If this view be adopted, religious experience, on its first emergence in mankind, will, mutatatis mutandis, have been grounded in a way similar to that in which theistic belief is grounded by the philosopher. It was the outcome of what may be called primitive philosophizing on Nature and man, and not of the exercise of an alleged transcendent faculty of intuition. In deed it would seem that such direct touch of God upon the human soul as religion and theology imply does not admit of being dis cerned with real immediacy : it is a case of causal activity, which admittedly is never perceptible. And as for the rest that has been said above, its gist is contained in the generally endorsed dictum, "no man hath seen God at any time." The mystic, it is true, claims to be an exception. But it is not necessary here to weigh his testimony, partly because he can only assert, on the strength of his peculiar experiences, the specious kind of immediacy which has already been shown to be irrelevant, and partly because mystical experience seems never to have issued in theological insight and doctrine that was unknown before and otherwise. Knowledge of God would seem to be in the same case with knowledge of our own souls and of other selves, as distinct from their material bodies. In each of these instances the object is not apprehended with directness, but read in analogically; and the reading or interpretation is justified or verified (never logically certified) by cumulative practical success. There well may have been, from the infancy of our race, a touching of man by God, even before man arrived at belief in the daemonic or the divine; but such rapport would not be religion until man had come to believe in such beings as gods. "He who cometh to God must believe that He is." That is to say, religion or religious experience presupposes, and is constituted distinctive, by a theological no tion or concept. This concept cannot be in the first instance de rived from religious experience, because religious experience can not exist till the idea is forthcoming.
It is very generally taught that theology presupposes religious experience and is but the explication of it. But it is all a matter of where, in a long chain of development, we fix our starting point for consideration. In the series of natural numbers, every odd number precedes ar even number and every odd number also succeeds an even number until we work back to i. Similarly, the "Athanasian" creed presupposes much Christian experience while the religious experience of Paul the Apostle differed from that of Paul the Rabbi in virtue of his acquired doctrinal belief as to the Person of Christ. But if we go back to the beginning of the series in which theology determines religious experience and in turn is determined by such experience, pursuing psychological be ginnings since historical origins are beyond our ken, it would seem that, originally, some crude equivalent to natural theology must have preceded and caused the emergence of distinctively religious experience. But religious experience once having arisen in this way, it will determine theological thought ; and the new thought will render possible a further advance in religious ex perience, and so on. Thus there is as much truth in the statement that theological doctrine determines the quality of religious experience as in the statement that religious experience and faith are presupposed by theological dogmas. When, e.g., the Christian asserts that he has experience of the indwelling Christ, he is ob viously interpreting his really immediate experiences, which con sist in consolations, joy, peace, uplifting of the will, etc. He would not so interpret such mental happenings had not Christ been preached to him, and had he not received doctrine as to the Person of Christ which he did not make out of his individual experience. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the idea of God, both in dogmatic theology and in philosophy, was moulded by religious experience, guided both by morality and intellect, after the initial stage of the long course of religious development.
The Relation of Theology to Philosophy.—From the earli est times philosophy has had a theological side. Since the dawn of Greek science and metaphysic, philosophy, Greek and other than Greek, has produced copious speculation concerning the existence and nature of God, as well as a vast volume of thought bearing more or less direct relevance to theological problems, such as the origin, destiny and meaning of the world and human life. The greatest of philosophers have dealt with these problems and it has often been from the side of religion that great thinkers have received their chief impulse towards philosophy. Moreover the ology and philosophy are largely identical in that theology is essentially metaphysics. No doubt the majority of those who profess theological beliefs hold their beliefs in complete absence of metaphysical reasoning; in that sense their belief—i.e., believ ing—is non-metaphysical. But their beliefs—i.e., their credenda —are all metaphysical dogmas or assertions about ultimate reality. They are religious beliefs in so far as they are metaphysical. For instance, that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate" is, as a bare historical fact, of no religious import; but when it is intended to imply further that He suffered for us—i.e., for our salvation— it is a metaphysical statement concerning the relation of God to human souls and, in virtue of that metaphysical content, is a religious doctrine.
Besides being concerned with the same metaphysical subject matter, philosophy is involved in theology and can aid its work in various ways. Firstly, in respect of the systematization and unification of knowledge. Christian theology needs must connect its more or less separate and independently elaborated doctrines into a coherent whole. Thus Origen, one of the first Fathers to present an ordered system of Christian dogma, tells us that while the Apostles delivered themselves clearly on certain points neces sary for all to understand, they left the grounds of their utter ances and the more precise determination and demonstration of many doctrines to the more zealous of their successors who should be "lovers of wisdom"; and he expresses his desire to form a connected series of truths or one body of doctrine. That is the goal of dogmatic theology which would relate, e.g., the doctrine of the Atonement with that of the Incarnation or the doctrine of Sin with that of Creation, and obviously such connection involves resort to philosophy. Again, the exposition of any single doctrine involves the use of interpretative ideas, such as can only be sup plied by the science and philosophy current in a given age. Several doctrines that purport to be deduced from scripture alone are less the result of strict exegesis than the result of speculation applied to such material as secular knowledge was believed to have estab lished. To give one example : the doctrine of Original Sin is not contained in the Old Testament and the only unmistakable pre sentation of it that can be found in the New does not appear to have been the starting-point for the first framers of the ecclesi astical doctrine. Tertullian set out from stoic psychology, Origen from the institution of infant-baptism and also from the myth of Plato concerning the fall of the soul from the celestial sphere into earthly life. But of greater importance than cases of this kind is the fact that the very terms and conceptions, requisite as a mould into which the relatively undefined traditional beliefs of the early Church must be cast in order to yield explicit and definite doctrine and, appropriated for that purpose, were sup plied by Greek philosophy.