must stand, it would seem, is that he is Spirit, an Ethical Personality. The word God is a most elastic one, made to cover in human thought the most diverse and mutually destructive conceptions of the Deity. It has been used to cover such ideas as that "God is the substance of the world," the "Impersonal Force," or "Eternal Energy," of the universe. He has been called the "Unknown," the "Unconscious" soul of the universe, and now a new cult has arisen which makes much of saying that "God is the Principle of the universe." Such terms as these for God we can have no Christian use for as ultimate terms, because when followed to their legitimate conclusions they will always be found to destroy his ethical character, because they impliedly deny his personality. If God be not a self-conscious and self-directing intelligence, then so far as we can see we cannot have a moral Deity. Moral distinctions can have no meaning to him. Without personality, in much the same sense as when we apply these terms to man, then God is inevitably dissolved into and lost in the universe, or evaporated into a mental abstraction. From the standpoint of the religious consciousness of man, an impersonal God is the same as none. When