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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Edward Caldwell Moore, by Edward Moore
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Edward Caldwell Moore
+       Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
+
+Author: Edward Moore
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2005 [EBook #15780]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE ***
+
+
+
+
+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 in
+religion, he represents a popular phase of thought. With all of this, it
+is strange to find a man of so much learning who had so little sympathy
+with the comparative study of religions, who was such a dogmatist on
+behalf of his own inadequate notion of revelation, the logical effect of
+whose teaching concerning the Church would be the revival of an
+institutionalism and externalism such as Protestantism has hardly known.
+
+Since Schleiermacher the German theologians had made the problem of the
+person of Christ the centre of discussion. In the same period the
+problem of the person of Christ had been the central point of debate in
+America. Here, as there, all the other points arranged themselves about
+this one. The new movement which went out from Ritschl took as its
+centre the work of Christ in redemption. This is obvious from the very
+title of Ritschl's great book, _Die Christliche Lehre von der
+Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung_. Of this work the first edition of the
+third and significant volume was published in 1874. Before that time the
+formal treatises on theology had followed a traditional order of topics.
+It had been assumed as self-evident that one should speak of a person
+before one talked of his work. It did not occur to the theologians that
+in the case of the divine person, at all events, we can securely say
+that we know something as to his work. Much concerning his person must
+remain a mystery to us, exactly because he is divine. Our safest course,
+therefore, would be to infer the unknown qualities of his person from
+the known traits of his work. Certainly this would be true as to the
+work of God in nature. This was not the way, however, in which the minds
+of theologians worked. The habit of dealing with conceptions as if they
+were facts had too deep hold upon them. So long as men believed in
+revelation as giving them, not primarily God and the transcendental
+world itself, but information about God and the transcendental, they
+naturally held that they knew as much of the persons of God and Christ
+as of their works.
+
+Schleiermacher had opened men's eyes to the fact that the great work of
+Christ in redemption is an inward one, an ethical and spiritual work,
+the transformation of character. He had said, not merely that the
+transformation of man's character follows upon the work of redemption.
+It is the work of redemption. The primary witness to the work of Christ
+is, therefore, in the facts of consciousness and history. These are
+capable of empirical scrutiny. They demand psychological investigation.
+When thus investigated they yield our primary material for any assertion
+we may make concerning God. Above all, it is the nature of Jesus, as
+learned on the evidence of his work in the hearts of men, which is our
+great revelation and source of inference concerning the nature of God.
+Instead of saying in the famous phrase, that the Christians think of
+Christ as God, we say that we are able to think of God, as a religious
+magnitude, in no other terms than in those of his manifestation and
+redemptive activity in Jesus.
+
+None since Kant, except extreme confessionalists, and those in
+diminishing degree, have held that the great effect of the work of
+Christ was upon the mind and attitude of God. Less and less have men
+thought of justification as forensic and judicial, a declaring sinners
+righteous in the eye of the divine law, the attribution of Christ's
+righteousness to men, so far at least as to relieve these last of
+penalty. This was the Anselmic scheme. Indeed, it had been Tertullian's.
+Less and less have men thought of reconciliation as that of an angry God
+to men, more and more as of alienated men with God. The phrases of the
+orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, Lutheran as well as Calvinistic,
+survive. More and more new meaning, not always consistent, is injected
+into them. No one would deny that the loftiest moral enthusiasm, the
+noblest sense of duty, animated the hearts of many who thought in the
+terms of Calvinism. The delineation of God as unreconciled, of the work
+and sufferings of Christ as a substitution, of salvation as a
+conferment, caused gratitude, tender devotion, heroic allegiance in
+some. It worked revulsion in others. It was protested against most
+radically by Kant, as indeed it had been condemned by many before him.
+For Kant the renovation of character was the essential salvation. Yet
+the development of his doctrine was deficient through the
+individualistic form which it took. Salvation was essentially a change
+in the individual mind, brought about through the practical reason, and
+having its ideal in Jesus. Yet for Kant our salvation had no closer
+relation to the historic revelation in Jesus. Furthermore, so much was
+this change an individual issue that we may say that the actualisation
+of redemption would be the same for a given man, were he the only man in
+the universe. To hold fast to the ethical idealism of Kant, and to
+overcome its subjectivity and individualism, was the problem.
+
+The reference to experience which underlies all that was said above was
+particularly congruous with the mood of an age grown weary of
+Hegelianism and much impressed with the value of the empirical method in
+all the sciences. Another great contention of our age is for the
+recognition of the value of what is social. Its emphasis is upon that
+which binds men together. Salvation is not normally achieved except in
+the life of a man among and for his fellows. It is by doing one's duty
+that one becomes good. One is saved, not in order to become a citizen of
+heaven by and by, but in order to be an active citizen of a kingdom of
+real human goodness here and now. In reality no man is being saved,
+except as he does actively and devotedly belong to that kingdom. The
+individual would hardly be in God's eyes worth the saving, except in
+order that he might be the instrumentality of the realisation of the
+kingdom. Those are ideas which it is possible to exaggerate in statement
+or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their quality as
+half-truths. But it is hardly possible to exaggerate their significance
+as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness, inadequacy, and
+artificiality both of the official statement and of the popular
+apprehension of Christianity. These ideas appeal to men in our time.
+They are popular because men think them already. Men are pleased, even
+when somewhat incredulous, to learn that Christianity will bear this
+social interpretation. Most Christians are in our time overwhelmingly
+convinced that in this direction lies the interpretation which
+Christianity must bear, if it is to do the work and meet the needs of
+the age. Its consonance with some of the truths underlying socialism may
+account, in a measure, for the influence which the Ritschlian theology
+has had.
+
+As was indicated, Ritschl's epoch-making book bears the title, _The
+Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation_. The book might
+be described in the language of the schools as a monograph upon one
+great dogma of the Christian faith, around which, as the author treats
+it, all the other doctrines are arranged. The familiar topic of
+justification, of which Luther made so much, was thus given again the
+central place. What the book really offered was something quite
+different from this. It was a complete system of theology, but it
+differed from the traditional systems of theology. These had followed
+helplessly a logical scheme which begins with God as he is in himself
+and apart from any knowledge which we have of him. They then slowly
+proceeded to man and sin and redemption, one empirical object and two
+concrete experiences which we may know something about. Ritschl reversed
+the process. He aimed to begin with certain facts of life. Such facts
+are sin and the consciousness of forgiveness, awareness of restoration
+to the will and power of goodness, the gift of love and of a spirit
+which can feel itself victorious even in the midst of ills in life,
+confidence that this life is not all. These phrases, taken together,
+would describe the consciousness of salvation. This consciousness of sin
+and salvation is a fact in individual men. It has evidently been a fact
+in the life of masses of men for many generations. The facts have thus a
+psychology and a history from which reflection on the phenomenon of
+faith must take its departure. There is no reason why, upon this basis,
+and until it departs from the scientific methods which are given with
+the nature of its object, theology should not be as truly a science as
+is any other known among men.
+
+This science starts with man, who in the object of many other sciences.
+It confines itself to man in this one aspect of his relation to moral
+life and to the transcendent meaning of the universe. It notes the fact
+that men, when awakened, usually have the sense of not being in harmony
+with the life of the universe or on the way to realisation of its
+meaning. It notes the fact that many men have had the consciousness of
+progressive restoration to that harmony. It inquires as to the process
+of that restoration. It asks as to the power of it. It discovers that
+that power is a personal one. Men have believed that this power has been
+exerted over them, either in personal contact, or across the ages and
+through generations of believers, by one Jesus, whom they call Saviour.
+They have believed that it was God who through Jesus saved them. Jesus'
+consciousness thus became to them a revelation of God. The thought leads
+on to the consideration of that which a saved man does, or ought to do,
+in the life of the world and among his fellows, of the institution in
+which this attitude of mind is cherished and of the sum total of human
+institutions and relations of which the saved life should be the inward
+force. There is room even for a clause in which to compress the little
+that we know of anything beyond this life. We have written in
+unconventional words. There is no one place, either in Ritschl's work or
+elsewhere, where this grand and simple scheme stands together in one
+context. This is unfortunate. Were this the case, even wayfaring men
+might have understood somewhat better than they have what Ritschl was
+aiming at.
+
+It is a still greater pity that the execution of the scheme should have
+left so much to be desired. That this execution would prove difficult
+needs hardly to be said. That it could never be the work of one man is
+certainly true. To have had so great an insight is title enough to fame.
+Ritschl falls off from his endeavour as often as did
+Schleiermacher--more often and with less excuse. The might of the past
+is great. The lumber which he meekly carries along with him is
+surprising, as one feels his lack of meekness in the handling of the
+lumber which he recognised as such. The putting of new wine into old
+bottles is so often reprobated by Ritschl that the reader is justly
+surprised when he nevertheless recognises the bottles. The system is not
+'all of one piece'--distinctly not. There are places where the rent is
+certainly made worse by the old cloth on the new garment. The work taken
+as a whole is so bewildering that one finds himself asking, 'What is
+Ritschl's method?' If what is meant is not a question of detail, but of
+the total apprehension of the problem to be solved, the apprehension
+which we strove to outline above, then Ritschl's courageous and complete
+inversion of the ancient method, his demand that we proceed from the
+known to the unknown, is a contribution so great that all shortcomings
+in the execution of it are insignificant. His first volume deals with
+the history of the doctrine of justification, beginning with Anselm and
+Abelard. In it Ritschl's eminent qualities as historian come out. In it
+also his prejudices have their play. The second volume deals with the
+Biblical foundations for the doctrine. Ritschl was bred in the Tübingen
+school. Yet here is much forced exegesis. Ritschl's positivistic view of
+the Scripture and of the whole question of revelation, was not congruous
+with his well-learned biblical criticism. The third volume is the
+constructive one. It is of immeasurably greater value than the other
+two. It is this third volume which has frequently been translated.
+
+In respect of his contention against metaphysics it is hardly necessary
+that we should go into detail. With his empirical and psychological
+point of departure, given above, most men will find themselves in entire
+sympathy. The confusion of religion, which is an experience, with dogma
+which is reasoning about it, and the acceptance of statements in
+Scripture which are metaphysical in nature, as if they were religious
+truths--these two things have, in time past, prevented many earnest
+thinkers from following the true road. When it comes to the constructive
+portion of his work, it is, of course, impossible for Ritschl to build
+without the theoretical supports which philosophy gives, or to follow up
+certain of the characteristic magnitudes of religion without following
+them into the realm of metaphysics, to which, quite as truly as to that
+of religion, they belong. It would be unjust to Ritschl to suppose that
+these facts were hidden from him.
+
+As to his attitude toward mysticism, there is a word to say. In the long
+history of religious thought those who have revolted against
+metaphysical interpretation, orthodox or unorthodox, have usually taken
+refuge in mysticism. Hither the prophet Augustine takes refuge when he
+would flee the ecclesiastic Augustine, himself. The Brethren of the Free
+Spirit, Tauler, à Kempis, Suso, the author of the _Theologia Germanica_,
+Molinos, Madame Gayon, illustrate the thing we mean. Ritschl had seen
+much of mysticism in pietist circles. He knew the history of the
+movement well. What impressed his sane mind was the fact that unhealthy
+minds have often claimed, as their revelation from God, an experience
+which might, with more truth, be assigned to almost any other source. He
+desired to cut off the possibility of what seemed to him often a tragic
+delusion. The margin of any mystical movement stretches out toward
+monstrosities and absurdities. For that matter, what prevents a Buddhist
+from declaring his thoughts and feelings to be Christianity? Indeed,
+Ritschl asks, why is not Buddhism as good as such Christianity? He is,
+therefore, suspicious of revelations which have nothing by which they
+can be measured and checked.
+
+The claim of mystics that they came, in communion with God, to the point
+where they have no need of Christ, seemed to him impious. There is no
+way of knowing that we are in fellowship with God, except by comparing
+what we feel that this fellowship has given us, with that which we
+historically learn that the fellowship with God gave to Christ. This is
+the sense and this the connexion in which Ritschl says that we cannot
+come to God save in and through the historic Christ as he is given us in
+the Gospels. The inner life, at least, which is there depicted for us
+is, in this outward and authoritative sense, our norm and guide.
+
+Large difficulties loom upon the horizon of this positivistic insistence
+upon history. Can we know the inner life of Christ well enough to use it
+thus as test in every, or even in any case? Does not the use of such a
+test, or of any test in this external way, take us out of the realm of
+the religion of the spirit? Men once said that the Church was their
+guide. Others said the Scripture was their guide. Now, in the sense of
+the outwardness of its authority, we repudiate even this. It rings
+devoutly if we say Christ is our guide. Yet, as Ritschl describes this
+guidance, in the exigency of his contention against mysticism, have we
+anything different? What becomes of Confucianists and Shintoists, who
+have never heard of the historic Christ? And all the while we have the
+sense of a query in our minds. Is it open to any man to repudiate
+mysticism absolutely and with contumely, and then leave us to discover
+that he does not mean mysticism as historians of every faith have
+understood it, but only the margin of evil which is apparently
+inseparable from it? That margin of evil others see and deplore. Against
+it other remedies have been suggested, as, for example, intelligence.
+Some would feel that in Ritschl's remedy the loss is greater than the
+gain.
+
+This historical character of revelation is so truly one of the fountain
+heads of the theology which takes its rise in Ritschl, that it deserves
+to be considered somewhat more at length. The Ritschlian movement has
+engaged a generation of more or less notable thinkers in the period
+since Ritschl's death. These have dissented at many points from
+Ritschl's views, diverged from his path and marked out courses of their
+own. We shall do well in the remainder of this chapter to attempt the
+delineation in terms, not exclusively of Ritschl, but of that which may
+with some laxity be styled Ritschlianism. The value judgments of
+religion indicate only the subjective form of religious knowledge, as
+the Ritschlians understand it. Faith, however, does not invent its own
+contents. Historical facts, composing the revelation, actually exist,
+quite independent of the use which the believer makes of them. No group
+of thinkers have more truly sought to draw near to the person of the
+historic Jesus. The historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, is the divine
+revelation. That sums up this aspect of the Ritschlian position. Some
+negative consequences of this position we have already noted. Let us
+turn to its positive significance.
+
+Herrmann is the one of the Ritschlians who has dealt with this matter
+not only with great clearness, but also with deep Christian feeling in
+his _Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_, 1886, and notably in his address,
+_Der Begriff der Offenbarung_, 1887. If the motive of religion were an
+intellectual curiosity, a verbal communication would suffice. As it is a
+practical necessity, this must be met by actual impulse in life. That
+passing out of the unhappiness of sin, into the peace and larger life
+which is salvation, does indeed imply the movement of God's spirit on
+our hearts, in conversion and thereafter. This is essentially mediated
+to us through the Scriptures, especially through those of the New
+Testament, because the New Testament contains the record of the
+personality of Jesus. In that our personality is filled with the spirit
+which breathes in him, our salvation is achieved. The image of Jesus
+which we receive acts upon us as something indubitably real. It
+vindicates itself as real, in that it takes hold upon our manhood. Of
+course, this assumes that the Church has been right in accepting the
+Gospels as historical. Herrmann candidly faces this question. Not every
+word or deed, he says, which is recorded concerning Jesus, belongs to
+this central and dynamic revelation of which we speak. We do not help
+men to see Jesus in a saving way if, on the strength of accounts in the
+New Testament, we insist concerning Jesus that he was born of a virgin,
+that he raised the dead, that he himself rose from the dead. We should
+not put these things before men with the declaration that they must
+assent to them. We must not try to persuade ourselves that that which
+acted upon the disciples as indubitably real must of necessity act
+similarly upon us. We are to allow ourselves to be seized and uplifted
+by that which, in our position, touches us as indubitably real. This is,
+in the first place, the moral character of Jesus. It is his inner life
+which, on the testimony of the disciples, meets us as something real and
+active in the world, as truly now as then. What are some facts of this
+inner life? The Jesus of the New Testament shows a firmness of religious
+conviction, a clearness of moral judgment, a purity and force of will,
+such as are not found united in any other figure in history. We have the
+image of a man who is conscious that he does not fall short of the ideal
+for which he offers himself. It is this consciousness which is yet
+united in him with the most perfect humility. He lives out his life and
+faces death in a confidence and independence which have never been
+approached. He has confidence that he can lift men to such a height that
+they also will partake with him in the highest good, through their full
+surrender to God and their life of love for their fellows.
+
+It is clear that Herrmann aims to bring to the front only those elements
+in the life of Jesus which are likely to prove most effectual in meeting
+the need and winning the faith of the men of our age. He would cast into
+the background those elements which are likely to awaken doubt and to
+hinder the approach of men's souls to God. For Herrmann himself the
+virgin birth has the significance that the spiritual life of Jesus did
+not proceed from the sinful race. But Herrmann admits that a man could
+hold even that without needing to allege that the physical life of Jesus
+did not come into being in the ordinary way. The distinction between the
+inner and outward life of Jesus, and the declaration that belief in the
+former alone is necessary, has the result of thus ridding us of
+questions which can scarcely fail to be present to the mind of every
+modern man. Yet it would be unjust to imply that this is the purpose.
+Quite the contrary, the distinction is logical for this theology.
+Redemption is an affair of the inner life of a man. It is the force of
+the inner life of the Redeemer which avails for it. It is from the
+belief that such an inner and spiritual life was once realised here on
+earth, that our own faith gathers strength, and gets guidance in the
+conflict for the salvation of our souls. The belief in the historicity
+of such an inner life is necessary. So Harnack also declares in his
+_Wesen des Christenthums_, 1900. It is noteworthy that in this connexion
+neither of these writers advances to a form of speculation concerning
+the exalted Christ, which in recent years has had some currency.
+According to this doctrine, there is ascribed to the risen and ascended
+Jesus an existence with God which is thought of in terms different from
+those which we associate with the idea of immortality. In other words,
+this continued existence of Christ as God is a counterpart of that
+existence before the incarnation, which the doctrine of the
+pre-existence alleged. But surely this speculation can have no better
+standing than that of the pre-existence.
+
+Sin in the language of religion is defection from the law of God. It is
+the transgression of the divine command. In what measure, therefore, the
+life of man can be thought of as sinful, depends upon his knowledge of
+the will of God. In Scripture, as in the legends of the early history of
+the race, this knowledge stands in intimate connexion with the witness
+to a primitive revelation. This thought has had a curious history. The
+ideas of mankind concerning God and his will have grown and changed as
+much as have any other ideas. The rudimentary idea of the good is
+probably of social origin. It first emerges in the conflict of men one
+with another. As the personalised ideal of conduct, the god then reacts
+upon conduct, as the conduct reacts upon the notion of the god. Only
+slowly has the ideal of the good been clarified. Only slowly have the
+gods been ethicised. 'An honest God is the noblest work of man.' The
+moralising and spiritualising of the idea of Jahve lies right upon the
+face of the Old Testament. The ascent of man on his ethical and
+spiritual side is as certain as is that on his physical side. Long
+struggle upward through ignorance, weakness, sin, gradual elevating of
+the standard of what ought to he, growingly successful effort to conform
+to that standard--this is what the history of the race has seen.
+
+Athwart this lies the traditional dogma. The dogma took up into itself a
+legend of the childhood of the world. It elaborated that which in
+Genesis is vague and poetic into a vast scheme which has passed as a
+sacred philosophy of history. It postulated an original revelation. It
+affirmed the created state of man as one of holiness before a fall. To
+the framers of the dogma, if sin is the transgression of God's will,
+then it must be in light of a revelation of that will. In the Scriptures
+we have vague intimations concerning God's will, growingly clearer
+knowledge of that will, evolving through history to Jesus. In the dogma
+we have this grand assumption of a paradisaic state of perfectness in
+which the will of God was from the beginning perfectly known.
+
+In the Platonic, as in the rabbinic, speculation the idea must precede
+the fact. Every step of progress is a defection from that idea. The
+dogma suffers from an insoluble contradiction within itself. It aims to
+give us the point of departure by which we are to recognise the nature
+of sin. At the same moment it would describe the perfection of man at
+which God has willed that by age-long struggle he should arrive. Now, if
+we place this perfection at the beginning of human history, before all
+human self-determination, we divest it of ethical quality. Whatever else
+it may be, it is not character. On the other hand, if we would make this
+perfection really that of moral character, then we cannot place it at
+the beginning of human history, but far down the course of the evolution
+of the higher human traits, of the consciousness of sin and of the
+struggle for redemption. It is not revelation from God, but naïve
+imagination, later giving place to adventurous speculation concerning
+the origin of the universe, which we have in the doctrine of the
+primeval perfection of man. We do not really make earnest with our
+Christian claim that in Jesus we have our paramount revelation, until we
+admit this. It is through Jesus, and not from Adam that we know sin.
+
+So we might go on to say that the dogma of inherited guilt is a
+contradiction in terms. Disadvantage may be inherited, weakness,
+proclivity to sin, but not guilt, not sin in the sense of that which
+entails guilt. What entails guilt is action counter to the will of God
+which we know. That is always the act of the individual man myself. It
+cannot by any possibility be the act of another. It may be the
+consequence of the sins of my ancestors that I do moral evil without
+knowing it to be such. Even my fellows view this as a mitigation, if not
+as an exculpation. The very same act, however, which up to this point
+has been only an occasion for pity, becomes sin and entails guilt, when
+it passes through my own mind and will as a defection from a will of God
+in which I believe, and as a righteousness which I refuse. The confusion
+of guilt and sin in order to the inclusion of all under the need of
+salvation, as in the Augustinian scheme, ended in bewilderment and
+stultification of the moral sense. It caused men to despair of
+themselves and gravely to misrepresent God. It is no wonder if in the
+age of rationalism this dogma was largely done away with. The religious
+sense of sin was declared to be an hallucination. Nothing is more
+evident in the rationalist theology than its lack of the sense of sin.
+This alone is sufficient explanation of the impotency and inadequacy of
+that theology. Kant's doctrine of radical evil testifies to his deep
+sense that the rationalists were wrong. He could see also the
+impossibility of the ancient view. But he had no substitute. Hegel, much
+as he prided himself upon the restoration of dogma, viewed evil as only
+relative, good in the making. Schleiermacher made a beginning of
+construing the thought of sin from the point of view of the Christian
+consciousness. Ritschl was the first consistently to carry out
+Schleiermacher's idea, placing the Christian consciousness in the centre
+and claiming that the revelation of the righteousness of God and of the
+perfection of man is in Jesus. All men being sinners, there is a vast
+solidarity, which he describes as the Kingdom of Evil and sets over
+against the Kingdom of God, yet not so that the freedom or
+responsibility of man is impaired. God forgives all sin save that of
+wilful resistance to the spirit of the good. That is, Ritschl regards
+all sin, short of this last, as mainly ignorance and weakness. It is
+from Ritschl, and more particularly from Kaftan, that the phrases have
+been mainly taken which served as introduction to this paragraph.
+
+For the work of God through Christ, in the salvation of men from the
+guilt and power of sin, various terms have been used. Different aspects
+of the work have been described by different names. Redemption,
+regeneration, justification, reconciliation and election or
+predestination--these are the familiar words. This is the order in which
+the conceptions stand, if we take them as they occur in consciousness.
+Election then means nothing more than the ultimate reference to God of
+the mystery of an experience in which the believer already rejoices. On
+the other hand, in the dogma the order is reversed. Election must come
+first, since it is the decree of God upon which all depends. Redemption
+and reconciliation have, in Christian doctrine, been traditionally
+regarded as completed transactions, waiting indeed to be applied to the
+individual or appropriated by him through faith, but of themselves
+without relation to faith. Reconciliation was long thought of as that of
+an angry God to man. Especially was this last the characteristic view of
+the West, where juristic notions prevailed. Origen talked of a right of
+the devil over the soul of man until bought off by the sacrifice of
+Christ. This is pure paganism, of course. The doctrine of Anselm marks a
+great advance. It runs somewhat thus: The divine honour is offended in
+the sin of man. Satisfaction corresponding to the greatness of the guilt
+must be rendered. Man is under obligation to render this satisfaction;
+yet he is unable so to do. A sin against God is an infinite offence. It
+demands an infinite satisfaction. Man can render no satisfaction which
+is not finite. The way out of this dilemma is the incarnation of the
+divine Logos. For the god-man, as man, is entitled to bring this
+satisfaction for men. On the other hand, as God he is able so to do. In
+his death this satisfaction is embodied. He gave his life freely. God
+having received satisfaction through him demands nothing more from us.
+
+Abelard had, almost at the same time with Anselm, interpreted the death
+of Christ in far different fashion. It was a revelation of the love of
+God which wins men to love in turn. This notion of Abelard was far too
+subtle. The crass objective dogma of Anselm prevailed. The death of
+Christ was a sacrifice. The purpose was the propitiation of an angry
+God. The effect was that, on the side of God, a hindrance to man's
+salvation was removed. The doctrine accurately reflects the feudal ideas
+of the time which produced it. In Grotius was done away the notion of
+private right, which lies at the basis of the theory of Anselm. That of
+public duty took its place. A sovereign need not stand upon his offended
+honour, as in Anselm's thought. Still, he cannot, like a private
+citizen, freely forgive. He must maintain the dignity of his office, in
+order not to demoralise the world. The sufferings of Christ did not
+effect a necessary private satisfaction. They were an example which
+satisfied the moral order of the world. Apart from this change, the
+conception remains the same.
+
+As Kaftan argues, we can escape the dreadful externality and
+artificiality of this scheme, only as redemption and regeneration are
+brought back to their primary place in consciousness. These are the
+initial experiences in which we become aware of God's work through
+Christ in us and for us. The reconciliation is of us. The redemption is
+from our sins. The regeneration is to a new moral life. Through the
+influence of Jesus, reconciled on our part to God and believing in His
+unchanging love to us, we are translated into God's kingdom and live for
+the eternal in our present existence. Redemption is indeed the work of
+God through Christ, but it has intelligible parallel in the awakening of
+the life of the mind, or again of the spirit of self-sacrifice, through
+the personal influence of the wise and good. Salvation begins in such an
+awakening through the personal influence of the wisest and best. It is
+transformation of our personality through the personality of Jesus, by
+the personal God of truth, of goodness and of love. All that which God
+through Jesus has done for us is futile, save as we make the
+actualisation of our deliverance from sin our continuous and unceasing
+task. When this connexion of thought is broken through, we transfer the
+whole matter of salvation from the inner to the outer world and make of
+it a transaction independent of the moral life of man.
+
+Justification and reconciliation also are primarily acts and gifts of
+God. Justification is a forensic act. The sense is not that in
+justification we are made just. We are, so to say, temporarily thus
+regarded, not that leniency may become the occasion of a new offence,
+but that in grateful love we may make it the starting point of a new
+life. We must justify our justification. It is easy to see the
+objections to such a course on the part of a civil judge. He must
+consider the rights of others. It was this which brought Grotius and the
+rest, with the New England theologians down to Park, to feel that
+forgiveness could not be quite free. If we acknowledge that this
+symbolism of God as judge or sovereign is all symbolism, mere figure of
+speech, not fact at all, then that objection--and much else--falls away.
+If we assert that another figure of speech, that of God as Father, more
+perfectly suggests the relation of God and man, then forgiveness may be
+free. Then justification and forgiveness are only two words for one and
+the same idea. Then the nightmare of a God who would forgive and cannot,
+of a God who will forgive but may not justify until something further
+happens, is all done away. Then the relation of the death of Jesus to
+the forgiveness of our sins cannot be other than the relation of his
+life to that forgiveness. Both the one and the other are a revelation of
+the forgiving love of God. We may say that in his death the whole
+meaning of his life was gathered. We may say that his death was the
+consummation of his life, that without it his life would not have been
+what it is. This is, however, very far from being the ordinary statement
+of the relation of Jesus' death, either to his own life or to the
+forgiveness of our sins.
+
+The doctrinal tradition made much also of the deliverance from
+punishment which follows after the forgiveness of sin. In fact, in many
+forms of the dogma, it has been the escape from punishment which was
+chiefly had in mind. Along with the forensic notion of salvation we
+largely or wholly discard the notion of punishment. We retain only the
+sense that the consequence of continuing in sin is to become more
+sinful. God himself is powerless to prevent that. Punishment is
+immanent, vital, necessary. The penalty is gradually taken away if the
+sin itself is taken away--not otherwise. It returns with the sin, it
+continues in the sin, it is inseparable from the sin. Punishment is no
+longer the right word. Reward is not the true description of that
+growing better which is the consequence of being good. Reward or
+punishment as _quid pro quo_, as arbitrary assignments, as external
+equivalents, do not so much as belong to the world of ideas in which we
+move. For this view the idea that God laid upon Jesus penalties due to
+us, fades into thin air. Jesus could by no possibility have met the
+punishment of sin, except he himself had been a sinner. Then he must
+have met the punishment of his own sin and not that of others. That
+portion which one may gladly bear of the consequences of another's sin
+may rightfully be called by almost any other name. It cannot be called
+punishment since punishment is immanent. Even eternal death is not a
+judicial assignment for our obstinate sinfulness. Eternal death is the
+obstinate sinfulness, and the sinfulness the death.
+
+It must be evident that reconciliation can have, in this scheme, no
+meaning save that man's being reconciled to God. Jesus reveals a God who
+has no need to be reconciled to us. The alienation is not on the side of
+God. That, being alienated from God, man may imagine that God is hostile
+to him, is only the working of a familiar law of the human mind. The
+fiction of an angry God is the most awful survival among us of primitive
+paganism. That which Jesus by his revelation of God brought to pass was
+a true 'at-one-ment,' a causing of God and man to be at one again. To
+the word atonement, as currently pronounced, and as, until a half
+century ago, almost universally apprehended, the notion of that which is
+sacrificial attached. To the life and death of Jesus, as revelation of
+God and Saviour of men, we can no longer attach any sacrificial meaning
+whatsoever. There is indeed the perfectly general sense in which so
+beautiful a life and so heroic a death were, of course, a grand
+exemplification of self-sacrifice. Yet this is a sense so different from
+the other and in itself so obvious, that one hesitates to use the same
+word in the immediate context with that other, lest it should appear
+that the intention was to obscure rather than to make clear the meaning.
+For atonement in a sense different from that of reconciliation, we have
+no significance whatever. Reconciliation and atonement describe one and
+the same fact. In the dogma the words were as far as possible from being
+synonyms. They referred to two facts, the one of which was the means and
+essential prerequisite of the other. The vicarious sacrifice was the
+antecedent condition of the reconciling of God. In our thought it is not
+a reconciliation of God which is aimed at. No sacrifice is necessary. No
+sacrifice such as that postulated is possible. Of the reconciliation of
+man to God the only condition is the revelation of the love of God in
+the life and death of Jesus and the obedient acceptance of that
+revelation on the part of men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT
+
+
+It has been said that in Christian times the relation of philosophy and
+religion may be determined by the attitude of reason toward a single
+matter, namely, the churchly doctrine of revelation.[4] There are three
+possible relations of reason to this doctrine. First, it may be affirmed
+that the content of religion and theology is matter communicated to man
+in extraordinary fashion, truth otherwise unattainable, on which it is
+beyond the competence of reason to sit in judgment. We have then the two
+spheres arbitrarily separated. As regards their relation, theology is at
+first supreme. Reason is the handmaiden of faith. It is occupied in
+applying the principles which it receives at the hands of theology.
+These are the so-called Ages of Faith. Notably was this the attitude of
+the Middle Age. But in the long run either authoritative revelation,
+thus conceived, must extinguish reason altogether, or else reason must
+claim the whole man. After all, it is in virtue of his having some
+reason that man is the subject of revelation. He is continually asked to
+exercise his reason upon certain parts of the revelation, even by those
+who maintain that he must do so only within limits. It is only because
+there in a certain reasonableness in the conceptions of revealed
+religion that man has ever been able to make them his own or to find in
+them meaning and edification. This external relation of reason to
+revelation cannot continue. Nor can the encroachments of reason be met
+by temporary distinctions such as that between the natural and the
+supernatural. The antithesis to the natural is not the supernatural, but
+the unnatural. The antithesis to reason is not faith, but irrationality.
+The antithesis to human truth is not the divine truth. It is falsehood.
+
+[Footnote 4: Seth Pringle-Pattison, _The Philosophical Radicals_, p.
+216.]
+
+When men have made this discovery, a revulsion carries their minds to
+the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely, the position of
+extreme denial. It is an attitude of negation toward revelation, such as
+prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the
+eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges
+itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive
+religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of
+deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion
+of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely
+the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is
+that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable
+assumptions. Indeed, they may think it to be but the obstinate adherence
+to these assumptions minus the current morality. It is impossible that
+this shallow view should prevail. To overcome it, however, there is need
+of a philosophy which shall give not less, but greater scope to reason
+and at the same time an inward meaning to revelation.
+
+This brings us to the third possible position, to which the best
+thinkers of the nineteenth century have advanced. So long as deistic
+views of the relation of God to man and the world held the field,
+revelation meant something interjected _ab extra_ into the established
+order of things. The popular theology which so abhorred deism was yet
+essentially deistic in its notion of God and of his separation from the
+world. Men did not perceive that by thus separating God from the world
+they set up alongside of him a sphere and an activity to which his
+relations were transient and accidental. No wonder that other men,
+finding their satisfying activity within the sphere which was thus
+separated from God, came to think of this absentee God as an appendage
+to the scheme of things. But if man himself be inexplicable, save as
+sharing in the wider life of universal reason, if the process of history
+be realised as but the working out of an inherent divine purpose, the
+manifestation of an indwelling divine force, then revelation denotes no
+longer an interference with that evolution. It is a factor in that
+evolution. It is but the normal relation of the immanent spirit of God
+to the children of men at the crises of their fate. Then revelation is
+an experience of men precisely in the line and according to the method
+of all their nobler experiences. It is itself reasonable and moral.
+Inspiration is the normal and continuous effect of the contact of the
+God who is spirit with man who is spirit too. The relation is never
+broken. But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt.
+There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth of
+communion with God has been vouchsafed. To such persons and eras the
+religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to restrict
+the words 'revelation' and 'inspiration.' This restriction, however,
+signifies the separation of the grand experience from the ordinary, only
+in degree and not in kind. Such an experience was that of prophets and
+law-givers under the ancient covenant. Such an experience, in
+immeasurably greater degree, was that of Jesus himself. Such a
+turning-point in the life of the race was the advent of Christianity.
+The world has not been wrong in calling the documents of these
+revelations sacred books and in attributing to them divine authority. It
+has been largely wrong _in the manner in which it construed their
+authority_. It has been wholly wrong in imagining that the documents
+themselves were the revelation. They are merely the record _of a
+personal communion with the transcendent_. It was Lessing who first cast
+these fertile ideas into the soil of modern thought. They were never
+heartily taken up by Kant. One can think, however, with what enthusiasm
+men recurred to them after their postulates had been verified and the
+idea of God, of man and of the world which they implied, had been
+confirmed by Fichte and Schelling.
+
+In the philosophical movement, the outline of which we have suggested,
+what one may call the _nidus_ of a new faith in Scripture had been
+prepared. The quality had been forecast which the Scripture must be
+found to possess, if it were to retain its character as document of
+revelation. In those very same years the great movement of biblical
+criticism was gathering force which, in the course of the nineteenth
+century, was to prove by stringent literary and historical methods, what
+qualities the documents which we know as Scripture do possess. It was to
+prove in the most objective fashion that the Scripture does not possess
+those qualities which men had long assigned to it. It was to prove that,
+as a matter of fact, the literature does possess the qualities which the
+philosophic forecast, above hinted, required. It was thus actually to
+restore the Bible to an age in which many reasonable men had lost their
+faith in it. It was to give a genetic reconstruction of the literature
+and show the progress of the history which the Scripture enshrines.
+After a contest in which the very foundations of faith seemed to be
+removed, it was to afford a basis for a belief in Scripture and
+revelation as positive and secure as any which men ever enjoyed, with
+the advantage that it is a foundation upon which the modern man can and
+does securely build. The synchronism of the two endeavours is
+remarkable. The convergence upon one point, of studies starting, so to
+say, from opposite poles and having no apparent interest in common, is
+instructive. It is an illustration of that which Comte said, that all
+the great intellectual movements of a given time are but the
+manifestation of a common impulse, which pervades and possesses the
+minds of the men of that time.
+
+The attempt to rationalise the narrative of Scripture was no new one. It
+grew in intensity in the early years of the nineteenth century. The
+conflict which was presently precipitated concerned primarily the
+Gospels. It was natural that it should do so. These contain the most
+important Scripture narrative, that of the life of Jesus. Strauss had in
+good faith turned his attention to the Gospels, precisely because he
+felt their central importance. His generation was to learn that they
+presented also the greatest difficulties. The old rationalistic
+interpretation had started from the assumption that what we have in the
+gospel narrative is fact. Yet, of course, for the rationalists, the
+facts must be natural. They had the appearance of being supernatural
+only through the erroneous judgment of the narrators. It was for the
+interpreter to reduce everything which is related to its simple, natural
+cause. The water at Cana was certainly not turned into wine. It must
+have been brought by Jesus as a present and opened thus in jest. Jesus
+was, of course, begotten in the natural manner. A simple maiden must
+have been deceived. The execution of this task of the rationalising of
+the narratives by one Dr. Paulus, was the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
+claim. The most spiritual of the narratives, the finest flower of
+religious poetry, was thus turned into the meanest and most trivial
+incident without any religious significance whatsoever. The obtuseness
+of the procedure was exceeded only by its vulgarity.
+
+
+STRAUSS
+
+
+On the other hand, as Pfleiderer has said, we must remember the
+difficulty which beset the men of that age. Their general culture made
+it difficult for them to accept the miraculous element in the gospel
+narrative as it stood. Yet their theory of Scripture gave them no notion
+as to any other way in which the narratives might be understood. The men
+had never asked themselves how the narratives arose. In the preface to
+his _Leben Jesu_, Strauss said: 'Orthodox and rationalists alike
+proceed from the false assumption that we have always in the Gospels
+testimony, sometimes even that of eye-witnesses, to fact. They are,
+therefore, reduced to asking themselves what can have been the real and
+natural fact which is here witnessed to in such extraordinary way. We
+have to realise,' Strauss proceeds, 'that the narrators testify
+sometimes, not to outward facts, but to ideas, often most poetical and
+beautiful ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had
+unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions
+upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time
+and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not
+falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naïve,
+and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within
+the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in
+narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of
+spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic
+statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had appreciated that
+particular episodes, like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection,
+might have some such explanation as this. No one had ever undertaken to
+apply this method consistently, from one end to the other of the gospel
+narrative. What was of more significance, no one had clearly defined the
+conception of legend. Strauss was sure that in the application of this
+notion to certain portions of the Scripture no irreverence was shown. No
+moral taint was involved. Nothing which could detract from the reverence
+in which we hold the Scripture was implied. Rather, in his view, the
+history of Jesus is more wonderful than ever, when some, at least, of
+its elements are viewed in this way, when they are seen as the product
+of the poetic spirit, working all unconsciously at a certain level of
+culture and under the impulse of a great enthusiasm.
+
+There is no doubt that Strauss, who was at that time an earnest
+Christian, felt the relief from certain difficulties in the biography of
+Jesus which this theory affords. He put it forth in all sincerity as
+affording to others like relief. He said that while rationalists and
+supernaturalists alike, by their methods, sacrificed the divine content
+of the story and clung only to its form, his hypothesis sacrificed the
+historicity of the narrative form, but kept the eternal and spiritual
+truth. In his opinion, the lapse of a single generation was enough to
+give room for this process of the growth of the legendary elements which
+have found place in the written Gospels which we have. Ideas entertained
+by primitive Christians relative to their lost Master, have been, all
+unwittingly, transformed into facts and woven into the tale of his
+career. The legends of a people are in their basal elements never the
+work of a single individual. They are never intentionally produced. The
+imperceptible growth of a joint creative work of this kind was possible,
+however, only on the supposition that oral tradition was, for a time,
+the means of transmission of the reminiscences of Jesus. Strauss'
+explanation of his theory has been given above, to some extent in his
+own words. We may see how he understood himself. We may appreciate also
+the genuineness of the religious spirit of his work. At the same time
+the thorough-going way in which he applied his principle, the relentless
+march of his argument, the character of his results, must sometimes have
+been startling even to himself. They certainly startled others. The
+effect of his work was instantaneous and immense. It was not at all the
+effect which he anticipated. The issue of the furious controversy which
+broke out was disastrous both to Strauss' professional career and to his
+whole temperament and character.
+
+David Friedrich Strauss was born in 1808 in Ludwigsburg in Württemberg.
+He studied in Tübingen and in Berlin. He became an instructor in the
+theological faculty in Tübingen in 1832. He published his _Leben Jesu_
+in 1835. He was almost at once removed from his portion. In 1836 he
+withdrew altogether from the professorial career. His answer to his
+critics, written in 1837, was in bitter tone. More conciliatory was his
+book, _Über Vergängliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum_, published in
+1839. Indeed there were some concessions in the third edition of his
+_Leben Jesu_ in 1838, but these were all repudiated in 1840. His _Leben
+Jesu für das deutsche Volk_, published in 1866 was the effort to
+popularise that which he had done. It is, however, in point of method,
+superior to his earlier work, Comments were met with even greater
+bitterness. Finally, not long before his death in 1874, he published
+_Der Alte und der Neue Glaube_, in which he definitely broke with
+Christianity altogether and went over to materialism and pessimism.
+
+Pfleiderer, who had personal acquaintance with Strauss and held him in
+regard, once wrote: 'Strauss' error did not lie in his regarding some of
+the gospel stories as legends, and some of the narratives of the
+miraculous as symbols of ideal truths. So far Strauss was right. The
+contribution which he made is one which we have all appropriated and
+built upon. His error lay in his looking for those religious truths
+which are thus symbolised, outside of religion itself, in adventurous
+metaphysical speculations. He did not seek them in the facts of the
+devout heart and moral will, as these are illustrated in the actual life
+of Jesus.' If Strauss, after the disintegration in criticism of certain
+elements in the biography of Jesus, had given us a positive picture of
+Jesus as the ideal of religious character and ethical force, his work
+would indeed have been attacked. But it would have outlived the attack
+and conferred a very great benefit. It conferred a great benefit as it
+was, although not the benefit which Strauss supposed. The benefit which
+it really conferred was in its critical method, and not at all in its
+results.
+
+Of the mass of polemic and apologetic literature which Strauss' _Leben
+Jesu_ called forth, little is at this distance worth the mentioning.
+Ullmann, who was far more appreciative than most of his adversaries,
+points out the real weakness of Strauss' work. That weakness lay in the
+failure to draw any distinction between the historical and the mythical.
+He threatened to dissolve the whole history into myth. He had no sense
+for the ethical element in the personality and teaching of Jesus nor of
+the creative force which this must have exerted. Ullmann says with
+cogency that, according to Strauss, the Church created its Christ
+virtually out of pure imagination. But we are then left with the query:
+What created the Church? To this query Strauss has absolutely no answer
+to give. The answer is, says Ullmann, that the ethical personality of
+Jesus created the Church. This ethical personality is thus a supreme
+historic fact and a sublime historic cause, to which we must endeavour
+to penetrate, if need be through the veil of legend. The old
+rationalists had made themselves ridiculous by their effort to explain
+everything in some natural way. Strauss and his followers often appeared
+frivolous, since, according to them, there was little left to be
+explained. If a portion of the narrative presented a difficulty, it was
+declared mythical. What was needed was such a discrimination between the
+legendary and historical elements in the Gospels as could be reached
+only by patient, painstaking study of the actual historical quality and
+standing of the documents. No adequate study of this kind had ever been
+undertaken. Strauss did not undertake it, nor even perceive that it was
+to be undertaken. There had been many men of vast learning in textual
+and philological criticism. Here, however, a new sort of critique was
+applied to a problem which had but just now been revealed in all its
+length and breadth. The establishing of the principles of this
+historical criticism--the so-called Higher Criticism--was the herculean
+task of the generation following Strauss. To the development of that
+science another Tübingen professor, Baur, made permanent contribution.
+With Strauss himself, sadder than the ruin of his career, was the
+tragedy of the uprooting of his faith. This tragedy followed in many
+places in the wake of the recognition of Strauss' fatal half-truth.
+
+
+BAUR
+
+
+Baur, Strauss' own teacher in Tübingen, afterward famous as biblical
+critic and church-historian, said of Strauss' book, that through it was
+revealed in startling fashion to that generation of scholars, how little
+real knowledge they had of the problem which the Gospels present. To
+Baur it was clear that if advance was to be made beyond Strauss'
+negative results, the criticism of the gospel history must wait upon an
+adequate criticism of the documents which are our sources for that
+history. Strauss' failure had brought home to the minds of men the fact
+that there were certain preliminary studies which must needs be taken
+up. Meantime the other work must wait. As one surveys the literature of
+the next thirty years this fact stands out. Many apologetic lives of
+Jesus had to be written in reply to Strauss. But they are almost
+completely negligible. No constructive work was done in this field until
+nearly a generation had passed.
+
+Since all history, said Baur, before it reaches us must pass through the
+medium of a narrator, our first question as to the gospel history is
+not, what objective reality can be accorded to the narrative itself.
+There is a previous question. This concerns the relation of the
+narrative to the narrator. It might be very difficult for us to make up
+our minds as to what it was that, in a given case, the witness saw. We
+have not material for such a judgment. We have probably much evidence,
+up and down his writings, as to what sort of man the witness was, in
+what manner he would be likely to see anything and with what personal
+equation he would relate that which he saw. Baur would seem to have been
+the first vigorously and consistently to apply this principle to the
+gospel narratives. Before we can penetrate deeply into the meaning of an
+author we must know, if we may, his purpose in writing. Every author
+belongs to the time in which he lives. The greater the importance of his
+subject for the parties and struggles of his day, the safer is the
+assumption that both he and his work will bear the impress of these
+struggles. He will represent the interests of one or another of the
+parties. His work will have a tendency of some kind. This was one of
+Baur's oft-used words--the tendency of a writer and of his work. We must
+ascertain that tendency. The explanation of many things both in the form
+and substance of a writing would be given could we but know that. The
+letters of Paul, for example, are written in palpable advocacy of
+opinions which were bitterly opposed by other apostles. The biographies
+of Jesus suggest that they also represent, the one this tendency, the
+other that. We have no cause to assert that this trait of which we speak
+implies conscious distortion of the facts which the author would relate.
+The simple-minded are generally those least aware of the bias in the
+working of their own minds. It is obvious that until we have reckoned
+with such elements as these, we cannot truly judge of that which the
+Gospels say. To the elaboration of the principles of this historical
+criticism Baur gave the labour of his life. His biblical work alone
+would have been epoch-making.
+
+Ferdinand Christian Baur was born in 1793 in Schmieden, near Stuttgart.
+He became a professor in Tübingen in 1826 and died there in 1860. He was
+an ardent disciple of Hegel. His greatest work was surely in the field
+of the history of dogma. His works, _Die Christliche Lehre von der
+Vereöhnung_, 1838, _Die Christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und
+Menschwerdung Gottes_, 1841-1843, his _Lehrbuch der Christlichen
+Dogmengeschichte_, 1847, together constitute a contribution to which
+Harnack's work in our own time alone furnishes a parallel. Baur had
+begun his thorough biblical studies before the publication of Strauss'
+book. The direction of those studies was more than ever confirmed by his
+insight of the shortcomings of Strauss' work. Very characteristically
+also he had begun his investigations, not at the most difficult point,
+that of the Gospels, as Strauss had done, but at the easiest point, the
+Epistles of Paul. As early as 1831 he had published a tractate, _Die
+Christus-Partei in der Corinthischen Gemeinde_. In that book he had
+delineated the bitter contest between Paul and the Judaising element in
+the Apostolic Church which opposed Paul whithersoever he went. In 1835
+his disquisition, _Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe_, appeared. In the
+teachings of these letters he discovered the antithesis to the gnostic
+heresies of the second century. He thought also that the stage of
+organisation of the Church which they imply, accorded better with this
+supposition than with that of their apostolic authorship. The same
+general theme is treated in a much larger way in Baur's _Paulus, der
+Apostel Jesu Christi_, in 1845. Here the results of his study of the
+book of the Acts are combined with those of his inquiries as to the
+Pauline Epistles. In the history of the apostolic age men had been
+accustomed to see the evidence only of peace and harmony. Baur sought to
+show that the period had been one of fierce struggle, between the narrow
+Judaic and legalistic form of faith in the Messiah and that conception,
+introduced by Paul, of a world-religion free from the law. Out of this
+conflict, which lasted a hundred and fifty years, went forth the
+Catholic Church. The monuments of this struggle and witnesses of this
+process of growth are the New Testament writings, most of which were
+produced in the second century. The only documents which we have which
+were written before A.D. 70, were the four great Epistles of Paul, those
+to the Galatians, to the Romans, and to the Corinthians, together with
+the Apocalypse.
+
+Many details in Baur's view are now seen to have been overstated and
+others false. Yet this was the first time that a true historical method
+had been applied to the New Testament literature as a whole. Baur's
+contribution lay in the originality of his conception of Christianity,
+in his emphasis upon Paul, in his realisation of the magnitude of the
+struggle which Paul inaugurated against Jewish prejudices in the
+primitive Church. In his idea, the issue of that struggle was, on the
+one hand, the freeing of Christianity from Judaism and on the other, the
+developing of Christian thought into a system of dogma and of the
+scattered Christian communities into an organised Church. The Fourth
+Gospel contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the
+gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy. The
+Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily in the
+phenomenal world in the person of Jesus. It enters into conflict with
+the darkness and evil of the world. This speculation is but thinly
+clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus. That an account completely
+dominated by speculative motives gives but slight guarantee of
+historical truth, was for Baur self-evident. The author remains unknown,
+the age uncertain. The book, however, can hardly have appeared before
+the time of the Montanist movement, that is, toward the end of the
+second century. Scholars now rate far more highly than did Baur the
+element of genuine Johannine tradition which may lie behind the Fourth
+Gospel and account for its name. They do not find traces of Montanism or
+of paschal controversies. But the main contention stands. The Fourth
+Gospel represents the beginning of elaborate reflexion upon the life and
+work of Jesus. It is what it is because of the fusion of the ethical and
+spiritual content of the revelation in the personality of Jesus, with
+metaphysical abstractions and philosophical interpretation.
+
+Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he offered of
+the problem which the synoptic Gospels present. His opinions are of no
+interest except as showing that he too worked diligently upon a question
+which for a long time seemed only to grow in complexity and which has
+busied scholars practically from Baur's day to our own. His zeal here
+also to discover dogmatic purposes led him astray. The _Tendenzkritik_
+had its own tendencies. The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness.
+Baur had the kind of ear which hears grass grow. There is much
+overstrained acumen. Many radically false conclusions are reached by
+prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the last
+analysis is that of Hegel. Everything is to be explained on the
+principle of antithesis. Again, the assumption of conscious purpose in
+everything which men do or write is a grave exaggeration. It is often in
+contradiction of that wonderful unconsciousness with which men and
+institutions move to the fulfilment of a purpose for the good, the
+purpose of God, into which their own life is grandly taken up. To make
+each phase of such a movement the contribution of some one man's scheme
+or endeavour is, as was once said, to make God act like a professor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The method of this book is that it seeks to deal only with men who have
+inaugurated movements, or marked some turning-point in their course
+which has proved of more than usual significance. The compass of the
+book demands such a limitation. But by this method whole chapters in the
+life of learning are passed over, in which the substance of achievement
+has been the carrying out of a plan of which we have been able to note
+only the inception. There is a sense in which the carrying out of a plan
+is both more difficult and more worthy than the mere setting it in
+motion. When one thinks of the labour and patience which have been
+expended, for example, upon the problem of the Gospels in the past
+seventy years, those truths come home to us. When one reminds himself of
+the hypotheses which have been made but to be abandoned, which have yet
+had the value that they at least indicated the area within which
+solutions do not lie,--when one thinks of the wellnigh immeasurable toil
+by which we have been led to large results which now seem secure, one is
+made to realise that the conditions of the advance of science are, for
+theologians, not different from those which obtain for scholars who, in
+any other field, would establish truth and lead men. In a general way,
+however, it may be said that the course of opinion in these two
+generations, in reference to such questions as those of the dates and
+authorship of the New Testament writings, has been one of rather
+noteworthy retrogression from many of the Tübingen positions. Harnack's
+_Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1893, and his _Chronologie
+der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1897, present a marked contrast to
+Baur's scheme.
+
+
+THE CANON
+
+
+The minds of New Testament scholars in the last generation have been
+engaged with a question which, in its full significance, was hardly
+present to the attention of Baur's school. It is the question of the New
+Testament as a whole. It is the question as to the time and manner and
+motives of the gathering together of the separate writings into a canon
+of Scripture which, despite the diversity of its elements, exerted its
+influence as a unit and to which an authority was ascribed, which the
+particular writings cannot originally have had. When and how did the
+Christians come to have a sacred book which they placed on an equality
+with the Old Testament, which last they had taken over from the
+synagogue? How did they choose the writings which were to belong to this
+new collection? Why did they reject books which we know were read for
+edification in the early churches? Deeper even than the question of the
+growth of the collection is that of the growth of the apprehension
+concerning it. This apprehension of these twenty-seven different
+writings as constituting the sole document of Christian revelation,
+given by the Holy Spirit, the identical holy book of the Christian
+Church, gave to the book a significance altogether different from that
+which its constituent elements must have had for men to whom they had
+appeared as but the natural literary deposit of the religious movement
+of the apostolic age. This apprehension took possession of the mind of
+the Christian community. It was made the subject of deliverances by
+councils of the Church. How did this great transformation take place?
+Was it an isolated achievement, or was it part of a general movement?
+Did not this development of life in the Christian communities which gave
+them a New Testament belong to an evolution which gave them also the
+so-called Apostles' Creed and a monarchical organisation of the Church
+and the beginnings of a ritual of worship?
+
+It is clear that we have here a question of greatest moment. With the
+rise of this idea of the canon, with the assigning to this body of
+literature the character of Scripture, we have the beginning of the
+larger mastery which the New Testament has exerted over the minds and
+life of men. Compared with this question, investigations as to the
+authorship and as to the time, place and circumstance of the production
+of particular books, came, for the time, to occupy a secondary rank. As
+they have emerged again, they wear a new aspect and are approached in a
+different spirit. The writings are revealed as belonging to a far larger
+context, that of the whole body of the Christian literature of the age.
+It in no way follows from that which we have said that the body of
+documents, which ultimately found themselves together in the New
+Testament, have not a unity other than the outward one which was by
+consensus of opinion or conciliar decree imposed upon them. They do
+represent, in the large and in varying degrees, an inward and spiritual
+unity. There was an inspiration of the main body of these writings, the
+outward condition of which, at all events, was the nearness of their
+writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the consequence of which
+was the unique relation which the more important of these documents
+historically bore to the formation of the Christian Church. There was a
+heaven which lay about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly
+faded into the common light of day. That heaven was the spirit of the
+Master himself. The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the
+first pure illumination of that spirit. But the churchmen who made the
+canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave mistaken
+reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless were right. They
+gave what they considered sound external reasons. They alleged apostolic
+authorship. They should have been content with internal evidence and
+spiritual effectiveness. The apostles had come, in the mind of the early
+Church, to occupy a place of unique distinction. Writings long enshrined
+in affection for their potent influence, but whose origin had not been
+much considered, were now assigned to apostles, that they might have
+authority and distinction. The theory of the canon came after the fact.
+The theory was often wrong. The canon had been, in the main and in its
+inward principle, soundly constituted. Modern critics reversed the
+process. They began where the Church Fathers left off. They tore down
+first that which had been last built up. Modern criticism, too, passed
+through a period in which points like those of authorship and date of
+Gospels and Epistles seemed the only ones to be considered. The results
+being here often negative, complete disintegration of the canon seemed
+threatened, through discovery of errors in the processes by which the
+canon had been outwardly built up. Men realise now that that was a
+mistake.
+
+Two things have been gained in this discussion. There is first the
+recognition that the canon is a growth. The holy book and the conception
+of its holiness, as well, were evolved. Christianity was not primarily a
+book-religion save in the sense that almost all Christians revered the
+Old Testament. Other writings than those which we esteem canonical were
+long used in churches. Some of those afterward canonical were not used
+in all the churches. In similar fashion we have learned that identical
+statements of faith were not current in the earliest churches. Nor was
+there one uniform system of organisation and government. There was a
+time concerning which we cannot accurately use the word Church. There
+were churches, very simple, worshipping communities. But the Church, as
+outward magnitude, as triumphant organisation, grew. So there were many
+creeds or, at least, informally accredited and current beginnings of
+doctrine. By and by there was a formally accepted creed. So there were
+first dearly loved memorials of Jesus and letters of apostolic men. Only
+by and by was there a New Testament. The first gain is the recognition
+of this state of things. The second follows. It is the recognition that,
+despite a sense in which this literature is unique, there is also a
+sense in which it is but a part of the whole body of early Christian
+literature. From the exact and exhaustive study of the early Christian
+literature as a whole, we are to expect a clearer understanding and a
+juster estimate of the canonical part of it. It is not easy to say to
+whom we have to ascribe the discovery and elaboration of these truths.
+The historians of dogma have done much for this body of opinion. The
+historians of Christian literature have perhaps done more. Students of
+institutions and of the canon law have had their share. Baur had more
+than an inkling of the true state of things. But by far the most
+conspicuous teacher of our generation, in two at least of these
+particular fields, has been Harnack. In his lifelong labour upon the
+sources of Christian history, he had come upon this question of the
+canon again and again. In his _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_,
+1887-1890, 4te. Aufl., 1910, the view of the canon, which was given
+above, is absolutely fundamental. In his _Geschichte der altchristlichen
+Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1893, and _Chronologic der allchristlichen
+Literatur_, 1897-1904, the evidence is offered in rich detail. It was in
+his tractate, _Das Neue Testament um das Jahr_ 200, 1889, that he
+contended for the later date against Zahn, who had urged that the
+outline of the New Testament was established and the conception of it as
+Scripture present, by the end of the first century. Harnack argues that
+the decision practically shaped itself between the time of Justin
+Martyr, c. A.D. 150, and that of Irenæus, c. A.D. 180. The studies of
+the last twenty years have more and more confirmed this view.
+
+
+LIFE OF JESUS
+
+
+We said that the work of Strauss revealed nothing so clearly as the
+ignorance of his time concerning the documents of the early Christian
+movement. The labours of Baur and of his followers were directed toward
+overcoming this difficulty. Suddenly the public interest was stirred,
+and the earlier excitement recalled by the publication of a new life of
+Jesus. The author was a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, at one time a candidate
+for the priesthood in the Roman Church. He was a man of learning and
+literary skill, who made his _Vie de Jésus_, which appeared in 1863, the
+starting-point for a series of historical works under the general title,
+_Les Origines de Christianisme_. In the next year appeared Strauss'
+popular work, _Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk_. In 1864 was published
+also Weizsäcker's contribution to the life of Christ, his
+_Untersuchungen über die evangelische Geschichte_. To the same year
+belonged Schenkel's _Charakterbild Jesu_. In the years from 1867-1872
+appeared Keim's _Geschichte Jesu von Nazara_. There is something very
+striking in this recurrence to the topic. After ail, this was the point
+for the sake of which those laborious investigations had been
+undertaken. This was and is the theme of undying religious interest, the
+character and career of the Nazarene. Renan's philosophical studies had
+been mainly in English, studies of Locke and Hume. But Herder also had
+been his beloved guide. For his biblical and oriental studies he had
+turned almost exclusively to the Germans. There is a deep religious
+spirit in the work of the period of his conflict with the Church. The
+enthusiasm for Christ sustained him in his struggle. Of the days before
+he withdrew from the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant
+like a professor in Halle or Tübingen.' French was at that time a
+language much better known in the world at large, particularly the
+English-speaking world, than was German. Renan's book had great art and
+charm. It took a place almost at once as a bit of world-literature. The
+number of editions in French and of translations into other languages is
+amazing. Beyond question, the critical position was made known through
+Renan to multitudes who would never have been reached by the German
+works which were really Renan's authorities. It is idle to say with
+Pfleiderer that it is a pity that, having possessed so much learning,
+Renan had not possessed more. That is not quite the point. The book has
+much breadth and solidity of learning. Yet Renan has scarcely the
+historian's quality. His work is a work of art. It has the halo of
+romance. Imagination and poetical feeling make it in a measure what it
+is.
+
+Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany. He set out for the
+priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages and
+history. He made long sojourn in the East. He spoke of Palestine as
+having been to him a fifth Gospel. He became Professor of Hebrew in the
+_College de France_. He was suspended from his office in 1863, and
+permitted to read again only in 1871. He had formally separated himself
+from the Roman Church in 1845. He was a member of the Academy. His
+diction is unsurpassed. He died in 1894. In his own phrase, he sought to
+bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life
+of his people. He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then
+as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but
+doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to
+his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never
+was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes.
+He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of
+mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or
+an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet
+enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or
+period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than
+the scant records acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.
+
+Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate. This was the
+fact which, by all these biographies of Jesus, was brought home to men's
+minds. Keim's book, the most learned of those mentioned, is hardly more
+than a vast collection of material for the history of Jesus' age, which
+has now been largely superseded by Schürer's _Geschichte des Judischen
+Volkes im Zeitalier Jesu Christi_, 2 Bde., 1886-1890. There have been
+again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the great
+problem. Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the eighties lives
+of Jesus which, especially the former, are noteworthy in their treatment
+of the critical material. They do not for a moment face the question of
+the person of Christ. The same remark might be made, almost without
+exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in
+England and America. The best books of recent years are Albert Reville's
+_Jesus de Nazareth_, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's _Leben Jesu_, 1901. So
+great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they
+urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic recognition
+of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here rendered, in a
+calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling of his theme.
+Meantime new questions have arisen, questions of the relation of Jesus
+to Messianism, like those touched upon by Wrede in his _Das Messias
+Geheimniss in den Evangelien_, 1901, and questions as to the
+eschatological trait in Jesus' own teaching. Schweitzer's book, _Von
+Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung_, 1906, not
+merely sets forth this deeply interesting chapter in the history of the
+thought of modern men, but has also serious interpretative value in
+itself. For English readers Sanday's _Life of Christ in Recent
+Research_, 1907, follows the descriptive aspect, at least, of the same
+purpose with Schweitzer's book, covering, however, only the last twenty
+years.
+
+It is characteristic that Ritschl, notwithstanding his emphasis upon the
+historical Jesus, asserted the impossibility of a biography of Jesus.
+The understanding of Jesus is through faith. For Wrede, on the other
+hand, such a biography is impossible because of the nature of our
+sources. Not alone are they scant, but they are not biographical. They
+are apologetic, propagandist, interested in everything except those
+problems which a biographer must raise. The last few years have even
+conjured up the question whether Jesus ever lived. One may say with all
+simplicity, that the question has, of course, as much rightfulness as
+has any other question any man could raise. The somewhat extended
+discussion has, however, done nothing to make evident how it could
+arise, save in minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in
+historical research. The conditions which beset us when we ask for a
+biography of Jesus that shall answer scientific requirement are not
+essentially different from those which meet us in the case of any other
+personage equally remote in point of time, and equally woven about--if
+any such have been--by the love and devotion of men. Bousset's little
+book, _Was Wissen wir von Jesus?_ 1904, convinces a quiet mind that we
+know a good deal. Qualities in the personality of Jesus obviously worked
+in transcendent measure to call out devotion. No understanding of
+history is adequate which has no place for the unfathomed in
+personality. Exactly because we ourselves share this devotion, we could
+earnestly wish that the situation as to the biography of Jesus were
+other than it is.
+
+
+THE OLD TESTAMENT
+
+
+We have spoken thus far as if the whole biblical-critical problem had
+been that of the New Testament. In reality the same impulses which had
+opened up that question to the minds of men had set them working upon
+the problem of the Old Testament as well. We have seen how the
+Christians made for themselves a canon of the New Testament. By the
+force of that conception of the canon, and through the belief that,
+almost in a literal sense, God was the author of the whole book, the
+obvious differences among the writings had been obscured. Men forgot the
+evolution through which the writings had passed. The same thing had
+happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the
+rabbis before the Christian movement. When the Christians took over the
+Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book
+wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel
+had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation of the old
+covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament became a Christian
+book. Not merely were the Christian facts prophesied in the Old
+Testament, but its doctrines also were implied. Almost down to modern
+times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove
+doctrine and sustain theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are
+cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference. What we
+have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic
+Puritan divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.
+
+The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the
+one which we have described in reference to the New. Of course, elder
+scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic
+authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman Catholic
+scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of
+inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth
+views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a
+revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of
+considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which
+would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which
+would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth
+of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the
+religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the
+true relation of Judaism to Christianity.
+
+In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss' _Leben Jesu_ saw the
+light, Wilhelm Vatke published his _Religion des Alten Testaments_.
+Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in Berlin in 1830, was professor
+extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full
+professorship. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public
+attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work had
+caused. Reuss in Strassburg was working on the same lines, but published
+the main body of his results much later.
+
+The truth for which these scholars and others like them argued, worked
+its way slowly by force of its own merit. Perhaps it was due to this
+fact that the development of Old Testament critical views was subject to
+a fluctuation less marked than that which characterised the case of the
+New Testament. It is not necessary to describe the earlier stages of the
+discussion in Vatke's own terms. To his honour be it said that the views
+which he thus early enunciated were in no small degree identical with
+those which were in masterful fashion substantiated in Holland by Kuenen
+about 1870, in Germany by Wellhausen after 1878, and made known to
+English readers by Robertson Smith In 1881.
+
+Budde has shown in his _Kanon des Alten Testaments_, 1900, that the Old
+Testament which lies before us finished and complete, assumed its
+present form only as the result of the growth of several centuries. At
+the beginning of this process of the canonisation stands that strange
+event, the sudden appearance of a holy book of the law under King
+Josiah, in 621 B.C. The end of the process, through the decisions of the
+scribes, falls after the destruction of Jerusalem, possibly even in the
+second century. Lagarde seems to have proved that the rabbis of the
+second century succeeded in destroying all copies of the Scripture which
+differed from the standard then set up. This state of things has
+enormously increased a difficulty which was already great enough, that
+of the detection and separation of the various elements of which many of
+the books in this ancient literature are made up. Certain books of the
+New Testament also present the problem of the discrimination of elements
+of different ages, which have been wrought together into the documents
+as we now have them, in a way that almost defies our skill to disengage.
+The synoptic Gospels are, of course, the great example. The book of the
+Acts presents a problem of the same kind. But the Pentateuch, or rather
+Hexateuch, the historical books in less degree, the writings even of
+some of the prophets, the codes which formulate the law and ritual, are
+composites which have been whole centuries in the making and remaking.
+There was no such thing as right of authorship in ancient Israel, little
+of it in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popular or
+priestly property. Histories were newly narrated, laws enlarged and
+rearranged, prophecies attributed to conspicuous persons. All this took
+place not in deliberate intention to pervert historic truth, but because
+there was no interest in historic truth and no conception of it. The
+rewriting of a nation's history from the point of view of its priesthood
+bore, to the ancient Israelite, beyond question, an aspect altogether
+different from that which the same transaction would bear to us. The
+difficulty of the separation of these materials, great in any case, is
+enhanced by the fact alluded to, that we have none but internal
+evidence. The success of the achievement, and the unanimity attained
+with reference to the most significant questions, is one of the marvels
+of the life of learning of our age.
+
+In the Jewish tradition it had been assumed that the Mosaic law was
+written down in the wilderness. Then, in the times of the Judges and of
+the Kings, the historical books took shape, with David's Psalms and the
+wise words of Solomon. At the end of the period of the Kings we have the
+prophetic literature and finally Ezra and Nehemiah. De Wette had
+disputed this order, but Wellhausen in his _Prolegomena zur Geshichte
+Israels_, 1883, may be said to have proved that this view was no longer
+tenable. Men ask, could the law, or even any greater part of it, have
+been given to nomads in the wilderness? Do not all parts of it assume a
+settled state of society and an agricultural life? Do the historical
+books from Judges to the II. Kings know anything about the law? Are the
+practices of worship which they imply consonant with the supposition
+that the law was in force? How is it that that law appears both under
+Josiah and again under Ezra, as something new, thus far unknown, and yet
+as ruling the religious life of the people from that day forth? It seems
+impossible to escape the conclusion that only after Josiah's
+reformation, more completely after the restoration under Ezra, did the
+religion of the law exist. The centralisation of worship at one point,
+such as the book of Deuteronomy demands, seems to have been the thing
+achieved by the reform under Josiah. The establishment of the priestly
+hierarchy such as the code ordains was the issue of the religious
+revolution wrought in Ezra's time. To put it differently, the so-called
+_Book of the Covenant, the nucleus of the law-giving_, itself implies
+the multiplicity of the places of worship. Deuteronomy demands the
+centralisation of the worship as something which is yet to take place.
+The priestly Code declares that the limitation of worship to one place
+was a fact already in the time of the journeys of Israel in the
+wilderness. It is assumed that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared
+the almost universal worship of the stars. Moses may indeed have
+concluded a covenant between his people and Jahve, their God, hallowing
+the judicial and moral life of the people, bringing these into relation
+to the divine will. Jahve was a holy God whose will was to guide the
+people coming up out of the degradation of nature-worship. That part of
+the people held to the old nature-worship is evident in the time of
+Elijah. The history of Israel is not that of defection from a pure
+revelation. It is the history of a gradual attainment of purer
+revelation, of enlargement in the application of it, of discovery of new
+principles contained in it. It is the history also of the decline of
+spiritual religion. The zeal of the prophets against the ceremonial
+worship shows that. Their protest reveals at that early date the
+beginning of that antithesis which had become so sharp in Jesus' time.
+
+This determination of the relative positions of law and prophets was the
+first step in the reconstruction of the history, both of the nation of
+Israel and of its literature. At the beginning, as in every literature,
+are songs of war and victory, of praise and grief, hymns, even riddles
+and phrases of magic. Everywhere poetry precedes prose. Then come myths
+relating to the worship and tales of the fathers and heroes. Elements of
+both these sorts are embedded in the simple chronicles which began now
+to be written, primitive historical works, such as those of the Jahvist
+and Elohist, of the narrators of the deeds of the judges and of David
+and of Saul. Perhaps at this point belong the earliest attempts at
+fixing the tradition of family and clan rights, and of the regulation of
+personal conduct, as in the Book of the Covenant. Then comes the great
+outburst of the prophetic spirit, the preaching of an age of great
+religious revival. Then follows the law, with its minute regulation of
+all details of life upon which would depend the favour of the God who
+had brought punishment upon the people in the exile. The prophecy runs
+on into apocalyptic like that of the book of Daniel. The contact with
+the outside world makes possible a phase of literature such as that to
+which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The deepening of the
+inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms, some of which are
+credibly assigned to a period so late as that of the Maccabees.
+
+In this which has been said of the literature we have the clue also for
+the reconstruction of the nation's history. The naïve assumption in the
+writing of all history had once been that one must begin with the
+beginning. But to Wellhausen, Stade, Eduard Meyer and Kittel and
+Cornill, it has been clear that the history of the earliest times is the
+most uncertain. It is the least adapted to furnish a secure point of
+departure for historical inquiry. There exist for it usually no
+contemporary authorities, or only such as are of problematical worth.
+This earliest period constitutes a problem, the solution of which, so
+far as any solution is possible, can be hoped for only through approach
+from the side of ascertained facts. We must start from a period which is
+historically known. For the history of the Hebrews, this is the time of
+the first prophets of whom we have written records, or from whom we have
+written prophecies. We get from these, as also from the earliest direct
+attempts at history writing, only that conception of Israel's
+pre-historic life which was entertained in prophetic circles in the
+eighth century. We learn the heroic legends in the interpretation which
+the prophets put upon them. We have still to seek to interpret them for
+ourselves. We must begin in the middle and work both backward and
+forward. Such a view of the history of Israel affords every opportunity
+for the connecting of the history and religion of Israel with those of
+the other Semite stocks. Some of these have in recent years been
+discovered to offer extraordinary parallels to that which the Old
+Testament relates.
+
+
+THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE
+
+
+When speaking of Baur's contribution to New Testament criticism, we
+alluded to his historical works. He was in a distinct sense a reformer
+of the method of the writing of church history. To us the notions of the
+historical and of that which is genetic are identical. Of course, naïve
+religious chronicles do not meet that test. A glance at the histories
+produced by the age of rationalism will show that these also fall short
+of it. The perception of the relativity of institutions like the papacy
+is here wholly wanting. Men and things are brought summarily to the bar
+of the wisdom of the author's year of grace. They are approved or
+condemned by this criterion. For Baur, all things had come to pass in
+the process of the great life of the world. There must have been a
+rationale of their becoming. It is for the historian with sympathy and
+imagination to find out what their inherent reason was. One other thing
+distinguishes Baur as church historian from his predecessors. He
+realised that before one can delineate one must investigate. One must go
+to the sources. One must estimate the value of those sources. One must
+have ground in the sources for every judgment. Baur was himself a great
+investigator. Yet the movement for the investigation of the sources of
+biblical and ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has
+gone on to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the
+foundations of Baur's own work as precarious, the results at which he
+arrived as unwarranted. New documents have come to light since his day.
+Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of learning as to
+the literature of the Christian origins has been vastly changed. There
+is still another other thing to say concerning Baur. He was a Hegelian.
+He has the disposition always to interpret the movements of the
+religious spirit in the sense of philosophical ideas. He frankly says
+that without speculation every historical investigation remains but a
+play upon the surface of things. Baur's fault was that in his search
+for, or rather in his confident discovery of, the great connecting
+forces of history, the biographical element, the significance of
+personality, threatened altogether to disappear. The force in the
+history was the absolute, the immanent divine will. The method
+everywhere was that of advance by contrasts and antagonisms. One gets an
+impression, for example, that the Nicene dogma became what it did by the
+might of the idea, that it could not by any possibility have had any
+other issue.
+
+The foil to much of this in Baur's own age was represented in the work
+of Neander, a converted Jew, professor of church history in Berlin, who
+exerted great influence upon a generation of English and American
+scholars. He was not an investigator of sources. He had no talent for
+the task. He was a delineator, one of the last of the great painters of
+history, if one may so describe the type. He had imagination, sympathy,
+a devout spirit. His great trait was his insight into personality. He
+wrote history with the biographical interest. He almost resolves history
+into a series of biographical types. He has too little sense for the
+connexion of things, for the laws of the evolution of the religious
+spirit. The great dramatic elements tend to disappear behind the
+emotions of individuals. The old delineators were before the age of
+investigation. Since that impulse became masterful, some historians have
+been completely absorbed in the effort to make contribution to this
+investigation. Others, with a sense of the impossibility of mastering
+the results of investigation in all fields, have lost the zeal for the
+writing of church history on a great scale. They have contented
+themselves with producing monographs upon some particular subject, in
+which, at the most, they may hope to embody all that is known as to some
+specific question.
+
+We spoke above of the new conception of the relation of the canonical
+literature of the New Testament to the extracanonical. We alluded to the
+new sense of the continuity of the history of the apostolic churches
+with that of the Church of the succeeding age. The influence of these
+ideas has been to set all problems here involved in a new light. Until
+1886 it might have been said with truth that we had no good history of
+the apostolic age. In that year Weizsäcker's book, _Das Apostolische
+Zeitalter der Christlichen Kirche_, admirably filled the place. A part
+of the problem of the historian of the apostolic age is difficult for
+the same reason which was given when we were speaking of the biography
+of Jesus. Our materials are inadequate. First with the beginning of the
+activities of Paul have we sources of the first rank. The relation of
+statements in the Pauline letters to data in the book of the Acts was
+one of the earliest problems which the Tübingen school set itself. An
+attempt to write the biography of Paul reminds us sharply of our
+limitations. We know almost nothing of Paul prior to his conversion, or
+subsequent to the enigmatical breaking off of the account of the
+beginnings of his work at Rome. Harnack's _Mission und Ausbreitung des
+Christenthums_, 1902 (translated, Moffatt, 1908), takes up the work of
+Paul's successors in that cardinal activity. It offers, strange as it
+may seem, the first discussion of the dissemination of Christianity
+which has dealt adequately with the sources. It gives also a picture of
+the world into which the Christian movement went. It emphasises anew the
+truth which has for a generation past grown in men's apprehension that
+there is no possibility of understanding Christianity, except against
+the background of the religious life and thought of the world into which
+it came. Christianity had vital relation, at every step of its progress,
+to the religious movements and impulses of the ancient world, especially
+in those centres of civilisation which Paul singled out for his
+endeavour and which remained the centres of the Christian growth. It was
+an age which has often been summarily described as corrupt. Despite its
+corruption, or possibly because it was corrupt, it gives evidence,
+however, of religious stirring, of strong ethical reaction, of spiritual
+endeavour rarely paralleled. In the Roman Empire everything travelled.
+Religions travelled. In the centres of civilisation there was scarcely a
+faith of mankind which had not its votaries.
+
+It was an age of religious syncretism, of hospitality to diverse
+religious ideas, of the commingling of those ideas. These things
+facilitated the progress of Christianity. They made certain that if the
+Christian movement had in it the divine vitality which men claimed, it
+would one day conquer the world. Equally, they made certain that, as the
+very condition of this conquest, Christianity would be itself
+transformed. This it is which has happened in the evolution of
+Christianity from its very earliest stages and in all phases of its
+life. Of any given rite, opinion or institution, of the many which have
+passed for almost two millenniums unchallenged under the Christian name,
+men about us are now asking: But how much of it is Christian? In what
+measure have we to think of it as derived from some other source, and
+representing the accommodation and assimilation of Christianity to its
+environment in process of its work? What is Christianity? Not
+unnaturally the ancient Church looked with satisfaction upon the great
+change which passed over Christianity when Constantine suddenly made
+that which had been the faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the
+religion of the world. The Fathers can have thought thus only because
+their minds rested upon that which was outward and spectacular. Not
+unnaturally the metamorphosis in the inward nature of Christianity which
+had taken place a century and a quarter earlier was hidden from their
+eyes. In truth, by that earlier and subtler transformation Christianity
+had passed permanently beyond the stage in which it had been
+preponderantly a moral and spiritual enthusiasm, with its centre and
+authority in the person of Jesus. It became a system and an institution,
+with a canon of New Testament Scripture, a monarchical organisation and
+a rule of faith which was formulated in the Apostles' Creed.
+
+To Baur the truth as to the conflict of Paul with the Judaisers had
+meant much. He thought, therefore, with reference to the rise of
+priesthood and ritual among the Christians, to the emphasis on Scripture
+in the fashion of the scribes, to the insistence upon rules and dogmas
+after the manner of the Pharisees, that they were but the evidence of
+the decline and defeat of Paul's free spirit and of the resurgence of
+Judaism in Christianity. He sought to explain the rise of the episcopal
+organisation by the example of the synagogue. Ritschl in his _Entstehung
+der alt-catholischen Kirche_, 1857, had seen that Baur's theory could
+not be true. Christianity did not fall back into Judaism. It went
+forward to embrace the Hellenic and Roman world. The institutions,
+dogmas, practices of that which, after A.D. 200, may with propriety be
+called the Catholic Church, are the fruit of that embrace. There was
+here a falling off from primitive and spiritual Christianity. But it was
+not a falling back into Judaism. There were priests and scribes and
+Pharisees with other names elsewhere. The phenomenon of the waning of
+the original enthusiasm of a period of religious revelation has been a
+frequent one. Christianity on a grand scale illustrated this phenomenon
+anew. Harnack has elaborated this thesis with unexampled brilliancy and
+power. He has supported it with a learning in which he has no rival and
+with a religious interest which not even hostile critics would deny. The
+phrase, 'the Hellenisation of Christianity,' might almost be taken as
+the motto of the work to which he owes his fame.
+
+
+HARNACK
+
+
+Adolf Harnack was born in 1851 in Dorpat, in one of the Baltic provinces
+of Russia. His father, Theodosius Harnack, was professor of pastoral
+theology in the University of Dorpat. Harnack studied in Leipzig and
+began to teach there in 1874. He was called to the chair of church
+history in Giessen in 1879. In 1886 he removed to Marburg and in 1889 to
+Berlin. Harnack's earlier published work was almost entirely in the
+field of the study of the sources and materials of early church history.
+His first book, published in 1873, was an inquiry as to the sources for
+the history of Gnosticism. His _Patrum Apostolicorum Opera_, 1876,
+prepared by him jointly with von Gehhardt and Zahn, was in a way only a
+forecast of the great collection, _Texte und Untersuchungen zur
+Geschickte der alt-christlichen Literatur_, begun in 1882, upon which
+numbers of scholars have worked together with him. The collection has
+already more than thirty-five volumes. In his own two works, _Die
+Geschichte der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1893, and _Die
+Chronologie der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1897, are
+deposited the results of his reflexion on the mass of this material. His
+_Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament_, 1906, etc., should not
+be overlooked. He has had the good fortune to be among those who have
+discovered manuscripts of importance. He has had to do with the Prussian
+Academy's edition of the Greek Fathers. A list of his published works,
+which was prepared in connexion with the celebration of his sixtieth
+birthday in 1911, bears witness to his amazing diligence and fertility.
+He was for thirty-five years associated with Schurer in the publication
+of the _Theologische Literaturzeitung_. He has filled important posts in
+the Church and under the government. To this must be added an activity
+as a teacher which has placed a whole generation of students from every
+portion of the world under undying obligation. One speaks with reserve
+of the living, but surely no man of our generation has done more to make
+the history of which we write.
+
+Harnack's epoch-making work was his _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_,
+1886-88, fourth edition, 1910. The book met, almost from the moment of
+its appearance, with the realisation of the magnitude of that which had
+been achieved. It rested upon a fresh and independent study of the
+sources. It departed from the mechanism which had made the old treatises
+upon the history of doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to
+the full how many influences other than theological had had part in the
+development of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and
+practice, and of external circumstances on the history of thought. His
+history of doctrine has thus a breadth and human quality never before
+attained. Philosophy, worship, morals, the development of Church
+government and of the canon, the common interests and passions of the
+age and those of the individual participants, are all made tributary to
+his delineation.
+
+Harnack cannot share Baur's view that the triumph of the
+Logos-Christology at Nicæa and Chalcedon was inevitable. A certain
+historic naturalness of the movement he would concede, the world on
+which Christianity entered being what it was. He is aware, however, that
+many elements other than Christian have entered into the development. He
+has phrased his apprehension thus. That Hellenisation of Christianity
+which Gnosticism represented, and against which, in this, its acute
+form, the Church contended was, after all, the same thing which, by
+slower process and more unconsciously, befell the Church itself. That
+pure moral enthusiasm and inspiration which had been the gist of the
+Christian movement, in its endeavour to appropriate the world, had been
+appropriated by the world in far greater measure than its adherents
+knew. It had taken up its mission to change the world. It had dreamed
+that while changing the world it had itself remained unchanged. The
+world was changed, the world of life, of feeling and of thought. But
+Christianity was also changed. It had conquered the world. It had no
+perception of the fact that it illustrated the old law that the
+conquered give laws to the conquerors. It had fused the ancient culture
+with the flame of its inspiration. It did not appreciate the degree in
+which the elements of that ancient culture now coloured its far-shining
+flame. It had been a maker of history. Meantime it had been unmade and
+remade by its own history. It confidently carried back its canon, dogma,
+organisation, to Christ and the apostles. It did not realise that the
+very fact that it could find these things natural and declare them
+ancient, proved with conclusiveness that it had itself departed from the
+standard of Christ and the apostles. It esteemed that these were its
+defences against the world. It little dreamed that they were, by their
+very existence, the evidence of the fact that the Church had not
+defended itself against the world. Its dogma was the Hellenisation of
+its thought. Its organisation was the Romanising of its life. Its canon
+and ritual were the externalising, and conventionalising of its spirit
+and enthusiasm. These are positive and constructive statements of
+Harnack's main position.
+
+When, however, they are turned about and stated negatively, these
+statements all convey, more or less, the impression that the advance of
+Christianity had been its destruction, and the evolution of dogma had
+been a defection from Christ. This is the aspect of the contention which
+gave hostile critics opportunity to say that we have before us the
+history of the loss of Christianity. Harnack himself has many sentences
+which superficially will bear that construction. Hatch had said in his
+brilliant book, _The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the
+Christian Church_, 1891, that the domestication of Greek philosophy in
+the Church signified a defection from the Sermon on the Mount. The
+centre of gravity of the Gospel was changed from life to doctrine, from
+morals to metaphysics, from goodness to orthodoxy. The change was
+portentous. The aspect of pessimism is, however, removed when one
+recognises the inevitableness of some such process, if Christianity was
+ever to wield an influence in the world at all. Again, one must consider
+that the process of the recovery of pure Christianity must begin at
+exactly this point, namely, with the recognition of how much in current
+Christianity is extraneous. It must begin with the sloughing off of
+these extraneous elements, with the recovery of the sense for that which
+original Christianity was. Such a recovery would be the setting free
+again of the power of the religion itself.
+
+The constant touchstone and point of reference for every stage of the
+history of the Church must be the gospel of Jesus. But what was the
+gospel of Jesus? In what way did the very earliest Christians apprehend
+that gospel? This question is far more difficult for us to answer than
+it was for those to whom the New Testament was a closed body of
+literature, externally differentiated from all other, and with a
+miraculous inspiration extending uniformly to every phrase in any book.
+These men would have said that they had but to find the proper
+combination of the sacred phrases. But we acknowledge that the central
+inspiration was the personality of Jesus. The books possess this
+inspiration in varying degree. Certain of the books have distinctly
+begun the fusion of Christian with other elements. They themselves
+represent the first stages of the history of doctrine. We acknowledge
+that those utterances of Jesus which have been preserved for us, shaped
+themselves by the antitheses in which Jesus stood. There is much about
+them that is palpably incidental, practically relevant and
+unquestionably only relative. In a large sense, much of the meaning of
+the gospel has to be gathered out of the evidence of the operation of
+its spirit in subsequent ages of the Christian Church, and from remoter
+aspects of the influence of Jesus on the world. Thus the very conception
+of the gospel of Jesus becomes inevitably more or less subjective. It
+becomes an ideal construction. The identification of this ideal with the
+original gospel proclamation becomes precarious. We seem to move in a
+circle. We derive the ideal from the history, and then judge the history
+by the ideal.
+
+Is there any escape from this situation, short of the return to the
+authority of Church or Scripture in the ancient sense? Furthermore, even
+the men to whom the gospel was in the strictest sense a letter,
+identified the gospel with their own private interpretation of this
+letter. Certainly the followers of Ritschl who will acknowledge no
+traits of the gospel save those of which they find direct witness in the
+Gospels, thus ignore that the Gospels are themselves interpretations.
+This undue stress upon the documents which we are fortunate enough to
+possess, makes us forget the limitations of these documents. We tend
+thus to exaggerate that which must be only incidental, as, for example,
+the Jewish element, in the teaching of Jesus. We thus underrate phases
+of Jesus' teaching which, no doubt, a man like Paul would have
+apprehended better than did the evangelists themselves. In truth, in
+Harnack's own delineation of the teaching of Jesus, those elements of it
+which found their way to expression in Paul, or again in the fourth
+Gospel, are rather underrated than overstated, in the author's anxiety
+to exclude elements which are acknowledged to be interpretative in their
+nature. We are driven, in some measure, to seek to find out what the
+gospel was from the way in which the earliest Christians took it up. We
+return ever afresh to questions nearly unanswerable from the materials
+at hand. What was the central principle in the shaping of the earliest
+stages of the new community, both as to its thought and life? Was it the
+longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the striving after the
+righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it the faith of the
+Messiah, the reverence for the Messiah, directed to the person of Jesus?
+What word dominated the preaching? Was it that the Kingdom of God was
+near, that the Son of Man would come? Or was it that in Jesus Messiah
+has come? What was the demand upon the hearer? Was it, Repent, or was
+it, Believe on the Lord Jesus, or was it both, and which had the greater
+emphasis? Was the name of Jesus used in the formulas of worship before
+the time of Paul? What do we know about prayer in the name of Jesus, or
+baptism in that name, or miracles in the name of Jesus, or of the Lord's
+Supper and the conception of the Lord as present with his disciples in
+the rite? Was this revering of Jesus, which was fast moving toward a
+worship of him, the inner motive force of the whole construction of the
+dogma of his person and of the trinity?
+
+In the second volume Harnack treats of the development primarily of the
+Christological and trinitarian dogma, from the fourth to the seventh
+centuries. The dramatic interest of the narrative exceeds anything which
+has been written on this theme. A debate which to most modern men is
+remote and abstruse almost to the point of unintelligibility, and of
+which many of the external aspects are disheartening in the extreme, is
+here brought before us in something of the reasonableness which it must
+have had for those who took part in it. Tertullian shaped the problem
+and established the nomenclature for the Christological solution which
+the Orient two hundred years later made its own. It was he who, from the
+point of view of the Jurist, rather than of the philosopher, gave the
+words 'person' and 'substance,' which continually occur in this
+discussion, the meaning which in the Nicene Creed they bear. Most
+brilliant is Harnack's characterisation of Arius and Athanasius. In
+Arius the notion of the Son of God is altogether done away. Only the
+name remains. The victory of Arianism would have resolved Christianity
+into cosmology and formal ethics. It would have destroyed it as
+religion. Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce
+controversy had drifted cannot be better illustrated than by one
+undisputed fact. Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character
+as a religion of the living communion of God with man, is yet the
+theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the
+recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared. The purpose of the
+redemption is to bring men into community of life with God. But
+Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and
+from above, of a divine nature. He subordinated everything to this idea.
+The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that
+the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the
+possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His incarnation, his
+manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a
+mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous
+endowment. The Christ, who was God, lifts men up to godhood. They become
+God. These phrases are of course capable of ethical and intelligible
+meaning. The development of the doctrine, however, threw the emphasis
+upon the metaphysical and miraculous aspects of the work. It gloried in
+the fact that the presence of divine and human, two natures in one
+person forever, was unintelligible. In the end it came to pass that the
+enthusiastic assent to that which defied explanation became the very
+mark of a humble and submissive faith. One reads the so-called
+Athanasian Creed, and hears the ring of its determination to exact
+assent. It had long since been clear to these Catholics and churchmen
+that, with the mere authority of Scripture, it was not possible to
+defend Christianity against the heretics. The heresies read their
+heresies out of the Bible. The orthodox read orthodoxy from the same
+page. Marcion had proved that, in the very days when the canon took its
+shape. There must be an authority to define the interpretation of the
+Scripture. Those who would share the benefits which the Church dispensed
+must assent unconditionally to the terms of membership.
+
+All these questions were veiled for the early Christians behind the
+question of the kind of Christ in whom their hearts believed. With all
+that we have said about the reprehensible admixture of the metaphysical
+element in the dogma, with all the accusation which we bring concerning
+acute or gradual Hellenisation, secularisation and defection from the
+Christ, we ought not to hide from ourselves that in this gigantic
+struggle there were real religious interests at stake, and that for the
+men of both parties. Dimly, or perhaps vividly, the man of either party
+felt that the conception of the Christ which he was fighting for was
+congruous with the conception of religion which he had, or felt that he
+must have. It is this religious issue, everywhere present, which gives
+dignity to a struggle which otherwise does often sadly lack it. There
+are two religious views of the person of Christ which have stood, from
+the beginning, the one over against the other.[5] The one saw in Jesus
+of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special calling as the Messianic
+King, endued with special powers, lifted above all men ever known, yet a
+man, completely subject to God in faith, obedience and prayer. This view
+is surely sustained by many of Jesus' own words and deeds. It shines
+through the testimony of the men who followed him. Even the belief in
+his resurrection and his second coming did not altogether do away with
+it. The other view saw in him a new God who, descending from God,
+brought mysterious powers for the redemption of mankind into the world,
+and after short obscuring of his glory, returned to the abode of God,
+where he had been before. From this belief come all the hymns and
+prayers to Jesus as to God, all miracles and exorcisms in his name.
+
+[Footnote 5: Wernle, _Einfzhrung in das Theologische Studium_, 1908, v.
+204.]
+
+In the long run, the simpler view did not maintain itself. If false gods
+and demons were expelled, it was the God Jesus who expelled them. The
+more modest faith believed that in the man Jesus, being such an one as
+he was, men had received the greatest gift which the love of God had to
+bestow. In turn the believer felt the assurance that he also was a child
+of God, and in the spirit of Jesus was to realise that sonship.
+Syncretist religions suggested other thoughts. We see that already even
+in the synoptic tradition the calling upon the name of Jesus had found
+place. One wonders whether that first apprehension ever stood alone in
+its purity. The Gentile Churches founded by Paul, at all events, had no
+such simple trust. Equally, the second form of faith seems never to have
+been able to stand alone in its peculiar quality. Some of the gnostic
+sects had it. Marcion again is our example. The new God Jesus had
+nothing to do with the cruel God of the Old Testament. He supplanted the
+old God and became the only God. In the Church the new God, come down
+from heaven, must be set in relation with the long-known God of Israel.
+No less, must he stand in relation to the simple hero of the Gospels
+with his human traits. The problem of theological reflexion was to find
+the right middle course, to keep the divine Christ in harmony, on the
+one side, with monotheism, and on the other, with the picture which the
+Gospels gave. Belief knew nothing of these contradictions. The same
+simple soul thanked God for Jesus with his sorrows and his sympathy, as
+man's guide and helper, and again prayed to Jesus because he seemed too
+wonderful to be a man. The same kind of faith achieves the same
+wondering and touching combination to-day, after two thousand years.
+With thought comes trouble. Reflexion wears itself out upon the
+insoluble difficulty, the impossible combination, the flat
+contradiction, which the two views present, so soon as they are clearly
+seen.
+
+In the earliest Christian writings the fruit of this reflexion lies
+before us in this form:--The Creator of worlds, the mediator, the lord
+of angels and demons, the Logos which was God and is our Saviour, was
+yet a humble son of man, undergoing suffering and death, having laid
+aside his divine glory. This picture is made with materials which the
+canonical writings themselves afford. Theological study had henceforth
+nothing to do but to avoid extremes and seek to make this image, which
+reflexion upon two polar opposites had yielded, as nearly thinkable as
+possible. It has been said that the trinitarian doctrine is not in the
+New Testament, that it was later elaborated by a different kind of mind.
+This is not true. But the inference is precisely the contrary of that
+which defenders of the dogma would formerly have drawn from this
+concession. The same kind of mind, or rather the same two kinds of mind,
+are at work in the New Testament. Both of the religious elements above
+suggested are in the Gospels and Epistles. The New Testament presents
+attempts at their combination. Either form may be found in the
+literature of the later age. If we ask ourselves, What is that in Jesus
+which gives us the sense of redemption, surely we should answer, It is
+his glad and confident resting in the love of God the Father. It is his
+courage, his faith in men, which becomes our faith in ourselves. It is
+his wonderful mingling of purity and love of righteousness with love of
+those who have sinned. You may find this in the ancient literature, as
+the Fathers describe that to which their souls cling. But this is not
+the point of view from which the dogma is organised. The Nicene
+Christology is not to be understood from this approach. The cry of a
+dying civilisation after power and light and life, the feeling that
+these might come to it, streaming down as it were, from above, as a
+physical, a mechanical, a magical deliverance, this is the frame within
+which is set what is here said of the help and redemption wrought by
+Christ. The resurrection and the incarnation are the points at which
+this streaming in of the divine light and power upon a darkened world is
+felt.
+
+That religion seemed the highest, that interpretation of Christianity
+the truest, the absolute one, which could boast that it possessed the
+power of the Almighty through his physical union with men. He who
+contended that Jesus was God, contended therewith for a power which
+could come upon men and make them in some sense one with God. This is
+the view which has been almost exclusively held in the Greek Church. It
+is the view which has run under and through and around the other
+conception in the Roman and Protestant Churches. The sense that
+salvation is inward, moral, spiritual, has rarely indeed been absent
+from Christendom. It would be preposterous to allege that it had. Yet
+this sense has been overlaid and underrun and shot through with that
+other and disparate idea of salvation, as of a pure bestowment,
+something achieved apart from us, or, if one may so say, some alteration
+of ourselves upon other than moral and spiritual terms. The conception
+of the person Christ shows the same uncertainty. Or rather, with a given
+view of the nature of religion and salvation, the corresponding view of
+Christ is certain. In the age-long and world-wide contest over the
+trinitarian formula, with all that is saddening in the struggle and all
+that was misleading in the issue, it is because we see men struggling to
+come into the clear as to these two meanings of religion, that the
+contest has such absorbing interest. Men have been right in declining to
+call that religion in which a man saves himself. They have been wrong in
+esteeming that they were then only saved of God or Christ when they were
+saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened
+when one no longer holds that God and men are mutually exclusive
+conceptions. It is God working within us who saves, the God who in Jesus
+worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the world has
+never seen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
+
+
+By the middle of the nineteenth century the empirical sciences had
+undergone vast expansion in the study of detail and in the discovery of
+principles. Men felt the necessity of some adequate discussion of the
+relation of these sciences one to another and of their unity. There was
+need of the organisation of the mass of knowledge, largely new and ever
+increasing, which the sciences furnished. It lay in the logic of the
+case that some of these attempts should advance the bold claim to deal
+with all knowledge whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a
+whole. Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages,
+had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great metaphysical
+systems had offered theories of the universe as a whole. Both had
+professed to include all facts. Notoriously both theology and
+metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate fashion with the material
+world, in the study of which the sciences were now achieving great
+results. Indeed, the methods current and authoritative with theologians
+and metaphysicians had actually prevented study of the physical
+universe. Both of these had invaded areas of fact to which their methods
+had no application and uttered dicta which had no relation to truth. The
+very life of the sciences depended upon deliverance from this bondage.
+The record of that deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in
+the history of thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment
+which long oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming
+victory had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their
+opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin. There was with
+some a disposition to deny that there exists an area of knowledge to
+which the methods of metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This
+was Comte's contention. Others conceded that there might be such an
+area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the
+theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that,
+concerning the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for
+example, God and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method
+of the physical sciences would give. They fell back upon Kant's
+distinction of the two reasons and two worlds. They exaggerated the
+sharpness of that distinction. They learned that the claim of
+agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind
+which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure. Indeed, if one may
+take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this was not the
+intent of some of the scientists in their strong assertion of
+agnosticism. Spencer's later work reveals that he had no disposition to
+deny that there are foundations for belief in a world lying behind the
+phenomenal, and from which the latter gets its meaning.
+
+Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was
+achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which
+Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested. This was the
+great development of the social sciences. Every aspect of the life of
+man, including religion itself, has been drawn within the area of the
+social sciences. To all these subjects, including religion, there have
+been applied empirical methods which have the closest analogy with those
+which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a
+science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a
+place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The
+ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the
+same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of consciousness
+are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and classify the
+phenomena of the religious life of the race in all lands and in all
+ages. A science of religions is taking its place among the other
+sciences. It is as purely an inductive science as is any other. The
+history of religions and the philosophy of religion are being rewritten
+from this point of view.
+
+In the first lines of this chapter we spoke of the empirical sciences,
+meaning the sciences of the material world. It is clear, however, that
+the sciences of mind, of morals and of religion have now become
+empirical sciences. They have their basis in experience, the experience
+of individuals and the experience of masses of men, of ages of
+observable human life. They all proceed by the method of observation and
+inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is a unity of method as
+between the natural and social and psychical sciences, the reach of
+which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of
+psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to
+conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the
+psychical is a vanishing distinction. Science comes nearer to offering
+an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs
+of this chapter would imply. But it does so by including religion, not
+by excluding it. No one would any longer think of citing Kant's
+distinction of two reasons and two worlds in the sense of establishing a
+city of refuge into which the persecuted might flee. Kant rendered
+incomparable service by making clear two poles of thought. Yet we must
+realise how the space between is filled with the gradations of an
+absolute continuity of activity. Man has but one reason. This may
+conceivably operate upon appropriate material in one or the other of
+these polar fashions. It does operate in infinite variations of degree,
+in unity with itself, after both fashions, at all times and upon all
+materials.
+
+Positivism was a system. Agnosticism was at least a phase of thought.
+The broadening of the conception of science and the invasion of every
+area of life by a science thus broadly conceived, has been an influence
+less tangible than those others but not, therefore, less effective.
+Positivism was bitterly hostile to Christianity, though, in the mind of
+Comte himself and of a few others, it produced a curious substitute,
+possessing many of the marks of Roman Catholicism. The name 'agnostic'
+was so loosely used that one must say that the contention was hostile to
+religion in the minds of some and not of others. The new movement for an
+inclusive science is not hostile to religion. Yet it will transform
+current conceptions of religion as those others never did. In proportion
+as it is scientific, it cannot be hostile. It may at most be
+indifferent. Nevertheless, in the long run, few will choose the theme of
+religion for the scientific labour of life who have not some interest in
+religion. Men of these three classes have accepted the doctrine of
+evolution. Comte thought he had discovered it. Spencer and those for
+whom we have taken him as type, did service in the elaboration of it. To
+the men of our third group, the truth of evolution seems no longer
+debatable. Here too, in the word 'evolution,' we have a term which has
+been used with laxity. It corresponds to a notion which has only
+gradually been evolved. Its implications were at first by no means
+understood. It was associated with a mechanical view of the universe
+which was diametrically opposed to its truth. Still, there could not be
+a doubt that the doctrine contravened those ideas as to the origin of
+the world, and more particularly of man, of the relations of species,
+and especially of the human species to other forms of animal life, which
+had immemorially prevailed in Christian circles and which had the
+witness of the Scriptures on their behalf. If we were to attempt, with
+acknowledged latitude, to name a book whose import might be said to be
+cardinal for the whole movement treated of in this chapter, that book
+would be Darwin's _Origin of Species_, which was published in 1859.
+
+Long before Darwin the creation legend had been recognised as such. The
+astronomy of the seventeenth century had removed the earth from its
+central position. The geology of the eighteenth had shown how long must
+have been the ages of the laying down of the earth's strata. The
+question of the descent of man, however, brought home the significance
+of evolution for religion more forcibly than any other aspect of the
+debate had done. There were scientific men of distinction who were not
+convinced of the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis. To most Christian
+men the theory seemed to leave no unique distinction or spiritual
+quality for man. It seemed to render impossible faith in the Scriptures
+as revelation. To many it seemed that the whole issue as between a
+spiritual and a purely materialistic view of the universe was involved.
+Particularly was this true of the English-speaking peoples.
+
+One other factor in the transformation of the Christian view needs to be
+dwelt upon. It is less theoretical than those upon which we have dwelt.
+It is the influence of socialism, taking that word in its largest sense.
+An industrial civilisation has developed both the good and the evil of
+individualism in incredible degree. The unity of society which the
+feudal system and the Church gave to Europe in the Middle Age had been
+destroyed. The individualism and democracy which were essential to
+Protestantism notoriously aided the civil and social revolution, but the
+centrifugal forces were too great. Initiative has been wonderful, but
+cohesion is lacking. Democracy is yet far from being realised. The civil
+liberations which were the great crises of the western world from 1640
+to 1830 appear now to many as deprived of their fruit. Governments
+undertake on behalf of subjects that which formerly no government would
+have dreamed of doing. The demand is that the Church, too, become a
+factor in the furtherance of the outward and present welfare of mankind.
+If that meant the call to love and charity it would be an old refrain.
+That is exactly what it does not mean. It means the attack upon evils
+which make charity necessary. It means the taking up into the
+idealisation of religion the endeavour to redress all wrongs, to do away
+with all evils, to confer all goods, to create a new world and not, as
+heretofore, mainly at least, a new soul in the midst of the old world.
+No one can deny either the magnitude of the evils which it is sought to
+remedy, or the greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion.
+The volume of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social
+questions is immense. It is revolutionary in its effect. For, after all,
+the very gist of religion has been held to be that it deals primarily
+with the inner life and the transcendent world. That it has dealt with
+the problem of the inner life and transcendent world in such a manner as
+to retard, or even only not to further, the other aspects of man's life
+is indeed a grave indictment. That it should, however, see ends in the
+outer life and present world as ends fully sufficient in themselves,
+that it should cease to set these in the light of the eternal, is that
+it should cease to be religion. The physical and social sciences have
+given to men an outward setting in the world, a basis of power and
+happiness such as men never have enjoyed. Yet the tragic failure of our
+civilisation to give to vast multitudes that power and happiness, is the
+proof that something more than the outward basis is needed. The success
+of our civilisation is its failure.
+
+This is by no means a recurrence to the old antithesis of religion and
+civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements. On the contrary,
+it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics
+are not two worlds, but merely different aspects of the same world.
+Therewith it is not alleged that religion has not a specific
+contribution to make.
+
+
+POSITIVISM
+
+
+The permanent influence of that phase of thought which called itself
+Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which numbered
+among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart Mill, George Henry
+Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be
+said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of
+which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be
+dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, _Coura de
+Philosophie Positive_, appeared between the years 1830 and 1842. Littré
+was his chief French interpreter. But the history of the positivist
+movement belongs to the history of English philosophical and religious
+thought, rather than to that of France.
+
+Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman
+Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear
+comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents,
+dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he
+eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy
+rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his
+genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of
+mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He
+did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him
+against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his
+book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific
+discovery. He came under the influence of Madame Vaux, whom, after her
+death, he idolised even more than before. For the problem which, in the
+earlier portion of his work, he set himself, that namely, of the
+organising of the sciences into a compact body of doctrine, he possessed
+extraordinary gifts. Later, he took on rather the air of a high priest
+of humanity, legislating concerning a new religion. It is but fair to
+say that at this point Littré and many others parted company with Comte.
+He developed a habit and practice ascetic in its rigour and mystic in
+its devotion to the positivists' religion--the worship of humanity. He
+was the friend and counsellor of working-men and agitators, of little
+children, of the poor and miserable. He ended his rather pathetic and
+turbulent career in 1857, gathering a few disciples about his bed as he
+remembered that Socrates had done.
+
+Comte begins with the natural sciences and postulates the doctrine of
+evolution. To the definition of this doctrine he makes some interesting
+approaches. The discussion of the order and arrangement of the various
+sciences and of their characteristic differences is wonderful in its
+insight and suggestiveness. He asserts that in the study of nature we
+are concerned solely with the facts before us and the relations which
+connect those facts. We have nothing to do with the supposed essence or
+hidden nature and meaning of those facts. Facts and the invariable laws
+which govern them are the only legitimate objects of pursuit. Comte
+infers that because we can know, in this sense, only phenomena and their
+relations, we should in consequence guard against illusions which creep
+in again if we so much as use the words principle, or cause, or will, or
+force. By phenomena must be understood objects of perception, to the
+exclusion, for example, of psychological changes reputed to be known in
+self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that
+there is no knowing except by perception--this is ever reiterated as
+self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the
+observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or
+even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must
+take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing
+subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By
+invincible necessity the human mind can observe all phenomena except its
+own. Commenting upon this, James Martineau observed: 'We have had in the
+history of thought numerous forms of idealism which construed all
+outward phenomena as mere appearances within the mind. We have hitherto
+had no strictly corresponding materialism, which claimed certainty for
+the outer world precisely because it was foreign to ourselves.' Man is
+the highest product of nature, the highest stage of nature's most mature
+and complex form. Man as individual is nothing more. Physiology gives us
+not merely his external constitution and one set of relations. It is the
+whole science of man. There is no study of mind in which its actions and
+states can be contemplated apart from the physical basis in conjunction
+with which mind exists.
+
+Thus far man has been treated only biologically, as individual. We must
+advance to man in society. Almost one half of Comte's bulky work is
+devoted to this side of the inquiry. Social phenomena are a class
+complex beyond any which have yet been investigated. So much is this the
+case and so difficult is the problem presented, that Comte felt
+constrained in some degree to change his method. We proceed from
+experience, from data in fact, as before. But the facts are not mere
+illustrations of the so called laws of individual human nature. Social
+facts are the results also of situations which represent the accumulated
+influence of past generations. In this, as against Bentham, for example,
+with his endless recurrence to human nature, as he called it, Comte was
+right. Comte thus first gave the study of history its place in
+sociology. In this study of history and sociology, the collective
+phenomena are more accessible to us and better known by us, than are the
+parts of which they are composed. We therefore proceed here from the
+general to the particular, not from the particular to the general, as in
+research of the kinds previously named. The state of every part of the
+social organisation is ultimately connected with the contemporaneous
+state of all the other parts. Philosophy, science, the fine arts,
+commerce, navigation, government, are all in close mutual dependence.
+When any considerable change takes place in one, we may know that a
+parallel change has preceded or will follow in the others. The progress
+of society is not the aggregate of partial changes, but the product of a
+single impulse acting through all the partial agencies. It can therefore
+be most easily traced by studying all together. These are the main
+principles of sociological investigation as set forth by Comte, some of
+them as they have been phrased by Mill.
+
+The most sweeping exemplification of the axiom last alluded to, as to
+parallel changes, is Comte's so-called law of the three states of
+civilisation. Under this law, he asserts, the whole historical evolution
+can be summed up. It is as certain as the law of gravitation. Everything
+in human society has passed, as has the individual man, through the
+theological and then through the metaphysical stage, and so arrives at
+the positive stage. In this last stage of thought nothing either of
+superstition or of speculation will survive. Theology and metaphysics
+Comte repeatedly characterises as the two successive stages of
+nescience, unavoidable as preludes to science. Equally unavoidable is it
+that science shall ultimately prevail in their place. The advance of
+science having once begun, there is no possibility but that it will
+ultimately possess itself of all. One hears the echo of this confidence
+in Haeckel also. There is a persistence about the denial of any
+knowledge whatsoever that goes beyond external facts, which ill comports
+with the pretensions of positivism to be a philosophy. For its final
+claim is not that it is content to rest in experimental science. On the
+contrary, it would transform this science into a homogeneous doctrine
+which is able to explain everything in the universe. This is but a _tour
+de force_. The promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of
+everything which science cannot explain. Comte was never willing to face
+the fact that the very existence of knowledge has a noumenal as well as
+a phenomenal side. The reasonableness of the universe is certainly a
+conception which we bring to the observation of nature. If we did not
+thus bring it with us, no mere observation of nature would ever give it
+to us. It is impossible for science to get rid of the conception of
+force, and ultimately of cause. There can be no phenomenon which is not
+a manifestation of something. The very nomenclature falls into hopeless
+confusion without these conceptions. Yet the moment we touch them we
+transcend science and pass into the realm of philosophy. It is mere
+juggling with words to say that our science has now become a philosophy.
+
+The adjective 'positive' contains the same fallacy. Apparently Comte
+meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would limit
+research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance, co-existence and
+succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the
+sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply that the inquiry into
+causes deals with that which has no reality, is to beg the question.
+This is not a premise with which he may set out in the evolution of his
+system.
+
+Comte denied the accusation of materialism and atheism. He did the first
+only by changing the meaning of the term materialism. Materialism the
+world has supposed to be the view of man's condition and destiny which
+makes these to begin and end in nature. That certainly was Comte's view.
+The accusation of atheism also he avoids by a mere play on words. He is
+not without a God. Humanity is God. Mankind is the positivist's Supreme.
+Altruism takes the place of devotion. The devotion so long wasted upon a
+mere creature of the imagination, to whom it could do no good, he would
+now give to men who sorely need it and can obviously profit by it.
+Surely the antithesis between nature and the supernatural, in the form
+in which Comte argues against it, is now abandoned by thoughtful people.
+Equally the antithesis of altruism to the service of God is perverse. It
+arouses one's pity that Comte should not have seen how, in true religion
+these two things coalesce.
+
+Moreover, this deification of mankind, in so far as it is not a sounding
+phrase, is an absurdity. When Comte says, for example, that the
+authority of humanity must take the place of that of God, he has
+recognised that religion must have authority. Indeed, the whole social
+order must have authority. However, this is not for him, as we are
+accustomed to say, the authority of the truth and of the right. There is
+no such abstraction as the truth, coming to various manifestations.
+There is no such thing as right, apart from relatively right concrete
+measures. There is no larger being indwelling in men. Society, humanity
+in its collective capacity, must, if need be, override the individual.
+Yet Comte despises the mere rule of majorities. The majority which he
+would have rule is that of those who have the scientific mind. We may
+admit that in this he aims at the supremacy of truth. But, in fact, he
+prepares the way for a doctrinaire tyranny which, of all forms of
+government, might easily turn out to be the worst which a long-suffering
+humanity has yet endured.
+
+In the end, we are told, love is to take the place of force. Humanity is
+present to us first in our mothers, wives and daughters. For these it is
+present in their fathers, husbands, sons. From this primary circle love
+widens and worship extends as hearts enlarge. It is the prayer to
+humanity which first rises above the mere selfishness of the sort to get
+something out of God. Remembrance in the hearts of those who loved us
+and owe something to us is the only worthy form of immortality. Clearly
+it is only the caricature of prayer or of the desire of immortality
+which rises before Comte's mind as the thing to be escaped. For this
+caricature religious men, both Catholic and Protestant, without doubt,
+gave him cause. There were to be seven sacraments, corresponding to
+seven significant epochs in a man's career. There were to be priests for
+the performance of these sacraments and for the inculcation of the
+doctrines of positivism. There were to be temples of humanity, affording
+opportunity for and reminder of this worship. In each temple there was
+to be set up the symbol of the positivist religion, a woman of thirty
+years with her little son in her arms. Littré spoke bitterly of the
+positivist religion as a lapse of the author into his old aberration.
+This religion was certainly regarded as negligible by many to whom his
+system as a whole meant a great deal. At least, it is an interesting
+example, as is also his transformation of science into a philosophy, of
+the resurgence of valid elements in life, even in the case of a man who
+has made it his boast to do away with them.
+
+
+NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM
+
+
+We may take Spencer as representative of a group of men who, after the
+middle of the nineteenth century, laboured enthusiastically to set forth
+evolutionary and naturalistic theories of the universe. These theories
+had also, for the most part, the common trait that they professed
+agnosticism as to all that lay beyond the reach of the
+natural-scientific methods, in which the authors were adept. Both Ward
+and Boutroux accept Spencer as such a type. Agnosticism for obvious
+reasons could be no system. Naturalism is a tendency in interpretation
+of the universe which has many ramifications. There is no intention of
+making the reference to one man's work do more than serve as
+introduction to the field.
+
+Spencer was eager in denial that he had been influenced by Comte. Yet
+there is a certain reminder of Comte in Spencer's monumental endeavour
+to systematise the whole mass of modern scientific knowledge, under the
+general title of 'A Synthetic Philosophy.' He would show the unity of
+the sciences and their common principles or, rather, the one great
+common principle which they all illustrate, the doctrine of evolution,
+as this had taken shape since the time of Darwin. Since 1904 we have an
+autobiography of Herbert Spencer, which, to be sure, seems largely to
+have been written prior to 1889. The book is interesting, as well in the
+light which it throws upon the expansion of the sciences and the
+development of the doctrine of evolution in those years, as in the
+revelation of the personal traits of the man himself. Concerning these
+Tolstoi wrote to a friend, apropos of a gift of the book: 'In
+autobiographies the most important psychological phenomena are often
+revealed quite independently of the author's will.'
+
+Spencer was born in 1820 in Derby, the son of a schoolmaster. He came of
+Nonconformist ancestry of most marked individuality. His early education
+was irregular and inadequate. Before he reached the age of seventeen his
+reading had been immense. He worked with an engineer in the period of
+the building of the railways in the Midlands. He always retained his
+interest in inventions. He wrote for the newspapers and magazines and
+definitely launched upon a literary career. At the age of thirty he
+published his first book, on _Social Statics_. He made friends among the
+most notable men and women of his age. So early as 1855 he was the
+victim of a disease of the heart which never left him. It was on his
+recovery from his first grave attack that he shaped the plan which
+henceforth held him, of organising the modern sciences and incorporating
+them into what he called a synthetic philosophy. There was immense
+increase in actual knowledge and in the power of his reflection on that
+knowledge, as the years went by. A generation elapsed between the
+publication of his _First Principles_ and the conclusion of his more
+formal literary labours. There is something captivating about a man's
+life, the energy of which remains so little impaired that he esteems it
+better to write a new book, covering some untouched portion of his
+scheme, than to give to an earlier volume the revision which in the
+light of his matured convictions it may need. His philosophical
+limitations he never transcended. He does not so naïvely offer a
+substitute for philosophy as does Comte. But he was no master in
+philosophy. There is a reflexion of the consciousness of this fact in
+his agnosticism.
+
+That the effort of the agnostic contention has been great, and on the
+whole salutary, few would deny. Spencer's own later work shows that his
+declaration, that the absolute which lies behind the universe is
+unknowable, is to be taken with considerable qualification. It is only a
+relative unknowableness which he predicates. Moreover, before Spencer's
+death, the doctrine of evolution had made itself profoundly felt in the
+discussion of all aspects of life, including that of religion. There
+seemed no longer any reason for the barrier between science and religion
+which Spencer had once thought requisite.
+
+The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of scientific
+mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid knowledge made,
+now by theology and now by speculative philosophy. It is hardly
+descriptive in any absolute sense. Spencer had coined the rather
+fortunate illustration which describes science as a gradually increasing
+sphere, such that every addition to its surface does but bring us into
+more extensive contact with surrounding nescience. Even upon this
+illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading. The
+continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of
+ignorance. It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of
+ignorance. The author of _Ecce Coelum_ has declared: 'Things die out
+under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see,
+unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our
+most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient unknown has
+become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men have a more
+rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.
+
+They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone secure
+and solid knowledge may be attained. They have undisguised scepticism as
+to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways. It was the working of
+these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth
+century so prevailingly the aspect of denial, the character which
+Carlyle described as an everlasting No. This was but a preparatory
+stage, a retrogression for a new and firmer advance.
+
+In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming
+modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our
+thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has
+administered. It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that
+precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one
+might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that
+phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been
+guilty of arrant dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of
+the claim that it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself
+unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and
+difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information
+concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine
+authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious
+investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the
+innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of
+a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves
+within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which
+is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that
+religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They apprehended
+more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that there is much
+ignorance which revelation does not mitigate. _Exeunt omnia in
+mysterium_. They are prepared to say concerning many of the dicta of
+religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to
+say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these
+with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward
+religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has
+taught us toward all truth whatsoever.
+
+The strictly philosophic term phenomenon, to which science has taken so
+kindly, is in itself an explicit avowal of something beyond the
+phenomenal. Spencer is careful to insist upon this relation of the
+phenomenal to the noumenal. His _Synthetic Philosophy_ opens with an
+exposition of this non-relative or absolute, without which the relative
+itself becomes contradictory. It is an essential part of Spencer's
+doctrine to maintain that our consciousness of the absolute, indefinite
+as it is, is positive and not negative. 'Though the absolute cannot in
+any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing, yet we
+find that its positive existence is a necessary datum of consciousness.
+The belief which this datum of consciousness constitutes has a higher
+warrant than any other belief whatsoever.' In short, the absolute or
+noumenal, according to Spencer, though not known as the phenomenal or
+relative is known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that
+the phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense
+inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances, without
+which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified with that
+ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists. Religion itself is a
+phenomenon, and the source and secret of most complex and interesting
+phenomena. It has always been of the greatest importance in the history
+of mankind. It has been able to hold its own in face of the attacks of
+science. It must contain an element of truth. All religions, however,
+assert that their God is for us not altogether cognisable, that God is a
+great mystery. The higher their rank, the more do they acknowledge this.
+It is by the flippant invasion of this mystery that the popular
+religiosity offends. It talks of God as if he were a man in the next
+street. It does not distinguish between merely imaginative fetches into
+the truth, and presumably accurate definition of that truth. Equally,
+the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions of
+the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are
+consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know and
+are involved in contradiction with themselves. But the results of modern
+physics and chemistry reveal, as the constant element in all phenomena,
+force. This manifests itself in various forms which are interchangeable,
+while amid all these changes the force remains the same. This latter
+must be regarded as the reality, and basis of all that is relative and
+phenomenal. The entire universe is to be explained from the movements of
+this absolute force. The phenomena of nature and of mental life come
+under the same general laws of matter, motion, and force.
+
+Spencer's doctrine, as here stated, is not adequate to account for the
+world of mental life or adapted to serve as the basis of a
+reconciliation of science and religion. It does not carry us beyond
+materialism. Spencer's real intention was directed to something higher
+than that. If the absolute is to be conceived at all, it is as a
+necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. If we get the idea of
+force from the experience of our own power of volition, is it not
+natural to think of mind-force as the prius of physical force, and not
+the reverse? Accordingly, the absolute force, basis of all specific
+forces, would be mind and will. The doctrine of evolution would
+harmonise perfectly with these inferences. But it would have to become
+idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead of materialistic, as in
+Comte. We are obliged, Spencer owns, to refer the phenomenal world of
+law and order to a first cause. He says that this first cause is
+incomprehensible. Yet he further says, when the question of attributing
+personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not
+between personality and something lower. It is between personality and
+something higher. To this may belong a mode of being as much
+transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion.
+It is strange, he says, that men should suppose the highest worship to
+lie in assimilating the object of worship to themselves. And yet, again,
+in one of the latest of his works he writes: 'Unexpected as it will be
+to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which manifests
+itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the
+power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. The conception to
+which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is much less that of a
+universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive.'
+
+Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley. Agnosticism had at
+first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological.
+It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical. After all, says
+Huxley, in one of his essays:--'What do we know of this terrible matter,
+except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our
+own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose
+threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen,
+except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of
+states of our consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable
+apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter.
+He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an
+ideal. It is an invention of the mind's own devising. It is not a
+physical fact. In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed
+disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had
+been turned exactly inside out. Instead of the physical world being
+primary and fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not
+altogether problematical, the precise converse is true.
+
+Nature, as science regards it, may be described as a system whose parts,
+be they simple or complex, are wholly governed by universal laws.
+Knowledge of these laws is an indispensable condition of that control of
+nature upon which human welfare in so large degree depends. But this
+reign of law is an hypothesis. It is not an axiom which it would be
+absurd to deny. It is not an obvious fact, thrust upon us whether we
+will or no. Experiences are possible without the conception of law and
+order. The fruit of experience in knowledge is not possible without it.
+That is only to say that the reason why we assume that nature is a
+connected system of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are
+self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the notion
+of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which we must
+eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical science
+perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a glance at the
+history, and particularly at the popular literature, of science affords
+the interesting spectacle of the rise of an hallucination, the growth of
+a habit of mythological speech, which is truly surprising. We begin to
+hear of self-existent laws which reign supreme and bind nature fast in
+fact. By this learned substitution for God, it was once confidently
+assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical
+shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear
+that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of
+myth-making and fetish worship--the homage to the fetish of law. Even
+the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,'
+says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we
+do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no
+causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If
+we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language of
+rational beings, laws of nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and
+independent of the phenomena which they are said to govern, such
+language must be merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak
+of the civil law. We say the law does that which we know the executive
+does. But the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as
+the last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of the
+movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined that the
+planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had supposed that
+this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of
+speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a
+smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which
+it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and
+self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and
+lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have
+given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other natural
+agencies, palpable and ready to hand for the explanation of everything,
+in the myth-making period of science which living men can still
+remember, have by this time paled. They have become simply various
+manifestations of one underlying spiritual energy, which is indeed
+beyond our perception.[6] When Comte said that the universe could not
+rest upon will, because then it would be arbitrary, incalculable,
+subject to caprice, one feels the humour and pathos of it. Comte's
+experience with will, his own and that of others, had evidently been too
+largely of that sad sort. Real freedom consists in conformity to what
+ought to be. In God, whom we conceive as perfect, this conformity is
+complete. With us it remains an ideal. Were we the creatures of a blind
+mechanical necessity there could be no talk of ideal standards and no
+meaning in reason at all.
+
+[Footnote 6: Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. p. 248.]
+
+
+EVOLUTION
+
+
+In the progress of the thought of the generation, say, from 1870 to the
+present day, the conception of evolution has been much changed. The
+doctrine of evolution has itself been largely evolved within that
+period. The application of it has become familiar in fields of which
+there was at first no thought. The bearing of the acceptance of it upon
+religion has been seen to be quite different from that which was at
+first supposed. The advocacy of the doctrine was at first associated
+with the claims of naturalism or positivism. Wider applications of the
+doctrine and deeper insight into its meaning have done away with this
+misunderstanding. Evolution, as originally understood, was as far as
+possible from suggesting anything mechanical. By the term was meant
+primarily the gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic
+beginning to its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded
+not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of
+growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the
+force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material and
+directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied ideal ends
+controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as prevailingly
+also with others in the study of the natural sciences, the ideas of end
+and of cause looked at askance. They are regarded an outside the pale of
+the natural sciences. In a very definite sense that is true. The logical
+consequence of this admission should be merely the recognition that the
+idea of evolution as developed in the natural sciences cannot be the
+whole idea.
+
+The entire history of anything, Spencer tells us, must include its
+appearance out of the imperceptible, and its disappearance again into
+the imperceptible. Be it a single object, or the whole universe, an
+account which begins with it in a concrete form, or leaves off with its
+concrete form, is incomplete. He uses a familiar instance, that of a
+cloud appearing when vapour drifts over a cold mountain top, and again
+disappearing when it emerges into warmer air. The cloud emerges from the
+imperceptible as heat is dissipated. It is dissolved again as heat is
+absorbed and the watery particles evaporate. Spencer esteems this an
+analogue of the appearance of the universe itself, according to the
+nebular hypothesis. Yet assuredly, as the cloud presupposes vapours
+which had previously condensed, and the vapour clouds that had
+previously evaporated, and as clouds dissolve in one place even at the
+moment that they are forming in another, so we are told of nebulæ which
+are in every phase of advance or of decline. To ask which was first,
+solid masses or nebulous haze, is much like recurring to the riddle of
+the hen and the egg. Still, we are told, we have but to extend our
+thought beyond this emergence and subsidence of sidereal systems, of
+continents, nations, men, to find a permanent totality made up of
+transient individuals in every stage of change. The physical assumption
+with which Spencer sets out is that the mass of the universe and its
+energy are fixed in quantity. All the phenomena of evolution are
+included in the conservation of this matter and force.
+
+Besides the criticism which was offered above, that the mere law of the
+persistence of force does not initiate our series, there is a further
+objection. Even within the series, once it has been started, this law of
+the persistence of force is solely a quantitative law. When energy is
+transformed there is an equivalence between the new form and the old. Of
+the reasons for the direction evolution takes, for the permanence of
+that direction once it has been taken, so that the sequence of forms is
+a progression, the explication of a latent nature--of all this, the mere
+law of the persistence of force gives us no explanation whatever. The
+change at random from one form of manifestation to another might be a
+striking illustration of the law of the persistence of force, but it
+would be the contradiction of evolution. The very notion of evolution is
+that of the sequence of forms, so that something is expressed or
+achieved. That achievement implies more than the mere force. Or rather,
+it involves a quality of the force with which the language of mechanism
+does not reckon. It assumes the idea which gives direction to the force,
+an ideal quality of the force.
+
+Unquestionably that which men sought to be rid of was the idea of
+purpose in nature, in the old sense of design in the mind of God,
+external to the material universe, of force exerted upon nature from
+without, so as to cause nature to conform to the design of its 'Great
+Original,' in Addison's high phrase. In this effort, however, the
+reducing of all to mere force and permutation of force, not merely
+explains nothing, but contradicts facts which stare us in the face. It
+deprives evolution of the quality which makes it evolution. To put in
+this incongruous quality at the beginning, because we find it necessary
+at the end, is, to say the least, naïve. To deny that we have put it in,
+to insist that in the marvellous sequence we have only an illustration
+of mechanism and of conservation of force, is perverse. We passed
+through an era in which some said that they did not believe in God;
+everything was accounted for by evolution. In so far as they meant that
+they did not believe in the God of deism and of much traditional
+theology, they did not stand alone in this claim. In so far as they
+meant by evolution mere mechanism, they explained nothing and destroyed
+the notion of evolution besides. In so far as they meant more than mere
+mechanism, they lapsed into the company of the scientific myth-makers to
+whom we alluded above. They attributed to their abstraction, evolution,
+qualities which other people found in the forms of the universe viewed
+as the manifestation of an immanent God. Only by so doing were they able
+to ascribe to evolution that which other people describe as the work of
+God. At this level the controversy becomes one simply about words.
+
+Of course, the great illumination as to the meaning of evolution has
+come with its application to many fields besides the physical. Darwin
+was certainly the great inaugurator of the evolutionary movement in
+England. Still, Darwin's problem was strictly limited. The impression is
+widespread that the biological evolutionary theories were first
+developed, and furnished the basis for the others. Yet both Hegel and
+Comte, not to speak of Schelling, were far more interested in the
+intellectual and historical, the ethical and social aspects of the
+question. Both Hegel and Comte were, whether rightly or wrongly, rather
+contemptuous of the appeal to biology and organic life. Both had the
+sense that they used a great figure of speech when they spoke of society
+as an organism, and compared the working of institutions to biological
+functions. This is indeed the question. It is a question over which
+Spencer sets himself lightly. He passes back and forth between organic
+evolution and the ethical, economic, and social movements which are
+described by the same term, as if we were in possession of a perfectly
+safe analogy, or rather as if we were assured of an identical principle.
+Much that is already archaic in Spencer's economic and social, his
+historical and ethical, not to say his religious, chapters is due to the
+influence of this fact. Of his own mind it was true that he had come to
+the doctrine of evolution from the physical side. He brought to his
+other subjects a more or less developed method of operating with the
+conception. He never fully realised how new subjects would alter the
+method and transform the conception. Spencerian evolution is an
+assertion of the all-sufficiency of natural law. The authority of
+conscience is but the experience of law-abiding and dutiful generations
+flowing in our veins. The public weal has hold over us, because the
+happiness and misery of past ages are inherited by us.
+
+It marked a great departure when Huxley began vigorously to dissent from
+these views. According to him evolutionary science has done nothing for
+ethics. Men become ethical only as they set themselves against the
+principles embodied in the evolutionary process of the world. Evolution
+is the struggle for existence. It is preposterous to say that man became
+good by succeeding in the struggle for existence. Instead of the old
+single movement, as in Spencer, straight from the nebula to the saint,
+Huxley has place for suffering. Suffering is most intense in man
+precisely under conditions most essential to the evolution of his nobler
+powers. The loss of ease or money may be gain in character. The cosmical
+process is not only full of pain. It is full of mercilessness and of
+wickedness. Good has been evolved, but so has evil. The fittest may have
+survived. There is no guarantee that they are the best. The continual
+struggle against our fellows poisons our higher life. It will hardly do
+to say with Huxley that the ethical struggle is the reverse of the
+cosmical process. Nevertheless, we have here a most interesting
+transformation in thought.
+
+These ideas and principles, as is well known, were elaborated and
+advanced upon in a very popular book, Drummond's _Ascent of Man_, 1894.
+Even the title was a happy and suggestive one. Struggle for life is a
+fact, but it is not the whole fact. It is balanced by the struggle for
+the life of others. This latter reaches far down into the levels of what
+we call brute life. Its divinest reach is only the fulfilment of the
+real nature of humanity. It is the living with men which develops the
+moral in man. The prolongation of infancy in the higher species has had
+to do with the development of moral nature. So only that we hold a
+sufficiently deep view of reason, provided we see clearly that reason
+transforms, perfects, makes new what we inherit from the beast, we need
+not fear for morality, though it should universally be taught that
+morality came into being by the slow and gradual fashioning of brute
+impulse.
+
+Benjamin Kidd in his _Social Evolution_, 1895, has reverted again to
+extreme Darwinism in morals and sociology. The law is that of unceasing
+struggle. Reason does not teach us to moderate the struggle. It but
+sharpens the conflict. All religions are præter-rational, Christianity
+most of all, in being the most altruistic. Kidd, not without reason,
+comments bitterly upon Spencer's Utopia, the passage of militarism into
+industrialism. The struggle in industrialism is fiercer than ever.
+Reason affects the animal nature of man for the worse. Clearly conscious
+of what he is doing, man objects to sacrificing himself for his family
+or tribe. Instinct might lead an ape to do that. Intelligence warns a
+man against it. Reason is cruel beyond anything dreamed of in the beast.
+That portion of the community which loves to hear the abuse of reason,
+rejoiced to hear this phrase. They rejoiced when they heard that
+religion was the only remedy, and that religion was ultra-rational,
+contra-rational, supernatural, in this new sense. How one comes by it,
+or how one can rationally justify the yielding of allegiance to it, is
+not clear. One must indeed have the will to believe if one believes on
+these terms.
+
+These again are but examples. They convey but a superficial impression
+of the effort to apply the conception of evolution to the moral and
+religious life of man. All this has taken place, of course, in a far
+larger setting that of the endeavour to elaborate the evolutionary view
+of politics and of the state, of economics and of trade, of social life
+and institutions, of culture and civilisation in every aspect. This
+elaboration and reiteration of the doctrine of evolution sometimes
+wearies us. It is but the unwearied following of the main clue to the
+riddle of the universe which the age has given us. It is nothing more
+and nothing less than the endeavour to apprehend the ideal life, no
+longer as something held out to us, set up before us, but also as
+something working within us, realising itself through us and among us.
+To deny the affinity of this with religion would be fatuous and also
+futile. Temporarily, at least, and to many interests of religion, it
+would be fatal.
