Again, Christianity exists not merely as a matter of history.  It exists also as a fact in living consciousness.  It is the function of psychology to investigate that consciousness.  We must say that, accurately speaking, there is no such thing as Christian philosophy.  There are philosophies, good or bad, current or obsolete.  These are Christian only in being applied to the history of Christianity and the content of the Christian consciousness.  There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as Christian consciousness.  There is the human consciousness, operating with and operated upon by the impulse of Christianity.  It is the great human experience from which we single out for investigation that part which is concerned with religion, and call that the religious experience.  It is essential, therefore, that those general investigations of human consciousness and experience, as such, which are being carried on all about us should be reckoned with, if our Christian life and thought are not altogether to fall out of touch with advancing knowledge.  For this reason we have misgiving about the position of some followers of Ritschl.  Their opinion, pushed to the limit, seems to mean that we have nothing to do with philosophy, or with the advance of science.  Religion is a feeling of which he alone who possesses it can give account.  He alone who has it can appreciate such an account when given.  We acknowledge that religion is in part a feeling.  But that feeling must have rational justification.  It must also have rational guidance if it is to be saved from degenerating into fanaticism.

To say that we have nothing to do with philosophy ends in our having to do with a bad philosophy.  In that case we have a philosophy with which we operate without having investigated it, instead of having one with which we operate because we have investigated it.  The philosophy of which we are aware we have.  The philosophy of which we are not aware has us.  No doubt, we may have religion without philosophy, but we cannot formulate it even in the rudest way to ourselves, we cannot communicate it in any way whatsoever to others, except in the terms of a philosophy.  In the general sense in which every man has a philosophy, this is merely the deposit of the regnant notions of the time.  It may be amended or superseded, and our theology with it.  Yet while it lasts it is our one possible vehicle of expression.  It is the interpreter and the critique of what we have experienced.  It is not open to a man to retreat within himself and say, I am a Christian, I feel thus, I think so, these thoughts are the content of Christianity.  The consequence of that position is that we make the religious experience to be no part of the normal human experience.  If we contend that the being a Christian is the great human experience, that the religious life is the true human life, we must pursue the opposite course.  We must make the religious life coherent with all the other phases and elements of life.  If we would contend that religious thought is the truest and deepest thought, we must begin at this very point.  We must make it conform absolutely to the laws of all other thought.  To contend for its isolation, as an area by itself and a process subject only to its own laws, is to court the judgment of men, that in its zeal to be Christian it has ceased to be thought.