If personality has any place in the
soul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority that
religion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limits
that reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un-borrowed
radiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay or
cleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in the
normal course of life. Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience
cannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true available test
of it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of God's
presence within us, and, as I have called it, the vitality of the whole
matter.
"Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under
such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice
in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of the
value of the personal soul in all men,--what to us is the office of the
Church? In theology it defines a philosophy which, though an
interpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectual
scheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value,
differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the most
mysterious known to thought.
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