ions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason
simplifies my procedure to-day. I need not discredit philosophy by
laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as
a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be
"objectively" convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does
not banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling
does. I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in
this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in
patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of
life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs
beforehand. It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it HAS
to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and
lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it
cannot now secure it.[292]

[292] As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions,
and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs
see the striking work of H. Fielding, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902,
which came into my hands after my text was written. "Creeds," says the
author, "are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar
is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants grammar is the
theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the
reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar
must follow" (p. 313). The whole book, which keeps unusually close to
concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text.

Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the
older systematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and
Catholic manuals, best of all in the innumerable text-books published
since Pope Leo's Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I
glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes
God's existence, after that at those by which it establishes his
nature.[293]

[293] For convenience' sake, I follow the order of A. Stockl's Lehrbuch
der Philosophie, 5te Autlage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. Boedder's
Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual; but
an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant theologians as
C. Hodge: Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A. H. Strong:
Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.

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