+
+
+MIRACLES
+
+
+It must be evident that the total view of the universe which the
+acceptance of the doctrine of evolution implies, has had effect in the
+diminution of the acuteness of the question concerning miracles. It
+certainly gives to that question a new form. A philosophy which asserts
+the constant presence of God in nature and the whole life of the world,
+a criticism which has given us a truer notion of the documents which
+record the biblical miracles, the reverent sense of ignorance which our
+increasing knowledge affords, have tended to diminish the dogmatism of
+men on either side of the debate. The contention on behalf of the
+miracle, in the traditional sense of the word, once seemed the bulwark
+of positive religion, the distinction between the man who was satisfied
+with a naturalistic explanation of the universe and one whose devout
+soul asked for something more. On the other hand, the contention against
+the miracle appeared to be a necessary corollary of the notion of a law
+and order which are inviolable throughout the universe. Furthermore,
+many men have come of themselves to the conclusion for which
+Schleiermacher long ago contended. Whatever may be theoretically
+determined concerning miracles, yet the miracle can never again be
+regarded as among the foundations of faith. This is for the simplest of
+reasons. The belief in a miracle presupposes faith. It is the faith
+which sustains the miracle, and not the miracle the faith. Jesus is to
+men the incomparable moral and spiritual magnitude which he is, not on
+the evidence of some unparalleled things physical which it is alleged he
+did. Quite the contrary, it is the immediate impression of the moral and
+spiritual wonder which Jesus is, that prepares what credence we can
+gather for the wonders which it is declared he did. This is a transfer
+of emphasis, a redistribution of weight in the structure of our thought,
+the relief of which many appreciate who have not reasoned the matter
+through for themselves.
+
+Schleiermacher had said, and Herrmann and others repeat the thought,
+that, as the Christian faith finds in Christ the highest revelation,
+miracles may reasonably be expected of him. Nevertheless, he adds, these
+deeds can be called miracles or esteemed extraordinary, only as
+containing something which was beyond contemporary knowledge of the
+regular and orderly connexion between physical and spiritual life.
+Therewith, it must be evident, that the notion of the miraculous is
+fundamentally changed. So it comes to pass that we have a book like
+Mackintosh's _Natural History of the Christian Religion_, 1894, whose
+avowed purpose is to do away with the miraculous altogether. Of course,
+the author means the traditional notion of the miraculous, according to
+which it is the essence of arbitrariness and the negation of law. It is
+not that he has less sense for the divine life of the world, or for the
+quality of Christianity as revelation. On the other hand, we have a book
+like Percy Gardner's _Exploratio Evangelica_, 1899. With the most
+searching criticism of the narratives of some miracles, there is
+reverent confession, on the author's part, that he is baffled by the
+reports of others. There is recognition of unknown possibilities in the
+case of a character like that of Jesus. It is not that Gardner has a
+less stringent sense of fact and of the inexorableness of law than has
+Mackintosh or an ardent physicist. The problem is reduced to that of the
+choice of expression. We are not able to withhold a justification of the
+scholar who declares: We must not say that we believe in the miraculous.
+This language is sure to be appropriated by those who still take their
+departure from the old dualism, now hopelessly obsolete, for which a
+breach of the law of nature was the crowning evidence of the love of
+God. On the other hand, the assertion that we do not believe in the
+miraculous will easily be taken by some to mean the denial of the whole
+sense of the nearness and power and love of God, and of the unimagined
+possibilities of such a moral nature as was that of Christ. It is to be
+repeated that we have here a mere difference as to terms. The debate is
+no longer about ideas.
+
+The traditional notion of the miracle arose out of the confusion of two
+series of ideas which, in the last analysis, have nothing to do with
+each other. On the one hand, there is the conception of law and order,
+of cause and effect, of the unbroken connexion of nature. On the other
+hand is the thought of the divine purpose in the life of the world and
+of the individual. By the aid of that first sequence of thoughts we find
+ourselves in the universe and interpret the world of fact to ourselves.
+Yet in the other sequence lies the essence of religion. The two
+sequences may perfectly well coexist in the same mind. Out of the
+attempt to combine them nothing clear or satisfying can issue. If one
+should be, to-day, brought face to face with a fact which was alleged to
+be a miracle, his instinctive effort would be, nevertheless, to seek to
+find its cause, to establish for it a connexion in the natural order. In
+the ancient world men did not argue thus, nor in the modern world until
+less than two hundred years ago. The presumption of the order of nature
+had not assumed for them the proportions which it has for us. For us it
+is overwhelming, self-evident. Therewith is not involved that we lack
+belief in a divine purpose for the world and for the individual life.
+
+We do not deny that there are laws of nature of which we have no
+experience, facts which we do not understand, events which, if they
+should occur, would stand before us as unique. Still, the decisive thing
+is, that in face of such an event, instead of viewing it quite simply as
+a divine intervention, as men used to do, we, with equal simplicity and
+no less devoutness, conceive that same event as only an illustration of
+a connexion in nature which we do not understand. There is no inherent
+reason why we may not understand it. When we do understand it, there
+will be nothing more about it that is conceivably miraculous. There will
+be then no longer a unique quality attaching to the event. Therewith
+ends the possible significance of such an event as proof of divine
+intervention for our especial help. We have but a connexion in nature
+such that, whether understood or not, if it were to recur, the event
+would recur.
+
+The miracles which are related in the Scripture may be divided for our
+consideration into three classes. To the first class belong most of
+those which are related in the Old Testament, but some also which are
+conspicuous in the New Testament. They are, in some cases, the poetical
+and imaginative representation of the profoundest religious ideas. So
+soon as one openly concedes this, when there is no longer any necessity
+either to attack or to defend the miracle in question, one is in a
+position to acknowledge how deep and wonderful the thoughts often are
+and how beautiful the form in which they are conveyed. It is through
+imagination and symbolism that we are able to convey the subtlest
+meanings which we have. Still more was this the case with men of an
+earlier age. In the second place, the narratives of miracles are, some
+of them, of such a sort that we may say that an event or circumstance in
+nature has been obviously apprehended in naïve fashion. This by no means
+forbids us to interpret that same event in quite a different way. The
+men of former time, exactly in proportion as they had less sense of the
+order of nature than have we, so were they also far readier to assume
+the immediate forthputting of the power of God. This was true not merely
+of the uneducated. It is difficult, or even impossible, for us to find
+out what the event was. Fact and apprehension are inextricably
+interwoven. That which really happened is concealed from us by the tale
+which had intended to reveal it. In the third place, there are many
+cases in the history of Jesus, and some in that of the apostles and
+prophets, in which that which is related moves in the borderland between
+body and soul, spirit and matter, the region of the influence of will,
+one's own or that of another, over physical conditions. Concerning such
+cases we are disposed, far more than were men even a few years ago, to
+concede that there is much that is by no means yet investigated, and the
+soundest judgment we can form is far from being sure. Even if we
+recognise to the full the lamentable resurgence of outworn superstitions
+and stupidities, which again pass current among us for an unhappy
+moment, if we detect the questionable or manifestly evil consequences of
+certain uses made or alleged of psychic influence, yet still we are not
+always in a position to say, with certainty, what is true in tales of
+healing which we hear in our own day. There are certain of the
+statements concerning Jesus' healing power and action which are
+absolutely baffling. They can be eliminated from the narrative only by a
+procedure which might just as well eliminate the narrative. In many of
+the narratives there may be much that is true. In some all may be as
+related. In Jesus' time, on the witness of the Scripture itself, it was
+assumed as something no one questioned, that miraculous deeds were
+performed, not alone by Jesus and the apostles, but by many others, and
+not always even by the good. Such deeds were performed through the power
+of evil spirits as well as by the power of God. To imagine that the
+working of miracles proved that Jesus came from God, is the most patent
+importation of a modern apologetic notion into the area of ancient
+thought. We must remember that Jesus himself laid no great weight upon
+the miracles which we assume that he believed he wrought, and some of
+which we may believe that he did work. Many he performed with hesitation
+and desired so far as possible to conceal.
+
+Even if we were in a position at one point or another in the life of
+Jesus to defend the traditional assumptions concerning the miraculous,
+yet it must be evident how opposed it is to right reason, to lay stress
+on the abstract necessity of belief in the miraculous. The traditional
+conception of the miraculous is done away for us. This is not at all by
+the fact that we are in a position to say with Matthew Arnold: 'The
+trouble with miracles is that they never happen.' We do not know enough
+to say that. To stake all on the assertion of the impossibility of
+so-called miracles is as foolish as to stake much on the affirmation of
+their actuality. The connexion of nature is only an induction. This can
+never be complete. The real question is both more complex and also more
+simple. The question is whether, even if an event, the most unparalleled
+of those related in the Gospels or outside of them, should be proved
+before our very eyes to have taken place, the question is whether we
+should believe it to have been a miracle in the traditional sense, an
+event in which the actual--not the known, but the possible--order of
+nature had been broken through, and in the old sense, God had
+arbitrarily supervened.
+
+Allowed that the event were, in our own experience and in the known
+experience of the race, unparalleled, yet it would never occur to us to
+suppose but that there was a law of this case, also, a connexion in
+nature in which, as work of God, it occurred, and in which, if the
+conditions were repeated, it would recur. We should unceasingly
+endeavour through observation, reflexion, and new knowledge, to show how
+we might subordinate this event in the connexion of nature which we
+assume. We should feel that we knew more, and not less, of God, if we
+should succeed. And if our effort should prove altogether futile, we
+should be no less sure that such natural connexion exists. This is
+because nature is for us the revelation of the divine. The divine, we
+assume, has a natural order of working. Its inviolability is the
+divinest thing about it. It is through this sequence of ideas that we
+are in a position to deny, not facts which may be inexplicable, but the
+traditional conception of the miracle. For surely no one needs to be
+told that this is not the conception of the miracle which has existed in
+the minds of the devout, and equally of the undevout, from the beginning
+of thought until the present day.
+
+However, there is nothing in all of this which hinders us from believing
+with a full heart in the love and grace and care of God, in his holy and
+redeeming purpose for mankind and for the individual. It is true that
+this belief cannot any longer retain its naïve and childish form. It is
+true that it demands of a man far more of moral force, of ethical and
+spiritual mastery, of insight and firm will, to sustain the belief in
+the purpose of God for himself and for all men, when a man believes that
+he sees and feels God only in and through nature and history, through
+personal consciousness and the personal consciousness of Jesus. It is
+true that it has, apparently, been easier for men to think of God as
+outside and above his world, and of themselves as separated from their
+fellows by his special providence. It is more difficult, through glad
+and intelligent subjection to all laws of nature and of history, to
+achieve the education of one's spirit, to make good one's inner
+deliverance from the world, to aid others in the same struggle and to
+set them on their way to God. Men grow uncertain within themselves,
+because they say that traditional religion has apprehended the matter in
+a different way. This is true. It is also misleading. Whatever miracles
+Jesus may have performed, no one can say that he performed them to make
+life easier for himself, to escape the common lot, to avoid struggle, to
+evade suffering and disgraceful death. On the contrary, in genuine human
+self-distrust, but also in genuine heroism, he gave himself to his
+vocation, accepting all that went therewith, and finished the work of
+God which he had made his own. This is the more wonderful because it lay
+so much nearer to him than it can lie to us, to pray for special
+evidence of the love of God and to set his faith on the receiving of it.
+He had not the conception of the relation of God to nature and history
+which we have.
+
+We may well view the modern tendency to belief in healings through
+prayer, suggestion and faith, as an intelligible, an interesting, and in
+part, a touching manifestation. Of course there is mingled with it much
+dense ignorance, some superstition and even deception. Yet behind such a
+phenomenon there is meaning. Men of this mind make earnest with the
+thought that God cares for them. Without that thought there is no
+religion. They have been taught to find the evidence of God's love and
+care in the unusual. They are quite logical. It has been a weak point of
+the traditional belief that men have said that in the time of Christ
+there were miracles, but since that time, no more. Why not, if we can
+only in spirit come near to Christ and God? They are quite logical also
+in that they have repudiated modern science. To be sure, no
+inconsiderable part of them use the word science continually.
+
+But the very esoteric quality of their science is that it means
+something which no one else ever understood that it meant. In reality
+their breach with science is more radical than their breach with
+Christianity. They feel the contradiction in which most men are bound
+fast, who will let science have its way, up to a certain point, but who
+beyond that, would retain the miracle. Dimly the former appreciate that
+this position is impossible. They leave it to other men to become
+altogether scientific if they wish. For themselves they prefer to remain
+religious. What a revival of ancient superstitions they have brought to
+pass, is obvious. Still we shall never get beyond such adventurous and
+preposterous endeavours to rescue that which is inestimably precious in
+religion, until the false antithesis between reason and faith, the lying
+contradiction between the providence of God and the order of nature, is
+overcome. Some science mankind apparently must have. Altogether without
+religion the majority, it would seem, will never be. How these are
+related, the one to the other, not every one sees. Many attempt their
+admixture in unhappy ways. They might try letting them stand in peace as
+complement and supplement the one to the other. Still better, they may
+perhaps some day see how each penetrates, permeates and glorifies the
+other.
+
+
+THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
+
+
+We said that the last generation had been characterised by an unexampled
+concentration of intellectual interest upon problems presented by the
+social sciences. With this has gone an unrivalled earnestness in the
+interpretation of religion as a social force. The great religious
+enthusiasm has been that of the application of Christianity to the
+social aspects of life. This effort has furnished most of the watchwords
+of religious teaching. It has laid vigorous, not to say violent, hands
+on religious institutions. It has given a new perspective to effort and
+a new impulse to devotion. The revival of religion in our age has taken
+this direction, with an exclusiveness which has had both good and evil
+consequences. Yet, before all, it should be made clear that it
+constitutes a religious revival. Some are deploring the prostrate
+condition of spiritual interests. If one judged only by conventional
+standards, they have much evidence upon their side. Some are seeking to
+galvanise religious life by recurrence to evangelistic methods
+successfully operative half a century ago. The outstanding fact is that
+the age shows immense religious vitality, so soon as one concedes that
+it must be allowed to show its vitality in its own way. It is the age of
+the social question. One must be ignorant indeed of the activity of the
+churches and of the productivity of religious thinkers, if he does not
+own that in Christian circles also no questions are so rife as these.
+Whether the panaceas have been all wise or profitable may be questioned.
+Whether the interest has not been even excessive and one-sided, whether
+the accusation has not been occasionally unjust and the self-accusation
+morbid, these are questions which it might be possible in some quarters
+to ask. This is, however, only another form of proof of what we say. The
+religious interest in social questions has not been aroused primarily by
+intellectual and scientific impulses, nor fostered mainly by doctrinaire
+discussion. On the contrary, the initiative has been from the practical
+side. It has been a question of life and service. If anything, one often
+misses the scientific note in the flood of semi-religious literature
+relating to this theme, the realisation that, to do well, it is often
+profitable to think. Yet there is effort to mediate the best results of
+social-scientific thinking, through clerical education and directly to
+the laity. On the other hand, a deep sense of ethical and spiritual
+responsibility is prevalent among thinkers upon social topics.
+
+Often indeed has the quality of Christianity been observed which is here
+exemplified. Each succeeding age has read into Christ's teachings, or
+drawn out from his example, the special meaning which that generation,
+or that social level, or that individual man had need to draw. To them
+in their enthusiasm it has often seemed as if this were the only lesson
+reasonable men could draw. Nothing could be more enlightening than is
+reflexion upon this reading of the ever-changing ideals of man's life
+into Christianity, or of Christianity into the ever-advancing ideals of
+man's life. This chameleonlike quality of Christianity is the farthest
+possible remove from the changelessness which men love to attribute to
+religion. It is the most wonderful quality which Christianity possesses.
+It is precisely because of the recognition of this capacity for change
+that one may safely argue the continuance of Christianity in the world.
+Yet also because of this recognition, one is put upon his guard against
+joining too easily in the clamour that a past apprehension of religion
+was altogether wrong, or that a new and urgent one, in its exclusive
+emphasis and its entirety, is right. Our age is haunted by the sense of
+terrific social and economic inequalities which prevail. It has set its
+heart upon the elimination of those inequalities. It is an age whose
+disrespect for religion is in some part due to the fact that religion
+has not done away with these inequalities. It is an age which is
+immediately interested in an interpretation of religion which will make
+central the contention that, before all things else, these inequalities
+must be done away. If religion can be made a means of every man's
+getting his share of the blessings of this world, well and good. If not,
+there are many men and women to whom religion seems utterly meaningless.
+
+This sentence hardly overstates the case. It is the challenge of the age
+to religion to do something which the age profoundly needs, and which
+religion under its age-long dominant apprehension has not conspicuously
+done, nor even on a great scale attempted. It is the challenge to
+religion to undertake a work of surpassing grandeur--nothing less than
+the actualisation of the whole ideal of the life of man. Religious men
+respond with the quickened and conscientious conviction, not indeed that
+they have laid too great an emphasis upon the spiritual, but that under
+a dualistic conception of God and man and world, they have never
+sufficiently realised that the spiritual is to be realised in the
+material, the ideal in and not apart from the actual, the eternal in and
+not after the temporal. Yet with that oscillatory quality which belongs
+to human movements, especially where old wrongs and errors have come
+deeply to be felt, a part of the literature of the contention shows
+marked tendency to extremes. A religion in the body must become a
+religion of the body. A Christianity of the social state runs risk of
+being apprehended as merely one more means for compassing outward and
+material ends. Religion does stand for the inner life and the
+transcendent world, only not an inner life through the neglect of the
+outer, or a transcendent world in some far-off star or after an æon or
+two. There might be meaning in the argument that, exactly because so
+many other forces in our age do make for the realisation of the outer
+life and present world with an effectiveness and success which no
+previous age has ever dreamed, there is the more reason, and not the
+less, why religion should still be religion. Exactly this is the
+contention of Eueken in one of the most significant contributions of
+recent years to the philosophy of religion, his _Wahrheitsgehalt der
+Religion_, 1901, transl. Jones, 1911. The very source and cause of the
+sure recovery of religion in our age will be the experience of the
+futility, the bankruptcy, of a civilisation without faith. No nobler
+argument has been heard in our time for the spiritual meaning of
+religion, with the fullest recognition of all its other meanings.
+
+The modern emphasis on the social aspects of religion may be said to
+have been first clearly expressed in Seeley's _Ecce Homo_, 1867. The
+pith of the book is in this phrase: 'To reorganise society and to bind
+the members of it together by the closest ties was the business of
+Jesus' life.' Allusion has been made to Fremantle's _The World as the
+Subject of Redemption_, 1885. Worthy of note is also Fairbairn's
+_Religion in History and Modern Life_, 1894; pre-eminently so is
+Bosanquet's _The Civilisation of Christendom_, 1893. Westcott's
+_Incarnation and Common Life_, 1893, contains utterances of weight.
+Peabody, in his book, _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_, 1905, has
+given, on the whole, the best résumé of the discussion. He conveys
+incidentally an impression of the body of literature produced in recent
+years, in which it is assumed, sometimes with embitterment, that the
+centre of gravity of Christianity is outside the Church. Sell, in the
+very title of his illuminating little book, _Christenthum und
+Weltgeschichte seit der Reformation: das Christenthum in seiner
+Entwickelung über die Kirche hinaus_, 1910, records an impression, which
+is widespread and true, that the characteristic mark of modern
+Christianity is that it has transcended the organs and agencies
+officially created for it. It has become non-ecclesiastical, if not
+actually hostile to the Church. It has permeated the world in unexpected
+fashion and does the deeds of Christianity, though rather eager to avoid
+the name. The anti-clericalism of the Latin countries is not
+unintelligible, the anti-ecclesiasticism of the Teutonic not without a
+cause. German socialism, ever since Karl Marx, has been fundamentally
+antagonistic to any religion whatsoever. It is purely secularist in
+tone. This is also a strained situation, liable to become perverse. That
+part of the Christian Church which understands itself, rejoices in
+nothing so much as in the fact that the spirit of Christ is so widely
+disseminated, his influence felt by many who do not know what influence
+it is which they feel, his work done by vast numbers who would never
+call themselves his workers. That part of the Church is not therewith
+convinced but that there is need of the Church as institution, and of
+those who are consciously disciples of Jesus in the world.
+
+By far the largest question, however, which is raised in this connexion,
+is one different from any thus far intimated. It is, perhaps, the last
+question one would have expected the literature of the social movement
+to raise. It is, namely, the question of the individual. Ever since the
+middle of the eighteenth century a sort of universalistic optimism, to
+which the individual is sacrificed, has obtained. Within the period of
+which this book treats the world has won an enlargement of horizon of
+which it never dreamed. It has gained a forecast of the future of
+culture and civilisation which is beyond imagination. The access of
+comfort makes men at home in the world as they never were at home. There
+has been set a value on this life which life never had before. The
+succession of discoveries and applications of discovery makes it seem as
+if there were to be no end in this direction. From Rousseau to Spencer
+men have elaborated the view that the historical process cannot really
+issue in anything else than in ever higher stages of perfection and of
+happiness. They postulate a continuous enhancement of energy and a
+steady perfecting of intellectual and moral quality. As the goal of
+evolution appears an ideal condition which is either indefinitely
+remote, that is, which gives room for the bliss of infinite progress in
+its direction, or else a definitely attainable condition, which would
+have within itself the conditions of perpetuity.
+
+The resistlessness with which this new view of the life of civilisation
+has won acknowledgment from men of all classes is amazing. It rests upon
+a belief in the self-sufficiency and the all-sufficiency of the life of
+this world, of the bearings of which it may be assumed that few of its
+votaries are aware. In reality this view cannot by any possibility be
+described as the result of knowledge. On the contrary, it is a venture
+of faith. It is the peculiar, the very characteristic and suggestive
+form which the faith of our age takes. Men believe in this indefinite
+progress of the world and of mankind, because without postulating such
+progress they do not see how they can assume the absolute worth of an
+activity which is yet the only thing which has any interest to most of
+them. Under this view one can assign to the individual life a definite
+significance, only upon the supposition that the individual is the organ
+of realisation of a part of this progress of mankind. All happiness and
+suffering, all changes in knowledge and manner of conduct, are supposed
+to have no worth each for itself or for the sake of the individual, but
+only for their relation to the movement as a whole. Surely this is an
+illusion. Exactly that in which the characteristic quality of the world
+and of life is found, the individual personalities, the single
+generations, the concrete events--these lose, in this view, their own
+particular worth. What can possibly be the worth of a whole of which the
+parts have no worth? We have here but a parallel on a huge scale of that
+deadly trait in our own private lives, according to which it makes no
+difference what we are doing, so only that we are doing, or whither we
+are going, so only that we cease not to go, or what our noise is all
+about, so only that there be no end of the noise. Certainly no one can
+establish the value of the evolutionary process in and of itself.
+
+If the movement as a whole has no definite end that has absolute worth,
+then it has no worth except as the stages, the individual factors
+included in it, attain to something within themselves which is of
+increasing worth. If the movement achieves this, then it has worth, not
+otherwise. We may illustrate this question by asking ourselves
+concerning the existence and significance of suffering and of the evil
+and of the bad which are in the world, in their relation to this
+tendency to indefinite progress which is supposed to be inherent in
+civilisation. On this theory we have to say that the suffering of the
+individual is necessary for the development and perfecting of the whole.
+As over against the whole the individual has no right to make demands as
+to welfare or happiness. The bad also becomes only relative. In the
+movement taken as a whole, it is probably unavoidable. In any case it is
+negligible, since the movement is irresistible. All ethical values are
+absorbed in the dynamic ones, all personal values in the collective
+ones. Surely the sole intelligent question about any civilisation is,
+what sort of men does it produce. If it produces worthless individuals,
+it is so far forth a worthless civilisation. If it has sacrificed many
+worthy men in order to produce this ignoble result, then it is more
+obviously ignoble than ever.
+
+Furthermore, this notion of an inherent necessity and an irresistible
+tendency to progress is a chimera. The progress of mankind is a task. It
+is something to which the worthy human spirit is called upon to make
+contribution. The unworthy never hear the call. Progress is not a
+natural necessity. It is an ethical obligation. It is a task which has
+been fulfilled by previous generations in varying degrees of
+perfectness. It will be participated in by succeeding generations with
+varying degrees of wisdom and success. But as to there being anything
+autonomous about it, this is sheer hallucination, myth-making again, on
+the part of those who boast that they despise the myth,
+miracle-mongering on the part of those who have abjured the miracle,
+nonsense on the part of those who boast that they alone are sane. There
+is no ultimate source of civilisation but the individual, as there is
+also no issue of civilisation but in individuals. Men, characters,
+personalities, are the makers of it. Men are the product which is made.
+The higher stages and achievements of the life of society have come to
+pass always and only upon condition that single personalities have
+recognised the problem, seen their individual duty and known how to
+inspire others with enthusiasm. Periods of decline are always those in
+which this personal element cannot make itself felt. Democracies and
+periods of the intensity of emphasis upon the social movement, tend
+directly to the depression and suppression of personality.[7] Such
+reflexions will have served their purpose if they give us some clear
+sense of what we have to understand as the effect of the social movement
+on religion. They may give also some forecast of the effect of real
+religion on the social movement. For religion is the relation of God and
+personality. It can be social only in the sense that society, in all its
+normal relations, is the sphere within which that relation of God and
+personality is to be wrought out.
+
+[Footnote 7: Siebeck, _Religionsphilosophie_, 1893, s. 407.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES: ACTION AND REACTION
+
+
+In those aspects of our subject with which we have thus far dealt,
+leadership has been largely with the Germans. Effort was indeed made in
+the chapter on the sciences to illustrate the progress of thought by
+reference to British writers. In this department the original and
+creative contribution of British authors was great. There were, however,
+also in the earlier portion of the nineteenth century movements of
+religious thought in Great Britain and America related to some of those
+which we have previously considered. Moreover, one of the most
+influential movements of English religious thought, the so-called Oxford
+Movement, with the Anglo-Catholic revival which it introduced, was of a
+reactionary tendency. It has seemed, therefore, feasible to append to
+this chapter that which we must briefly say concerning the general
+movement of reaction which marked the century. This reactionary movement
+has indeed everywhere run parallel to the one which we have endeavoured
+to record. It has often with vigour run counter to our movement. It has
+revealed the working of earnest and sometimes anxious minds in
+directions opposed to those which we have been studying. No one can fail
+to be aware that there has been a great Catholic revival in the
+nineteenth century. That revival has had place in the Roman Catholic
+countries of the Continent as well. It was in order to include the
+privilege of reference to these aspects of our subject that this chapter
+was given a double title. Yet in no country has the nineteenth century
+so favourably altered the position of the Roman Catholic Church as in
+England. In no country has a Church which has been esteemed to be
+Protestant been so much influenced by Catholic ideas. This again is a
+reason for including our reference to the reaction here.
+
+According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy may be said to
+have begun in Great Britain in the year 1825, with the publication of
+Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_. In Coleridge's _Confessions of an
+Enquiring Spirit_, published six years after his death in 1834, we have
+a suggestion of the biblical-critical movement which was beginning to
+shape itself in Germany. In the same years we have evidence in the works
+of Erskine and the early writings of Campbell, that in Scotland
+theologians were thinking on Schleiermacher's lines. In those same years
+books of more or less marked rationalistic tendency were put forth by
+the Oriel School. Finally, with Pusey's _Assize Sermon_, in 1833, Newman
+felt that the movement later to be called Tractarian had begun. We shall
+not be wrong, therefore, in saying that the decade following 1825 saw
+the beginnings in Britain of more formal reflexion upon all the aspects
+of the theme with which we are concerned.
+
+What went before that, however, in the way of liberal religious
+thinking, though informal in its nature, should not be ignored. It was
+the work of the poets of the end of the eighteenth and of the beginning
+of the nineteenth centuries. The culmination of the great revolt against
+the traditional in state and society and against the conventional in
+religion, had been voiced in Britain largely by the poets. So vigorous
+was this utterance and so effective, that some have spoken of the
+contribution of the English poets to the theological reconstruction. It
+is certain that the utterances of the poets tended greatly to the
+dissemination of the new ideas. There was in Great Britain no such unity
+as we have observed among the Germans, either of the movement as a whole
+or in its various parts. There was a consecution nothing less than
+marvellous in the work of the philosophers from Kant to Hegel. There was
+a theological sequence from Schleiermacher to Ritschl. There was an
+unceasing critical advance from the days of Strauss. There was nothing
+resembling this in the work of the English-speaking people. The
+contributions were for a long time only sporadic. The movement had no
+inclusiveness. There was no aspect of a solid front in the advance. In
+the department of the sciences only was the situation different. In a
+way, therefore, it will be necessary in this chapter merely to single
+out individuals, to note points of conflict, one and another, all along
+the great line of advance. Or, to put it differently, it will be
+possible to pursue a chronological arrangement which would have been
+bewildering in our study heretofore. With the one great division between
+the progressive spirits and the men of the reaction, it will be possible
+to speak of philosophers, critics and theologians together, among their
+own contemporaries, and so to follow the century as it advances.
+
+In the closing years of the eighteenth century in England what claimed
+to be a rational supernaturalism prevailed. Men sought to combine faith
+in revealed religion with the empirical philosophy of Locke. They
+conceived God and his relation to the world under deistical forms. The
+educated often lacked in singular degree all deeper religious feeling.
+They were averse to mysticism and spurned enthusiasm. Utilitarian
+considerations, which formed the practical side of the empirical
+philosophy, played a prominent part also in orthodox belief. The theory
+of the universe which obtained among the religious is seen at its worst
+in some of the volumes of the Warburton Lectures, and at its best
+perhaps in Butler's _Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion_. The
+character and views of the clergy and of the ruling class among the
+laity of the Church of England, early in the nineteenth century, are
+pictured with love and humour in Trollope's novels. They form the
+background in many of George Eliot's books, where, in more mordant
+manner, both their strength and weaknesses are shown. Even the remarks
+which introduce Dean Church's _Oxford Movement_, 1891, in which the
+churchly element is dealt with in deep affection, give anything but an
+inspiring view.
+
+The contrast with this would-be rational and unemotional religious
+respectability of the upper classes was furnished, for masses of the
+people, in the quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after
+the manner of the Methodists. But the Methodism of the earlier age had
+as good as no intellectual relations whatsoever. The Wesleys and
+Whitefield had indeed influenced a considerable portion of the Anglican
+communion. Their pietistic trait, combined, for the most part, with a
+Calvinism which Wesley abhorred and an old-fashioned low church feeling
+with which also Wesley had no sympathy, shows itself in the so-called
+evangelical party which was strong before 1830. This evangelical
+movement in the Church of England manifested deep religious feeling, it
+put forth zealous philanthropic effort, it had among its representatives
+men and women of great beauty of personal character and piety. Yet it
+was completely cut off from any living relation to the thought of the
+age. There was among its representatives no spirit of theological
+inquiry. There was, if anything, less probability of theological
+reconstruction, from this quarter, than from the circles of the older
+German pietism, with which this English evangelicalism of the time of
+the later Georges had not a little in common. There had been a great
+enthusiasm for humanity at the opening of the period of the French
+Revolution, but the excesses and atrocities of the Revolution had
+profoundly shocked the English mind. There was abroad something of the
+same sense for the return to nature, and of the greatness of man, which
+moved Schiller and Goethe. The exponents of it were, however, almost
+exclusively the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron. There was
+nothing which combined these various elements as parts of a great whole.
+Britain had stood outside the area of the Revolution, and yet had put
+forth stupendous efforts, ultimately successful, to make an end of the
+revolutionary era and of the Napoleonic despotism. This tended perhaps
+to give to Britons some natural satisfaction in the British Constitution
+and the established Church which flourished under it. Finally, while men
+on the Continent were devising holy alliances and other chimeras of the
+sort, England was precipitated into the earlier acute stages of the
+industrial revolution in which she has led the European nations and
+still leads. This fact explains a certain preoccupation of the British
+mind with questions remote from theological reconstruction or religious
+speculation.
+
+
+THE POETS
+
+
+It may now sound like a contradiction if we assert that the years from
+1780 to 1830 constitute the era of the noblest English poetry since the
+times of great Elizabeth. The social direction of the new theology of
+the present day, with its cry against every kind of injustice, with its
+claim of an equal opportunity for a happy life for every man--this was
+the forecast of Cowper, as it had been of Blake. To Blake all outward
+infallible authority of books or churches was iniquitous. He was at
+daggers drawn with every doctrine which set limit to the freedom of all
+men to love God, or which could doubt that God had loved all men. Jesus
+alone had seen the true thing. God was a father, every man his child.
+Long before 1789, Burns was filled with the new ideas of the freedom and
+brotherhood of man, with zeal for the overthrow of unjust privilege. He
+had spoken in imperishable words of the holiness of the common life. He
+had come into contact with the most dreadful consequences of Calvinism.
+He has pilloried these mercilessly in his 'Holy Tulzie' and in his 'Holy
+Willie's Prayer.' Such poems must have shaken Calvinism more than a
+thousand liberal sermons could have done. What Coleridge might have done
+in this field, had he not so early turned to prose, it is not easy to
+say. The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction, fundamental
+to his later philosophy, that all the new ideas concerning men and the
+world are a revelation of God. Wordsworth seems never consciously to
+have broken with the current theology. His view of the natural glory and
+goodness of humanity, especially among the poor and simple, has not much
+relation to that theology. His view of nature, not as created of God. in
+the conventional sense, but as itself filled with God, of God as
+conscious of himself at every point of nature's being, has still less.
+Man and nature are but different manifestations of the one soul of all.
+Byron's contribution to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a
+negative sort. It was destructive rather than constructive. Among the
+conventions and hypocrisies of society there were none which he more
+utterly despised than those of religion and the Church as he saw these.
+There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks. But there is a
+difference. Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current
+religion. Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.
+Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron thought he had none.
+Posterity has felt that he had much. His attack was made in a reckless
+bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the truth of many things which
+he said is now overwhelmingly obvious. Shelley began with being what he
+called an atheist. He ended with being what we call an agnostic, whose
+pure poetic spirit carried him far into the realm of the highest
+idealism. The existence of a conscious will within the universe is not
+quite thinkable. Yet immortal love pervades the whole. Immortality is
+improbable, but his highest flights continually imply it. He is sure
+that when any theology violates the primary human affections, it
+tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become
+good. The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss
+later called 'the old faith and the new,' or, as Arnold phrased it, were
+'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,' found
+their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough. From the
+time of the opening of Tennyson's work, the poets, not by destruction
+but by construction, not in opposition to religion but in harmony with
+it, have built up new doctrines of God and man and aided incalculably in
+preparing the way for a new and nobler theology. In the latter part of
+the nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in England who did
+more to read all of the vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher
+faith, and to fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of
+knowledge, than did Browning. Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a
+little of the noblest conviction of the age. And what shall one say of
+Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and
+Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who have spoken, often with consummate
+power and beauty, that which one never says at all without faith and
+rarely says well without art?
+
+
+COLERIDGE
+
+
+Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at his father's vicarage,
+Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire. He was the tenth child of his parents,
+weak in frame, always suffering much. He was a student at Christ's
+Hospital, London, where he was properly bullied, then at Jesus College,
+Cambridge, where he did not take his degree. For some happy years he
+lived in the Lake region and was the friend of Wordsworth and Southey.
+He studied in Göttingen, a thing almost unheard of in his time. The
+years 1798 to 1813 were indeed spent in utter misery, through the opium
+habit which he had contracted while seeking relief from rheumatic pain.
+He wrote and taught and talked in Highgate from 1814 to 1834. He had
+planned great works which never took shape. For a brief period he
+severed his connexion with the English Church, coming under Unitarian
+influence. He then reverted to the relation in which his ecclesiastical
+instincts were satisfied. We read his _Aids to Reflection_ and his
+_Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, and wonder how they can ever have
+exerted a great influence. Nevertheless, they were fresh and stimulating
+in their time. That Coleridge was a power, we have testimony from men
+differing among themselves so widely as do Hare, Sterling, Newman and
+John Stuart Mill. He was a master of style. He had insight and breadth.
+Tulloch says of the _Aids_, that it is a book which none but a thinker
+upon divine things will ever like. Not all even of these have liked it.
+Inexcusably fragmentary it sometimes seems. One is fain to ask: What
+right has any man to publish a scrap-book of his musings? Coleridge had
+the ambition to lay anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. The
+_Aids_ were but of the nature of prolegomena. For substance his
+philosophy went back to Locke and Hume and to the Cambridge Platonists.
+He had learned of Kant and Schleiermacher as well. He was no
+metaphysician, but a keen interpreter of spiritual facts, who himself
+had been quickened by a particularly painful experience. He saw in
+Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of our
+spiritual being and the remedy for its disorder. The evangelical
+tradition brought religion to a man from without. It took no account of
+man's spiritual constitution, beyond the fact that he was a sinner and
+in danger of hell. Coleridge set out, not from sin alone, but from the
+whole deep basis of spiritual capacity and responsibility upon which sin
+rests. He asserts experience. We are as sure of the capacity for the
+good and of the experience of the good as we can be of the evil. The
+case is similar as to the truth. There are aspects of truth which
+transcend our powers. We use words without meaning when we talk of the
+plans of a being who is neither an object for our senses nor a part of
+our self-consciousness. All truth must be capable of being rendered into
+words conformable to reason. Theologians had declared their doctrines
+true or false without reference to the subjective standard of judgment.
+Coleridge contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data,
+but upon inward experience. The authority of Scripture is in its
+truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human reason
+and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The doctrine of an
+atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too comes within the
+range of spiritual experience. The apostolic language took colour from
+the traditions concerning sacrifice. Much has been taken by the Church
+as literal dogmatic statement which should be taken as more figure of
+speech, borrowed from Jewish sources.
+
+Coleridge feared that his thoughts concerning Scripture might, if
+published, do more harm than good. They were printed first in 1840.
+Their writing goes back into the period long before the conflict raised
+by Strauss. There is not much here that one might not have learned from
+Herder and Lessing. Utterances of Whately and Arnold showed that minds
+in England were waking. But Coleridge's utterances rest consistently
+upon the philosophy of religion and theory of dogma which have been
+above implied. They are more significant than are mere flashes of
+generous insight, like those of the men named. The notion of verbal
+inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures could not
+possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had made
+itself felt. The rabbinical idea was bound to disappear. A truer sense
+of the conditions attending the origins and progress of civilisation and
+of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social
+ideas advance, brought of necessity a changed idea of the nature of
+Scripture and revelation. Its literature must be read as literature, its
+history as history. For the answer in our hearts to the spirit in the
+Book, Coleridge used the phrase: 'It finds me.' 'Whatever finds me bears
+witness to itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Ghost. In the
+Bible there is more that finds me than in all the other books which I
+have read.' Still, there is much in the Bible that does not find me. It
+is full of contradictions, both moral and historical. Are we to regard
+these as all equally inspired? The Scripture itself does not claim that.
+Besides, what good would it do us to claim that the original documents
+were inerrant, unless we could claim also that they had been inerrantly
+transmitted? Apparently Coleridge thought that no one would ever claim
+that. Coleridge wrote also concerning the Church. His volume on _The
+Constitution of Church and State_ appeared in 1830. It is the least
+satisfactory of his works. The vacillation of Coleridge's own course
+showed that upon this point his mind was never clear. Arnold also,
+though in a somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that
+Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State
+in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. If Thomas
+Arnold's moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save this
+theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be expected from
+Coleridge.
+
+
+THE ORIEL SCHOOL
+
+
+It has often happened in the history of the English universities that a
+given college has become, through its body of tutors and students,
+through its common-room talk and literary work, the centre, for the
+time, of a movement of thought which gives leadership to the college. In
+this manner it has been customary to speak of the group of men who,
+before the rise of the Oxford Movement, gathered at Oriel College, as
+the Oriel School. Newman and Keble were both Oriel tutors. The Oriel men
+were of distinctly liberal tendency. There were men of note among them.
+There was Whately, Archbishop of Dublin after 1831, and Copleston, from
+whom both Keble and Newman owned that they learned much. There was
+Arnold, subsequently Headmaster of Rugby. There was Hampden, Professor
+of Divinity after 1836. The school was called from its liberalism the
+Noetic school. Whether this epithet contained more of satire or of
+complacency it is difficult to say. These men arrested attention and
+filled some of the older academic and ecclesiastical heads with alarm.
+Without disrespect one may say that it is difficult now to understand
+the commotion which they made. Arnold had a truly beautiful character.
+What he might have done as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford
+was never revealed, for he died in 1842. Whately, viewed as a noetic,
+appears commonplace.
+
+Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was Hampden.
+In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the title of _The Scholastic
+Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology_, he
+assailed what had long been the very bulwark of traditionalism. His idea
+was to show how the vast fabric of scholastic theology had grown up,
+particularly what contributions had been made to it in the Middle Age.
+The traditional dogma is a structure reared upon the logical terminology
+of the patristic and mediæval schools. It has little foundation in
+Scripture and no response in the religious consciousness. We have here
+the application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our
+own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were not
+wrong in saying that his method would dissolve, not merely that
+particular system of theology, but all creeds and theologies whatsoever.
+Patristic, mediæval Catholic theology and scholastic Protestantism, no
+less, would go down before it. A pamphlet attributed to Newman,
+published in 1836, precipitated a discussion which, for bitterness, has
+rarely been surpassed in the melancholy history of theological dispute.
+The excitement went to almost unheard of lengths. In the controversy the
+Archbishop, Dr. Howley, made but a poor figure. The Duke of Wellington
+did not add to his fame. Wilberforce and Newman never cleared themselves
+of the suspicion of indirectness. This was, however, after the opening
+of the Oxford Movement.
+
+
+ERSKINE AND CAMPBELL
+
+
+The period from 1820 to 1850 was one of religious and intellectual
+activity in Scotland as well. Tulloch depicts with a Scotsman's
+patriotism the movement which centres about the names of Erskine and
+Campbell. Pfleiderer also judges that their contribution was as
+significant as any made to dogmatic theology in Great Britain in the
+nineteenth century. They achieved the same reconstruction of the
+doctrine of salvation which had been effected by Kant and
+Schleiermacher. At their hands the doctrine was rescued from that
+forensic externality into which Calvinism had degenerated. It was given
+again its quality of ethical inwardness, and based directly upon
+religious experience. High Lutheranism had issued in the same
+externality in Germany before Kant and Schleiermacher, and the New
+England theology before Channing and Bushnell. The merits of Christ
+achieved an external salvation, of which a man became participant
+practically upon condition of assent to certain propositions. Similarly,
+in the Catholic revival, salvation was conceived as an external and
+future good, of which a man became participant through the sacraments
+applied to him by priests in apostolical succession. In point of
+externality there was not much to choose between views which were felt
+to be radically opposed the one to the other.
+
+Erskine was not a man theologically educated. He led a peculiarly
+secluded life. He was an advocate by profession, but, withdrawing from
+that career, virtually gave himself up to meditation. Campbell was a
+minister of the Established Church of Scotland in a remote village, Row,
+upon the Gare Loch. When he was convicted of heresy and driven from the
+ministry, he also devoted himself to study and authorship. Both men seem
+to have come to their results largely from the application of their own
+sound religious sense to the Scriptures. That the Scottish Church should
+have rejected the truth for which these men contended was the heaviest
+blow which it could have inflicted on itself. Thereby it arrested its
+own healthy development. It perpetuated its traditional view, somewhat
+as New England orthodoxy was given a new lease of life through the
+partisanship which the Unitarian schism engendered. The matter was not
+mended at the time of the great rupture of the Scottish Church in 1843.
+That body which broke away from the Establishment, and achieved a purely
+ecclesiastical control of its own clergy, won, indeed, by this means the
+name of the Free Church, though, in point of theological opinion, it was
+far from representing the more free and progressive element. Tulloch
+pays a beautiful tribute to the character of Erskine, whom he knew.
+Quiet, brooding, introspective, he read his Bible and his own soul, and
+with singular purity of intuition generalised from his own experience.
+Therewith is described, however, both the power and the limitation of
+his work. His first book was entitled _Remarks on the Internal Evidence
+for the Truth of Revealed Religion_, 1820. The title itself is
+suggestive of the revolution through which the mind both of Erskine and
+of his age was passing. His book, _The Unconditional Freeness of the
+Gospel_, appeared in 1828; _The Brazen Serpent_ in 1831. Men have
+confounded forgiveness and pardon. They have made pardon equivalent to
+salvation. But salvation is character. Forgiveness is only one of the
+means of it. Salvation is not a future good. It is a present fellowship
+with God. It is sanctification of character by means of our labour and
+God's love. The fall was the rise of the spirit of freedom. Fallen man
+can never be saved except through glad surrender of his childish
+independence to the truth and goodness of God. Yet that surrender is the
+preservation and enlargement of our independence. It is the secret of
+true self-realisation. The sufferings of Christ reveal God's holy love.
+It is not as if God's love had been purchased by the sufferings of his
+Son. On the contrary, it is man who needs to believe in God's love, and
+so be reconciled to the God whom he has feared and hated. Christ
+overcomes sin by obediently enduring the suffering which sin naturally
+entails. He endures it in pure love of his brethren. Man must overcome
+sin in the same way.
+
+Campbell published, so late as 1856, his great work _The Nature of the
+Atonement and its Relation to the Remission of Sins and Eternal Life_.
+It was the matured result of the reflections of a quarter of a century,
+spent partly in enforced retirement after 1831. Campbell maintains
+unequivocally that the sacrifice of Christ cannot be understood as a
+punishment due to man's sin, meted out to Christ in man's stead. Viewed
+retrospectively, Christ's work in the atonement is but the highest
+example of a law otherwise universally operative. No man can work
+redemption for his fellows except by entering into their condition, as
+if everything in that condition were his own, though much of it may be
+in no sense his due. It is freely borne by him because of his
+identification of himself with them. Campbell lingers in the myth of
+Christ's being the federal head of the humanity. There is something
+pathetic in the struggle of his mind to save phrases and the
+paraphernalia of an ancient view which, however, his fundamental
+principle rendered obsolete, He struggles to save the word satisfaction,
+though it means nothing in his system save that God is satisfied as he
+contemplates the character of Christ. Prospectively considered, the
+sacrifice of Christ effects salvation by its moral power over men in
+example and inspiration. Vicarious sacrifice, the result of which was
+merely imputed, would leave the sinner just where he was before. It is
+an empty fiction. But the spectacle of suffering freely undertaken for
+our sakes discovers the treasures of the divine image in man. The love
+of God and a man's own resolve make him in the end, in fact, that which
+he has always been in capacity and destiny, a child of God, possessed of
+the secret of a growing righteousness, which is itself salvation.
+
+
+MAURICE
+
+
+Scottish books seem to have been but little read in England in that day.
+It was Maurice who first made the substance of Campbell's teaching known
+in England. Frederick Denison Maurice was the son of a Unitarian
+minister, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, at a time when it was
+impossible for a Nonconformist to obtain a degree. He was ordained a
+priest of the Church of England in 1834, even suffering himself to be
+baptised again. He was chaplain of Lincoln's Inn and Professor of
+Theology in King's College, London. After 1866 he was Professor of Moral
+Philosophy in Cambridge, though his life-work was over. At the heart of
+Maurice's theology lies the contention to which he gave the name of
+universal redemption. Christ's work is for every man. Every man is
+indeed in Christ. Man's unhappiness lies only in the fact that he will
+not own this fact and live accordingly. Man as man is the child of God.
+He cannot undo that fact or alter that relation if he would. He does not
+need to become a child of God, as the phrase has been. He needs only to
+recognise that he already is such a child. He can never cease to bear
+this relationship. He can only refuse to fulfil it. With other words
+Erskine and Coleridge and Schleiermacher had said this same thing.
+
+For the rest, one may speak briefly of Maurice. He was animated by the
+strongest desire for Church unity, but at the back of his mind lay a
+conception of the Church and an insistence upon uniformity which made
+unity impossible. In the light of his own inheritance his ecclesiastical
+positivism seems strange. Perhaps it was the course of his experience
+which made this irrational positivism natural. Few men in his generation
+suffered greater persecutions under the unwarranted supposition on the
+part of contemporaries that he had a liberal mind. In reality, few men
+in his generation had less of a quality which, had he possessed it,
+would have given him peace and joy even in the midst of his
+persecutions. The casual remark above made concerning Campbell is true
+in enhanced degree of Maurice. A large part of the industry of a very
+industrious life was devoted to the effort to convince others and
+himself that those few really wonderful glimpses of spiritual truth
+which he had, had no disastrous consequences for an inherited system of
+thought in which they certainly did not take their rise. His name was
+connected with the social enthusiasm that inaugurated a new movement in
+England which will claim attention in another paragraph.
+
+
+CHANNING
+
+
+Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology which took
+place in America also, upon the same general lines which we have seen in
+Schleiermacher and in Campbell. The typical figure here, the protagonist
+of the movement, is William Ellery Channing. It may be doubted whether
+there has ever been a civilisation more completely controlled by its
+Church and ministers, or a culture more entirely dominated by theology,
+than were those of New England until the middle of the eighteenth
+century. There had been indeed a marked decline in religious life. The
+history of the Great Awakening shows that. Remonstrances against the
+Great Awakening show also how men's minds were moving away from the
+theory of the universe which the theology of that movement implied. One
+cannot say that in the preaching of Hopkins there is an appreciable
+relaxation of the Edwardsian scheme. Interestingly enough, it was in
+Newport that Channing was born and with Hopkins that he associated until
+the time of his licensure to preach in 1802. Many thought that Channing
+would stand with the most stringent of the orthodox. Deism and
+rationalism had made themselves felt in America after the Revolution.
+Channing, during his years in Harvard College, can hardly have failed to
+come into contact with the criticism of religion from this side. There
+is no such clear influence of current rationalism upon Channing as, for
+example, upon Schleiermacher. Yet here in the West, which most Europeans
+thought of as a wilderness, circumstances brought about the launching of
+this man upon the career of a liberal religious thinker, when as yet
+Schleiermacher had hardly advanced beyond the position of the
+_Discourses_, when Erskine had not yet written a line and Campbell was
+still a child. Channing became minister of the Federal Street Church in
+Boston in 1803. The appointment of Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity
+in Harvard College took place in 1805. That appointment was the first
+clear indication of the liberal party's strength. Channing's Baltimore
+Address was delivered in 1819. He died in 1847.
+
+In the schism among the Congregational Churches in New England, which
+before 1819 apparently had come to be regarded by both parties as
+remediless, Channing took the side of the opposition to Calvinistic
+orthodoxy. He developed qualities as controversialist and leader which
+the gentler aspect of his early years had hardly led men to suspect.
+This American liberal movement had been referred to by Belsham as
+related to English Unitarianism. After 1815, in this country, by its
+opponents at least, the movement was consistently called Unitarian.
+Channing did with zeal contend against the traditional doctrine of the
+atonement and of the trinity. On the other hand, he saw in Christ the
+perfect revelation of God to humanity and at the same time the ideal of
+humanity. He believed in Jesus' sinlessness and in his miracles,
+especially in his resurrection. The keynote of Channing's character and
+convictions is found in his sense of the inherent greatness of man. Of
+this feeling his entire system is but the unfolding. It was early and
+deliberately adopted by him as a fundamental faith. It remained the
+immovable centre of his reverence and trust amid all the inroads of
+doubt and sorrow. Political interest was as natural to Channing's
+earlier manhood as it had been to Fichte in the emergency of the
+Fatherland. Similarly, in the later years of his life, when evils
+connected with slavery had made themselves felt, his participation in
+the abolitionist agitation showed the same enthusiasm and practical
+bent. He had his dream of communism, his perception of the evils of our
+industrial system, his contempt for charity in place of economic remedy.
+All was for man, all rested upon supreme faith in man. That man is
+endowed with knowledge of the right and with the power to realise it,
+was a fundamental maxim. Hence arose Channing's assertion of free-will.
+The denial of free-will renders the sentiment of duty but illusory. In
+the conscience there is both a revelation and a type of God. Its
+suggestions, by the very authority they carry with them, declare
+themselves to be God's law. God, concurring with our highest nature,
+present in its action, can be thought of only after the pattern which he
+gives us in ourselves. Whatever revelation God makes of himself, he must
+deal with us as with free beings living under natural laws. Revelation
+must be merely supplementary to those laws. Everything arbitrary and
+magical, everything which despairs of us or insults us as moral agents,
+everything which does not address itself to us through reason and
+conscience, must be excluded from the intercourse between God and man.
+What the doctrines of salvation and atonement, of the person of Christ
+and of the influence of the Holy Spirit, as construed from this centre
+would be, may without difficulty be surmised. The whole of Channing's
+teaching is bathed in an atmosphere of the reverent love of God which is
+the very source of his enthusiasm for man.
+
+
+BUSHNELL
+
+
+A very different man was Horace Bushnell, born in the year of Channing's
+licensure, 1802. He was not bred under the influence of the strict
+Calvinism of his day. His father was an Arminian. Edwards had made
+Arminians detested in New England. His mother had been reared in the
+Episcopal Church. She was of Huguenot origin. When about seventeen,
+while tending a carding-machine, he wrote a paper in which he
+endeavoured to bring Calvinism into logical coherence and, in the
+interest of sound reason, to correct St. Paul's willingness to be
+accursed for the sake of his brethren. He graduated from Yale College in
+1827. He taught there while studying law after 1829. He describes
+himself at this period as sound in ethics and sceptical in religion, the
+soundness of his morals being due to nature and training, the
+scepticism, to the theology in which he was involved. His law studies
+were complete, yet he turned to the ministry. He had been born on the
+orthodox side of the great contention in which Channing was a leader of
+the liberals in the days of which we speak. He never saw any reason to
+change this relation. His clerical colleagues, for half a life-time,
+sought to change it for him. In 1833 he was ordained and installed as
+minister of the North Church in Hartford, a pastorate which he never
+left. The process of disintegration of the orthodox body was continuing.
+There was almost as much rancour between the old and the new orthodoxy
+as between orthodox and Unitarians themselves. Almost before his career
+was well begun an incurable disease fastened itself upon him. Not much
+later, all the severity of theological strife befell him. Between these
+two we have to think of him doing his work and keeping his sense of
+humour.
+
+His earliest book of consequence was on _Christian Nurture_, published
+in 1846. Consistent Calvinism presupposes in its converts mature years.
+Even an adult must pass through waters deep for him. He is not a sinful
+child of the Father. He is a being totally depraved and damned to
+everlasting punishment. God becomes his Father only after he is
+redeemed. The revivalists' theory Bushnell bitterly opposed. It made of
+religion a transcendental matter which belonged on the outside of life,
+a kind of miraculous epidemic. He repudiated the prevailing
+individualism. He anticipated much that is now being said concerning
+heredity, environment and subconsciousness. He revived the sense of the
+Church in which Puritanism had been so sadly lacking. The book is a
+classic, one of the rich treasures which the nineteenth century offers
+to the twentieth.
+
+Bushnell, so far as one can judge, had no knowledge of Kant. He is,
+nevertheless, dealing with Kant's own problem, of the theory of
+knowledge, in his rather diffuse 'Dissertation on Language,' which is
+prefixed to the volume which bears the title _God in Christ_, 1849. He
+was following his living principle, the reference of doctrine to
+conscience. God must be a 'right God.' Dogma must make no assertion
+concerning God which will not stand this test. Not alone does the dogma
+make such assertions. The Scripture makes them as well. How can this be?
+What is the relation of language to thought and of thought to fact? How
+can the language of Scripture be explained, and yet the reality of the
+revelation not be explained away? There is a touching interest which
+attaches to this Hartford minister, working out, alone and clumsily, a
+problem the solution of which the greatest minds of the age had been
+gradually bringing to perfection for three-quarters of a century.
+
+In the year 1848 Bushnell was invited to give addresses at the
+Commencements of three divinity schools: that at Harvard, then
+unqualifiedly Unitarian; that at Andover, where the battle with
+Unitarianism had been fought; and that at Yale, where Bushnell had been
+trained. The address at Cambridge was on the subject of _the Atonement_;
+the one at New Haven on _the Divinity of Christ_, including Bushnell's
+doctrine of the trinity; the one at Andover on _Dogma and Spirit_, a
+plea for the cessation of strife. He says squarely of the old school
+theories of the atonement, which represent Christ as suffering the
+penalty of the law in our stead: 'They are capable, one and all of them,
+of no light in which they do not offend some right sentiment of our
+moral being. If the great Redeemer, in the excess of his goodness,
+consents to receive the penal woes of the world in his person, and if
+that offer is accepted, what does it signify, save that God will have
+his modicum of suffering somehow; and if he lets the guilty go he will
+yet satisfy himself out of the innocent?' The vicariousness of love, the
+identification of the sufferer with the sinner, in the sense that the
+Saviour is involved by his desire to help us in the woes which naturally
+follow sin, this Bushnell mightily affirmed. Yet there is no pretence
+that he used vicariousness or satisfaction in the same sense in which
+his adversaries did. He is magnificently free from all such indirection.
+In the New Haven address there is this same combination of fire and
+light. The chief theological value of the doctrine of the trinity, as
+maintained by the New England Calvinistic teachers, had been to furnish
+the _dramatis personæ_ for the doctrine of the atonement. In the
+speculation as to the negotiation of this substitutionary transaction,
+the language of the theologians had degenerated into stark tritheism.
+Edwards, describing the councils of the trinity, spoke of the three
+persons as 'they.' Bushnell saw that any proper view of the unity of God
+made the forensic idea of the atonement incredible. He sought to replace
+the ontological notion of the trinity by that of a trinity of
+revelation, which held for him the practical truths by which his faith
+was nourished, and yet avoided the contradictions which the other
+doctrine presented both to reason and faith. Bushnell would have been
+far from claiming that he was the first to make this fight. The American
+Unitarians had been making it for more than a generation. The Unitarian
+protest was wholesome. It was magnificent. It was providential, but it
+paused in negation. It never advanced to construction. Bushnell's
+significance is not that he fought this battle, but that he fought it
+from the ranks of the orthodox Church. He fought it with a personal
+equipment which Channing had not had. He was decades later in his work.
+He took up the central religious problem when Channing's successors were
+following either Emerson or Parker.
+
+The Andover address consisted in the statement of Bushnell's views of
+the causes which had led to the schism in the New England Church. A
+single quotation may give the key-note of the discourse:--'We had on our
+side an article of the creed which asserted a metaphysical trinity. That
+made the assertion of the metaphysical unity inevitable and desirable.
+We had theories of atonement, of depravity, of original sin, which
+required the appearance of antagonistic theories. On our side,
+theological culture was so limited that we took what was really only our
+own opinion for the unalterable truth of God. On the other side, it was
+so limited that men, perceiving the insufficiency of dogma, took the
+opposite contention with the same seriousness and totality of
+conviction. They asserted liberty, as indeed they must, to vindicate
+their revolt. They produced, meantime, the most intensely human and, in
+that sense, the most intensely opinionated religion ever invented.'
+
+
+THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL
+
+
+The Oxford Movement has been spoken of as a reaction against the
+so-called Oriel Movement, a conservative tendency over against an
+intellectualist and progressive one. In a measure the personal
+animosities within the Oxford circle may be accounted for in this way.
+The Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one hand, in the
+going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great
+revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands
+in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular
+movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it
+was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social
+aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the
+Enlightenment and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but
+complex. It was a revolt of the conservative spirit from the new ideals
+which had been suddenly translated into portentous realities. It was
+marked everywhere by hatred of the eighteenth century with all its ways
+and works. On the one side we have the revolutionary thesis, the rights
+of man, the authority of reason, the watchwords liberty, equality,
+fraternity. On the other side stood forth those who were prepared to
+assert the meaning of community, the continuity of history, spiritual as
+well as civil authority as the basis of order, and order as the
+condition of the highest good. In literature the tendency appears as
+romanticism, in politics as legitimism, in religion as ultramontanism.
+Le Maistre with his _L'Eglise gallicane du Pape_; Chateaubriand with his
+_Génie du Christianisme_; Lamennais with his _Essai sur l'Indifference
+en Matière, de Religion_, were, from 1820 to 1860, the exponents of a
+view which has had prodigious consequences for France and Italy. The
+romantic movement arose outside of Catholicism. It was impersonated in
+Herder. Friedrich Schlegel, Werner and others went over to the Roman
+Church. The political reaction was specifically Latin and Catholic. In
+the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to have a mission again. Divine
+right in the State must be restored through the Church. The Catholic
+apologetic saw the Revolution as only the logical conclusion of the
+premises of the Reformation. The religious revolt of the sixteenth
+century, the philosophical revolt of the seventeenth, the political
+revolt of the eighteenth, the social revolt of the nineteenth, are all
+parts of one dreadful sequence. As the Church lifted up the world after
+the first flood of the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world
+after the devastations made by the more terrible barbarians of the
+eighteenth century. England had indeed stood a little outside of the
+cyclone which had devastated the world from Coronna to Moscow and from
+the Channel to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting down
+the revolution. Only God's goodness had preserved England. The logic of
+Puritanism would have been the same. Indeed, in England the State was
+weaker and worse than were the states upon the Continent. For since 1688
+it had been a popular and constitutional monarchy. In Frederick
+William's phrase, its sovereign took his crown from the gutter. The
+Church was through and through Erastian, a creature of the State.
+Bishops were made by party representatives. Acts like the Reform Bills,
+the course of the Government in the matter of the Irish Church, were
+steps which would surely bring England to the pass which France had
+reached in 1789. The source of such acts was wrong. It was with the
+people. It was in men, not in God. It was in reason, not in authority.
+It would be difficult to overstate the strength of this reactionary
+sentiment in important circles in England at the end of the third decade
+of the nineteenth century.
+
+
+THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
+
+
+In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to made of the Oxford
+Movement or the Catholic revival a movement of life, ecclesiastical,
+social and political as well, its history falls outside the purpose of
+this book. We proposed to deal with the history of thought. Reactionary
+movements have frequently got on without much thought. They have left
+little deposit of their own in the realm of ideas. Their avowed
+principle has been that of recurrence to that which has already been
+thought, of fidelity to ideas which have long prevailed. This is the
+reason why the conservatives have not a large place in such a sketch as
+this. It is not that their writings have not often been full of high
+learning and of the subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas
+about which they reason do not belong to the history of the nineteenth
+century. They belong, on the earnest contention of the conservatives
+themselves--those of Protestants, to the history of the Reformation--and
+of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman, to the history of the early or
+mediæval Church.
+
+Nevertheless, when with passionate conviction a great man, taking the
+reactionary course, thinks the problem through again from his own point
+of view, then we have a real phenomenon in the history of contemporary
+thought. When such an one wrestles before God to give reason to himself
+and to his fellows for the faith that is in him, then the reactionary's
+reasoning is as imposing and suggestive as is any other. He leaves in
+his work an intellectual deposit which must be considered. He makes a
+contribution which must be reckoned with, even more seriously, perhaps,
+by those who dissent from it than by those who may agree with it. Such
+deposit Newman and the Tractarian movement certainly did make. They
+offered a rationale of the reaction. They gave to the Catholic revival a
+standing in the world of ideas, not merely in the world of action.
+Whether their reasoning has weight to-day, is a question upon which
+opinion is divided. Yet Newman and his compeers, by their character and
+standing, by their distinctively English qualities and by the road of
+reason which they took in the defence of Catholic principles, made
+Catholicism English again, in a sense in which it had not been English
+for three hundred years. Yet though Newman brought to the Roman Church
+in England, on his conversion to it, a prestige and qualities which in
+that communion were unequalled, he was never _persona grata_ in that
+Church. Outwardly the Roman Catholic revival in England was not in large
+measure due to Newman and his arguments. It was due far more to men like
+Wiseman and Manning, who were not men of argument but of deeds.
+
+
+NEWMAN
+
+
+John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. His
+mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic influence.
+Through study especially, of Romaine _On Faith_ he became the subject of
+an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he wrote: 'I am still more
+certain of it than that I have hands and feet.' Thomas Scott, the
+evangelical, moved him. Before he was sixteen he made a collection of
+Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the trinity. From Newton _On
+the Prophecies_ he learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ--a
+doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year
+1843. In his _Apologia_, 1865, he declares: 'From the age of fifteen,
+dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter
+into the idea of any other sort of religion.' At the age of twenty-one,
+two years after he had taken his degree, he came under very different
+influences. He passed from Trinity College to a fellowship in Oriel. To
+use his own phrase, he drifted in the direction of liberalism. He was
+touched by Whately. He was too logical, and also too dogmatic, to be
+satisfied with Whately's position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley
+says: 'Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he
+would go. It is not certain that he himself knew.' Francis W. Newman,
+Newman's brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own
+years of stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was
+profoundly uncongenial to him.
+
+The year 1827, in which Keble's _Christian Year_ was published, saw
+another change in Newman's views. Illness and bereavement came to him
+with awakening effect. He made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude.
+Froude brought Newman and Keble together. Henceforth Newman bore no more
+traces either of evangelicalism or of liberalism. Of Froude it is
+difficult to speak with confidence. His brother, James Anthony Froude,
+the historian, author of the _Nemesis of Faith_, 1848, says that he was
+gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic. Newman speaks of him with almost
+boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons, published after his death
+in 1836, make the impression neither of learning nor judgment. Clearly
+he had charm. Possibly he talked himself into a common-room reputation.
+Newman says: 'Froude made me look with admiration toward the Church of
+Rome.' Keble never had felt the liberalism through which Newman had
+passed. Cradled as the Church of England had been in Puritanism, the
+latter was to him simply evil. Opinions differing from his own were not
+simply mistaken, they were sinful. He conceived no religious truth
+outside the Church of England. In the _Christian Year_ one perceives an
+influence which Newman strongly felt. It was that of the idea of the
+sacramental significance of all natural objects or events. Pusey became
+professor of Hebrew in 1830. He lent the movement academic standing,
+which the others could not give. He had been in Germany, and had
+published an _Inquiry into the Rationalist Character of German
+Theology_, 1825. He hardly did more than expose the ignorance of Rose.
+He was himself denounced as a German rationalist who dared to speak of a
+new era in theology. Pusey, mourning the defection of Newman, whom he
+deeply loved, gathered in 1846 the forces of the Anglo-Catholics and
+continued in some sense a leader to the end of his long life in 1882.
+
+The course of political events was fretting the Conservatives
+intolerably. The agitation for the Reform Bill was taking shape. Sir
+Robert Peel, the member for Oxford, had introduced a Bill for the
+emancipation of the Roman Catholics. There was violent commotion in
+Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the measure. In 1830 there
+was revolution in France. In England the Whigs had come into power.
+Newman's mind was excited in the last degree. 'The vital question,' he
+says, 'is this, how are we to keep the Church of England from being
+liberalised?' At the end of 1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together.
+On this journey, as he lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he
+wrote his immortal hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' He came home assured that
+he had a work to do. Keble's Assize Sermon on the _National Apostasy_,
+preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman's return to Oxford,
+kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing. Newman
+conceived the idea of the _Tracts for the Times_ as a means of
+expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which deeply moved
+him. 'From the first,' he says, 'my battle was with liberalism. By
+liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle. Secondly, my aim was the
+assertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite
+religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the
+assertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.'
+Newman grew greatly in personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St.
+Mary's exerted spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at
+his best. All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His
+insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous
+play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble
+and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the
+question. Pusey began the _Library of the Fathers_, the most elaborate
+literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than
+the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the
+movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the
+_Tracts_. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did
+not insist. Newman's own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course
+which was still open to it.
+
+Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense
+that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that
+it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible
+source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective
+and fallible expressions? Newman's own studies in criticism, by no means
+profound, led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him
+of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible
+Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these
+there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying
+something of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to
+labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One
+must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the
+mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from
+without.
+
+According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been
+impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement,
+this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The
+intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in
+religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of
+intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority,
+if religion is to be saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly
+sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had
+a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his
+negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of
+the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning
+of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which
+to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely,
+religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one
+ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed
+that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the
+contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he
+says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because
+religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was
+the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute.
