Page:The varieties of religious experience, a study in human nature.djvu/450

434 there be than such a system would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological schools of to-day, almost as much as in those of the fore-time, a disdain for merely possible or probable truth, and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain. Principal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion:—

Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment. Theology, he says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he says, what it is not—not 'physical evidences' for God, not 'natural religion,' for these are but vague subjective interpretations:—