CHAPTER III We have no need to follow Fichte farther. Suffice it to say, with reference to the theory of knowledge, that he had discovered that one could not stand still with Kant. One must either go back toward the position of the old empiricism which assumed the reality of the world exactly as it appeared, or else one must go forward to an idealism more thorough-going than Kant had planned. Of the two paths which, with all the vast advance of the natural sciences, the thought of the nineteenth century might traverse, that of the denial of everything except the mechanism of nature, and that of the assertion that nature is but the organ of spirit and is instinct with reason, Fichte chose the latter and blazed out the path along which all the idealists have followed him. In reference to the philosophy of religion, we must say that, with all the extravagance, the pantheism and mysticism of his phrases, Fichte's great contribution was his breaking down of the old dualism between God and man which was still fundamental to Kant. It was his assertion of the unity of man and God and of the life of God in man. This thought has been appropriated in all of modern theology. SCHELLING It was the meagreness of Fichte's treatment of nature which impelled Schelling to what he called his outbreak into reality. Nature will not be dismissed, as simply that which is not I. You cannot say that nature is only the sphere of my self-realisation. Individuals are in their way the children of nature. They are this in respect of their souls as much as of their bodies. Nature was before they were. Nature is, moreover, not alien to intelligence. On the contrary, it is a treasure-house of intelligible forms which demand to be treated as such. It appeared to Schelling, therefore, a truer idealism to work out an intelligible system of nature, exhibiting its essential oneness with personality. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born in 1775 at Leonberg in Württemberg. His father was a clergyman. He was precocious in his intellectual development and much spoiled by vanity. Before he was twenty years old he had published three works upon problems suggested by Fichte. At twenty-three he was extraordinarius at Jena. He had apparently a brilliant career before him. He published his Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophe , 1799, and also his System des transcendentalen Idealismus , 1800. Even his short residence at Jena was troubled by violent conflicts with his colleagues. It was brought to an end by his marriage with the wife of Augustus von Schlegel, who had been divorced for the purpose. From 1806 to 1841 he lived in Munich in retirement. The long-expected books which were to fulfil his early promise never appeared. Hegel's stricture was just. Schelling had no taste for the prolonged and intense labour which his brilliant early works marked out. He died in 1854, having reached the age of seventy-nine years, of which at least fifty were as melancholy and fruitless as could well be imagined. The dominating idea of Schelling's philosophy of nature may be said to be the exhibition of nature as the progress of intelligence toward consciousness and personality. Nature is the ego in evolution, personality in the making. All natural objects are visible analogues and counterparts of mind. The intelligence which their structure reveals, men had interpreted as residing in the mind of a maker of the world. Nature had been spoken of as if it were a watch. God was its great artificer. No one asserted that its intelligence and power of development lay within itself. On the contrary, nature is always in the process of advance from lower, less highly organised and less intelligible forms, to those which are more highly organised, more nearly the counterpart of the active intelligence in man himself. The personality of man had been viewed as standing over against nature, this last being thought of as static and permanent. On the contrary, the personality of man, with all of its intelligence and free will, is but the climax and fulfilment of a long succession of intelligible forms in nature, passing upward from the inorganic to the organic, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the non-moral to the moral, as these are at last seen in man. Of course, it was the life of organic nature which first suggested this notion to Schelling. An organism is a self-moving, self-producing whole. It is an idea in process of self-realisation. What was observed in the organism was then made by Schelling the root idea of universal nature. Nature is in all its parts living, self-moving along the lines of its development, productivity and product both in one. Empirical science may deal with separate products of nature. It may treat them as objects of analysis and investigation. It may even take the whole of nature as an object. But nature is not mere object. Philosophy has to treat of the inner life which moves the whole of nature as intelligible productivity, as subject, no longer as object. Personality has slowly arisen out of nature. Nature was going through this process of self-development before there were any men to contemplate it. It would go through this process were there no longer men to contemplate it. Schelling has here rounded out the theory of absolute idealism which Fichte had carried through in a one-sided way. He has given us also a wonderful anticipation of certain modern ideas concerning nature's preparation for the doctrine of evolution, which was a stroke of genius in its way. He attempted to arrange the realm of unconscious intelligences in an ascending series which should bridge the gulf between the lowest of natural forms and the fully equipped organism in which self consciousness, with the intellectual, the emotional, and moral life, at last integrated. Inadequate material and a fondness for analogies led Schelling into vagaries in following out this scheme. Nevertheless, it is only in detail that we can look askance at his attempt. In principle our own conception of the universe is the same. It is the dynamic view of nature and an application of the principle of evolution in the widest sense. His errors were those into which a man was bound to fall who undertook to forestall by a sweep of the imagination that which has been the result of the detailed and patient investigation of three generations. What Schelling attempted was to take nature as we know it and to exhibit it as in reality a function of intelligence, pointing, through all the gradations of its varied forms, towards its necessary goal in self-conscious personality. Instead, therefore, of our having in nature and personality two things which cannot be brought together, these become members of one great organism of intelligence of which the immanent God is the source and the sustaining power. These ideas constitute Schelling's contribution to an idealistic and, of course, an essentially monistic view of the universe. The unity of man with God, Fichte had asserted. Schelling set forth the oneness of God and nature, and again of man and nature. The circle was complete. If we have succeeded in conveying a clear idea of the movement of thought from Kant to Hegel, that idea might be stated thus. There are but three possible objects which can engage the thought of man. These are nature and man and God. There is the universe, of which we become aware through experience from our earliest childhood. Then there is man, the man given in self-consciousness, primarily the man myself. In this sense man seems to stand over against nature. Then, as the third possible object of thought, we have God. Upon the thought of God we usually come from the point of view of the category of cause. God is the name which men give to that which lies behind nature and man as the origin and explanation of both. Plato's chief interest was in man. He talked much concerning a God who was somehow the speculative postulate of the spiritual nature in man. Aristotle began a real observation of nature. But the ancient and, still more, the mediæval study of nature was dominated by abstract and theological assumptions. These prevented any real study of that nature in the midst of which man lives, in reaction against which he develops his powers, and to which, on one whole side of his nature, he belongs. Even in respect of that which men reverently took to be thought concerning God, they seem to have been unaware how much of their material was imaginative and poetic symbolism drawn from the experience of man. The traditional idea of revelation proved a disturbing factor. Assuming that revelation gave information concerning God, and not rather the religious experience of communion with God himself, men accepted statements of the documents of revelation as if they had been definitions graciously given from out the realm of the unseen. In reality, they were but fetches from out the world of the known into the world of the unknown. The point of interest is this:—In all possible combinations in which, throughout the history of thought, these three objects had been set, the one with the others, they had always remained three objects. There was no essential relation of the one to the other. They were like the points of a triangle of which any one stood over against the other two. God stood over against the man whom he had fashioned, man over against the God to whom he was responsible. The consequences for theology are evident. When men wished to describe, for example, Jesus as the Son of God, they laid emphasis upon every quality which he had, or was supposed to have, which was not common to him with other men. They lost sight of