[ p. vii ]
THE leisure of Oxford is a thing of the past, and the effort to be learned in the old, dignified manner amid its everincreasing activity and noise becomes more and more a weariness, if it is not actually an anachronism. In the full sound of the roar of our busy streets these lectures were written and delivered. At least it has never been possible to forget, as the traffic sweeps by, how little either theology or psychology matter if they cannot be related swiftly and immediately to life. If my words can be so related, touching some moment’s need, until, within a very few years, they are out-of-date and forgotten, they will have served their purpose well enough. And indeed, though I owe much to books, I owe far more to life itself as a teacher. Most of all, perhaps, I owe to my pupils, and to those whom I have tried, stumblingly enough, to help in their difficulties. From them I have learned to separate the essential from the transient, and if what I have said has value for a wider audience, it is because it has been tested by their criticism and their trust.
It would be absurd to hope that these essays in a subject already handled so often should have any distinction either as theology or as psychology. My training and my work as a college teacher lie in the field of theology. In psychology I can only claim the role of an—interested spectator, interested because of my own needs and the needs of those who have laid upon me the responsibility and the honour of sharing their problems and anxieties interested because, as it would seem, there is doubt abroad and perplexity as to the bearings of these things upon the Faith. It is impossible for a theologian to keep in touch with his [ p. viii ] own subject and to be expert and informed in this vast new field of enquiry as well. For the multiplicity of psychological writings, and the kaleidoscopic diversity of psychological theories, constitute a phenomenon probably without parallel in the history of scientific discovery. It has been said that the stream of serious psychological publications continues at the rate of over two thousand a year. I need not say that I have failed to keep abreast of so sweeping a current. I have not even ventured upon the task of verifying the estimate. The apologist for theism, and for a Christian theism, cannot simplify his task by dealing with any one outstanding book or any single system of psychological theory. There are far too many books, and they abound in matter which, directly or indirectly, is of grave concern to Christians. The fact that many of these books are friendly in intention does not greatly lessen the gravity of the issue, since the presuppositions upon which they too often rest must, if pressed to their logical conclusion, tend either to a weakening of the grounds of faith or to a lowering of the level of Christian conduct. And throughout much of the literature, though happily the generalization is far less true for this country than for any other, the quest of the human soul for God, and the practices wherein it seeks the satisfaction of its deepest need, are assumed to be mere distortions of instinct, social or individual, pointing to no reality more ultimate than man himself. This has not been without its effect upon popular, and even upon educated, opinion. Psychological jargon has become current coin. The press and the modern novel are full of it. But psychological knowledge, and the deeper understanding of the words so glibly used, is rare enough still.
Had Canon Bampton been alive to-day he would have found a situation urgently demanding an apologetic such as he desired when he endowed the lectures which bear [ p. ix ] his name, but a situation not readily to be met by an exposition of Holy Scripture, or by a detailed study of the Fathers. Of the writers to whom he would naturally have turned for counsel and for re-assurance only St. Augustine, whose Confessions remains a psychological masterpiece as remarkable in its sincerity as in its clarity of analysis, can be named as casting any real light upon the problems which I have attempted to discuss. And yet I cannot but feel that those who honoured me with the invitation to deliver these lectures were right in believing that the subject which I offered for their consideration, and now offer for the consideration of a wider public, is one which may not unfittingly find a place in this series, however unworthy my treatment of it may be.
This at least is certain, that these questions, however important at the moment, will wear a very different aspect in a few years’ time. The psychological writers with whom I have been concerned are of significance to-day, but the psychology of the future will develop on lines as yet only dimly foreseen. It seemed, therefore, unnecessary to attempt to expand these lectures into a book which might rival in learning and in permanence those written by some of my distinguished predecessors in this lectureship, or even to adorn them with any very full references to the current literature. I have in all cases contented myself with citations of English translations, where such exist. And I have aimed at delaying publication as little as the exigencies of printing and publishing, of health and of the continued routine of college life, have allowed. To all who have helped to lighten my task, from the friends who have honoured my lectures by pertinent criticism upon points of detail, to the compositors, printers’ reader, and publishers, who have made the final stages of the work a pleasure, my sincerest thanks are due.
L. W. G.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.
Whitsunday 1930.