+The soul was of God. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his
+own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He
+dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him.
+The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must
+have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.
+
+His whole book, _The Grammar of Assent_, 1870, is pervaded by the
+intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives,
+determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the
+succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole aim of the work is
+to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason
+into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which
+reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective
+validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it. Again, he
+is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses. Had not
+Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl
+seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it
+within the realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end
+by different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen
+concerning Mephistopheles: 'He says the same thing with the pastor, only
+in different words.' Newman says the same words, but means a different
+thing.
+
+Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and
+Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the worthlessness of
+mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear
+Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible. 'The Church's
+infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to
+preserve religion in the world. Outside the Catholic Church all things
+tend to atheism. The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist,
+able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the
+all-dissolving scepticism of the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my
+belief in God. If I should be asked why I believe in God, I should
+answer, because I believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in
+myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a
+personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.' These
+passages are mainly taken from the _Apologia_, written long after Newman
+had gone over to the Roman Church. They perfectly describe the attitude
+of his mind toward the Anglican Church, so long as he believed this, and
+not the Roman, to be the true Church. He had once thought that a man
+could hold a position midway between the Protestantism which he
+repudiated and the Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the
+_via media_ so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts
+about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to
+overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies
+cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and
+universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the _Tracts_,
+_Tract Ninety_, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One
+must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles.
+This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in
+the communication of religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself
+to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of
+holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said
+must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do
+not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is,
+in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else
+how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their
+reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be
+uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with
+the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important
+article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of
+the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest
+against the tract. Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident
+to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was
+gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed
+as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and
+established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the
+parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he
+was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest
+Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.
+
+It is a strange thing that in his _Essay on the Development of Christian
+Doctrine_, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced
+substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many things
+concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds
+conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole
+dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman
+entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have
+foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious,
+because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine
+ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an
+infallible authority outside of the development must have existed from
+the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development
+from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems
+incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same
+argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic
+history. Similar is the case with the argument of the _Grammar of
+Assent_. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its
+contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the
+contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think
+brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief
+ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It
+is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that
+would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act
+of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite,
+the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which
+might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality.
+One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty.
+Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in
+Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his
+followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the
+Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the
+first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of
+Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put
+forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day.
+Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead,
+ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long
+lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering
+give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman
+lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible
+Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.
+
+[Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.]
+
+
+MODERNISM
+
+
+It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the
+reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the
+Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the
+Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those
+countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had free play. The
+alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised
+religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a
+position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and
+better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth
+century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the
+movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical,
+low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of
+the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its
+relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is
+another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must
+have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman
+and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual
+factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the
+effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of
+reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry
+Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not
+to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree
+of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments
+had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally
+through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they
+assert, then in the last analysis what they assert is truth. If one has
+given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason, then it is
+querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority do not comport
+with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest interest in the
+struggle as to the instance in which this authority is to be lodged.
+This interest attaches to the age-long struggle between Pope and
+Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of Döllinger, Dupanloup,
+Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once the Church has spoken there is,
+for the advocate of authoritative religion, no logic but to submit.
+
+Similarly as to the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, which
+forecast the present conflict concerning Modernism. The _Syllabus_ had a
+different atmosphere from that which any Englishman in the sixties would
+have given it. Had not Newman, however, made passionate warfare on the
+liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees?
+Was Gladstone's attitude intelligible? The contrast of two principles in
+life and religion, the principles of authority and of the spirit, is
+being brought home to men's consciousness as it has never been before.
+One reads _Il Santo_ and learns concerning the death of Fogazzaro, one
+looks into the literature relating to Tyrrell, one sees the fate of
+Loisy, comparing the really majestic achievement in his works and the
+spirit of his _Simple Reflections_ with the _Encyclical Pascendi_, 1907.
+One understands why these men have done what they could to remain within
+the Roman Church. One recalls the attitude of Döllinger to the
+inauguration of the Old Catholic Movement, reflects upon the relative
+futility of the Old Catholic Church, and upon the position of Hyacinthe
+Loyson. One appreciates the feeling of these men that it is impossible,
+from without, to influence as they would the Church which they have
+loved. The present difficulty of influencing it from within seems almost
+insuperable. The history of Modernism as an effective contention in the
+world of Christian thought seems scarcely begun. The opposition to
+Modernism is not yet a part of the history of thought.
+
+
+ROBERTSON
+
+
+In no life are reflected more perfectly the spiritual conflicts of the
+fifth decade of the nineteenth century than in that of Frederick W.
+Robertson. No mind worked itself more triumphantly out of these
+difficulties. Descended from a family of Scottish soldiers, evangelical
+in piety, a student in Oxford in 1837, repelled by the Oxford Movement,
+he undertook his ministry under a morbid sense of responsibility. He
+reacted violently against his evangelicalism. He travelled abroad, read
+enormously, was plunged into an agony which threatened mentally to undo
+him. He took his charge at Brighton in 1847, still only thirty-one years
+old, and at once shone forth in the splendour of his genius. A martyr to
+disease and petty persecution, dying at thirty-seven, he yet left the
+impress of one of the greatest preachers whom the Church of England has
+produced. He left no formal literary work such as he had designed. Of
+his sermons we have almost none from his own manuscripts. Yet his
+influence is to-day almost as intense as when the sermons were
+delivered. It is, before all, the wealth and depth of his thought, the
+reality of the content of the sermons, which commands admiration. They
+are a classic refutation of the remark that one cannot preach theology.
+Out of them, even in their fragmentary state, a well-articulated system
+might be made. He brought to his age the living message of a man upon
+whom the best light of his age had shone.
+
+
+PHILLIPS BROOKS
+
+
+Something of the same sort may be said concerning Phillips Brooks. He
+inherited on his father's side the sober rationalism and the humane and
+secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his mother's side the
+intensity of evangelical pietism with the Calvinistic form of thought.
+The conflict of these opposing tendencies in New England was at that
+time so great that Brooks's parents sought refuge with the low-church
+element in the Episcopal Church. Brooks's education at Harvard College,
+where he took his degree in 1855, as also at Alexandria, and still more,
+his reading and experience, made him sympathetic with that which, in
+England in those years, was called the Broad Church party. He was deeply
+influenced by Campbell and Maurice. Later well known in England, he was
+the compeer of the best spirits of his generation there. Deepened by the
+experience of the great war, he held in succession two pulpits of large
+influence, dying as Bishop of Massachusetts in 1893. There is a
+theological note about his preaching, as in the case of Robertson. Often
+it is the same note. Brooks had passed through no such crisis as had
+Robertson. He had flowered into the greatness of rational belief. His
+sermons are a contribution to the thinking of his age. We have much
+finished material of this kind from his own hand, and a book or two
+besides. His service through many years as preacher to his university
+was of inestimable worth. The presentation of ever-advancing thought to
+a great public constituency is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is
+also one of the most necessary. The fusion of such thoughtfulness with
+spiritual impulse has rarely been more perfectly achieved than in the
+preaching of Phillips Brooks.
+
+
+THE BROAD CHURCH
+
+
+We have used the phrase, the Broad Church party. Stanley had employed
+the adjective to describe the real character of the English Church, over
+against the antithesis of the Low Church and the High. The designation
+adhered to a group of which Stanley was himself a type. They were not
+bound together in a party. They had no ecclesiastical end in view. They
+were of a common spirit. It was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still
+less was it that of the Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had
+manifested. It aimed to hold the faith with an open mind in all the
+intellectual movement of the age. Maurice should be enumerated here,
+with reservations. Kingsley beyond question belonged to this group.
+There was great ardour among them for the improvement of social
+conditions, a sense of the social mission of Christianity. There grew up
+what was called a Christian Socialist movement, which, however, never
+attained or sought a political standing. The Broad Church movement
+seemed, at one time, assured of ascendancy in the Church of England. Its
+aims appeared congruous with the spirit of the times. Yet Dean Fremantle
+esteems himself perhaps the last survivor of an illustrious company.
+
+The men who in 1860 published the volume known as _Essays and Reviews_
+would be classed with the Broad Church. In its authorship were
+associated seven scholars, mostly Oxford men. Some one described _Essays
+and Reviews_ as the _Tract Ninety_ of the Broad Church. It stirred
+public sentiment and brought the authors into conflict with authority in
+a somewhat similar way. The living antagonism of the Broad Church was
+surely with the Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the
+most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy,
+touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of
+Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of Scripture.' It
+hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the controversy then
+precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's adherence to Platonic
+studies instead of his devoting himself to theology. The most decisive
+of the papers was that of Baden Powell on the 'Study of the Evidences of
+Christianity.' It was mainly a discussion of the miracle. It was radical
+and conclusive. The essay closes with an allusion to Darwin's _Origin of
+Species_, which had then just appeared. Baden Powell died shortly after
+its publication. The fight came on Rowland Williams's paper upon
+Bunson's _Biblical Researches_. It was really upon the prophecies and
+their use in 'Christian Evidences.' Baron Bunsen was not a great
+archæologist, but he brought to the attention of English readers that
+which was being done in Germany in this field. Williams used the
+archæological material to rectify the current theological notions
+concerning ancient history. A certain type of English mind has always
+shown zeal for the interpretation of prophecy. Williams's thesis,
+briefly put, was this: the Bible does not always give the history of the
+past with accuracy; it does not give the history of the future at all;
+prophecy means spiritual teaching, not secular prognostication. A reader
+of our day may naturally feel that Wilson, with his paper on the
+'National Church,' made the greatest contribution. He built indeed upon
+Coleridge, but he had a larger horizon. He knew the arguments of the
+great Frenchmen of his day and of their English imitators who, in Benn's
+phrase, narrowed and perverted the ideal of a world-wide humanity into
+that of a Church founded on dogmas and administered by clericals. Wilson
+argued that in Jesus' teaching the basis of the religious community is
+ethical. The Church is but the instrument for carrying out the will of
+God as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of God
+must extend beyond the limits of the Church's activity, however widely
+these are drawn. There arose a violent agitation. Williams and Wilson
+were prosecuted. The case was tried in the Court of Arches. Williams was
+defended by no less a person than Fitzjames Stephen. The two divines
+were sentenced to a year's suspension. This decision was reversed by the
+Lord Chancellor. Fitzjames Stephen had argued that if the men most
+interested in the church, namely, its clergy, are the only men who
+may be punished for serious discussion of the facts and truths of
+religion, then respect on the part of the world for the Church is at an
+end. By this discussion the English clergy, even if Anglo-Catholic, are
+in a very different position from the Roman priests, over whom
+encyclicals, even if not executed, are always suspended.
+
+Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Equipped
+mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest self-devotion, he had
+been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the process of the translation
+of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had come to reflect upon the problem
+which the Old Testament presents. In a manner which is altogether
+marvellous he worked out critical conclusions parallel to those of Old
+Testament scholars on the Continent. He was never really an expert, but
+in his main contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite
+severe pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such
+guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that biblical
+studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a development
+in which scholars of these nations are not behind the best scholars of
+the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson Smith in Edinburgh and of
+Dr. Briggs in New York have now little living interest. Yet biblical
+studies in Scotland and America were incalculably furthered by those
+discussions. The publication of a book like _Supernatural Religion_,
+1872, illustrates a proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal
+circles, for taking up a contention just when those who made it and have
+lived with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch
+and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to
+warrant the assertions above made.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service rendered
+to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and interpretation
+of religion at the hands of literary men. That country and age may be
+esteemed fortunate in which religion occupies a place such that it
+compels the attention of men of genius. In the history of culture this
+has by no means always been the case. That these men do not always speak
+the language of edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite
+worth is that the largest minds of the generation shall engage
+themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought concerning
+Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for example, of
+Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold--to mention only types.
+
+
+CARLYLE
+
+
+Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the Border;
+his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his mother with her
+frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he learned Latin, 'the
+priestliest man I ever beheld in any ecclesiastical guise.' The picture
+of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the
+Church. Such had been his mother's prayer. He took his arts course in
+Edinburgh. In the university, he says, 'there was much talk about
+progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young
+looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.'
+He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had
+arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the man
+for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become intellectually
+incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely miserable, bordering
+upon despair. He has described his spiritual deliverance: 'Precisely
+that befel me which the Methodists call their conversion, the
+deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth
+a sacred flame of joy in me.' With _Sartor Resartus_ his message to the
+world began. It was printed in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833, but not
+published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher
+embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his
+message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message.
+Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London
+or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was
+done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of
+body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.
+
+He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to be
+alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes needless.
+Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he desired he in no
+small measure achieved--that his readers should be arrested and feel
+themselves face to face with reality. His startling intuition, his
+intellectual uprightness, his grasp upon things as they are, his passion
+for what ought to be, made a great impression upon his age. It was in
+itself a religious influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of
+sternest truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His
+injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a
+social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler
+meaning than they had had before. His _French Revolution_, his papers on
+_Chartism_, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from
+1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth
+of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work. In his
+brooding sympathy with the downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the
+social movement. He felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no
+one has told us with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our
+democratic institutions. His word was a great corrective for much
+'rose-water' optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is,
+however, often lacking. The mythology of an absentee God had faded from
+him. Yet the God who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the
+sun in the heavens, was a God over the world, to judge it inexorably.
+Again, it is not difficult to accumulate evidence in his words which
+looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the religious benefit of
+pantheism, the sense that God is in his world, Carlyle often loses.
+
+Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it difficult to
+realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a different look. Carlyle
+was never weary of pouring out the vials of his contempt on
+'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was
+a man more opposed to the idea of a godless world, in which man is his
+own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence.
+His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and
+absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort
+to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in
+the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or
+superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable appeal to
+him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was
+imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superstitions and
+hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty was so ineffable, all
+effort to approach him so unworthy, that almost instinctively he would
+call upon the man who made the effort, to desist. So magnificent, all
+his life long, had been his protest against the credulity and stupidity
+of men, against beliefs which assert the impossible and blink the facts,
+that, for himself, the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to
+say, in their naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were
+half-querulously denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should
+be found credulous and self-deceived. From this titan labouring at the
+foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the
+Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at ships as they
+pass by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was Carlyle's
+friend.
+
+
+EMERSON
+
+
+Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these
+voices--Newman, Carlyle, Goethe--there came to us in the Oxford of my
+youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear and pure
+voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new and moving
+and unforgetable as those others. Lowell has described the apparition of
+Emerson to your young generation here. He was your Newman, your man of
+soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your
+heart and imagination.' Then he quotes as one of the most memorable
+passages in English speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the
+divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
+the connection of events. Great men have always done so, confiding
+themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying a perception
+which was stirring in their hearts, working through their hands,
+dominating their whole being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim
+insistence upon labour and righteousness but of his scorn of happiness,
+and then says: 'But Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness
+and veracity. In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope,
+that was Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the
+spirit is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the
+spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this
+Emerson was great.'
+
+Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers of New England churches. He
+inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue,
+sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his
+ideals was modified by the glow of transcendentalism which passed over
+parts of New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century,
+but the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced
+them and lived them, was the Puritan spirit, only elevated, enlarged and
+beautified by the poetic temperament. Taking his degree from Harvard in
+1821, despising school teaching, stirred by the passion for spiritual
+leadership, the ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its
+satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the Divinity School in Harvard to
+prepare himself for the Unitarian ministry. In 1829 he became associate
+minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. He arrived at the
+conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Jesus to be a
+permanent sacrament. He found his congregation, not unnaturally,
+reluctant to agree with him. He therefore retired from the pastoral
+office. He was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His task
+was to befriend and guide the inner life of man. The influences of this
+period in his life have been enumerated as the liberating philosophy of
+Coleridge, the mystical vision of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of
+Wordsworth, the stimulating essays of Carlyle. His address before the
+graduating class of the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838 was an
+impassioned protest against what he called the defects of historical
+Christianity, its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus,
+its failure to explore the moral nature of man. He made a daring plea
+for absolute self-reliance and new inspiration in religion: 'In the soul
+let redemption be sought. Refuse the good models, even those which are
+sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you. Acquaint
+men at first hand with deity.' He never could have been the power he was
+by the force of his negations. His power lay in the wealth, the variety,
+the beauty and insight with which he set forth the positive side of his
+doctrine of the greatness of man, of the presence of God in man, of the
+divineness of life, of God's judgment and mercy in the order of the
+world. One sees both the power and the limitation of Emerson's religious
+teaching. At the root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not
+philosophise. He was always passing from the principle to its
+application. He could not systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable
+tendency to the lapidary style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy
+in fragments, just as one finds his interpretation of religion in
+flashes of marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either,
+in Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for it or not.
+
+
+ARNOLD
+
+
+What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself? Without doubt the twenty
+years by which Arnold was Newman's junior at Oxford made a great
+difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and of the
+English world of letters, at the time when Arnold's mind was maturing.
+He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman. His mind was hardly one
+to appreciate the whole force of that spell. He was at Oxford too early
+for the full understanding of the limits within which alone the
+scientific conception of the world can be said to be true. Arnold often
+boasted that he was no metaphysician. He really need never have
+mentioned the fact. The assumption that whatever is true can be verified
+in the sense of the precise kind of verification which science implies
+is a very serious mistake. Yet his whole intellectual strength was
+devoted to the sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion,
+but certainly that of noble conduct, and to the assertion of the elation
+of duty and the joy of righteousness. With all the scorn that Arnold
+pours upon the trust which we place in God's love, he yet holds to the
+conviction that 'the power without ourselves which makes for
+righteousness' is one upon which we may in rapture rely.
+
+Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such as ours, which will
+take nothing for granted, but must verify everything, Christianity, in
+the old form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and
+miraculous events, is no longer tenable. We must confine ourselves to
+such ethical truths as can be verified by experience. We must reject
+everything which goes beyond these. Religion has no more to do with
+supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy. It has nothing to
+do with either. It has to do with conduct. It is folly to make religion
+depend upon the conviction of the existence of an intelligent and moral
+governor of the universe, as the theologians have done. For the object
+of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not
+ourselves which makes for righteousness.' So soon as we go beyond this,
+we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief,
+_aberglaube_, which always revenges itself. These are the main
+contentions of his book, _Literature and Dogma_, 1875.
+
+One feels the value of Arnold's recall to the sense of the literary
+character of the Scriptural documents, as urged in his book, _Saint Paul
+and Protestantism_, 1870, and again to the sense of the influence which
+the imagination of mankind has had upon religion. One feels the truth of
+his assertion of our ignorance. One feels Arnold's own deep earnestness.
+It was his concern that reason and the will of God should prevail.
+Though he was primarily a literary man, yet his great interest was in
+religion. One feels so sincerely that his main conclusion is sound, that
+it is the more trying that his statement of it should be often so
+perverse and his method of sustaining it so precarious. It is quite
+certain that the idea of the Eternal not ourselves which makes for
+righteousness is far from being the clear idea which Arnold claims. It
+is far from being an idea derived from experience or verifiable in
+experience, in the sense which he asserts. It seems positively
+incredible that Arnold did not know that with this conception he passed
+the boundary of the realm of science and entered the realm of
+metaphysics, which he so abhorred.
+
+He was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby. He was educated at
+Winchester and Rugby and at Balliol College. He was Professor of Poetry
+in Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was an inspector of schools. The years
+of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways which were
+wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of
+Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory
+of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless
+personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which
+has absolutely passed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a
+distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a
+grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mrs.
+Humphry Ward, in her novels, has dealt largely with problems of
+religious life, and more particularly of religious thoughtfulness. She
+has done for her generation, in her measure, that which George Eliot did
+for hers.
+
+
+MARTINEAU
+
+As the chapter and the book draw to their close we can think of no man
+whose life more nearly spanned the century, or whose work touched more
+fruitfully almost every aspect of Christian thoughtfulness than did that
+of James Martineau. We can think of no man who gathered into himself
+more fully the significant theological tendencies of the age, or whose
+utterance entitles him to be listened to more reverently as seer and
+saint. He was born in 1805. He was bred as an engineer. He fulfilled for
+years the calling of minister and preacher. He gradually exchanged this
+for the activity of a professor. He was a religious philosopher in the
+old sense, but he was also a critic and historian. His position with
+reference to the New Testament was partly antiquated before his _Seat of
+Authority in Religion_, 1890, made its appearance. Evolutionism never
+became with him a coherent and consistent assumption. Ethics never
+altogether got rid of the innate ideas. The social movement left him
+almost untouched. Yet, despite all this, he was in some sense a
+representative progressive theologian of the century.
+
+There is a parallel between Newman and Martineau. Both busied themselves
+with the problem of authority. Criticism had been fatal to the
+apprehension which both had inherited concerning the authority of
+Scripture. From that point onward they took divergent courses. The
+arguments which touched the infallible and oracular authority of
+Scripture, for Newman established that of the Church; for Martineau they
+had destroyed that of the Church four hundred years ago. Martineau's
+sense, even of the authority of Jesus, reverent as it is, is yet no
+pietistic and mystical view. The authority of Jesus is that of the truth
+which he speaks, of the goodness which dwells in him, of God himself and
+God alone. A real interest in the sciences and true learning in some of
+them made Martineau able to write that wonderful chapter in his _Seat of
+Authority_, which he entitled 'God in Nature.' Newman could see in
+nature, at most a sacramental suggestion, a symbol of transcendental
+truth.
+
+The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England belonged to
+the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of British Unitarianism
+came. The righteousness of a persecuted race had left an austere impress
+upon their domestic and social life. Intellectually they inherited the
+advanced liberalism of their day. Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had
+been of the most fervent sort. She reacted violently against it in later
+years. She had little of the politic temper and gentleness of her
+brother. She described one of her own later works as the last word of
+philosophic atheism. James was, and always remained, of deepest
+sensitiveness and reverence and of a gentleness which stood in high
+contrast with his powers of conflict, if necessity arose. Out of
+Martineau's years as preacher in Liverpool and London came two books of
+rare devotional quality, _Endeavours after the Christian Life_, 1843 and
+1847, and _Hours of Thought on Sacred Things_, 1873 and 1879. Almost all
+his life he was identified with Manchester College, as a student when
+the college was located at York, as a teacher when it returned to
+Manchester and again when it was removed to London. With its removal to
+Oxford, accomplished in 1889, he had not fully sympathised. He believed
+that the university itself must some day do justice to the education of
+men for the ministry in other churches than the Anglican. He was eighty
+years old when he published his _Types of Ethical Theory_, eighty-two
+when he gave to the world his _Study of Religion_, eighty-five when his
+_Seat of Authority_ saw the light. The effect of this postponement of
+publication was not wholly good. The books represented marvellous
+learning and ripeness of reflection. But they belong to a period
+anterior to the dates they bear upon their title-pages. Martineau's
+education and his early professional experience put him in touch with
+the advancing sciences. In the days when most men of progressive spirit
+were carried off their feet, when materialism was flaunted in men's
+faces and the defence of religion was largely in the hands of those who
+knew nothing of the sciences, Martineau was not moved. He saw the end
+from the beginning. There is nothing finer in his latest work than his
+early essays--'Nature and God,' 'Science, Nescience and Faith,' and
+'Religion as affected by Modern Materialism.' He died in 1900 in his
+ninety-fifth year.
+
+It is difficult to speak of the living in these pages. Personal
+relations enforce reserve and brevity. Nevertheless, no one can think of
+Manchester College and Martineau without being reminded of Mansfield
+College and of Fairbairn, a Scotchman, but of the Independent Church. He
+also was both teacher and preacher all his days, leader of the movement
+which brought Mansfield College from Birmingham to Oxford, by the
+confession both of Anglicans and of Non-conformists the most learned man
+in his subjects in the Oxford of his time, an historian, touched by the
+social enthusiasm, but a religious philosopher, _par excellence_. His
+_Religion and Modern Life_, 1894, his _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_,
+1899, his _Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, 1893, his _Philosophy of
+the Christian Religion_, 1902, and his _Studies in Religion and
+Theology_, 1910, indicate the wideness of his sympathies and the scope
+of the application, of his powers. If imitation is homage, grateful
+acknowledgment is here made of rich spoil taken from his books.
+
+Philosophy took a new turn in Britain after the middle of the decade of
+the sixties. It began to be conceded that Locke and Hume were dead. Had
+Mill really appreciated that fact he might have been a philosopher more
+fruitful and influential than he was. Sir William Hamilton was dead.
+Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism to conjure the most absurdly
+positivistic faith, had left thinking men more exposed to scepticism, if
+possible, than they had been before. When Hegel was thought in Germany
+to be obsolete, and everywhere the cry was 'back to Kant,' some Scotch
+and English scholars, the two Cairds and Seth Pringle-Pattison, with
+Thomas Hill Green, made a modified Hegelianism current in Great Britain.
+They led by this path in the introduction of their countrymen to later
+German idealism. By this introduction philosophy in both Britain and
+America has greatly gained. Despite these facts, John Caird's
+_Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, 1880, is still only a
+religious philosophy. It is not a philosophy of religion. His
+_Fundamental Ideas of Christianity_, 1896, hardly escapes the old
+antitheses among which theological discussion moved, say, thirty years
+ago. Edward Caird's _Critical Philosophy of Kant_, 1889, and especially
+his _Evolution of Religion_, 1892, marked the coming change more
+definitely than did any of the labours of his brother. Thomas Hill Green
+gave great promise in his _Introduction to Hume_, 1885, his _Prolegomena
+to Ethics_, 1883, and still more in essays and papers scattered through
+the volumes edited by Nettleship after Green's death. His contribution
+to religious discussion was such as to make his untimely end to be
+deeply deplored. Seth Pringle-Pattison's early work, _The Development
+from Kant to Hegel_, 1881, still has great worth. His _Hegelianism and
+Personality_, 1893, deals with one aspect of the topic which needs ever
+again to be explored, because of the psychological basis which in
+religious discussion is now assumed.
+
+
+JAMES
+
+
+The greatest contribution of America to religious discussion in recent
+years is surely William James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_,
+1902. The book is unreservedly acknowledged in Britain, and in Germany
+as well, to be the best which we yet have upon the psychology of
+religion. Not only so, it gives a new intimation as to what psychology
+of religion means. It blazes a path along which investigators are
+eagerly following. Boyce, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in
+1911, declared James to be the third representative philosopher whom
+America has produced. He had the form of philosophy as Emerson never
+had. He could realise whither he was going, as Emerson in his
+intuitiveness never did. He criticised the dominant monism in most
+pregnant way. He recurred to the problems which dualism owned but could
+not solve. We cannot call the new scheme dualism. The world does not go
+back. Yet James made an over-confident generation feel that the
+centuries to which dualism had seemed reasonable were not so completely
+without intelligence as has been supposed by some. No philosophy may
+claim completeness as an interpretation of the universe. No more
+conclusive proof of this judgment could be asked than is given quite
+unintentionally in Haeckel's _Weltrãthsel_.
+
+At no point is this recall more earnest than in James's dealing with the
+antithesis of good and evil. The reaction of the mind of the race, and
+primarily of individuals, upon the fact of evil, men's consciousness of
+evil in themselves, their desire to be rid of it, their belief that
+there is a deliverance from it and that they have found that
+deliverance, is for James the point of departure for the study of the
+actual phenomena and the active principle of religion. The truest
+psychological and philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the
+experience of conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most
+men have, at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity
+for God which is unfulfilled, of a relation to God unrealised, which is
+broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that their
+own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the sense also
+that something without themselves empowers them to attempt this recovery
+and to persevere in the attempt. The psychology of religion is thus put
+in the forefront. The vast masses of material of this sort which the
+religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either
+actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and
+obscured the facts. The experience is the fact. The best science the
+world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact.
+This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's
+book. James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian
+theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began to
+lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in
+1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He died in 1910.
+
+When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed
+investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but
+imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true
+worthlessness. We know very little about primitive man. What we learn as
+to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part
+from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living,
+thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is
+not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of
+the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from
+earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is
+perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which
+never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students.
+Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by
+later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience
+which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always
+claimed. The modern man is not to be converted after the pattern which
+it is alleged that his grandfather followed. For, first, there is the
+question as to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern. And
+beyond that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the
+grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience of
+the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious admixture of
+knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century, which would occasion
+characteristic differences. The modern saint is not asked to be a saint
+like Francis. In the first place, how do we know what Francis was like?
+In the second place, the experience of Francis may be most easily
+understood by the aid of modern experience of true revolt from
+worldliness and of consecration to self-sacrifice, as these exist among
+us, with, of course, the proper background furnished by the history of
+the thirteenth century. Souls are one. Our souls may be, at least in
+some measure, known to ourselves. Even the souls of some of our fellows
+may be measurably known to us. What are the facts of the religious
+experience? How do souls react in face of the eternal? The experience of
+religion, the experience of the fatherhood of God, of the sonship of
+man, of the moving of the spirit, is surely one experience. How did even
+Christ's great soul react, experience, work, will, and suffer? By what
+possible means can we ever know how he reacted, worked, willed,
+suffered? In the literature we learn only how men thought that he
+reacted. We must inquire of our own souls. To be sure, Christ belonged
+to the first century, and we live in the twentieth. It is possible for
+us to learn something of the first century and of the concrete outward
+conditions which caused his life to take the shape which it did. We
+learn this by strict historical research. Assuredly the supreme measure
+in which the spirit of all truth and goodness once took possession of
+the Nazarene, remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable.
+Dwelling in Jesus, that spirit made through him a revelation of the
+divine such as the world has never seen. Yet that mystery leads forth
+along the path of that which is intelligible. And, in another sense,
+even such religious experience as we ourselves may have, poor though it
+be and sadly limited, leads back into the same mystery.
+
+It was with this contention that religion is a fact of the inner life of
+man, that it is to be understood through consciousness, that it is
+essentially and absolutely reasonable and yet belongs to the
+transcendental world, it was with this contention that, in the person of
+Immanuel Kant, the history of modern religious thought began. It is with
+this contention, in one of its newest and most far-reaching applications
+in the work of William James, that this history continues. For no one
+can think of the number of questions which recent years have raised,
+without realising that this history is by no means concluded. It is
+conceivable that the changes which the twentieth century will bring may
+be as noteworthy as those which the nineteenth century has seen. At
+least we may be grateful that so great and sure a foundation has been
+laid.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+WERNLE, PAUL. _Einführung in das theologische Studium._ Tübingen, 2.
+Aufl., 1911.
+
+DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 1. _Geschichte der
+Christlichen Religion_, v. Wellhausen, Jülieber, Harnack u. A., 2. Aufl.
+Berlin, 1909.
+
+DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 2. _Systematische
+Christliche Religion_, v. Troeltsch, Herrmann, Holtzmann u. A., 2. Aufl.
+Berlin, 1909.
+
+PFLEIDERER, OTTO. _The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant,
+and its Progress in Great Britain since_ 1825. Transl., J. FREDERICK
+SMITH. London, 1893.
+
+LICHTENBERGER, F. _Histoire des Idées Religieuses en Allemagne despuis
+le milieu du XVIII' siécle à nos jours._ Paris, 1873. Transl., with
+notes, W. HASTIE. Edinburgh, 1889.
+
+ADENEY, W.F. _A Century of Progress in Religious Life and Thought._
+London, 1901.
+
+HARNACK, ADOLF. _Das Wesen des Christenthums._ Berlin, 1900. Transl.,
+_What is Christianity?_ T.B. SAUNDERS. London, 1901.
+
+STEPHEN, LESLIE. _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century._
+2 vols. London, 3rd ed., 1902.
+
+TROELTSCH, ERNST. Art. 'Deismus' in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyclopädie für
+Protestantische Theologie und Kirche._ 3. Aufl. Leipzig, 4. Bd., 1898,
+s. 532 f.: art. 'Aufklärung,' 2. Bd., 1897, s. 225 f.: art. 'Idealismus,
+deutscher,' 8. Bd., 1900, s. 612 f.
+
+MIRBT, CARL. Art. 'Pietiamus' in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencydopädie_, 15.
+Bd., 1904, s. 774 f.
+
+RITSCHL, ALBRECHT. _Geschichte des Pietismus_, 3 Bde. Bonn, 1880-1886.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+WINDELBAND, W. _Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie in ihrem
+Zusammenhang mit der allgemeinen Kultur und den besouderen
+Wissenschaften._ 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1899.
+
+HÖFFDING, HAROLD. _Geschichte der neueren Philosophie._ Uebersetzt v.
+Bendixen. 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1896.
+
+EUCKEN, RUDOLF. _Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker._ 8. Anfl.
+Leipzig, 1909. Transl., _The Problem of Human Life as viewed _by the
+Great Thinkers_, by W.S. HOUGH and W.R. BOYCE GIBSON. New York, 1910.
+
+PRINGLE-PATTISON, A. SETH. _The Development from Kant to Hegel._ London,
+1881.
+
+DREWS, ARTHUR. _Die Deutsche Spekulation seit Kant_ 2 Bde. Berlin, 1893.
+
+ROYCE, JOSIAH. _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy._ Boston, 1893. _The
+Religious Aspect of Philosophy._ Boston, 1885. _The World and the
+Individual._ 2 vols. New York, 1901 and 1904.
+
+PAULSEN, FRIEDRICH. _Immanuel Kant, sein Leben und seine Lehre._
+Stuttgart, 3. Aufl., 1899. Transl., CREIGHTON AND LEFEVER. New York,
+1902.
+
+CAIRD, EDWARD. _A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant_: with an
+Historical Introduction. Glasgow, 1877.
+
+FISCHER, KUNO. _Hegels Leben, Werke und Lehre._ 2 Bde. Heidelberg, 1901.
+
+SIEBECK, HERMANN. _Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie._ Freiburg, 1893.
+
+EUCKEN, RUDOLF. _Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion._ Leipzig, 4. Aufl.,
+1906. Transl., JONES. London, 1911.
+
+TIELE, C.P. _Compendium der Religionsgeschichte._ Uebersetzt v. Weber.
+3. Aufl. umgearbeitet v. Söderblom. Breslau, 1903.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+VON FRANK, H.R. _Geschichte und Kritik der neueren Theologie
+insbesondere der systematischen seit Schleiermacher._ Hrsg, v.
+Schaarschmidt. Eriangen, 1898.
+
+SCHWARZ, CARL. _Zur Gesehichte der neuiten Theologie._ Leipzig, 4.
+Aufl., 1869.
+
+KATTENBUSCH, FERDINAND. _Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl._ Giessen, 1892.
+
+BROWN, WILLIAM ADAMS. _The Essence of Christianity: a Study in the
+ History of Definition._ New York, 1902.
+
+DILTHEY, WILHELM. _Leben Schleiermachers_, 1. Bd. Berlin, 1870.
+
+GASS, WILHELM. _Geschichte der Protestantischen Dogmatik_, 4 Bde.
+Leipzig, 1854-67.
+
+GARVIE, ALFRED. _The Ritschlian Theology_, 2nd ed. Edinburgh, 1902.
+
+HERRMANN, W. _Der evangeliche Glaube und die Theologie Albrecht
+Ritschls._ Marburg, 1896.
+
+PFLEIDERER, OTTO. _Die Ritschlche Theologie kritiech beleuchtet._
+Braunschweig, 1891.
+
+KAFTAN, JULIUS. _Dogmatik._ Tübingen, 4. Aufl., 1901.
+
+STEVENS, GEORGE B. _The Christian Doctrine of Salvation._ New York,
+1905.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+CARPENTER, J. ESTLIN. _The Bible in the Nineteenth Century._ London,
+1903.
+
+GARDNER, Percy. _A Historic View of the New Testament._ London,1901.
+
+JÜLICHER, ADOLF. _Einleitung in das Neue Testament._ Freiliurg, 6.
+Aufl., 1906. Transl., Miss Janet Ward. 1904.
+
+MOORE, EDWARD CALDWELL. _The New Testament in the Christian Church._ New
+York, 1904.
+
+LIKTZMANN, HANS. _Wie wurden die Bücher des neuen Testaments heilige
+Schrift?_ Tübingen, 1907.
+
+LOISY, A. _L'Ecangile el I'Eglise._ Paris, 2nd ed., 1903. Transl.,
+London, 1904.
+
+WERNLE, PAUL. _Die Anfänge unserer Religion._ Tübingen, 1901.
+
+SCHWEITZER, ALBERT. _Von Reimarus zu Wrede, eine Geschichte der
+Leben-Jesu-Forschung._ Tübingen, 1906.
+
+SANDAY, WILLIAM. _The Life of Christ in Recent Research._ Oxford, 1907.
+
+HOLTZMANN, OSKAR. _Neu-Testamentliche Zeitgeschichte._ Freiburg, 2.
+Aufl., 1906.
+
+DRIVER, SAMUEL B. _Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament._
+Edinburgh, 2nd ed., 1909.
+
+WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS. _Prolegomena sur Geschichte Israels._ Berlin, 5.
+Aufl., 1899.
+
+BUDDE, KARL._The Religion of Israel to the Exile._ New York, 1899.
+
+KAUTSCH, E. _Abriss der Geschichte des alt-tentamentlichen Schriftthums
+in seiner 'Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments.'_ Freiburg, 1894.
+Transl., J.J. TAYLOR, and published separately, New York, 1899.
+
+SMITH, W. ROBERTSON. _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church._ Glasgow,
+2nd ed., 1892. _The Prophets of Israel_, 2nd ed., 1892.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+MEHZ, JOHH. _A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century._
+Vols. 1 and 2, Edinburgh, 1904 and 1903.
+
+WHITE, ANDREW D. _The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
+Christendom._ 2 vols. New York, 1896.
+
+OTTO, RUDOLF. _Naturalistisehe und religiöse Weltansicht._ Tübingen, 2.
+Aufl., 1909.
+
+WARD, JAMES. _Naturalism and Agnosticism._ 2 vols. London, 1899.
+
+FLINT, ROBERT. _Agnosticism._ Edinburgh, 1903.
+
+TULLOCH, JOHN. _Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion._ Edinburgh,
+1884.
+
+MARTINEAU, JAMES. _Essays, Reviews and Addresses._ Vols. 1 and 3 London,
+1890.
+
+BOUTROUX, EMILE. _Science et Religion dans la Philosophie
+contemporaine._ Paris, 1008. Transl., NIELD. London, 1909.
+
+FLINT, ROBERT. _Socialism._ London, 1895.
+
+PEABODY, FRANCIS G. _Jesus Christ and the Social Question._ New York,
+1905.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+HUNT, JOHN. _Religious Thought in England in the Nineteenth Century._
+London, 1896.
+
+TULLOCH, JOHN. _Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the
+Nineteenth Century._ London, 1885.
+
+BENN, ALFRED WILLIAM. _The History of English Rationalism in the
+Nineteenth Century._ 2 vols. London, 1906.
+
+HUTTON, RICHARD H. _Essays on some of the Modern Guides to English
+Thought in Matters of Faith._ London, 1900.
+
+MELLONE, SIDNEY H. _Leaders of Religious Thought in the Nineteenth
+Century._ Edinburgh, 1902.
+
+BROOKE, STOPFORD A. _Theology in the English Poets._ London, 1896.
+
+SCUDDER, VIDA D. _The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets_.
+Boston, 1899.
+
+CHURCH, R.W. _The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833-1845._ London,
+1904.
+
+FAIRBAIRN, ANDREW M. _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican._ New York, 1899.
+
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+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Edward Caldwell Moore, by Edward Moore
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Edward Caldwell Moore
+       Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
+
+Author: Edward Moore
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2005 [EBook #15780]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE ***
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+Produced by Afra Ullah, David King, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
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+
+<h1>AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT SINCE KANT</h1>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE</h2>
+<h3>PARKMAN PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY</h3>
+<h3>NEW YORK</h3>
+<h3>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h3>
+<h3>1912</h3>
+<h4>TO ADOLF HARNACK ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY BY HIS FIRST AMERICAN
+PUPIL</h4>
+<hr />
+<h2>PREFATORY NOTE</h2>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>PASQUE ISLAND, MASS.,<br />
+<i>July</i> 28, 1911.</p>
+<hr />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<p><a href="#chap1">CHAPTER I</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap1-1">A. INTRODUCTION.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap1-2">B. THE BACKGROUND.</a><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#chap1-2-1">DEISM.</a><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#chap1-2-2">RATIONALISM.</a><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#chap1-2-3">PIETISM.</a><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#chap1-2-4">&AElig;STHETIC IDEALISM.</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap2">CHAPTER II</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap2-1">IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap2-2">KANT.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap2-3">FICHTE.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap2-4">SCHELLING.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap2-5">HEGEL.</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap3">CHAPTER III</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap3-1">THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap3-2">SCHLEIERMACHER.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap3-3">RITSCHL AND THE RITSCHLIANS.</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap4">CHAPTER IV</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap4-1">THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
+MOVEMENT.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap4-2">STRAUSS.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap4-3">BAUR.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap4-4">THE CANON.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap4-5">THE LIFE OF JESUS.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap4-6">THE OLD TESTAMENT.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap4-7">THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap4-8">HARNACK.</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap5">CHAPTER V</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap5-1">THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE SCIENCES.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap5-2">POSITIVISM.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap5-3">NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap5-4">EVOLUTION.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap5-5">MIRACLES.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap5-6">THE SOCIAL SCIENCES.</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap6">CHAPTER VI</a></p>
+<p><a href="#chap6-1">THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES; ACTION AND
+REACTION.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-2">THE POETS.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-3">COLERIDGE.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-4">THE ORIEL SCHOOL.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-5">ERSINE AND CAMPBELL.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-6">MAURICE.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-7">CHANNING.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-8">BUSHNELL.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-9">THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-10">THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-11">NEWMAN.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-12">MODERNISM.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-13">ROBERTSON.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-14">PHILLIPS BROOKS.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-15">THE BROAD CHURCH.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-16">CARLYLE.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-17">EMERSON.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-18">ARNOLD.</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-19">MARTINEAU</a><br />
+<a href="#chap6-20">JAMES.</a></p>
+<p><a href="#biblio">BIBLIOGRAPHY.</a></p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page1" id="page1"></a>{1}</span>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="chap1" id="chap1">CHAPTER I</a></h2>
+<h3><a name="chap1-1" id="chap1-1">A. INTRODUCTION</a></h3>
+<p>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 medi&aelig;val
+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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page2" id="page2"></a>{2}</span>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 medi&aelig;val 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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page3" id="page3"></a>{3}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page4" id="page4"></a>{4}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>There have been thus indicated three, at least, of the larger
+factors which enter into an interpretation of Christianity
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page5" id="page5"></a>{5}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page6" id=
+"page6"></a>{6}</span> and science afford. In this sense only can
+we give the study of religion and Christianity a place among the
+sciences.</p>
+<p>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
+&aelig;sthetic 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page7" id=
+"page7"></a>{7}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page8" id="page8"></a>{8}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <i>Analogy</i> that
+religion was in his time hardly considered a subject for discussion
+among reasonable men. Schleiermacher in the very title of his
+<i>Discourses</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page9" id="page9"></a>{9}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page10" id=
+"page10"></a>{10}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page11" id="page11"></a>{11}</span>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page12" id="page12"></a>{12}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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, <i>Kritik der
+reinen Vernunft</i>, in 1781.<a id="footnotetag1" name=
+"footnotetag1"></a><a href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a> 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, <i>Der Religion innerhalb
+der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft</i>, 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.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote1" name=
+"footnote1"></a><b>Footnote 1:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag1">(return)</a>
+<p>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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page13" id="page13"></a>{13}</span>
+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 <i>Leben Jesu</i>, 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.</p>
+<p>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 <i>Origin of
+Species</i>, 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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page14" id="page14"></a>{14}</span>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page15" id=
+"page15"></a>{15}</span> of national churches and denominational
+predilections counted for more.</p>
+<p>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,
+'<i>&Eacute;crasez l'inf&acirc;me</i>,' 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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page16" id="page16"></a>{16}</span>
+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 <i>Aids to Reflection</i>,
+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.</p>
+<p>Coleridge left among his literary remains a work published in
+1840 under the title of <i>Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit</i>.
+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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page17" id="page17"></a>{17}</span>
+<p>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 <i>Philosophie Positive</i>. 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page18" id=
+"page18"></a>{18}</span> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page19"
+id="page19"></a>{19}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page20" id="page20"></a>{20}</span>
+<i>l'Avenir</i> 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 <i>Syllabus of Errors</i> of 1864, and again of the
+<i>Encyclical</i> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page21" id="page21"></a>{21}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page22" id="page22"></a>{22}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page23" id="page23"></a>{23}</span> 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.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap1-2" id="chap1-2">B. THE BACKGROUND</a></h3>
+<h4><a name="chap1-2-1" id="chap1-2-1">Deism</a></h4>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page24" id="page24"></a>{24}</span> 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.'</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page25" id="page25"></a>{25}</span>
+<h4><a name="chap1-2-2" id="chap1-2-2">Rationalism</a></h4>
+<p>In 1784 Kant wrote a tractate entitled, <i>Was ist
+Aufkl&auml;rung?</i> He said: 'Aufkl&auml;rung 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. <i>Sapere aude!</i>
+"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.'</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page26" id="page26"></a>{26}</span> 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 <i>Aufkl&auml;rung</i>,
+which the speech of the Fatherland furnished him, is a better word
+than ours. It is a better word than the French
+<i>l'Illuminisme</i>, 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 medi&aelig;val 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page27" id="page27"></a>{27}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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.<a id="footnotetag2" name="footnotetag2"></a><a href=
+"#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a> 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 <i>lex natur&aelig;</i> in contradistinction with the old
+<i>lex divina</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page28" id=
+"page28"></a>{28}</span> 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.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote2" name=
+"footnote2"></a><b>Footnote 2:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag2">(return)</a>
+<p>Troeltsch, Art. 'Aufkl&auml;rung' in Herzog-Hauck,
+<i>Realencylop&auml;die</i>, 3 Aufl., Bd. ii., s. 225 f.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page29" id=
+"page29"></a>{29}</span> beneath, these are thoughts which have
+consequences. Instead of the old deductive method, that of the
+medi&aelig;val 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
+Encyclop&aelig;dia. 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page30" id="page30"></a>{30}</span> 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 Encyclop&aelig;dists. 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h4><a name="chap1-2-3" id="chap1-2-3">Pietism</a></h4>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page31" id="page31"></a>{31}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page32" id="page32"></a>{32}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page33" id="page33"></a>{33}</span> 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.</p>
+<h4><a name="chap1-2-4" id="chap1-2-4">&AElig;sthetic
+Idealism</a></h4>
+<p>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
+&aelig;sthetic-idealistic <span class="pagenum"><a name="page34"
+id="page34"></a>{34}</span> 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 &aelig;sthetic. 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
+&aelig;sthetic 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.</p>
+<p>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, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page35" id="page35"></a>{35}</span> 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 &aelig;sthetic, 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
+&aelig;stheticism 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.</p>
+<p>To this group of &aelig;sthetic 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page36" id=
+"page36"></a>{36}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>At a period in his life when Herder had undergone conversion to
+court orthodoxy at B&uuml;ckeburg 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page37" id="page37"></a>{37}</span> 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
+<i>Syst&egrave;me de la Nature</i> 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.' <span class="pagenum"><a name="page38" id=
+"page38"></a>{38}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <i>Faust</i>.
+Certain passages in <i>Dichtung</i> and <i>Wahrheit</i> 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.'</p>
+<p>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
+<i>Wanderjahre</i> 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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page39" id="page39"></a>{39}</span>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="chap2" id="chap2">CHAPTER II</a></h2>
+<h3><a name="chap2-1" id="chap2-1">IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY</a></h3>
+<p>The causes which we have named, religious and &aelig;sthetic, 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 &aelig;stheticism 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.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap2-2" id="chap2-2">KANT</a></h3>
+<p>Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in K&ouml;nigsberg, 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 K&ouml;nigsberg belonged to Russia. He <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page40" id="page40"></a>{40}</span> 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 W&ouml;llner's government was the only
+instance in which his peace and public honour were disturbed. He
+never married. He died in K&ouml;nigsberg in 1804. He had been for
+ten years so much enfeebled that his death was a merciful
+release.</p>
+<p>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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page41" id=
+"page41"></a>{41}</span> It distinguishes between the perception of
+that which is in accordance with natural law and the understanding
+of the moral meaning of things.<a id="footnotetag3" name=
+"footnotetag3"></a><a href="#footnote3"><sup>3</sup></a> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page42" id=
+"page42"></a>{42}</span> the development of life, of the course of
+history, all viewed as necessary sequences of cause and effect.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote3" name=
+"footnote3"></a><b>Footnote 3:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag3">(return)</a>
+<p>Paulsen, <i>Kant</i>, a. 2.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page43" id="page43"></a>{43}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page44" id="page44"></a>{44}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page45" id="page45"></a>{45}</span>
+of Scripture, alleging such and such acts and events. They did not
+recognise these as the na&iuml;ve 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.</p>
+<p>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.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page46" id="page46"></a>{46}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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,
+<i>tabula rasa</i>, 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 <i>Ding an sich</i> 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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page47" id="page47"></a>{47}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page48" id="page48"></a>{48}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page49" id=
+"page49"></a>{49}</span> 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.' <i>Das radicale
+B&ouml;se</i> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page50" id="page50"></a>{50}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page51" id=
+"page51"></a>{51}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page52" id=
+"page52"></a>{52}</span> 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&mdash;the
+ontological argument, the cosmological, the
+physico-theological&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page53" id="page53"></a>{53}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page54" id="page54"></a>{54}</span> 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.'</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page55" id=
+"page55"></a>{55}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page56" id=
+"page56"></a>{56}</span> 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.</p>
+<hr />
+<p>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 <i>Ding-an-sich</i>, in Kant's phrase. We know only
+that there must be a 'thing in itself.'</p>
+<h3><a name="chap2-3" id="chap2-3">FICHTE</a></h3>
+<p>Fichte asked, Why? Why must there be a <i>Ding-an-sich</i>? Why
+is not that also the result of the activity of the ego?
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page57" id="page57"></a>{57}</span>
+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 <i>Ding-an-sich</i> at the
+end of the series, there is no escape from the answer that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page58" id="page58"></a>{58}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <i>Vocation of Man</i>,
+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.'</p>
+<p>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&mdash;his <i>Critique of Revelation</i>. 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 <i>Wissenschaftslehre</i>,
+1794. His popular Works, <i>Die Bestimmung des Menschen</i> and
+<i>Anweisung zum seligen Leben</i>, belong to his Berlin period.
+The disasters of 1806 drove him out of Berlin. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page59" id="page59"></a>{59}</span> Amidst the
+dangers and discouragements of the next few years he wrote his
+famous <i>Reden an die deutsche Nation</i>. 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page60" id="page60"></a>{60}</span> should say
+rather that it borders on acosmic pantheism, for which everything
+is God and the world does not exist.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap2-4" id="chap2-4">SCHELLING</a></h3>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born in 1775
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page61" id="page61"></a>{61}</span>
+at Leonberg in W&uuml;rttemberg. 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 <i>Erster Entwurf eines Systems der
+Naturphilosophe</i>, 1799, and also his <i>System des
+transcendentalen Idealismus</i>, 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page62" id=
+"page62"></a>{62}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page63"
+id="page63"></a>{63}</span> 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.</p>
+<hr />
+<p>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 medi&aelig;val 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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page64" id="page64"></a>{64}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>The point of interest is this:&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page65" id="page65"></a>{65}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page66" id="page66"></a>{66}</span>
+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.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap2-5" id="chap2-5">HEGEL</a></h3>
+<p>Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. His
+father was in the fiscal service of the King of W&uuml;rttemberg.
+He studied in T&uuml;bingen. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page67" id=
+"page67"></a>{67}</span> 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 <i>Phenomenologie des
+Geistes</i> 1807 (translated, Baillie, London, 1910), was published
+at the end of his Jena period. His <i>Philosophie der Religion</i>
+and <i>Philosophie der Geschichte</i> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page68" id=
+"page68"></a>{68}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Fichte had said: The essence of the universe is spirit. Hegel
+said: Yes, but the true notion of spirit is that of the resolution
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page69" id="page69"></a>{69}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page70" id=
+"page70"></a>{70}</span> their thoughts of this sort in a form
+which we can historically trace. For Platonists and Neoplatonists,
+such as the makers of the creeds&mdash;and some portions of the
+Scripture show this influence, as well&mdash;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.</p>
+<p>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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page71" id=
+"page71"></a>{71}</span> in a sense which sees no meaning any
+longer in the old debate as between his divinity and his deity.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page72" id="page72"></a>{72}</span>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page73" id="page73"></a>{73}</span>
+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 <i>World as the Subject of Redemption</i> is
+their thorough-going exposition in the English tongue.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page74" id="page74"></a>{74}</span>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="chap3" id="chap3">CHAPTER III</a></h2>
+<h3><a name="chap3-1" id="chap3-1">THEOLOGICAL
+RECONSTRUCTION</a></h3>
+<p>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.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap3-2" id="chap3-2">SCHLEIERMACHER</a></h3>
+<p>Between Kant and Hegel came another, Schleiermacher. He too was
+no mean philosopher. But he was essentially <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page75" id="page75"></a>{75}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 Charit&eacute; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page76" id="page76"></a>{76}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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, <i>Reden &uuml;ber die
+Religion, an die Gebildeten unter ihren Ver&auml;chtern</i>
+(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. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page77" id="page77"></a>{77}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>The religion of feeling, as advocated in the <i>Reden</i>, had
+left much on the ethical side to be desired. This defect the author
+sought to remedy in his <i>Monologen</i>, published in 1800. The
+programme of theological studies for the new University of Berlin,
+<i>Kurze Darstellung des Theologischen Studiums</i>, 1811, shows
+his theological system already in large part matured. His <i>Der
+christliche Glaube</i>, published in 1821, revised three years
+before his death in 1834, is his monumental work. His <i>Ethik</i>,
+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.</p>
+<p>All of the immediacy of religion, its independence of rational
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page78" id="page78"></a>{78}</span>
+argument, of historical tradition or institutional forms, which was
+characteristic of Schleiermacher to his latest day, is felt in the
+<i>Reden</i>. 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 <i>outr&eacute;</i>, 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&mdash;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
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page79" id="page79"></a>{79}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>In his <i>Monologues</i> 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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page80" id="page80"></a>{80}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>In the <i>Reden</i> 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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page81" id="page81"></a>{81}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page82" id=
+"page82"></a>{82}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page83" id="page83"></a>{83}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page84" id="page84"></a>{84}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page85" id="page85"></a>{85}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page86" id=
+"page86"></a>{86}</span> 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 <i>a priori</i>
+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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, 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 <i>Discourses</i>,
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="page87" id=
+"page87"></a>{87}</span> 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.</p>
+<p>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.'</p>
+<p>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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page88" id="page88"></a>{88}</span> 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 <i>Grammar of Assent</i>. Yet
+another group, that of the so-called mediating theologians,
+contains some well-known names. Here belong Nitzsch, Rothe,
+M&uuml;ller, 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 <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page89" id="page89"></a>{89}</span> 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.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap3-3" id="chap3-3">RITSCHL AND THE
+RITSCHLIANS</a></h3>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Albrecht Ritschl was born in 1822 in Berlin, the son of a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page90" id="page90"></a>{90}</span>
+bishop in the Lutheran Church. He was educated at Bonn and at
+T&uuml;bingen. He established himself at Bonn, where, in 1853, he
+became professor extraordinarius and in 1860 ordinaries. In 1864 he
+was called to G&ouml;ttingen. 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
+<i>Werthurtheile</i>, judgments of value, considerations of our
+relation to the world, which are of moment solely in accordance
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page91" id="page91"></a>{91}</span>
+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.</p>
+<p>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 G&ouml;ttingen
+wall.</p>
+<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page92" id="page92"></a>{92}</span> 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 T&uuml;bingen school all would
+now agree. In his feeling against mere sentimentalities of piety
+many sympathise. In his emphasis upon the ethical and practical, in
+his urgency upon the actual problem of a man's vocation in the
+world, he meets in striking manner the temper of our age. In his
+emphasis upon the social factor in religion, he represents a
+popular phase of thought. With all of this, it is strange to find a
+man of so much learning who had so little sympathy with the
+comparative study of religions, who was such a dogmatist on behalf
+of his own inadequate notion of revelation, the logical effect of
+whose teaching concerning the Church would be the revival of an
+institutionalism and externalism such as Protestantism has hardly
+known.</p>
+<p>Since Schleiermacher the German theologians had made the problem
+of the person of Christ the centre of discussion. In the same
+period the problem of the person of Christ had been the central
+point of debate in America. Here, as there, all the other points
+arranged themselves about this one. The new movement which went out
+from Ritschl took as its centre the work of Christ in redemption.
+This is obvious from the very title of Ritschl's great book, <i>Die
+Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Vers&ouml;hnung</i>.
+Of this work the first edition of the third and significant volume
+was published in 1874. Before that time the formal treatises on
+theology had followed a traditional order of topics. It had been
+assumed as self-evident that one should speak of a person before
+one talked of his work. It did not occur to the theologians
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page93" id="page93"></a>{93}</span>
+that in the case of the divine person, at all events, we can
+securely say that we know something as to his work. Much concerning
+his person must remain a mystery to us, exactly because he is
+divine. Our safest course, therefore, would be to infer the unknown
+qualities of his person from the known traits of his work.
+Certainly this would be true as to the work of God in nature. This
+was not the way, however, in which the minds of theologians worked.
+The habit of dealing with conceptions as if they were facts had too
+deep hold upon them. So long as men believed in revelation as
+giving them, not primarily God and the transcendental world itself,
+but information about God and the transcendental, they naturally
+held that they knew as much of the persons of God and Christ as of
+their works.</p>
+<p>Schleiermacher had opened men's eyes to the fact that the great
+work of Christ in redemption is an inward one, an ethical and
+spiritual work, the transformation of character. He had said, not
+merely that the transformation of man's character follows upon the
+work of redemption. It is the work of redemption. The primary
+witness to the work of Christ is, therefore, in the facts of
+consciousness and history. These are capable of empirical scrutiny.
+They demand psychological investigation. When thus investigated
+they yield our primary material for any assertion we may make
+concerning God. Above all, it is the nature of Jesus, as learned on
+the evidence of his work in the hearts of men, which is our great
+revelation and source of inference concerning the nature of God.
+Instead of saying in the famous phrase, that the Christians think
+of Christ as God, we say that we are able to think of God, as a
+religious magnitude, in no other terms than in those of his
+manifestation and redemptive activity in Jesus.</p>
+<p>None since Kant, except extreme confessionalists, and those in
+diminishing degree, have held that the great effect of the work of
+Christ was upon the mind and attitude of God. Less and less have
+men thought of justification as forensic and judicial, a declaring
+sinners righteous in the eye of the divine law, the attribution of
+Christ's righteousness to men, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page94" id="page94"></a>{94}</span> so far at least as to relieve
+these last of penalty. This was the Anselmic scheme. Indeed, it had
+been Tertullian's. Less and less have men thought of reconciliation
+as that of an angry God to men, more and more as of alienated men
+with God. The phrases of the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century,
+Lutheran as well as Calvinistic, survive. More and more new
+meaning, not always consistent, is injected into them. No one would
+deny that the loftiest moral enthusiasm, the noblest sense of duty,
+animated the hearts of many who thought in the terms of Calvinism.
+The delineation of God as unreconciled, of the work and sufferings
+of Christ as a substitution, of salvation as a conferment, caused
+gratitude, tender devotion, heroic allegiance in some. It worked
+revulsion in others. It was protested against most radically by
+Kant, as indeed it had been condemned by many before him. For Kant
+the renovation of character was the essential salvation. Yet the
+development of his doctrine was deficient through the
+individualistic form which it took. Salvation was essentially a
+change in the individual mind, brought about through the practical
+reason, and having its ideal in Jesus. Yet for Kant our salvation
+had no closer relation to the historic revelation in Jesus.
+Furthermore, so much was this change an individual issue that we
+may say that the actualisation of redemption would be the same for
+a given man, were he the only man in the universe. To hold fast to
+the ethical idealism of Kant, and to overcome its subjectivity and
+individualism, was the problem.</p>
+<p>The reference to experience which underlies all that was said
+above was particularly congruous with the mood of an age grown
+weary of Hegelianism and much impressed with the value of the
+empirical method in all the sciences. Another great contention of
+our age is for the recognition of the value of what is social. Its
+emphasis is upon that which binds men together. Salvation is not
+normally achieved except in the life of a man among and for his
+fellows. It is by doing one's duty that one becomes good. One is
+saved, not in order to become a citizen of heaven by and by, but in
+order to be an active citizen of a kingdom of real human
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page95" id="page95"></a>{95}</span>
+goodness here and now. In reality no man is being saved, except as
+he does actively and devotedly belong to that kingdom. The
+individual would hardly be in God's eyes worth the saving, except
+in order that he might be the instrumentality of the realisation of
+the kingdom. Those are ideas which it is possible to exaggerate in
+statement or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their
+quality as half-truths. But it is hardly possible to exaggerate
+their significance as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness,
+inadequacy, and artificiality both of the official statement and of
+the popular apprehension of Christianity. These ideas appeal to men
+in our time. They are popular because men think them already. Men
+are pleased, even when somewhat incredulous, to learn that
+Christianity will bear this social interpretation. Most Christians
+are in our time overwhelmingly convinced that in this direction
+lies the interpretation which Christianity must bear, if it is to
+do the work and meet the needs of the age. Its consonance with some
+of the truths underlying socialism may account, in a measure, for
+the influence which the Ritschlian theology has had.</p>
+<p>As was indicated, Ritschl's epoch-making book bears the title,
+<i>The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation</i>.
+The book might be described in the language of the schools as a
+monograph upon one great dogma of the Christian faith, around
+which, as the author treats it, all the other doctrines are
+arranged. The familiar topic of justification, of which Luther made
+so much, was thus given again the central place. What the book
+really offered was something quite different from this. It was a
+complete system of theology, but it differed from the traditional
+systems of theology. These had followed helplessly a logical scheme
+which begins with God as he is in himself and apart from any
+knowledge which we have of him. They then slowly proceeded to man
+and sin and redemption, one empirical object and two concrete
+experiences which we may know something about. Ritschl reversed the
+process. He aimed to begin with certain facts of life. Such facts
+are sin and the consciousness of forgiveness, awareness of
+restoration to the will and power of goodness, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page96" id="page96"></a>{96}</span> the gift of
+love and of a spirit which can feel itself victorious even in the
+midst of ills in life, confidence that this life is not all. These
+phrases, taken together, would describe the consciousness of
+salvation. This consciousness of sin and salvation is a fact in
+individual men. It has evidently been a fact in the life of masses
+of men for many generations. The facts have thus a psychology and a
+history from which reflection on the phenomenon of faith must take
+its departure. There is no reason why, upon this basis, and until
+it departs from the scientific methods which are given with the
+nature of its object, theology should not be as truly a science as
+is any other known among men.</p>
+<p>This science starts with man, who in the object of many other
+sciences. It confines itself to man in this one aspect of his
+relation to moral life and to the transcendent meaning of the
+universe. It notes the fact that men, when awakened, usually have
+the sense of not being in harmony with the life of the universe or
+on the way to realisation of its meaning. It notes the fact that
+many men have had the consciousness of progressive restoration to
+that harmony. It inquires as to the process of that restoration. It
+asks as to the power of it. It discovers that that power is a
+personal one. Men have believed that this power has been exerted
+over them, either in personal contact, or across the ages and
+through generations of believers, by one Jesus, whom they call
+Saviour. They have believed that it was God who through Jesus saved
+them. Jesus' consciousness thus became to them a revelation of God.
+The thought leads on to the consideration of that which a saved man
+does, or ought to do, in the life of the world and among his
+fellows, of the institution in which this attitude of mind is
+cherished and of the sum total of human institutions and relations
+of which the saved life should be the inward force. There is room
+even for a clause in which to compress the little that we know of
+anything beyond this life. We have written in unconventional words.
+There is no one place, either in Ritschl's work or elsewhere, where
+this grand and simple scheme stands together in one context. This
+is unfortunate. Were this <span class="pagenum"><a name="page97"
+id="page97"></a>{97}</span> the case, even wayfaring men might have
+understood somewhat better than they have what Ritschl was aiming
+at.</p>
+<p>It is a still greater pity that the execution of the scheme
+should have left so much to be desired. That this execution would
+prove difficult needs hardly to be said. That it could never be the
+work of one man is certainly true. To have had so great an insight
+is title enough to fame. Ritschl falls off from his endeavour as
+often as did Schleiermacher&mdash;more often and with less excuse.
+The might of the past is great. The lumber which he meekly carries
+along with him is surprising, as one feels his lack of meekness in
+the handling of the lumber which he recognised as such. The putting
+of new wine into old bottles is so often reprobated by Ritschl that
+the reader is justly surprised when he nevertheless recognises the
+bottles. The system is not 'all of one piece'&mdash;distinctly not.
+There are places where the rent is certainly made worse by the old
+cloth on the new garment. The work taken as a whole is so
+bewildering that one finds himself asking, 'What is Ritschl's
+method?' If what is meant is not a question of detail, but of the
+total apprehension of the problem to be solved, the apprehension
+which we strove to outline above, then Ritschl's courageous and
+complete inversion of the ancient method, his demand that we
+proceed from the known to the unknown, is a contribution so great
+that all shortcomings in the execution of it are insignificant. His
+first volume deals with the history of the doctrine of
+justification, beginning with Anselm and Abelard. In it Ritschl's
+eminent qualities as historian come out. In it also his prejudices
+have their play. The second volume deals with the Biblical
+foundations for the doctrine. Ritschl was bred in the T&uuml;bingen
+school. Yet here is much forced exegesis. Ritschl's positivistic
+view of the Scripture and of the whole question of revelation, was
+not congruous with his well-learned biblical criticism. The third
+volume is the constructive one. It is of immeasurably greater value
+than the other two. It is this third volume which has frequently
+been translated.</p>
+<p>In respect of his contention against metaphysics it is hardly
+necessary that we should go into detail. With his empirical
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page98" id="page98"></a>{98}</span>
+and psychological point of departure, given above, most men will
+find themselves in entire sympathy. The confusion of religion,
+which is an experience, with dogma which is reasoning about it, and
+the acceptance of statements in Scripture which are metaphysical in
+nature, as if they were religious truths&mdash;these two things
+have, in time past, prevented many earnest thinkers from following
+the true road. When it comes to the constructive portion of his
+work, it is, of course, impossible for Ritschl to build without the
+theoretical supports which philosophy gives, or to follow up
+certain of the characteristic magnitudes of religion without
+following them into the realm of metaphysics, to which, quite as
+truly as to that of religion, they belong. It would be unjust to
+Ritschl to suppose that these facts were hidden from him.</p>
+<p>As to his attitude toward mysticism, there is a word to say. In
+the long history of religious thought those who have revolted
+against metaphysical interpretation, orthodox or unorthodox, have
+usually taken refuge in mysticism. Hither the prophet Augustine
+takes refuge when he would flee the ecclesiastic Augustine,
+himself. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, Tauler, &agrave; Kempis,
+Suso, the author of the <i>Theologia Germanica</i>, Molinos, Madame
+Gayon, illustrate the thing we mean. Ritschl had seen much of
+mysticism in pietist circles. He knew the history of the movement
+well. What impressed his sane mind was the fact that unhealthy
+minds have often claimed, as their revelation from God, an
+experience which might, with more truth, be assigned to almost any
+other source. He desired to cut off the possibility of what seemed
+to him often a tragic delusion. The margin of any mystical movement
+stretches out toward monstrosities and absurdities. For that
+matter, what prevents a Buddhist from declaring his thoughts and
+feelings to be Christianity? Indeed, Ritschl asks, why is not
+Buddhism as good as such Christianity? He is, therefore, suspicious
+of revelations which have nothing by which they can be measured and
+checked.</p>
+<p>The claim of mystics that they came, in communion with God, to
+the point where they have no need of Christ, seemed to him impious.