that profound interest of religion which has always claimed that, in some sense, all men are sons of God and Jesus was the son of man. Jesus was then only truly honoured as divine when every trait of his humanity was ignored. Similarly, when men spoke of revelation they laid emphasis upon those particulars in which this supposed method of coming by information was unlike all other methods. Knowledge derived directly from God through revelation was in no sense the parallel of knowledge derived by men in any other way. So also God stood over against nature. God was indeed declared to have made nature. He had, however, but given it, so to say, an original impulse. That impulse also it had in some strange way lost or perverted, so that the world, though it had been made by God, was not good. For the most part it moved itself, although God's sovereignty was evidenced in that he could still supervene upon it, if he chose. The supernatural was the realm of God. Natural and supernatural were mutually exclusive terms, just as we saw that divine and human were exclusive terms. So also, on the third side of our triangle, man stood over against nature. Nature was to primitive men the realm of caprice, in which they imagined demons, spirits and the like. These were antagonistic to men, as also hostile to God. Then, when with the advance of reflexion these spirits, and equally their counterparts, the good genii and angels, had all died, nature became the realm of iron necessity, of regardless law, of all-destroying force, of cruel and indifferent fate. From this men took refuge in the thought of a compassionate God, though they could not withdraw themselves or those whom they loved from the inexorable laws of nature. They could not see that God always, or even often, intervened on their behalf. It cannot be denied that these ideas prevail to some extent in the popular theology at the present moment. Much of our popular religious language is an inheritance from a time when they universally prevailed. The religious intuition even of psalmists and prophets opposed many of these notions. The pure religious intuition of Jesus opposed almost every one of them. Mystics in every religion have had, at times, insight into an altogether different scheme of things. The philosophy, however, even of the learned, would, in the main, have supported the views above described, from the dawn of reflexion almost to our own time. It was Kant who first began the resolution of this three-cornered difficulty. When he pointed out that into the world, as we know it, an element of spirit goes, that in it an element of the ideal inheres, he began a movement which has issued in modern monism. He affirmed that that element from my thought which enters into the world, as I know it, may be so great that only just a point of matter and a prick of sense remains. Fichte said: 'Why do we put it all in so perverse a way? Why reduce the world of matter to just a point? Why is it not taken for what it is, and yet understood to be all alive with God and we able to think of it, because we are parts of the great thinker God?' Still Fichte had busied himself almost wholly with consciousness. Schelling endeavoured to correct that. Nature lives and moves in God, just as truly in one way as does man in another. Men arise out of nature. A circle has been drawn through the points of our triangle. Nature and man are in a new and deeper sense revelations of God. In fact, supplementing one another, they constitute the only possible channels for the manifestation of God. It hardly needs to be said that these thoughts are widely appropriated in our modern world. These once novel speculations of the kings of thought have made their way slowly to all strata of society. Remote and difficult in their first expression in the language of the schools, their implications are to-day on everybody's lips. It is this unitary view of the universe which has made difficult the acceptance of a theology, the understandlng of a religion, which are still largely phrased in the language of a philosophy to which these ideas did not belong. There is not an historic creed, there is hardly a greater system of theology, which is not stated in terms of a philosophy and science which no longer reign. Men are asking: 'cannot Christianity be so stated and interpreted that it shall meet the needs of men of the twentieth century, as truly as it met those of men of the first or of the sixteenth?' Hegel, the last of this great group of idealistic philosophers whom we shall name, enthusiastically believed in this new interpretation of the faith which was profoundly dear to him. He made important contribution to that interpretation. HEGEL Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. His father was in the fiscal service of the King of Württemberg. He studied in Tübingen. He was heavy and slow of development, in striking contrast with Schelling. He served as tutor in Bern and Frankfort, and began to lecture in Jena in 1801. He was much overshadowed by Schelling. The victory of Napoleon at Jena in 1806 closed the university for a time. In 1818 he was called to Fichte's old chair in Berlin. Never on very good terms with the Prussian Government, he yet showed his large sympathy with life in every way. After 1820 a school of philosophical thinkers began to gather about him. His first great book, his Phenomenologie des Geistes 1807 (translated, Baillie, London, 1910), was published at the end of his Jena period. His Philosophie der Religion and Philosophie der Geschichte were edited after his death. They are mainly in the form which his notes took between 1823 and 1827. He died during an epidemic of cholera in Berlin in 1831. Besides his deep interest in history the most striking feature of Hegel's preliminary training was his profound study of Christianity. He might almost be said to have turned to philosophy as a means of formulating the ideas which he had conceived concerning the development of the religious consciousness, which seemed to him to have been the bearer of all human culture. No one could fail to see that the idea of the relation of God and man, of which we have been speaking, was bound to make itself felt in the interpretation of the doctrine of the incarnation and of all the dogmas, like that of the trinity, which are connected with it. Characteristically, Hegel had pure joy in the speculative aspects of the problem. If one may speak in all reverence, and, at the same time, not without a shade of humour, Hegel rejoiced to find himself able, as he supposed, to rehabilitate the dogma of the trinity, rationalised in approved fashion. It is as if the dogma had been a revered form or mould, which was for him indeed emptied of its original content. He felt bound to fill it anew. Or to speak more justly, he was really convinced that the new meaning which he poured into the dogma was the true meaning which the Church Fathers had been seeking all the while. In the light of two generations of sober dealing, as historians, with such problems, we can but view his solution in a manner very different from that which he indulged. He was even disposed mildly to censure the professional theologians for leaving the defence of the doctrine of the trinity to the philosophers. There were then, and have since been, defenders of the doctrine who have thought that Hegel tendered them great aid. As a matter of fact, despite his own utter seriousness and reverent desire, his solution was a complete dissolution of the doctrine and of much else besides. His view would have been fatal, not merely to that particular form of orthodox thought, but, what is much more serious, to the religious meaning for which it stood. Sooner or later men have seen that the whole drift of Hegelianism was to transform religion into intellectualism. One might say that it was exactly this which the ancient metaphysicians, in the classic doctrine of the trinity, had done. They had transformed religion into metaphysics. The matter would not have been remedied by having a modern metaphysician do the same thing in another way. Hegel was weary of Fichte's endless discussion of the ego and Schelling's of the absolute. It was not the abyss of the unknowable from which things said to come, or that into which they go, which interested Hegel. It was their process and progress which we can know. It was that part of their movement which is observable within actual experience, with which he was concerned. Now one of the laws of the movement of all things, he said, is that by which every thought suggests, and every force tends directly to produce, its opposite. Nothing stands alone. Everything exists by the balance and friction of opposing tendencies. We have the universal contrasts of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of inward and outward, of static and dynamic, of yes and no. There are two sides to every case, democratic government and absolutism, freedom of religion and authority, the individualistic and the social principles, a materialistic and a spiritual interpretation of the universe. Only things which are dead have ceased to have this tide and alternation. Christ is for living religion now a man, now God, revelation now natural, now supernatural. Religion in the eternal conflict between reason and faith, morals the struggle of good and evil, God now mysterious and now manifest. Fichte had said: The essence of the universe is spirit. Hegel said: Yes, but the true notion of spirit is that of the resolution of contradiction, of the exhibition of opposites as held together in their unity. This is the meaning of the trinity. In the trinity we have God who wills to