An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming
modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our
thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has
administered. It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that
precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one
might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that
phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been
guilty of arrant dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of
the claim that it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself
unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and
difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information
concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine
authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious
investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the
innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of
a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves
within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which
is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that
religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They apprehended
more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that there is much
ignorance which revelation does not mitigate. _Exeunt omnia in
mysterium_. They are prepared to say concerning many of the dicta of
religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to
say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these
with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward
religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has
taught us toward all truth whatsoever.