Reality

Originally published in 1926The purpose of this book is to outline, in the simplest and clearest language I can command, a position in which my own mind has found rest after thirty years of search. But in order that the point of view from which it is written may be the more easily apprehended I have, after some hesitation, thought it well to preface it with a few details of an autobiographical nature.I came up to Oxford with a scholarship in Classics in 1893, fully determined to follow my father in the profession of the Law. But about the end of my second year---I was reading 'Greats'-I realised quite suddenly that the religious beliefs in which I had been brought up rested on a very slender intellectual foundation ; and I awoke one day to find myself an agnostic. After a year or so of thought and reading, and discussion with older friends, I reached, through the gateway of T. H. Green's philosophy, what at the time seemed to me an adequate intellectual basis of religion largely taken over, in a not too well-digested form, from the earlier writings of Illingworth and Gore. The conviction was then borne in upon me that it was my duty to give my life to the task of further working out, and passing on to others, the truth which I had seen ; and I decided to seek ordination. After taking my Degree I read Theology, and there opened up a possibility, which had not previously occurred to me, that my work might be in Oxford ; but it was not till some little time after I had been elected to a Fellowship that I realised how very far from being intellectually water-tight was the position which I had reached. The restraining advice of a senior friend kept me from relinquishing my Orders ; but I think that I should ultimately have taken this step but for the reinvigorating inspiration of the Summer Conferences of the Student Christian Movement, which I began to attend 'in 1905. Here I gained a renewed confidence that in Religion man can attain to a genuine apprehension of Reality, of that 'Beyond which is also Within', in a way and of a kind which any intellectual theory of the Universe must account for or confess itself bankrupt.I started again on my quest with a new courage, but with no weakening of my old conviction that religion in its mystical, emotional or practical expression was, to me at any rate, of little value if divorced from intellectual integrity. 1 endeavoured to work on in the spirit of the philosopher who, in Samuel Butler's famous phrase,'should have given up all, even Christ Himself, for Christ's sake'.