manifest himself, Jesus in whom he is manifest, and the spirit common to them both. God's existence is not static, it is dynamic. It is motion, not rest. God is revealer, recipient, and revelation all in one. The trinity was for Hegel the central doctrine of Christianity. Popular orthodoxy had drawn near to the assertion of three Gods. The revolt, however, in asserting the unity of God, had made of God a meaningless absolute as foundation of the universe. The orthodox, in respect to the person of Christ, had always indeed asserted in laboured way that Jesus was both God and man. Starting from their own abstract conception of God, and attributing to Jesus the qualities of that abstraction, they had ended in making of the humanity of Jesus a perfectly unreal thing. On the other hand, those who had set out from Jesus's real humanity had been unable to see that he was anything more than a mere man, as their phrase was. On their own assumption of the mutual exclusiveness of the conceptions of God and man, they could not do otherwise. Hegel saw clearly that God can be known to us only in and through manifestation. We can certainly make no predication as to how God exists, in himself, as men say, and apart from our knowledge. He exists for our knowledge only as manifest in nature and man. Man is for Hegel part of nature and Jesus is the highest point which the nature of God as manifest in man has reached. In this sense Hegel sometimes even calls nature the Son of God, and mankind and Jesus are thought of as parts of this one manifestation of God. If the Scripture asserts, as it seemed to the framers of the creeds to do, that God manifested himself from before all worlds in and to a self-conscious personality like his own, Hegel would answer: But the Scripture is no third source of knowledge, besides nature and man. Scripture is only the record of God's revelation of himself in and to men. If these men framed their profoundest thought in this way, that is only because they lived in an age when men had all their thoughts of this sort in a form which we can historically trace. For Platonists and Neoplatonists, such as the makers of the creeds—and some portions of the Scripture show this influence, as well—the divine, the ideal, was always thought of as eternal. It always existed as pure archetype before it ever existed as historic fact. The rabbins had a speculation to the same effect. The divine which exists must have pre-existed. Jesus as Son of God could not be thought of by the ancient world in any terms but these. The divine was static, changelessly perfect. For the modern man the divinest of all things is the mystery of growth. The perfect man is not at the beginning, but far down the immeasurable series of approaches to perfection. The perfection of other men is the work of still other ages, in which this extraordinary and inexplicable moral magnitude which Jesus is, has had its influence, and conferred upon them power to aid them in the fulfilment of God's intent for themselves, which is like that intent for himself which Jesus has fulfilled. Surely enough has been said to show that what we have here is only the absorption of even the profoundest religious meanings into the vortex of an all-dissolving metaphysical system. The most obvious meaning of the phrase 'Son of God,' its moral and spiritual, its real religious meaning, is dwelt on, here in Hegel, as little as Hegel claimed that the Nicene trinitarians had dwelt upon it. Nothing marks more clearly the distance we have travelled since Hegel than does the general recognition that his attempted solution does not even lie in the right direction. It is an attempt within the same area as that of the Nicene Council and the creeds, namely, the metaphysical area. What is at stake is not the pre-existence or the two natures. Hegel was right in what he said concerning these. The pre-existence cannot be thought of except as ideal. The two natures we assert for every man, only not in such a manner as to destroy unity in the personality. The heart of the dogma is not in these. It is the oneness of God and man, a moral and spiritual oneness, oneness in conduct and consciousness, the presence and realisation of God, who is spirit, in a real man, the divineness of Jesus, in a sense which sees no meaning any longer in the old debate as between his divinity and his deity. In the light of the new theory of the universe which we have reviewed, it flashes upon us that both defenders and assailants of the doctrine of the incarnation, in the age-long debate, have proceeded from the assumption that God and man are opposites. Men contended for the divineness of Jesus in terms which by definition shut out his true humanity. They asserted the identity of a real man, a true historic personage, with an abstract notion of God which had actually been framed by the denial of all human qualities. Their opponents with a like helplessness merely reversed the situation. To admit the deity of Jesus would have been for them, in all candour and clear-sightedness, absolutely impossible, because the admission would have shut out his true humanity. On the old definitions we cannot wonder that the struggle was a bitter one. Each party was on its own terms right. If God is by definition other than man, and man the opposite of God, then it is not surprising that the attempt to say that Jesus of Nazareth was both, remained mysticism to the one and seemed folly to the other. Now, within the area of the philosophy which begins with Kant this old antinomy has been resolved. An actual circle of clear relations joins the points of the old hopeless triangle. Men are men because of God indwelling in them, working through them. The phrase 'mere man' is seen to be a mere phrase. To say that the Nazarene, in some way not genetically to be explained, but which is hidden within the recesses of his own personality, shows forth in incomparable fulness that relation of God and man which is the ideal for us all, seems only to be saying over again what Jesus said when he proclaimed: 'I and My Father are one.' That Jesus actualised, not absolutely in the sense that he stood out of relation to history, but still perfectly within his relation to history, that which in us and for us is potential, the sonship of God—that seems a very simple and intelligible assertion. It certainly makes a large part of the debate of ages seem remote from us. It brings home to us that we live in a new world. Interesting and fruitful is Hegel's expansion of the idea of redemption beyond that of the individual to that of the whole humanity, and in every aspect of its life. In my relation to the world are given my duties. The renunciation of outward duty makes the inward life barren. The principle which is to transform the world wears an aspect very different from that of stoicism, of asceticism or even of the individualism which has sought soul-salvation. In the midst of unworthiness and helplessness there springs up the consciousness of reconciliation. Man, with all his imperfections, becomes aware that he is the object of the loving purpose of God. Still this redemption of a man is something which is to be worked out, in the individual life and on the stage of universal history. The first step beyond the individual life is that of the Church. It is from within this community of believers that men, in the rule, receive the impulse to the good. The community is, in its idea, a society in which the conquest of evil is already being achieved, where the individual is spared much bitter conflict and loneliness. Nevertheless, so long as this unity of the life of man with God is realised in the Church alone there remains a false and harmful opposition between the Church and the world. Religion is faced by a hostile power to which its principles have no application. The world is denounced as unholy. With this stigma cast upon it, it may be unholy. Yet the retribution falls also upon the Church, in that it becomes artificial, clerical, pharisaical. The end is never that what have been called the standards of the Church shall prevail. The end is that the Church shall be the shrine and centre of an influence by virtue of which the standard of truth and goodness which naturally belongs to any relation of life shall prevail. The distinction between religion and secular life must be abandoned. Nothing is less sacred than a Church set on its own aggrandisement. The relations of family and of the State, of business and social life, are to be restored to the divineness which belongs to them, or rather, the divineness which is inalienable from them is to be recognised. In the laws and customs of a true State, Christianity first penetrates with its principles the real world. One sees how large a portion of these thoughts have been taken up into the programme of modern social movements. They are the basis of what men call a social theology. A book like Fremantle's World as the Subject of Redemption is their thorough-going exposition in the English tongue. We have no cause to pursue the philosophical movement beyond this point. Its exponents are not without interest. Especially is this true of Schopenhauer. But the deposit from their work is for our particular purpose not great. The wonderful impulse had spent itself. These four brilliant men stand together, almost as much isolated from the generation which followed them as from that which went before. The historian of Christian thought in the nineteenth century cannot overestimate the significance of their personal interest in religion. CHAPTER III THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION The outstanding trait of Kant's reflection