know the heart's bitterness and its yearning tenderness, he must be mindful of the mysteries that shroud the soul of man, and must perceive how the interweaving and entangling of lives with one another make up the glory and the tragedy of existence. These human realities must enter into his experience, if his interpretation of the eternal life is to come home to men with power. He needs to behold how "Life, like a dome of many colored glass, in order that he may do something toward helping each individual with his own peculiarly colored outlook, realize something of the fulness of the light celestial. The fundamental conviction on which these lectures are based is that theology cannot be isolated from human problems without the most fatal results. But such a statement in its broad and general form arouses the dissent of no one. On the contrary it is likely to be accepted complacently as an obvious truth. The idea becomes momentous only when we ask what kind of a relation exists between human problems and theology. How far in the realm of religious truth does such a relation extend? How constant and pervasive is it? Are we, with the supernaturalist of the older type, to conceive of religious truth as let down from heaven like the New Jerusalem, but of course let down for the salvation and perfecting of men, and so to that extent practical in its nature? Or are we to conceive of religious truth, with those who base their theology on absolute idealism, as a land into which we migrate, a realm whose geography is fixed, but which has a practical aspect in the sense that we are to inhabit and till it? Or again, as the Ritschlian thinks, is religious truth like a vessel bearing us over an unplumbed and uncharted sea toward a New World, of which our pilot, alone of all men, has taught us to dream? Or once more, shall we adopt the teaching of the pragmatist, according to which all truth, that of religion included, is like the body of the soul, a thing instinct with life in every part, the organ by which a soul communicates with its fellows and with the Infinite, growing as the soul grows, and as immortal as the spirits, finite or Infinite, by which its tissue is woven? The question need be put no more concretely than this. We already have come upon one of those "Battles of opinion That divide the sons of men." The task of the present lectures is to try to fashion the general conviction that theology should be kept in close relation to human problems into greater definiteness by discussing it in the light of the contrasts presented by the different points of view just mentioned. The stand-point of the older supernaturalism indeed has been criticised so thoroughly in our time that it will be referred to only incidentally in the following lectures; but the stand-points of the absolute idealist, the Ritschlian, and the pragmatist must be taken up for as serious discussion as the compass of this lectureship allows. How do these doctrines bear upon the issues of life? To what extent do they lead us into direct contact with the great human problems, and afford us hope of gaining in some measure their solutions? With this question in mind let us proceed to the theme of the hour, which is, "Highways of Thought," and the approach they may afford us to human problems. I HIGHWAYS OF THOUGHT WHATEVER may be the special goal that a student is seeking, he finds that, if he wishes to make real progress toward it, he must follow one of the great highways of thought. These highways as one now finds them are the creation of no single man. A few great pioneer thinkers did indeed first traverse them alone. All honor to those pioneers! But the trails which they opened up have since been trampled broad by the passage of many thinkers. As for the average philosopher or theologian, he is little more than a macadamizer on one of the great highways—a worthy but not a glorious task. Now so inevitably does the commerce of thought move along a certain few main highways that present-day theology cannot avoid making use of them, even if it would. In truth, it would not be difficult to show that |