Testimony of Christian Experience 79 has scaled off the conception of matter and builds his materi alistic system on that. Another takes motion or energy and force, and so on, I had almost said ad infinitum. The result of the process is that the philosophers get clear away from human life and experience. They fix their gaze on the photograph of a dim and far away image of reality and become absorbed in excessive star-gazing, metaphysical cliff-climbing and transcendental soap-bubbleblowing. They are like the Indian juggler who hung his gladder on thin air without touching the ground below, sprang upon it, climbed out of sight, pulled the ladder after him, and disappeared in the clouds. T H E REMEDY All this ought not to discredit philosophy but teach it a lesson. Men fail to find the secret of the world until God and God’s dealing with men are considered. Dr. Ashmore tells of some men on a raft floating down the Mississippi river who stopped for supper one night, and their float went on, but returned after awhile to the same place or a similar one. They did this several times until they discovered that they were caught in an eddy of vast dimensions and were being swept in a circle back again repeatedly to the starting point. So has philosophy moved in a circle, with way stations along the route but never able to escape from the circular movement of human thought. There is one way for philosophy to escape from its situation and find the current on the bosom of the river of thought which will carry it on to its destination. That current is religious experience wherein man’s upward soaring thought is met by God’s descending revelation and love. When this current of thought is once reached, a new day will dawn for philosophy and ere long the philosophers will see the gleam on the gates of pearl and the sparkle of the jasper walls of the city of God, whither they would find the way.
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