upon religion is its supreme interest in morals and conduct. Metaphysician that he was, Kant saw the evil which intellectualism had done to religion. Religion was a profoundly real thing to him in his own life. Religion is a life. It is a system of thought only because life is a whole. It is a system of thought only in the way of deposit from a vivid and vigorous life. A man normally reflects on the conditions and aims of what he does. Religion is conduct. Ends in character are supreme. Religions and the many interpretations of Christianity have been good or bad, according as they ministered to character. So strong was this ethical trait in Kant that it dwarfed all else. He was not himself a man of great breadth or richness of feeling. He was not a man of imagination. His religion was austere, not to say arid. Hegel was before all things an intellectualist. Speculation was the breath of life to him. He had metaphysical genius. He tended to transform in this direction everything which he touched. Religion is thought. He criticised the rationalist movement from the height of vantage which idealism had reached. But as pure intellectualist he would put most rationalists to shame. We owe to this temperament his zeal for an interpretation of the universe 'all in one piece.' Its highest quality would be its abstract truth. His understanding of religion had the glory and the limitations which attend this view. SCHLEIERMACHER Between Kant and Hegel came another, Schleiermacher. He too was no mean philosopher. But he was essentially a theologian, the founder of modern theology. He served in the same faculty with Hegel and was overshadowed by him. His influence upon religious thought was less immediate. It has been more permanent. It was characteristically upon the side which Kant and Hegel had neglected. That was the side of feeling. His theology has been called the theology of feeling. He defined religion as feeling. Christianity is for him a specific feeling. Because he made so much of feeling, his name has been made a theological household word by many who appropriated little else of all he had to teach. His warmth and passion, his enthusiasm for Christ, the central place of Christ in his system, made him loved by many who, had they understood him better, might have loved him less. For his real greatness lay, not in the fact that he possessed these qualities alone, but that he possessed them in a singularly beautiful combination with other qualities. The emphasis is, however, correct. He was the prophet of feeling, as Kant had been of ethical religion and Hegel of the intellectuality of faith. The entire Protestant theology of the nineteenth century has felt his influence. The English-speaking race is almost as much his debtor as is his own. The French Huguenots of the revival felt him to be one of themselves. Even to Amiel and Scherer he was a kindred spirit. It is a true remark of Dilthey that in unusual degree an understanding of the man's personality and career is necessary to the appreciation of his thought. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher was born in 1768 in Breslau, the son of a chaplain in the Reformed Church. He never connected himself officially with the Lutheran Church. We have alluded to an episode broadly characteristic of his youth. He was tutor in the house of one of the landed nobility of Prussia, curate in a country parish, preacher at the Charité in Berlin in 1795, professor extraordinarius at Halle in 1804, preacher at the Church of the Dreifaltigkeit in Berlin in 1807, professor of theology and organiser of that faculty in the newly-founded University of Berlin in 1810. He never gave up his position as pastor and preacher, maintaining this activity along with his unusual labours as teacher, executive and author. He died in 1834. In his earlier years in Berlin he belonged to the circle of brilliant men and women who made Berlin famous in those years. It was a fashionable society composed of persons more or less of the rationalistic school. Not a few of them, like the Schlegels, were deeply tinged with romanticism. There were also among them Jews of the house of the elder Mendelssohn. Morally it was a society not altogether above reproach. Its opposition to religion was a by-word. An affection of the susceptible youth for a woman unhappily married brought him to the verge of despair. It was an affection which his passing pride as romanticist would have made him think it prudish to discard, while the deep, underlying elements of his nature made it inconceivable that he should indulge. Only in later years did he heal his wound in a happy married life. The episode was typical of the experience he was passing through. He understood the public with which his first book dealt. That book bears the striking title, Reden über die Religion, an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (translated, Oman, Oxford, 1893). His public understood him. He could reach them as perhaps no other man could do. If he had ever concealed what religion was to him, he now paid the price. If they had made light of him, he now made war on them. This meed they could hardly withhold from him, that he understood most other things quite as well as they, and religion much better than they. The rhetorical form is a fiction. The addresses were never delivered. Their tension and straining after effect is palpable. They are a cry of pain on the part of one who sees that assailed which is sacred to him, of triumph as he feels himself able to repel the assault, of brooding persuasiveness lest any should fail to be won for his truth. He concedes everything. It is part of his art to go further than his detractors. He is so well versed in his subject that he can do that with consummate mastery, where they are clumsy or dilettante. It is but a pale ghost of religion that he has left. But he has attained his purpose. He has vindicated the place of religion in the life of culture. He has shown the relation of religion to every great thing in civilisation, its affinity with art, its common quality with poetry, its identity with all profound activities of the soul. These all are religion, though their votaries know it not. These are reverence for the highest, dependence on the highest, self-surrender to the highest. No great man ever lived, no great work was ever done, save in an attitude toward the universe, which is identical with that of the religious man toward God. The universe is God. God is the universe. That religionists have obscured this simple truth and denied this grand relation is true, and nothing to the point. The cultivated should be ashamed not to know this. Then, with a sympathy with institutional religion and a knowledge of history in which he stood almost alone, he retracts much that he has yielded, he rebuilds much that he has thrown down, proclaims much which they must now concede. The book was published in 1799. Twenty years later he said sadly that if he were rewriting it, its shafts would be directed against some very different persons, against glib and smug people who boasted the form of godliness, conventional, even fashionable religionists and loveless ecclesiastics. Vast and various influences in the Germany of the first two decades of the century had wrought for the revival of religion. Of those influences, not the least had been that of Schleiermacher's book. Among the greatest had been Schleiermacher himself. The religion of feeling, as advocated in the Reden , had left much on the ethical side to be desired. This defect the author sought to remedy in his Monologen , published in 1800. The programme of theological studies for the new University of Berlin, Kurze Darstellung des Theologischen Studiums , 1811, shows his theological system already in large part matured. His Der christliche Glaube , published in 1821, revised three years before his death in 1834, is his monumental work. His Ethik , his lectures upon many subjects, numerous volumes of sermons, all published after his death, witness his versatility. His sermons have the rare note which one finds in Robertson and Brooks. All of the immediacy of religion, its independence of rational argument, of historical tradition or institutional forms, which was characteristic of Schleiermacher to his latest day, is felt in the Reden . By it he thrilled the hearts of men as they have rarely been thrilled. It is not forms and traditions which create religion. It is religion which creates these. They cannot exist without it. It may exist without them, though not so well or so effectively. Religion is the sense of God. That sense we have, though many call it by another name. It would be more true to say that that sense has us. It is inescapable. All who have it are the religious. Those who hold to dogmas, rites, institutions in such a way as to obscure and overlay this sense of God, those who hold those as substitute for that sense, are the nearest to being irreligious. Any form, the most outré , bizarre and unconventional, is good, so only that it helps a man to God. All forms are evil, the most accredited the most evil, if they come between a man and God. The pantheism of the thought of God in all of Schleiermacher's early work is undeniable. He never wholly put it aside. The personality of God seemed to him a limitation. Language is here only symbolical, a mere expression from an environment which we know, flung out into the depths of that we cannot see. If the language of personal relations helps men in living with their truth—well and good. It hinders also. For himself he felt that it hindered more than helped. His definition of religion as the feeling of dependence upon God, is cited as evidence of the effect upon him of his contention against the personalness of God. Religion is also, it is alleged, the sentiment of fellowship with God. Fellowship implies persons. But to no man was the fellowship with the soul of his own soul and of all the universe more real than was that fellowship to Schleiermacher. This was the more true in his maturer years, the years of the magnificent rounding out of his thought. God was to him indeed not 'a man in the next street.' What he says about the problem of the personalness of God is true. We see, perhaps, more clearly than did he that the debate is largely about words. Similarly, we may say that Schleiermacher's passing denial of the immortality of the soul was directed, in the first instance, against the crass, unsocial and immoral view which has disfigured much of the teaching of religion. His contention was directed toward that losing of oneself in God through ideals and service now, which in more modern phrase we call the entrance upon the immortal life here, the being in eternity now. For a soul so disposed, for a life thus inspired, death is but an episode. For himself he rejoices to declare it one to the issue of which he is indifferent. If he may thus live with God now, he cares little whether or not he shall live by and by. In his Monologues Schleiermacher first sets forth his ethical thought. As it is religion that a man feels himself dependent upon God, so is it the beginning of morality that a man feels his dependence upon his fellows and their dependence on him. Slaves of their own time and circumstance, men live out their lives in superficiality and isolation. They are a prey to their own selfishness. They never come into those relations with their fellows in which the moral ideal can be realised. Man in his isolation from his fellows is nothing and accomplishes nothing. The interests of the whole humanity are his private interests. His own happiness and welfare are not possible to be secured save through his co-operation with others, his work and service for others. The happiness and welfare of others not merely react upon his own. They are in a large sense identical with his own. This oneness of a man with all men is the basis of morality, just as the oneness of man with God is the basis of religion. In both cases the oneness exists whether or not we know it. The contradictions and miseries into which immoral or unmoral conduct plunges us, are the witness of the fact that this inviolable unity of a man with humanity is operative, even if he ignores it. Often it is his ignoring of this relation which brings him through misery to consciousness of it. Man as moral being is but an individuation of humanity, just as, again, as religious being he is but an individuation of God. The goal of the moral life is the absorption of self, the elimination of self, which is at the same time the realisation of self, through the life and service for others. The goal of religion is the elimination of self, the swallowing up of self, in the service of God. In truth, the unity of man with man is at bottom only another form of his unity with God, and the service of humanity is the identical service of God. Other so-called services of God are a means to this, or else an illusion. This parallel of religion and morals is to be set over against other passages, easily to be cited, in which Schleiermacher speaks of passivity and contemplation as the means of the realisation of the unity of man and God, as if the elimination of self meant a sort of Nirvana. Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic. No philosopher save Kant ever influenced him half so much as did Spinoza. There is something almost oriental in his mood at times. An occasional fragment of description of religion might pass as a better delineation of Buddhism than of Christianity. This universality of his mind is interesting. These elements have not been unattractive to some portions of his following. One wearied with the Philistinism of the modern popular urgency upon practicality turns to Schleiermacher, as indeed sometimes to Spinoza, and says, here is a man who at least knows what religion is. Yet nothing is further from the truth than to say that Schleiermacher had no sense for the meaning of religion in the outward life and present world. In the Reden Schleiermacher had contended that religion is a condition of devout feeling, specifically the feeling of dependence upon God. This view dominates his treatment of Christianity. It gives him his point of departure. A Christian is possessed of the devout feeling of dependence upon God through Jesus Christ or, as again he phrases it, of dependence upon Christ. Christianity is a positive religion in the sense that it has direct relation to certain facts in the history of the race, most of all to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But it does not consist in any positive propositions whatsoever. These have arisen in the process of interpretation of the faith. The substance of the faith is the experience of renewal in Christ, of redemption through Christ. This inward experience is neither produced by pure thought nor dependent upon it. Like all other experience it is simply an object to be described and reckoned with. Orthodox dogmatists had held that the content of the Christian faith is a doctrine given in revelation. Schleiermacher held that it is a consciousness inspired primarily by the personality of Jesus. It must be connected with the other data and acta of our consciousness under the general laws of the operation of the mind. Against rationalism and much so-called liberal Christianity, Schleiermacher contended that Christianity is not a new set of propositions periodically brought up to date and proclaimed as if these alone were true. New propositions can have only the same relativity of truth which belonged to the old ones in their day. They may stand between men and religion as seriously as the others had done. The condition of the heart, which is religion, the experience through Jesus which is Christianity, is primarily an individual matter. But it is not solely such. It is a common experience also. Schleiermacher recognises the common element in the Christian consciousness, the element which shows itself in the Christian experience of all ages, of different races and of countless numbers of men. By this recognition of the Christian Church in its deep and spiritual sense, Schleiermacher hopes to escape the vagaries and eccentricities, and again the narrowness and bigotries of pure individualism. No liberal theologian until Schleiermacher had had any similar sense of the meaning of the Christian Church, and of the privilege and duty of Christian thought to contribute to the welfare of that body of men believing in God and following Christ which is meant by the Church. This is in marked contrast with the individualism of Kant. Of course, Schleiermacher would never have recognised as the Church that part of humanity which is held together by adherence to particular dogmas, since, for him, Christianity is not dogma. Still less could he recognise as the Church that part of mankind which is held together by a common tradition of worship, or by a given theory of organisation, since these also are historical and incidental. He meant by the Church that part of humanity, in all places and at all times, which has been held together by the common possession of the Christian consciousness and the Christian experience. The outline of this experience, the content of this consciousness, can never be so defined as to make it legislatively operative. If it were so defined we should have dogma and not Christianity. Nevertheless, it may be practically potent. The degree in which a given man may justly identify his own consciousness and experience with that of the Christian world is problematical. In Schleiermacher's own case, the identification of some of his contentions as, for example, the thought that God is not personal with the great Christian consciousness of the past, is more than problematical. To this Schleiermacher would reply that if these contentions were true, they would become the possession of spiritual Christendom with the lapse of time. Advance always originated with one or a few. If, however, in the end, a given portion found no place in the consciousness of generation truly evidencing their Christian life, that position would be adjudged an idiosyncrasy, a negligible quantity. This view of Schleiermacher's as to the Church is suggestive. It is the undertone of a view which widely prevails in our own time. It is somewhat difficult of practical combination with the traditional marks of the churches, as these have been inherited even in Protestantism from the Catholic age. In a very real sense Jesus occupied the central place in Schleiermacher's system. The centralness of Jesus Christ he himself was never weary of emphasising. It became in the next generation a favorite phrase of some who followed Schleiermacher's pure and bounteous spirit afar off. Too much of a mystic to assert that it is through Jesus alone that we know God, he yet accords to Jesus an absolutely unique place in revelation. It is through the character and personality of Jesus that the change in the character of man, which is redemption, is marshalled and sustained. Redemption is a man's being brought out of the condition in which all higher self consciousness was dimmed and enfeebled, into one in which this higher consciousness is vivid and strong and the power of self-determination toward the good has been restored. Salvation is thus moral and spiritual, present