If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for
consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies,
what do you find?

Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-
reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and
aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat.
By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-
called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the
philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce.
This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of
our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has
already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism
at large.

That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through
one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic
theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic
church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy
of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that
has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of
the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one
hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on
the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James
Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel
themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you
like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a
thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things.
It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology,