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An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

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Title: An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

Author: Edward Caldwell Moore


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT SINCE KANT ***




Produced by Afra Ullah, David King, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team





AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT SINCE KANT

BY

EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE

PARKMAN PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY



NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1912

TO
ADOLF HARNACK
ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY
BY HIS FIRST AMERICAN PUPIL




PREFATORY NOTE


It is hoped that this book may serve as an outline for a larger work, in
which the Judgments here expressed may be supported in detail.
Especially, the author desires to treat the literature of the social
question and of the modernist movement with a fulness which has not been
possible within the limits of this sketch. The philosophy of religion
and the history of religions should have place, as also that estimate of
the essence of Christianity which is suggested by the contact of
Christianity with the living religions of the Orient.

PASQUE ISLAND, MASS.,
_July_ 28, 1911.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I

A. INTRODUCTION. 1.
B. THE BACKGROUND. 23.
  DEISM. 23.
  RATIONALISM. 25.
  PIETISM. 30.
  ÆSTHETIC IDEALISM. 33.


CHAPTER II


IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 39.
KANT. 39.
FICHTE. 55.
SCHELLING. 60.
HEGEL. 66.


CHAPTER III


THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION. 74.
SCHLEIERMACHER. 74.
RITSCHL AND THE RITSCHLIANS. 89


CHAPTER IV


THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT. 110.
STRAUSS. 114.
BAUR. 118.
THE CANON. 123.
THE LIFE OF JESUS. 127.
THE OLD TESTAMENT. 130.
THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE. 136.
HARNACK. 140.


CHAPTER V


THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE SCIENCES. 151.
   POSITIVISM. 156.
   NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM. 162.
   EVOLUTION. 170.
   MIRACLES. 175.
   THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. 176.


CHAPTER VI


THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES; ACTION AND REACTION. 191.
   THE POETS. 195.
   COLERIDGE. 197.
   THE ORIEL SCHOOL. 199.
   ERSINE AND CAMPBELL. 201.
   MAURICE. 204.
   CHANNING. 205.
   BUSHNELL. 207.
   THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL. 211.
   THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 212.
   NEWMAN. 214.
   MODERNISM. 221.
   ROBERTSON. 223.
   PHILLIPS BROOKS. 224.
   THE BROAD CHURCH. 224.
   CARLYLE. 228.
   EMERSON. 230.
   ARNOLD. 232.
   MARTINEAU. 234.
   JAMES. 238.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. 243.




CHAPTER I

A. INTRODUCTION


The Protestant Reformation marked an era both in life and thought for
the modern world. It ushered in a revolution in Europe. It established
distinctions and initiated tendencies which are still significant. These
distinctions have been significant not for Europe alone. They have had
influence also upon those continents which since the Reformation have
come under the dominion of Europeans. Yet few would now regard the
Reformation as epoch-making in the sense in which that pre-eminence has
been claimed. No one now esteems that it separates the modern from the
mediæval and ancient world in the manner once supposed. The perspective
of history makes it evident that large areas of life and thought
remained then untouched by the new spirit. Assumptions which had their
origin in feudal or even in classical culture continued unquestioned.
More than this, impulses in rational life and in the interpretation of
religion, which showed themselves with clearness in one and another of
the reformers themselves, were lost sight of, if not actually
repudiated, by their successors. It is possible to view many things in
the intellectual and religious life of the nineteenth century, even some
which Protestants have passionately reprobated, as but the taking up
again of clues which the reformers had let fall, the carrying out of
purposes of their movement which were partly hidden from themselves.

Men have asserted that the Renaissance inaugurated a period of paganism.
They have gloried that there supervened upon this paganism the religious
revival which the Reformation was. Even these men will, however, not
deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation which made the religious
reformation possible or, at all events, effective. Nor can it be denied
that after the Revolution, in the Protestant communities the
intellectual element was thrust into the background. The practical and
devotional prevailed. Humanism was for a time shut out. There was more
room for it in the Roman Church than among Protestants. Again, the
Renaissance itself had been not so much an era of discovery of a new
intellectual and spiritual world. It had been, rather, the rediscovery
of valid principles of life in an ancient culture and civilisation. That
thorough-going review of the principles at the basis of all relations of
the life of man, which once seemed possible to Renaissance and
Reformation, was postponed to a much later date. When it did take place,
it was under far different auspices.

There is a remarkable unity in the history of Protestant thought in the
period from the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth century. There
is a still more surprising unity of Protestant thought in this period
with the thought of the mediæval and ancient Church. The basis and
methods are the same. Upon many points the conclusions are identical.
There was nothing of which the Protestant scholastics were more proud
than of their agreement with the Fathers of the early Church. They did
not perceive in how large degree they were at one with Christian
thinkers of the Roman communion as well. Few seem to have realised how
largely Catholic in principle Protestant thought has been. The
fundamental principles at the basis of the reasoning have been the same.
The notions of revelation and inspiration were identical. The idea of
authority was common to both, only the instance in which that authority
is lodged was different. The thoughts of God and man, of the world, of
creation, of providence and prayer, of the nature and means of
salvation, are similar. Newman was right in discovering that from the
first he had thought, only and always, in what he called Catholic terms.
It was veiled from him that many of those who ardently opposed him
thought in those same terms.

It is impossible to write upon the theme which this book sets itself
without using the terms Catholic and Protestant in the conventional
sense. The words stand for certain historic magnitudes. It is equally
impossible to conceal from ourselves how misleading the language often
is. The line between that which has been happily called the religion of
authority and the religion of the spirit does not run between Catholic
and Protestant. It runs through the middle of many Protestant bodies,
through the border only of some, and who will say that the Roman Church
knows nothing of this contrast? The sole use of recurrence here to the
historic distinction is to emphasise the fact that this distinction
stands for less than has commonly been supposed. In a large way the
history of Christian thought, from earliest times to the end of the
eighteenth century, presents a very striking unity.

In contrast with this, that modern reflection which has taken the
phenomenon known as religion and, specifically, that historic form of
religion known as Christianity, as its object, has indeed also slowly
revealed the fact that it is in possession of certain principles.
Furthermore, these principles, as they have emerged, have been felt to
be new and distinctive principles. They are essentially modern
principles. They are the principles which, taken together, differentiate
the thinker of the nineteenth century from all who have ever been before
him. They are principles which unite all thinkers at the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, in practically
every portion of the world, as they think of all subjects except
religion. It comes more and more to be felt that these principles must
be reckoned with in our thought concerning religion as well.

One of these principles is, for example, that of dealing in true
critical fashion with problems of history and literature. Long before
the end of the age of rationalism, this principle had been applied to
literature and history, other than those called sacred. The thorough
going application of this scientific method to the literatures and
history of the Old and New Testaments is almost wholly an achievement of
the nineteenth century. It has completely altered the view of revelation
and inspiration. The altered view of the nature of the documents of
revelation has had immeasurable consequences for dogma.

Another of these elements is the new view of nature and of man's
relation to nature. Certain notable discoveries in physics and astronomy
had proved possible of combination with traditional religion, as in the
case of Newton. Or again, they had proved impossible of combination with
any religion, as in the case of Laplace. The review of the religious and
Christian problem in the light of the ever increasing volume of
scientific discoveries--this is the new thing in the period which we
have undertaken to describe. A theory of nature as a totality, in which
man, not merely as physical, but even also as social and moral and
religious being, has place in a series which suggests no break, has
affected the doctrines of God and of man in a way which neither those
who revered nor those who repudiated religion at the beginning of the
nineteenth century could have imagined.

Another leading principle grows out of Kant's distinction of two worlds
and two orders of reason. That distinction issued in a new theory of
knowledge. It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the
universe. In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature
to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic
movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing forever to
much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, yet had
never been able to prove by any method which the ordered reasoning of
man had provided. Religion as feeling regained its place. Ethics was set
once more in the light of the eternal. The soul of man became the object
of a scientific study.

There have been thus indicated three, at least, of the larger factors
which enter into an interpretation of Christianity which may fairly be
said to be new in the nineteenth century. They are new in a sense in
which the intellectual elements entering into the reconsideration of
Christianity in the age of the Reformation were not new. They are
characteristic of the nineteenth century. They would naturally issue in
an interpretation of Christianity in the general context of the life and
thought of that century. The philosophical revolution inaugurated by
Kant, with the general drift toward monism in the interpretation of the
universe, separates from their forebears men who have lived since Kant,
by a greater interval than that which divided Kant from Plato. The
evolutionary view of nature, as developed from Schelling and Comte
through Darwin to Bergson, divides men now living from the
contemporaries of Kant in his youthful studies of nature, as those men
were not divided from the followers of Aristotle.

Of purpose, the phrase Christian thought has been interpreted as thought
concerning Christianity. The problem which this book essays is that of
an outline of the history of the thought which has been devoted, during
this period of marvellous progress, to that particular object in
consciousness and history which is known as Christianity. Christianity,
as object of the philosophical, critical, and scientific reflection of
the age--this it is which we propose to consider. Our religion as
affected in its interpretation by principles of thought which are
already widespread, and bid fair to become universal among educated
men--this it is which in this little volume we aim to discuss. The term
religious thought has not always had this significance. Philosophy of
religion has signified, often, a philosophising of which religion was,
so to say, the atmosphere. We cannot wonder if, in these circumstances,
to the minds of some, the atmosphere has seemed to hinder clearness of
vision. The whole subject of the philosophy of religion has within the
last few decades undergone a revival, since it has been accepted that
the aim is not to philosophise upon things in general in a religious
spirit. On the contrary, the aim is to consider religion itself, with
the best aid which current philosophy and science afford. In this sense
only can we give the study of religion and Christianity a place among
the sciences.

It remains true, now as always, that the majority, at all events, of
those who have thought profoundly concerning Christianity will be found
to have been Christian men. Religion is a form of consciousness. It will
be those who have had experience to which that consciousness
corresponds, whose judgments can be supposed to have weight. That remark
is true, for example, of æsthetic matters as well. To be a good judge of
music one must have musical feeling and experience. To speak with any
deeper reasonableness concerning faith, one must have faith. To think
profoundly concerning Christianity one needs to have had the Christian
experience. But this is very different from saying that to speak
worthily of the Christian religion, one must needs have made his own the
statements of religion which men of a former generation may have found
serviceable. The distinction between religion itself, on the one hand,
and the expression of religion in doctrines and rites, or the
application of religion through institutions, on the other hand, is in
itself one of the great achievements of the nineteenth century. It is
one which separates us from Christian men in previous centuries as
markedly as it does any other. It is a simple implication of the Kantian
theory of knowledge. The evidence for its validity has come through the
application of historical criticism to all the creeds. Mystics of all
ages have seen the truth from far. The fact that we may assume the
prevalence of this distinction among Christian men, and lay it at the
base of the discussion we propose, is assuredly one of the gains which
the nineteenth century has to record.

It follows that not all of the thinkers with whom we have to deal will
have been, in their own time, of the number of avowedly Christian men.
Some who have greatly furthered movements which in the end proved
fruitful for Christian thought, have been men who in their own time
alienated from professed and official religion. In the retrospect we
must often feel that their opposition to that which they took to be
religion was justifiable. Yet their identification of that with religion
itself, and their frank declaration of what they called their own
irreligion, was often a mistake. It was a mistake to which both they and
their opponents in due proportion contributed. A still larger class of
those with whom we have to do have indeed asserted for themselves a
personal adherence to Christianity. But their identification with
Christianity, or with a particular Christian Church, has been often
bitterly denied by those who bore official responsibility in the Church.
The heresy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next. There is
something perverse in Gottfried Arnold's maxim, that the true Church, in
any age, is to be found with those who have just been excommunicated
from the actual Church. However, the maxim points in the direction of a
truth. By far the larger part of those with whom we have to do have had
acknowledged relation to the Christian tradition and institution. They
were Christians and, at the same time, true children of the intellectual
life of their own age. They esteemed it not merely their privilege, but
also their duty, to endeavour to ponder anew the religious and Christian
problem, and to state that which they thought in a manner congruous with
the thoughts which the men of the age would naturally have concerning
other themes.

It has been to most of these men axiomatic that doctrine has only
relative truth. Doctrine is but a composite of the content of the
religious consciousness with materials which the intellect of a given
man or age or nation in the total view of life affords. As such,
doctrine is necessary and inevitable for all those who in any measure
live the life of the mind. But the condition of doctrine is its mobile,
its fluid and changing character. It is the combination of a more or
less stable and characteristic experience, with a reflection which,
exactly in proportion as it is genuine, is transformed from age to age,
is modified by qualities of race and, in the last analysis, differs with
individual men. Dogma is that portion of doctrine which has been
elevated by decree of ecclesiastical authority, or even only by common
consent, into an absoluteness which is altogether foreign to its nature.
It is that part of doctrine concerning which men have forgotten that it
had a history, and have decided that it shall have no more. In its very
notion dogma confounds a statement of truth, which must of necessity be
human, with the truth itself, which is divine. In its identification of
statement and truth it demands credence instead of faith. Men have
confounded doctrine and dogma; they have been taught so to do. They have
felt the history of Christian doctrine to be an unfruitful and
uninteresting theme. But the history of Christian thought would seek to
set forth the series of interpretations put, by successive generations,
upon the greatest of all human experiences, the experience of the
communion of men with God. These interpretations ray out at all edges
into the general intellectual life of the age. They draw one whole set
of their formative impulses from the general intellectual life of the
age. It is this relation of the progress of doctrine to the general
history of thought in the nineteenth century, which the writer designed
to emphasise in choosing the title of this work.

As was indicated in the closing paragraphs of the preceding volume of
this series, the issue of the age of rationalism had been for the cause
of religion on the whole a distressing one. The majority of those who
were resolved to follow reason were agreed in abjuring religion. That
they had, as it seems to us, but a meagre understanding of what religion
is, made little difference in their conclusion. Bishop Butler complains
in his _Analogy_ that religion was in his time hardly considered a
subject for discussion among reasonable men. Schleiermacher in the very
title of his _Discourses_ makes it plain that in Germany the situation
was not different. If the reasonable eschewed religious protests in
Germany, evangelicals in England, the men of the great revivals in
America, many of them, took up a corresponding position as towards the
life of reason, especially toward the use of reason in religion. The
sinister cast which the word rationalism bears in much of the popular
speech is evidence of this fact. To many minds it appeared as if one
could not be an adherent both of reason and of faith. That was a
contradiction which Kant, first of all in his own experience, and then
through his system of thought, did much to transcend. The deliverance
which he wrought has been compared to the deliverance which Luther in
his time achieved for those who had been in bondage to scholasticism in
the Roman Church. Although Kant has been dead a hundred years, both the
defence of religion and the assertion of the right of reason are still,
with many, on the ancient lines. There is no such strife between
rationality and belief as has been supposed. But the confidence of that
fact is still far from being shared by all Christians at the beginning
of the twentieth century. The course in reinterpretation and
readjustment of Christianity, which that calm conviction would imply, is
still far from being the one taken by all of those who bear the
Christian name. If it is permissible in the writing of a book like this
to have an aim besides that of the most objective delineation, the
author may perhaps be permitted to say that he writes with the earnest
hope that in some measure he may contribute also to the establishment of
an understanding upon which so much both for the Church and the world
depends.

We should say a word at this point as to the general relation of
religion and philosophy. We realise the evil which Kant first in
clearness pointed out. It was the evil of an apprehension which made the
study of religion a department of metaphysics. The tendency of that
apprehension was to do but scant justice to the historical content of
Christianity. Religion is an historical phenomenon. Especially is this
true of Christianity. It is a fact, or rather, a vast complex of facts.
It is a positive religion. It is connected with personalities, above all
with one transcendent personality, that of Jesus. It sprang out of
another religion which had already emerged into the light of
world-history. It has been associated for two thousand years with
portions of the race which have made achievements in culture and left
record of those achievements. It is the function of speculation to
interpret this phenomenon. When speculation is tempted to spin by its
own processes something which it would set beside this historic
magnitude or put in place of it, and still call that Christianity, we
must disallow the claim. It was the licence of its speculative
endeavour, and the identification of these endeavours with Christianity,
which finally discredited Hegelianism with religious men. Nor can it be
denied that theologians themselves have been sinners in this respect.
The disposition to regard Christianity as a revealed and divinely
authoritative metaphysic began early and continued long. When the
theologians also set out to interpret Christianity and end in offering
us a substitute, which, if it were acknowledged as absolute truth, would
do away with Christianity as historic fact, as little can we allow the
claim.

Again, Christianity exists not merely as a matter of history. It exists
also as a fact in living consciousness. It is the function of psychology
to investigate that consciousness. We must say that, accurately
speaking, there is no such thing as Christian philosophy. There are
philosophies, good or bad, current or obsolete. These are Christian only
in being applied to the history of Christianity and the content of the
Christian consciousness. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as
Christian consciousness. There is the human consciousness, operating
with and operated upon by the impulse of Christianity. It is the great
human experience from which we single out for investigation that part
which is concerned with religion, and call that the religious
experience. It is essential, therefore, that those general
investigations of human consciousness and experience, as such, which are
being carried on all about us should be reckoned with, if our Christian
life and thought are not altogether to fall out of touch with advancing
knowledge. For this reason we have misgiving about the position of some
followers of Ritschl. Their opinion, pushed to the limit, seems to mean
that we have nothing to do with philosophy, or with the advance of
science. Religion is a feeling of which he alone who possesses it can
give account. He alone who has it can appreciate such an account when
given. We acknowledge that religion is in part a feeling. But that
feeling must have rational justification. It must also have rational
guidance if it is to be saved from degenerating into fanaticism.

To say that we have nothing to do with philosophy ends in our having to
do with a bad philosophy. In that case we have a philosophy with which
we operate without having investigated it, instead of having one with
which we operate because we have investigated it. The philosophy of
which we are aware we have. The philosophy of which we are not aware has
us. No doubt, we may have religion without philosophy, but we cannot
formulate it even in the rudest way to ourselves, we cannot communicate
it in any way whatsoever to others, except in the terms of a philosophy.
In the general sense in which every man has a philosophy, this is merely
the deposit of the regnant notions of the time. It may be amended or
superseded, and our theology with it. Yet while it lasts it is our one
possible vehicle of expression. It is the interpreter and the critique
of what we have experienced. It is not open to a man to retreat within
himself and say, I am a Christian, I feel thus, I think so, these
thoughts are the content of Christianity. The consequence of that
position is that we make the religious experience to be no part of the
normal human experience. If we contend that the being a Christian is the
great human experience, that the religious life is the true human life,
we must pursue the opposite course. We must make the religious life
coherent with all the other phases and elements of life. If we would
contend that religious thought is the truest and deepest thought, we
must begin at this very point. We must make it conform absolutely to the
laws of all other thought. To contend for its isolation, as an area by
itself and a process subject only to its own laws, is to court the
judgment of men, that in its zeal to be Christian it has ceased to be
thought.

Our most profitable mode of procedure would seem to be this. We shall
seek to follow, as we may, those few main movements of thought marking
the nineteenth century which have immediate bearing upon our theme. We
shall try to register the effect which these movements have had upon
religious conceptions. It will not be possible at any point to do more
than to select typical examples. Perhaps the true method is that we
should go back to the beginnings of each one of these movements. We
should mark the emergence of a few great ideas. It is the emergence of
an idea which is dramatically interesting. It is the moment of emergence
in which that which is characteristic appears. Our subject is far too
complicated to permit that the ramifications of these influences should
be followed in detail. Modifications, subtractions, additions, the
reader must make for himself.

These main movements of thought are, as has been said, three in number.
We shall take them in their chronological order. There is first the
philosophical revolution which is commonly associated with the name of
Kant. If we were to seek with arbitrary exactitude to fix a date for the
beginning of this movement, this might be the year of the publication of
his first great work, _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, in 1781.[1] Kant was
indeed himself, both intellectually and spiritually, the product of
tendencies which had long been gathering strength. He was the exponent
of ideas which in fragmentary way had been expressed by others, but he
gathered into himself in amazing fashion the impulses of his age. Out
from some portion of his works lead almost all the paths which
philosophical thinkers since his time have trod. One cannot say even of
his work, _Der Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft_,
1793, that it is the sole source, or even the greatest source, of his
influence upon religious thinking. But from the body of his work as a
whole, there came a new theory of knowledge which has changed completely
the notion of revelation. There came also a view of the universe as an
ideal unity which, especially as elaborated by Fichte, Schelling and
Hegel, has radically altered the traditional ideas of God, of man, of
nature and of their relations, the one to the other.

[Footnote 1: In the text the titles of books which are discussed are
given for the first time in the language in which they are written.
Books which are merely alluded to are mentioned in English.]

We shall have then, secondly, to note the historical and critical
movement. It is the effort to apply consistently and without fear the
maxims of historical and literary criticism to the documents of the Old
and New Testaments. With still greater arbitrariness, and yet with
appreciation of the significance of Strauss' endeavour, we might set as
the date of the full impact of this movement upon cherished religious
convictions, that of the publication of his _Leben Jesu_, 1835. This
movement has supported with abundant evidence the insight of the
philosophers as to the nature of revelation. It has shown that that
which we actually have in the Scriptures is just that which Kant, with
his reverence for the freedom of the human mind, had indicated that we
must have, if revelation is to be believed in at all. With this changed
view has come an altered attitude toward many statements which devout
men had held that they must accept as true, because these were found in
Scripture. With this changed view the whole history, whether of the
Jewish people or of Jesus and the origins of the Christian Church, has
been set in a new light.

In the third place, we shall have to deal with the influence of the
sciences of nature and of society, as these have been developed
throughout the whole course of the nineteenth century. If one must have
a date for an outstanding event in this portion of the history, perhaps
that of the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, 1859, would
serve as well as any other. The principles of these sciences have come
to underlie in a great measure all the reflection of cultivated men in
our time. In amazing degree they have percolated, through elementary
instruction, through popular literature, and through the newspapers, to
the masses of mankind. They are recognised as the basis of a triumphant
material civilisation, which has made everything pertaining to the inner
and spiritual life seem remote. Through the social sciences there has
come an impulse to the transfer of emphasis from the individual to
society, the disposition to see everything in its social bearing, to do
everything in the light of its social antecedents and of its social
consequences. Here again we have to note the profoundest influence upon
religious conceptions. The very notion connected with the words
redemption and salvation appears to have been changed.

In the case of each of these particular movements the church, as the
organ of Christianity, has passed through a period of antagonism to
these influences, of fear of their consequences, of resistance to their
progress. In large portions of the church at the present moment the
protest is renewed. The substance of these modern teachings, which yet
seem to be the very warp and woof of the intellectual life of the modern
man, is repudiated and denounced. It is held to imperil the salvation of
the soul. It is pronounced impossible of combination with belief in a
divinely revealed truth concerning the universe and a saving faith for
men. In other churches, outside the churches, the forms in which men
hold their Christianity have been in large measure adjusted to the
results of these great movements of thought. They have, as these men
themselves believe, been immensely strengthened and made sure by those
very influences which were once considered dangerous.

In connection with this indication of the nature of our materials, we
have sought to say something of the time of emergence of the salient
elements. It may be in point also to give some intimation of the place
of their origins, that is to say, of the participation of the various
nationalities in this common task of the modern Christian world. That
international quality of scholarship which seems to us natural, is a
thing of very recent date. That a discovery should within a reasonable
interval become the property of all educated men, that scholars of one
nation should profit by that which the learned of another land have
done, appears to us a thing to be assumed. It has not always been so,
especially not in matters of religious faith. The Roman Church and the
Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain
international character. Again the Renaissance and Reformation had a
certain world wide quality. The relations of the English Church in the
reigns of the last Tudors to Germany, Switzerland, and France are not to
be forgotten. But the life of the Protestant national churches in the
eighteenth century shows little of this trait. The barriers of language
counted for something. The provincialism of national churches and
denominational predilections counted for more.

In the philosophical movement we must begin with the Germans. The
movement of English thought known as deism was a distinct forerunner of
the rationalist movement, within the particular area of the discussion
of religion. However, it ran into the sand. The rationalist movement,
considered in its other aspects, never attained in England in the
eighteenth century the proportions which it assumed in France and
Germany. In France that movement ran its full course, both among the
learned and, equally, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the
unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it
more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for
years cried, '_Écrasez l'infâme_,' and Rousseau preached that the youth
would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had
had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many
minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism. Quite logically,
therefore, after the downfall of the Republic and of the Empire there
set in a great reaction. Still it was simply a reversion to the absolute
religion of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth by the Jesuit party.
There was no real transcending of the rationalist movement in France in
the interest of religion. There has been no great constructive movement
in religious thought in France in the nineteenth century. There is
relatively little literature of our subject in the French language until
recent years.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rationalist movement had always had
over against it the great foil and counterpoise of the pietist movement.
Rationalism ran a much soberer course than in France. It was never a
revolutionary and destructive movement as in France. It was not a
dilettante and aristocratic movement as deism had been in England. It
was far more creative and constructive than elsewhere. Here also before
the end of the century it had run its course. Yet here the men who
transcended the rationalist movement and shaped the spiritual revival in
the beginning of the nineteenth century were men who had themselves been
trained in the bosom of the rationalist movement. They had appropriated
the benefits of it. They did not represent a violent reaction against
it, but a natural and inevitable progress within and beyond it. This it
was which gave to the Germans their leadership at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in the sphere of the intellectual life. It is worthy
of note that the great heroes of the intellectual life in Germany, in
the period of which we speak, were most of them deeply interested in the
problem of religion. The first man to bring to England the leaven of
this new spirit, and therewith to transcend the old philosophical
standpoint of Locke and Hume, was Coleridge with his _Aids to
Reflection_, published in 1825. But even after this impulse of Coleridge
the movement remained in England a sporadic and uncertain one. It had
nothing of the volume and conservativeness which belonged to it in
Germany.

Coleridge left among his literary remains a work published in 1840 under
the title of _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_. What is here written
is largely upon the basis of intuition and forecast like that of Remarus
and Lessing a half-century earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were
already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke
and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, and
destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's
maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss'
first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly
appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first
radical and subversive in the extreme. They were fiercely repudiated in
Strauss' own country. Yet in the main there was acknowledgement of the
correctness of the principle for which Strauss had stood. Hardly before
the decade of the sixties was that method accepted in England in any
wider way, and hardly before the decade of the seventies in America.
Ronan was the first to set forth, in 1863, the historical and critical
problem in the new spirit, in a way that the wide public which read
French understood.

When we come to speak of the scientific movement it is not easy to say
where the leadership lay. Many Englishmen were in the first rank of
investigators and accumulators of material. The first attempt at a
systematisation of the results of the modern sciences was that of
Auguste Comte in his _Philosophie Positive_. This philosophy, however,
under its name of Positivism, exerted a far greater influence, both in
Comte's time and subsequently, in England than it did in France. Herbert
Spencer, after the middle of the decade of the sixties, essayed to do
something of the sort which Comte had attempted. He had far greater
advantages for the solution of the problem. Comte's foil in all of his
discussions of religion was the Catholicism of the south of France. None
the less, the religion which in his later years he created, bears
striking resemblance to that which in his earlier years he had sought to
destroy. Spencer's attitude toward religion was in his earlier work one
of more pronounced antagonism or, at least, of more complete agnosticism
than in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his
scientific freedom and conscientiousness. Both of these men represent
the effort to construe the world, including man, from the point of view
of the natural and also of the social sciences, and to define the place
of religion in that view of the world which is thus set forth. The fact
that there had been no such philosophical readjustment in Great Britain
as in Germany, made the acceptance of the evolutionary theory of the
universe, which more and more the sciences enforced, slower and more
difficult. The period of resistance on the part of those interested in
religion extended far into the decade of the seventies.

A word may be added concerning America. The early settlers had been
proud of their connection with the English universities. An
extraordinary number of them, in Massachusetts at least, had been
Cambridge men. Yet a tradition of learning was later developed, which
was not without the traits of isolation natural in the circumstances.
The residence, for a time, even of a man like Berkeley in this country,
altered that but little. The clergy remained in singular degree the
educated and highly influential class. The churches had developed, in
consonance with their Puritan character, a theology and philosophy so
portentous in their conclusions, that we can without difficulty
understand the reaction which was brought about. Wesleyanism had
modified it in some portions of the country, but intensified it in
others. Deism apparently had had no great influence. When the
rationalist movement of the old world began to make itself felt, it was
at first largely through the influence of France. The religious life of
the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century was at a low ebb.
Men like Belaham and Priestley were known as apostles of a freer spirit
in the treatment of the problem of religion. Priestley came to
Pennsylvania in his exile. In the large, however, one may say that the
New England liberal movement, which came by and by to be called
Unitarian, was as truly American as was the orthodoxy to which it was
opposed. Channing reminds one often of Schleiermacher. There is no
evidence that he had learned from Schleiermacher. The liberal movement
by its very impetuosity gave a new lease of life to an orthodoxy which,
without that antagonism, would sooner have waned. The great revivals,
which were a benediction to the life of the country, were thought to
have closer relation to the theology of those who participated in them
than they had. The breach between the liberal and conservative
tendencies of religious thought in this country came at a time when the
philosophical reconstruction was already well under way in Europe. The
debate continued until long after the biblical-critical movement was in
progress. The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically
total ignorance of these facts. There are traces upon both sides of that
insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the
logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws. There
will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by
reverent and, in their own way, learned and original men. Yet there is a
pathos about the sturdy originality of good men expended upon a problem
which had been already solved. The men in either camp proceeded from
assumptions which are now impossible to the men of both. It was not
until after the Civil War that American students of theology began in
numbers to study in Germany. It is a much more recent thing that one may
assume the immediate reading of foreign books, or boast of current
contribution from American scholars to the labour of the world's thought
upon these themes.

We should make a great mistake if we supposed that the progress has been
an unceasing forward movement. Quite the contrary, in every aspect of it
the life of the early part of the nineteenth century presents the
spectacle of a great reaction. The resurgence of old ideas and forces
seems almost incredible. In the political world we are wont to attribute
this fact to the disillusionment which the French Revolution had
wrought, and the suffering which the Napoleonic Empire had entailed. The
reaction in the world of thought, and particularly of religious thought,
was, moreover, as marked as that in the world of deeds. The Roman Church
profited by this swing of the pendulum in the minds of men as much as
did the absolute State. Almost the first act of Pius VII. after his
return to Rome in 1814, was the revival of the Society of Jesus, which
had been after long agony in 1773 dissolved by the papacy itself. 'Altar
and throne' became the watchword of an ardent attempt at restoration of
all of that which millions had given their lives to do away. All too
easily, one who writes in sympathy with that which is conventionally
called progress may give the impression that our period is one in which
movement has been all in one direction. That is far from being true. One
whose very ideal of progress is that of movement in directions opposite
to those we have described may well say that the nineteenth century has
had its gifts for him as well. The life of mankind is too complex that
one should write of it with one exclusive standard as to loss and gain.
And whatever be one's standard the facts cannot be ignored.

The France of the thirties and the forties saw a liberal movement within
the Roman Church. The names of Lamennais, of Lacordaire, of Montalembert
and Ozanam, the title _l'Avenir_ occur to men's minds at once. Perhaps
there has never been in France a party more truly Catholic, more devout,
refined and tolerant, more fitted to heal the breach between the
cultivated and the Church. However, before the Second Empire, an end had
been made of that. It cannot be said that the French Church exactly
favoured the infallibility. It certainly did not stand against the
decree as in the old days it would have done. The decree of
infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of
reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does
away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to
which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which
the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of
Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is
viewed in the light of the _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, and again of
the _Encyclical_ of 1907, or whether the encyclicals are viewed in the
light of the decree, the fact remains that a power has been given to the
Curia against what has come to be called Modernism such as Innocent
never wielded against the heresies of his day. Meantime, so hostile are
exactly those peoples among whom Roman Catholicism has had full sway,
that it would almost appear that the hope of the Roman Church is in
those countries in which, in the sequence of the Reformation, a
religious tolerance obtains, which the Roman Church would have done
everything in its power to prevent.

Again, we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that the reaction had
been felt only in Roman Catholic lands. A minister of Prussia forbade
Kant to speak concerning religion. The Prussia of Frederick William III.
and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich
had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna. The history of the censorship
of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the
year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church
in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The
universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom.
But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which
staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively sustained,
was almost doomed to further that alienation between the life of piety
and the life of learning which is so much to be deplored. In the Church
the conservatives have to this moment largely triumphed. In the
theological faculties of the universities the liberals in the main have
held their own. The fact that both Church and faculties are
functionaries of the State is often cited as sure in the end to bring
about a solution of this unhappy state of things. For such a solution,
it must be owned, we wait.

The England of the period after 1815 had indeed no such cause for
reaction as obtained in France or even in Germany. The nation having had
its Revolution in the seventeenth century escaped that of the
eighteenth. Still the country was exhausted in the conflict against
Napoleon. Commercial, industrial and social problems agitated it. The
Church slumbered. For a time the liberal thought of England found
utterance mainly through the poets. By the decade of the thirties
movement had begun. The opinions of the Noetics in Oriel College,
Oxford, now seem distinctly mild. They were sufficient to awaken Newman
and Pusey, Froude, Keble, and the rest. Then followed the most
significant ecclesiastical movement which the Church of England in the
nineteenth century has seen, the Oxford or Tractarian movement, as it
has been called. There was conscious recurrence of a mind like that of
Newman to the Catholic position. He had never been able to conceive
religion in any other terms than those of dogma, or the Christian
assurance on any other basis than that of external authority. Nothing
could be franker than the antagonism of the movement, from its
inception, to the liberal spirit of the age. By inner logic Newman found
himself at last in the Roman Church. Yet the Anglo-Catholic movement is
to-day overwhelmingly in the ascendant in the English Church. The Broad
Churchmen of the middle of the century have had few successors. It is
the High Church which stands over against the great mass of the
dissenting churches which, taken in the large, can hardly be said to be
theologically more liberal than itself. It is the High Church which has
showed Franciscanlike devotion in the problems of social readjustment
which England to-day presents. It has shown in some part of its
constituency a power of assimilation of new philosophical, critical and
scientific views, which makes all comparison of it with the Roman Church
misleading. And yet it remains in its own consciousness Catholic to the
core.

In America also the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the
beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with
which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church
was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who
devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further
liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the
deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete
effects of the division of the churches was the separation of the
education of the clergy from the universities, the entrusting it to
isolated theological schools under denominational control. The system
has done less harm than might have been expected. Yet at present there
would appear to be a general movement of recurrence to the elder
tradition. The maintenance of the religious life is to some extent a
matter of nurture and observances, of religious habit and practice. This
truth is one which liberals, in their emphasis upon liberty and the
individual, are always in danger of overlooking. The great revivals of
religion in this century, like those of the century previous, have been
connected with a form of religious thought pronouncedly pietistic. The
building up of religious institutions in the new regions of the West,
and the participation of the churches of the country in missions, wear
predominantly this cast. Antecedently, one might have said that the lack
of ecclesiastical cohesion among the Christians of the land, the ease
with which a small group might split off for the furtherance of its own
particular view, would tend to liberalisation. It is doubtful whether
this is true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The
emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their
permanence. The middle of the nineteenth century in the United States
was a period of intense denominationalism. That is synonymous with a
period of the stagnation of Christian thought. The religion of a people
absorbed in the practical is likely to be one which they at least
suppose to be a practical religion. In one age the most practical thing
will appear to men to be to escape hell, in another to further
socialism. The need of adjustment of religion to the great intellectual
life of the world comes with contact with that life. What strikes one in
the survey of the religious thought of the country, by and large, for a
century and a quarter, is not so much that it has been reactionary, as
that it has been stationary. Almost every other aspect of the life of
our country, including even that of religious life as distinguished from
religious thought, has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. This it is which
in a measure has created the tension which we feel.


B. THE BACKGROUND

Deism


In England before the end of the Civil War a movement for the
rationalisation of religion had begun to make itself felt. It was in
full force in the time of the Revolution of 1688. It had not altogether
spent itself by the middle of the eighteenth century. The movement has
borne the name of Deism. In so far as it had one watchword, this came to
be 'natural religion.' The antithesis had in mind was that to revealed
religion, as this had been set forth in the tradition of the Church, and
particularly under the bibliolatry of the Puritans. It is a witness to
the liberty of speech enjoyed by Englishmen in that day and to their
interest in religion, that such a movement could have arisen largely
among laymen who were often men of rank. It is an honour to the English
race that, in the period of the rising might of the rational spirit
throughout the western world, men should have sought at once to utilise
that force for the restatement of religion. Yet one may say quite simply
that this undertaking of the deists was premature. The time was not ripe
for the endeavour. The rationalist movement itself needed greater
breadth and deeper understanding of itself. Above all, it needed the
salutary correction of opposing principles before it could avail for
this delicate and difficult task. Religion is the most conservative of
human interests. Rationalism would be successful in establishing a new
interpretation of religion only after it had been successful in many
other fields. The arguments of the deists were never successfully
refuted. On the contrary, the striking thing is that their opponents,
the militant divines and writings of numberless volumes of 'Evidences
for Christianity,' had come to the same rational basis with the deists.
They referred even the most subtle questions to the pure reason, as no
one now would do. The deistical movement was not really defeated. It
largely compelled its opponents to adopt its methods. It left a deposit
which is more nearly rated at its worth at the present than it was in
its own time. But it ceased to command confidence, or even interest.
Samuel Johnson said, as to the publication of Bolingbroke's work by his
executor, three years after the author's death: 'It was a rusty old
blunderbuss, which he need not have been afraid to discharge himself,
instead of leaving a half-crown to a Scotchman to let it off after his
death.'

It is a great mistake, however, in describing the influence of
rationalism upon Christian thought to deal mainly with deism. English
deism made itself felt in France, as one may see in the case of
Voltaire. Kant was at one time deeply moved by some English writers who
would be assigned to this class. In a sense Kant showed traces of the
deistical view to the last. The centre of the rationalistic movement
had, however, long since passed from England to the Continent. The
religious problem was no longer its central problem. We quite fail to
appreciate what the nineteenth century owes to the eighteenth and to the
rationalist movement in general, unless we view this latter in a far
greater way.


Rationalism


In 1784 Kant wrote a tractate entitled, _Was ist Aufklärung?_ He said:
'Aufklärung is the advance of man beyond the stage of voluntary
immaturity. By immaturity is meant a man's inability to use his
understanding except under the guidance of another. The immaturity is
voluntary when the cause is not want of intelligence but of resolution.
_Sapere aude!_ "Dare to use thine own understanding," is therefore the
motto of free thought. If it be asked, "Do we live in a free-thinking
age?" the answer is, "No, but we live in an age of free thought." As
things are at present, men in general are very far from possessing, or
even from being able to acquire, the power of making a sure and right
use of their own understanding without the guidance of others. On the
other hand, we have clear indications that the field now lies,
nevertheless, open before them, to which they can freely make their way
and that the hindrances to general freedom of thought are gradually
becoming less. And again he says: 'If we wish to insure the true use of
the understanding by a method which is universally valid, we must first
critically examine the laws which are involved in the very nature of the
understanding itself. For the knowledge of a truth which is valid for
everyone is possible only when based on laws which are involved in the
nature of the human mind, as such, and have not been imported into it
from without through facts of experience, which must always be
accidental and conditional.'

There speaks, of course, the prophet of the new age which was to
transcend the old rationalist movement. Men had come to harp in
complacency upon reason. They had never inquired into the nature and
laws of action of the reason itself. Kant, though in fullest sympathy
with its fundamental principles, was yet aware of the excesses and
weaknesses in which the rationalist movement was running out. No man was
ever more truly a child of rationalism. No man has ever written, to whom
the human reason was more divine and inviolable. Yet no man ever had
greater reserves within himself which rationalism, as it had been, had
never touched. It was he, therefore, who could lay the foundations for a
new and nobler philosophy for the future. The word _Aufklärung_, which
the speech of the Fatherland furnished him, is a better word than ours.
It is a better word than the French _l'Illuminisme_, the Enlightenment.
Still we are apparently committed to the term Rationalism, although it
is not an altogether fortunate designation which the English-speaking
race has given to a tendency practically universal in the thinking of
Europe, from about 1650 to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Historically, the rationalistic movement was the necessary preliminary
for the modern period of European civilization as distinguished from the
ecclesiastically and theologically determined culture which had
prevailed up to that time. It marks the great cleft between the ancient
and mediæval world of culture on the one hand and the modern world on
the other. The Reformation had but pushed ajar the door to the modern
world and then seemed in surprise and fear about to close it again. The
thread of the Renaissance was taken up again only in the Enlightenment.
The stream flowed underground which was yet to fertilise the modern
world.

We are here mainly concerned to note the breadth and universality of the
movement. It was a transformation of culture, a change in the principles
underlying civilisation, in all departments of life. It had indeed, as
one of its most general traits, the antagonism to ecclesiastical and
theological authority. Whatever it was doing, it was never without a
sidelong glance at religion. That was because the alleged divine right
of churches and states was the one might which it seemed everywhere
necessary to break. The conflict with ecclesiasticism, however, was
taken up also by Pietism, the other great spiritual force of the age.
This was in spite of the fact that the Pietists' view of religion was
the opposite of the rationalist view. Rationalism was characterised by
thorough-going antagonism to supernaturalism with all its consequences.
This arose from its zeal for the natural and the human, in a day when
all men, defenders and assailants of religion alike, accepted the dictum
that what was human could not be divine, the divine must necessarily be
the opposite of the human. In reality this general trait of opposition
to religion deceives us. It is superficial. In large part the
rationalists were willing to leave the question of religion on one side
if the ecclesiastics would let them alone. This is true in spite of the
fact that the pot-house rationalism of Germany and France in the
eighteenth century found the main butt of its ridicule in the priesthood
and the Church. On its sober side, in the studies of scholars, in the
bureaux of statesmen, in the laboratories of discoverers, it found more
solid work. It accomplished results which that other trivial aspect must
not hide from us.

Troeltsch first in our own day has given us a satisfactory account of
the vast achievement of the movement in every department of human
life.[2] It annihilated the theological notion of the State. In the
period after the Thirty Years' War men began to question what had been
the purpose of it all. Diplomacy freed itself from Jesuitical and papal
notions. It turned preponderantly to commercial and economic aims. A
secular view of the purpose of God in history began to prevail in all
classes of society. The Grand Monarque was ready to proclaim the divine
right of the State which was himself. Still, not until the period of his
dotage did that claim bear any relation to what even he would have
called religion. Publicists, both Catholic and Protestant, sought to
recur to the _lex naturæ_ in contradistinction with the old _lex
divina_. The natural rights of man, the rights of the people, the
rationally conditioned rights of the State, a natural, prudential,
utilitarian morality interested men. One of the consequences of this
theory of the State was a complete alteration in the thought of the
relation of State and Church. The nature of the Church itself as an
empirical institution in the midst of human society was subjected to the
same criticism with the State. Men saw the Church in a new light. As the
State was viewed as a kind of contract in men's social interest, so the
Church was regarded as but a voluntary association to care for their
religious interests. It was to be judged according to the practical
success with which it performed this function.

[Footnote 2: Troeltsch, Art. 'Aufklärung' in Herzog-Hauck,
_Realencylopädie_, 3 Aufl., Bd. ii., s. 225 f.]

Then also, in the economic and social field the rational spirit made
itself felt. Commerce and the growth of colonies, the extension of the
middle class, the redistribution of wealth, the growth of cities, the
dependence in relations of trade of one nation upon another, all these
things shook the ancient organisation of society. The industrial system
grew up upon the basis of a naturalistic theory of all economic
relations. Unlimited freedom in labour and in the use of capital were
claimed. There came a great revolution in public opinion upon all
matters of morals. The ferocity of religious wars, the cruelty of
religious controversies, the bigotry of the confessional, these all,
which, only a generation earlier, had been taken by long-suffering
humanity as if they had been matters of course, were now viewed with
contrition by the more exalted spirits and with contempt and
embitterment by the rest. Men said, if religion can give us not better
morality than this, it is high time we looked to the natural basis of
morality. Natural morality came to be the phrase ever on the lips of the
leading spirits. Too frequently they had come to look askance at the
morality of those who alleged a supernatural sanction for that which
they at least enjoined upon others. We come in this field also, as in
others, upon the assertion of the human as nobler and more beautiful
than that which had by the theologians been alleged to be divine. The
assertion came indeed to be made in ribald and blasphemous forms, but it
was not without a great measure of provocation.

Then there was the altered view of nature which came through the
scientific discoveries of the age. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,
Gassendi, Newton, are the fathers of the modern sciences. These are the
men who brought new worlds to our knowledge and new methods to our use.
That the sun does not move about the earth, that the earth is but a
speck in space, that heaven cannot be above nor hell beneath, these are
thoughts which have consequences. Instead of the old deductive method,
that of the mediæval Aristotelianism, which had been worse than
fruitless in the study of nature, men now set out with a great
enthusiasm to study facts, and to observe their laws. Modern optics,
acoustics, chemistry, geology, zoology, psychology and medicine, took
their rises within the period of which we speak. The influence was
indescribable. Newton might maintain his own simple piety side by side,
so to say, with his character, as a scientific man, though even he did
not escape the accusation of being a Unitarian. In the resistance which
official religion offered at every step to the advance of the sciences,
it is small wonder if natures less placid found the maintenance of their
ancestral faith too difficult. Natural science was deistic with Locke
and Voltaire, it was pantheistic in the antique sense with Shaftesbury,
it was pantheistic-mystical with Spinoza, spiritualistic with Descartes,
theistic with Leibnitz, materialistic with the men of the Encyclopædia.
It was orthodox with nobody. The miracle as traditionally defined became
impossible. At all events it became the millstone around the neck of the
apologists. The movement went to an extreme. All the evils of excess
upon this side from which we since have suffered were forecast. They
were in a measure called out by the evils and errors which had so long
reigned upon the other side.

Again, in the field of the writing of history and of the critique of
ancient literatures, the principles of rational criticism were worked
out and applied in all seriousness. Then these maxims began to be
applied, sometimes timidly and sometimes in scorn and shallowness, to
the sacred history and literature as well. To claim, as the defenders of
the faith were fain to do, that this one department of history was
exempt, was only to tempt historians to say that this was equivalent to
confession that we have not here to do with history at all.

Nor can we overlook the fact that the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries witnessed a great philosophical revival. Here again it is the
rationalist principle which is everywhere at work. The observations upon
nature, the new feeling concerning man, the vast complex of facts and
impulses which we have been able in these few words to suggest, demanded
a new philosophical treatment. The philosophy which now took its rise
was no longer the servant of theology. It was, at most, the friend, and
even possibly the enemy, of theology. Before the end of the rationalist
period it was the master of theology, though often wholly indifferent to
theology, exactly because of its sense of mastery. The great
philosophers of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, belong
with a part only of their work and tendency to the rationalist movement.
Still their work rested upon that which had already been done by Spinoza
and Malebranche, by Hobbes and Leibnitz, by Descartes and Bayle, by
Locke and Wolff, by Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. With all of the
contrasts among these men there are common elements. There is an ever
increasing antipathy to the thought of original sin and of supernatural
revelation, there is the confidence of human reason, the trust in the
will of man, the enthusiasm for the simple, the natural, the
intelligible and practical, the hatred of what was scholastic and, above
all, the repudiation of authority.

All these elements led, toward the end of the period, to the effort at
the construction of a really rational theology. Leibnitz and Lessing
both worked at that problem. However, not until after the labours of
Kant was it possible to utilise the results of the rationalist movement
for the reconstruction of theology. If evidence for this statement were
wanting, it could be abundantly given from the work of Herder. He was
younger than Kant, yet the latter seems to have exerted but slight
influence upon him. He earnestly desired to reinterpret Christianity in
the new light of his time, yet perhaps no part of his work is so futile.


Pietism


Allusion has been made to pietism. We have no need to set forth its own
achievements. We must recur to it merely as one of the influences which
made the transition from the century of rationalism to bear, in Germany,
an aspect different from that which it bore in any other land. Pietism
had at first much in common with rationalism. It shared with the latter
its opposition to the whole administration of religion established by
the State, its antagonism to the social distinctions which prevailed,
its individualism, its emphasis upon the practical. It was part of a
general religious reaction against ecclesiasticism, as were also
Jansenism in France, and Methodism in England, and the Whitefieldian
revival in America. But, through the character of Spener, and through
the peculiarity of German social relations, it gained an influence over
the educated classes, such as Methodism never had in England, nor, on
the whole, the Great Awakening in America. In virtue of this, German
pietism was able, among influential persons, to present victorious
opposition to the merely secular tendencies of the rationalistic
movement. In no small measure it breathed into that movement a religious
quality which in other lands was utterly lacking. It gave to it an
ethical seriousness from which in other places it had too often set
itself free.

In England there had followed upon the age of the great religious
conflict one of astounding ebb of spiritual interest. Men turned with
all energy to the political and economic interests of a wholly modern
civilisation. They retained, after a short period of friction, a smug
and latitudinarian orthodoxy, which Methodism did little to change. In
France not only was the Huguenot Church annihilated, but the Jansenist
movement was savagely suppressed. The tyranny of the Bourbon State and
the corruption of the Gallican Church which was so deeply identified
with it caused the rationalist movement to bear the trait of a
passionate opposition to religion. In the time of Pascal, Jansenism had
a moment when it bade fair to be to France what pietism was to Germany.
Later, in the anguish and isolation of the conflict the movement lost
its poise and intellectual quality. In Germany, even after the temporary
alliance of pietism and rationalism against the Church had been
transcended, and the length and breadth of their mutual antagonism had
been revealed, there remained a deep mutual respect and salutary
interaction. Obscurantists and sentimentalists might denounce
rationalism. Vulgar ranters like Dippel and Barth might defame religion.
That had little weight as compared with the fact that Klopstock, Hamann
and Herder, Jacobi, Goethe and Jean Paul, had all passed at some time
under the influence of pietism. Lessing learned from the Moravians the
undogmatic essence of religion. Schleiermacher was bred among the
devoted followers of Zinzendorf. Even the radicalism of Kant retained
from the teaching of his pietistic youth the stringency of its ethic,
the sense of the radical evil of human nature and of the categorical
imperative of duty. It would be hard to find anything to surpass his
testimony to the purity of character and spirit of his parents, or the
beauty of the home life in which he was bred. Such facts as these made
themselves felt both in the philosophy and in the poetry of the age. The
rationalist movement itself came to have an ethical and spiritual trait.
The triviality, the morbidness and superstition of pietism received
their just condemnation. But among the leaders of the nation in every
walk of life were some who felt the drawing to deal with ethical and
religious problems in the untrammelled fashion which the century had
taught.

We may be permitted to try to show the meaning of pietism by a concrete
example. No one can read the correspondence between the youthful
Schleiermacher and his loving but mistaken father, or again, the
lifelong correspondence of Schleiermacher with his sister, without
receiving, if he has any religion of his own, a touching impression of
what the pietistic religion meant. The father had long before, unknown
to the son, passed through the torments of the rational assault upon a
faith which was sacred to him. He had preached, through years, in the
misery of contradiction with himself. He had rescued his drowning soul
in the ark of the most intolerant confessional orthodoxy. In the crisis
of his son's life he pitiably concealed these facts. They should have
been the bond of sympathy. The son, a sorrowful little motherless boy,
was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby. He was to
escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which
his father had passed. Even there the spirit of the age pursued him. The
precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race
was wrestling with. He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the
man he so revered. Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself
upon his father's mercy, only to be abused and measurelessly condemned.
He had his way. He resorted to Halle, turned his back on sacred things,
worked in titanic fashion at everything but the problem of religion. At
least he kept his life clean and his soul sensitive among the flagrantly
immoral who were all about him, even in the pietists' own university. He
laid the foundations for his future philosophical construction. He
bathed in the sentiments and sympathies, poetic, artistic and
humanitarian, of the romanticist movement. In his early Berlin period he
was almost swept from his feet by its flood. He rescued himself,
however, by his rationalism and romanticism into a breadth and power of
faith which made him the prophet of the new age. By him, for a
generation, men like-minded saved their souls. As one reads, one
realises that it was the pietists' religion which saved him, and which,
in another sense, he saved. His recollections of his instruction among
the Herrnhuter are full of beauty and pathos. His sister never advanced
a step upon the long road which he travelled. Yet his sympathy with her
remained unimpaired. The two poles of the life of the age are visible
here. The episode, full of exquisite personal charm, is a veritable
miniature of the first fifty years of the movement which we have to
record. No one did for England or for France what Schleiermacher had
done for the Fatherland.


Æsthetic Idealism


Besides pietism, the Germany of the end of the eighteenth century
possessed still another foil and counterpoise to its decadent
rationalism. This was the so-called æsthetic-idealistic movement, which
shades off into romanticism. The debt of Schleiermacher to that movement
has been already hinted at. It was the revolt of those who had this in
common with the pietists, that they hated and despised the outworn
rationalism. They thought they wanted no religion. It is open to us to
say that they misunderstood religion. It was this misunderstanding which
Schleiermacher sought to bring home to them. What religion they
understood, ecclesiasticism, Roman or Lutheran, or again, the banalities
and fanaticisms of middle-class pietism, they despised. Their war with
rationalism was not because it had deprived man of religion. It had been
equally destructive of another side of the life of feeling, the
æsthetic. Their war was not on behalf of the good, it was in the name of
the beautiful. Rationalism had starved the soul, it had minimised and
derided feeling. It had suppressed emotion. It had been fatal to art. It
was barren of poetry. It had had no sympathy with history and no
understanding of history. It had reduced everything to the process by
which two and two make four. The pietists said that the frenzy for
reason had made man oblivious of the element of the divine. The æsthetic
idealists said that it had been fatal to the element of the human. From
this point of view their movement has been called the new humanism. The
glamour of life was gone, they said. Mystery had vanished. And mystery
is the womb of every art. Rationalism had been absolutely uncreative,
only and always destructive. Rousseau had earlier uttered this wail in
France, and had greatly influenced certain minds in Germany. Shelley and
Keats were saying something of the sort in England. Even as to
Wordsworth, it may be an open question if his religion was not mainly
romanticism. All these men used language which had been conventionally
associated with religion, to describe this other emotion.

Rationalism had ended in proving deadly to ideals. This was true. But
men forgot for the moment how glorious an ideal it had once been to be
rational and to assert the rationality of the universe. Still the time
had come when, in Germany at all events, the great cry was, 'back to the
ideal.' It is curious that men always cry 'back' when they mean
'forward.' For it was not the old idealism, either religious or
æsthetic, which they were seeking. It was a new one in which the sober
fruits of rationalism should find place. Still, for the moment, as we
have seen, the air was full of the cry, 'back to the State by divine
right, back to the Church, back to the Middle Age, back to the beauty of
classical antiquity.' The poetry, the romance, the artistic criticism of
this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage
and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust
of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had
been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before.
It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new
elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. It saw
morals and religion, language and society, along with art and itself, as
the free and unconscious product through the ages, of the vitality of
the human spirit. It must be said that it neither solved nor put away
the ancient questions. Especially through its one-sided æstheticism it
veiled that element of dualism in the world which Kant clearly saw, and
we now see again, after a century which has sometimes leaned to easy
pantheism. However, it led to a study of the human soul and of all its
activities, which came closer to living nature than anything which the
world had yet seen.

To this group of æsthetic idealists belong, not to mention lesser names,
Lessing and Hamann and Winckelmann, but above all Herder and Goethe.
Herder was surely the finest spirit among the elder contemporaries of
Goethe. Bitterly hostile to the rationalists, he had been moved by
Rousseau to enthusiasm for the free creative life of the human spirit.
With Lessing he felt the worth of every art in and for itself, and the
greatness of life in its own fulfilment. He sets out from the analysis
of the poetic and artistic powers, the appreciation of which seemed to
him to be the key to the understanding of the spiritual world. Then
first he approaches the analysis of the ethical and religious feeling.
All the knowledge and insight thus gained he gathers together into a
history of the spiritual life of mankind. This life of the human spirit
comes forth everywhere from nature, is bound to nature. It constitutes
one whole with a nature which the devout soul calls God, and apprehends
within itself as the secret of all that it is and does. Even in the
period in which he had become passionately Christian, Herder never was
able to attain to a scientific establishing of his Christianity, or to
any sense of the specific aim of its development. He felt himself to be
separated from Kant by an impassable gulf. All the sharp antinomies
among which Kant moved, contrasts of that which is sensuous with that
which is reasonable, of experience with pure conception, of substance
and form in thought, of nature and freedom, of inclination and duty,
seemed to Herder grossly exaggerated, if not absolutely false. Sometimes
Herder speaks as if the end of life were simply the happiness which a
man gets out of the use of all his powers and out of the mere fact of
existence. Deeper is Kant's contention, that the true aim of life can be
only moral culture, even independent of happiness, or rather one must
find his noblest happiness in that moral culture.

At a period in his life when Herder had undergone conversion to court
orthodoxy at Bückeburg and threatened to throw away that for which his
life had stood, he was greatly helped by Goethe. The identification of
Herder with Christianity continued to be more deep and direct than that
of Goethe ever became, yet Goethe has also his measure of significance
for our theme. If he steadied Herder in his religious experience, he
steadied others in their poetical emotionalism and artistic
sentimentality, which were fast becoming vices of the time. The classic
repose of his spirit, his apparently unconscious illustration of the
ancient maxim, 'nothing too much,' was the more remarkable, because
there were few influences in the whole gamut of human life to which he
did not sooner or later surrender himself, few experiences which he did
not seek, few areas of thought upon which he did not enter. Systems and
theories were never much to his mind. A fact, even if it were
inexplicable, interested him much more. To the evolution of formal
thought in his age he held himself receptive rather than directing. He
kept, to the last, his own manner of brooding and creating, within the
limits of a poetic impressionableness which instinctively viewed the
material world and the life of the soul in substantially similar
fashion. There is something almost humorous in the way in which he
eagerly appropriated the results of the philosophising of his time, in
so far as he could use these to sustain his own positions, and
caustically rejected those which he could not thus use. He soon got by
heart the negative lessons of Voltaire and found, to use the words which
he puts into the mouth of Faust, that while it freed him from his
superstitions, at the same time it made the world empty and dismal
beyond endurance. In the mechanical philosophy which presented itself in
the _Système de la Nature_ as a positive substitute for his lost faith,
he found only that which filled his poet's soul with horror. 'It
appeared to us,' he says, 'so grey, so cimmerian and so dead that we
shuddered at it as at a ghost. We thought it the very quintessence of
old age. All was said to be necessary, and therefore there was no God.
Why not a necessity for a God to take its place among the other
necessities!' On the other hand, the ordinary teleological theology,
with its external architect of the world and its externally determined
designs, could not seem to Goethe more satisfactory than the mechanical
philosophy. He joined for a time in Rousseau's cry for the return to
nature. But Goethe was far too well balanced not to perceive that such a
cry may be the expression of a very artificial and sophisticated state
of mind. It begins indeed in the desire to throw off that which is
really oppressive. It ends in a fretful and reckless revolt against the
most necessary conditions of human life. Goethe lived long enough to see
in France that dissolution of all authority, whether of State or Church,
for which Rousseau had pined. He saw it result in the return of a
portion of mankind to what we now believe to have been their primitive
state, a state in which they were 'red in tooth and claw.' It was not
that paradisaic state of love and innocence, which, curiously enough,
both Rousseau and the theologians seem to have imagined was the
primitive state.

The thought of the discipline and renunciation of our lower nature in
order to the realisation of a higher nature of mankind is written upon
the very face of the second part of _Faust_. Certain passages in
_Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ are even more familiar. 'Our physical as well
as our social life, morality, custom, knowledge of the world,
philosophy, religion, even many an accidental occurrence in our daily
life, all tell us that we must renounce.' 'Renunciation, once for all,
in view of the eternal,' that was the lesson which he said made him feel
an atmosphere of peace breathed upon him. He perceived the supreme moral
prominence of certain Christian ideas, especially that of the atonement
as he interpreted it. 'It is altogether strange to me,' he writes to
Jacobi, 'that I, an old heathen, should see the cross planted in my own
garden, and hear Christ's blood preached without its offending me.'

Goethe's quarrel with Christianity was due to two causes. In the first
place, it was due to his viewing Christianity as mainly, if not
exclusively, a religion of the other world, as it has been called, a
religion whose God is not the principle of all life and nature and for
which nature and life are not divine. In the second place, it was due to
the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as
commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of
self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both
of these respects he would have found himself much more at home with the
apprehension of Christianity which we have inherited from the nineteenth
century. The programme of charity which he outlines in the _Wanderjahre_
as a substitute for religion would be taken to-day, so far as it goes,
as a rather moderate expression of the very spirit of the Christian
religion.




CHAPTER II

IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY


The causes which we have named, religious and æsthetic, as well as
purely speculative, led to such a revision of philosophical principles
in Germany as took place in no other land. The new idealistic
philosophy, as it took shape primarily at the hands of Kant, completed
the dissolution of the old rationalism. It laid the foundation for the
speculative thought of the western world for the century which was to
come. The answers which æstheticism and pietism gave to rationalism were
incomplete. They consisted largely in calling attention to that which
rationalism had overlooked. Kant's idealism, however, met the
intellectual movement on its own grounds. It triumphed over it with its
own weapons. The others set feeling over against thought. He taught men
a new method in thinking. The others put emotion over against reason. He
criticised in drastic fashion the use which had been made of reason. He
inquired into the nature of reason. He vindicated the reasonableness of
some truths which men had indeed felt to be indefeasibly true, but which
they had not been able to establish by reasoning.


KANT


Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, possibly of remoter
Scottish ancestry. His father was a saddler, as Melanchthon's had been
an armourer and Wolff's a tanner. His native city with its university
was the scene of his whole life and labour. He was never outside of
Prussia except for a brief interval when Königsberg belonged to Russia.
He was a German professor of the old style. Studying, teaching, writing
books, these were his whole existence. He was the fourth of nine
children of a devoted pietist household. Two of his sisters served in
the houses of friends. The consistorial-rath opened the way to the
university. An uncle aided him to publish his first books. His earlier
interest was in the natural sciences. He was slow in coming to
promotion. Only after 1770 was he full professor of logic and
metaphysics. In 1781 he published the first of the books upon which
rests his world-wide fame. Nevertheless, he lived to see the triumph of
his philosophy in most of the German universities. His subjects are
abstruse, his style involved. It never occurred to him to make the
treatment of his themes easier by use of the imagination. He had but a
modicum of that quality. He was hostile to the pride of intellect often
manifested by petty rationalists. He was almost equally hostile to
excessive enthusiasm in religion. The note of his life, apart from his
intellectual power, was his ethical seriousness. He was in conflict with
ecclesiastical personages and out of sympathy with much of institutional
religion. None the less, he was in his own way one of the most religious
of men. His brief conflict with Wöllner's government was the only
instance in which his peace and public honour were disturbed. He never
married. He died in Königsberg in 1804. He had been for ten years so
much enfeebled that his death was a merciful release.

Kant used the word 'critique' so often that his philosophy has been
called the 'critical philosophy.' The word therefore needs an
explanation. Kant himself distinguished two types of philosophy, which
he called the dogmatic and critical types. The essence of a dogmatic
philosophy is that it makes belief to rest upon knowledge. Its endeavour
is to demonstrate that which is believed. It brings out as its foil the
characteristically sceptical philosophy. This esteems that the proofs
advanced in the interest of belief are inadequate. The belief itself is
therefore an illusion. The essence of a critical philosophy, on the
other hand, consists in this, that it makes a distinction between the
functions of knowing and believing. It distinguishes between the
perception of that which is in accordance with natural law and the
understanding of the moral meaning of things.[3] Kant thus uses his word
critique in accordance with the strict etymological meaning of the root.
He seeks to make a clear separation between the provinces of belief and
knowledge, and thus to find an adjustment of their claims. Of an object
of belief we may indeed say that we know it. Yet we must make clear to
ourselves that we know it in a different sense from that in which we
know physical fact. Faith, since it does not spring from the pure
reason, cannot indeed, as the old dogmatisms, both philosophical and
theological, have united in asserting, be demonstrated by the reason.
Equally it cannot, as scepticism has declared, be overthrown by the pure
reason.

The ancient positive dogmatism had been the idealistic philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle. The old negative dogmatism had been the materialism
of the Epicureans. To Plato the world was the realisation of ideas.
Ideas, spiritual entities, were the counterparts and necessary
antecedents of the natural objects and actual facts of life. To the
Epicureans, on the other hand, there are only material bodies and
natural laws. There are no ideas or purposes. In the footsteps of the
former moved all the scholastics of the Middle Age, and again, even
Locke and Leibnitz in their so-called 'natural theology.' In the
footsteps of the latter moved the men who had made materialism and
scepticism to be the dominant philosophy of France in the latter half of
the eighteenth century. The aim of Kant was to resolve this age-long
contradiction. Free, unprejudiced investigation of the facts and laws of
the phenomenal world can never touch the foundations of faith. Natural
science can lead in the knowledge only of the realm of the laws of
things. It cannot give us the inner moral sense of those things. To
speak of the purposes of nature as men had done was absurd. Natural
theology, as men had talked of it, was impossible. What science can give
is a knowledge of the facts about us in the world, of the growth of the
cosmos, of the development of life, of the course of history, all viewed
as necessary sequences of cause and effect.

[Footnote 3: Paulsen, _Kant_, a. 2.]

On the other hand, with the idealists, Kant is fully persuaded that
there is a meaning in things and that we can know it. There is a sense
in life. With immediate certainty we set moral good as the absolute aim
in life. This is done, however, not through the pure reason or by
scientific thinking, but primarily through the will, or as Kant prefers
to call it, the practical reason. What is meant by the practical reason
is the intelligence, the will and the affections operating together;
that is to say, the whole man and not merely his intellect, directed to
those problems upon which, in sympathy and moral reaction, the whole man
must be directed and upon which the pure reason, the mere faculty of
ratiocination, does not adequately operate. In the practical reason the
will is the central thing. The will is that faculty of man to which
moral magnitudes appeal. It is with moral magnitudes that the will is
primarily concerned. The pure reason may operate without the will and
the affections. The will, as a source of knowledge, never works without
the intelligence and the affections. But it is the will which alone
judges according to the predicates good and evil. The pure reason judges
according to the predicates true and false. It is the practical reason
which ventures the credence that moral worth is the supreme worth in
life. It then confirms this ventured credence in a manifold experience
that yields a certainty with which no certainty of objects given in the
senses is for a moment to be compared. We know that which we have
believed. We know it as well as that two and two make four. Still we do
not know it in the same way. Nor can we bring knowledge of it to others
save through an act of freedom on their part, which is parallel to the
original act of freedom on our own part.

How can these two modes of thought stand related the one to the other?
Kant's answer is that they correspond to the distinction between two
worlds, the world of sense and the transcendental or supersensible
world. The pure and the practical reason are the faculties of man for
dealing with these two worlds respectively, the phenomenal and the
noumenal. The world which is the object of scientific investigation is
not the actuality itself. This is true in spite of the fact that to the
common man the material and sensible is always, as he would say, the
real. On the contrary, in Kant's opinion the material world is only the
presentation to our senses of something deeper, of which our senses are
no judge. The reality lies behind this sensible presentation and
appearance. The world of religious belief is the world of this
transcendent reality. The spirit of man, which is not pure reason only,
but moral will as well, recognises itself also as part of this reality.
It expresses the essence of that mysterious reality in terms of its own
essence. Its own essence as free spirit is the highest aspect of reality
of which it is aware. It may be unconscious of the symbolic nature of
its language in describing that which is higher than anything which we
know, by the highest which we do know. Yet, granting that, and supposing
that it is not a contradiction to attempt a description of the
transcendent at all, there is no description which carries us so far.

This series of ideas was perhaps that which gave to Kant's philosophy
its immediate and immense effect upon the minds of men wearied with the
endless strife and insoluble contradiction of the dogmatic and sceptical
spirits. We may disagree with much else in the Kantian system. Even here
we may say that we have not two reasons, but only two functionings of
one. We have not two worlds. The philosophical myth of two worlds has no
better standing than the religious myth of two worlds. We have two
characteristic aspects of one and the same world. These perfectly
interpenetrate the one the other, if we may help ourselves with the
language of space. Each is everywhere present. Furthermore, these
actions of reason and aspects of world shade into one another by
imperceptible degrees. Almost all functionings of reason have something
of the qualities of both. However, when all is said, it was of greatest
worth to have had these two opposite poles of thought brought clearly to
mind. The dogmatists, in the interest of faith, were resisting at every
step the progress of the sciences, feeling that that progress was
inimical to faith. The devotees of science were saying that its
processes were of universal validity, its conclusions irresistible, the
gradual dissolution of faith was certain. Kant made plain that neither
party had the right to such conclusions. Each was attempting to apply
the processes appropriate to one form of rational activity within the
sphere which belonged to the other. Nothing but confusion could result.
The religious man has no reason to be jealous of the advance of the
sciences. The interests of faith itself are furthered by such
investigation. Illusions as to fact which have been mistakenly
identified with faith are thus done away. Nevertheless, its own eternal
right is assured to faith. With it lies the interpretation of the facts
of nature and of history, whatever those facts may be found to be. With
the practical reason is the interpretation of these facts according to
their moral worth, a worth of which the pure reason knows nothing and
scientific investigation reveals nothing.

Here was a deliverance not unlike that which the Reformation had
brought. The mingling of Aristotelianism and religion in the scholastic
theology Luther had assailed. Instead of assent to human dogmas Luther
had the immediate assurance of the heart that God was on his side. And
what is that but a judgment of the practical reason, the response of the
heart in man to the spiritual universe? It is given in experience. It is
not mediated by argument. It cannot be destroyed by syllogism. It needs
no confirmation from science. It is capable of combination with any of
the changing interpretations which science may put upon the outward
universe. The Reformation had, however, not held fast to its great
truth. It had gone back to the old scholastic position. It had rested
faith in an essentially rationalistic manner upon supposed facts in
nature and alleged events of history in connection with the revelation.
It had thus jeopardised the whole content of faith, should these
supposed facts of nature or events in history be at any time disproved.
Men had made faith to rest upon statements of Scripture, alleging such
and such acts and events. They did not recognise these as the naïve and
childlike assumptions concerning nature and history which the authors of
Scripture would naturally have. When, therefore, these statements began
with the progress of the sciences to be disproved, the defenders of the
faith presented always the feeble spectacle of being driven from one
form of evidence to another, as the old were in turn destroyed. The
assumption was rife at the end of the eighteenth century that
Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable
men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men
infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the
hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the
ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly
devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They
felt that there is an inexpugnable truth of religion. Still that was
merely an intuition of their hearts. They were right. But they were
unable to prove that they were right, or even to get a hearing with many
of the cultivated of their age. To Kant we owe the debt, that he put an
end to this state of things. He made the real evidence for religion that
of the moral sense, of the nonscience and hearts of men themselves. The
real ground of religious conviction is the religious experience. He thus
set free both science and religion from an embarrassment under which
both laboured, and by which both had been injured.

Kant parted company with the empirical philosophy which had held that
all knowledge arises from without, comes from experienced sensations, is
essentially perception. This theory had not been able to explain the
fact that human experience always conforms to certain laws. On the other
hand, the philosophy of so-called innate ideas had sought to derive all
knowledge from the constitution of the mind itself. It left out of
consideration the dependence of the mind upon experience. It tended to
confound the creations of its own speculation with reality, or rather,
to claim correspondence with fact for statements which had no warrant in
experience. There was no limit to which this speculative process might
not be pushed. By this process the medieval theologians, with all
gravity, propounded the most absurd speculations concerning nature. By
this process men made the most astonishing declarations upon the basis,
as they supposed, of revelation. They made allegations concerning
history and the religious experience which the most rudimentary
knowledge of history or reflection upon consciousness proved to be quite
contrary to fact.

Both empiricism and the theory of innate ideas had agreed in regarding
all knowledge as something given, from without or from within. The
knowing mind was only a passive recipient of impressions thus imparted
to it. It was as wax under the stylus, _tabula rasa_, clean paper
waiting to be written upon. Kant departed from this radically. He
declared that all cognition rests upon the union of the mind's activity
with its receptivity. The material of thought, or at least some of the
materials of thought, must be given us in the multiformity of our
perceptions, through what we call experience from the outer world. On
the other hand, the formation of this material into knowledge is the
work of the activity of our own minds. Knowledge is the result of the
systematising of experience and of reflection upon it. This activity of
the mind takes place always in accordance with the mind's own laws. Kant
held them to the absolute dependence of knowledge upon material applied
in experience. He compared himself to Copernicus who had taught men that
they themselves revolved around a central fact of the universe. They had
supposed that the facts revolved about them. The central fact of the
intellectual world is experience. This experience seems to be given us
in the forms of time and space and cause. These are merely forms of the
mind's own activity. It is not possible for us to know 'the thing in
itself,' the _Ding an sich_ in Kant's phrase, which is the external
factor in any sensation or perception. We cannot distinguish that
external factor from the contribution to it, as it stands in our
perception, which our own minds have made. If we cannot do that even for
ourselves, how much less can we do it for others! It is the subject, the
thinking being who says 'I,' which, by means of its characteristic and
necessary active processes, in the perception of things under the forms
of time and space, converts the chaotic material of knowledge into a
regular and ordered world of reasoned experience. In this sense the
understanding itself imposes laws, if not upon nature, yet, at least,
upon nature as we can ever know it. There is thus in Kant's philosophy a
sceptical aspect. Knowledge is limited to phenomena. We cannot by pure
reason know anything of the world which lies beyond experience. This
thought had been put forth by Locke and Berkeley, and by Hume also, in a
different way. But with Kant this scepticism was not the gist of his
philosophy. It was urged rather as the basis of the unconditioned
character which he proposed to assert for the practical reason. Kant's
scepticism is therefore very different from that of Hume. It does not
militate against the profoundest religious conviction. Yet it prepared
the way for some of the just claims of modern agnosticism.

According to Kant, it is as much the province of the practical reason to
lay down laws for action as it is the province of pure reason to
determine the conditions of thought, though the practical reason can
define only the form of action which shall be in the spirit of duty. It
cannot present duty to us as an object of desire. Desire can be only a
form of self-love. In the end it reckons with the advantage of having
done one's duty. It thus becomes selfish and degraded. The
identification of duty and interest was particularly offensive to Kant.
He was at war with every form of hedonism. To do one's duty because one
expects to reap advantage is not to have done one's duty. The doing of
duty in this spirit simply resolves itself into a subtler and more
pervasive form of selfishness. He castigates the popular presentation of
religion as fostering this same fault. On the other hand, there is a
trait of rigorism in Kant, a survival of the ancient dualism, which was
not altogether consistent with the implications of his own philosophy.
This philosophy afforded, as we have seen, the basis for a monistic view
of the universe. But to his mind the natural inclinations of man are
opposed to good conscience and sound reason. He had contempt for the
shallow optimism of his time, according to which the nature of man was
all good, and needed only to be allowed to run its natural course to
produce highest ethical results. He does not seem to have penetrated to
the root of Rousseau's fallacy, the double sense in which he constantly
used the words 'nature' and 'natural.' Otherwise, Kant would have been
able to repudiate the preposterous doctrine of Rousseau, without himself
falling back upon the doctrine of the radical evil of human nature. In
this doctrine he is practically at one with the popular teaching of his
own pietistic background, and with Calvinism as it prevailed with many
of the religiously-minded of his day. In its extreme statements the
latter reminds one of the pagan and oriental dualisms which so long ran
parallel to the development of Christian thought and so profoundly
influenced it.

Kant's system is not at one with itself at this point. According to him
the natural inclinations of men are such as to produce a never-ending
struggle between duty and desire. To desire to do a thing made him
suspicious that he was not actuated by the pure spirit of duty in doing
it. The sense in which man may be in his nature both a child of God,
and, at the same time, part of the great complex of nature, was not yet
clear either to Kant or to his opponents. His pessimism was a reflection
of his moral seriousness. Yet it failed to reckon with that which is yet
a glorious fact. One of the chief results of doing one's duty is the
gradual escape from the desire to do the contrary. It is the gradual
fostering by us, the ultimate dominance in us, of the desire to do that
duty. Even to have seen one's duty is the dawning in us of this high
desire. In the lowest man there is indeed the superficial desire to
indulge his passions. There is also the latent longing to be conformed
to the good. There is the sense that he fulfils himself then only when
he is obedient to the good. One of the great facts of spiritual
experience is this gradual, or even sudden, inversion of standard within
us. We do really cease to desire the things which are against right
reason and conscience. We come to desire the good, even if it shall cost
us pain and sacrifice to do it. Paul could write: 'When I would do good,
evil is present with me.' But, in the vividness of his identification of
his willing self with his better self against his sinning self, he could
also write: 'So then it is no more I that do the sin.' _Das radicale
Böse_ of human nature is less radical than Kant supposed, and 'the
categorical imperative' of duty less externally categorical than he
alleged. Still it is the great merit of Kant's philosophy to have
brought out with all possible emphasis, not merely as against the
optimism of the shallow, but as against the hedonism of soberer people,
that our life is a conflict between inclination and duty. The claims of
duty are the higher ones. They are mandatory, absolute. We do our duty
whether or not we superficially desire to do it. We do our duty whether
or not we foresee advantage in having done it. We should do it if we
foresaw with clearness disadvantage. We should find our satisfaction in
having done it, even at the cost of all our other satisfactions. There
is a must which is over and above all our desires. This is what Kant
really means by the categorical imperative. Nevertheless, his statement
comes in conflict with the principle of freedom, which is one of the
most fundamental in his system. The phrases above used only eddy about
the one point which is to be held fast. There may be that in the
universe which destroys the man who does not conform to it, but in the
last analysis he is self-destroyed, that is, he chooses not to conform.
If he is saved, it is because he chooses thus to conform. Man would be
then most truly man in resisting that which would merely overpower him,
even if it were goodness. Of course, there can be no goodness which
overpowers. There can be no goodness which is not willed. Nothing can be
a motive except through awakening our desire. That which one desires is
never wholly external to oneself.

According to Kant, morality becomes religion when that which the former
shows to be the end of man is conceived also to be the end of the
supreme law-giver, God. Religion is the recognition of our duties as
divine commands. The distinction between revealed and natural religion
is stated thus: In the former we know a thing to be a divine command
before we recognise it as our duty. In the latter we know it to be our
duty before we recognise it as a divine command. Religion may be both
natural and revealed. Its tenets may be such that man can be conceived
as arriving at them by unaided reason. But he would thus have arrived at
them at a later period in the evolution of the race. Hence revelation
might be salutary or even necessary for certain times and places without
being essential at all times or, for that matter, a permanent guarantee
of the truth of religion. There is nothing here which is new or original
with Kant. This line of reasoning was one by which men since Lessing had
helped themselves over certain difficulties. It is cited only to show
how Kant, too, failed to transcend his age in some matters, although he
so splendidly transcended it in others.

The orthodox had immemorially asserted that revelation imparted
information not otherwise attainable, or not then attainable. The
rationalists here allege the same. Kant is held fast in this view.
Assuredly what revelation imparts is not information of any sort
whatsoever, not even information concerning God. What revelation imparts
is God himself, through the will and the affection, the practical
reason. Revelation is experience, not instruction. The revealers are
those who have experienced God, Jesus the foremost among them. They have
experienced God, whom then they have manifested as best they could, but
far more significantly in what they were than in what they said. There
is surely the gravest exaggeration of what is statutory and external in
that which Kant says of the relation of ethics and religion. How can we
know that to be a command of God, which does not commend itself in our
own heart and conscience? The traditionalist would have said, by
documents miraculously confirmed. It was not in consonance with his
noblest ideas for Kant to say that. On the other hand, that which I
perceive to be my duty I, as religious man, feel to be a command of God,
whether or not a mandate of God to that effect can be adduced. Whether
an alleged revelation from God inculcates such a truth or duty may be
incidental. In a sense it is accidental. The content of all historic
revelation is conditioned in the circumstances of the man to whom the
revelation is addressed. It is clear that the whole matter of revelation
is thus apprehended by Kant with more externality than we should have
believed. His thought is still essentially archaic and dualistic. He is,
therefore, now and then upon the point of denying that such a thing as
revelation is possible. The very idea of revelation, in this form, does
violence to his fundamental principle of the autonomy of the human
reason and will. At many points in his reflection it is transparently
clear that nothing can ever come to a man, or be given forth by him,
which is not creatively shaped by himself. As regards revelation,
however, Kant never frankly took that step. The implications of his own
system would have led him to that step. They led to an idea of
revelation which was psychologically in harmony with the assumptions of
his system, and historically could be conceived as taking place without
the interjection of the miraculous in the ordinary sense. If the divine
revelation is to be thought as taking place within the human spirit, and
in consonance with the laws of all other experience, then the human
spirit must itself be conceived as standing in such relation to the
divine that the eternal reason may express and reveal itself in the
regular course of the mind's own activity. Then the manifold moral and
religious ideals of mankind in all history must take their place as
integral factors also in the progress of the divine revelation.

When we come to the more specific topics of his religious teaching,
freedom, immortality, God, Kant is prompt to assert that these cannot be
objects of theoretical knowledge. Insoluble contradictions arise
whenever a proof of them is attempted. If an object of faith could be
demonstrated it would cease to be an object of faith. It would have been
brought down out of the transcendental world. Were God to us an object
among other objects, he would cease to be a God. Were the soul a
demonstrable object like any other object, it would cease to be the
transcendental aspect of ourselves. Kant makes short work of the
so-called proofs for the existence of God which had done duty in the
scholastic theology. With subtilty, sometimes also with bitter irony, he
shows that they one and all assume that which they set out to prove.
They are theoretically insufficient and practically unnecessary. They
have such high-sounding names--the ontological argument, the
cosmological, the physico-theological--that almost in spite of ourselves
we bring a reverential mood to them. They have been set forth with
solemnity by such redoubtable thinkers that there is something almost
startling in the way that Kant knocks them about. The fact that the
ordinary man among us easily perceives that Kant was right shows only
how the climate of the intellectual world has changed. Freedom,
immortality, God, are not indeed provable. If given at all, they can be
given only in the practical reason. Still they are postulates in the
moral order which makes man the citizen of an intelligible world. There
can be no 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can perceive, and
do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it.
However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such
that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of
eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of
a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man
is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not
only a law-giver, but in himself also the realisation of the law of
the moral world.