as well as future. It is possible in the future only because actual in the present. It is the reconstruction of a man's nature and life by the action of the spirit of God, conjointly with that of man's own free spirit. It is intelligible in Schleiermacher's context that Jesus should be spoken of as the sole redeemer of men, their only hope, and that the Christian's dependence upon him should be described as absolute. As a matter of fact, however, the idea of dependence upon Christ alone has been often, indeed, one may say generally, associated with a conception of salvation widely different from that of Schleiermacher. It has been oftenest associated with the notion of something purely external, forensic, even magical. It is connected, even down to our own time, with reliance upon the blood of Christ, almost as if this were externally applied. It has postulated a propitiatory sacrifice, a vicarious atonement, a completed transaction, something which was laid up for all and waiting to be availed of by some. Now every external, forensic, magical notion of salvation, as something purchased for us, imputed to us, conferred upon us, would have been utterly impossible to Schleiermacher. It is within the soul of man that redemption takes place. Conferment from the side of God and Christ, or from God through Christ, can be nothing more, as also it can be nothing less, than the imparting of wisdom and grace and spiritual power from the personality of Jesus, which a man then freely takes up within himself and gives forth as from himself. The Christian consciousness contains, along with the sense of dependence upon Jesus, the sense of moral alliance and spiritual sympathy with him, of a free relation of the will of man to the will of God as revealed in Jesus. The will of man is set upon the reproduction within himself, so far as possible, of the consciousness, experience and character of Jesus. The sin from which man is to be delivered is described by Schleiermacher thus: It is the dominance of the lower nature in us, of the sense-consciousness. It is the determination of our course of life by the senses. This preponderance of the senses over the consciousness of God is the secret of unhappiness, of the feeling of defeat and misery in men, of the need of salvation. One has to read Schleiermacher's phrase, 'the senses' here, as we read Paul's phrase, 'the flesh.' On the other hand, the preponderance of the consciousness of God, the willing obedience to it in every act of life, becomes to us the secret of strength and of blessedness in life. This is the special experience of the Christian. It is the effect of the impulse and influence of Christ. We receive this impulse in a manner wholly consistent with the laws of our psychological and moral being. We carry forward this impulse with varying fortunes and by free will. It comes to us, however, from without and from above, through one who was indeed true man, but who is also, in a manner not further explicable, to be identified with the moral ideal of humanity. This identification of Jesus with the moral ideal is complete and unquestioning with Schleiermacher. It is visible in the interchangeable use of the titles Jesus and Christ. Our saving consciousness of God could proceed from the person of Jesus only if that consciousness were actually present in Jesus in an absolute measure. Ideal and person in him perfectly coincide. As typical and ideal man, according to Schleiermacher, Jesus was distinguished from all other founders of religions. These come before us as men chosen from the number of their fellows, receiving, quite as much for themselves as for others, that which they received from God. It is nowhere implied that Jesus himself was in need of redemption, but rather that he alone possessed from earliest years the fulness of redemptive power. He was distinguished from other men by his absolute moral perfection. This excluded not merely actual sin, but all possibility of sin and, accordingly, all real moral struggle. This perfection was characterised also by his freedom from error. He never originated an erroneous notion nor adopted one from others as a conviction of his own. In this respect his person was a moral miracle in the midst of the common life of our humanity, of an order to be explained only by a new spiritually creative act of God. On the other hand, Schleiermacher says squarely that the absence of the natural paternal participation in the origin of the physical life of Jesus, according to the account in the first and third Gospels, would add nothing to the moral miracle if it could be proved and detract nothing if it should be taken away. Singular is this ability on the part of Schleiermacher to believe in the moral miracle, not upon its own terms, of which we shall speak later, but upon terms upon which the outward and physical miracle, commonly so-called, had become, we need not say incredible, but unnecessary to Schleiermacher himself. Singular is this whole part of Schleiermacher's construction, with its lapse into abstraction of the familiar sort, of which, in general, the working of his mind had been so free. For surely what we here have is abstraction. It is an undissolved fragment of metaphysical theology. It is impossible of combination with the historical. It is wholly unnecessary for the religious view of salvation which Schleiermacher had distinctly taken. It is surprising how slow men have been to learn that the absolute cannot be historic nor the historic absolute. Surely the claim that Jesus was free from error in intellectual conception is unnecessary, from the point of view of the saving influence upon character which Schleiermacher had asserted. It is in contradiction with the view of revelation to which Schleiermacher had already advanced. It is to be accounted for only from the point of view of the mistaken assumption that the divine, even in manifestation, must be perfect, in the sense of that which is static and not of that which is dynamic. The assertion is not sustained from the Gospel itself. It reduces many aspects of the life of Jesus to mere semblance. That also which is claimed in regard to the abstract impossibility of sin upon the part of Jesus is in hopeless contradiction with that which Schleiermacher had said as to the normal and actual development of Jesus, in moral as also in all other ways. Such development is impossible without struggle. Struggle is not real when failure is impossible. So far as we know, it is in struggle only that character is made. Even as to the actual commission of sin on Jesus' part, the assertion of the abstract necessity of his sinlessness, for the work of moral redemption, goes beyond anything which we know. The question of the sinlessness of Jesus is not an a priori question. To say that he was by conception free from sin is to beg the question. We thus form a conception and then read the Gospels to find evidence to sustain it. To say that he did, though tempted in all points like as we are, yet so conduct himself in the mystery of life as to remain unstained, is indeed to allege that he achieved that which, so far us we know, is without parallel in the history of the race. But it is to leave him true man, and so the moral redeemer of men who would be true. To say that, if he were true man, he must have sinned, is again to beg the question. Let us repeat that the question is one of evidence. To say that he was, though true man, so far as we have any evidence in fact, free from sin, is only to say that his humanity was uniquely penetrated by the spirit of God for the purposes of the life which he had to live. That heart-broken recollection of his own sin which one hears in The Scarlet Letter , giving power to the preacher who would reach men in their sins, has not the remotest parallel in any reminiscence of Jesus which we possess. There is every evidence of the purity of Jesus' consciousness. There is no evidence of the consciousness of sin. There is a passage in the Discourses , in which Schleiermacher himself declared that the identification of the fundamental idea of religion with the historical fact in which that religion had its rise, was a mistake. Surely it is exactly this mistake which Schleiermacher has here made. It will be evident from all that has been said that to Schleiermacher the Scripture was not the foundation of faith. As such it was almost universally regarded in his time. The New Testament, he declared, is itself but a product of the Christian consciousness. It is a record of the Christian experience of the men of the earlier time. To us it is a means of grace because it is the vivid and original register of that experience. The Scriptures can be regarded as the work of the Holy Spirit only in so far as this was this common spirit of the early Church. This spirit has borne witness to Christ in these writings not essentially otherwise than in later writings, only more at first hand, more under the impression of intercourse with Jesus. Least of all may we base the authority of Scripture upon a theory of inspiration such as that generally current in Schleiermacher's time. It is the personality of Jesus which is the inspiration of the New Testament. Christian faith, including the faith in the Scriptures, can rest only upon the total impression of the character of Jesus. In the same manner Schleiermacher speaks of miracles. These cannot be regarded in the conventional manner as supports of religion, for the simplest of all reasons. They presuppose religion and faith and must be understood by means of those. The accounts of external miracles contained in the Gospels are matters for unhesitating criticism. The Christian finds, for moral reasons and because of the response of his own heart, the highest revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Extraordinary events may be expected in Jesus' career. Yet these can be called miracles only relatively, as containing something extraordinary for contemporary knowledge. They may remain to us events wholly inexplicable, illustrating a law higher than any which we yet know. Therewith they are not taken out of the realm of the orderly phenomena of nature. In other words, the notion of the miraculous is purely subjective. What is a miracle for one age may be no miracle in the view of the next. Whatever the deeds of Jesus may have been, however inexplicable all ages may find them, we can but regard them as merely natural consequences of the personality of Jesus, unique because he was unique. 