The Sources Of Religious Insight   By: Josiah Royce

The Problem of the Old Testament, by James Orr, D.D. (Bross Prize, 1905) net $1.50

The Bible: Its Origin and Nature, by Marcus Dods, D.D. . . net $1.00

The Bible of Nature, by J. Arthur Thomson, M.A net $1.00

The Religions of Modern Syria and Palestine, by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D net $1.50

The Sources of Religious Insight, by Josiah Royce, Ph.D., LL.D. net $1.25

THE BROSS LIBRARY

VOLUME VI

THE BROSS LECTURES . . 1911

THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS INSIGHT

LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE LAKE FOREST COLLEGE ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE WILLIAM BROSS

BY

JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK .... 1912

Copyright, 1912, by THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY

Published April. 1912

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THE BROSS FOUNDATION

The Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund established in 1879 by the late William Bross, Lieutenant Governor of Illinois from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some memorial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died in 1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agreement with the "Trustees of Lake Forest University," whereby there was finally transferred to them the sum of forty thousand dollars, the income of which was to accumulate in perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the accumulations of one decade to be spent in the following decade, for the purpose of stimulating the best books or treatises "on the connection, relation, and mutual bearing of any practical science, the history of our race, or the facts in any department of knowledge, with and upon the Christian Religion." The object of the donor was to "call out the best efforts of the highest talent and the ripest scholarship of the world to illustrate from science, or from any department of knowledge, and to demonstrate the divine origin and the authority of the Christian Scriptures; and, further, to show how both science and revelation coincide and prove the existence, {vi} the providence, or any or all of the attributes of the only living and true God, 'infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'"

The gift contemplated in the original agreement of 1879 was finally consummated in 1890. The first decade of the accumulation of interest having closed in 1900, the Trustees of the Bross Fund began at this time to carry out the provisions of the deed of gift. It was determined to give the general title of "The Bross Library" to the series of books purchased and published with the proceeds of the Bross Fund. In accordance with the express wish of the donor, that the "Evidences of Christianity" of his "very dear friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D.," be purchased and "ever numbered and known as No. 1 of the series," the Trustees secured the copyright of this work, which has been republished in a presentation edition as Volume I of the Bross Library.

The trust agreement prescribed two methods by which the production of books and treatises of the nature contemplated by the donor was to be stimulated: