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xxviii multitudes of them are still of firm hope, and even of persuasion, that religion, in its highest historic meaning, is verifiable by reason. Their inheritance in aspirations after Immortality as the only field for exercising to the full their moral Freedom, — in longings after the reality of God, in which alone, as they see, have those aspirations any sure warrant, — this inheritance they are still confident will be shown valid at the bar of knowledge, will be vindicated as of the substance of reality itself, when once the nature of that reality gets stated as genuine intelligence sees it to be. They know the inheritance is worthless unless it has this certification by intelligence, but they are alert in the trust that the certification is there, and only waits to be shown. The hour has arrived, they are sure, for a higher philosophy, thoroughly Personal, which will prove itself Complete Idealism and Fulfilled Realism at one and the same time.

It is on this ground, one now may repeat, that the existing interest in that form of Theism which culminates in the school of Hegel can be explained. In this way, too, one can understand why this interest, in spite of interrupting pauses, has continued to grow since the day of its beginning, and why, coming into a religious medium more serious and stable when it took possession of the English-speaking mind, it has spread far more widely since the rise and growth of scientific evolution. At present, the way of thinking which engages this interest moves, in one form or another, side by side with the advancing spread of Spencerian thought, and appears more and more as