'In the interests of religion the necessity can never arise of regarding an event as taken out of its connection with nature, in consequence of its dependence upon God.' It is not possible within the compass of this book to do more than deal with typical and representative persons. Schleiermacher was epoch-making. He gathered in himself the creative impulses of the preceding period. The characteristic theological tendencies of the two succeeding generations may be traced back to him. Many men worked in seriousness upon the theological problem. No one of them marks an era again until we come to Ritschl. The theologians of the interval between Schleiermacher and Ritschl have been divided into three groups. The first group is of distinctly philosophical tendency. The influence of Hegel was felt upon them all. To this group belong Schweitzer, Biedermann, Lipsius, and Pfleiderer. The influence of Hegel was greatest upon Biedermann, least upon Lipsius. An estimate of the influence of Schleiermacher would reverse that order. Especially did Lipsius seek to lay at the foundation of his work that exact psychological study of the phenomena of religion which Schleiermacher had declared requisite. It is possible that Lipsius will more nearly come to his own when the enthusiasm for Ritschl has waned. The second group of Schleiermacher's followers took the direction opposite to that which we have named. They were the confessional theologians. Hoffmann shows himself learned, acute and full of power. One does not see, however, why his method should not prove anything which any confession ever claimed. He sets out from Schleiermacher's declaration concerning the content of the Christian consciousness. In Hoffmann's own devout consciousness there had been response, since his childhood, to every item which the creed alleged. Therefore these items must have objective truth. One is reminded of an English parallel in Newman's Grammar of Assent . Yet another group, that of the so-called mediating theologians, contains some well-known names. Here belong Nitzsch, Rothe, Müller, Dorner. The name had originally described the effort to find, in the Union, common ground between Lutherans and Reformed. In the fact that it made the creeds of little importance and fell back on Schleiermacher's emphasis upon feeling, the movement came to have the character also of an attempt to find a middle way between confessionalists and rationalists. Its representatives had often the kind of breadth of sympathy which goes with lack of insight, rather than that breadth of sympathy which is due to the possession of insight. Yet Rothe rises to real distinction, especially in his forecast of the social interpretation of religion. With the men of this group arose a speculation concerning the person of Christ which for a time had some currency. It was called the theory of the kenosis. Jesus is spoken of in a famous passage of the letter to the Philippians; as having emptied himself of divine qualities that he might be found in fashion as a man. In this speculation the divine attributes were divided into two classes. Of the one class it was held Christ had emptied himself in becoming flesh, or at least he had them in abeyance. He had them, but did not use them. What we have here is but a despairing effort to be just to Jesus' humanity and yet to assert his deity in the ancient metaphysical terms. It is but saying yes and no in the same breath. Biedermann said sadly of the speculation that it represented the kenosis, not of the divine nature, but of the human understanding. RITSCHL AND THE RITSCHLIANS If any man in the department of theology in the latter half of the nineteenth century attained a position such as to entitle him to be compared with Schleiermacher, it was Ritschl. He was long the most conspicuous figure in any chair of dogmatic theology in Germany. He established a school of theological thinkers in a sense in which Schleiermacher never desired to gain a following. He exerted ecclesiastical influence of a kind which Schleiermacher never sought. He was involved in controversy in a degree to which the life of Schleiermacher presents no parallel. He was not a preacher, he was no philosopher. He was not a man of Schleiermacher's breadth of interest. His intellectual history presents more than one breach within itself, as that of Schleiermacher presented none, despite the wide arc which he traversed. Of Ritschl, as of Schleiermacher, it may be said that he exerted a great influence over many who have only in part agreed with him. Albrecht Ritschl was born in 1822 in Berlin, the son of a bishop in the Lutheran Church. He was educated at Bonn and at Tübingen. He established himself at Bonn, where, in 1853, he became professor extraordinarius and in 1860 ordinaries. In 1864 he was called to Göttingen. In 1874 he became consistorialrath in the new Prussian establishment for the Hanoverian Church. He died in 1888. These are the simple outward facts of a somewhat stormy professional career. There was pietistic influence in Ritschl's ancestry, as also in Schleiermacher's. Ritschl had, however, reacted violently against it. His attitude was that of repudiation of everything mystical. He had strong aversion to the type of piety which rested its assurance solely upon inward experience. This aversion is one root of the historic positivism which makes him, at the last, assert the worthlessness of all supposed revelations outside of the Bible and of all supposed Christian experience apart from the influence of the historical Christ. He began his career under the influence of Hegel. He came to the position in which he felt that the sole hope for theology was in the elimination from it of all metaphysical elements. He felt that none of his predecessors had carried out Schleiermacher's dictum, that religion is not thought, but religious thought only one of the functions of religion. Yet, of course, he was not able to discuss fundamental theological questions without philosophical basis, particularly an explicit theory of knowledge. His theory of knowledge he had derived eclectically and somewhat eccentrically, from Lotze and Kant. To this day not all, either of his friends or foes, are quite certain what it was. It is open to doubt whether Ritschl really arrived at his theory of cognition and then made it one of the bases of his theology. It is conceivable that he made his theology and then propounded his theory of cognition in its defence. In a word, the basis of distinction between religious and scientific knowledge is not to be sought in its object. It is to be found in the sphere of the subject, in the difference of attitude of the subject toward the object. Religion is concerned with what he calls Werthurtheile , judgments of value, considerations of our relation to the world, which are of moment solely in accordance with their value in awakening feelings of pleasure or of pain. The thought of God, for example, must be treated solely as a judgment of value. It is a conception which is of worth for the attainment of good, for our spiritual peace and victory over the world. What God is in himself we cannot know, an existential Judgment we cannot form without going over to the metaphysicians. What God is to us we can know simply as religious men and solely upon the basis of religious experience. God is holy love. That is a religious value-judgment. But what sort of a being God must be in order that we may assign to him these attributes, we cannot say without leaving the basis of experience. This is pragmatism indeed. It opens up boundless possibilities of subjectivism in a man who was apparently only too matter-of-fact. There was a time in his career when Ritschl was popular with both conservatives and liberals. There were long years in which he was bitterly denounced by both. Yet there was something in the man and in his teaching which went beyond all the antagonisms of the schools. There can be no doubt that it was the intention of Ritschl to build his theology solely upon the gospel of Jesus Christ. The joy and confidence with which this theology could be preached, Ritschl awakened in his pupils in a degree which had not been equalled by any theologian since Schleiermacher himself. Numbers who, in the time of philosophical and scientific uncertainty, had lost their courage, regained it in contact with his confident and deeply religious spirit. A wholesome nature, eminently objective in temper, concentrated with all his force upon his task, of rare dialectical gifts, he had a great sense of humour and occasionally also the faculty of bitterly sarcastic speech. His very figure radiated the delight of conflict as he walked the Göttingen wall. A devoted pupil, writing immediately after Ritschl's death, used concerning Schleiermacher a phrase which we may transfer to Ritschl himself. 