Keeping Religion Philosophical

Abstract

O NE of the most characteristic of the recent changes in the teaching of religion is the weaning away of religion from its old ally in the college curriculum, philosophy. This alliance had long been accepted as inevitable. Not only the theological training of many teachers of philosophy but the related interests of students themselves contributed to this close relationship. Those who look back upon the teaching of Royce at Harvard, Hyde at Bowdoin and Garman at Amherst, to recall but a few, will remember how inseparable in it was the bond of intention and philosophical outlook. There was, further, the conviction that there was a genuine inter-connection between the religious and philosophical subject-matters themselves, exemplified not only in the frequent inclusion in the curriculum of courses in Christian Evidences, of which a few hardy cases still survive, but also in the increasing favor, springing no doubt from the dominant influences of philosophical idealism and psychological empiricism, with which courses in the philosophy and psychology of religion were regarded. In either case instruction in the Bible went on