Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 71:282 (Apr 1914)
Article: Royce’s Philosophy Of Religion
Author: Edwin Stutely Carr

BSac 71:282 (April 1914) p. 283

Royce’s Philosophy Of Religion

Edwin S. Carr

Popular interest has recently been aroused by the writings and lectures of Professor Royce. He has not heretofore been conspicuous as a champion of orthodoxy. His lectures, however, at Beloit College, before the Lowell Institute, and at Manchester College, Oxford, since published under the title, “The Problem of Christianity,” have attracted much attention in religious circles. In a recent communication to the Advance (Nov. 13, 1913), an Iowa Congregational minister declares that Royce has established the truth of the old-fashioned Calvinistic doctrines of Sin, Penalty, Divine Grace and Atonement “with an inexorable logic from which there is no escape.” And he adds the remark, from which surely there can be no dissent, “When these doctrines come from the leading philosophical thinker of America, and from an institution popularly regarded as liberal, the event is even more noteworthy.” This noteworthy achievement so impresses the Advance editor that he prints the letter of the Iowa minister under the caption, “Royce, Defender of the Faith.”

In a recent number of Faith and Doubt, a magazine established for the defense of orthodoxy, appears a review of Royce’s “Sources of Religious Insight.” The writer is in nothing critical but in all things commendatory. Professor

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Royce is hailed as the Moses who shall lead our doubting and troubled age into the promised land of faith and freedom. And his final exhortation runs, “By all means read the book.”

It should be an interesting and profitable study to trace the development of Dr. Royce’s philosophical opinions and religious experience.

Josiah Royce was born in Grass Valley, California, in 1855. He received the degree of A.B. from the University of California in 1875, and a Ph.D., from Johns Hopkins in 1878. He was instructor in English Literature and Logic in the University of California from 1878 to 1882, instructor and assistant professor of Philosophy from 1882 to 1892, and since 1892 has held the chair of History of Philosophy at Harvard University.

Note that he began his academic career as instructor in English Literature. This is where he belongs; the line for which his mental gifts fit him. He is a rhetorician and an expositor of other men’s opinions rather than a thoroughgoing and consistent thinker. He first gained public recognition and notoriety by attacking the prevalent conceptions of God and immortality. Later, as he attempted to construct some sort of philosophy, he was driven more and more to accept the essential principles of the only permanently satisfactory philosophical system our ...