'One wonders whether such a theology ever existed as a connected whole, except in the mind of its originator. Neither by those about him, nor by those after him, has it been reproduced in its entirety or free from glaring contradictions.' It was not free from contradictions in Ritschl's own mind. His pupils divided his inheritance among them. Each appropriated that which accorded with his own way of looking at things and viewed the remainder as something which might be left out of the account. It is long since one could properly speak of a Ritschlian school. It will be long until we shall cease to reckon with a Ritschlian influence. He did yeoman service in breaking down the high Lutheran confessionalism which had been the order of the day. In his recognition of the excesses of the Tübingen school all would now agree. In his feeling against mere sentimentalities of piety many sympathise. In his emphasis upon the ethical and practical, in his urgency upon the actual problem of a man's vocation in the world, he meets in striking manner the temper of our age. In his emphasis upon the social factor in religion, he represents a popular phase of thought. With all of this, it is strange to find a man of so much learning who had so little sympathy with the comparative study of religions, who was such a dogmatist on behalf of his own inadequate notion of revelation, the logical effect of whose teaching concerning the Church would be the revival of an institutionalism and externalism such as Protestantism has hardly known. Since Schleiermacher the German theologians had made the problem of the person of Christ the centre of discussion. In the same period the problem of the person of Christ had been the central point of debate in America. Here, as there, all the other points arranged themselves about this one. The new movement which went out from Ritschl took as its centre the work of Christ in redemption. This is obvious from the very title of Ritschl's great book, Die Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung . Of this work the first edition of the third and significant volume was published in 1874. Before that time the formal treatises on theology had followed a traditional order of topics. It had been assumed as self-evident that one should speak of a person before one talked of his work. It did not occur to the theologians that in the case of the divine person, at all events, we can securely say that we know something as to his work. Much concerning his person must remain a mystery to us, exactly because he is divine. Our safest course, therefore, would be to infer the unknown qualities of his person from the known traits of his work. Certainly this would be true as to the work of God in nature. This was not the way, however, in which the minds of theologians worked. The habit of dealing with conceptions as if they were facts had too deep hold upon them. So long as men believed in revelation as giving them, not primarily God and the transcendental world itself, but information about God and the transcendental, they naturally held that they knew as much of the persons of God and Christ as of their works. Schleiermacher had opened men's eyes to the fact that the great work of Christ in redemption is an inward one, an ethical and spiritual work, the transformation of character. He had said, not merely that the transformation of man's character follows upon the work of redemption. It is the work of redemption. The primary witness to the work of Christ is, therefore, in the facts of consciousness and history. These are capable of empirical scrutiny. They demand psychological investigation. When thus investigated they yield our primary material for any assertion we may make concerning God. Above all, it is the nature of Jesus, as learned on the evidence of his work in the hearts of men, which is our great revelation and source of inference concerning the nature of God. Instead of saying in the famous phrase, that the Christians think of Christ as God, we say that we are able to think of God, as a religious magnitude, in no other terms than in those of his manifestation and redemptive activity in Jesus. None since Kant, except extreme confessionalists, and those in diminishing degree, have held that the great effect of the work of Christ was upon the mind and attitude of God. Less and less have men thought of justification as forensic and judicial, a declaring sinners righteous in the eye of the divine law, the attribution of Christ's righteousness to men, so far at least as to relieve these last of penalty. This was the Anselmic scheme. Indeed, it had been Tertullian's. Less and less have men thought of reconciliation as that of an angry God to men, more and more as of alienated men with God. The phrases of the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, Lutheran as well as Calvinistic, survive. More and more new meaning, not always consistent, is injected into them. No one would deny that the loftiest moral enthusiasm, the noblest sense of duty, animated the hearts of many who thought in the terms of Calvinism. The delineation of God as unreconciled, of the work and sufferings of Christ as a substitution, of salvation as a conferment, caused gratitude, tender devotion, heroic allegiance in some. It worked revulsion in others. It was protested against most radically by Kant, as indeed it had been condemned by many before him. For Kant the renovation of character was the essential salvation. Yet the development of his doctrine was deficient through the individualistic form which it took. Salvation was essentially a change in the individual mind, brought about through the practical reason, and having its ideal in Jesus. Yet for Kant our salvation had no closer relation to the historic revelation in Jesus. Furthermore, so much was this change an individual issue that we may say that the actualisation of redemption would be the same for a given man, were he the only man in the universe. To hold fast to the ethical idealism of Kant, and to overcome its subjectivity and individualism, was the problem. The reference to experience which underlies all that was said above was particularly congruous with the mood of an age grown weary of Hegelianism and much impressed with the value of the empirical method in all the sciences. Another great contention of our age is for the recognition of the value of what is social. Its emphasis is upon that which binds men together. Salvation is not normally achieved except in the life of a man among and for his fellows. It is by doing one's duty that one becomes good. One is saved, not in order to become a citizen of heaven by and by, but in order to be an active citizen of a kingdom of real human goodness here and now. In reality no man is being saved, except as he does actively and devotedly belong to that kingdom. The individual would hardly be in God's eyes worth the saving, except in order that he might be the instrumentality of the realisation of the kingdom. Those are ideas which it is possible to exaggerate in statement or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their quality as half-truths. But it is hardly possible to exaggerate their significance as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness, inadequacy, and artificiality both of the official statement and of the popular apprehension of Christianity. These ideas appeal to men in our time. They are popular because men think them already. Men are pleased, even when somewhat incredulous, to learn that Christianity will bear this social interpretation. Most Christians are in our time overwhelmingly convinced that in this direction lies the interpretation which Christianity must bear, if it is to do the work and meet the needs of the age. Its consonance with some of the truths underlying socialism may account, in a measure, for the influence which the Ritschlian theology has had. As was indicated, Ritschl's epoch-making book bears the title, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation . The book might be described in the language of the schools as a monograph upon one great dogma of the Christian faith, around which, as the author treats it, all the other doctrines are arranged. The familiar topic of justification, of which Luther made so much, was thus given again the central place. What the book really offered was something quite different from this. It was a complete system of theology, but it differed from the traditional systems of theology. These had followed helplessly a logical scheme which begins with God as he is in himself and apart from any knowledge which we have of him. They then slowly proceeded to man and sin and redemption, one empirical object and two concrete experiences which we may know something about. Ritschl reversed the process. He aimed to begin with certain facts of life. Such facts are sin and the consciousness of forgiveness, awareness of restoration to the will and power of goodness, the gift of love and of a spirit which can feel itself victorious even in the midst of ills in life, confidence that this life is not all. These phrases, taken together, would describe the consciousness of salvation. This consciousness of sin and salvation is a fact in individual men. It has evidently been a fact in the life of masses of men for many generations. The facts have thus a psychology and a history from which reflection on the phenomenon of faith must take its departure. There is no reason why, upon this basis, and until it departs from the scientific methods which are given with the nature of its object, theology should not be as truly a science as is any other known among men.