+There is no way of knowing that we are in <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page99" id="page99"></a>{99}</span> fellowship
+with God, except by comparing what we feel that this fellowship has
+given us, with that which we historically learn that the fellowship
+with God gave to Christ. This is the sense and this the connexion
+in which Ritschl says that we cannot come to God save in and
+through the historic Christ as he is given us in the Gospels. The
+inner life, at least, which is there depicted for us is, in this
+outward and authoritative sense, our norm and guide.</p>
+<p>Large difficulties loom upon the horizon of this positivistic
+insistence upon history. Can we know the inner life of Christ well
+enough to use it thus as test in every, or even in any case? Does
+not the use of such a test, or of any test in this external way,
+take us out of the realm of the religion of the spirit? Men once
+said that the Church was their guide. Others said the Scripture was
+their guide. Now, in the sense of the outwardness of its authority,
+we repudiate even this. It rings devoutly if we say Christ is our
+guide. Yet, as Ritschl describes this guidance, in the exigency of
+his contention against mysticism, have we anything different? What
+becomes of Confucianists and Shintoists, who have never heard of
+the historic Christ? And all the while we have the sense of a query
+in our minds. Is it open to any man to repudiate mysticism
+absolutely and with contumely, and then leave us to discover that
+he does not mean mysticism as historians of every faith have
+understood it, but only the margin of evil which is apparently
+inseparable from it? That margin of evil others see and deplore.
+Against it other remedies have been suggested, as, for example,
+intelligence. Some would feel that in Ritschl's remedy the loss is
+greater than the gain.</p>
+<p>This historical character of revelation is so truly one of the
+fountain heads of the theology which takes its rise in Ritschl,
+that it deserves to be considered somewhat more at length. The
+Ritschlian movement has engaged a generation of more or less
+notable thinkers in the period since Ritschl's death. These have
+dissented at many points from Ritschl's views, diverged from his
+path and marked out courses of their own. We shall do well in the
+remainder of this chapter to attempt <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page100" id="page100"></a>{100}</span> the delineation in terms,
+not exclusively of Ritschl, but of that which may with some laxity
+be styled Ritschlianism. The value judgments of religion indicate
+only the subjective form of religious knowledge, as the Ritschlians
+understand it. Faith, however, does not invent its own contents.
+Historical facts, composing the revelation, actually exist, quite
+independent of the use which the believer makes of them. No group
+of thinkers have more truly sought to draw near to the person of
+the historic Jesus. The historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, is
+the divine revelation. That sums up this aspect of the Ritschlian
+position. Some negative consequences of this position we have
+already noted. Let us turn to its positive significance.</p>
+<p>Herrmann is the one of the Ritschlians who has dealt with this
+matter not only with great clearness, but also with deep Christian
+feeling in his <i>Verkehr des Christen mit Gott</i>, 1886, and
+notably in his address, <i>Der Begriff der Offenbarung</i>, 1887.
+If the motive of religion were an intellectual curiosity, a verbal
+communication would suffice. As it is a practical necessity, this
+must be met by actual impulse in life. That passing out of the
+unhappiness of sin, into the peace and larger life which is
+salvation, does indeed imply the movement of God's spirit on our
+hearts, in conversion and thereafter. This is essentially mediated
+to us through the Scriptures, especially through those of the New
+Testament, because the New Testament contains the record of the
+personality of Jesus. In that our personality is filled with the
+spirit which breathes in him, our salvation is achieved. The image
+of Jesus which we receive acts upon us as something indubitably
+real. It vindicates itself as real, in that it takes hold upon our
+manhood. Of course, this assumes that the Church has been right in
+accepting the Gospels as historical. Herrmann candidly faces this
+question. Not every word or deed, he says, which is recorded
+concerning Jesus, belongs to this central and dynamic revelation of
+which we speak. We do not help men to see Jesus in a saving way if,
+on the strength of accounts in the New Testament, we insist
+concerning Jesus that he was born of a virgin, that he raised the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page101" id=
+"page101"></a>{101}</span> dead, that he himself rose from the
+dead. We should not put these things before men with the
+declaration that they must assent to them. We must not try to
+persuade ourselves that that which acted upon the disciples as
+indubitably real must of necessity act similarly upon us. We are to
+allow ourselves to be seized and uplifted by that which, in our
+position, touches us as indubitably real. This is, in the first
+place, the moral character of Jesus. It is his inner life which, on
+the testimony of the disciples, meets us as something real and
+active in the world, as truly now as then. What are some facts of
+this inner life? The Jesus of the New Testament shows a firmness of
+religious conviction, a clearness of moral judgment, a purity and
+force of will, such as are not found united in any other figure in
+history. We have the image of a man who is conscious that he does
+not fall short of the ideal for which he offers himself. It is this
+consciousness which is yet united in him with the most perfect
+humility. He lives out his life and faces death in a confidence and
+independence which have never been approached. He has confidence
+that he can lift men to such a height that they also will partake
+with him in the highest good, through their full surrender to God
+and their life of love for their fellows.</p>
+<p>It is clear that Herrmann aims to bring to the front only those
+elements in the life of Jesus which are likely to prove most
+effectual in meeting the need and winning the faith of the men of
+our age. He would cast into the background those elements which are
+likely to awaken doubt and to hinder the approach of men's souls to
+God. For Herrmann himself the virgin birth has the significance
+that the spiritual life of Jesus did not proceed from the sinful
+race. But Herrmann admits that a man could hold even that without
+needing to allege that the physical life of Jesus did not come into
+being in the ordinary way. The distinction between the inner and
+outward life of Jesus, and the declaration that belief in the
+former alone is necessary, has the result of thus ridding us of
+questions which can scarcely fail to be present to the mind of
+every modern man. Yet <span class="pagenum"><a name="page102" id=
+"page102"></a>{102}</span> it would be unjust to imply that this is
+the purpose. Quite the contrary, the distinction is logical for
+this theology. Redemption is an affair of the inner life of a man.
+It is the force of the inner life of the Redeemer which avails for
+it. It is from the belief that such an inner and spiritual life was
+once realised here on earth, that our own faith gathers strength,
+and gets guidance in the conflict for the salvation of our souls.
+The belief in the historicity of such an inner life is necessary.
+So Harnack also declares in his <i>Wesen des Christenthums</i>,
+1900. It is noteworthy that in this connexion neither of these
+writers advances to a form of speculation concerning the exalted
+Christ, which in recent years has had some currency. According to
+this doctrine, there is ascribed to the risen and ascended Jesus an
+existence with God which is thought of in terms different from
+those which we associate with the idea of immortality. In other
+words, this continued existence of Christ as God is a counterpart
+of that existence before the incarnation, which the doctrine of the
+pre-existence alleged. But surely this speculation can have no
+better standing than that of the pre-existence.</p>
+<p>Sin in the language of religion is defection from the law of
+God. It is the transgression of the divine command. In what
+measure, therefore, the life of man can be thought of as sinful,
+depends upon his knowledge of the will of God. In Scripture, as in
+the legends of the early history of the race, this knowledge stands
+in intimate connexion with the witness to a primitive revelation.
+This thought has had a curious history. The ideas of mankind
+concerning God and his will have grown and changed as much as have
+any other ideas. The rudimentary idea of the good is probably of
+social origin. It first emerges in the conflict of men one with
+another. As the personalised ideal of conduct, the god then reacts
+upon conduct, as the conduct reacts upon the notion of the god.
+Only slowly has the ideal of the good been clarified. Only slowly
+have the gods been ethicised. 'An honest God is the noblest work of
+man.' The moralising and spiritualising of the idea of Jahve lies
+right upon the face of the Old Testament. The ascent of man on his
+ethical and spiritual side <span class="pagenum"><a name="page103"
+id="page103"></a>{103}</span> is as certain as is that on his
+physical side. Long struggle upward through ignorance, weakness,
+sin, gradual elevating of the standard of what ought to he,
+growingly successful effort to conform to that standard&mdash;this
+is what the history of the race has seen.</p>
+<p>Athwart this lies the traditional dogma. The dogma took up into
+itself a legend of the childhood of the world. It elaborated that
+which in Genesis is vague and poetic into a vast scheme which has
+passed as a sacred philosophy of history. It postulated an original
+revelation. It affirmed the created state of man as one of holiness
+before a fall. To the framers of the dogma, if sin is the
+transgression of God's will, then it must be in light of a
+revelation of that will. In the Scriptures we have vague
+intimations concerning God's will, growingly clearer knowledge of
+that will, evolving through history to Jesus. In the dogma we have
+this grand assumption of a paradisaic state of perfectness in which
+the will of God was from the beginning perfectly known.</p>
+<p>In the Platonic, as in the rabbinic, speculation the idea must
+precede the fact. Every step of progress is a defection from that
+idea. The dogma suffers from an insoluble contradiction within
+itself. It aims to give us the point of departure by which we are
+to recognise the nature of sin. At the same moment it would
+describe the perfection of man at which God has willed that by
+age-long struggle he should arrive. Now, if we place this
+perfection at the beginning of human history, before all human
+self-determination, we divest it of ethical quality. Whatever else
+it may be, it is not character. On the other hand, if we would make
+this perfection really that of moral character, then we cannot
+place it at the beginning of human history, but far down the course
+of the evolution of the higher human traits, of the consciousness
+of sin and of the struggle for redemption. It is not revelation
+from God, but na&iuml;ve imagination, later giving place to
+adventurous speculation concerning the origin of the universe,
+which we have in the doctrine of the primeval perfection of man. We
+do not really make earnest with our Christian claim that in Jesus
+we have our paramount revelation, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page104" id="page104"></a>{104}</span> until we admit this. It is
+through Jesus, and not from Adam that we know sin.</p>
+<p>So we might go on to say that the dogma of inherited guilt is a
+contradiction in terms. Disadvantage may be inherited, weakness,
+proclivity to sin, but not guilt, not sin in the sense of that
+which entails guilt. What entails guilt is action counter to the
+will of God which we know. That is always the act of the individual
+man myself. It cannot by any possibility be the act of another. It
+may be the consequence of the sins of my ancestors that I do moral
+evil without knowing it to be such. Even my fellows view this as a
+mitigation, if not as an exculpation. The very same act, however,
+which up to this point has been only an occasion for pity, becomes
+sin and entails guilt, when it passes through my own mind and will
+as a defection from a will of God in which I believe, and as a
+righteousness which I refuse. The confusion of guilt and sin in
+order to the inclusion of all under the need of salvation, as in
+the Augustinian scheme, ended in bewilderment and stultification of
+the moral sense. It caused men to despair of themselves and gravely
+to misrepresent God. It is no wonder if in the age of rationalism
+this dogma was largely done away with. The religious sense of sin
+was declared to be an hallucination. Nothing is more evident in the
+rationalist theology than its lack of the sense of sin. This alone
+is sufficient explanation of the impotency and inadequacy of that
+theology. Kant's doctrine of radical evil testifies to his deep
+sense that the rationalists were wrong. He could see also the
+impossibility of the ancient view. But he had no substitute. Hegel,
+much as he prided himself upon the restoration of dogma, viewed
+evil as only relative, good in the making. Schleiermacher made a
+beginning of construing the thought of sin from the point of view
+of the Christian consciousness. Ritschl was the first consistently
+to carry out Schleiermacher's idea, placing the Christian
+consciousness in the centre and claiming that the revelation of the
+righteousness of God and of the perfection of man is in Jesus. All
+men being sinners, there is a vast solidarity, which he describes
+as the Kingdom of Evil and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page105"
+id="page105"></a>{105}</span> sets over against the Kingdom of God,
+yet not so that the freedom or responsibility of man is impaired.
+God forgives all sin save that of wilful resistance to the spirit
+of the good. That is, Ritschl regards all sin, short of this last,
+as mainly ignorance and weakness. It is from Ritschl, and more
+particularly from Kaftan, that the phrases have been mainly taken
+which served as introduction to this paragraph.</p>
+<p>For the work of God through Christ, in the salvation of men from
+the guilt and power of sin, various terms have been used. Different
+aspects of the work have been described by different names.
+Redemption, regeneration, justification, reconciliation and
+election or predestination&mdash;these are the familiar words. This
+is the order in which the conceptions stand, if we take them as
+they occur in consciousness. Election then means nothing more than
+the ultimate reference to God of the mystery of an experience in
+which the believer already rejoices. On the other hand, in the
+dogma the order is reversed. Election must come first, since it is
+the decree of God upon which all depends. Redemption and
+reconciliation have, in Christian doctrine, been traditionally
+regarded as completed transactions, waiting indeed to be applied to
+the individual or appropriated by him through faith, but of
+themselves without relation to faith. Reconciliation was long
+thought of as that of an angry God to man. Especially was this last
+the characteristic view of the West, where juristic notions
+prevailed. Origen talked of a right of the devil over the soul of
+man until bought off by the sacrifice of Christ. This is pure
+paganism, of course. The doctrine of Anselm marks a great advance.
+It runs somewhat thus: The divine honour is offended in the sin of
+man. Satisfaction corresponding to the greatness of the guilt must
+be rendered. Man is under obligation to render this satisfaction;
+yet he is unable so to do. A sin against God is an infinite
+offence. It demands an infinite satisfaction. Man can render no
+satisfaction which is not finite. The way out of this dilemma is
+the incarnation of the divine Logos. For the god-man, as man, is
+entitled to bring this satisfaction for men. On the other hand, as
+God he is able so to do. In his death this <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page106" id="page106"></a>{106}</span>
+satisfaction is embodied. He gave his life freely. God having
+received satisfaction through him demands nothing more from us.</p>
+<p>Abelard had, almost at the same time with Anselm, interpreted
+the death of Christ in far different fashion. It was a revelation
+of the love of God which wins men to love in turn. This notion of
+Abelard was far too subtle. The crass objective dogma of Anselm
+prevailed. The death of Christ was a sacrifice. The purpose was the
+propitiation of an angry God. The effect was that, on the side of
+God, a hindrance to man's salvation was removed. The doctrine
+accurately reflects the feudal ideas of the time which produced it.
+In Grotius was done away the notion of private right, which lies at
+the basis of the theory of Anselm. That of public duty took its
+place. A sovereign need not stand upon his offended honour, as in
+Anselm's thought. Still, he cannot, like a private citizen, freely
+forgive. He must maintain the dignity of his office, in order not
+to demoralise the world. The sufferings of Christ did not effect a
+necessary private satisfaction. They were an example which
+satisfied the moral order of the world. Apart from this change, the
+conception remains the same.</p>
+<p>As Kaftan argues, we can escape the dreadful externality and
+artificiality of this scheme, only as redemption and regeneration
+are brought back to their primary place in consciousness. These are
+the initial experiences in which we become aware of God's work
+through Christ in us and for us. The reconciliation is of us. The
+redemption is from our sins. The regeneration is to a new moral
+life. Through the influence of Jesus, reconciled on our part to God
+and believing in His unchanging love to us, we are translated into
+God's kingdom and live for the eternal in our present existence.
+Redemption is indeed the work of God through Christ, but it has
+intelligible parallel in the awakening of the life of the mind, or
+again of the spirit of self-sacrifice, through the personal
+influence of the wise and good. Salvation begins in such an
+awakening through the personal influence of the wisest and best. It
+is transformation of our personality through the personality
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page107" id=
+"page107"></a>{107}</span> of Jesus, by the personal God of truth,
+of goodness and of love. All that which God through Jesus has done
+for us is futile, save as we make the actualisation of our
+deliverance from sin our continuous and unceasing task. When this
+connexion of thought is broken through, we transfer the whole
+matter of salvation from the inner to the outer world and make of
+it a transaction independent of the moral life of man.</p>
+<p>Justification and reconciliation also are primarily acts and
+gifts of God. Justification is a forensic act. The sense is not
+that in justification we are made just. We are, so to say,
+temporarily thus regarded, not that leniency may become the
+occasion of a new offence, but that in grateful love we may make it
+the starting point of a new life. We must justify our
+justification. It is easy to see the objections to such a course on
+the part of a civil judge. He must consider the rights of others.
+It was this which brought Grotius and the rest, with the New
+England theologians down to Park, to feel that forgiveness could
+not be quite free. If we acknowledge that this symbolism of God as
+judge or sovereign is all symbolism, mere figure of speech, not
+fact at all, then that objection&mdash;and much else&mdash;falls
+away. If we assert that another figure of speech, that of God as
+Father, more perfectly suggests the relation of God and man, then
+forgiveness may be free. Then justification and forgiveness are
+only two words for one and the same idea. Then the nightmare of a
+God who would forgive and cannot, of a God who will forgive but may
+not justify until something further happens, is all done away. Then
+the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of our sins
+cannot be other than the relation of his life to that forgiveness.
+Both the one and the other are a revelation of the forgiving love
+of God. We may say that in his death the whole meaning of his life
+was gathered. We may say that his death was the consummation of his
+life, that without it his life would not have been what it is. This
+is, however, very far from being the ordinary statement of the
+relation of Jesus' death, either to his own life or to the
+forgiveness of our sins.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page108" id=
+"page108"></a>{108}</span>
+<p>The doctrinal tradition made much also of the deliverance from
+punishment which follows after the forgiveness of sin. In fact, in
+many forms of the dogma, it has been the escape from punishment
+which was chiefly had in mind. Along with the forensic notion of
+salvation we largely or wholly discard the notion of punishment. We
+retain only the sense that the consequence of continuing in sin is
+to become more sinful. God himself is powerless to prevent that.
+Punishment is immanent, vital, necessary. The penalty is gradually
+taken away if the sin itself is taken away&mdash;not otherwise. It
+returns with the sin, it continues in the sin, it is inseparable
+from the sin. Punishment is no longer the right word. Reward is not
+the true description of that growing better which is the
+consequence of being good. Reward or punishment as <i>quid pro
+quo</i>, as arbitrary assignments, as external equivalents, do not
+so much as belong to the world of ideas in which we move. For this
+view the idea that God laid upon Jesus penalties due to us, fades
+into thin air. Jesus could by no possibility have met the
+punishment of sin, except he himself had been a sinner. Then he
+must have met the punishment of his own sin and not that of others.
+That portion which one may gladly bear of the consequences of
+another's sin may rightfully be called by almost any other name. It
+cannot be called punishment since punishment is immanent. Even
+eternal death is not a judicial assignment for our obstinate
+sinfulness. Eternal death is the obstinate sinfulness, and the
+sinfulness the death.</p>
+<p>It must be evident that reconciliation can have, in this scheme,
+no meaning save that man's being reconciled to God. Jesus reveals a
+God who has no need to be reconciled to us. The alienation is not
+on the side of God. That, being alienated from God, man may imagine
+that God is hostile to him, is only the working of a familiar law
+of the human mind. The fiction of an angry God is the most awful
+survival among us of primitive paganism. That which Jesus by his
+revelation of God brought to pass was a true 'at-one-ment,' a
+causing of God and man to be at one again. To the word atonement,
+as currently pronounced, and as, until a half <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page109" id="page109"></a>{109}</span> century
+ago, almost universally apprehended, the notion of that which is
+sacrificial attached. To the life and death of Jesus, as revelation
+of God and Saviour of men, we can no longer attach any sacrificial
+meaning whatsoever. There is indeed the perfectly general sense in
+which so beautiful a life and so heroic a death were, of course, a
+grand exemplification of self-sacrifice. Yet this is a sense so
+different from the other and in itself so obvious, that one
+hesitates to use the same word in the immediate context with that
+other, lest it should appear that the intention was to obscure
+rather than to make clear the meaning. For atonement in a sense
+different from that of reconciliation, we have no significance
+whatever. Reconciliation and atonement describe one and the same
+fact. In the dogma the words were as far as possible from being
+synonyms. They referred to two facts, the one of which was the
+means and essential prerequisite of the other. The vicarious
+sacrifice was the antecedent condition of the reconciling of God.
+In our thought it is not a reconciliation of God which is aimed at.
+No sacrifice is necessary. No sacrifice such as that postulated is
+possible. Of the reconciliation of man to God the only condition is
+the revelation of the love of God in the life and death of Jesus
+and the obedient acceptance of that revelation on the part of
+men.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page110" id=
+"page110"></a>{110}</span>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="chap4" id="chap4">CHAPTER IV</a></h2>
+<h3><a name="chap4-1" id="chap4-1">THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL
+MOVEMENT</a></h3>
+<p>It has been said that in Christian times the relation of
+philosophy and religion may be determined by the attitude of reason
+toward a single matter, namely, the churchly doctrine of
+revelation.<a id="footnotetag4" name="footnotetag4"></a><a href=
+"#footnote4"><sup>4</sup></a> There are three possible relations of
+reason to this doctrine. First, it may be affirmed that the content
+of religion and theology is matter communicated to man in
+extraordinary fashion, truth otherwise unattainable, on which it is
+beyond the competence of reason to sit in judgment. We have then
+the two spheres arbitrarily separated. As regards their relation,
+theology is at first supreme. Reason is the handmaiden of faith. It
+is occupied in applying the principles which it receives at the
+hands of theology. These are the so-called Ages of Faith. Notably
+was this the attitude of the Middle Age. But in the long run either
+authoritative revelation, thus conceived, must extinguish reason
+altogether, or else reason must claim the whole man. After all, it
+is in virtue of his having some reason that man is the subject of
+revelation. He is continually asked to exercise his reason upon
+certain parts of the revelation, even by those who maintain that he
+must do so only within limits. It is only because there in a
+certain reasonableness in the conceptions of revealed religion that
+man has ever been able to make them his own or to find in them
+meaning and edification. This external relation of reason to
+revelation cannot continue. Nor can the encroachments of reason be
+met by temporary distinctions such as that between the natural and
+the supernatural. The antithesis to the natural is not the
+supernatural, but the unnatural. The antithesis to reason is not
+faith, but irrationality. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page111"
+id="page111"></a>{111}</span> The antithesis to human truth is not
+the divine truth. It is falsehood.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote4" name=
+"footnote4"></a><b>Footnote 4:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag4">(return)</a>
+<p>Seth Pringle-Pattison, <i>The Philosophical Radicals</i>, p.
+216.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>When men have made this discovery, a revulsion carries their
+minds to the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely,
+the position of extreme denial. It is an attitude of negation
+toward revelation, such as prevailed in the barren and trivial
+rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century. The reason having
+been long repressed revenges itself, usurping everything. The
+explanation of the rise of positive religion and of the claim of
+revelation is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, of ambitious
+priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion of those who thus
+argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely the current
+morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is that it is
+merely the current morality plus certain unprovable assumptions.
+Indeed, they may think it to be but the obstinate adherence to
+these assumptions minus the current morality. It is impossible that
+this shallow view should prevail. To overcome it, however, there is
+need of a philosophy which shall give not less, but greater scope
+to reason and at the same time an inward meaning to revelation.</p>
+<p>This brings us to the third possible position, to which the best
+thinkers of the nineteenth century have advanced. So long as
+deistic views of the relation of God to man and the world held the
+field, revelation meant something interjected <i>ab extra</i> into
+the established order of things. The popular theology which so
+abhorred deism was yet essentially deistic in its notion of God and
+of his separation from the world. Men did not perceive that by thus
+separating God from the world they set up alongside of him a sphere
+and an activity to which his relations were transient and
+accidental. No wonder that other men, finding their satisfying
+activity within the sphere which was thus separated from God, came
+to think of this absentee God as an appendage to the scheme of
+things. But if man himself be inexplicable, save as sharing in the
+wider life of universal reason, if the process of history be
+realised as but the working out of an inherent divine purpose, the
+manifestation of an indwelling divine force, then <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page112" id="page112"></a>{112}</span>
+revelation denotes no longer an interference with that evolution.
+It is a factor in that evolution. It is but the normal relation of
+the immanent spirit of God to the children of men at the crises of
+their fate. Then revelation is an experience of men precisely in
+the line and according to the method of all their nobler
+experiences. It is itself reasonable and moral. Inspiration is the
+normal and continuous effect of the contact of the God who is
+spirit with man who is spirit too. The relation is never broken.
+But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt.
+There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth
+of communion with God has been vouchsafed. To such persons and eras
+the religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to
+restrict the words 'revelation' and 'inspiration.' This
+restriction, however, signifies the separation of the grand
+experience from the ordinary, only in degree and not in kind. Such
+an experience was that of prophets and law-givers under the ancient
+covenant. Such an experience, in immeasurably greater degree, was
+that of Jesus himself. Such a turning-point in the life of the race
+was the advent of Christianity. The world has not been wrong in
+calling the documents of these revelations sacred books and in
+attributing to them divine authority. It has been largely wrong
+<i>in the manner in which it construed their authority</i>. It has
+been wholly wrong in imagining that the documents themselves were
+the revelation. They are merely the record <i>of a personal
+communion with the transcendent</i>. It was Lessing who first cast
+these fertile ideas into the soil of modern thought. They were
+never heartily taken up by Kant. One can think, however, with what
+enthusiasm men recurred to them after their postulates had been
+verified and the idea of God, of man and of the world which they
+implied, had been confirmed by Fichte and Schelling.</p>
+<p>In the philosophical movement, the outline of which we have
+suggested, what one may call the <i>nidus</i> of a new faith in
+Scripture had been prepared. The quality had been forecast which
+the Scripture must be found to possess, if it were to retain its
+character as document of revelation. In those <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page113" id="page113"></a>{113}</span> very same
+years the great movement of biblical criticism was gathering force
+which, in the course of the nineteenth century, was to prove by
+stringent literary and historical methods, what qualities the
+documents which we know as Scripture do possess. It was to prove in
+the most objective fashion that the Scripture does not possess
+those qualities which men had long assigned to it. It was to prove
+that, as a matter of fact, the literature does possess the
+qualities which the philosophic forecast, above hinted, required.
+It was thus actually to restore the Bible to an age in which many
+reasonable men had lost their faith in it. It was to give a genetic
+reconstruction of the literature and show the progress of the
+history which the Scripture enshrines. After a contest in which the
+very foundations of faith seemed to be removed, it was to afford a
+basis for a belief in Scripture and revelation as positive and
+secure as any which men ever enjoyed, with the advantage that it is
+a foundation upon which the modern man can and does securely build.
+The synchronism of the two endeavours is remarkable. The
+convergence upon one point, of studies starting, so to say, from
+opposite poles and having no apparent interest in common, is
+instructive. It is an illustration of that which Comte said, that
+all the great intellectual movements of a given time are but the
+manifestation of a common impulse, which pervades and possesses the
+minds of the men of that time.</p>
+<p>The attempt to rationalise the narrative of Scripture was no new
+one. It grew in intensity in the early years of the nineteenth
+century. The conflict which was presently precipitated concerned
+primarily the Gospels. It was natural that it should do so. These
+contain the most important Scripture narrative, that of the life of
+Jesus. Strauss had in good faith turned his attention to the
+Gospels, precisely because he felt their central importance. His
+generation was to learn that they presented also the greatest
+difficulties. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page114" id=
+"page114"></a>{114}</span> The old rationalistic interpretation had
+started from the assumption that what we have in the gospel
+narrative is fact. Yet, of course, for the rationalists, the facts
+must be natural. They had the appearance of being supernatural only
+through the erroneous judgment of the narrators. It was for the
+interpreter to reduce everything which is related to its simple,
+natural cause. The water at Cana was certainly not turned into
+wine. It must have been brought by Jesus as a present and opened
+thus in jest. Jesus was, of course, begotten in the natural manner.
+A simple maiden must have been deceived. The execution of this task
+of the rationalising of the narratives by one Dr. Paulus, was the
+<i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of the claim. The most spiritual of the
+narratives, the finest flower of religious poetry, was thus turned
+into the meanest and most trivial incident without any religious
+significance whatsoever. The obtuseness of the procedure was
+exceeded only by its vulgarity.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap4-2" id="chap4-2">STRAUSS</a></h3>
+<p>On the other hand, as Pfleiderer has said, we must remember the
+difficulty which beset the men of that age. Their general culture
+made it difficult for them to accept the miraculous element in the
+gospel narrative as it stood. Yet their theory of Scripture gave
+them no notion as to any other way in which the narratives might be
+understood. The men had never asked themselves how the narratives
+arose. In the preface to his <i>Leben Jesu</i>, Strauss said:
+'Orthodox and rationalists alike proceed from the false assumption
+that we have always in the Gospels testimony, sometimes even that
+of eye-witnesses, to fact. They are, therefore, reduced to asking
+themselves what can have been the real and natural fact which is
+here witnessed to in such extraordinary way. We have to realise,'
+Strauss proceeds, 'that the narrators testify sometimes, not to
+outward facts, but to ideas, often most poetical and beautiful
+ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had unconsciously put
+upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions upon them,
+reflexions and imaginings <span class="pagenum"><a name="page115"
+id="page115"></a>{115}</span> such as were natural to the time and
+at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not
+falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic,
+na&iuml;ve, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension
+of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight.
+It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature,
+illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than
+any hard, prosaic statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had
+appreciated that particular episodes, like the virgin birth and the
+bodily resurrection, might have some such explanation as this. No
+one had ever undertaken to apply this method consistently, from one
+end to the other of the gospel narrative. What was of more
+significance, no one had clearly defined the conception of legend.
+Strauss was sure that in the application of this notion to certain
+portions of the Scripture no irreverence was shown. No moral taint
+was involved. Nothing which could detract from the reverence in
+which we hold the Scripture was implied. Rather, in his view, the
+history of Jesus is more wonderful than ever, when some, at least,
+of its elements are viewed in this way, when they are seen as the
+product of the poetic spirit, working all unconsciously at a
+certain level of culture and under the impulse of a great
+enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>There is no doubt that Strauss, who was at that time an earnest
+Christian, felt the relief from certain difficulties in the
+biography of Jesus which this theory affords. He put it forth in
+all sincerity as affording to others like relief. He said that
+while rationalists and supernaturalists alike, by their methods,
+sacrificed the divine content of the story and clung only to its
+form, his hypothesis sacrificed the historicity of the narrative
+form, but kept the eternal and spiritual truth. In his opinion, the
+lapse of a single generation was enough to give room for this
+process of the growth of the legendary elements which have found
+place in the written Gospels which we have. Ideas entertained by
+primitive Christians relative to their lost Master, have been, all
+unwittingly, transformed into facts and woven into the tale of his
+career. The legends of a people are in their basal elements
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page116" id=
+"page116"></a>{116}</span> never the work of a single individual.
+They are never intentionally produced. The imperceptible growth of
+a joint creative work of this kind was possible, however, only on
+the supposition that oral tradition was, for a time, the means of
+transmission of the reminiscences of Jesus. Strauss' explanation of
+his theory has been given above, to some extent in his own words.
+We may see how he understood himself. We may appreciate also the
+genuineness of the religious spirit of his work. At the same time
+the thorough-going way in which he applied his principle, the
+relentless march of his argument, the character of his results,
+must sometimes have been startling even to himself. They certainly
+startled others. The effect of his work was instantaneous and
+immense. It was not at all the effect which he anticipated. The
+issue of the furious controversy which broke out was disastrous
+both to Strauss' professional career and to his whole temperament
+and character.</p>
+<p>David Friedrich Strauss was born in 1808 in Ludwigsburg in
+W&uuml;rttemberg. He studied in T&uuml;bingen and in Berlin. He
+became an instructor in the theological faculty in T&uuml;bingen in
+1832. He published his <i>Leben Jesu</i> in 1835. He was almost at
+once removed from his portion. In 1836 he withdrew altogether from
+the professorial career. His answer to his critics, written in
+1837, was in bitter tone. More conciliatory was his book,
+<i>&Uuml;ber Verg&auml;ngliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum</i>,
+published in 1839. Indeed there were some concessions in the third
+edition of his <i>Leben Jesu</i> in 1838, but these were all
+repudiated in 1840. His <i>Leben Jesu f&uuml;r das deutsche
+Volk</i>, published in 1866 was the effort to popularise that which
+he had done. It is, however, in point of method, superior to his
+earlier work, Comments were met with even greater bitterness.
+Finally, not long before his death in 1874, he published <i>Der
+Alte und der Neue Glaube</i>, in which he definitely broke with
+Christianity altogether and went over to materialism and
+pessimism.</p>
+<p>Pfleiderer, who had personal acquaintance with Strauss and held
+him in regard, once wrote: 'Strauss' error did not lie in his
+regarding some of the gospel stories as legends, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page117" id="page117"></a>{117}</span> and some
+of the narratives of the miraculous as symbols of ideal truths. So
+far Strauss was right. The contribution which he made is one which
+we have all appropriated and built upon. His error lay in his
+looking for those religious truths which are thus symbolised,
+outside of religion itself, in adventurous metaphysical
+speculations. He did not seek them in the facts of the devout heart
+and moral will, as these are illustrated in the actual life of
+Jesus.' If Strauss, after the disintegration in criticism of
+certain elements in the biography of Jesus, had given us a positive
+picture of Jesus as the ideal of religious character and ethical
+force, his work would indeed have been attacked. But it would have
+outlived the attack and conferred a very great benefit. It
+conferred a great benefit as it was, although not the benefit which
+Strauss supposed. The benefit which it really conferred was in its
+critical method, and not at all in its results.</p>
+<p>Of the mass of polemic and apologetic literature which Strauss'
+<i>Leben Jesu</i> called forth, little is at this distance worth
+the mentioning. Ullmann, who was far more appreciative than most of
+his adversaries, points out the real weakness of Strauss' work.
+That weakness lay in the failure to draw any distinction between
+the historical and the mythical. He threatened to dissolve the
+whole history into myth. He had no sense for the ethical element in
+the personality and teaching of Jesus nor of the creative force
+which this must have exerted. Ullmann says with cogency that,
+according to Strauss, the Church created its Christ virtually out
+of pure imagination. But we are then left with the query: What
+created the Church? To this query Strauss has absolutely no answer
+to give. The answer is, says Ullmann, that the ethical personality
+of Jesus created the Church. This ethical personality is thus a
+supreme historic fact and a sublime historic cause, to which we
+must endeavour to penetrate, if need be through the veil of legend.
+The old rationalists had made themselves ridiculous by their effort
+to explain everything in some natural way. Strauss and his
+followers often appeared frivolous, since, according to them, there
+was little left to be explained. If a portion of the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page118" id="page118"></a>{118}</span> narrative
+presented a difficulty, it was declared mythical. What was needed
+was such a discrimination between the legendary and historical
+elements in the Gospels as could be reached only by patient,
+painstaking study of the actual historical quality and standing of
+the documents. No adequate study of this kind had ever been
+undertaken. Strauss did not undertake it, nor even perceive that it
+was to be undertaken. There had been many men of vast learning in
+textual and philological criticism. Here, however, a new sort of
+critique was applied to a problem which had but just now been
+revealed in all its length and breadth. The establishing of the
+principles of this historical criticism&mdash;the so-called Higher
+Criticism&mdash;was the herculean task of the generation following
+Strauss. To the development of that science another T&uuml;bingen
+professor, Baur, made permanent contribution. With Strauss himself,
+sadder than the ruin of his career, was the tragedy of the
+uprooting of his faith. This tragedy followed in many places in the
+wake of the recognition of Strauss' fatal half-truth.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap4-3" id="chap4-3">BAUR</a></h3>
+<p>Baur, Strauss' own teacher in T&uuml;bingen, afterward famous as
+biblical critic and church-historian, said of Strauss' book, that
+through it was revealed in startling fashion to that generation of
+scholars, how little real knowledge they had of the problem which
+the Gospels present. To Baur it was clear that if advance was to be
+made beyond Strauss' negative results, the criticism of the gospel
+history must wait upon an adequate criticism of the documents which
+are our sources for that history. Strauss' failure had brought home
+to the minds of men the fact that there were certain preliminary
+studies which must needs be taken up. Meantime the other work must
+wait. As one surveys the literature of the next thirty years this
+fact stands out. Many apologetic lives of Jesus had to be written
+in reply to Strauss. But they are almost completely negligible. No
+constructive <span class="pagenum"><a name="page119" id=
+"page119"></a>{119}</span> work was done in this field until nearly
+a generation had passed.</p>
+<p>Since all history, said Baur, before it reaches us must pass
+through the medium of a narrator, our first question as to the
+gospel history is not, what objective reality can be accorded to
+the narrative itself. There is a previous question. This concerns
+the relation of the narrative to the narrator. It might be very
+difficult for us to make up our minds as to what it was that, in a
+given case, the witness saw. We have not material for such a
+judgment. We have probably much evidence, up and down his writings,
+as to what sort of man the witness was, in what manner he would be
+likely to see anything and with what personal equation he would
+relate that which he saw. Baur would seem to have been the first
+vigorously and consistently to apply this principle to the gospel
+narratives. Before we can penetrate deeply into the meaning of an
+author we must know, if we may, his purpose in writing. Every
+author belongs to the time in which he lives. The greater the
+importance of his subject for the parties and struggles of his day,
+the safer is the assumption that both he and his work will bear the
+impress of these struggles. He will represent the interests of one
+or another of the parties. His work will have a tendency of some
+kind. This was one of Baur's oft-used words&mdash;the tendency of a
+writer and of his work. We must ascertain that tendency. The
+explanation of many things both in the form and substance of a
+writing would be given could we but know that. The letters of Paul,
+for example, are written in palpable advocacy of opinions which
+were bitterly opposed by other apostles. The biographies of Jesus
+suggest that they also represent, the one this tendency, the other
+that. We have no cause to assert that this trait of which we speak
+implies conscious distortion of the facts which the author would
+relate. The simple-minded are generally those least aware of the
+bias in the working of their own minds. It is obvious that until we
+have reckoned with such elements as these, we cannot truly judge of
+that which the Gospels say. To the elaboration of the principles of
+this historical criticism Baur gave the labour <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page120" id="page120"></a>{120}</span> of his
+life. His biblical work alone would have been epoch-making.</p>
+<p>Ferdinand Christian Baur was born in 1793 in Schmieden, near
+Stuttgart. He became a professor in T&uuml;bingen in 1826 and died
+there in 1860. He was an ardent disciple of Hegel. His greatest
+work was surely in the field of the history of dogma. His works,
+<i>Die Christliche Lehre von der Vere&ouml;hnung</i>, 1838, <i>Die
+Christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung
+Gottes</i>, 1841-1843, his <i>Lehrbuch der Christlichen
+Dogmengeschichte</i>, 1847, together constitute a contribution to
+which Harnack's work in our own time alone furnishes a parallel.
+Baur had begun his thorough biblical studies before the publication
+of Strauss' book. The direction of those studies was more than ever
+confirmed by his insight of the shortcomings of Strauss' work. Very
+characteristically also he had begun his investigations, not at the
+most difficult point, that of the Gospels, as Strauss had done, but
+at the easiest point, the Epistles of Paul. As early as 1831 he had
+published a tractate, <i>Die Christus-Partei in der Corinthischen
+Gemeinde</i>. In that book he had delineated the bitter contest
+between Paul and the Judaising element in the Apostolic Church
+which opposed Paul whithersoever he went. In 1835 his disquisition,
+<i>Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe</i>, appeared. In the teachings
+of these letters he discovered the antithesis to the gnostic
+heresies of the second century. He thought also that the stage of
+organisation of the Church which they imply, accorded better with
+this supposition than with that of their apostolic authorship. The
+same general theme is treated in a much larger way in Baur's
+<i>Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi</i>, in 1845. Here the results
+of his study of the book of the Acts are combined with those of his
+inquiries as to the Pauline Epistles. In the history of the
+apostolic age men had been accustomed to see the evidence only of
+peace and harmony. Baur sought to show that the period had been one
+of fierce struggle, between the narrow Judaic and legalistic form
+of faith in the Messiah and that conception, introduced by Paul, of
+a world-religion free from the law. Out of this conflict, which
+lasted a hundred and fifty years, went forth <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page121" id="page121"></a>{121}</span> the
+Catholic Church. The monuments of this struggle and witnesses of
+this process of growth are the New Testament writings, most of
+which were produced in the second century. The only documents which
+we have which were written before A.D. 70, were the four great
+Epistles of Paul, those to the Galatians, to the Romans, and to the
+Corinthians, together with the Apocalypse.</p>
+<p>Many details in Baur's view are now seen to have been overstated
+and others false. Yet this was the first time that a true
+historical method had been applied to the New Testament literature
+as a whole. Baur's contribution lay in the originality of his
+conception of Christianity, in his emphasis upon Paul, in his
+realisation of the magnitude of the struggle which Paul inaugurated
+against Jewish prejudices in the primitive Church. In his idea, the
+issue of that struggle was, on the one hand, the freeing of
+Christianity from Judaism and on the other, the developing of
+Christian thought into a system of dogma and of the scattered
+Christian communities into an organised Church. The Fourth Gospel
+contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the
+gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy.
+The Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily
+in the phenomenal world in the person of Jesus. It enters into
+conflict with the darkness and evil of the world. This speculation
+is but thinly clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus. That an
+account completely dominated by speculative motives gives but
+slight guarantee of historical truth, was for Baur self-evident.
+The author remains unknown, the age uncertain. The book, however,
+can hardly have appeared before the time of the Montanist movement,
+that is, toward the end of the second century. Scholars now rate
+far more highly than did Baur the element of genuine Johannine
+tradition which may lie behind the Fourth Gospel and account for
+its name. They do not find traces of Montanism or of paschal
+controversies. But the main contention stands. The Fourth Gospel
+represents the beginning of elaborate reflexion upon the life and
+work of Jesus. It is what it is because of the fusion of the
+ethical and spiritual content of <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page122" id="page122"></a>{122}</span> the revelation in the
+personality of Jesus, with metaphysical abstractions and
+philosophical interpretation.</p>
+<p>Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he
+offered of the problem which the synoptic Gospels present. His
+opinions are of no interest except as showing that he too worked
+diligently upon a question which for a long time seemed only to
+grow in complexity and which has busied scholars practically from
+Baur's day to our own. His zeal here also to discover dogmatic
+purposes led him astray. The <i>Tendenzkritik</i> had its own
+tendencies. The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness. Baur
+had the kind of ear which hears grass grow. There is much
+overstrained acumen. Many radically false conclusions are reached
+by prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the
+last analysis is that of Hegel. Everything is to be explained on
+the principle of antithesis. Again, the assumption of conscious
+purpose in everything which men do or write is a grave
+exaggeration. It is often in contradiction of that wonderful
+unconsciousness with which men and institutions move to the
+fulfilment of a purpose for the good, the purpose of God, into
+which their own life is grandly taken up. To make each phase of
+such a movement the contribution of some one man's scheme or
+endeavour is, as was once said, to make God act like a
+professor.</p>
+<hr />
+<p>The method of this book is that it seeks to deal only with men
+who have inaugurated movements, or marked some turning-point in
+their course which has proved of more than usual significance. The
+compass of the book demands such a limitation. But by this method
+whole chapters in the life of learning are passed over, in which
+the substance of achievement has been the carrying out of a plan of
+which we have been able to note only the inception. There is a
+sense in which the carrying out of a plan is both more difficult
+and more worthy than the mere setting it in motion. When one thinks
+of the labour and patience which have been expended, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page123" id="page123"></a>{123}</span> for
+example, upon the problem of the Gospels in the past seventy years,
+those truths come home to us. When one reminds himself of the
+hypotheses which have been made but to be abandoned, which have yet
+had the value that they at least indicated the area within which
+solutions do not lie,&mdash;when one thinks of the wellnigh
+immeasurable toil by which we have been led to large results which
+now seem secure, one is made to realise that the conditions of the
+advance of science are, for theologians, not different from those
+which obtain for scholars who, in any other field, would establish
+truth and lead men. In a general way, however, it may be said that
+the course of opinion in these two generations, in reference to
+such questions as those of the dates and authorship of the New
+Testament writings, has been one of rather noteworthy retrogression
+from many of the T&uuml;bingen positions. Harnack's <i>Geschichte
+der altchristlichen Literatur</i>, 1893, and his <i>Chronologie der
+altchristlichen Literatur</i>, 1897, present a marked contrast to
+Baur's scheme.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap4-4" id="chap4-4">THE CANON</a></h3>
+<p>The minds of New Testament scholars in the last generation have
+been engaged with a question which, in its full significance, was
+hardly present to the attention of Baur's school. It is the
+question of the New Testament as a whole. It is the question as to
+the time and manner and motives of the gathering together of the
+separate writings into a canon of Scripture which, despite the
+diversity of its elements, exerted its influence as a unit and to
+which an authority was ascribed, which the particular writings
+cannot originally have had. When and how did the Christians come to
+have a sacred book which they placed on an equality with the Old
+Testament, which last they had taken over from the synagogue? How
+did they choose the writings which were to belong to this new
+collection? Why did they reject books which we know were read for
+edification in the early churches? Deeper even than the question of
+the growth of the collection is that of the growth of the
+apprehension concerning it. This apprehension <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page124" id="page124"></a>{124}</span> of these
+twenty-seven different writings as constituting the sole document
+of Christian revelation, given by the Holy Spirit, the identical
+holy book of the Christian Church, gave to the book a significance
+altogether different from that which its constituent elements must
+have had for men to whom they had appeared as but the natural
+literary deposit of the religious movement of the apostolic age.
+This apprehension took possession of the mind of the Christian
+community. It was made the subject of deliverances by councils of
+the Church. How did this great transformation take place? Was it an
+isolated achievement, or was it part of a general movement? Did not
+this development of life in the Christian communities which gave
+them a New Testament belong to an evolution which gave them also
+the so-called Apostles' Creed and a monarchical organisation of the
+Church and the beginnings of a ritual of worship?</p>
+<p>It is clear that we have here a question of greatest moment.
+With the rise of this idea of the canon, with the assigning to this
+body of literature the character of Scripture, we have the
+beginning of the larger mastery which the New Testament has exerted
+over the minds and life of men. Compared with this question,
+investigations as to the authorship and as to the time, place and
+circumstance of the production of particular books, came, for the
+time, to occupy a secondary rank. As they have emerged again, they
+wear a new aspect and are approached in a different spirit. The
+writings are revealed as belonging to a far larger context, that of
+the whole body of the Christian literature of the age. It in no way
+follows from that which we have said that the body of documents,
+which ultimately found themselves together in the New Testament,
+have not a unity other than the outward one which was by consensus
+of opinion or conciliar decree imposed upon them. They do
+represent, in the large and in varying degrees, an inward and
+spiritual unity. There was an inspiration of the main body of these
+writings, the outward condition of which, at all events, was the
+nearness of their writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the
+consequence of which was the unique relation which the more
+important <span class="pagenum"><a name="page125" id=
+"page125"></a>{125}</span> of these documents historically bore to
+the formation of the Christian Church. There was a heaven which lay
+about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly faded into the
+common light of day. That heaven was the spirit of the Master
+himself. The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the
+first pure illumination of that spirit. But the churchmen who made
+the canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave
+mistaken reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless
+were right. They gave what they considered sound external reasons.
+They alleged apostolic authorship. They should have been content
+with internal evidence and spiritual effectiveness. The apostles
+had come, in the mind of the early Church, to occupy a place of
+unique distinction. Writings long enshrined in affection for their
+potent influence, but whose origin had not been much considered,
+were now assigned to apostles, that they might have authority and
+distinction. The theory of the canon came after the fact. The
+theory was often wrong. The canon had been, in the main and in its
+inward principle, soundly constituted. Modern critics reversed the
+process. They began where the Church Fathers left off. They tore
+down first that which had been last built up. Modern criticism,
+too, passed through a period in which points like those of
+authorship and date of Gospels and Epistles seemed the only ones to
+be considered. The results being here often negative, complete
+disintegration of the canon seemed threatened, through discovery of
+errors in the processes by which the canon had been outwardly built
+up. Men realise now that that was a mistake.</p>
+<p>Two things have been gained in this discussion. There is first
+the recognition that the canon is a growth. The holy book and the
+conception of its holiness, as well, were evolved. Christianity was
+not primarily a book-religion save in the sense that almost all
+Christians revered the Old Testament. Other writings than those
+which we esteem canonical were long used in churches. Some of those
+afterward canonical were not used in all the churches. In similar
+fashion we have learned that identical statements of faith were not
+current <span class="pagenum"><a name="page126" id=
+"page126"></a>{126}</span> in the earliest churches. Nor was there
+one uniform system of organisation and government. There was a time
+concerning which we cannot accurately use the word Church. There
+were churches, very simple, worshipping communities. But the
+Church, as outward magnitude, as triumphant organisation, grew. So
+there were many creeds or, at least, informally accredited and
+current beginnings of doctrine. By and by there was a formally
+accepted creed. So there were first dearly loved memorials of Jesus
+and letters of apostolic men. Only by and by was there a New
+Testament. The first gain is the recognition of this state of
+things. The second follows. It is the recognition that, despite a
+sense in which this literature is unique, there is also a sense in
+which it is but a part of the whole body of early Christian
+literature. From the exact and exhaustive study of the early
+Christian literature as a whole, we are to expect a clearer
+understanding and a juster estimate of the canonical part of it. It
+is not easy to say to whom we have to ascribe the discovery and
+elaboration of these truths. The historians of dogma have done much
+for this body of opinion. The historians of Christian literature
+have perhaps done more. Students of institutions and of the canon
+law have had their share. Baur had more than an inkling of the true
+state of things. But by far the most conspicuous teacher of our
+generation, in two at least of these particular fields, has been
+Harnack. In his lifelong labour upon the sources of Christian
+history, he had come upon this question of the canon again and
+again. In his <i>Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte</i>, 1887-1890, 4te.
+Aufl., 1910, the view of the canon, which was given above, is
+absolutely fundamental. In his <i>Geschichte der altchristlichen
+Literatur bis Eusebius</i>, 1893, and <i>Chronologic der
+allchristlichen Literatur</i>, 1897-1904, the evidence is offered
+in rich detail. It was in his tractate, <i>Das Neue Testament um
+das Jahr</i> 200, 1889, that he contended for the later date
+against Zahn, who had urged that the outline of the New Testament
+was established and the conception of it as Scripture present, by
+the end of the first century. Harnack argues that the decision
+practically shaped itself between the time of Justin Martyr,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page127" id=
+"page127"></a>{127}</span> c. A.D. 150, and that of Iren&aelig;us,
+c. A.D. 180. The studies of the last twenty years have more and
+more confirmed this view.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap4-5" id="chap4-5">LIFE OF JESUS</a></h3>
+<p>We said that the work of Strauss revealed nothing so clearly as
+the ignorance of his time concerning the documents of the early
+Christian movement. The labours of Baur and of his followers were
+directed toward overcoming this difficulty. Suddenly the public
+interest was stirred, and the earlier excitement recalled by the
+publication of a new life of Jesus. The author was a Frenchman,
+Ernest Renan, at one time a candidate for the priesthood in the
+Roman Church. He was a man of learning and literary skill, who made
+his <i>Vie de J&eacute;sus</i>, which appeared in 1863, the
+starting-point for a series of historical works under the general
+title, <i>Les Origines de Christianisme</i>. In the next year
+appeared Strauss' popular work, <i>Leben Jesu f&uuml;r das deutsche
+Volk</i>. In 1864 was published also Weizs&auml;cker's contribution
+to the life of Christ, his <i>Untersuchungen &uuml;ber die
+evangelische Geschichte</i>. To the same year belonged Schenkel's
+<i>Charakterbild Jesu</i>. In the years from 1867-1872 appeared
+Keim's <i>Geschichte Jesu von Nazara</i>. There is something very
+striking in this recurrence to the topic. After ail, this was the
+point for the sake of which those laborious investigations had been
+undertaken. This was and is the theme of undying religious
+interest, the character and career of the Nazarene. Renan's
+philosophical studies had been mainly in English, studies of Locke
+and Hume. But Herder also had been his beloved guide. For his
+biblical and oriental studies he had turned almost exclusively to
+the Germans. There is a deep religious spirit in the work of the
+period of his conflict with the Church. The enthusiasm for Christ
+sustained him in his struggle. Of the days before he withdrew from
+the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant like a
+professor in Halle or T&uuml;bingen.' French was at that time a
+language much better known in the world at large, particularly the
+English-speaking world, than was German. Renan's book had great art
+and charm. It <span class="pagenum"><a name="page128" id=
+"page128"></a>{128}</span> took a place almost at once as a bit of
+world-literature. The number of editions in French and of
+translations into other languages is amazing. Beyond question, the
+critical position was made known through Renan to multitudes who
+would never have been reached by the German works which were really
+Renan's authorities. It is idle to say with Pfleiderer that it is a
+pity that, having possessed so much learning, Renan had not
+possessed more. That is not quite the point. The book has much
+breadth and solidity of learning. Yet Renan has scarcely the
+historian's quality. His work is a work of art. It has the halo of
+romance. Imagination and poetical feeling make it in a measure what
+it is.</p>
+<p>Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany. He set out for
+the priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages
+and history. He made long sojourn in the East. He spoke of
+Palestine as having been to him a fifth Gospel. He became Professor
+of Hebrew in the <i>College de France</i>. He was suspended from
+his office in 1863, and permitted to read again only in 1871. He
+had formally separated himself from the Roman Church in 1845. He
+was a member of the Academy. His diction is unsurpassed. He died in
+1894. In his own phrase, he sought to bring Jesus forth from the
+darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people. He
+paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then as a
+struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but
+doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality
+to his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who
+never was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before
+our eyes. He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the
+deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some
+respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us
+history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist's
+intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to
+ourselves of a personality, better than the scant records
+acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.</p>
+<p>Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate. This
+was the fact which, by all these biographies <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page129" id="page129"></a>{129}</span> of Jesus,
+was brought home to men's minds. Keim's book, the most learned of
+those mentioned, is hardly more than a vast collection of material
+for the history of Jesus' age, which has now been largely
+superseded by Sch&uuml;rer's <i>Geschichte des Judischen Volkes im
+Zeitalier Jesu Christi</i>, 2 Bde., 1886-1890. There have been
+again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the
+great problem. Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the
+eighties lives of Jesus which, especially the former, are
+noteworthy in their treatment of the critical material. They do not
+for a moment face the question of the person of Christ. The same
+remark might be made, almost without exception, as to those lives
+of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in England and America. The
+best books of recent years are Albert Reville's <i>Jesus de
+Nazareth</i>, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's <i>Leben Jesu</i>, 1901.
+So great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are
+they urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic
+recognition of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here
+rendered, in a calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling
+of his theme. Meantime new questions have arisen, questions of the
+relation of Jesus to Messianism, like those touched upon by Wrede
+in his <i>Das Messias Geheimniss in den Evangelien</i>, 1901, and
+questions as to the eschatological trait in Jesus' own teaching.
+Schweitzer's book, <i>Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der
+Leben Jesu-Forschung</i>, 1906, not merely sets forth this deeply
+interesting chapter in the history of the thought of modern men,
+but has also serious interpretative value in itself. For English
+readers Sanday's <i>Life of Christ in Recent Research</i>, 1907,
+follows the descriptive aspect, at least, of the same purpose with
+Schweitzer's book, covering, however, only the last twenty
+years.</p>
+<p>It is characteristic that Ritschl, notwithstanding his emphasis
+upon the historical Jesus, asserted the impossibility of a
+biography of Jesus. The understanding of Jesus is through faith.
+For Wrede, on the other hand, such a biography is impossible
+because of the nature of our sources. Not alone are they scant, but
+they are not biographical. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page130"
+id="page130"></a>{130}</span> They are apologetic, propagandist,
+interested in everything except those problems which a biographer
+must raise. The last few years have even conjured up the question
+whether Jesus ever lived. One may say with all simplicity, that the
+question has, of course, as much rightfulness as has any other
+question any man could raise. The somewhat extended discussion has,
+however, done nothing to make evident how it could arise, save in
+minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in historical
+research. The conditions which beset us when we ask for a biography
+of Jesus that shall answer scientific requirement are not
+essentially different from those which meet us in the case of any
+other personage equally remote in point of time, and equally woven
+about&mdash;if any such have been&mdash;by the love and devotion of
+men. Bousset's little book, <i>Was Wissen wir von Jesus?</i> 1904,
+convinces a quiet mind that we know a good deal. Qualities in the
+personality of Jesus obviously worked in transcendent measure to
+call out devotion. No understanding of history is adequate which
+has no place for the unfathomed in personality. Exactly because we
+ourselves share this devotion, we could earnestly wish that the
+situation as to the biography of Jesus were other than it is.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap4-6" id="chap4-6">THE OLD TESTAMENT</a></h3>
+<p>We have spoken thus far as if the whole biblical-critical
+problem had been that of the New Testament. In reality the same
+impulses which had opened up that question to the minds of men had
+set them working upon the problem of the Old Testament as well. We
+have seen how the Christians made for themselves a canon of the New
+Testament. By the force of that conception of the canon, and
+through the belief that, almost in a literal sense, God was the
+author of the whole book, the obvious differences among the
+writings had been obscured. Men forgot the evolution through which
+the writings had passed. The same thing had happened for the Old
+Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the rabbis before the
+Christian movement. When the Christians took <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page131" id="page131"></a>{131}</span> over the
+Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book
+wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of
+Israel had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation
+of the old covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament
+became a Christian book. Not merely were the Christian facts
+prophesied in the Old Testament, but its doctrines also were
+implied. Almost down to modern times texts have been drawn
+indifferently from either Testament to prove doctrine and sustain
+theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are cited to support
+an argument, without any sense of difference. What we have said is
+hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic Puritan
+divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.</p>
+<p>The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points
+of the one which we have described in reference to the New. Of
+course, elder scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to
+the Mosaic authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman
+Catholic scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the
+stringent theory of inspiration had less significance than for
+Protestants, had set forth views which showed an awakening to the
+real condition. Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no
+one would have forecast a revolution in opinion which would
+recognise the legendary quality of considerable portions of the
+Pentateuch and historical books, which would leave but little that
+is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which would place the prophets
+before the law, which would concede the growth of the Jewish canon,
+which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the religions of
+the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the true
+relation of Judaism to Christianity.</p>
+<p>In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss' <i>Leben
+Jesu</i> saw the light, Wilhelm Vatke published his <i>Religion des
+Alten Testaments</i>. Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in
+Berlin in 1830, was professor extraordinarius there in 1837 and
+died in 1882, not yet holding a full professorship. His book was
+obscurely written and scholastic. Public attention was largely
+occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page132" id="page132"></a>{132}</span> had
+caused. Reuss in Strassburg was working on the same lines, but
+published the main body of his results much later.</p>
+<p>The truth for which these scholars and others like them argued,
+worked its way slowly by force of its own merit. Perhaps it was due
+to this fact that the development of Old Testament critical views
+was subject to a fluctuation less marked than that which
+characterised the case of the New Testament. It is not necessary to
+describe the earlier stages of the discussion in Vatke's own terms.
+To his honour be it said that the views which he thus early
+enunciated were in no small degree identical with those which were
+in masterful fashion substantiated in Holland by Kuenen about 1870,
+in Germany by Wellhausen after 1878, and made known to English
+readers by Robertson Smith In 1881.</p>
+<p>Budde has shown in his <i>Kanon des Alten Testaments</i>, 1900,
+that the Old Testament which lies before us finished and complete,
+assumed its present form only as the result of the growth of
+several centuries. At the beginning of this process of the
+canonisation stands that strange event, the sudden appearance of a
+holy book of the law under King Josiah, in 621 B.C. The end of the
+process, through the decisions of the scribes, falls after the
+destruction of Jerusalem, possibly even in the second century.
+Lagarde seems to have proved that the rabbis of the second century
+succeeded in destroying all copies of the Scripture which differed
+from the standard then set up. This state of things has enormously
+increased a difficulty which was already great enough, that of the
+detection and separation of the various elements of which many of
+the books in this ancient literature are made up. Certain books of
+the New Testament also present the problem of the discrimination of
+elements of different ages, which have been wrought together into
+the documents as we now have them, in a way that almost defies our
+skill to disengage. The synoptic Gospels are, of course, the great
+example. The book of the Acts presents a problem of the same kind.
+But the Pentateuch, or rather Hexateuch, the historical books in
+less degree, the writings even of some of the prophets, the codes
+which formulate the law and ritual, are composites <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page133" id="page133"></a>{133}</span> which
+have been whole centuries in the making and remaking. There was no
+such thing as right of authorship in ancient Israel, little of it
+in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popular or
+priestly property. Histories were newly narrated, laws enlarged and
+rearranged, prophecies attributed to conspicuous persons. All this
+took place not in deliberate intention to pervert historic truth,
+but because there was no interest in historic truth and no
+conception of it. The rewriting of a nation's history from the
+point of view of its priesthood bore, to the ancient Israelite,
+beyond question, an aspect altogether different from that which the
+same transaction would bear to us. The difficulty of the separation
+of these materials, great in any case, is enhanced by the fact
+alluded to, that we have none but internal evidence. The success of
+the achievement, and the unanimity attained with reference to the
+most significant questions, is one of the marvels of the life of
+learning of our age.</p>
+<p>In the Jewish tradition it had been assumed that the Mosaic law
+was written down in the wilderness. Then, in the times of the
+Judges and of the Kings, the historical books took shape, with
+David's Psalms and the wise words of Solomon. At the end of the
+period of the Kings we have the prophetic literature and finally
+Ezra and Nehemiah. De Wette had disputed this order, but Wellhausen
+in his <i>Prolegomena zur Geshichte Israels</i>, 1883, may be said
+to have proved that this view was no longer tenable. Men ask, could
+the law, or even any greater part of it, have been given to nomads
+in the wilderness? Do not all parts of it assume a settled state of
+society and an agricultural life? Do the historical books from
+Judges to the II. Kings know anything about the law? Are the
+practices of worship which they imply consonant with the
+supposition that the law was in force? How is it that that law
+appears both under Josiah and again under Ezra, as something new,
+thus far unknown, and yet as ruling the religious life of the
+people from that day forth? It seems impossible to escape the
+conclusion that only after Josiah's reformation, more completely
+after the restoration under Ezra, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page134" id="page134"></a>{134}</span> did the religion of the law
+exist. The centralisation of worship at one point, such as the book
+of Deuteronomy demands, seems to have been the thing achieved by
+the reform under Josiah. The establishment of the priestly
+hierarchy such as the code ordains was the issue of the religious
+revolution wrought in Ezra's time. To put it differently, the
+so-called <i>Book of the Covenant, the nucleus of the
+law-giving</i>, itself implies the multiplicity of the places of
+worship. Deuteronomy demands the centralisation of the worship as
+something which is yet to take place. The priestly Code declares
+that the limitation of worship to one place was a fact already in
+the time of the journeys of Israel in the wilderness. It is assumed
+that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared the almost universal
+worship of the stars. Moses may indeed have concluded a covenant
+between his people and Jahve, their God, hallowing the judicial and
+moral life of the people, bringing these into relation to the
+divine will. Jahve was a holy God whose will was to guide the
+people coming up out of the degradation of nature-worship. That
+part of the people held to the old nature-worship is evident in the
+time of Elijah. The history of Israel is not that of defection from
+a pure revelation. It is the history of a gradual attainment of
+purer revelation, of enlargement in the application of it, of
+discovery of new principles contained in it. It is the history also
+of the decline of spiritual religion. The zeal of the prophets
+against the ceremonial worship shows that. Their protest reveals at
+that early date the beginning of that antithesis which had become
+so sharp in Jesus' time.</p>
+<p>This determination of the relative positions of law and prophets
+was the first step in the reconstruction of the history, both of
+the nation of Israel and of its literature. At the beginning, as in
+every literature, are songs of war and victory, of praise and
+grief, hymns, even riddles and phrases of magic. Everywhere poetry
+precedes prose. Then come myths relating to the worship and tales
+of the fathers and heroes. Elements of both these sorts are
+embedded in the simple chronicles which began now to be written,
+primitive historical works, such as those of the Jahvist and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page135" id=
+"page135"></a>{135}</span> Elohist, of the narrators of the deeds
+of the judges and of David and of Saul. Perhaps at this point
+belong the earliest attempts at fixing the tradition of family and
+clan rights, and of the regulation of personal conduct, as in the
+Book of the Covenant. Then comes the great outburst of the
+prophetic spirit, the preaching of an age of great religious
+revival. Then follows the law, with its minute regulation of all
+details of life upon which would depend the favour of the God who
+had brought punishment upon the people in the exile. The prophecy
+runs on into apocalyptic like that of the book of Daniel. The
+contact with the outside world makes possible a phase of literature
+such as that to which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The
+deepening of the inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms,
+some of which are credibly assigned to a period so late as that of
+the Maccabees.</p>
+<p>In this which has been said of the literature we have the clue
+also for the reconstruction of the nation's history. The na&iuml;ve
+assumption in the writing of all history had once been that one
+must begin with the beginning. But to Wellhausen, Stade, Eduard
+Meyer and Kittel and Cornill, it has been clear that the history of
+the earliest times is the most uncertain. It is the least adapted
+to furnish a secure point of departure for historical inquiry.
+There exist for it usually no contemporary authorities, or only
+such as are of problematical worth. This earliest period
+constitutes a problem, the solution of which, so far as any
+solution is possible, can be hoped for only through approach from
+the side of ascertained facts. We must start from a period which is
+historically known. For the history of the Hebrews, this is the
+time of the first prophets of whom we have written records, or from
+whom we have written prophecies. We get from these, as also from
+the earliest direct attempts at history writing, only that
+conception of Israel's pre-historic life which was entertained in
+prophetic circles in the eighth century. We learn the heroic
+legends in the interpretation which the prophets put upon them. We
+have still to seek to interpret them for ourselves. We must begin
+in the middle and work both backward and <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page136" id="page136"></a>{136}</span> forward.
+Such a view of the history of Israel affords every opportunity for
+the connecting of the history and religion of Israel with those of
+the other Semite stocks. Some of these have in recent years been
+discovered to offer extraordinary parallels to that which the Old
+Testament relates.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap4-7" id="chap4-7">THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE</a></h3>
+<p>When speaking of Baur's contribution to New Testament criticism,
+we alluded to his historical works. He was in a distinct sense a
+reformer of the method of the writing of church history. To us the
+notions of the historical and of that which is genetic are
+identical. Of course, na&iuml;ve religious chronicles do not meet
+that test. A glance at the histories produced by the age of
+rationalism will show that these also fall short of it. The
+perception of the relativity of institutions like the papacy is
+here wholly wanting. Men and things are brought summarily to the
+bar of the wisdom of the author's year of grace. They are approved
+or condemned by this criterion. For Baur, all things had come to
+pass in the process of the great life of the world. There must have
+been a rationale of their becoming. It is for the historian with
+sympathy and imagination to find out what their inherent reason
+was. One other thing distinguishes Baur as church historian from
+his predecessors. He realised that before one can delineate one
+must investigate. One must go to the sources. One must estimate the
+value of those sources. One must have ground in the sources for
+every judgment. Baur was himself a great investigator. Yet the
+movement for the investigation of the sources of biblical and
+ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has gone on
+to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the
+foundations of Baur's own work as precarious, the results at which
+he arrived as unwarranted. New documents have come to light since
+his day. Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of
+learning as to the literature of the Christian origins has been
+vastly changed. There is still another other thing to say
+concerning Baur. He was a Hegelian. He has the disposition always
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page137" id=
+"page137"></a>{137}</span> to interpret the movements of the
+religious spirit in the sense of philosophical ideas. He frankly
+says that without speculation every historical investigation
+remains but a play upon the surface of things. Baur's fault was
+that in his search for, or rather in his confident discovery of,
+the great connecting forces of history, the biographical element,
+the significance of personality, threatened altogether to
+disappear. The force in the history was the absolute, the immanent
+divine will. The method everywhere was that of advance by contrasts
+and antagonisms. One gets an impression, for example, that the
+Nicene dogma became what it did by the might of the idea, that it
+could not by any possibility have had any other issue.</p>
+<p>The foil to much of this in Baur's own age was represented in
+the work of Neander, a converted Jew, professor of church history
+in Berlin, who exerted great influence upon a generation of English
+and American scholars. He was not an investigator of sources. He
+had no talent for the task. He was a delineator, one of the last of
+the great painters of history, if one may so describe the type. He
+had imagination, sympathy, a devout spirit. His great trait was his
+insight into personality. He wrote history with the biographical
+interest. He almost resolves history into a series of biographical
+types. He has too little sense for the connexion of things, for the
+laws of the evolution of the religious spirit. The great dramatic
+elements tend to disappear behind the emotions of individuals. The
+old delineators were before the age of investigation. Since that
+impulse became masterful, some historians have been completely
+absorbed in the effort to make contribution to this investigation.
+Others, with a sense of the impossibility of mastering the results
+of investigation in all fields, have lost the zeal for the writing
+of church history on a great scale. They have contented themselves
+with producing monographs upon some particular subject, in which,
+at the most, they may hope to embody all that is known as to some
+specific question.</p>
+<p>We spoke above of the new conception of the relation of the
+canonical literature of the New Testament to the extracanonical.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page138" id=
+"page138"></a>{138}</span> We alluded to the new sense of the
+continuity of the history of the apostolic churches with that of
+the Church of the succeeding age. The influence of these ideas has
+been to set all problems here involved in a new light. Until 1886
+it might have been said with truth that we had no good history of
+the apostolic age. In that year Weizs&auml;cker's book, <i>Das
+Apostolische Zeitalter der Christlichen Kirche</i>, admirably
+filled the place. A part of the problem of the historian of the
+apostolic age is difficult for the same reason which was given when
+we were speaking of the biography of Jesus. Our materials are
+inadequate. First with the beginning of the activities of Paul have
+we sources of the first rank. The relation of statements in the
+Pauline letters to data in the book of the Acts was one of the
+earliest problems which the T&uuml;bingen school set itself. An
+attempt to write the biography of Paul reminds us sharply of our
+limitations. We know almost nothing of Paul prior to his
+conversion, or subsequent to the enigmatical breaking off of the
+account of the beginnings of his work at Rome. Harnack's <i>Mission
+und Ausbreitung des Christenthums</i>, 1902 (translated, Moffatt,
+1908), takes up the work of Paul's successors in that cardinal
+activity. It offers, strange as it may seem, the first discussion
+of the dissemination of Christianity which has dealt adequately
+with the sources. It gives also a picture of the world into which
+the Christian movement went. It emphasises anew the truth which has
+for a generation past grown in men's apprehension that there is no
+possibility of understanding Christianity, except against the
+background of the religious life and thought of the world into
+which it came. Christianity had vital relation, at every step of
+its progress, to the religious movements and impulses of the
+ancient world, especially in those centres of civilisation which
+Paul singled out for his endeavour and which remained the centres
+of the Christian growth. It was an age which has often been
+summarily described as corrupt. Despite its corruption, or possibly
+because it was corrupt, it gives evidence, however, of religious
+stirring, of strong ethical reaction, of spiritual endeavour rarely
+paralleled. In the Roman Empire everything travelled. Religions
+travelled. In the centres <span class="pagenum"><a name="page139"
+id="page139"></a>{139}</span> of civilisation there was scarcely a
+faith of mankind which had not its votaries.</p>
+<p>It was an age of religious syncretism, of hospitality to diverse
+religious ideas, of the commingling of those ideas. These things
+facilitated the progress of Christianity. They made certain that if
+the Christian movement had in it the divine vitality which men
+claimed, it would one day conquer the world. Equally, they made
+certain that, as the very condition of this conquest, Christianity
+would be itself transformed. This it is which has happened in the
+evolution of Christianity from its very earliest stages and in all
+phases of its life. Of any given rite, opinion or institution, of
+the many which have passed for almost two millenniums unchallenged
+under the Christian name, men about us are now asking: But how much
+of it is Christian? In what measure have we to think of it as
+derived from some other source, and representing the accommodation
+and assimilation of Christianity to its environment in process of
+its work? What is Christianity? Not unnaturally the ancient Church
+looked with satisfaction upon the great change which passed over
+Christianity when Constantine suddenly made that which had been the
+faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the religion of the world.
+The Fathers can have thought thus only because their minds rested
+upon that which was outward and spectacular. Not unnaturally the
+metamorphosis in the inward nature of Christianity which had taken
+place a century and a quarter earlier was hidden from their eyes.
+In truth, by that earlier and subtler transformation Christianity
+had passed permanently beyond the stage in which it had been
+preponderantly a moral and spiritual enthusiasm, with its centre
+and authority in the person of Jesus. It became a system and an
+institution, with a canon of New Testament Scripture, a monarchical
+organisation and a rule of faith which was formulated in the
+Apostles' Creed.</p>
+<p>To Baur the truth as to the conflict of Paul with the Judaisers
+had meant much. He thought, therefore, with reference to the rise
+of priesthood and ritual among the Christians, to the emphasis on
+Scripture in the fashion of the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page140" id="page140"></a>{140}</span> scribes, to the insistence
+upon rules and dogmas after the manner of the Pharisees, that they
+were but the evidence of the decline and defeat of Paul's free
+spirit and of the resurgence of Judaism in Christianity. He sought
+to explain the rise of the episcopal organisation by the example of
+the synagogue. Ritschl in his <i>Entstehung der alt-catholischen
+Kirche</i>, 1857, had seen that Baur's theory could not be true.
+Christianity did not fall back into Judaism. It went forward to
+embrace the Hellenic and Roman world. The institutions, dogmas,
+practices of that which, after A.D. 200, may with propriety be
+called the Catholic Church, are the fruit of that embrace. There
+was here a falling off from primitive and spiritual Christianity.
+But it was not a falling back into Judaism. There were priests and
+scribes and Pharisees with other names elsewhere. The phenomenon of
+the waning of the original enthusiasm of a period of religious
+revelation has been a frequent one. Christianity on a grand scale
+illustrated this phenomenon anew. Harnack has elaborated this
+thesis with unexampled brilliancy and power. He has supported it
+with a learning in which he has no rival and with a religious
+interest which not even hostile critics would deny. The phrase,
+'the Hellenisation of Christianity,' might almost be taken as the
+motto of the work to which he owes his fame.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap4-8" id="chap4-8">HARNACK</a></h3>
+<p>Adolf Harnack was born in 1851 in Dorpat, in one of the Baltic
+provinces of Russia. His father, Theodosius Harnack, was professor
+of pastoral theology in the University of Dorpat. Harnack studied
+in Leipzig and began to teach there in 1874. He was called to the
+chair of church history in Giessen in 1879. In 1886 he removed to
+Marburg and in 1889 to Berlin. Harnack's earlier published work was
+almost entirely in the field of the study of the sources and
+materials of early church history. His first book, published in
+1873, was an inquiry as to the sources for the history of
+Gnosticism. His <i>Patrum Apostolicorum Opera</i>, 1876, prepared
+by him jointly with <span class="pagenum"><a name="page141" id=
+"page141"></a>{141}</span> von Gehhardt and Zahn, was in a way only
+a forecast of the great collection, <i>Texte und Untersuchungen zur
+Geschickte der alt-christlichen Literatur</i>, begun in 1882, upon
+which numbers of scholars have worked together with him. The
+collection has already more than thirty-five volumes. In his own
+two works, <i>Die Geschichte der alt-christlichen Literatur bis
+Eusebius</i>, 1893, and <i>Die Chronologie der alt-christlichen
+Literatur bis Eusebius</i>, 1897, are deposited the results of his
+reflexion on the mass of this material. His <i>Beitrage zur
+Einleitung in das Neue Testament</i>, 1906, etc., should not be
+overlooked. He has had the good fortune to be among those who have
+discovered manuscripts of importance. He has had to do with the
+Prussian Academy's edition of the Greek Fathers. A list of his
+published works, which was prepared in connexion with the
+celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 1911, bears witness to his
+amazing diligence and fertility. He was for thirty-five years
+associated with Schurer in the publication of the <i>Theologische
+Literaturzeitung</i>. He has filled important posts in the Church
+and under the government. To this must be added an activity as a
+teacher which has placed a whole generation of students from every
+portion of the world under undying obligation. One speaks with
+reserve of the living, but surely no man of our generation has done
+more to make the history of which we write.</p>
+<p>Harnack's epoch-making work was his <i>Lehrbuch der
+Dogmengeschichte</i>, 1886-88, fourth edition, 1910. The book met,
+almost from the moment of its appearance, with the realisation of
+the magnitude of that which had been achieved. It rested upon a
+fresh and independent study of the sources. It departed from the
+mechanism which had made the old treatises upon the history of
+doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to the full how many
+influences other than theological had had part in the development
+of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and
+practice, and of external circumstances on the history of thought.
+His history of doctrine has thus a breadth and human quality never
+before attained. Philosophy, worship, morals, the development of
+Church government and of the canon, the common <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page142" id="page142"></a>{142}</span> interests
+and passions of the age and those of the individual participants,
+are all made tributary to his delineation.</p>
+<p>Harnack cannot share Baur's view that the triumph of the
+Logos-Christology at Nic&aelig;a and Chalcedon was inevitable. A
+certain historic naturalness of the movement he would concede, the
+world on which Christianity entered being what it was. He is aware,
+however, that many elements other than Christian have entered into
+the development. He has phrased his apprehension thus. That
+Hellenisation of Christianity which Gnosticism represented, and
+against which, in this, its acute form, the Church contended was,
+after all, the same thing which, by slower process and more
+unconsciously, befell the Church itself. That pure moral enthusiasm
+and inspiration which had been the gist of the Christian movement,
+in its endeavour to appropriate the world, had been appropriated by
+the world in far greater measure than its adherents knew. It had
+taken up its mission to change the world. It had dreamed that while
+changing the world it had itself remained unchanged. The world was
+changed, the world of life, of feeling and of thought. But
+Christianity was also changed. It had conquered the world. It had
+no perception of the fact that it illustrated the old law that the
+conquered give laws to the conquerors. It had fused the ancient
+culture with the flame of its inspiration. It did not appreciate
+the degree in which the elements of that ancient culture now
+coloured its far-shining flame. It had been a maker of history.
+Meantime it had been unmade and remade by its own history. It
+confidently carried back its canon, dogma, organisation, to Christ
+and the apostles. It did not realise that the very fact that it
+could find these things natural and declare them ancient, proved
+with conclusiveness that it had itself departed from the standard
+of Christ and the apostles. It esteemed that these were its
+defences against the world. It little dreamed that they were, by
+their very existence, the evidence of the fact that the Church had
+not defended itself against the world. Its dogma was the
+Hellenisation of its thought. Its organisation was the Romanising
+of its life. Its canon and ritual were the externalising, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page143" id=
+"page143"></a>{143}</span> conventionalising of its spirit and
+enthusiasm. These are positive and constructive statements of
+Harnack's main position.</p>
+<p>When, however, they are turned about and stated negatively,
+these statements all convey, more or less, the impression that the
+advance of Christianity had been its destruction, and the evolution
+of dogma had been a defection from Christ. This is the aspect of
+the contention which gave hostile critics opportunity to say that
+we have before us the history of the loss of Christianity. Harnack
+himself has many sentences which superficially will bear that
+construction. Hatch had said in his brilliant book, <i>The
+Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church</i>,
+1891, that the domestication of Greek philosophy in the Church
+signified a defection from the Sermon on the Mount. The centre of
+gravity of the Gospel was changed from life to doctrine, from
+morals to metaphysics, from goodness to orthodoxy. The change was
+portentous. The aspect of pessimism is, however, removed when one
+recognises the inevitableness of some such process, if Christianity
+was ever to wield an influence in the world at all. Again, one must
+consider that the process of the recovery of pure Christianity must
+begin at exactly this point, namely, with the recognition of how
+much in current Christianity is extraneous. It must begin with the
+sloughing off of these extraneous elements, with the recovery of
+the sense for that which original Christianity was. Such a recovery
+would be the setting free again of the power of the religion
+itself.</p>
+<p>The constant touchstone and point of reference for every stage
+of the history of the Church must be the gospel of Jesus. But what
+was the gospel of Jesus? In what way did the very earliest
+Christians apprehend that gospel? This question is far more
+difficult for us to answer than it was for those to whom the New
+Testament was a closed body of literature, externally
+differentiated from all other, and with a miraculous inspiration
+extending uniformly to every phrase in any book. These men would
+have said that they had but to find the proper combination of the
+sacred phrases. But we acknowledge <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page144" id="page144"></a>{144}</span> that the central
+inspiration was the personality of Jesus. The books possess this
+inspiration in varying degree. Certain of the books have distinctly
+begun the fusion of Christian with other elements. They themselves
+represent the first stages of the history of doctrine. We
+acknowledge that those utterances of Jesus which have been
+preserved for us, shaped themselves by the antitheses in which
+Jesus stood. There is much about them that is palpably incidental,
+practically relevant and unquestionably only relative. In a large
+sense, much of the meaning of the gospel has to be gathered out of
+the evidence of the operation of its spirit in subsequent ages of
+the Christian Church, and from remoter aspects of the influence of
+Jesus on the world. Thus the very conception of the gospel of Jesus
+becomes inevitably more or less subjective. It becomes an ideal
+construction. The identification of this ideal with the original
+gospel proclamation becomes precarious. We seem to move in a
+circle. We derive the ideal from the history, and then judge the
+history by the ideal.</p>
+<p>Is there any escape from this situation, short of the return to
+the authority of Church or Scripture in the ancient sense?
+Furthermore, even the men to whom the gospel was in the strictest
+sense a letter, identified the gospel with their own private
+interpretation of this letter. Certainly the followers of Ritschl
+who will acknowledge no traits of the gospel save those of which
+they find direct witness in the Gospels, thus ignore that the
+Gospels are themselves interpretations. This undue stress upon the
+documents which we are fortunate enough to possess, makes us forget
+the limitations of these documents. We tend thus to exaggerate that
+which must be only incidental, as, for example, the Jewish element,
+in the teaching of Jesus. We thus underrate phases of Jesus'
+teaching which, no doubt, a man like Paul would have apprehended
+better than did the evangelists themselves. In truth, in Harnack's
+own delineation of the teaching of Jesus, those elements of it
+which found their way to expression in Paul, or again in the fourth
+Gospel, are rather underrated than overstated, in the author's
+anxiety to exclude elements which are acknowledged to be
+interpretative in their nature. We are <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page145" id="page145"></a>{145}</span> driven,
+in some measure, to seek to find out what the gospel was from the
+way in which the earliest Christians took it up. We return ever
+afresh to questions nearly unanswerable from the materials at hand.
+What was the central principle in the shaping of the earliest
+stages of the new community, both as to its thought and life? Was
+it the longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the striving
+after the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it the
+faith of the Messiah, the reverence for the Messiah, directed to
+the person of Jesus? What word dominated the preaching? Was it that
+the Kingdom of God was near, that the Son of Man would come? Or was
+it that in Jesus Messiah has come? What was the demand upon the
+hearer? Was it, Repent, or was it, Believe on the Lord Jesus, or
+was it both, and which had the greater emphasis? Was the name of
+Jesus used in the formulas of worship before the time of Paul? What
+do we know about prayer in the name of Jesus, or baptism in that
+name, or miracles in the name of Jesus, or of the Lord's Supper and
+the conception of the Lord as present with his disciples in the
+rite? Was this revering of Jesus, which was fast moving toward a
+worship of him, the inner motive force of the whole construction of
+the dogma of his person and of the trinity?</p>
+<p>In the second volume Harnack treats of the development primarily
+of the Christological and trinitarian dogma, from the fourth to the
+seventh centuries. The dramatic interest of the narrative exceeds
+anything which has been written on this theme. A debate which to
+most modern men is remote and abstruse almost to the point of
+unintelligibility, and of which many of the external aspects are
+disheartening in the extreme, is here brought before us in
+something of the reasonableness which it must have had for those
+who took part in it. Tertullian shaped the problem and established
+the nomenclature for the Christological solution which the Orient
+two hundred years later made its own. It was he who, from the point
+of view of the Jurist, rather than of the philosopher, gave the
+words 'person' and 'substance,' which continually occur in this
+discussion, the meaning which in the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page146" id="page146"></a>{146}</span> Nicene Creed they bear.
+Most brilliant is Harnack's characterisation of Arius and
+Athanasius. In Arius the notion of the Son of God is altogether
+done away. Only the name remains. The victory of Arianism would
+have resolved Christianity into cosmology and formal ethics. It
+would have destroyed it as religion. Yet the perverse situation
+into which the long and fierce controversy had drifted cannot be
+better illustrated than by one undisputed fact. Athanasius, who
+assured for Christianity its character as a religion of the living
+communion of God with man, is yet the theologian in whose
+Christology almost every possible trace of the recollection of the
+historic Jesus has disappeared. The purpose of the redemption is to
+bring men into community of life with God. But Athanasius
+apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and from
+above, of a divine nature. He subordinated everything to this idea.
+The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation
+that the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was
+the possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His
+incarnation, his manifestation in real human life, held fast to in
+word, is reduced to a mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical
+process, but a miraculous endowment. The Christ, who was God, lifts
+men up to godhood. They become God. These phrases are of course
+capable of ethical and intelligible meaning. The development of the
+doctrine, however, threw the emphasis upon the metaphysical and
+miraculous aspects of the work. It gloried in the fact that the
+presence of divine and human, two natures in one person forever,
+was unintelligible. In the end it came to pass that the
+enthusiastic assent to that which defied explanation became the
+very mark of a humble and submissive faith. One reads the so-called
+Athanasian Creed, and hears the ring of its determination to exact
+assent. It had long since been clear to these Catholics and
+churchmen that, with the mere authority of Scripture, it was not
+possible to defend Christianity against the heretics. The heresies
+read their heresies out of the Bible. The orthodox read orthodoxy
+from the same page. Marcion had proved that, in the very days when
+the canon <span class="pagenum"><a name="page147" id=
+"page147"></a>{147}</span> took its shape. There must be an
+authority to define the interpretation of the Scripture. Those who
+would share the benefits which the Church dispensed must assent
+unconditionally to the terms of membership.</p>
+<p>All these questions were veiled for the early Christians behind
+the question of the kind of Christ in whom their hearts believed.
+With all that we have said about the reprehensible admixture of the
+metaphysical element in the dogma, with all the accusation which we
+bring concerning acute or gradual Hellenisation, secularisation and
+defection from the Christ, we ought not to hide from ourselves that
+in this gigantic struggle there were real religious interests at
+stake, and that for the men of both parties. Dimly, or perhaps
+vividly, the man of either party felt that the conception of the
+Christ which he was fighting for was congruous with the conception
+of religion which he had, or felt that he must have. It is this
+religious issue, everywhere present, which gives dignity to a
+struggle which otherwise does often sadly lack it. There are two
+religious views of the person of Christ which have stood, from the
+beginning, the one over against the other.<a id="footnotetag5"
+name="footnotetag5"></a><a href="#footnote5"><sup>5</sup></a> The
+one saw in Jesus of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special
+calling as the Messianic King, endued with special powers, lifted
+above all men ever known, yet a man, completely subject to God in
+faith, obedience and prayer. This view is surely sustained by many
+of Jesus' own words and deeds. It shines through the testimony of
+the men who followed him. Even the belief in his resurrection and
+his second coming did not altogether do away with it. The other
+view saw in him a new God who, descending from God, brought
+mysterious powers for the redemption of mankind into the world, and
+after short obscuring of his glory, returned to the abode of God,
+where he had been before. From this belief come all the hymns and
+prayers to Jesus as to God, all miracles and exorcisms in his
+name.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote5" name=
+"footnote5"></a><b>Footnote 5:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag5">(return)</a>
+<p>Wernle, <i>Einfzhrung in das Theologische Studium</i>, 1908, v.
+204.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In the long run, the simpler view did not maintain itself. If
+false gods and demons were expelled, it was the God <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page148" id="page148"></a>{148}</span> Jesus who
+expelled them. The more modest faith believed that in the man
+Jesus, being such an one as he was, men had received the greatest
+gift which the love of God had to bestow. In turn the believer felt
+the assurance that he also was a child of God, and in the spirit of
+Jesus was to realise that sonship. Syncretist religions suggested
+other thoughts. We see that already even in the synoptic tradition
+the calling upon the name of Jesus had found place. One wonders
+whether that first apprehension ever stood alone in its purity. The
+Gentile Churches founded by Paul, at all events, had no such simple
+trust. Equally, the second form of faith seems never to have been
+able to stand alone in its peculiar quality. Some of the gnostic
+sects had it. Marcion again is our example. The new God Jesus had
+nothing to do with the cruel God of the Old Testament. He
+supplanted the old God and became the only God. In the Church the
+new God, come down from heaven, must be set in relation with the
+long-known God of Israel. No less, must he stand in relation to the
+simple hero of the Gospels with his human traits. The problem of
+theological reflexion was to find the right middle course, to keep
+the divine Christ in harmony, on the one side, with monotheism, and
+on the other, with the picture which the Gospels gave. Belief knew
+nothing of these contradictions. The same simple soul thanked God
+for Jesus with his sorrows and his sympathy, as man's guide and
+helper, and again prayed to Jesus because he seemed too wonderful
+to be a man. The same kind of faith achieves the same wondering and
+touching combination to-day, after two thousand years. With thought
+comes trouble. Reflexion wears itself out upon the insoluble
+difficulty, the impossible combination, the flat contradiction,
+which the two views present, so soon as they are clearly seen.</p>
+<p>In the earliest Christian writings the fruit of this reflexion
+lies before us in this form:&mdash;The Creator of worlds, the
+mediator, the lord of angels and demons, the Logos which was God
+and is our Saviour, was yet a humble son of man, undergoing
+suffering and death, having laid aside his divine glory. This
+picture is made with materials which the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page149" id="page149"></a>{149}</span> canonical
+writings themselves afford. Theological study had henceforth
+nothing to do but to avoid extremes and seek to make this image,
+which reflexion upon two polar opposites had yielded, as nearly
+thinkable as possible. It has been said that the trinitarian
+doctrine is not in the New Testament, that it was later elaborated
+by a different kind of mind. This is not true. But the inference is
+precisely the contrary of that which defenders of the dogma would
+formerly have drawn from this concession. The same kind of mind, or
+rather the same two kinds of mind, are at work in the New
+Testament. Both of the religious elements above suggested are in
+the Gospels and Epistles. The New Testament presents attempts at
+their combination. Either form may be found in the literature of
+the later age. If we ask ourselves, What is that in Jesus which
+gives us the sense of redemption, surely we should answer, It is
+his glad and confident resting in the love of God the Father. It is
+his courage, his faith in men, which becomes our faith in
+ourselves. It is his wonderful mingling of purity and love of
+righteousness with love of those who have sinned. You may find this
+in the ancient literature, as the Fathers describe that to which
+their souls cling. But this is not the point of view from which the
+dogma is organised. The Nicene Christology is not to be understood
+from this approach. The cry of a dying civilisation after power and
+light and life, the feeling that these might come to it, streaming
+down as it were, from above, as a physical, a mechanical, a magical
+deliverance, this is the frame within which is set what is here
+said of the help and redemption wrought by Christ. The resurrection
+and the incarnation are the points at which this streaming in of
+the divine light and power upon a darkened world is felt.</p>
+<p>That religion seemed the highest, that interpretation of
+Christianity the truest, the absolute one, which could boast that
+it possessed the power of the Almighty through his physical union
+with men. He who contended that Jesus was God, contended therewith
+for a power which could come upon men and make them in some sense
+one with God. This <span class="pagenum"><a name="page150" id=
+"page150"></a>{150}</span> is the view which has been almost
+exclusively held in the Greek Church. It is the view which has run
+under and through and around the other conception in the Roman and
+Protestant Churches. The sense that salvation is inward, moral,
+spiritual, has rarely indeed been absent from Christendom. It would
+be preposterous to allege that it had. Yet this sense has been
+overlaid and underrun and shot through with that other and
+disparate idea of salvation, as of a pure bestowment, something
+achieved apart from us, or, if one may so say, some alteration of
+ourselves upon other than moral and spiritual terms. The conception
+of the person Christ shows the same uncertainty. Or rather, with a
+given view of the nature of religion and salvation, the
+corresponding view of Christ is certain. In the age-long and
+world-wide contest over the trinitarian formula, with all that is
+saddening in the struggle and all that was misleading in the issue,
+it is because we see men struggling to come into the clear as to
+these two meanings of religion, that the contest has such absorbing
+interest. Men have been right in declining to call that religion in
+which a man saves himself. They have been wrong in esteeming that
+they were then only saved of God or Christ when they were saved by
+an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened when
+one no longer holds that God and men are mutually exclusive
+conceptions. It is God working within us who saves, the God who in
+Jesus worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the
+world has never seen.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page151" id=
+"page151"></a>{151}</span>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="chap5" id="chap5">CHAPTER V</a></h2>
+<h3><a name="chap5-1" id="chap5-1">THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NATURAL
+AND SOCIAL SCIENCES</a></h3>
+<p>By the middle of the nineteenth century the empirical sciences
+had undergone vast expansion in the study of detail and in the
+discovery of principles. Men felt the necessity of some adequate
+discussion of the relation of these sciences one to another and of
+their unity. There was need of the organisation of the mass of
+knowledge, largely new and ever increasing, which the sciences
+furnished. It lay in the logic of the case that some of these
+attempts should advance the bold claim to deal with all knowledge
+whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a whole.
+Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages,
+had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great
+metaphysical systems had offered theories of the universe as a
+whole. Both had professed to include all facts. Notoriously both
+theology and metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate fashion with
+the material world, in the study of which the sciences were now
+achieving great results. Indeed, the methods current and
+authoritative with theologians and metaphysicians had actually
+prevented study of the physical universe. Both of these had invaded
+areas of fact to which their methods had no application and uttered
+dicta which had no relation to truth. The very life of the sciences
+depended upon deliverance from this bondage. The record of that
+deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of
+thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment which long
+oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming victory
+had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their
+opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page152" id=
+"page152"></a>{152}</span> There was with some a disposition to
+deny that there exists an area of knowledge to which the methods of
+metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This was Comte's
+contention. Others conceded that there might be such an area, but
+claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the theologians,
+after their first shock, were disposed to concede that, concerning
+the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for example,
+God and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method of
+the physical sciences would give. They fell back upon Kant's
+distinction of the two reasons and two worlds. They exaggerated the
+sharpness of that distinction. They learned that the claim of
+agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence,
+behind which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure. Indeed,
+if one may take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this
+was not the intent of some of the scientists in their strong
+assertion of agnosticism. Spencer's later work reveals that he had
+no disposition to deny that there are foundations for belief in a
+world lying behind the phenomenal, and from which the latter gets
+its meaning.</p>
+<p>Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a
+thing was achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and
+in which Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested.
+This was the great development of the social sciences. Every aspect
+of the life of man, including religion itself, has been drawn
+within the area of the social sciences. To all these subjects,
+including religion, there have been applied empirical methods which
+have the closest analogy with those which have reigned in the
+physical sciences. Psychology has been made a science of
+experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a place
+within the area of its observations and generalizations. The
+ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected
+to the same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of
+consciousness are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and
+classify the phenomena of the religious life of the race in all
+lands and in all ages. A science of religions is taking its place
+among the other sciences. It is as purely an <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page153" id="page153"></a>{153}</span> inductive
+science as is any other. The history of religions and the
+philosophy of religion are being rewritten from this point of
+view.</p>
+<p>In the first lines of this chapter we spoke of the empirical
+sciences, meaning the sciences of the material world. It is clear,
+however, that the sciences of mind, of morals and of religion have
+now become empirical sciences. They have their basis in experience,
+the experience of individuals and the experience of masses of men,
+of ages of observable human life. They all proceed by the method of
+observation and inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is
+a unity of method as between the natural and social and psychical
+sciences, the reach of which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed,
+the physiological aspects of psychology, the investigations of the
+relation of adolescence to conversion, suggest that the distinction
+between the physical and the psychical is a vanishing distinction.
+Science comes nearer to offering an interpretation of the universe
+as a whole than the opening paragraphs of this chapter would imply.
+But it does so by including religion, not by excluding it. No one
+would any longer think of citing Kant's distinction of two reasons
+and two worlds in the sense of establishing a city of refuge into
+which the persecuted might flee. Kant rendered incomparable service
+by making clear two poles of thought. Yet we must realise how the
+space between is filled with the gradations of an absolute
+continuity of activity. Man has but one reason. This may
+conceivably operate upon appropriate material in one or the other
+of these polar fashions. It does operate in infinite variations of
+degree, in unity with itself, after both fashions, at all times and
+upon all materials.</p>
+<p>Positivism was a system. Agnosticism was at least a phase of
+thought. The broadening of the conception of science and the
+invasion of every area of life by a science thus broadly conceived,
+has been an influence less tangible than those others but not,
+therefore, less effective. Positivism was bitterly hostile to
+Christianity, though, in the mind of Comte himself and of a few
+others, it produced a curious substitute, possessing many of the
+marks of Roman Catholicism. The name <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page154" id="page154"></a>{154}</span> 'agnostic' was so loosely
+used that one must say that the contention was hostile to religion
+in the minds of some and not of others. The new movement for an
+inclusive science is not hostile to religion. Yet it will transform
+current conceptions of religion as those others never did. In
+proportion as it is scientific, it cannot be hostile. It may at
+most be indifferent. Nevertheless, in the long run, few will choose
+the theme of religion for the scientific labour of life who have
+not some interest in religion. Men of these three classes have
+accepted the doctrine of evolution. Comte thought he had discovered
+it. Spencer and those for whom we have taken him as type, did
+service in the elaboration of it. To the men of our third group,
+the truth of evolution seems no longer debatable. Here too, in the
+word 'evolution,' we have a term which has been used with laxity.
+It corresponds to a notion which has only gradually been evolved.
+Its implications were at first by no means understood. It was
+associated with a mechanical view of the universe which was
+diametrically opposed to its truth. Still, there could not be a
+doubt that the doctrine contravened those ideas as to the origin of
+the world, and more particularly of man, of the relations of
+species, and especially of the human species to other forms of
+animal life, which had immemorially prevailed in Christian circles
+and which had the witness of the Scriptures on their behalf. If we
+were to attempt, with acknowledged latitude, to name a book whose
+import might be said to be cardinal for the whole movement treated
+of in this chapter, that book would be Darwin's <i>Origin of
+Species</i>, which was published in 1859.</p>
+<p>Long before Darwin the creation legend had been recognised as
+such. The astronomy of the seventeenth century had removed the
+earth from its central position. The geology of the eighteenth had
+shown how long must have been the ages of the laying down of the
+earth's strata. The question of the descent of man, however,
+brought home the significance of evolution for religion more
+forcibly than any other aspect of the debate had done. There were
+scientific men of distinction who were not convinced of the truth
+of the evolutionary <span class="pagenum"><a name="page155" id=
+"page155"></a>{155}</span> hypothesis. To most Christian men the
+theory seemed to leave no unique distinction or spiritual quality
+for man. It seemed to render impossible faith in the Scriptures as
+revelation. To many it seemed that the whole issue as between a
+spiritual and a purely materialistic view of the universe was
+involved. Particularly was this true of the English-speaking
+peoples.</p>
+<p>One other factor in the transformation of the Christian view
+needs to be dwelt upon. It is less theoretical than those upon
+which we have dwelt. It is the influence of socialism, taking that
+word in its largest sense. An industrial civilisation has developed
+both the good and the evil of individualism in incredible degree.
+The unity of society which the feudal system and the Church gave to
+Europe in the Middle Age had been destroyed. The individualism and
+democracy which were essential to Protestantism notoriously aided
+the civil and social revolution, but the centrifugal forces were
+too great. Initiative has been wonderful, but cohesion is lacking.
+Democracy is yet far from being realised. The civil liberations
+which were the great crises of the western world from 1640 to 1830
+appear now to many as deprived of their fruit. Governments
+undertake on behalf of subjects that which formerly no government
+would have dreamed of doing. The demand is that the Church, too,
+become a factor in the furtherance of the outward and present
+welfare of mankind. If that meant the call to love and charity it
+would be an old refrain. That is exactly what it does not mean. It
+means the attack upon evils which make charity necessary. It means
+the taking up into the idealisation of religion the endeavour to
+redress all wrongs, to do away with all evils, to confer all goods,
+to create a new world and not, as heretofore, mainly at least, a
+new soul in the midst of the old world. No one can deny either the
+magnitude of the evils which it is sought to remedy, or the
+greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion. The volume
+of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social
+questions is immense. It is revolutionary in its effect. For, after
+all, the very gist of religion has been held to be that it deals
+primarily with the inner life and the transcendent <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page156" id="page156"></a>{156}</span> world.
+That it has dealt with the problem of the inner life and
+transcendent world in such a manner as to retard, or even only not
+to further, the other aspects of man's life is indeed a grave
+indictment. That it should, however, see ends in the outer life and
+present world as ends fully sufficient in themselves, that it
+should cease to set these in the light of the eternal, is that it
+should cease to be religion. The physical and social sciences have
+given to men an outward setting in the world, a basis of power and
+happiness such as men never have enjoyed. Yet the tragic failure of
+our civilisation to give to vast multitudes that power and
+happiness, is the proof that something more than the outward basis
+is needed. The success of our civilisation is its failure.</p>
+<p>This is by no means a recurrence to the old antithesis of
+religion and civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements.
+On the contrary, it is but to show that the present world of
+religion and of economics are not two worlds, but merely different
+aspects of the same world. Therewith it is not alleged that
+religion has not a specific contribution to make.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap5-2" id="chap5-2">POSITIVISM</a></h3>
+<p>The permanent influence of that phase of thought which called
+itself Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which
+numbered among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart
+Mill, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and
+Matthew Arnold, cannot be said to have been without significance. A
+book upon the translation of which Harriet Martinean worked with
+sustained enthusiasm cannot be dismissed as if it were merely a
+curiosity. Comte's work, <i>Coura de Philosophie Positive</i>,
+appeared between the years 1830 and 1842. Littr&eacute; was his
+chief French interpreter. But the history of the positivist
+movement belongs to the history of English philosophical and
+religious thought, rather than to that of France.</p>
+<p>Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense
+Roman Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might
+bear comparison with Mill's. Expelled <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page157" id="page157"></a>{157}</span> from
+school, cast off by his parents, dismissed by the elder Casimir
+Perier, whose secretary he had been, he eked out a living by
+tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy rallied to his
+support. He never occupied a post comparable with his genius. He
+was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of mental
+aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He
+did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered
+him against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production
+of his book he cut himself off from any reading save that of
+current scientific discovery. He came under the influence of Madame
+Vaux, whom, after her death, he idolised even more than before. For
+the problem which, in the earlier portion of his work, he set
+himself, that namely, of the organising of the sciences into a
+compact body of doctrine, he possessed extraordinary gifts. Later,
+he took on rather the air of a high priest of humanity, legislating
+concerning a new religion. It is but fair to say that at this point
+Littr&eacute; and many others parted company with Comte. He
+developed a habit and practice ascetic in its rigour and mystic in
+its devotion to the positivists' religion&mdash;the worship of
+humanity. He was the friend and counsellor of working-men and
+agitators, of little children, of the poor and miserable. He ended
+his rather pathetic and turbulent career in 1857, gathering a few
+disciples about his bed as he remembered that Socrates had
+done.</p>
+<p>Comte begins with the natural sciences and postulates the
+doctrine of evolution. To the definition of this doctrine he makes
+some interesting approaches. The discussion of the order and
+arrangement of the various sciences and of their characteristic
+differences is wonderful in its insight and suggestiveness. He
+asserts that in the study of nature we are concerned solely with
+the facts before us and the relations which connect those facts. We
+have nothing to do with the supposed essence or hidden nature and
+meaning of those facts. Facts and the invariable laws which govern
+them are the only legitimate objects of pursuit. Comte infers that
+because we can know, in this sense, only phenomena and their
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page158" id=
+"page158"></a>{158}</span> relations, we should in consequence
+guard against illusions which creep in again if we so much as use
+the words principle, or cause, or will, or force. By phenomena must
+be understood objects of perception, to the exclusion, for example,
+of psychological changes reputed to be known in self-consciousness.
+That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that there is no
+knowing except by perception&mdash;this is ever reiterated as
+self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the
+observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology,
+or even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much
+impressed, must take its place. Every object of knowledge is other
+than the knowing subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can
+never know itself. By invincible necessity the human mind can
+observe all phenomena except its own. Commenting upon this, James
+Martineau observed: 'We have had in the history of thought numerous
+forms of idealism which construed all outward phenomena as mere
+appearances within the mind. We have hitherto had no strictly
+corresponding materialism, which claimed certainty for the outer
+world precisely because it was foreign to ourselves.' Man is the
+highest product of nature, the highest stage of nature's most
+mature and complex form. Man as individual is nothing more.
+Physiology gives us not merely his external constitution and one
+set of relations. It is the whole science of man. There is no study
+of mind in which its actions and states can be contemplated apart
+from the physical basis in conjunction with which mind exists.</p>
+<p>Thus far man has been treated only biologically, as individual.
+We must advance to man in society. Almost one half of Comte's bulky
+work is devoted to this side of the inquiry. Social phenomena are a
+class complex beyond any which have yet been investigated. So much
+is this the case and so difficult is the problem presented, that
+Comte felt constrained in some degree to change his method. We
+proceed from experience, from data in fact, as before. But the
+facts are not mere illustrations of the so called laws of
+individual human nature. Social facts are the results also of
+situations which represent the accumulated influence of past
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page159" id=
+"page159"></a>{159}</span> generations. In this, as against
+Bentham, for example, with his endless recurrence to human nature,
+as he called it, Comte was right. Comte thus first gave the study
+of history its place in sociology. In this study of history and
+sociology, the collective phenomena are more accessible to us and
+better known by us, than are the parts of which they are composed.
+We therefore proceed here from the general to the particular, not
+from the particular to the general, as in research of the kinds
+previously named. The state of every part of the social
+organisation is ultimately connected with the contemporaneous state
+of all the other parts. Philosophy, science, the fine arts,
+commerce, navigation, government, are all in close mutual
+dependence. When any considerable change takes place in one, we may
+know that a parallel change has preceded or will follow in the
+others. The progress of society is not the aggregate of partial
+changes, but the product of a single impulse acting through all the
+partial agencies. It can therefore be most easily traced by
+studying all together. These are the main principles of
+sociological investigation as set forth by Comte, some of them as
+they have been phrased by Mill.</p>
+<p>The most sweeping exemplification of the axiom last alluded to,
+as to parallel changes, is Comte's so-called law of the three
+states of civilisation. Under this law, he asserts, the whole
+historical evolution can be summed up. It is as certain as the law
+of gravitation. Everything in human society has passed, as has the
+individual man, through the theological and then through the
+metaphysical stage, and so arrives at the positive stage. In this
+last stage of thought nothing either of superstition or of
+speculation will survive. Theology and metaphysics Comte repeatedly
+characterises as the two successive stages of nescience,
+unavoidable as preludes to science. Equally unavoidable is it that
+science shall ultimately prevail in their place. The advance of
+science having once begun, there is no possibility but that it will
+ultimately possess itself of all. One hears the echo of this
+confidence in Haeckel also. There is a persistence about the denial
+of any knowledge whatsoever that goes beyond <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page160" id="page160"></a>{160}</span> external
+facts, which ill comports with the pretensions of positivism to be
+a philosophy. For its final claim is not that it is content to rest
+in experimental science. On the contrary, it would transform this
+science into a homogeneous doctrine which is able to explain
+everything in the universe. This is but a <i>tour de force</i>. The
+promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of
+everything which science cannot explain. Comte was never willing to
+face the fact that the very existence of knowledge has a noumenal
+as well as a phenomenal side. The reasonableness of the universe is
+certainly a conception which we bring to the observation of nature.
+If we did not thus bring it with us, no mere observation of nature
+would ever give it to us. It is impossible for science to get rid
+of the conception of force, and ultimately of cause. There can be
+no phenomenon which is not a manifestation of something. The very
+nomenclature falls into hopeless confusion without these
+conceptions. Yet the moment we touch them we transcend science and
+pass into the realm of philosophy. It is mere juggling with words
+to say that our science has now become a philosophy.</p>
+<p>The adjective 'positive' contains the same fallacy. Apparently
+Comte meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would
+limit research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance,
+co-existence and succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena
+positive, in the sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply
+that the inquiry into causes deals with that which has no reality,
+is to beg the question. This is not a premise with which he may set
+out in the evolution of his system.</p>
+<p>Comte denied the accusation of materialism and atheism. He did
+the first only by changing the meaning of the term materialism.
+Materialism the world has supposed to be the view of man's
+condition and destiny which makes these to begin and end in nature.
+That certainly was Comte's view. The accusation of atheism also he
+avoids by a mere play on words. He is not without a God. Humanity
+is God. Mankind is the positivist's Supreme. Altruism takes the
+place of devotion. The devotion so long wasted upon a mere creature
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page161" id=
+"page161"></a>{161}</span> of the imagination, to whom it could do
+no good, he would now give to men who sorely need it and can
+obviously profit by it. Surely the antithesis between nature and
+the supernatural, in the form in which Comte argues against it, is
+now abandoned by thoughtful people. Equally the antithesis of
+altruism to the service of God is perverse. It arouses one's pity
+that Comte should not have seen how, in true religion these two
+things coalesce.</p>
+<p>Moreover, this deification of mankind, in so far as it is not a
+sounding phrase, is an absurdity. When Comte says, for example,
+that the authority of humanity must take the place of that of God,
+he has recognised that religion must have authority. Indeed, the
+whole social order must have authority. However, this is not for
+him, as we are accustomed to say, the authority of the truth and of
+the right. There is no such abstraction as the truth, coming to
+various manifestations. There is no such thing as right, apart from
+relatively right concrete measures. There is no larger being
+indwelling in men. Society, humanity in its collective capacity,
+must, if need be, override the individual. Yet Comte despises the
+mere rule of majorities. The majority which he would have rule is
+that of those who have the scientific mind. We may admit that in
+this he aims at the supremacy of truth. But, in fact, he prepares
+the way for a doctrinaire tyranny which, of all forms of
+government, might easily turn out to be the worst which a
+long-suffering humanity has yet endured.</p>
+<p>In the end, we are told, love is to take the place of force.
+Humanity is present to us first in our mothers, wives and
+daughters. For these it is present in their fathers, husbands,
+sons. From this primary circle love widens and worship extends as
+hearts enlarge. It is the prayer to humanity which first rises
+above the mere selfishness of the sort to get something out of God.
+Remembrance in the hearts of those who loved us and owe something
+to us is the only worthy form of immortality. Clearly it is only
+the caricature of prayer or of the desire of immortality which
+rises before Comte's mind as the thing to be escaped. For this
+caricature religious men, both Catholic and Protestant, without
+doubt, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page162" id=
+"page162"></a>{162}</span> gave him cause. There were to be seven
+sacraments, corresponding to seven significant epochs in a man's
+career. There were to be priests for the performance of these
+sacraments and for the inculcation of the doctrines of positivism.
+There were to be temples of humanity, affording opportunity for and
+reminder of this worship. In each temple there was to be set up the
+symbol of the positivist religion, a woman of thirty years with her
+little son in her arms. Littr&eacute; spoke bitterly of the
+positivist religion as a lapse of the author into his old
+aberration. This religion was certainly regarded as negligible by
+many to whom his system as a whole meant a great deal. At least, it
+is an interesting example, as is also his transformation of science
+into a philosophy, of the resurgence of valid elements in life,
+even in the case of a man who has made it his boast to do away with
+them.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap5-3" id="chap5-3">NATURALISM AND
+AGNOSTICISM</a></h3>
+<p>We may take Spencer as representative of a group of men who,
+after the middle of the nineteenth century, laboured
+enthusiastically to set forth evolutionary and naturalistic
+theories of the universe. These theories had also, for the most
+part, the common trait that they professed agnosticism as to all
+that lay beyond the reach of the natural-scientific methods, in
+which the authors were adept. Both Ward and Boutroux accept Spencer
+as such a type. Agnosticism for obvious reasons could be no system.
+Naturalism is a tendency in interpretation of the universe which
+has many ramifications. There is no intention of making the
+reference to one man's work do more than serve as introduction to
+the field.</p>
+<p>Spencer was eager in denial that he had been influenced by
+Comte. Yet there is a certain reminder of Comte in Spencer's
+monumental endeavour to systematise the whole mass of modern
+scientific knowledge, under the general title of 'A Synthetic
+Philosophy.' He would show the unity of the sciences and their
+common principles or, rather, the one great common principle which
+they all illustrate, the doctrine of <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page163" id="page163"></a>{163}</span> evolution, as this had
+taken shape since the time of Darwin. Since 1904 we have an
+autobiography of Herbert Spencer, which, to be sure, seems largely
+to have been written prior to 1889. The book is interesting, as
+well in the light which it throws upon the expansion of the
+sciences and the development of the doctrine of evolution in those
+years, as in the revelation of the personal traits of the man
+himself. Concerning these Tolstoi wrote to a friend, apropos of a
+gift of the book: 'In autobiographies the most important
+psychological phenomena are often revealed quite independently of
+the author's will.'</p>
+<p>Spencer was born in 1820 in Derby, the son of a schoolmaster. He
+came of Nonconformist ancestry of most marked individuality. His
+early education was irregular and inadequate. Before he reached the
+age of seventeen his reading had been immense. He worked with an
+engineer in the period of the building of the railways in the
+Midlands. He always retained his interest in inventions. He wrote
+for the newspapers and magazines and definitely launched upon a
+literary career. At the age of thirty he published his first book,
+on <i>Social Statics</i>. He made friends among the most notable
+men and women of his age. So early as 1855 he was the victim of a
+disease of the heart which never left him. It was on his recovery
+from his first grave attack that he shaped the plan which
+henceforth held him, of organising the modern sciences and
+incorporating them into what he called a synthetic philosophy.
+There was immense increase in actual knowledge and in the power of
+his reflection on that knowledge, as the years went by. A
+generation elapsed between the publication of his <i>First
+Principles</i> and the conclusion of his more formal literary
+labours. There is something captivating about a man's life, the
+energy of which remains so little impaired that he esteems it
+better to write a new book, covering some untouched portion of his
+scheme, than to give to an earlier volume the revision which in the
+light of his matured convictions it may need. His philosophical
+limitations he never transcended. He does not so na&iuml;vely offer
+a substitute for philosophy as does Comte. But he was <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page164" id="page164"></a>{164}</span> no master
+in philosophy. There is a reflexion of the consciousness of this
+fact in his agnosticism.</p>
+<p>That the effort of the agnostic contention has been great, and
+on the whole salutary, few would deny. Spencer's own later work
+shows that his declaration, that the absolute which lies behind the
+universe is unknowable, is to be taken with considerable
+qualification. It is only a relative unknowableness which he
+predicates. Moreover, before Spencer's death, the doctrine of
+evolution had made itself profoundly felt in the discussion of all
+aspects of life, including that of religion. There seemed no longer
+any reason for the barrier between science and religion which
+Spencer had once thought requisite.</p>
+<p>The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of
+scientific mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid
+knowledge made, now by theology and now by speculative philosophy.
+It is hardly descriptive in any absolute sense. Spencer had coined
+the rather fortunate illustration which describes science as a
+gradually increasing sphere, such that every addition to its
+surface does but bring us into more extensive contact with
+surrounding nescience. Even upon this illustration Ward has
+commented that the metaphor is misleading. The continent of our
+knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of ignorance. It is
+intersected and cut up by straits and seas of ignorance. The author
+of <i>Ecce Coelum</i> has declared: 'Things die out under the
+microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see,
+unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of
+our most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient
+unknown has become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men
+have a more rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.</p>
+<p>They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone
+secure and solid knowledge may be attained. They have undisguised
+scepticism as to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways. It
+was the working of these motives which gave to the labours of the
+middle of the nineteenth century so prevailingly the aspect of
+denial, the character which Carlyle described as an everlasting No.
+This <span class="pagenum"><a name="page165" id=
+"page165"></a>{165}</span> was but a preparatory stage, a
+retrogression for a new and firmer advance.</p>
+<p>In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a
+becoming modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into
+which all our thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction
+which agnosticism has administered. It is a fact which has had
+disastrous consequences, that precisely the department of thought,
+namely the religious, which one might suppose would most have
+reminded men of the outlying mystery, that phase of life whose very
+atmosphere is mystery, has most often been guilty of arrant
+dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of the claim that
+it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself unlimited licence
+of affirmation concerning the most remote and difficult matters. It
+has alleged miraculously communicated information concerning those
+matters. It has clothed with a divine authoritativeness, overriding
+the mature reflexion and laborious investigation of learned men,
+that which was, after all, nothing but the innocent imaginings of
+the childhood of the race. In this good sense of a parallel to that
+agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves within their
+own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which is one
+of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that
+religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They
+apprehended more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that
+there is much ignorance which revelation does not mitigate.
+<i>Exeunt omnia in mysterium</i>. They are prepared to say
+concerning many of the dicta of religiosity, that they cannot
+affirm their truth. They are prepared to say concerning the
+experience of God and the soul, that they know these with an
+indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward
+religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science
+has taught us toward all truth whatsoever.</p>
+<p>The strictly philosophic term phenomenon, to which science has
+taken so kindly, is in itself an explicit avowal of something
+beyond the phenomenal. Spencer is careful to insist upon this
+relation of the phenomenal to the noumenal. His <i>Synthetic
+Philosophy</i> opens with an exposition of this non-relative or
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page166" id=
+"page166"></a>{166}</span> absolute, without which the relative
+itself becomes contradictory. It is an essential part of Spencer's
+doctrine to maintain that our consciousness of the absolute,
+indefinite as it is, is positive and not negative. 'Though the
+absolute cannot in any manner or degree be known, in the strict
+sense of knowing, yet we find that its positive existence is a
+necessary datum of consciousness. The belief which this datum of
+consciousness constitutes has a higher warrant than any other
+belief whatsoever.' In short, the absolute or noumenal, according
+to Spencer, though not known as the phenomenal or relative is
+known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that the
+phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense
+inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances,
+without which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified
+with that ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists.
+Religion itself is a phenomenon, and the source and secret of most
+complex and interesting phenomena. It has always been of the
+greatest importance in the history of mankind. It has been able to
+hold its own in face of the attacks of science. It must contain an
+element of truth. All religions, however, assert that their God is
+for us not altogether cognisable, that God is a great mystery. The
+higher their rank, the more do they acknowledge this. It is by the
+flippant invasion of this mystery that the popular religiosity
+offends. It talks of God as if he were a man in the next street. It
+does not distinguish between merely imaginative fetches into the
+truth, and presumably accurate definition of that truth. Equally,
+the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions
+of the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are
+consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know
+and are involved in contradiction with themselves. But the results
+of modern physics and chemistry reveal, as the constant element in
+all phenomena, force. This manifests itself in various forms which
+are interchangeable, while amid all these changes the force remains
+the same. This latter must be regarded as the reality, and basis of
+all that is relative and phenomenal. The entire universe is to be
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page167" id=
+"page167"></a>{167}</span> explained from the movements of this
+absolute force. The phenomena of nature and of mental life come
+under the same general laws of matter, motion, and force.</p>
+<p>Spencer's doctrine, as here stated, is not adequate to account
+for the world of mental life or adapted to serve as the basis of a
+reconciliation of science and religion. It does not carry us beyond
+materialism. Spencer's real intention was directed to something
+higher than that. If the absolute is to be conceived at all, it is
+as a necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. If we get the
+idea of force from the experience of our own power of volition, is
+it not natural to think of mind-force as the prius of physical
+force, and not the reverse? Accordingly, the absolute force, basis
+of all specific forces, would be mind and will. The doctrine of
+evolution would harmonise perfectly with these inferences. But it
+would have to become idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead
+of materialistic, as in Comte. We are obliged, Spencer owns, to
+refer the phenomenal world of law and order to a first cause. He
+says that this first cause is incomprehensible. Yet he further
+says, when the question of attributing personality to this first
+cause is raised, that the choice is not between personality and
+something lower. It is between personality and something higher. To
+this may belong a mode of being as much transcending intelligence
+and will as these transcend mechanical motion. It is strange, he
+says, that men should suppose the highest worship to lie in
+assimilating the object of worship to themselves. And yet, again,
+in one of the latest of his works he writes: 'Unexpected as it will
+be to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which
+manifests itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned
+form of the power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. The
+conception to which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is
+much less that of a universe of dead matter than that of a universe
+everywhere alive.'</p>
+<p>Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley. Agnosticism had
+at first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the
+teleological. It ended in fastening upon the material and
+mechanical. After all, says Huxley, in one of his
+essays:&mdash;'What <span class="pagenum"><a name="page168" id=
+"page168"></a>{168}</span> do we know of this terrible matter,
+except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of
+our own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over
+whose threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now
+arisen, except that it is also a name for an unknown and
+hypothetical cause of states of our consciousness?' He concedes
+that matter is inconceivable apart from mind, but that mind is not
+inconceivable apart from matter. He concedes that the conception of
+universal and necessary law is an ideal. It is an invention of the
+mind's own devising. It is not a physical fact. In brief, taking
+agnostic naturalism just as it seemed disposed a generation ago to
+present itself, it now appears as if it had been turned exactly
+inside out. Instead of the physical world being primary and
+fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not altogether
+problematical, the precise converse is true.</p>
+<p>Nature, as science regards it, may be described as a system
+whose parts, be they simple or complex, are wholly governed by
+universal laws. Knowledge of these laws is an indispensable
+condition of that control of nature upon which human welfare in so
+large degree depends. But this reign of law is an hypothesis. It is
+not an axiom which it would be absurd to deny. It is not an obvious
+fact, thrust upon us whether we will or no. Experiences are
+possible without the conception of law and order. The fruit of
+experience in knowledge is not possible without it. That is only to
+say that the reason why we assume that nature is a connected system
+of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are
+self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the
+notion of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which
+we must eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical
+science perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a
+glance at the history, and particularly at the popular literature,
+of science affords the interesting spectacle of the rise of an
+hallucination, the growth of a habit of mythological speech, which
+is truly surprising. We begin to hear of self-existent laws which
+reign supreme and bind nature fast in fact. By this learned
+substitution for God, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page169" id=
+"page169"></a>{169}</span> it was once confidently assumed that the
+race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical shadows into
+the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear that at
+this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of
+myth-making and fetish worship&mdash;the homage to the fetish of
+law. Even the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know
+and law I know,' says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred
+rhetoric. But surely we do not know law in the same sense in which
+we know fact. If there are no causes among our facts, then we do
+not know anything about the laws. If we do know laws it is because
+we assume causes. If, in the language of rational beings, laws of
+nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and independent of the
+phenomena which they are said to govern, such language must be
+merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak of the civil
+law. We say the law does that which we know the executive does. But
+the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as the
+last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of
+the movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined
+that the planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had
+supposed that this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be
+scientific mode of speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony
+of Hesiod, only on a smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed
+life to everything of which it talked. Polytheism in religion and
+independent forces and self-existent laws in science are thus upon
+a par. The gods many and lords many, so amenable to concrete
+presentation in poetry and art, have given place to one Supreme
+Being. So also light, heat, and other natural agencies, palpable
+and ready to hand for the explanation of everything, in the
+myth-making period of science which living men can still remember,
+have by this time paled. They have become simply various
+manifestations of one underlying spiritual energy, which is indeed
+beyond our perception.<a id="footnotetag6" name=
+"footnotetag6"></a><a href="#footnote6"><sup>6</sup></a> When Comte
+said that the universe could not rest upon will, because then it
+would be arbitrary, incalculable, subject to caprice, one feels the
+humour and pathos <span class="pagenum"><a name="page170" id=
+"page170"></a>{170}</span> of it. Comte's experience with will, his
+own and that of others, had evidently been too largely of that sad
+sort. Real freedom consists in conformity to what ought to be. In
+God, whom we conceive as perfect, this conformity is complete. With
+us it remains an ideal. Were we the creatures of a blind mechanical
+necessity there could be no talk of ideal standards and no meaning
+in reason at all.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote6" name=
+"footnote6"></a><b>Footnote 6:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag6">(return)</a>
+<p>Ward, <i>Naturalism and Agnosticism</i>, vol. ii. p. 248.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h3><a name="chap5-4" id="chap5-4">EVOLUTION</a></h3>
+<p>In the progress of the thought of the generation, say, from 1870
+to the present day, the conception of evolution has been much
+changed. The doctrine of evolution has itself been largely evolved
+within that period. The application of it has become familiar in
+fields of which there was at first no thought. The bearing of the
+acceptance of it upon religion has been seen to be quite different
+from that which was at first supposed. The advocacy of the doctrine
+was at first associated with the claims of naturalism or
+positivism. Wider applications of the doctrine and deeper insight
+into its meaning have done away with this misunderstanding.
+Evolution, as originally understood, was as far as possible from
+suggesting anything mechanical. By the term was meant primarily the
+gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic beginning to
+its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded not merely
+as the goal actually reached through successive stages of growth.
+It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the
+force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material
+and directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied
+ideal ends controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as
+prevailingly also with others in the study of the natural sciences,
+the ideas of end and of cause looked at askance. They are regarded
+an outside the pale of the natural sciences. In a very definite
+sense that is true. The logical consequence of this admission
+should be merely the recognition that the idea of evolution as
+developed in the natural sciences cannot be the whole idea.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page171" id=
+"page171"></a>{171}</span>
+<p>The entire history of anything, Spencer tells us, must include
+its appearance out of the imperceptible, and its disappearance
+again into the imperceptible. Be it a single object, or the whole
+universe, an account which begins with it in a concrete form, or
+leaves off with its concrete form, is incomplete. He uses a
+familiar instance, that of a cloud appearing when vapour drifts
+over a cold mountain top, and again disappearing when it emerges
+into warmer air. The cloud emerges from the imperceptible as heat
+is dissipated. It is dissolved again as heat is absorbed and the
+watery particles evaporate. Spencer esteems this an analogue of the
+appearance of the universe itself, according to the nebular
+hypothesis. Yet assuredly, as the cloud presupposes vapours which
+had previously condensed, and the vapour clouds that had previously
+evaporated, and as clouds dissolve in one place even at the moment
+that they are forming in another, so we are told of nebul&aelig;
+which are in every phase of advance or of decline. To ask which was
+first, solid masses or nebulous haze, is much like recurring to the
+riddle of the hen and the egg. Still, we are told, we have but to
+extend our thought beyond this emergence and subsidence of sidereal
+systems, of continents, nations, men, to find a permanent totality
+made up of transient individuals in every stage of change. The
+physical assumption with which Spencer sets out is that the mass of
+the universe and its energy are fixed in quantity. All the
+phenomena of evolution are included in the conservation of this
+matter and force.</p>
+<p>Besides the criticism which was offered above, that the mere law
+of the persistence of force does not initiate our series, there is
+a further objection. Even within the series, once it has been
+started, this law of the persistence of force is solely a
+quantitative law. When energy is transformed there is an
+equivalence between the new form and the old. Of the reasons for
+the direction evolution takes, for the permanence of that direction
+once it has been taken, so that the sequence of forms is a
+progression, the explication of a latent nature&mdash;of all this,
+the mere law of the persistence of force gives us no explanation
+whatever. The change at random from one <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page172" id="page172"></a>{172}</span> form of
+manifestation to another might be a striking illustration of the
+law of the persistence of force, but it would be the contradiction
+of evolution. The very notion of evolution is that of the sequence
+of forms, so that something is expressed or achieved. That
+achievement implies more than the mere force. Or rather, it
+involves a quality of the force with which the language of
+mechanism does not reckon. It assumes the idea which gives
+direction to the force, an ideal quality of the force.</p>
+<p>Unquestionably that which men sought to be rid of was the idea
+of purpose in nature, in the old sense of design in the mind of
+God, external to the material universe, of force exerted upon
+nature from without, so as to cause nature to conform to the design
+of its 'Great Original,' in Addison's high phrase. In this effort,
+however, the reducing of all to mere force and permutation of
+force, not merely explains nothing, but contradicts facts which
+stare us in the face. It deprives evolution of the quality which
+makes it evolution. To put in this incongruous quality at the
+beginning, because we find it necessary at the end, is, to say the
+least, na&iuml;ve. To deny that we have put it in, to insist that
+in the marvellous sequence we have only an illustration of
+mechanism and of conservation of force, is perverse. We passed
+through an era in which some said that they did not believe in God;
+everything was accounted for by evolution. In so far as they meant
+that they did not believe in the God of deism and of much
+traditional theology, they did not stand alone in this claim. In so
+far as they meant by evolution mere mechanism, they explained
+nothing and destroyed the notion of evolution besides. In so far as
+they meant more than mere mechanism, they lapsed into the company
+of the scientific myth-makers to whom we alluded above. They
+attributed to their abstraction, evolution, qualities which other
+people found in the forms of the universe viewed as the
+manifestation of an immanent God. Only by so doing were they able
+to ascribe to evolution that which other people describe as the
+work of God. At this level the controversy becomes one simply about
+words.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page173" id=
+"page173"></a>{173}</span>
+<p>Of course, the great illumination as to the meaning of evolution
+has come with its application to many fields besides the physical.
+Darwin was certainly the great inaugurator of the evolutionary
+movement in England. Still, Darwin's problem was strictly limited.
+The impression is widespread that the biological evolutionary
+theories were first developed, and furnished the basis for the
+others. Yet both Hegel and Comte, not to speak of Schelling, were
+far more interested in the intellectual and historical, the ethical
+and social aspects of the question. Both Hegel and Comte were,
+whether rightly or wrongly, rather contemptuous of the appeal to
+biology and organic life. Both had the sense that they used a great
+figure of speech when they spoke of society as an organism, and
+compared the working of institutions to biological functions. This
+is indeed the question. It is a question over which Spencer sets
+himself lightly. He passes back and forth between organic evolution
+and the ethical, economic, and social movements which are described
+by the same term, as if we were in possession of a perfectly safe
+analogy, or rather as if we were assured of an identical principle.
+Much that is already archaic in Spencer's economic and social, his
+historical and ethical, not to say his religious, chapters is due
+to the influence of this fact. Of his own mind it was true that he
+had come to the doctrine of evolution from the physical side. He
+brought to his other subjects a more or less developed method of
+operating with the conception. He never fully realised how new
+subjects would alter the method and transform the conception.
+Spencerian evolution is an assertion of the all-sufficiency of
+natural law. The authority of conscience is but the experience of
+law-abiding and dutiful generations flowing in our veins. The
+public weal has hold over us, because the happiness and misery of
+past ages are inherited by us.</p>
+<p>It marked a great departure when Huxley began vigorously to
+dissent from these views. According to him evolutionary science has
+done nothing for ethics. Men become ethical only as they set
+themselves against the principles embodied in the evolutionary
+process of the world. Evolution is the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page174" id="page174"></a>{174}</span> struggle
+for existence. It is preposterous to say that man became good by
+succeeding in the struggle for existence. Instead of the old single
+movement, as in Spencer, straight from the nebula to the saint,
+Huxley has place for suffering. Suffering is most intense in man
+precisely under conditions most essential to the evolution of his
+nobler powers. The loss of ease or money may be gain in character.
+The cosmical process is not only full of pain. It is full of
+mercilessness and of wickedness. Good has been evolved, but so has
+evil. The fittest may have survived. There is no guarantee that
+they are the best. The continual struggle against our fellows
+poisons our higher life. It will hardly do to say with Huxley that
+the ethical struggle is the reverse of the cosmical process.
+Nevertheless, we have here a most interesting transformation in
+thought.</p>
+<p>These ideas and principles, as is well known, were elaborated
+and advanced upon in a very popular book, Drummond's <i>Ascent of
+Man</i>, 1894. Even the title was a happy and suggestive one.
+Struggle for life is a fact, but it is not the whole fact. It is
+balanced by the struggle for the life of others. This latter
+reaches far down into the levels of what we call brute life. Its
+divinest reach is only the fulfilment of the real nature of
+humanity. It is the living with men which develops the moral in
+man. The prolongation of infancy in the higher species has had to
+do with the development of moral nature. So only that we hold a
+sufficiently deep view of reason, provided we see clearly that
+reason transforms, perfects, makes new what we inherit from the
+beast, we need not fear for morality, though it should universally
+be taught that morality came into being by the slow and gradual
+fashioning of brute impulse.</p>
+<p>Benjamin Kidd in his <i>Social Evolution</i>, 1895, has reverted
+again to extreme Darwinism in morals and sociology. The law is that
+of unceasing struggle. Reason does not teach us to moderate the
+struggle. It but sharpens the conflict. All religions are
+pr&aelig;ter-rational, Christianity most of all, in being the most
+altruistic. Kidd, not without reason, comments bitterly upon
+Spencer's Utopia, the passage of militarism into <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page175" id="page175"></a>{175}</span>
+industrialism. The struggle in industrialism is fiercer than ever.
+Reason affects the animal nature of man for the worse. Clearly
+conscious of what he is doing, man objects to sacrificing himself
+for his family or tribe. Instinct might lead an ape to do that.
