"REVELATION AND MODERN THEOLOGY C ON TRASTE D."
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—The review of my work in your number of the 15th inst. contains an error respecting a matter of fact, which I shall be much obliged by your allowing me to correct. I should not ask this, if it involved a matter of opinion ; for every reviewer is entitled to form his own on the soundness of the positions which are laid down in a work which he undertakes to review. The point in question is the view which I have taken in my work as to the function of theology. As I read the review, it represents me to have reduced it to the narrowest possible limits. It is true that my object has been to prove that Christianity, as a revelation, does not embrace a wide range of abstract subject- matter; but I have several times affirmed that Christian theology is a science, and stands to Christianity, as a revela- tion, precisely in the same relation as other sciences stand to the facts and phenomena of the Universe; and whether it is received as a science or a philosophy, it must be dealt with by precisely the same methods as other sciences and philo- sophies. But on this point the last chapter in the work, which consists of twenty clearly reasoned pages, is conclusive. Its title is " Theology—its Function in Reference to Christianity as a Revelation." I have read it through, and the conclusion which I have arrived at is, that the function which I have assigned to theology scarcely, if at all, differs from that of your reviewer. It is certain that in this chapter, in which my position is laid down with great care, I have assigned to theology an extent of subject-matter which ought to satisfy any rational theologian.
Will you kindly allow me to express an opinion on another point ? If the views against which a considerable portion of the work is directed are passing away from modern theology, I should be most thankful to think so; but it is certain that they are embodied in the confessions of nearly every Church and community of Christians in Christendom, and that they form the foundation of what I have designated "Popular Theology.'
—I am, Sir, &c.,
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