Kant's moral argument thus steps off the line of the others. It is not a
proof at all in the sense in which they attempted to be proofs. The
existence of God appears as a necessary assumption, if the highest good
and value in the world are to be fulfilled. But the conception and
possibility of realisation of a highest good is itself something which
cannot be concluded with theoretical evidentiality. It is the object of
a belief which in entire freedom is directed to that end. Kant lays
stress upon the fact that among the practical ideas of reason, that of
freedom is the one whose reality admits most nearly of being proved by
the laws of pure reason, as well as in conduct and experience. Upon an
act of freedom, then, belief rests. 'It is the free holding that to be
true, which for the fulfilment of a purpose we find necessary.' Now, as
object of this 'free holding something to be true,' he sets forth the
conception of the highest good in the world, to be realised through
freedom. It is clear that before this argument would prove that a God is
necessary to the realisation of the moral order, it would have to be
shown that there are no adequate forces immanent within society itself
for the establishment and fulfilment of that order. As a matter of fact,
reflexion in the nineteenth century, devoted as it has been to the
evolution of society, has busied itself with hardly anything more than
with the study of those immanent elements which make for morality. It is
therefore not an external guarantor of morals, such as Kant thought,
which is here given. It is the immanent God who is revealed in the
history and life of the race, even as also it is the immanent God who is
revealed in the consciousness of the individual soul. Even the moral
argument, therefore, in the form in which Kant puts it, sounds remote
and strange to us. His reasoning strains and creaks almost as if he were
still trying to do that which he had just declared could not be done.
What remains of significance for us, is this. All the debate about first
causes, absolute beings, and the rest, gives us no God such as our souls
need. If a man is to find the witness for soul, immortality and God at
all, he must find it within himself and in the spiritual history of his
fellows. He must venture, in freedom, the belief in these things, and
find their corroboration in the contribution which they make to the
solution of the mystery of life. One must venture to win them. One must
continue to venture, to keep them. If it were not so, they would not be
objects of faith.

The source of the radical evil in man is an intelligible act of human
freedom not further to be explained. Moral evil is not, as such,
transmitted. Moral qualities are inseparable from the responsibility of
the person who commits the deeds. Yet this radical disposition to evil
is to be changed into a good one, not altogether by a process of moral
reformation. There is such a thing as a fundamental revolution of a
man's habit of thought, a conscious and voluntary transference of a
man's intention to obey, from the superficial and selfish desires which
he has followed, to the deep and spiritual ones which he will henceforth
allow. There is an epoch in a man's life when he makes the transition.
He probably does it under the spell of personal influence, by the power
of example, through the beauty of another personality. To Kant salvation
was character. It was of and in and by character. To no thinker has the
moral participation of a man in the regeneration of his own character
been more certain and necessary than to Kant. Yet, the change in
direction of the will generally comes by an impulse from without. It
comes by the impress of a noble personality. It is sustained by
enthusiasm for that personality. Kant has therefore a perfectly rational
and ethical and vital meaning for the phrase 'new birth.'

For the purpose of this impulse to goodness, nothing is so effective as
the contemplation of an historical example of such surpassing moral
grandeur as that which we behold in Jesus. For this reason we may look
to Jesus as the ideal of goodness presented to us in flesh and blood.
Yet the assertion that Jesus' historical personality altogether
corresponds with the complete and eternal ethical ideal is one which we
have no need to make. We do not possess in our own minds the absolute
ideal with which in that assertion we compare him.

The ethical ideal of the race is still in process of development. Jesus
has been the greatest factor urging forward that development. We
ourselves stand at a certain point in that development. We have the
ideals which we have because we stand at that point at which we do. The
men who come after us will have a worthier ideal than we do. Again, to
say that Jesus in his words and conduct expressed in its totality the
eternal ethical ideal, would make of his life something different from
the real, human life. Every real, human life is lived within certain
actual antitheses which call out certain qualities and do not call out
others. They demand certain reactions and not others. This is the
concrete element without which nothing historical can be conceived. To
say that Jesus lived in entire conformity to the ethical ideal so far as
we are able to conceive it, and within the circumstances which his own
time and place imposed, is the most that we can say. But in any case,
Kant insists, the real object of our religious faith is not the historic
man, but the ideal of humanity well-pleasing to God. Since this ideal is
not of our own creation, but is given us in our super-sensible nature,
it may be conceived as the Son of God come down from heaven.

The turn of this last phrase is an absolutely characteristic one, and
brings out another quality of Kant's mind in dealing with the Christian
doctrines. They are to him but symbols, forms into which a variety of
meanings may be run. He had no great appreciation of the historical
element in doctrine. He had no deep sense of the social element and of
that for which Christian institutions stand. We may illustrate with that
which he says concerning Christ's vicarious sacrifice. Substitution
cannot take place in the moral world. Ethical salvation could not be
conferred through such a substitution, even if this could take place.
Still, the conception of the vicarious suffering of Christ may be taken
as a symbolical expression of the idea that in the pain of
self-discipline, of obedience and patience, the new man in us suffers,
as it were vicariously, for the old. The atonement is a continual
ethical process in the heart of the religious man. It is a grave defect
of Kant's religious philosophy, that it was so absolutely
individualistic. Had he realised more deeply than he did the social
character of religion and the meaning of these doctrines, not alone as
between man and God, but as between man and man, he surely would have
drawn nearer to that interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement
which has come more and more to prevail. This is the solution which
finds in the atonement of Christ the last and most glorious example of a
universal law of human life and history. That law is that no redemptive
good for men is ever secured without the suffering and sacrifice of
those who seek to confer that good upon their fellows. Kant was disposed
to regard the traditional forms of Christian doctrine, not as the old
rationalism had done, as impositions of a priesthood or inherently
absurd. He sought to divest them indeed of that which was speculatively
untrue, though he saw in them only symbols of the great moral truths
which lie at the heart of religion. The historical spirit of the next
fifty years was to teach men a very different way of dealing with these
same doctrines.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kant had said that the primary condition, fundamental not merely to
knowledge, but to all connected experience, is the knowing,
experiencing, thinking, acting self. It is that which says 'I,' the ego,
the permanent subject. But that is not enough. The knowing self demands
in turn a knowable world. It must have something outside of itself to
which it yet stands related, the object of knowledge. Knowledge is
somehow the combination of those two, the result of their co-operation.
How have we to think of this co-operation? Both Hume and Berkeley had
ended in scepticism as to the reality of knowledge. Hume was in doubt as
to the reality of the subject, Berkeley as to that of the object. Kant
dissented from both. He vindicated the undoubted reality of the
impression which we have concerning a thing. Yet how far that impression
is the reproduction of the thing as it is in itself, we can never
perfectly know. What we have in our minds is not the object. It is a
notion of that object, although we may be assured that we could have no
such notion were there no object. Equally, the notion is what it is
because the subject is what it is. We can never get outside the
processes of our own thought. We cannot know the thing as it is, the
_Ding-an-sich_, in Kant's phrase. We know only that there must be a
'thing in itself.'


FICHTE


Fichte asked, Why? Why must there be a _Ding-an-sich_? Why is not that
also the result of the activity of the ego? Why is not the ego, the
thinking subject, all that is, the creator of the world, according to
the laws of thought? If so much is reduced to idea, why not all? This
was Fichte's rather forced resolution of the old dualism of thought and
thing. It is not the denial of the reality of things, but the assertion
that their ideal element, that part of them which is not mere 'thing,'
the action and subject of the action, is their underlying reality.
According to Kant things exist in a world beyond us. Man has no faculty
by which he can penetrate into that world. Still, the farther we follow
Kant in his analysis the more does the contribution to knowledge from
the side of the mind tend to increase, and the more does the factor in
our impressions from the side of things tend to fade away. This basis of
impression being wholly unknowable is as good as non-existent for us.
Yet it never actually disappears. There would seem to be inevitable a
sort of kernel of matter or prick of sense about which all our thoughts
are generated. Yet this residue is a vanishing quantity. This seemed to
Fichte to be a self-contradiction and a half-way measure. Only two
positions appeared to him thorough-going and consequent. Either one
posits as fundamental the thing itself, matter, independent of any
consciousness of it. So Spinoza had taught. Or else one takes
consciousness, the conscious subject, independent of any matter or thing
as fundamental. This last Fichte claimed to be the real issue of Kant's
thought. He asserts that from the point of view of the thing in itself
we can never explain knowledge. We may be as skilful as possible in
placing one thing behind another in the relation of cause to effect. It
is, however, an unending series. It is like the cosmogony of the Eastern
people which fabled that the earth rests upon the back of an elephant.
The elephant stands upon a tortoise. The question is, upon what does the
tortoise stand? So here, we may say, in the conclusive manner in which
men have always said, that God made the world. Yet sooner or later we
come to the child's question: Who made God? Fichte rightly replied: 'If
God is for us only an object of knowledge, the _Ding-an-sich_ at the end
of the series, there is no escape from the answer that man, the thinker,
in thinking God made him.' All the world, including man, is but the
reflexion, the revelation in forms of the finite, of an unceasing action
of thought of which the ego is the object. Nothing more paradoxical than
this conclusion can be imagined. It seems to make the human subject, the
man myself, the creator of the universe, and the universe only that
which I happen to think it to be.

This interpretation was at first put upon Fichte's reasoning with such
vigour that he was accused of atheism. He was driven from his chair in
Jena. Only after several years was he called to a corresponding post in
Berlin. Later, in his _Vocation of Man_, he brought his thought to
clearness in this form: 'If God be only the object of thought, it
remains true that he is then but the creation of man's thought. God is,
however, to be understood as subject, as the real subject, the
transcendent thinking and knowing subject, indwelling in the world and
making the world what it is, indwelling in us and making us what we are.
We ourselves are subjects only in so far as we are parts of God. We
think and know only in so far as God thinks and knows and acts and lives
in us. The world, including ourselves, is but the reflection of the
thought of God, who thus only has existence. Neither the world nor we
have existence apart from him.'

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born at Rammenau in 1762. His father was a
ribbon weaver. He came of a family distinguished for piety and
uprightness. He studied at Jena, and became an instructor there in 1793.
He was at first a devout disciple of Kant, but gradually separated
himself from his master. There is a humorous tale as to one of his early
books which was, through mistake of the publisher, put forth without the
author's name. For a brief time it was hailed as a work of Kant--his
_Critique of Revelation_. Fichte was a man of high moral enthusiasm,
very uncompromising, unable to put himself in the place of an opponent,
in incessant strife. The great work of his Jena period was his
_Wissenschaftslehre_, 1794. His popular Works, _Die Bestimmung des
Menschen_ and _Anweisung zum seligen Leben_, belong to his Berlin
period. The disasters of 1806 drove him out of Berlin. Amidst the
dangers and discouragements of the next few years he wrote his famous
_Reden an die deutsche Nation_. He drew up the plan for the founding of
the University of Berlin. In 1810 he was called to be rector of the
newly established university. He was, perhaps, the chief adviser of
Frederick William III in the laying of the foundations of the
university, which was surely a notable venture for those trying years.
In the autumn of 1812 and again in 1813, when the hospitals were full of
sick and wounded after the Russian and Leipzig campaigns, Fichte and his
wife were unceasing in their care of the sufferers. He died of fever
contracted in the hospital in January 1814.

According to Fichte, as we have seen, the world of sense is the
reflection of our own inner activity. It exists for us as the sphere and
material of our duty. The moral order only is divine. We, the finite
intelligences, exist only in and through the infinite intelligence. All
our life is thus God's life. We are immortal because he is immortal. Our
consciousness is his consciousness. Our life and moral force is his, the
reflection and manifestation of his being, individuation of the infinite
reason which is everywhere present in the finite. In God we see the
world also in a new light. There is no longer any nature which is
external to ourselves and unrelated to ourselves. There is only God
manifesting himself in nature. Even the evil is only a means to good
and, therefore, only an apparent evil. We are God's immediate
manifestation, being spirit like himself. The world is his mediate
manifestation. The world of dead matter, as men have called it, does not
exist. God is the reality within the forms of nature and within
ourselves, by which alone we have reality. The duty to which a God
outside of ourselves could only command us, becomes a privilege to which
we need no commandment, but to the fulfilment of which, rather, we are
drawn in joy by the forces of our own being. How a man could, even in
the immature stages of these thoughts, have been persecuted for atheism,
it is not easy to see, although we may admit that his earlier forms of
statement were bewildering. When we have his whole thought before us we
should say rather that it borders on acosmic pantheism, for which
everything is God and the world does not exist.

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

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