+Intelligence warns a man against it. Reason is cruel beyond
+anything dreamed of in the beast. That portion of the community
+which loves to hear the abuse of reason, rejoiced to hear this
+phrase. They rejoiced when they heard that religion was the only
+remedy, and that religion was ultra-rational, contra-rational,
+supernatural, in this new sense. How one comes by it, or how one
+can rationally justify the yielding of allegiance to it, is not
+clear. One must indeed have the will to believe if one believes on
+these terms.</p>
+<p>These again are but examples. They convey but a superficial
+impression of the effort to apply the conception of evolution to
+the moral and religious life of man. All this has taken place, of
+course, in a far larger setting that of the endeavour to elaborate
+the evolutionary view of politics and of the state, of economics
+and of trade, of social life and institutions, of culture and
+civilisation in every aspect. This elaboration and reiteration of
+the doctrine of evolution sometimes wearies us. It is but the
+unwearied following of the main clue to the riddle of the universe
+which the age has given us. It is nothing more and nothing less
+than the endeavour to apprehend the ideal life, no longer as
+something held out to us, set up before us, but also as something
+working within us, realising itself through us and among us. To
+deny the affinity of this with religion would be fatuous and also
+futile. Temporarily, at least, and to many interests of religion,
+it would be fatal.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap5-5" id="chap5-5">MIRACLES</a></h3>
+<p>It must be evident that the total view of the universe which the
+acceptance of the doctrine of evolution implies, has had effect in
+the diminution of the acuteness of the question concerning
+miracles. It certainly gives to that question a new form. A
+philosophy which asserts the constant presence <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page176" id="page176"></a>{176}</span> of God in
+nature and the whole life of the world, a criticism which has given
+us a truer notion of the documents which record the biblical
+miracles, the reverent sense of ignorance which our increasing
+knowledge affords, have tended to diminish the dogmatism of men on
+either side of the debate. The contention on behalf of the miracle,
+in the traditional sense of the word, once seemed the bulwark of
+positive religion, the distinction between the man who was
+satisfied with a naturalistic explanation of the universe and one
+whose devout soul asked for something more. On the other hand, the
+contention against the miracle appeared to be a necessary corollary
+of the notion of a law and order which are inviolable throughout
+the universe. Furthermore, many men have come of themselves to the
+conclusion for which Schleiermacher long ago contended. Whatever
+may be theoretically determined concerning miracles, yet the
+miracle can never again be regarded as among the foundations of
+faith. This is for the simplest of reasons. The belief in a miracle
+presupposes faith. It is the faith which sustains the miracle, and
+not the miracle the faith. Jesus is to men the incomparable moral
+and spiritual magnitude which he is, not on the evidence of some
+unparalleled things physical which it is alleged he did. Quite the
+contrary, it is the immediate impression of the moral and spiritual
+wonder which Jesus is, that prepares what credence we can gather
+for the wonders which it is declared he did. This is a transfer of
+emphasis, a redistribution of weight in the structure of our
+thought, the relief of which many appreciate who have not reasoned
+the matter through for themselves.</p>
+<p>Schleiermacher had said, and Herrmann and others repeat the
+thought, that, as the Christian faith finds in Christ the highest
+revelation, miracles may reasonably be expected of him.
+Nevertheless, he adds, these deeds can be called miracles or
+esteemed extraordinary, only as containing something which was
+beyond contemporary knowledge of the regular and orderly connexion
+between physical and spiritual life. Therewith, it must be evident,
+that the notion of the miraculous is fundamentally changed. So it
+comes to pass <span class="pagenum"><a name="page177" id=
+"page177"></a>{177}</span> that we have a book like Mackintosh's
+<i>Natural History of the Christian Religion</i>, 1894, whose
+avowed purpose is to do away with the miraculous altogether. Of
+course, the author means the traditional notion of the miraculous,
+according to which it is the essence of arbitrariness and the
+negation of law. It is not that he has less sense for the divine
+life of the world, or for the quality of Christianity as
+revelation. On the other hand, we have a book like Percy Gardner's
+<i>Exploratio Evangelica</i>, 1899. With the most searching
+criticism of the narratives of some miracles, there is reverent
+confession, on the author's part, that he is baffled by the reports
+of others. There is recognition of unknown possibilities in the
+case of a character like that of Jesus. It is not that Gardner has
+a less stringent sense of fact and of the inexorableness of law
+than has Mackintosh or an ardent physicist. The problem is reduced
+to that of the choice of expression. We are not able to withhold a
+justification of the scholar who declares: We must not say that we
+believe in the miraculous. This language is sure to be appropriated
+by those who still take their departure from the old dualism, now
+hopelessly obsolete, for which a breach of the law of nature was
+the crowning evidence of the love of God. On the other hand, the
+assertion that we do not believe in the miraculous will easily be
+taken by some to mean the denial of the whole sense of the nearness
+and power and love of God, and of the unimagined possibilities of
+such a moral nature as was that of Christ. It is to be repeated
+that we have here a mere difference as to terms. The debate is no
+longer about ideas.</p>
+<p>The traditional notion of the miracle arose out of the confusion
+of two series of ideas which, in the last analysis, have nothing to
+do with each other. On the one hand, there is the conception of law
+and order, of cause and effect, of the unbroken connexion of
+nature. On the other hand is the thought of the divine purpose in
+the life of the world and of the individual. By the aid of that
+first sequence of thoughts we find ourselves in the universe and
+interpret the world of fact to ourselves. Yet in the other sequence
+lies the essence of religion. The two sequences may perfectly well
+coexist <span class="pagenum"><a name="page178" id=
+"page178"></a>{178}</span> in the same mind. Out of the attempt to
+combine them nothing clear or satisfying can issue. If one should
+be, to-day, brought face to face with a fact which was alleged to
+be a miracle, his instinctive effort would be, nevertheless, to
+seek to find its cause, to establish for it a connexion in the
+natural order. In the ancient world men did not argue thus, nor in
+the modern world until less than two hundred years ago. The
+presumption of the order of nature had not assumed for them the
+proportions which it has for us. For us it is overwhelming,
+self-evident. Therewith is not involved that we lack belief in a
+divine purpose for the world and for the individual life.</p>
+<p>We do not deny that there are laws of nature of which we have no
+experience, facts which we do not understand, events which, if they
+should occur, would stand before us as unique. Still, the decisive
+thing is, that in face of such an event, instead of viewing it
+quite simply as a divine intervention, as men used to do, we, with
+equal simplicity and no less devoutness, conceive that same event
+as only an illustration of a connexion in nature which we do not
+understand. There is no inherent reason why we may not understand
+it. When we do understand it, there will be nothing more about it
+that is conceivably miraculous. There will be then no longer a
+unique quality attaching to the event. Therewith ends the possible
+significance of such an event as proof of divine intervention for
+our especial help. We have but a connexion in nature such that,
+whether understood or not, if it were to recur, the event would
+recur.</p>
+<p>The miracles which are related in the Scripture may be divided
+for our consideration into three classes. To the first class belong
+most of those which are related in the Old Testament, but some also
+which are conspicuous in the New Testament. They are, in some
+cases, the poetical and imaginative representation of the
+profoundest religious ideas. So soon as one openly concedes this,
+when there is no longer any necessity either to attack or to defend
+the miracle in question, one is in a position to acknowledge how
+deep and wonderful the thoughts often are and how beautiful the
+form <span class="pagenum"><a name="page179" id=
+"page179"></a>{179}</span> in which they are conveyed. It is
+through imagination and symbolism that we are able to convey the
+subtlest meanings which we have. Still more was this the case with
+men of an earlier age. In the second place, the narratives of
+miracles are, some of them, of such a sort that we may say that an
+event or circumstance in nature has been obviously apprehended in
+na&iuml;ve fashion. This by no means forbids us to interpret that
+same event in quite a different way. The men of former time,
+exactly in proportion as they had less sense of the order of nature
+than have we, so were they also far readier to assume the immediate
+forthputting of the power of God. This was true not merely of the
+uneducated. It is difficult, or even impossible, for us to find out
+what the event was. Fact and apprehension are inextricably
+interwoven. That which really happened is concealed from us by the
+tale which had intended to reveal it. In the third place, there are
+many cases in the history of Jesus, and some in that of the
+apostles and prophets, in which that which is related moves in the
+borderland between body and soul, spirit and matter, the region of
+the influence of will, one's own or that of another, over physical
+conditions. Concerning such cases we are disposed, far more than
+were men even a few years ago, to concede that there is much that
+is by no means yet investigated, and the soundest judgment we can
+form is far from being sure. Even if we recognise to the full the
+lamentable resurgence of outworn superstitions and stupidities,
+which again pass current among us for an unhappy moment, if we
+detect the questionable or manifestly evil consequences of certain
+uses made or alleged of psychic influence, yet still we are not
+always in a position to say, with certainty, what is true in tales
+of healing which we hear in our own day. There are certain of the
+statements concerning Jesus' healing power and action which are
+absolutely baffling. They can be eliminated from the narrative only
+by a procedure which might just as well eliminate the narrative. In
+many of the narratives there may be much that is true. In some all
+may be as related. In Jesus' time, on the witness of the Scripture
+itself, it was assumed as something no one questioned, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page180" id="page180"></a>{180}</span> that
+miraculous deeds were performed, not alone by Jesus and the
+apostles, but by many others, and not always even by the good. Such
+deeds were performed through the power of evil spirits as well as
+by the power of God. To imagine that the working of miracles proved
+that Jesus came from God, is the most patent importation of a
+modern apologetic notion into the area of ancient thought. We must
+remember that Jesus himself laid no great weight upon the miracles
+which we assume that he believed he wrought, and some of which we
+may believe that he did work. Many he performed with hesitation and
+desired so far as possible to conceal.</p>
+<p>Even if we were in a position at one point or another in the
+life of Jesus to defend the traditional assumptions concerning the
+miraculous, yet it must be evident how opposed it is to right
+reason, to lay stress on the abstract necessity of belief in the
+miraculous. The traditional conception of the miraculous is done
+away for us. This is not at all by the fact that we are in a
+position to say with Matthew Arnold: 'The trouble with miracles is
+that they never happen.' We do not know enough to say that. To
+stake all on the assertion of the impossibility of so-called
+miracles is as foolish as to stake much on the affirmation of their
+actuality. The connexion of nature is only an induction. This can
+never be complete. The real question is both more complex and also
+more simple. The question is whether, even if an event, the most
+unparalleled of those related in the Gospels or outside of them,
+should be proved before our very eyes to have taken place, the
+question is whether we should believe it to have been a miracle in
+the traditional sense, an event in which the actual&mdash;not the
+known, but the possible&mdash;order of nature had been broken
+through, and in the old sense, God had arbitrarily supervened.</p>
+<p>Allowed that the event were, in our own experience and in the
+known experience of the race, unparalleled, yet it would never
+occur to us to suppose but that there was a law of this case, also,
+a connexion in nature in which, as work of God, it occurred, and in
+which, if the conditions were repeated, it would recur. We should
+unceasingly endeavour through <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page181" id="page181"></a>{181}</span> observation, reflexion, and
+new knowledge, to show how we might subordinate this event in the
+connexion of nature which we assume. We should feel that we knew
+more, and not less, of God, if we should succeed. And if our effort
+should prove altogether futile, we should be no less sure that such
+natural connexion exists. This is because nature is for us the
+revelation of the divine. The divine, we assume, has a natural
+order of working. Its inviolability is the divinest thing about it.
+It is through this sequence of ideas that we are in a position to
+deny, not facts which may be inexplicable, but the traditional
+conception of the miracle. For surely no one needs to be told that
+this is not the conception of the miracle which has existed in the
+minds of the devout, and equally of the undevout, from the
+beginning of thought until the present day.</p>
+<p>However, there is nothing in all of this which hinders us from
+believing with a full heart in the love and grace and care of God,
+in his holy and redeeming purpose for mankind and for the
+individual. It is true that this belief cannot any longer retain
+its na&iuml;ve and childish form. It is true that it demands of a
+man far more of moral force, of ethical and spiritual mastery, of
+insight and firm will, to sustain the belief in the purpose of God
+for himself and for all men, when a man believes that he sees and
+feels God only in and through nature and history, through personal
+consciousness and the personal consciousness of Jesus. It is true
+that it has, apparently, been easier for men to think of God as
+outside and above his world, and of themselves as separated from
+their fellows by his special providence. It is more difficult,
+through glad and intelligent subjection to all laws of nature and
+of history, to achieve the education of one's spirit, to make good
+one's inner deliverance from the world, to aid others in the same
+struggle and to set them on their way to God. Men grow uncertain
+within themselves, because they say that traditional religion has
+apprehended the matter in a different way. This is true. It is also
+misleading. Whatever miracles Jesus may have performed, no one can
+say that he performed them to make life easier for himself, to
+escape <span class="pagenum"><a name="page182" id=
+"page182"></a>{182}</span> the common lot, to avoid struggle, to
+evade suffering and disgraceful death. On the contrary, in genuine
+human self-distrust, but also in genuine heroism, he gave himself
+to his vocation, accepting all that went therewith, and finished
+the work of God which he had made his own. This is the more
+wonderful because it lay so much nearer to him than it can lie to
+us, to pray for special evidence of the love of God and to set his
+faith on the receiving of it. He had not the conception of the
+relation of God to nature and history which we have.</p>
+<p>We may well view the modern tendency to belief in healings
+through prayer, suggestion and faith, as an intelligible, an
+interesting, and in part, a touching manifestation. Of course there
+is mingled with it much dense ignorance, some superstition and even
+deception. Yet behind such a phenomenon there is meaning. Men of
+this mind make earnest with the thought that God cares for them.
+Without that thought there is no religion. They have been taught to
+find the evidence of God's love and care in the unusual. They are
+quite logical. It has been a weak point of the traditional belief
+that men have said that in the time of Christ there were miracles,
+but since that time, no more. Why not, if we can only in spirit
+come near to Christ and God? They are quite logical also in that
+they have repudiated modern science. To be sure, no inconsiderable
+part of them use the word science continually.</p>
+<p>But the very esoteric quality of their science is that it means
+something which no one else ever understood that it meant. In
+reality their breach with science is more radical than their breach
+with Christianity. They feel the contradiction in which most men
+are bound fast, who will let science have its way, up to a certain
+point, but who beyond that, would retain the miracle. Dimly the
+former appreciate that this position is impossible. They leave it
+to other men to become altogether scientific if they wish. For
+themselves they prefer to remain religious. What a revival of
+ancient superstitions they have brought to pass, is obvious. Still
+we shall never get beyond such adventurous and preposterous
+endeavours to rescue that which is inestimably precious in
+religion, until the false antithesis <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page183" id="page183"></a>{183}</span> between reason and faith,
+the lying contradiction between the providence of God and the order
+of nature, is overcome. Some science mankind apparently must have.
+Altogether without religion the majority, it would seem, will never
+be. How these are related, the one to the other, not every one
+sees. Many attempt their admixture in unhappy ways. They might try
+letting them stand in peace as complement and supplement the one to
+the other. Still better, they may perhaps some day see how each
+penetrates, permeates and glorifies the other.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap5-6" id="chap5-6">THE SOCIAL SCIENCES</a></h3>
+<p>We said that the last generation had been characterised by an
+unexampled concentration of intellectual interest upon problems
+presented by the social sciences. With this has gone an unrivalled
+earnestness in the interpretation of religion as a social force.
+The great religious enthusiasm has been that of the application of
+Christianity to the social aspects of life. This effort has
+furnished most of the watchwords of religious teaching. It has laid
+vigorous, not to say violent, hands on religious institutions. It
+has given a new perspective to effort and a new impulse to
+devotion. The revival of religion in our age has taken this
+direction, with an exclusiveness which has had both good and evil
+consequences. Yet, before all, it should be made clear that it
+constitutes a religious revival. Some are deploring the prostrate
+condition of spiritual interests. If one judged only by
+conventional standards, they have much evidence upon their side.
+Some are seeking to galvanise religious life by recurrence to
+evangelistic methods successfully operative half a century ago. The
+outstanding fact is that the age shows immense religious vitality,
+so soon as one concedes that it must be allowed to show its
+vitality in its own way. It is the age of the social question. One
+must be ignorant indeed of the activity of the churches and of the
+productivity of religious thinkers, if he does not own that in
+Christian circles also no questions are so rife as these. Whether
+the panaceas have <span class="pagenum"><a name="page184" id=
+"page184"></a>{184}</span> been all wise or profitable may be
+questioned. Whether the interest has not been even excessive and
+one-sided, whether the accusation has not been occasionally unjust
+and the self-accusation morbid, these are questions which it might
+be possible in some quarters to ask. This is, however, only another
+form of proof of what we say. The religious interest in social
+questions has not been aroused primarily by intellectual and
+scientific impulses, nor fostered mainly by doctrinaire discussion.
+On the contrary, the initiative has been from the practical side.
+It has been a question of life and service. If anything, one often
+misses the scientific note in the flood of semi-religious
+literature relating to this theme, the realisation that, to do
+well, it is often profitable to think. Yet there is effort to
+mediate the best results of social-scientific thinking, through
+clerical education and directly to the laity. On the other hand, a
+deep sense of ethical and spiritual responsibility is prevalent
+among thinkers upon social topics.</p>
+<p>Often indeed has the quality of Christianity been observed which
+is here exemplified. Each succeeding age has read into Christ's
+teachings, or drawn out from his example, the special meaning which
+that generation, or that social level, or that individual man had
+need to draw. To them in their enthusiasm it has often seemed as if
+this were the only lesson reasonable men could draw. Nothing could
+be more enlightening than is reflexion upon this reading of the
+ever-changing ideals of man's life into Christianity, or of
+Christianity into the ever-advancing ideals of man's life. This
+chameleonlike quality of Christianity is the farthest possible
+remove from the changelessness which men love to attribute to
+religion. It is the most wonderful quality which Christianity
+possesses. It is precisely because of the recognition of this
+capacity for change that one may safely argue the continuance of
+Christianity in the world. Yet also because of this recognition,
+one is put upon his guard against joining too easily in the clamour
+that a past apprehension of religion was altogether wrong, or that
+a new and urgent one, in its exclusive emphasis and its entirety,
+is right. Our age is <span class="pagenum"><a name="page185" id=
+"page185"></a>{185}</span> haunted by the sense of terrific social
+and economic inequalities which prevail. It has set its heart upon
+the elimination of those inequalities. It is an age whose
+disrespect for religion is in some part due to the fact that
+religion has not done away with these inequalities. It is an age
+which is immediately interested in an interpretation of religion
+which will make central the contention that, before all things
+else, these inequalities must be done away. If religion can be made
+a means of every man's getting his share of the blessings of this
+world, well and good. If not, there are many men and women to whom
+religion seems utterly meaningless.</p>
+<p>This sentence hardly overstates the case. It is the challenge of
+the age to religion to do something which the age profoundly needs,
+and which religion under its age-long dominant apprehension has not
+conspicuously done, nor even on a great scale attempted. It is the
+challenge to religion to undertake a work of surpassing
+grandeur&mdash;nothing less than the actualisation of the whole
+ideal of the life of man. Religious men respond with the quickened
+and conscientious conviction, not indeed that they have laid too
+great an emphasis upon the spiritual, but that under a dualistic
+conception of God and man and world, they have never sufficiently
+realised that the spiritual is to be realised in the material, the
+ideal in and not apart from the actual, the eternal in and not
+after the temporal. Yet with that oscillatory quality which belongs
+to human movements, especially where old wrongs and errors have
+come deeply to be felt, a part of the literature of the contention
+shows marked tendency to extremes. A religion in the body must
+become a religion of the body. A Christianity of the social state
+runs risk of being apprehended as merely one more means for
+compassing outward and material ends. Religion does stand for the
+inner life and the transcendent world, only not an inner life
+through the neglect of the outer, or a transcendent world in some
+far-off star or after an &aelig;on or two. There might be meaning
+in the argument that, exactly because so many other forces in our
+age do make for the realisation of the outer life and present world
+with an effectiveness and success which no previous age has ever
+dreamed, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page186" id=
+"page186"></a>{186}</span> there is the more reason, and not the
+less, why religion should still be religion. Exactly this is the
+contention of Eueken in one of the most significant contributions
+of recent years to the philosophy of religion, his
+<i>Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion</i>, 1901, transl. Jones, 1911. The
+very source and cause of the sure recovery of religion in our age
+will be the experience of the futility, the bankruptcy, of a
+civilisation without faith. No nobler argument has been heard in
+our time for the spiritual meaning of religion, with the fullest
+recognition of all its other meanings.</p>
+<p>The modern emphasis on the social aspects of religion may be
+said to have been first clearly expressed in Seeley's <i>Ecce
+Homo</i>, 1867. The pith of the book is in this phrase: 'To
+reorganise society and to bind the members of it together by the
+closest ties was the business of Jesus' life.' Allusion has been
+made to Fremantle's <i>The World as the Subject of Redemption</i>,
+1885. Worthy of note is also Fairbairn's <i>Religion in History and
+Modern Life</i>, 1894; pre-eminently so is Bosanquet's <i>The
+Civilisation of Christendom</i>, 1893. Westcott's <i>Incarnation
+and Common Life</i>, 1893, contains utterances of weight. Peabody,
+in his book, <i>Jesus Christ and the Social Question</i>, 1905, has
+given, on the whole, the best r&eacute;sum&eacute; of the
+discussion. He conveys incidentally an impression of the body of
+literature produced in recent years, in which it is assumed,
+sometimes with embitterment, that the centre of gravity of
+Christianity is outside the Church. Sell, in the very title of his
+illuminating little book, <i>Christenthum und Weltgeschichte seit
+der Reformation: das Christenthum in seiner Entwickelung &uuml;ber
+die Kirche hinaus</i>, 1910, records an impression, which is
+widespread and true, that the characteristic mark of modern
+Christianity is that it has transcended the organs and agencies
+officially created for it. It has become non-ecclesiastical, if not
+actually hostile to the Church. It has permeated the world in
+unexpected fashion and does the deeds of Christianity, though
+rather eager to avoid the name. The anti-clericalism of the Latin
+countries is not unintelligible, the anti-ecclesiasticism of the
+Teutonic not without a cause. German socialism, ever since Karl
+Marx, has been <span class="pagenum"><a name="page187" id=
+"page187"></a>{187}</span> fundamentally antagonistic to any
+religion whatsoever. It is purely secularist in tone. This is also
+a strained situation, liable to become perverse. That part of the
+Christian Church which understands itself, rejoices in nothing so
+much as in the fact that the spirit of Christ is so widely
+disseminated, his influence felt by many who do not know what
+influence it is which they feel, his work done by vast numbers who
+would never call themselves his workers. That part of the Church is
+not therewith convinced but that there is need of the Church as
+institution, and of those who are consciously disciples of Jesus in
+the world.</p>
+<p>By far the largest question, however, which is raised in this
+connexion, is one different from any thus far intimated. It is,
+perhaps, the last question one would have expected the literature
+of the social movement to raise. It is, namely, the question of the
+individual. Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century a sort
+of universalistic optimism, to which the individual is sacrificed,
+has obtained. Within the period of which this book treats the world
+has won an enlargement of horizon of which it never dreamed. It has
+gained a forecast of the future of culture and civilisation which
+is beyond imagination. The access of comfort makes men at home in
+the world as they never were at home. There has been set a value on
+this life which life never had before. The succession of
+discoveries and applications of discovery makes it seem as if there
+were to be no end in this direction. From Rousseau to Spencer men
+have elaborated the view that the historical process cannot really
+issue in anything else than in ever higher stages of perfection and
+of happiness. They postulate a continuous enhancement of energy and
+a steady perfecting of intellectual and moral quality. As the goal
+of evolution appears an ideal condition which is either
+indefinitely remote, that is, which gives room for the bliss of
+infinite progress in its direction, or else a definitely attainable
+condition, which would have within itself the conditions of
+perpetuity.</p>
+<p>The resistlessness with which this new view of the life of
+civilisation has won acknowledgment from men of all classes
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page188" id=
+"page188"></a>{188}</span> is amazing. It rests upon a belief in
+the self-sufficiency and the all-sufficiency of the life of this
+world, of the bearings of which it may be assumed that few of its
+votaries are aware. In reality this view cannot by any possibility
+be described as the result of knowledge. On the contrary, it is a
+venture of faith. It is the peculiar, the very characteristic and
+suggestive form which the faith of our age takes. Men believe in
+this indefinite progress of the world and of mankind, because
+without postulating such progress they do not see how they can
+assume the absolute worth of an activity which is yet the only
+thing which has any interest to most of them. Under this view one
+can assign to the individual life a definite significance, only
+upon the supposition that the individual is the organ of
+realisation of a part of this progress of mankind. All happiness
+and suffering, all changes in knowledge and manner of conduct, are
+supposed to have no worth each for itself or for the sake of the
+individual, but only for their relation to the movement as a whole.
+Surely this is an illusion. Exactly that in which the
+characteristic quality of the world and of life is found, the
+individual personalities, the single generations, the concrete
+events&mdash;these lose, in this view, their own particular worth.
+What can possibly be the worth of a whole of which the parts have
+no worth? We have here but a parallel on a huge scale of that
+deadly trait in our own private lives, according to which it makes
+no difference what we are doing, so only that we are doing, or
+whither we are going, so only that we cease not to go, or what our
+noise is all about, so only that there be no end of the noise.
+Certainly no one can establish the value of the evolutionary
+process in and of itself.</p>
+<p>If the movement as a whole has no definite end that has absolute
+worth, then it has no worth except as the stages, the individual
+factors included in it, attain to something within themselves which
+is of increasing worth. If the movement achieves this, then it has
+worth, not otherwise. We may illustrate this question by asking
+ourselves concerning the existence and significance of suffering
+and of the evil and of the bad which are in the world, in their
+relation to this <span class="pagenum"><a name="page189" id=
+"page189"></a>{189}</span> tendency to indefinite progress which is
+supposed to be inherent in civilisation. On this theory we have to
+say that the suffering of the individual is necessary for the
+development and perfecting of the whole. As over against the whole
+the individual has no right to make demands as to welfare or
+happiness. The bad also becomes only relative. In the movement
+taken as a whole, it is probably unavoidable. In any case it is
+negligible, since the movement is irresistible. All ethical values
+are absorbed in the dynamic ones, all personal values in the
+collective ones. Surely the sole intelligent question about any
+civilisation is, what sort of men does it produce. If it produces
+worthless individuals, it is so far forth a worthless civilisation.
+If it has sacrificed many worthy men in order to produce this
+ignoble result, then it is more obviously ignoble than ever.</p>
+<p>Furthermore, this notion of an inherent necessity and an
+irresistible tendency to progress is a chimera. The progress of
+mankind is a task. It is something to which the worthy human spirit
+is called upon to make contribution. The unworthy never hear the
+call. Progress is not a natural necessity. It is an ethical
+obligation. It is a task which has been fulfilled by previous
+generations in varying degrees of perfectness. It will be
+participated in by succeeding generations with varying degrees of
+wisdom and success. But as to there being anything autonomous about
+it, this is sheer hallucination, myth-making again, on the part of
+those who boast that they despise the myth, miracle-mongering on
+the part of those who have abjured the miracle, nonsense on the
+part of those who boast that they alone are sane. There is no
+ultimate source of civilisation but the individual, as there is
+also no issue of civilisation but in individuals. Men, characters,
+personalities, are the makers of it. Men are the product which is
+made. The higher stages and achievements of the life of society
+have come to pass always and only upon condition that single
+personalities have recognised the problem, seen their individual
+duty and known how to inspire others with enthusiasm. Periods of
+decline are always those in which this personal element cannot make
+itself felt. Democracies <span class="pagenum"><a name="page190"
+id="page190"></a>{190}</span> and periods of the intensity of
+emphasis upon the social movement, tend directly to the depression
+and suppression of personality.<a id="footnotetag7" name=
+"footnotetag7"></a><a href="#footnote7"><sup>7</sup></a> Such
+reflexions will have served their purpose if they give us some
+clear sense of what we have to understand as the effect of the
+social movement on religion. They may give also some forecast of
+the effect of real religion on the social movement. For religion is
+the relation of God and personality. It can be social only in the
+sense that society, in all its normal relations, is the sphere
+within which that relation of God and personality is to be wrought
+out.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote7" name=
+"footnote7"></a><b>Footnote 7:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag7">(return)</a>
+<p>Siebeck, <i>Religionsphilosophie</i>, 1893, s. 407.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page191" id=
+"page191"></a>{191}</span>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="chap6" id="chap6">CHAPTER VI</a></h2>
+<h3><a name="chap6-1" id="chap6-1">THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES:
+ACTION AND REACTION</a></h3>
+<p>In those aspects of our subject with which we have thus far
+dealt, leadership has been largely with the Germans. Effort was
+indeed made in the chapter on the sciences to illustrate the
+progress of thought by reference to British writers. In this
+department the original and creative contribution of British
+authors was great. There were, however, also in the earlier portion
+of the nineteenth century movements of religious thought in Great
+Britain and America related to some of those which we have
+previously considered. Moreover, one of the most influential
+movements of English religious thought, the so-called Oxford
+Movement, with the Anglo-Catholic revival which it introduced, was
+of a reactionary tendency. It has seemed, therefore, feasible to
+append to this chapter that which we must briefly say concerning
+the general movement of reaction which marked the century. This
+reactionary movement has indeed everywhere run parallel to the one
+which we have endeavoured to record. It has often with vigour run
+counter to our movement. It has revealed the working of earnest and
+sometimes anxious minds in directions opposed to those which we
+have been studying. No one can fail to be aware that there has been
+a great Catholic revival in the nineteenth century. That revival
+has had place in the Roman Catholic countries of the Continent as
+well. It was in order to include the privilege of reference to
+these aspects of our subject that this chapter was given a double
+title. Yet in no country has the nineteenth century so favourably
+altered the position of the Roman Catholic Church as in England. In
+no country has a Church <span class="pagenum"><a name="page192" id=
+"page192"></a>{192}</span> which has been esteemed to be Protestant
+been so much influenced by Catholic ideas. This again is a reason
+for including our reference to the reaction here.</p>
+<p>According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy may be
+said to have begun in Great Britain in the year 1825, with the
+publication of Coleridge's <i>Aids to Reflection</i>. In
+Coleridge's <i>Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit</i>, published
+six years after his death in 1834, we have a suggestion of the
+biblical-critical movement which was beginning to shape itself in
+Germany. In the same years we have evidence in the works of Erskine
+and the early writings of Campbell, that in Scotland theologians
+were thinking on Schleiermacher's lines. In those same years books
+of more or less marked rationalistic tendency were put forth by the
+Oriel School. Finally, with Pusey's <i>Assize Sermon</i>, in 1833,
+Newman felt that the movement later to be called Tractarian had
+begun. We shall not be wrong, therefore, in saying that the decade
+following 1825 saw the beginnings in Britain of more formal
+reflexion upon all the aspects of the theme with which we are
+concerned.</p>
+<p>What went before that, however, in the way of liberal religious
+thinking, though informal in its nature, should not be ignored. It
+was the work of the poets of the end of the eighteenth and of the
+beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The culmination of the great
+revolt against the traditional in state and society and against the
+conventional in religion, had been voiced in Britain largely by the
+poets. So vigorous was this utterance and so effective, that some
+have spoken of the contribution of the English poets to the
+theological reconstruction. It is certain that the utterances of
+the poets tended greatly to the dissemination of the new ideas.
+There was in Great Britain no such unity as we have observed among
+the Germans, either of the movement as a whole or in its various
+parts. There was a consecution nothing less than marvellous in the
+work of the philosophers from Kant to Hegel. There was a
+theological sequence from Schleiermacher to Ritschl. There was an
+unceasing critical advance from the days of Strauss. There was
+nothing resembling this in the work of the English-speaking people.
+The contributions <span class="pagenum"><a name="page193" id=
+"page193"></a>{193}</span> were for a long time only sporadic. The
+movement had no inclusiveness. There was no aspect of a solid front
+in the advance. In the department of the sciences only was the
+situation different. In a way, therefore, it will be necessary in
+this chapter merely to single out individuals, to note points of
+conflict, one and another, all along the great line of advance. Or,
+to put it differently, it will be possible to pursue a
+chronological arrangement which would have been bewildering in our
+study heretofore. With the one great division between the
+progressive spirits and the men of the reaction, it will be
+possible to speak of philosophers, critics and theologians
+together, among their own contemporaries, and so to follow the
+century as it advances.</p>
+<p>In the closing years of the eighteenth century in England what
+claimed to be a rational supernaturalism prevailed. Men sought to
+combine faith in revealed religion with the empirical philosophy of
+Locke. They conceived God and his relation to the world under
+deistical forms. The educated often lacked in singular degree all
+deeper religious feeling. They were averse to mysticism and spurned
+enthusiasm. Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical
+side of the empirical philosophy, played a prominent part also in
+orthodox belief. The theory of the universe which obtained among
+the religious is seen at its worst in some of the volumes of the
+Warburton Lectures, and at its best perhaps in Butler's <i>Analogy
+of Natural and Revealed Religion</i>. The character and views of
+the clergy and of the ruling class among the laity of the Church of
+England, early in the nineteenth century, are pictured with love
+and humour in Trollope's novels. They form the background in many
+of George Eliot's books, where, in more mordant manner, both their
+strength and weaknesses are shown. Even the remarks which introduce
+Dean Church's <i>Oxford Movement</i>, 1891, in which the churchly
+element is dealt with in deep affection, give anything but an
+inspiring view.</p>
+<p>The contrast with this would-be rational and unemotional
+religious respectability of the upper classes was furnished, for
+masses of the people, in the quickening of the consciousness
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page194" id=
+"page194"></a>{194}</span> of sin and grace after the manner of the
+Methodists. But the Methodism of the earlier age had as good as no
+intellectual relations whatsoever. The Wesleys and Whitefield had
+indeed influenced a considerable portion of the Anglican communion.
+Their pietistic trait, combined, for the most part, with a
+Calvinism which Wesley abhorred and an old-fashioned low church
+feeling with which also Wesley had no sympathy, shows itself in the
+so-called evangelical party which was strong before 1830. This
+evangelical movement in the Church of England manifested deep
+religious feeling, it put forth zealous philanthropic effort, it
+had among its representatives men and women of great beauty of
+personal character and piety. Yet it was completely cut off from
+any living relation to the thought of the age. There was among its
+representatives no spirit of theological inquiry. There was, if
+anything, less probability of theological reconstruction, from this
+quarter, than from the circles of the older German pietism, with
+which this English evangelicalism of the time of the later Georges
+had not a little in common. There had been a great enthusiasm for
+humanity at the opening of the period of the French Revolution, but
+the excesses and atrocities of the Revolution had profoundly
+shocked the English mind. There was abroad something of the same
+sense for the return to nature, and of the greatness of man, which
+moved Schiller and Goethe. The exponents of it were, however,
+almost exclusively the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron.
+There was nothing which combined these various elements as parts of
+a great whole. Britain had stood outside the area of the
+Revolution, and yet had put forth stupendous efforts, ultimately
+successful, to make an end of the revolutionary era and of the
+Napoleonic despotism. This tended perhaps to give to Britons some
+natural satisfaction in the British Constitution and the
+established Church which flourished under it. Finally, while men on
+the Continent were devising holy alliances and other chimeras of
+the sort, England was precipitated into the earlier acute stages of
+the industrial revolution in which she has led the European nations
+and still leads. This fact explains a certain preoccupation
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page195" id=
+"page195"></a>{195}</span> of the British mind with questions
+remote from theological reconstruction or religious
+speculation.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-2" id="chap6-2">THE POETS</a></h3>
+<p>It may now sound like a contradiction if we assert that the
+years from 1780 to 1830 constitute the era of the noblest English
+poetry since the times of great Elizabeth. The social direction of
+the new theology of the present day, with its cry against every
+kind of injustice, with its claim of an equal opportunity for a
+happy life for every man&mdash;this was the forecast of Cowper, as
+it had been of Blake. To Blake all outward infallible authority of
+books or churches was iniquitous. He was at daggers drawn with
+every doctrine which set limit to the freedom of all men to love
+God, or which could doubt that God had loved all men. Jesus alone
+had seen the true thing. God was a father, every man his child.
+Long before 1789, Burns was filled with the new ideas of the
+freedom and brotherhood of man, with zeal for the overthrow of
+unjust privilege. He had spoken in imperishable words of the
+holiness of the common life. He had come into contact with the most
+dreadful consequences of Calvinism. He has pilloried these
+mercilessly in his 'Holy Tulzie' and in his 'Holy Willie's Prayer.'
+Such poems must have shaken Calvinism more than a thousand liberal
+sermons could have done. What Coleridge might have done in this
+field, had he not so early turned to prose, it is not easy to say.
+The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction, fundamental
+to his later philosophy, that all the new ideas concerning men and
+the world are a revelation of God. Wordsworth seems never
+consciously to have broken with the current theology. His view of
+the natural glory and goodness of humanity, especially among the
+poor and simple, has not much relation to that theology. His view
+of nature, not as created of God. in the conventional sense, but as
+itself filled with God, of God as conscious of himself at every
+point of nature's being, has still less. Man and nature are but
+different manifestations of the one soul of all. Byron's
+contribution to Christian thought, we need <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page196" id="page196"></a>{196}</span> hardly
+say, was of a negative sort. It was destructive rather than
+constructive. Among the conventions and hypocrisies of society
+there were none which he more utterly despised than those of
+religion and the Church as he saw these. There is something
+volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks. But there is a difference.
+Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current
+religion. Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.
+Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron thought he had
+none. Posterity has felt that he had much. His attack was made in a
+reckless bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the truth of
+many things which he said is now overwhelmingly obvious. Shelley
+began with being what he called an atheist. He ended with being
+what we call an agnostic, whose pure poetic spirit carried him far
+into the realm of the highest idealism. The existence of a
+conscious will within the universe is not quite thinkable. Yet
+immortal love pervades the whole. Immortality is improbable, but
+his highest flights continually imply it. He is sure that when any
+theology violates the primary human affections, it tramples into
+the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become good.
+The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss later
+called 'the old faith and the new,' or, as Arnold phrased it, were
+'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,'
+found their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur
+Clough. From the time of the opening of Tennyson's work, the poets,
+not by destruction but by construction, not in opposition to
+religion but in harmony with it, have built up new doctrines of God
+and man and aided incalculably in preparing the way for a new and
+nobler theology. In the latter part of the nineteenth century there
+was perhaps no one man in England who did more to read all of the
+vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher faith, and to fill
+such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of knowledge, than
+did Browning. Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a little of
+the noblest conviction of the age. And what shall one say of Mrs.
+Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and
+Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page197" id="page197"></a>{197}</span> who have spoken, often with
+consummate power and beauty, that which one never says at all
+without faith and rarely says well without art?</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-3" id="chap6-3">COLERIDGE</a></h3>
+<p>Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at his father's
+vicarage, Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire. He was the tenth child of
+his parents, weak in frame, always suffering much. He was a student
+at Christ's Hospital, London, where he was properly bullied, then
+at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he did not take his degree. For
+some happy years he lived in the Lake region and was the friend of
+Wordsworth and Southey. He studied in G&ouml;ttingen, a thing
+almost unheard of in his time. The years 1798 to 1813 were indeed
+spent in utter misery, through the opium habit which he had
+contracted while seeking relief from rheumatic pain. He wrote and
+taught and talked in Highgate from 1814 to 1834. He had planned
+great works which never took shape. For a brief period he severed
+his connexion with the English Church, coming under Unitarian
+influence. He then reverted to the relation in which his
+ecclesiastical instincts were satisfied. We read his <i>Aids to
+Reflection</i> and his <i>Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit</i>,
+and wonder how they can ever have exerted a great influence.
+Nevertheless, they were fresh and stimulating in their time. That
+Coleridge was a power, we have testimony from men differing among
+themselves so widely as do Hare, Sterling, Newman and John Stuart
+Mill. He was a master of style. He had insight and breadth. Tulloch
+says of the <i>Aids</i>, that it is a book which none but a thinker
+upon divine things will ever like. Not all even of these have liked
+it. Inexcusably fragmentary it sometimes seems. One is fain to ask:
+What right has any man to publish a scrap-book of his musings?
+Coleridge had the ambition to lay anew the foundations of spiritual
+philosophy. The <i>Aids</i> were but of the nature of prolegomena.
+For substance his philosophy went back to Locke and Hume and to the
+Cambridge Platonists. He had learned of Kant and Schleiermacher as
+well. He was no metaphysician, but a <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page198" id="page198"></a>{198}</span> keen interpreter of
+spiritual facts, who himself had been quickened by a particularly
+painful experience. He saw in Christianity, rightly conceived, at
+once the true explanation of our spiritual being and the remedy for
+its disorder. The evangelical tradition brought religion to a man
+from without. It took no account of man's spiritual constitution,
+beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of hell.
+Coleridge set out, not from sin alone, but from the whole deep
+basis of spiritual capacity and responsibility upon which sin
+rests. He asserts experience. We are as sure of the capacity for
+the good and of the experience of the good as we can be of the
+evil. The case is similar as to the truth. There are aspects of
+truth which transcend our powers. We use words without meaning when
+we talk of the plans of a being who is neither an object for our
+senses nor a part of our self-consciousness. All truth must be
+capable of being rendered into words conformable to reason.
+Theologians had declared their doctrines true or false without
+reference to the subjective standard of judgment. Coleridge
+contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data, but
+upon inward experience. The authority of Scripture is in its
+truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human
+reason and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The
+doctrine of an atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too
+comes within the range of spiritual experience. The apostolic
+language took colour from the traditions concerning sacrifice. Much
+has been taken by the Church as literal dogmatic statement which
+should be taken as more figure of speech, borrowed from Jewish
+sources.</p>
+<p>Coleridge feared that his thoughts concerning Scripture might,
+if published, do more harm than good. They were printed first in
+1840. Their writing goes back into the period long before the
+conflict raised by Strauss. There is not much here that one might
+not have learned from Herder and Lessing. Utterances of Whately and
+Arnold showed that minds in England were waking. But Coleridge's
+utterances rest consistently upon the philosophy of religion and
+theory of dogma which have been above implied. They are
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page199" id=
+"page199"></a>{199}</span> more significant than are mere flashes
+of generous insight, like those of the men named. The notion of
+verbal inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures
+could not possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical
+inquiry had made itself felt. The rabbinical idea was bound to
+disappear. A truer sense of the conditions attending the origins
+and progress of civilisation and of the immaturities through which
+religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, brought of
+necessity a changed idea of the nature of Scripture and revelation.
+Its literature must be read as literature, its history as history.
+For the answer in our hearts to the spirit in the Book, Coleridge
+used the phrase: 'It finds me.' 'Whatever finds me bears witness to
+itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Ghost. In the Bible
+there is more that finds me than in all the other books which I
+have read.' Still, there is much in the Bible that does not find
+me. It is full of contradictions, both moral and historical. Are we
+to regard these as all equally inspired? The Scripture itself does
+not claim that. Besides, what good would it do us to claim that the
+original documents were inerrant, unless we could claim also that
+they had been inerrantly transmitted? Apparently Coleridge thought
+that no one would ever claim that. Coleridge wrote also concerning
+the Church. His volume on <i>The Constitution of Church and
+State</i> appeared in 1830. It is the least satisfactory of his
+works. The vacillation of Coleridge's own course showed that upon
+this point his mind was never clear. Arnold also, though in a
+somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that Church and
+State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in
+its educational and religious aspect and organisation. If Thomas
+Arnold's moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save
+this theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be
+expected from Coleridge.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-4" id="chap6-4">THE ORIEL SCHOOL</a></h3>
+<p>It has often happened in the history of the English universities
+that a given college has become, through its body of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page200" id="page200"></a>{200}</span> tutors
+and students, through its common-room talk and literary work, the
+centre, for the time, of a movement of thought which gives
+leadership to the college. In this manner it has been customary to
+speak of the group of men who, before the rise of the Oxford
+Movement, gathered at Oriel College, as the Oriel School. Newman
+and Keble were both Oriel tutors. The Oriel men were of distinctly
+liberal tendency. There were men of note among them. There was
+Whately, Archbishop of Dublin after 1831, and Copleston, from whom
+both Keble and Newman owned that they learned much. There was
+Arnold, subsequently Headmaster of Rugby. There was Hampden,
+Professor of Divinity after 1836. The school was called from its
+liberalism the Noetic school. Whether this epithet contained more
+of satire or of complacency it is difficult to say. These men
+arrested attention and filled some of the older academic and
+ecclesiastical heads with alarm. Without disrespect one may say
+that it is difficult now to understand the commotion which they
+made. Arnold had a truly beautiful character. What he might have
+done as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford was never
+revealed, for he died in 1842. Whately, viewed as a noetic, appears
+commonplace.</p>
+<p>Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was
+Hampden. In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the title of <i>The
+Scholastic Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian
+Theology</i>, he assailed what had long been the very bulwark of
+traditionalism. His idea was to show how the vast fabric of
+scholastic theology had grown up, particularly what contributions
+had been made to it in the Middle Age. The traditional dogma is a
+structure reared upon the logical terminology of the patristic and
+medi&aelig;val schools. It has little foundation in Scripture and
+no response in the religious consciousness. We have here the
+application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our
+own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were
+not wrong in saying that his method would dissolve, not merely that
+particular system of theology, but all creeds and theologies
+whatsoever. Patristic, medi&aelig;val Catholic theology
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page201" id=
+"page201"></a>{201}</span> and scholastic Protestantism, no less,
+would go down before it. A pamphlet attributed to Newman, published
+in 1836, precipitated a discussion which, for bitterness, has
+rarely been surpassed in the melancholy history of theological
+dispute. The excitement went to almost unheard of lengths. In the
+controversy the Archbishop, Dr. Howley, made but a poor figure. The
+Duke of Wellington did not add to his fame. Wilberforce and Newman
+never cleared themselves of the suspicion of indirectness. This
+was, however, after the opening of the Oxford Movement.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-5" id="chap6-5">ERSKINE AND CAMPBELL</a></h3>
+<p>The period from 1820 to 1850 was one of religious and
+intellectual activity in Scotland as well. Tulloch depicts with a
+Scotsman's patriotism the movement which centres about the names of
+Erskine and Campbell. Pfleiderer also judges that their
+contribution was as significant as any made to dogmatic theology in
+Great Britain in the nineteenth century. They achieved the same
+reconstruction of the doctrine of salvation which had been effected
+by Kant and Schleiermacher. At their hands the doctrine was rescued
+from that forensic externality into which Calvinism had
+degenerated. It was given again its quality of ethical inwardness,
+and based directly upon religious experience. High Lutheranism had
+issued in the same externality in Germany before Kant and
+Schleiermacher, and the New England theology before Channing and
+Bushnell. The merits of Christ achieved an external salvation, of
+which a man became participant practically upon condition of assent
+to certain propositions. Similarly, in the Catholic revival,
+salvation was conceived as an external and future good, of which a
+man became participant through the sacraments applied to him by
+priests in apostolical succession. In point of externality there
+was not much to choose between views which were felt to be
+radically opposed the one to the other.</p>
+<p>Erskine was not a man theologically educated. He led a
+peculiarly secluded life. He was an advocate by profession,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page202" id=
+"page202"></a>{202}</span> but, withdrawing from that career,
+virtually gave himself up to meditation. Campbell was a minister of
+the Established Church of Scotland in a remote village, Row, upon
+the Gare Loch. When he was convicted of heresy and driven from the
+ministry, he also devoted himself to study and authorship. Both men
+seem to have come to their results largely from the application of
+their own sound religious sense to the Scriptures. That the
+Scottish Church should have rejected the truth for which these men
+contended was the heaviest blow which it could have inflicted on
+itself. Thereby it arrested its own healthy development. It
+perpetuated its traditional view, somewhat as New England orthodoxy
+was given a new lease of life through the partisanship which the
+Unitarian schism engendered. The matter was not mended at the time
+of the great rupture of the Scottish Church in 1843. That body
+which broke away from the Establishment, and achieved a purely
+ecclesiastical control of its own clergy, won, indeed, by this
+means the name of the Free Church, though, in point of theological
+opinion, it was far from representing the more free and progressive
+element. Tulloch pays a beautiful tribute to the character of
+Erskine, whom he knew. Quiet, brooding, introspective, he read his
+Bible and his own soul, and with singular purity of intuition
+generalised from his own experience. Therewith is described,
+however, both the power and the limitation of his work. His first
+book was entitled <i>Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth
+of Revealed Religion</i>, 1820. The title itself is suggestive of
+the revolution through which the mind both of Erskine and of his
+age was passing. His book, <i>The Unconditional Freeness of the
+Gospel</i>, appeared in 1828; <i>The Brazen Serpent</i> in 1831.
+Men have confounded forgiveness and pardon. They have made pardon
+equivalent to salvation. But salvation is character. Forgiveness is
+only one of the means of it. Salvation is not a future good. It is
+a present fellowship with God. It is sanctification of character by
+means of our labour and God's love. The fall was the rise of the
+spirit of freedom. Fallen man can never be saved except through
+glad surrender of his childish independence to the truth and
+goodness of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page203" id=
+"page203"></a>{203}</span> God. Yet that surrender is the
+preservation and enlargement of our independence. It is the secret
+of true self-realisation. The sufferings of Christ reveal God's
+holy love. It is not as if God's love had been purchased by the
+sufferings of his Son. On the contrary, it is man who needs to
+believe in God's love, and so be reconciled to the God whom he has
+feared and hated. Christ overcomes sin by obediently enduring the
+suffering which sin naturally entails. He endures it in pure love
+of his brethren. Man must overcome sin in the same way.</p>
+<p>Campbell published, so late as 1856, his great work <i>The
+Nature of the Atonement and its Relation to the Remission of Sins
+and Eternal Life</i>. It was the matured result of the reflections
+of a quarter of a century, spent partly in enforced retirement
+after 1831. Campbell maintains unequivocally that the sacrifice of
+Christ cannot be understood as a punishment due to man's sin, meted
+out to Christ in man's stead. Viewed retrospectively, Christ's work
+in the atonement is but the highest example of a law otherwise
+universally operative. No man can work redemption for his fellows
+except by entering into their condition, as if everything in that
+condition were his own, though much of it may be in no sense his
+due. It is freely borne by him because of his identification of
+himself with them. Campbell lingers in the myth of Christ's being
+the federal head of the humanity. There is something pathetic in
+the struggle of his mind to save phrases and the paraphernalia of
+an ancient view which, however, his fundamental principle rendered
+obsolete, He struggles to save the word satisfaction, though it
+means nothing in his system save that God is satisfied as he
+contemplates the character of Christ. Prospectively considered, the
+sacrifice of Christ effects salvation by its moral power over men
+in example and inspiration. Vicarious sacrifice, the result of
+which was merely imputed, would leave the sinner just where he was
+before. It is an empty fiction. But the spectacle of suffering
+freely undertaken for our sakes discovers the treasures of the
+divine image in man. The love of God and a man's own resolve make
+him in the end, in fact, that which he <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page204" id="page204"></a>{204}</span> has
+always been in capacity and destiny, a child of God, possessed of
+the secret of a growing righteousness, which is itself
+salvation.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-6" id="chap6-6">MAURICE</a></h3>
+<p>Scottish books seem to have been but little read in England in
+that day. It was Maurice who first made the substance of Campbell's
+teaching known in England. Frederick Denison Maurice was the son of
+a Unitarian minister, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, at a
+time when it was impossible for a Nonconformist to obtain a degree.
+He was ordained a priest of the Church of England in 1834, even
+suffering himself to be baptised again. He was chaplain of
+Lincoln's Inn and Professor of Theology in King's College, London.
+After 1866 he was Professor of Moral Philosophy in Cambridge,
+though his life-work was over. At the heart of Maurice's theology
+lies the contention to which he gave the name of universal
+redemption. Christ's work is for every man. Every man is indeed in
+Christ. Man's unhappiness lies only in the fact that he will not
+own this fact and live accordingly. Man as man is the child of God.
+He cannot undo that fact or alter that relation if he would. He
+does not need to become a child of God, as the phrase has been. He
+needs only to recognise that he already is such a child. He can
+never cease to bear this relationship. He can only refuse to fulfil
+it. With other words Erskine and Coleridge and Schleiermacher had
+said this same thing.</p>
+<p>For the rest, one may speak briefly of Maurice. He was animated
+by the strongest desire for Church unity, but at the back of his
+mind lay a conception of the Church and an insistence upon
+uniformity which made unity impossible. In the light of his own
+inheritance his ecclesiastical positivism seems strange. Perhaps it
+was the course of his experience which made this irrational
+positivism natural. Few men in his generation suffered greater
+persecutions under the unwarranted supposition on the part of
+contemporaries that he had a liberal mind. In reality, few men in
+his generation <span class="pagenum"><a name="page205" id=
+"page205"></a>{205}</span> had less of a quality which, had he
+possessed it, would have given him peace and joy even in the midst
+of his persecutions. The casual remark above made concerning
+Campbell is true in enhanced degree of Maurice. A large part of the
+industry of a very industrious life was devoted to the effort to
+convince others and himself that those few really wonderful
+glimpses of spiritual truth which he had, had no disastrous
+consequences for an inherited system of thought in which they
+certainly did not take their rise. His name was connected with the
+social enthusiasm that inaugurated a new movement in England which
+will claim attention in another paragraph.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-7" id="chap6-7">CHANNING</a></h3>
+<p>Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology
+which took place in America also, upon the same general lines which
+we have seen in Schleiermacher and in Campbell. The typical figure
+here, the protagonist of the movement, is William Ellery Channing.
+It may be doubted whether there has ever been a civilisation more
+completely controlled by its Church and ministers, or a culture
+more entirely dominated by theology, than were those of New England
+until the middle of the eighteenth century. There had been indeed a
+marked decline in religious life. The history of the Great
+Awakening shows that. Remonstrances against the Great Awakening
+show also how men's minds were moving away from the theory of the
+universe which the theology of that movement implied. One cannot
+say that in the preaching of Hopkins there is an appreciable
+relaxation of the Edwardsian scheme. Interestingly enough, it was
+in Newport that Channing was born and with Hopkins that he
+associated until the time of his licensure to preach in 1802. Many
+thought that Channing would stand with the most stringent of the
+orthodox. Deism and rationalism had made themselves felt in America
+after the Revolution. Channing, during his years in Harvard
+College, can hardly have failed to come into contact with the
+criticism of religion from this side. There is no such clear
+influence of current rationalism <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page206" id="page206"></a>{206}</span> upon Channing as, for
+example, upon Schleiermacher. Yet here in the West, which most
+Europeans thought of as a wilderness, circumstances brought about
+the launching of this man upon the career of a liberal religious
+thinker, when as yet Schleiermacher had hardly advanced beyond the
+position of the <i>Discourses</i>, when Erskine had not yet written
+a line and Campbell was still a child. Channing became minister of
+the Federal Street Church in Boston in 1803. The appointment of
+Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity in Harvard College took place
+in 1805. That appointment was the first clear indication of the
+liberal party's strength. Channing's Baltimore Address was
+delivered in 1819. He died in 1847.</p>
+<p>In the schism among the Congregational Churches in New England,
+which before 1819 apparently had come to be regarded by both
+parties as remediless, Channing took the side of the opposition to
+Calvinistic orthodoxy. He developed qualities as controversialist
+and leader which the gentler aspect of his early years had hardly
+led men to suspect. This American liberal movement had been
+referred to by Belsham as related to English Unitarianism. After
+1815, in this country, by its opponents at least, the movement was
+consistently called Unitarian. Channing did with zeal contend
+against the traditional doctrine of the atonement and of the
+trinity. On the other hand, he saw in Christ the perfect revelation
+of God to humanity and at the same time the ideal of humanity. He
+believed in Jesus' sinlessness and in his miracles, especially in
+his resurrection. The keynote of Channing's character and
+convictions is found in his sense of the inherent greatness of man.
+Of this feeling his entire system is but the unfolding. It was
+early and deliberately adopted by him as a fundamental faith. It
+remained the immovable centre of his reverence and trust amid all
+the inroads of doubt and sorrow. Political interest was as natural
+to Channing's earlier manhood as it had been to Fichte in the
+emergency of the Fatherland. Similarly, in the later years of his
+life, when evils connected with slavery had made themselves felt,
+his participation in the abolitionist agitation showed the same
+enthusiasm and practical bent. He had <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page207" id="page207"></a>{207}</span> his dream
+of communism, his perception of the evils of our industrial system,
+his contempt for charity in place of economic remedy. All was for
+man, all rested upon supreme faith in man. That man is endowed with
+knowledge of the right and with the power to realise it, was a
+fundamental maxim. Hence arose Channing's assertion of free-will.
+The denial of free-will renders the sentiment of duty but illusory.
+In the conscience there is both a revelation and a type of God. Its
+suggestions, by the very authority they carry with them, declare
+themselves to be God's law. God, concurring with our highest
+nature, present in its action, can be thought of only after the
+pattern which he gives us in ourselves. Whatever revelation God
+makes of himself, he must deal with us as with free beings living
+under natural laws. Revelation must be merely supplementary to
+those laws. Everything arbitrary and magical, everything which
+despairs of us or insults us as moral agents, everything which does
+not address itself to us through reason and conscience, must be
+excluded from the intercourse between God and man. What the
+doctrines of salvation and atonement, of the person of Christ and
+of the influence of the Holy Spirit, as construed from this centre
+would be, may without difficulty be surmised. The whole of
+Channing's teaching is bathed in an atmosphere of the reverent love
+of God which is the very source of his enthusiasm for man.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-8" id="chap6-8">BUSHNELL</a></h3>
+<p>A very different man was Horace Bushnell, born in the year of
+Channing's licensure, 1802. He was not bred under the influence of
+the strict Calvinism of his day. His father was an Arminian.
+Edwards had made Arminians detested in New England. His mother had
+been reared in the Episcopal Church. She was of Huguenot origin.
+When about seventeen, while tending a carding-machine, he wrote a
+paper in which he endeavoured to bring Calvinism into logical
+coherence and, in the interest of sound reason, to correct St.
+Paul's willingness to be accursed for the sake of his brethren. He
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page208" id=
+"page208"></a>{208}</span> graduated from Yale College in 1827. He
+taught there while studying law after 1829. He describes himself at
+this period as sound in ethics and sceptical in religion, the
+soundness of his morals being due to nature and training, the
+scepticism, to the theology in which he was involved. His law
+studies were complete, yet he turned to the ministry. He had been
+born on the orthodox side of the great contention in which Channing
+was a leader of the liberals in the days of which we speak. He
+never saw any reason to change this relation. His clerical
+colleagues, for half a life-time, sought to change it for him. In
+1833 he was ordained and installed as minister of the North Church
+in Hartford, a pastorate which he never left. The process of
+disintegration of the orthodox body was continuing. There was
+almost as much rancour between the old and the new orthodoxy as
+between orthodox and Unitarians themselves. Almost before his
+career was well begun an incurable disease fastened itself upon
+him. Not much later, all the severity of theological strife befell
+him. Between these two we have to think of him doing his work and
+keeping his sense of humour.</p>
+<p>His earliest book of consequence was on <i>Christian
+Nurture</i>, published in 1846. Consistent Calvinism presupposes in
+its converts mature years. Even an adult must pass through waters
+deep for him. He is not a sinful child of the Father. He is a being
+totally depraved and damned to everlasting punishment. God becomes
+his Father only after he is redeemed. The revivalists' theory
+Bushnell bitterly opposed. It made of religion a transcendental
+matter which belonged on the outside of life, a kind of miraculous
+epidemic. He repudiated the prevailing individualism. He
+anticipated much that is now being said concerning heredity,
+environment and subconsciousness. He revived the sense of the
+Church in which Puritanism had been so sadly lacking. The book is a
+classic, one of the rich treasures which the nineteenth century
+offers to the twentieth.</p>
+<p>Bushnell, so far as one can judge, had no knowledge of Kant. He
+is, nevertheless, dealing with Kant's own problem, of the theory of
+knowledge, in his rather diffuse 'Dissertation on <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page209" id="page209"></a>{209}</span>
+Language,' which is prefixed to the volume which bears the title
+<i>God in Christ</i>, 1849. He was following his living principle,
+the reference of doctrine to conscience. God must be a 'right God.'
+Dogma must make no assertion concerning God which will not stand
+this test. Not alone does the dogma make such assertions. The
+Scripture makes them as well. How can this be? What is the relation
+of language to thought and of thought to fact? How can the language
+of Scripture be explained, and yet the reality of the revelation
+not be explained away? There is a touching interest which attaches
+to this Hartford minister, working out, alone and clumsily, a
+problem the solution of which the greatest minds of the age had
+been gradually bringing to perfection for three-quarters of a
+century.</p>
+<p>In the year 1848 Bushnell was invited to give addresses at the
+Commencements of three divinity schools: that at Harvard, then
+unqualifiedly Unitarian; that at Andover, where the battle with
+Unitarianism had been fought; and that at Yale, where Bushnell had
+been trained. The address at Cambridge was on the subject of <i>the
+Atonement</i>; the one at New Haven on <i>the Divinity of
+Christ</i>, including Bushnell's doctrine of the trinity; the one
+at Andover on <i>Dogma and Spirit</i>, a plea for the cessation of
+strife. He says squarely of the old school theories of the
+atonement, which represent Christ as suffering the penalty of the
+law in our stead: 'They are capable, one and all of them, of no
+light in which they do not offend some right sentiment of our moral
+being. If the great Redeemer, in the excess of his goodness,
+consents to receive the penal woes of the world in his person, and
+if that offer is accepted, what does it signify, save that God will
+have his modicum of suffering somehow; and if he lets the guilty go
+he will yet satisfy himself out of the innocent?' The vicariousness
+of love, the identification of the sufferer with the sinner, in the
+sense that the Saviour is involved by his desire to help us in the
+woes which naturally follow sin, this Bushnell mightily affirmed.
+Yet there is no pretence that he used vicariousness or satisfaction
+in the same sense in which his adversaries did. He is magnificently
+free from <span class="pagenum"><a name="page210" id=
+"page210"></a>{210}</span> all such indirection. In the New Haven
+address there is this same combination of fire and light. The chief
+theological value of the doctrine of the trinity, as maintained by
+the New England Calvinistic teachers, had been to furnish the
+<i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> for the doctrine of the atonement. In
+the speculation as to the negotiation of this substitutionary
+transaction, the language of the theologians had degenerated into
+stark tritheism. Edwards, describing the councils of the trinity,
+spoke of the three persons as 'they.' Bushnell saw that any proper
+view of the unity of God made the forensic idea of the atonement
+incredible. He sought to replace the ontological notion of the
+trinity by that of a trinity of revelation, which held for him the
+practical truths by which his faith was nourished, and yet avoided
+the contradictions which the other doctrine presented both to
+reason and faith. Bushnell would have been far from claiming that
+he was the first to make this fight. The American Unitarians had
+been making it for more than a generation. The Unitarian protest
+was wholesome. It was magnificent. It was providential, but it
+paused in negation. It never advanced to construction. Bushnell's
+significance is not that he fought this battle, but that he fought
+it from the ranks of the orthodox Church. He fought it with a
+personal equipment which Channing had not had. He was decades later
+in his work. He took up the central religious problem when
+Channing's successors were following either Emerson or Parker.</p>
+<p>The Andover address consisted in the statement of Bushnell's
+views of the causes which had led to the schism in the New England
+Church. A single quotation may give the key-note of the
+discourse:&mdash;'We had on our side an article of the creed which
+asserted a metaphysical trinity. That made the assertion of the
+metaphysical unity inevitable and desirable. We had theories of
+atonement, of depravity, of original sin, which required the
+appearance of antagonistic theories. On our side, theological
+culture was so limited that we took what was really only our own
+opinion for the unalterable truth of God. On the other side, it was
+so limited that men, perceiving the insufficiency of dogma, took
+the opposite contention <span class="pagenum"><a name="page211" id=
+"page211"></a>{211}</span> with the same seriousness and totality
+of conviction. They asserted liberty, as indeed they must, to
+vindicate their revolt. They produced, meantime, the most intensely
+human and, in that sense, the most intensely opinionated religion
+ever invented.'</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-9" id="chap6-9">THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL</a></h3>
+<p>The Oxford Movement has been spoken of as a reaction against the
+so-called Oriel Movement, a conservative tendency over against an
+intellectualist and progressive one. In a measure the personal
+animosities within the Oxford circle may be accounted for in this
+way. The Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one
+hand, in the going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the
+other, in a great revival of Catholic principles within the
+Anglican Church itself, stands in a far larger setting. It was not
+merely an English or insular movement. It was a wave from a
+continental flood. On its own showing it was not merely an
+ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social aims as well.
+There was a universal European reaction against the Enlightenment
+and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but complex. It
+was a revolt of the conservative spirit from the new ideals which
+had been suddenly translated into portentous realities. It was
+marked everywhere by hatred of the eighteenth century with all its
+ways and works. On the one side we have the revolutionary thesis,
+the rights of man, the authority of reason, the watchwords liberty,
+equality, fraternity. On the other side stood forth those who were
+prepared to assert the meaning of community, the continuity of
+history, spiritual as well as civil authority as the basis of
+order, and order as the condition of the highest good. In
+literature the tendency appears as romanticism, in politics as
+legitimism, in religion as ultramontanism. Le Maistre with his
+<i>L'Eglise gallicane du Pape</i>; Chateaubriand with his
+<i>G&eacute;nie du Christianisme</i>; Lamennais with his <i>Essai
+sur l'Indifference en Mati&egrave;re, de Religion</i>, were, from
+1820 to 1860, the exponents of a view which has had prodigious
+consequences for France and Italy. The romantic movement
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page212" id=
+"page212"></a>{212}</span> arose outside of Catholicism. It was
+impersonated in Herder. Friedrich Schlegel, Werner and others went
+over to the Roman Church. The political reaction was specifically
+Latin and Catholic. In the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to
+have a mission again. Divine right in the State must be restored
+through the Church. The Catholic apologetic saw the Revolution as
+only the logical conclusion of the premises of the Reformation. The
+religious revolt of the sixteenth century, the philosophical revolt
+of the seventeenth, the political revolt of the eighteenth, the
+social revolt of the nineteenth, are all parts of one dreadful
+sequence. As the Church lifted up the world after the first flood
+of the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world after the
+devastations made by the more terrible barbarians of the eighteenth
+century. England had indeed stood a little outside of the cyclone
+which had devastated the world from Coronna to Moscow and from the
+Channel to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting down
+the revolution. Only God's goodness had preserved England. The
+logic of Puritanism would have been the same. Indeed, in England
+the State was weaker and worse than were the states upon the
+Continent. For since 1688 it had been a popular and constitutional
+monarchy. In Frederick William's phrase, its sovereign took his
+crown from the gutter. The Church was through and through Erastian,
+a creature of the State. Bishops were made by party
+representatives. Acts like the Reform Bills, the course of the
+Government in the matter of the Irish Church, were steps which
+would surely bring England to the pass which France had reached in
+1789. The source of such acts was wrong. It was with the people. It
+was in men, not in God. It was in reason, not in authority. It
+would be difficult to overstate the strength of this reactionary
+sentiment in important circles in England at the end of the third
+decade of the nineteenth century.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-10" id="chap6-10">THE OXFORD MOVEMENT</a></h3>
+<p>In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to made of the
+Oxford Movement or the Catholic revival a movement <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page213" id="page213"></a>{213}</span> of life,
+ecclesiastical, social and political as well, its history falls
+outside the purpose of this book. We proposed to deal with the
+history of thought. Reactionary movements have frequently got on
+without much thought. They have left little deposit of their own in
+the realm of ideas. Their avowed principle has been that of
+recurrence to that which has already been thought, of fidelity to
+ideas which have long prevailed. This is the reason why the
+conservatives have not a large place in such a sketch as this. It
+is not that their writings have not often been full of high
+learning and of the subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the
+ideas about which they reason do not belong to the history of the
+nineteenth century. They belong, on the earnest contention of the
+conservatives themselves&mdash;those of Protestants, to the history
+of the Reformation&mdash;and of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman,
+to the history of the early or medi&aelig;val Church.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless, when with passionate conviction a great man,
+taking the reactionary course, thinks the problem through again
+from his own point of view, then we have a real phenomenon in the
+history of contemporary thought. When such an one wrestles before
+God to give reason to himself and to his fellows for the faith that
+is in him, then the reactionary's reasoning is as imposing and
+suggestive as is any other. He leaves in his work an intellectual
+deposit which must be considered. He makes a contribution which
+must be reckoned with, even more seriously, perhaps, by those who
+dissent from it than by those who may agree with it. Such deposit
+Newman and the Tractarian movement certainly did make. They offered
+a rationale of the reaction. They gave to the Catholic revival a
+standing in the world of ideas, not merely in the world of action.
