IN a previous lecture I dealt with the relation of dog-
matic theology to one department of knowledge--
historiography. But the theology of revealed religion
has been asserted to have another basis for its truth-claim
besides historiographical data, viz. the experience of
Christians in any generation. In this last lecture of my
course I propose to set forth, with some comment, the
views which have been held by typical schools of
theology, natural as well as revealed, as to the founda-
tions of their science and its basis in religious experience,
and as to whether theology is independent of other
departments of knowledge.

If I may use the word 'modernity', in connexion with
theology, to mean freedom of thought from external
authority, rejection of the traditional infallibilities, and
adoption of verifiability rather than apostolicity or
œcumenicalness as the criterion of truth, theology may
be said, without much qualification, to have entered on
modernity with eighteenth-century deism. The free
lances who were named deists, but who would be more
accurately called rational theists, seem to be the first to
put into practice, in theology as distinct from institu-
tions, etc., that independence to which the Reformation

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