st Professor Ward's dictum that 'the actual is wholly
historical,' as a view little better than naive realism. History, he
says, is a hybrid form of experience, incapable of any considerable
degree of being or trueness. It is a fragmentary diorama of finite
life-processes seen from the outside, and very imperfectly known. It
consists largely of assigning parts in some great world-experience to
particular actors--a highly speculative enterprise. To set these
contingent and dubious constructions above the operations of pure
thought and pure insight is indeed a return to the philosophy of the man
in the street. 'Social morality, art, philosophy, and religion take us
far beyond the spatio-temporal externality of history; these are
concrete and necessary living worlds, and in them the finite mind begins
to experience something of what individuality must ultimately mean.' Our
inquiry has thus led us to the threshold of one of the fundamental
problems of philosophy--the value and reality of time. For the
institutionalist, happenings in time have a meaning and importance far
greater than the mystic is willing to allow to them. Like most other
great philosophical problems, this question is largely one of
temperament. Christianity has found room for both types. I believe,
however, that the aberrations or exaggerations of institutionalism have
been, and are, more dangerous, and further removed from the spirit of
Christianity than those of mysticism, and that we must look to the
latter type, rather than to the former, to give life to the next
religious revival.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] Moore, _Science and the Faith_, Introduction.

[91] Troeltsch, _Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu
fuer den Glauben,_ pp. 25 _sq_.

[92] Royce, _The Problem of Christianity_, vol. i. 39.

THE INDICTMENT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY

(1917)

No thinking man can deny that this war has grievously stained the
reputation of Europe. Even if the verdict of history confirms the
opinion that the conspiracy which threw the torch into the
powder-magazine was laid by a few persons in one or two countries, and
that the unparalleled outrages which have accompanied the conflict were
ordered by a small coterie of brutal officers, we cannot forget that
these crimes have been committed by the responsible representatives of a
civilised European power, and that the nation which they represent has
shown no qualms of conscience. That such a cal