+Whether their reasoning has weight to-day, is a question upon which
+opinion is divided. Yet Newman and his compeers, by their character
+and standing, by their distinctively English qualities and by the
+road of reason which they took in the defence of Catholic
+principles, made Catholicism English again, in a sense in which it
+had not been English for three hundred years. Yet though Newman
+brought to the Roman Church in England, on his conversion
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page214" id=
+"page214"></a>{214}</span> to it, a prestige and qualities which in
+that communion were unequalled, he was never <i>persona grata</i>
+in that Church. Outwardly the Roman Catholic revival in England was
+not in large measure due to Newman and his arguments. It was due
+far more to men like Wiseman and Manning, who were not men of
+argument but of deeds.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-11" id="chap6-11">NEWMAN</a></h3>
+<p>John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker.
+His mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic
+influence. Through study especially, of Romaine <i>On Faith</i> he
+became the subject of an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he
+wrote: 'I am still more certain of it than that I have hands and
+feet.' Thomas Scott, the evangelical, moved him. Before he was
+sixteen he made a collection of Scripture texts in proof of the
+doctrine of the trinity. From Newton <i>On the Prophecies</i> he
+learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ&mdash;a doctrine by
+which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year 1843. In
+his <i>Apologia</i>, 1865, he declares: 'From the age of fifteen,
+dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot
+enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.' At the age of
+twenty-one, two years after he had taken his degree, he came under
+very different influences. He passed from Trinity College to a
+fellowship in Oriel. To use his own phrase, he drifted in the
+direction of liberalism. He was touched by Whately. He was too
+logical, and also too dogmatic, to be satisfied with Whately's
+position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley says: 'Probably no
+one who then knew Newman could have told which way he would go. It
+is not certain that he himself knew.' Francis W. Newman, Newman's
+brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own years of
+stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was
+profoundly uncongenial to him.</p>
+<p>The year 1827, in which Keble's <i>Christian Year</i> was
+published, saw another change in Newman's views. Illness and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page215" id=
+"page215"></a>{215}</span> bereavement came to him with awakening
+effect. He made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude. Froude brought
+Newman and Keble together. Henceforth Newman bore no more traces
+either of evangelicalism or of liberalism. Of Froude it is
+difficult to speak with confidence. His brother, James Anthony
+Froude, the historian, author of the <i>Nemesis of Faith</i>, 1848,
+says that he was gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic. Newman speaks of
+him with almost boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons,
+published after his death in 1836, make the impression neither of
+learning nor judgment. Clearly he had charm. Possibly he talked
+himself into a common-room reputation. Newman says: 'Froude made me
+look with admiration toward the Church of Rome.' Keble never had
+felt the liberalism through which Newman had passed. Cradled as the
+Church of England had been in Puritanism, the latter was to him
+simply evil. Opinions differing from his own were not simply
+mistaken, they were sinful. He conceived no religious truth outside
+the Church of England. In the <i>Christian Year</i> one perceives
+an influence which Newman strongly felt. It was that of the idea of
+the sacramental significance of all natural objects or events.
+Pusey became professor of Hebrew in 1830. He lent the movement
+academic standing, which the others could not give. He had been in
+Germany, and had published an <i>Inquiry into the Rationalist
+Character of German Theology</i>, 1825. He hardly did more than
+expose the ignorance of Rose. He was himself denounced as a German
+rationalist who dared to speak of a new era in theology. Pusey,
+mourning the defection of Newman, whom he deeply loved, gathered in
+1846 the forces of the Anglo-Catholics and continued in some sense
+a leader to the end of his long life in 1882.</p>
+<p>The course of political events was fretting the Conservatives
+intolerably. The agitation for the Reform Bill was taking shape.
+Sir Robert Peel, the member for Oxford, had introduced a Bill for
+the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. There was violent
+commotion in Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the
+measure. In 1830 there was revolution in France. In England the
+Whigs had come into <span class="pagenum"><a name="page216" id=
+"page216"></a>{216}</span> power. Newman's mind was excited in the
+last degree. 'The vital question,' he says, 'is this, how are we to
+keep the Church of England from being liberalised?' At the end of
+1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together. On this journey, as he
+lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he wrote his immortal
+hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' He came home assured that he had a work
+to do. Keble's Assize Sermon on the <i>National Apostasy</i>,
+preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman's return to
+Oxford, kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing.
+Newman conceived the idea of the <i>Tracts for the Times</i> as a
+means of expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which
+deeply moved him. 'From the first,' he says, 'my battle was with
+liberalism. By liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle.
+Secondly, my aim was the assertion of the visible Church with
+sacraments and rites and definite religious teaching on the
+foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the assertion of the Anglican
+Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.' Newman grew greatly in
+personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St. Mary's exerted
+spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at his best.
+All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His insight,
+his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous play
+of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble
+and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of
+the question. Pusey began the <i>Library of the Fathers</i>, the
+most elaborate literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be
+more amazing than the uncritical quality of the whole performance.
+The first check to the movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of
+Oxford animadverted upon the <i>Tracts</i>. Newman professed his
+willingness to stop them. The Bishop did not insist. Newman's own
+thought moved rapidly onward in the only course which was still
+open to it.</p>
+<p>Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In
+a sense that reverence never left him, though it changed its form.
+He saw that it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as
+an infallible source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly
+conveyed in defective and fallible <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page217" id="page217"></a>{217}</span> expressions? Newman's own
+studies in criticism, by no means profound, led him to this correct
+conclusion. This was the end for him of evangelical Protestantism.
+The recourse was then to the infallible Church. Infallible guide
+and authority one must have. Without these there can be no
+religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying something
+of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to
+labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable.
+One must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes
+of the mind from within. This can come only by miraculous
+certification from without.</p>
+<p>According to Newman the authority of the Church should never
+have been impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of
+that movement, this authority, for truly Christian men, had never
+been impaired. The intellect is aggressive, capricious,
+untrustworthy. Its action in religious matters is corrosive,
+dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of intellect must be smitten
+hard and thrown back by infallible authority, if religion is to be
+saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly sceptical, although,
+unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had a deep
+religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his negation
+of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of the
+value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning
+of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that
+which to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at
+all, namely, religious experience. Newman was the child of his age,
+though no one ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the
+child. He supposed that he believed in religion on the basis of
+authority. Quite the contrary, he believed in religion because he
+had religion or, as he says, in a magnificent passage in one of his
+parochial sermons, because religion had him. His scepticism forbade
+him to recognise that this was the basis of his belief. His
+diremption of human nature was absolute. The soul was of God. The
+mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his own intellect
+concerning this inestimable treasure of his <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page218" id="page218"></a>{218}</span>
+experience. He dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither
+it might lead him. The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a
+power above it. It must have its stiff neck bent to recognise its
+Creator.</p>
+<p>His whole book, <i>The Grammar of Assent</i>, 1870, is pervaded
+by the intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its
+motives, determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions,
+rules over the succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole
+aim of the work is to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from
+the region of reason into the realm of conscience and imagination,
+where the arguments which reign may satisfy personal experience
+without alleging objective validity or being able to bear the
+criticism which tests it. Again, he is the perverse, unconscious
+child of the age which he curses. Had not Kant and Schleiermacher,
+Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl seek, to remove
+religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it within the
+realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end by
+different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen
+concerning Mephistopheles: 'He says the same thing with the pastor,
+only in different words.' Newman says the same words, but means a
+different thing.</p>
+<p>Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant
+and Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the
+worthlessness of mentality, which they would have denied, we are
+not surprised to hear Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is
+invincible. 'The Church's infallibility is the provision adopted by
+the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world. Outside
+the Catholic Church all things tend to atheism. The Catholic Church
+is the one face to face antagonist, able to withstand and baffle
+the fierce energy of passion and the all-dissolving scepticism of
+the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my belief in God. If I
+should be asked why I believe in God, I should answer, because I
+believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in myself,
+without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a
+personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.' These
+passages are mainly taken from the <i>Apologia</i>, written long
+after Newman <span class="pagenum"><a name="page219" id=
+"page219"></a>{219}</span> had gone over to the Roman Church. They
+perfectly describe the attitude of his mind toward the Anglican
+Church, so long as he believed this, and not the Roman, to be the
+true Church. He had once thought that a man could hold a position
+midway between the Protestantism which he repudiated and the
+Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the <i>via media</i>
+so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts about the
+Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to
+overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican
+formularies cannot be at variance with the teachings of the
+authoritative and universal Church. This is the problem which the
+last of the <i>Tracts</i>, <i>Tract Ninety</i>, sets itself. It is
+one of those which Newman wrote. One must find the sense of the
+Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles. This tract is prefaced by
+an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in the communication of
+religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself to mankind have
+always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of holiness. The
+Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said must be
+true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do not
+mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that
+is, in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic
+men. Else how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church?
+Through their reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age.
+They cannot be uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be
+identical in meaning with the great Catholic creeds? Then follows
+an exposition of every important article of the thirty-nine, an
+effort to interpret each in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church
+of to-day. Four tutors published a protest against the tract.
+Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident to Newman
+that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was gone.
+From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed
+as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and
+established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned
+the parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October
+1845 he was formally admitted to the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page220" id="page220"></a>{220}</span> Roman Church. On the 6th of
+October Ernest Renan had formally severed his connexion with that
+Church.</p>
+<p>It is a strange thing that in his <i>Essay on the Development of
+Christian Doctrine</i>, written in 1845, Newman himself should have
+advanced substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many
+things concerning the development of doctrine which commend
+themselves to minds conversant with the application of historical
+criticism to the whole dogmatic structure of the Christian ages.
+The purpose is with Newman entirely polemical, the issue exactly
+that which one would not have foreseen. Precisely because the
+development of doctrine is so obvious, because no historical point
+can be found at which the growth of doctrine ceased and the rule of
+faith was once for all settled, therefore an infallible authority
+outside of the development must have existed from the beginning, to
+provide a means of distinguishing true development from false. This
+infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems incredible
+that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same argument
+which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic
+history. Similar is the case with the argument of the <i>Grammar of
+Assent</i>. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the
+thought of its contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the
+thought of the contradictory of a belief which I have made my own,
+is that so to think brings me pain and darkness, this does not
+prove my truth. If my belief ever had its origin in reason, it must
+be ever refutable by reason. It is not corroborated by the fact
+that I do not wish to see anything that would refute it.<a id=
+"footnotetag8" name="footnotetag8"></a><a href=
+"#footnote8"><sup>8</sup></a> This last fact may be in the highest
+degree an act of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of
+thinking the opposite, the test of truth, and then to shut one's
+eyes to those evidences which might compel one to think the
+opposite, is the essence of irrationality. One attains by this
+method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty. Newman lived in
+some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham for
+many years. A few distinguished men, and a <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page221" id="page221"></a>{221}</span> number of
+his followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over
+to the Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as,
+in the first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward
+influence of Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the
+ideas which he put forth have certainly been of great influence in
+that Church to this day. Most men know the portrait of the great
+cardinal, the wide forehead, ploughed deep with horizontal furrows,
+the pale cheek, down which 'long lines of shadow slope, which years
+and anxious thought and suffering give.' One looks into the
+wonderful face of those last days&mdash;Newman lived to his
+ninetieth year&mdash;and wonders if he found in the infallible
+Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.</p>
+<blockquote class="footnote"><a id="footnote8" name=
+"footnote8"></a><b>Footnote 8:</b><a href=
+"#footnotetag8">(return)</a>
+<p>Fairbairn, <i>Catholicism, Roman and Anglican</i>, p. 157.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h3><a name="chap6-12" id="chap6-12">MODERNISM</a></h3>
+<p>It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of
+the reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation
+of the Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin
+countries of the Continent the lamentable one that it is. That
+position is worst in those countries where the Roman Church has
+most nearly had free play. The alienation both of the intellectual
+and civil life from organised religion is grave. That the Roman
+Church occupies in England to-day a position more favourable than
+in almost any nation on the Continent, and better than it occupied
+in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is due in
+large measure to the general influence of the movement with which
+we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the beginning of
+the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical, low-church and
+conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of the
+twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its
+relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles
+is another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors
+must have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments
+which Newman and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the
+mere intellectual factor, is not <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page222" id="page222"></a>{222}</span> adequate. There is an
+inherent contradiction in the effort to ground in reason an
+authority which is to take the place of reason. Yet round and round
+this circle all the labours of John Henry Newman go. Cardinal
+Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not to be won by
+argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree of
+infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments
+had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally
+through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they
+assert, then in the last analysis what they assert is truth. If one
+has given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason,
+then it is querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority
+do not comport with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest
+interest in the struggle as to the instance in which this authority
+is to be lodged. This interest attaches to the age-long struggle
+between Pope and Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of
+D&ouml;llinger, Dupanloup, Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once
+the Church has spoken there is, for the advocate of authoritative
+religion, no logic but to submit.</p>
+<p>Similarly as to the <i>Encyclical</i> and <i>Syllabus of
+Errors</i> of 1864, which forecast the present conflict concerning
+Modernism. The <i>Syllabus</i> had a different atmosphere from that
+which any Englishman in the sixties would have given it. Had not
+Newman, however, made passionate warfare on the liberalism of the
+modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees? Was
+Gladstone's attitude intelligible? The contrast of two principles
+in life and religion, the principles of authority and of the
+spirit, is being brought home to men's consciousness as it has
+never been before. One reads <i>Il Santo</i> and learns concerning
+the death of Fogazzaro, one looks into the literature relating to
+Tyrrell, one sees the fate of Loisy, comparing the really majestic
+achievement in his works and the spirit of his <i>Simple
+Reflections</i> with the <i>Encyclical Pascendi</i>, 1907. One
+understands why these men have done what they could to remain
+within the Roman Church. One recalls the attitude of D&ouml;llinger
+to the inauguration of the Old Catholic Movement, reflects upon the
+relative futility of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page223"
+id="page223"></a>{223}</span> Old Catholic Church, and upon the
+position of Hyacinthe Loyson. One appreciates the feeling of these
+men that it is impossible, from without, to influence as they would
+the Church which they have loved. The present difficulty of
+influencing it from within seems almost insuperable. The history of
+Modernism as an effective contention in the world of Christian
+thought seems scarcely begun. The opposition to Modernism is not
+yet a part of the history of thought.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-13" id="chap6-13">ROBERTSON</a></h3>
+<p>In no life are reflected more perfectly the spiritual conflicts
+of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century than in that of
+Frederick W. Robertson. No mind worked itself more triumphantly out
+of these difficulties. Descended from a family of Scottish
+soldiers, evangelical in piety, a student in Oxford in 1837,
+repelled by the Oxford Movement, he undertook his ministry under a
+morbid sense of responsibility. He reacted violently against his
+evangelicalism. He travelled abroad, read enormously, was plunged
+into an agony which threatened mentally to undo him. He took his
+charge at Brighton in 1847, still only thirty-one years old, and at
+once shone forth in the splendour of his genius. A martyr to
+disease and petty persecution, dying at thirty-seven, he yet left
+the impress of one of the greatest preachers whom the Church of
+England has produced. He left no formal literary work such as he
+had designed. Of his sermons we have almost none from his own
+manuscripts. Yet his influence is to-day almost as intense as when
+the sermons were delivered. It is, before all, the wealth and depth
+of his thought, the reality of the content of the sermons, which
+commands admiration. They are a classic refutation of the remark
+that one cannot preach theology. Out of them, even in their
+fragmentary state, a well-articulated system might be made. He
+brought to his age the living message of a man upon whom the best
+light of his age had shone.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page224" id=
+"page224"></a>{224}</span>
+<h3><a name="chap6-14" id="chap6-14">PHILLIPS BROOKS</a></h3>
+<p>Something of the same sort may be said concerning Phillips
+Brooks. He inherited on his father's side the sober rationalism and
+the humane and secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his
+mother's side the intensity of evangelical pietism with the
+Calvinistic form of thought. The conflict of these opposing
+tendencies in New England was at that time so great that Brooks's
+parents sought refuge with the low-church element in the Episcopal
+Church. Brooks's education at Harvard College, where he took his
+degree in 1855, as also at Alexandria, and still more, his reading
+and experience, made him sympathetic with that which, in England in
+those years, was called the Broad Church party. He was deeply
+influenced by Campbell and Maurice. Later well known in England, he
+was the compeer of the best spirits of his generation there.
+Deepened by the experience of the great war, he held in succession
+two pulpits of large influence, dying as Bishop of Massachusetts in
+1893. There is a theological note about his preaching, as in the
+case of Robertson. Often it is the same note. Brooks had passed
+through no such crisis as had Robertson. He had flowered into the
+greatness of rational belief. His sermons are a contribution to the
+thinking of his age. We have much finished material of this kind
+from his own hand, and a book or two besides. His service through
+many years as preacher to his university was of inestimable worth.
+The presentation of ever-advancing thought to a great public
+constituency is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is also one
+of the most necessary. The fusion of such thoughtfulness with
+spiritual impulse has rarely been more perfectly achieved than in
+the preaching of Phillips Brooks.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-15" id="chap6-15">THE BROAD CHURCH</a></h3>
+<p>We have used the phrase, the Broad Church party. Stanley had
+employed the adjective to describe the real character of the
+English Church, over against the antithesis of the Low <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page225" id="page225"></a>{225}</span> Church
+and the High. The designation adhered to a group of which Stanley
+was himself a type. They were not bound together in a party. They
+had no ecclesiastical end in view. They were of a common spirit. It
+was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still less was it that of the
+Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had manifested. It aimed
+to hold the faith with an open mind in all the intellectual
+movement of the age. Maurice should be enumerated here, with
+reservations. Kingsley beyond question belonged to this group.
+There was great ardour among them for the improvement of social
+conditions, a sense of the social mission of Christianity. There
+grew up what was called a Christian Socialist movement, which,
+however, never attained or sought a political standing. The Broad
+Church movement seemed, at one time, assured of ascendancy in the
+Church of England. Its aims appeared congruous with the spirit of
+the times. Yet Dean Fremantle esteems himself perhaps the last
+survivor of an illustrious company.</p>
+<p>The men who in 1860 published the volume known as <i>Essays and
+Reviews</i> would be classed with the Broad Church. In its
+authorship were associated seven scholars, mostly Oxford men. Some
+one described <i>Essays and Reviews</i> as the <i>Tract Ninety</i>
+of the Broad Church. It stirred public sentiment and brought the
+authors into conflict with authority in a somewhat similar way. The
+living antagonism of the Broad Church was surely with the
+Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the most
+significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy,
+touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master
+of Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of
+Scripture.' It hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the
+controversy then precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's
+adherence to Platonic studies instead of his devoting himself to
+theology. The most decisive of the papers was that of Baden Powell
+on the 'Study of the Evidences of Christianity.' It was mainly a
+discussion of the miracle. It was radical and conclusive. The essay
+closes with an allusion to Darwin's <i>Origin of Species</i>, which
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page226" id=
+"page226"></a>{226}</span> had then just appeared. Baden Powell
+died shortly after its publication. The fight came on Rowland
+Williams's paper upon Bunson's <i>Biblical Researches</i>. It was
+really upon the prophecies and their use in 'Christian Evidences.'
+Baron Bunsen was not a great arch&aelig;ologist, but he brought to
+the attention of English readers that which was being done in
+Germany in this field. Williams used the arch&aelig;ological
+material to rectify the current theological notions concerning
+ancient history. A certain type of English mind has always shown
+zeal for the interpretation of prophecy. Williams's thesis, briefly
+put, was this: the Bible does not always give the history of the
+past with accuracy; it does not give the history of the future at
+all; prophecy means spiritual teaching, not secular
+prognostication. A reader of our day may naturally feel that
+Wilson, with his paper on the 'National Church,' made the greatest
+contribution. He built indeed upon Coleridge, but he had a larger
+horizon. He knew the arguments of the great Frenchmen of his day
+and of their English imitators who, in Benn's phrase, narrowed and
+perverted the ideal of a world-wide humanity into that of a Church
+founded on dogmas and administered by clericals. Wilson argued that
+in Jesus' teaching the basis of the religious community is ethical.
+The Church is but the instrument for carrying out the will of God
+as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of God
+must extend beyond the limits of the Church's activity, however
+widely these are drawn. There arose a violent agitation. Williams
+and Wilson were prosecuted. The case was tried in the Court of
+Arches. Williams was defended by no less a person than Fitzjames
+Stephen. The two divines were sentenced to a year's suspension.
+This decision was reversed by the Lord Chancellor. Fitzjames
+Stephen had argued that if the men most interested in the church,
+namely, its clergy, are the only men who may be punished for
+serious discussion of the facts and truths of religion, then
+respect on the part of the world for the Church is at an end. By
+this discussion the English clergy, even if Anglo-Catholic, are in
+a very different position from the Roman priests, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page227" id="page227"></a>{227}</span> over whom
+encyclicals, even if not executed, are always suspended.</p>
+<p>Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal.
+Equipped mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest
+self-devotion, he had been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the
+process of the translation of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had
+come to reflect upon the problem which the Old Testament presents.
+In a manner which is altogether marvellous he worked out critical
+conclusions parallel to those of Old Testament scholars on the
+Continent. He was never really an expert, but in his main
+contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite severe
+pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such
+guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that
+biblical studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a
+development in which scholars of these nations are not behind the
+best scholars of the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson
+Smith in Edinburgh and of Dr. Briggs in New York have now little
+living interest. Yet biblical studies in Scotland and America were
+incalculably furthered by those discussions. The publication of a
+book like <i>Supernatural Religion</i>, 1872, illustrates a
+proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal circles, for
+taking up a contention just when those who made it and have lived
+with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch
+and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to
+warrant the assertions above made.</p>
+<hr />
+<p>More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service
+rendered to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and
+interpretation of religion at the hands of literary men. That
+country and age may be esteemed fortunate in which religion
+occupies a place such that it compels the attention of men of
+genius. In the history of culture this has by no means always been
+the case. That these men do not always speak the language of
+edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite worth is
+that the largest <span class="pagenum"><a name="page228" id=
+"page228"></a>{228}</span> minds of the generation shall engage
+themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought
+concerning Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for
+example, of Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold&mdash;to mention
+only types.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-16" id="chap6-16">CARLYLE</a></h3>
+<p>Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the
+Border; his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his
+mother with her frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he
+learned Latin, 'the priestliest man I ever beheld in any
+ecclesiastical guise.' The picture of his mother never faded from
+his memory. Carlyle was destined for the Church. Such had been his
+mother's prayer. He took his arts course in Edinburgh. In the
+university, he says, 'there was much talk about progress of the
+species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young looked to
+their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.' He
+entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had
+arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the
+man for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become
+intellectually incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely
+miserable, bordering upon despair. He has described his spiritual
+deliverance: 'Precisely that befel me which the Methodists call
+their conversion, the deliverance of their souls from the devil and
+the pit. There burst forth a sacred flame of joy in me.' With
+<i>Sartor Resartus</i> his message to the world began. It was
+printed in <i>Fraser's Magazine</i> in 1833, but not published
+separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher
+embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of
+his message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his
+message. Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great
+world of London or set a more peremptory mark upon its
+notabilities. His best work was done before 1851. His later years
+were darkened with much misery of body. No one can allege that he
+ever had a happy mind.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page229" id=
+"page229"></a>{229}</span>
+<p>He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to
+be alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes
+needless. Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he
+desired he in no small measure achieved&mdash;that his readers
+should be arrested and feel themselves face to face with reality.
+His startling intuition, his intellectual uprightness, his grasp
+upon things as they are, his passion for what ought to be, made a
+great impression upon his age. It was in itself a religious
+influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of sternest
+truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His
+injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a
+social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler
+meaning than they had had before. His <i>French Revolution</i>, his
+papers on <i>Chartism</i>, his unceasing comment on the troubled
+life of the years from 1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our
+understanding of the growth of that social feeling in the midst of
+which we live and work. In his brooding sympathy with the
+downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the social movement. He
+felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no one has told us
+with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our democratic
+institutions. His word was a great corrective for much 'rose-water'
+optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is, however,
+often lacking. The mythology of an absentee God had faded from him.
+Yet the God who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the
+sun in the heavens, was a God over the world, to judge it
+inexorably. Again, it is not difficult to accumulate evidence in
+his words which looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the
+religious benefit of pantheism, the sense that God is in his world,
+Carlyle often loses.</p>
+<p>Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it
+difficult to realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a
+different look. Carlyle was never weary of pouring out the vials of
+his contempt on 'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as
+against matter. Never was a man more opposed to the idea of a
+godless world, in which man is his own chief end, and his sensual
+pleasures the main aims of his existence. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page230" id="page230"></a>{230}</span> His
+insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and
+absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the
+effort to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout
+heart and in the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him
+cant or superstition. The humble life of godliness made an
+unspeakable appeal to him. He had known those who lived that life.
+His love for them was imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the
+superstitions and hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty
+was so ineffable, all effort to approach him so unworthy, that
+almost instinctively he would call upon the man who made the
+effort, to desist. So magnificent, all his life long, had been his
+protest against the credulity and stupidity of men, against beliefs
+which assert the impossible and blink the facts, that, for himself,
+the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to say, in their
+naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were half-querulously
+denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should be found
+credulous and self-deceived. From this titan labouring at the
+foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the
+Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at ships as
+they pass by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was
+Carlyle's friend.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-17" id="chap6-17">EMERSON</a></h3>
+<p>Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these
+voices&mdash;Newman, Carlyle, Goethe&mdash;there came to us in the
+Oxford of my youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a
+clear and pure voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a
+strain as new and moving and unforgetable as those others. Lowell
+has described the apparition of Emerson to your young generation
+here. He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius, speaking to
+your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination.'
+Then he quotes as one of the most memorable passages in English
+speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the divine
+providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
+the connection of events. Great men have always done so,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page231" id=
+"page231"></a>{231}</span> confiding themselves childlike to the
+genius of their age, betraying a perception which was stirring in
+their hearts, working through their hands, dominating their whole
+being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim insistence upon labour and
+righteousness but of his scorn of happiness, and then says: 'But
+Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness and veracity.
+In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope, that was
+Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the spirit
+is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the
+spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this
+Emerson was great.'</p>
+<p>Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers of New England
+churches. He inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty,
+strenuous virtue, sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to
+ideals. The form of his ideals was modified by the glow of
+transcendentalism which passed over parts of New England in the
+second quarter of the nineteenth century, but the spirit in which
+Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced them and lived them,
+was the Puritan spirit, only elevated, enlarged and beautified by
+the poetic temperament. Taking his degree from Harvard in 1821,
+despising school teaching, stirred by the passion for spiritual
+leadership, the ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its
+satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the Divinity School in Harvard to
+prepare himself for the Unitarian ministry. In 1829 he became
+associate minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. He
+arrived at the conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended
+by Jesus to be a permanent sacrament. He found his congregation,
+not unnaturally, reluctant to agree with him. He therefore retired
+from the pastoral office. He was always a preacher, though of a
+singular order. His task was to befriend and guide the inner life
+of man. The influences of this period in his life have been
+enumerated as the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical
+vision of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth, the
+stimulating essays of Carlyle. His address before the graduating
+class of the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838 was an
+impassioned protest against what he called the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page232" id="page232"></a>{232}</span> defects
+of historical Christianity, its undue reliance upon the personal
+authority of Jesus, its failure to explore the moral nature of man.
+He made a daring plea for absolute self-reliance and new
+inspiration in religion: 'In the soul let redemption be sought.
+Refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the
+imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you. Acquaint men at
+first hand with deity.' He never could have been the power he was
+by the force of his negations. His power lay in the wealth, the
+variety, the beauty and insight with which he set forth the
+positive side of his doctrine of the greatness of man, of the
+presence of God in man, of the divineness of life, of God's
+judgment and mercy in the order of the world. One sees both the
+power and the limitation of Emerson's religious teaching. At the
+root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not philosophise. He was
+always passing from the principle to its application. He could not
+systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable tendency to the lapidary
+style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy in fragments, just
+as one finds his interpretation of religion in flashes of
+marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either, in
+Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for it or not.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-18" id="chap6-18">ARNOLD</a></h3>
+<p>What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself? Without doubt the
+twenty years by which Arnold was Newman's junior at Oxford made a
+great difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and
+of the English world of letters, at the time when Arnold's mind was
+maturing. He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman. His mind
+was hardly one to appreciate the whole force of that spell. He was
+at Oxford too early for the full understanding of the limits within
+which alone the scientific conception of the world can be said to
+be true. Arnold often boasted that he was no metaphysician. He
+really need never have mentioned the fact. The assumption that
+whatever is true can be verified in the sense of the precise kind
+of verification which science <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page233" id="page233"></a>{233}</span> implies is a very serious
+mistake. Yet his whole intellectual strength was devoted to the
+sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion, but
+certainly that of noble conduct, and to the assertion of the
+elation of duty and the joy of righteousness. With all the scorn
+that Arnold pours upon the trust which we place in God's love, he
+yet holds to the conviction that 'the power without ourselves which
+makes for righteousness' is one upon which we may in rapture
+rely.</p>
+<p>Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such as ours, which
+will take nothing for granted, but must verify everything,
+Christianity, in the old form of authoritative belief in
+supernatural beings and miraculous events, is no longer tenable. We
+must confine ourselves to such ethical truths as can be verified by
+experience. We must reject everything which goes beyond these.
+Religion has no more to do with supernatural dogma than with
+metaphysical philosophy. It has nothing to do with either. It has
+to do with conduct. It is folly to make religion depend upon the
+conviction of the existence of an intelligent and moral governor of
+the universe, as the theologians have done. For the object of faith
+in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not
+ourselves which makes for righteousness.' So soon as we go beyond
+this, we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of
+extra belief, <i>aberglaube</i>, which always revenges itself.
+These are the main contentions of his book, <i>Literature and
+Dogma</i>, 1875.</p>
+<p>One feels the value of Arnold's recall to the sense of the
+literary character of the Scriptural documents, as urged in his
+book, <i>Saint Paul and Protestantism</i>, 1870, and again to the
+sense of the influence which the imagination of mankind has had
+upon religion. One feels the truth of his assertion of our
+ignorance. One feels Arnold's own deep earnestness. It was his
+concern that reason and the will of God should prevail. Though he
+was primarily a literary man, yet his great interest was in
+religion. One feels so sincerely that his main conclusion is sound,
+that it is the more trying that his statement of it should be often
+so perverse and his method of sustaining it <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page234" id="page234"></a>{234}</span> so
+precarious. It is quite certain that the idea of the Eternal not
+ourselves which makes for righteousness is far from being the clear
+idea which Arnold claims. It is far from being an idea derived from
+experience or verifiable in experience, in the sense which he
+asserts. It seems positively incredible that Arnold did not know
+that with this conception he passed the boundary of the realm of
+science and entered the realm of metaphysics, which he so
+abhorred.</p>
+<p>He was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby. He was educated
+at Winchester and Rugby and at Balliol College. He was Professor of
+Poetry in Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was an inspector of schools.
+The years of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways
+which were wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary
+intuition to an idea of Scripture which others had built up from
+the point of view of a theory of knowledge and by investigation of
+the facts. He is the helpless personification of a view of the
+relation of science and religion which has absolutely passed away.
+Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a distinguished inheritance
+may mean is gathered from the fact that a grand-daughter of Thomas
+Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her
+novels, has dealt largely with problems of religious life, and more
+particularly of religious thoughtfulness. She has done for her
+generation, in her measure, that which George Eliot did for
+hers.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-19" id="chap6-19">MARTINEAU</a></h3>
+<p>As the chapter and the book draw to their close we can think of
+no man whose life more nearly spanned the century, or whose work
+touched more fruitfully almost every aspect of Christian
+thoughtfulness than did that of James Martineau. We can think of no
+man who gathered into himself more fully the significant
+theological tendencies of the age, or whose utterance entitles him
+to be listened to more reverently as seer and saint. He was born in
+1805. He was bred as an engineer. He fulfilled for years the
+calling of minister and preacher. He gradually exchanged this for
+the activity <span class="pagenum"><a name="page235" id=
+"page235"></a>{235}</span> of a professor. He was a religious
+philosopher in the old sense, but he was also a critic and
+historian. His position with reference to the New Testament was
+partly antiquated before his <i>Seat of Authority in Religion</i>,
+1890, made its appearance. Evolutionism never became with him a
+coherent and consistent assumption. Ethics never altogether got rid
+of the innate ideas. The social movement left him almost untouched.
+Yet, despite all this, he was in some sense a representative
+progressive theologian of the century.</p>
+<p>There is a parallel between Newman and Martineau. Both busied
+themselves with the problem of authority. Criticism had been fatal
+to the apprehension which both had inherited concerning the
+authority of Scripture. From that point onward they took divergent
+courses. The arguments which touched the infallible and oracular
+authority of Scripture, for Newman established that of the Church;
+for Martineau they had destroyed that of the Church four hundred
+years ago. Martineau's sense, even of the authority of Jesus,
+reverent as it is, is yet no pietistic and mystical view. The
+authority of Jesus is that of the truth which he speaks, of the
+goodness which dwells in him, of God himself and God alone. A real
+interest in the sciences and true learning in some of them made
+Martineau able to write that wonderful chapter in his <i>Seat of
+Authority</i>, which he entitled 'God in Nature.' Newman could see
+in nature, at most a sacramental suggestion, a symbol of
+transcendental truth.</p>
+<p>The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England
+belonged to the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of
+British Unitarianism came. The righteousness of a persecuted race
+had left an austere impress upon their domestic and social life.
+Intellectually they inherited the advanced liberalism of their day.
+Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had been of the most fervent
+sort. She reacted violently against it in later years. She had
+little of the politic temper and gentleness of her brother. She
+described one of her own later works as the last word of
+philosophic atheism. James was, and always remained, of deepest
+sensitiveness and reverence and of a gentleness which stood in high
+contrast <span class="pagenum"><a name="page236" id=
+"page236"></a>{236}</span> with his powers of conflict, if
+necessity arose. Out of Martineau's years as preacher in Liverpool
+and London came two books of rare devotional quality, <i>Endeavours
+after the Christian Life</i>, 1843 and 1847, and <i>Hours of
+Thought on Sacred Things</i>, 1873 and 1879. Almost all his life he
+was identified with Manchester College, as a student when the
+college was located at York, as a teacher when it returned to
+Manchester and again when it was removed to London. With its
+removal to Oxford, accomplished in 1889, he had not fully
+sympathised. He believed that the university itself must some day
+do justice to the education of men for the ministry in other
+churches than the Anglican. He was eighty years old when he
+published his <i>Types of Ethical Theory</i>, eighty-two when he
+gave to the world his <i>Study of Religion</i>, eighty-five when
+his <i>Seat of Authority</i> saw the light. The effect of this
+postponement of publication was not wholly good. The books
+represented marvellous learning and ripeness of reflection. But
+they belong to a period anterior to the dates they bear upon their
+title-pages. Martineau's education and his early professional
+experience put him in touch with the advancing sciences. In the
+days when most men of progressive spirit were carried off their
+feet, when materialism was flaunted in men's faces and the defence
+of religion was largely in the hands of those who knew nothing of
+the sciences, Martineau was not moved. He saw the end from the
+beginning. There is nothing finer in his latest work than his early
+essays&mdash;'Nature and God,' 'Science, Nescience and Faith,' and
+'Religion as affected by Modern Materialism.' He died in 1900 in
+his ninety-fifth year.</p>
+<p>It is difficult to speak of the living in these pages. Personal
+relations enforce reserve and brevity. Nevertheless, no one can
+think of Manchester College and Martineau without being reminded of
+Mansfield College and of Fairbairn, a Scotchman, but of the
+Independent Church. He also was both teacher and preacher all his
+days, leader of the movement which brought Mansfield College from
+Birmingham to Oxford, by the confession both of Anglicans and of
+Non-conformists the most learned man in his subjects in the Oxford
+of his <span class="pagenum"><a name="page237" id=
+"page237"></a>{237}</span> time, an historian, touched by the
+social enthusiasm, but a religious philosopher, <i>par
+excellence</i>. His <i>Religion and Modern Life</i>, 1894, his
+<i>Catholicism, Roman and Anglican</i>, 1899, his <i>Place of
+Christ in Modern Theology</i>, 1893, his <i>Philosophy of the
+Christian Religion</i>, 1902, and his <i>Studies in Religion and
+Theology</i>, 1910, indicate the wideness of his sympathies and the
+scope of the application, of his powers. If imitation is homage,
+grateful acknowledgment is here made of rich spoil taken from his
+books.</p>
+<p>Philosophy took a new turn in Britain after the middle of the
+decade of the sixties. It began to be conceded that Locke and Hume
+were dead. Had Mill really appreciated that fact he might have been
+a philosopher more fruitful and influential than he was. Sir
+William Hamilton was dead. Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism
+to conjure the most absurdly positivistic faith, had left thinking
+men more exposed to scepticism, if possible, than they had been
+before. When Hegel was thought in Germany to be obsolete, and
+everywhere the cry was 'back to Kant,' some Scotch and English
+scholars, the two Cairds and Seth Pringle-Pattison, with Thomas
+Hill Green, made a modified Hegelianism current in Great Britain.
+They led by this path in the introduction of their countrymen to
+later German idealism. By this introduction philosophy in both
+Britain and America has greatly gained. Despite these facts, John
+Caird's <i>Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion</i>, 1880, is
+still only a religious philosophy. It is not a philosophy of
+religion. His <i>Fundamental Ideas of Christianity</i>, 1896,
+hardly escapes the old antitheses among which theological
+discussion moved, say, thirty years ago. Edward Caird's <i>Critical
+Philosophy of Kant</i>, 1889, and especially his <i>Evolution of
+Religion</i>, 1892, marked the coming change more definitely than
+did any of the labours of his brother. Thomas Hill Green gave great
+promise in his <i>Introduction to Hume</i>, 1885, his
+<i>Prolegomena to Ethics</i>, 1883, and still more in essays and
+papers scattered through the volumes edited by Nettleship after
+Green's death. His contribution to religious discussion was such as
+to make his untimely end to be deeply deplored. Seth <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page238" id="page238"></a>{238}</span>
+Pringle-Pattison's early work, <i>The Development from Kant to
+Hegel</i>, 1881, still has great worth. His <i>Hegelianism and
+Personality</i>, 1893, deals with one aspect of the topic which
+needs ever again to be explored, because of the psychological basis
+which in religious discussion is now assumed.</p>
+<h3><a name="chap6-20" id="chap6-20">JAMES</a></h3>
+<p>The greatest contribution of America to religious discussion in
+recent years is surely William James's <i>Varieties of Religious
+Experience</i>, 1902. The book is unreservedly acknowledged in
+Britain, and in Germany as well, to be the best which we yet have
+upon the psychology of religion. Not only so, it gives a new
+intimation as to what psychology of religion means. It blazes a
+path along which investigators are eagerly following. Boyce, in his
+Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1911, declared James to be the
+third representative philosopher whom America has produced. He had
+the form of philosophy as Emerson never had. He could realise
+whither he was going, as Emerson in his intuitiveness never did. He
+criticised the dominant monism in most pregnant way. He recurred to
+the problems which dualism owned but could not solve. We cannot
+call the new scheme dualism. The world does not go back. Yet James
+made an over-confident generation feel that the centuries to which
+dualism had seemed reasonable were not so completely without
+intelligence as has been supposed by some. No philosophy may claim
+completeness as an interpretation of the universe. No more
+conclusive proof of this judgment could be asked than is given
+quite unintentionally in Haeckel's <i>Weltr&atilde;thsel</i>.</p>
+<p>At no point is this recall more earnest than in James's dealing
+with the antithesis of good and evil. The reaction of the mind of
+the race, and primarily of individuals, upon the fact of evil,
+men's consciousness of evil in themselves, their desire to be rid
+of it, their belief that there is a deliverance from it and that
+they have found that deliverance, is for James the point of
+departure for the study of the actual phenomena and the active
+principle of religion. The truest <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page239" id="page239"></a>{239}</span> psychological and
+philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the experience of
+conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most men have,
+at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity for
+God which is unfulfilled, of a relation to God unrealised, which is
+broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that
+their own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the
+sense also that something without themselves empowers them to
+attempt this recovery and to persevere in the attempt. The
+psychology of religion is thus put in the forefront. The vast
+masses of material of this sort which the religious world, both
+past and present, possesses, have been either actually unexplored,
+or else set forth in ways which distorted and obscured the facts.
+The experience is the fact. The best science the world knows is now
+to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact. This is the
+epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's book.
+James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian
+theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began
+to lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of
+Philosophy in 1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He
+died in 1910.</p>
+<p>When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much
+supposed investigation of primitive religions, which is really
+nothing but imagination concerning primitive religions, will be
+shown in its true worthlessness. We know very little about
+primitive man. What we learn as to primitive man, on the side of
+his religion, we must learn in part from the psychology of the
+matured and civilised, the present living, thinking, feeling man in
+contact with his religion. Matured religion is not to be judged by
+the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of the history of
+religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from earliest to
+latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is
+perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that
+which never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century
+students. Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is
+to be judged by later Christianity, by present <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page240" id="page240"></a>{240}</span>
+Christianity, by the Christian experience which we see and know
+to-day, and not conversely, as men have always claimed. The modern
+man is not to be converted after the pattern which it is alleged
+that his grandfather followed. For, first, there is the question as
+to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern. And beyond
+that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the
+grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience
+of the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious
+admixture of knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century,
+which would occasion characteristic differences. The modern saint
+is not asked to be a saint like Francis. In the first place, how do
+we know what Francis was like? In the second place, the experience
+of Francis may be most easily understood by the aid of modern
+experience of true revolt from worldliness and of consecration to
+self-sacrifice, as these exist among us, with, of course, the
+proper background furnished by the history of the thirteenth
+century. Souls are one. Our souls may be, at least in some measure,
+known to ourselves. Even the souls of some of our fellows may be
+measurably known to us. What are the facts of the religious
+experience? How do souls react in face of the eternal? The
+experience of religion, the experience of the fatherhood of God, of
+the sonship of man, of the moving of the spirit, is surely one
+experience. How did even Christ's great soul react, experience,
+work, will, and suffer? By what possible means can we ever know how
+he reacted, worked, willed, suffered? In the literature we learn
+only how men thought that he reacted. We must inquire of our own
+souls. To be sure, Christ belonged to the first century, and we
+live in the twentieth. It is possible for us to learn something of
+the first century and of the concrete outward conditions which
+caused his life to take the shape which it did. We learn this by
+strict historical research. Assuredly the supreme measure in which
+the spirit of all truth and goodness once took possession of the
+Nazarene, remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable.
+Dwelling in Jesus, that spirit made through him a revelation of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page241" id=
+"page241"></a>{241}</span> divine such as the world has never seen.
+Yet that mystery leads forth along the path of that which is
+intelligible. And, in another sense, even such religious experience
+as we ourselves may have, poor though it be and sadly limited,
+leads back into the same mystery.</p>
+<p>It was with this contention that religion is a fact of the inner
+life of man, that it is to be understood through consciousness,
+that it is essentially and absolutely reasonable and yet belongs to
+the transcendental world, it was with this contention that, in the
+person of Immanuel Kant, the history of modern religious thought
+began. It is with this contention, in one of its newest and most
+far-reaching applications in the work of William James, that this
+history continues. For no one can think of the number of questions
+which recent years have raised, without realising that this history
+is by no means concluded. It is conceivable that the changes which
+the twentieth century will bring may be as noteworthy as those
+which the nineteenth century has seen. At least we may be grateful
+that so great and sure a foundation has been laid.</p>
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="biblio" id="biblio">BIBLIOGRAPHY</a></h2>
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+<p>WERNLE, PAUL. <i>Einf&uuml;hrung in das theologische
+Studium.</i> T&uuml;bingen, 2. Aufl., 1911.</p>
+<p>DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 1. <i>Geschichte der
+Christlichen Religion</i>, v. Wellhausen, J&uuml;lieber, Harnack u.
+A., 2. Aufl. Berlin, 1909.</p>
+<p>DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 2. <i>Systematische
+Christliche Religion</i>, v. Troeltsch, Herrmann, Holtzmann u. A.,
+2. Aufl. Berlin, 1909.</p>
+<p>PFLEIDERER, OTTO. <i>The Development of Theology in Germany
+since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since</i> 1825.
+Transl., J. FREDERICK SMITH. London, 1893.</p>
+<p>LICHTENBERGER, F. <i>Histoire des Id&eacute;es Religieuses en
+Allemagne despuis le milieu du XVIII' si&eacute;cle &agrave; nos
+jours.</i> Paris, 1873. Transl., with notes, W. HASTIE. Edinburgh,
+1889.</p>
+<p>ADENEY, W.F. <i>A Century of Progress in Religious Life and
+Thought.</i> London, 1901.</p>
+<p>HARNACK, ADOLF. <i>Das Wesen des Christenthums.</i> Berlin,
+1900. Transl., <i>What is Christianity?</i> T.B. SAUNDERS. London,
+1901.</p>
+<p>STEPHEN, LESLIE. <i>History of English Thought in the Eighteenth
+Century.</i> 2 vols. London, 3rd ed., 1902.</p>
+<p>TROELTSCH, ERNST. Art. 'Deismus' in Herzog-Hauck,
+<i>Realencyclop&auml;die f&uuml;r Protestantische Theologie und
+Kirche.</i> 3. Aufl. Leipzig, 4. Bd., 1898, s. 532 f.: art.
+'Aufkl&auml;rung,' 2. Bd., 1897, s. 225 f.: art. 'Idealismus,
+deutscher,' 8. Bd., 1900, s. 612 f.</p>
+<p>MIRBT, CARL. Art. 'Pietiamus' in Herzog-Hauck,
+<i>Realencydop&auml;die</i>, 15. Bd., 1904, s. 774 f.</p>
+<p>RITSCHL, ALBRECHT. <i>Geschichte des Pietismus</i>, 3 Bde. Bonn,
+1880-1886.</p>
+<h3>CHAPTER II</h3>
+<p>WINDELBAND, W. <i>Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie in
+ihrem Zusammenhang mit der allgemeinen Kultur und den besouderen
+Wissenschaften.</i> 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1899.</p>
+<p>H&Ouml;FFDING, HAROLD. <i>Geschichte der neueren
+Philosophie.</i> Uebersetzt v. Bendixen. 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1896.</p>
+<p>EUCKEN, RUDOLF. <i>Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen
+Denker.</i> 8. Anfl. Leipzig, 1909. Transl., <i>The Problem of
+Human Life as viewed by the Great Thinkers</i>, by W.S. HOUGH and
+W.R. BOYCE GIBSON. New York, 1910.</p>
+<p>PRINGLE-PATTISON, A. SETH. <i>The Development from Kant to
+Hegel.</i> London, 1881.</p>
+<p>DREWS, ARTHUR. <i>Die Deutsche Spekulation seit Kant</i> 2 Bde.
+Berlin, 1893.</p>
+<p>ROYCE, JOSIAH. <i>The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.</i> Boston,
+1893. <i>The Religious Aspect of Philosophy.</i> Boston, 1885.
+<i>The World and the Individual.</i> 2 vols. New York, 1901 and
+1904.</p>
+<p>PAULSEN, FRIEDRICH. <i>Immanuel Kant, sein Leben und seine
+Lehre.</i> Stuttgart, 3. Aufl., 1899. Transl., CREIGHTON AND
+LEFEVER. New York, 1902.</p>
+<p>CAIRD, EDWARD. <i>A Critical Account of the Philosophy of
+Kant</i>: with an Historical Introduction. Glasgow, 1877.</p>
+<p>FISCHER, KUNO. <i>Hegels Leben, Werke und Lehre.</i> 2 Bde.
+Heidelberg, 1901.</p>
+<p>SIEBECK, HERMANN. <i>Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie.</i>
+Freiburg, 1893.</p>
+<p>EUCKEN, RUDOLF. <i>Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion.</i>
+Leipzig, 4. Aufl., 1906. Transl., JONES. London, 1911.</p>
+<p>TIELE, C.P. <i>Compendium der Religionsgeschichte.</i>
+Uebersetzt v. Weber. 3. Aufl. umgearbeitet v. S&ouml;derblom.
+Breslau, 1903.</p>
+<h3>CHAPTER III</h3>
+<p>VON FRANK, H.R. <i>Geschichte und Kritik der neueren Theologie
+insbesondere der systematischen seit Schleiermacher.</i> Hrsg, v.
+Schaarschmidt. Eriangen, 1898.</p>
+<p>SCHWARZ, CARL. <i>Zur Gesehichte der neuiten Theologie.</i>
+Leipzig, 4. Aufl., 1869.</p>
+<p>KATTENBUSCH, FERDINAND. <i>Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl.</i>
+Giessen, 1892.</p>
+<p>BROWN, WILLIAM ADAMS. <i>The Essence of Christianity: a Study in
+the History of Definition.</i> New York, 1902.</p>
+<p>DILTHEY, WILHELM. <i>Leben Schleiermachers</i>, 1. Bd. Berlin,
+1870.</p>
+<p>GASS, WILHELM. <i>Geschichte der Protestantischen Dogmatik</i>,
+4 Bde. Leipzig, 1854-67.</p>
+<p>GARVIE, ALFRED. <i>The Ritschlian Theology</i>, 2nd ed.
+Edinburgh, 1902.</p>
+<p>HERRMANN, W. <i>Der evangeliche Glaube und die Theologie
+Albrecht Ritschls.</i> Marburg, 1896.</p>
+<p>PFLEIDERER, OTTO. <i>Die Ritschlche Theologie kritiech
+beleuchtet.</i> Braunschweig, 1891.</p>
+<p>KAFTAN, JULIUS. <i>Dogmatik.</i> T&uuml;bingen, 4. Aufl.,
+1901.</p>
+<p>STEVENS, GEORGE B. <i>The Christian Doctrine of Salvation.</i>
+New York, 1905.</p>
+<h3>CHAPTER IV</h3>
+<p>CARPENTER, J. ESTLIN. <i>The Bible in the Nineteenth
+Century.</i> London, 1903.</p>
+<p>GARDNER, Percy. <i>A Historic View of the New Testament.</i>
+London,1901.</p>
+<p>J&Uuml;LICHER, ADOLF. <i>Einleitung in das Neue Testament.</i>
+Freiliurg, 6. Aufl., 1906. Transl., Miss Janet Ward. 1904.</p>
+<p>MOORE, EDWARD CALDWELL. <i>The New Testament in the Christian
+Church.</i> New York, 1904.</p>
+<p>LIKTZMANN, HANS. <i>Wie wurden die B&uuml;cher des neuen
+Testaments heilige Schrift?</i> T&uuml;bingen, 1907.</p>
+<p>LOISY, A. <i>L'Ecangile el I'Eglise.</i> Paris, 2nd ed., 1903.
+Transl., London, 1904.</p>
+<p>WERNLE, PAUL. <i>Die Anf&auml;nge unserer Religion.</i>
+T&uuml;bingen, 1901.</p>
+<p>SCHWEITZER, ALBERT. <i>Von Reimarus zu Wrede, eine Geschichte
+der Leben-Jesu-Forschung.</i> T&uuml;bingen, 1906.</p>
+<p>SANDAY, WILLIAM. <i>The Life of Christ in Recent Research.</i>
+Oxford, 1907.</p>
+<p>HOLTZMANN, OSKAR. <i>Neu-Testamentliche Zeitgeschichte.</i>
+Freiburg, 2. Aufl., 1906.</p>
+<p>DRIVER, SAMUEL B. <i>Introduction to the Literature of the Old
+Testament.</i> Edinburgh, 2nd ed., 1909.</p>
+<p>WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS. <i>Prolegomena sur Geschichte Israels.</i>
+Berlin, 5. Aufl., 1899.</p>
+<p>BUDDE, KARL.<i>The Religion of Israel to the Exile.</i> New
+York, 1899.</p>
+<p>KAUTSCH, E. <i>Abriss der Geschichte des alt-tentamentlichen
+Schriftthums in seiner 'Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments.'</i>
+Freiburg, 1894. Transl., J.J. TAYLOR, and published separately, New
+York, 1899.</p>
+<p>SMITH, W. ROBERTSON. <i>The Old Testament in the Jewish
+Church.</i> Glasgow, 2nd ed., 1892. <i>The Prophets of Israel</i>,
+2nd ed., 1892.</p>
+<h3>CHAPTER V</h3>
+<p>MEHZ, JOHH. <i>A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth
+Century.</i> Vols. 1 and 2, Edinburgh, 1904 and 1903.</p>
+<p>WHITE, ANDREW D. <i>The History of the Warfare of Science with
+Theology in Christendom.</i> 2 vols. New York, 1896.</p>
+<p>OTTO, RUDOLF. <i>Naturalistisehe und religi&ouml;se
+Weltansicht.</i> T&uuml;bingen, 2. Aufl., 1909.</p>
+<p>WARD, JAMES. <i>Naturalism and Agnosticism.</i> 2 vols. London,
+1899.</p>
+<p>FLINT, ROBERT. <i>Agnosticism.</i> Edinburgh, 1903.</p>
+<p>TULLOCH, JOHN. <i>Modern Theories in Philosophy and
+Religion.</i> Edinburgh, 1884.</p>
+<p>MARTINEAU, JAMES. <i>Essays, Reviews and Addresses.</i> Vols. 1
+and 3 London, 1890.</p>
+<p>BOUTROUX, EMILE. <i>Science et Religion dans la Philosophie
+contemporaine.</i> Paris, 1008. Transl., NIELD. London, 1909.</p>
+<p>FLINT, ROBERT. <i>Socialism.</i> London, 1895.</p>
+<p>PEABODY, FRANCIS G. <i>Jesus Christ and the Social Question.</i>
+New York, 1905.</p>
+<h3>CHAPTER VI</h3>
+<p>HUNT, JOHN. <i>Religious Thought in England in the Nineteenth
+Century.</i> London, 1896.</p>
+<p>TULLOCH, JOHN. <i>Movements of Religious Thought in Britain
+during the Nineteenth Century.</i> London, 1885.</p>
+<p>BENN, ALFRED WILLIAM. <i>The History of English Rationalism in
+the Nineteenth Century.</i> 2 vols. London, 1906.</p>
+<p>HUTTON, RICHARD H. <i>Essays on some of the Modern Guides to
+English Thought in Matters of Faith.</i> London, 1900.</p>
+<p>MELLONE, SIDNEY H. <i>Leaders of Religious Thought in the
+Nineteenth Century.</i> Edinburgh, 1902.</p>
+<p>BROOKE, STOPFORD A. <i>Theology in the English Poets.</i>
+London, 1896.</p>
+<p>SCUDDER, VIDA D. <i>The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English
+Poets</i>. Boston, 1899.</p>
+<p>CHURCH, R.W. <i>The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years,
+1833-1845.</i> London, 1904.</p>
+<p>FAIRBAIRN, ANDREW M. <i>Catholicism, Roman and Anglican.</i> New
+York, 1899.</p>
+<p>WARD, WILFRID. <i>Life and Times of Cardinal Newman.</i> 2 vols.
+5th ed. London, 1900.</p>
+<p>WARD, WILFRID. <i>Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman.</i> 2
+vols. London, 1912.</p>
+<p>DOLLINGER, J.J. IGNAZ VON. <i>Das Papstthum; Neubearbeitung von
+Janus: Der Papst und das Concil, von J. Friedrich.</i>
+M&uuml;nchen, 1892.</p>
+<p>GOUT, RAOUL. <i>L'Affaire Tyrrell.</i> Paris, 1910.</p>
+<p>SABATIER, PAUL. <i>Modernism</i>. Transl., MILES. New York,
+1908.</p>
+<p>STANLEY, ARTHUR P. <i>The Life and Correspondence of Thomas
+Arnold.</i> 2 vols. London, 13th ed., 1882.</p>
+<p>BROOKE, STOPFORD A. <i>Life and Letters of Frederick W.
+Robertson.</i> 2 vols. London, 1891.</p>
+<p>ABBOTT, EVELYN and CAMPBELL, LEWIS. <i>Life and Letters of
+Benjamin Jowett</i>. 2 vols. London, 1897.</p>
+<p>DRUMMOND, JAMES, and UPTON, C.B. <i>Life and Letters of James
+Martineau.</i> 2 vols. London, 1902.</p>
+<p>ALLEN, ALEXANDER V.G. <i>Life and Letters of Phillips
+Brooks.</i> 2 vols. New York, 1900.</p>
+<p>MUNGER, THEODORE T. <i>Horace Bushnell, Preacher and
+Theologian.</i> Boston, 1899.</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Edward Caldwell Moore, by Edward Moore
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Edward Caldwell Moore, by Edward Moore
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Edward Caldwell Moore
+       Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
+
+Author: Edward Moore
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2005 [EBook #15780]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE ***
+
+
+
+
+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.
+  AESTHETIC 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
+mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 aesthetic 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, '_Ecrasez l'infame_,' 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 Aufklaerung?_ He said:
+'Aufklaerung 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 _Aufklaerung_, 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 mediaeval 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 naturae_ 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. 'Aufklaerung' in Herzog-Hauck,
+_Realencylopaedie_, 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 mediaeval 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 Encyclopaedia.
+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 Encyclopaedists. 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.
+
+
+AEsthetic 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 aesthetic-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
+aesthetic. 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 aesthetic
+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
+aesthetic, 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 aestheticism 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 aesthetic 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 Bueckeburg 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 _Systeme 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 aesthetic, 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 aestheticism 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 Koenigsberg, 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 Koenigsberg 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 Woellner's government was the only
+instance in which his peace and public honour were disturbed. He never
+married. He died in Koenigsberg 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 naive 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
+Boese_ 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
+Wuerttemberg. 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 mediaeval 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 Wuerttemberg. He studied in
+Tuebingen. 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 Charite 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 ueber die Religion, an die Gebildeten unter
+ihren Veraechtern_ (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 _outre_, 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, Mueller, 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 Tuebingen. He established
+himself at Bonn, where, in 1853, he became professor extraordinarius and
+in 1860 ordinaries. In 1864 he was called to Goettingen. 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 Goettingen 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 Tuebingen school all would now agree.
+In his feeling against mere sentimentalities of piety many sympathise.
+In his emphasis upon the ethical and practical, in his urgency upon the
+actual problem of a man's vocation in the world, he meets in striking
+manner the temper of our age. In his emphasis upon the social factor in
+religion, he represents a popular phase of thought. With all of this, it
+is strange to find a man of so much learning who had so little sympathy
+with the comparative study of religions, who was such a dogmatist on
+behalf of his own inadequate notion of revelation, the logical effect of
+whose teaching concerning the Church would be the revival of an
+institutionalism and externalism such as Protestantism has hardly known.
+
+Since Schleiermacher the German theologians had made the problem of the
+person of Christ the centre of discussion. In the same period the
+problem of the person of Christ had been the central point of debate in
+America. Here, as there, all the other points arranged themselves about
+this one. The new movement which went out from Ritschl took as its
+centre the work of Christ in redemption. This is obvious from the very
+title of Ritschl's great book, _Die Christliche Lehre von der
+Rechtfertigung und Versoehnung_. Of this work the first edition of the
+third and significant volume was published in 1874. Before that time the
+formal treatises on theology had followed a traditional order of topics.
+It had been assumed as self-evident that one should speak of a person
+before one talked of his work. It did not occur to the theologians that
+in the case of the divine person, at all events, we can securely say
+that we know something as to his work. Much concerning his person must
+remain a mystery to us, exactly because he is divine. Our safest course,
+therefore, would be to infer the unknown qualities of his person from
+the known traits of his work. Certainly this would be true as to the
+work of God in nature. This was not the way, however, in which the minds
+of theologians worked. The habit of dealing with conceptions as if they
+were facts had too deep hold upon them. So long as men believed in
+revelation as giving them, not primarily God and the transcendental
+world itself, but information about God and the transcendental, they
+naturally held that they knew as much of the persons of God and Christ
+as of their works.
+
+Schleiermacher had opened men's eyes to the fact that the great work of
+Christ in redemption is an inward one, an ethical and spiritual work,
+the transformation of character. He had said, not merely that the
+transformation of man's character follows upon the work of redemption.
+It is the work of redemption. The primary witness to the work of Christ
+is, therefore, in the facts of consciousness and history. These are
+capable of empirical scrutiny. They demand psychological investigation.
+When thus investigated they yield our primary material for any assertion
+we may make concerning God. Above all, it is the nature of Jesus, as
+learned on the evidence of his work in the hearts of men, which is our
+great revelation and source of inference concerning the nature of God.
+Instead of saying in the famous phrase, that the Christians think of
+Christ as God, we say that we are able to think of God, as a religious
+magnitude, in no other terms than in those of his manifestation and
+redemptive activity in Jesus.
+
+None since Kant, except extreme confessionalists, and those in
+diminishing degree, have held that the great effect of the work of
+Christ was upon the mind and attitude of God. Less and less have men
+thought of justification as forensic and judicial, a declaring sinners
+righteous in the eye of the divine law, the attribution of Christ's
+righteousness to men, so far at least as to relieve these last of
+penalty. This was the Anselmic scheme. Indeed, it had been Tertullian's.
+Less and less have men thought of reconciliation as that of an angry God
+to men, more and more as of alienated men with God. The phrases of the
+orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, Lutheran as well as Calvinistic,
+survive. More and more new meaning, not always consistent, is injected
+into them. No one would deny that the loftiest moral enthusiasm, the
+noblest sense of duty, animated the hearts of many who thought in the
+terms of Calvinism. The delineation of God as unreconciled, of the work
+and sufferings of Christ as a substitution, of salvation as a
+conferment, caused gratitude, tender devotion, heroic allegiance in
+some. It worked revulsion in others. It was protested against most
+radically by Kant, as indeed it had been condemned by many before him.
+For Kant the renovation of character was the essential salvation. Yet
+the development of his doctrine was deficient through the
+individualistic form which it took. Salvation was essentially a change
+in the individual mind, brought about through the practical reason, and
+having its ideal in Jesus. Yet for Kant our salvation had no closer
+relation to the historic revelation in Jesus. Furthermore, so much was
+this change an individual issue that we may say that the actualisation
+of redemption would be the same for a given man, were he the only man in
+the universe. To hold fast to the ethical idealism of Kant, and to
+overcome its subjectivity and individualism, was the problem.
+
+The reference to experience which underlies all that was said above was
+particularly congruous with the mood of an age grown weary of
+Hegelianism and much impressed with the value of the empirical method in
+all the sciences. Another great contention of our age is for the
+recognition of the value of what is social. Its emphasis is upon that
+which binds men together. Salvation is not normally achieved except in
+the life of a man among and for his fellows. It is by doing one's duty
+that one becomes good. One is saved, not in order to become a citizen of
+heaven by and by, but in order to be an active citizen of a kingdom of
+real human goodness here and now. In reality no man is being saved,
+except as he does actively and devotedly belong to that kingdom. The
+individual would hardly be in God's eyes worth the saving, except in
+order that he might be the instrumentality of the realisation of the
+kingdom. Those are ideas which it is possible to exaggerate in statement
+or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their quality as
+half-truths. But it is hardly possible to exaggerate their significance
+as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness, inadequacy, and
+artificiality both of the official statement and of the popular
+apprehension of Christianity. These ideas appeal to men in our time.
+They are popular because men think them already. Men are pleased, even
+when somewhat incredulous, to learn that Christianity will bear this
+social interpretation. Most Christians are in our time overwhelmingly
+convinced that in this direction lies the interpretation which
+Christianity must bear, if it is to do the work and meet the needs of
+the age. Its consonance with some of the truths underlying socialism may
+account, in a measure, for the influence which the Ritschlian theology
+has had.
+
+As was indicated, Ritschl's epoch-making book bears the title, _The
+Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation_. The book might
+be described in the language of the schools as a monograph upon one
+great dogma of the Christian faith, around which, as the author treats
+it, all the other doctrines are arranged. The familiar topic of
+justification, of which Luther made so much, was thus given again the
+central place. What the book really offered was something quite
+different from this. It was a complete system of theology, but it
+differed from the traditional systems of theology. These had followed
+helplessly a logical scheme which begins with God as he is in himself
+and apart from any knowledge which we have of him. They then slowly
+proceeded to man and sin and redemption, one empirical object and two
+concrete experiences which we may know something about. Ritschl reversed
+the process. He aimed to begin with certain facts of life. Such facts
+are sin and the consciousness of forgiveness, awareness of restoration
+to the will and power of goodness, the gift of love and of a spirit
+which can feel itself victorious even in the midst of ills in life,
+confidence that this life is not all. These phrases, taken together,
+would describe the consciousness of salvation. This consciousness of sin
+and salvation is a fact in individual men. It has evidently been a fact
+in the life of masses of men for many generations. The facts have thus a
+psychology and a history from which reflection on the phenomenon of
+faith must take its departure. There is no reason why, upon this basis,
+and until it departs from the scientific methods which are given with
+the nature of its object, theology should not be as truly a science as
+is any other known among men.
+
+This science starts with man, who in the object of many other sciences.
+It confines itself to man in this one aspect of his relation to moral
+life and to the transcendent meaning of the universe. It notes the fact
+that men, when awakened, usually have the sense of not being in harmony
+with the life of the universe or on the way to realisation of its
+meaning. It notes the fact that many men have had the consciousness of
+progressive restoration to that harmony. It inquires as to the process
+of that restoration. It asks as to the power of it. It discovers that
+that power is a personal one. Men have believed that this power has been
+exerted over them, either in personal contact, or across the ages and
+through generations of believers, by one Jesus, whom they call Saviour.
+They have believed that it was God who through Jesus saved them. Jesus'
+consciousness thus became to them a revelation of God. The thought leads
+on to the consideration of that which a saved man does, or ought to do,
+in the life of the world and among his fellows, of the institution in
+which this attitude of mind is cherished and of the sum total of human
+institutions and relations of which the saved life should be the inward
+force. There is room even for a clause in which to compress the little
+that we know of anything beyond this life. We have written in
+unconventional words. There is no one place, either in Ritschl's work or
+elsewhere, where this grand and simple scheme stands together in one
+context. This is unfortunate. Were this the case, even wayfaring men
+might have understood somewhat better than they have what Ritschl was
+aiming at.
+
+It is a still greater pity that the execution of the scheme should have
+left so much to be desired. That this execution would prove difficult
+needs hardly to be said. That it could never be the work of one man is
+certainly true. To have had so great an insight is title enough to fame.
+Ritschl falls off from his endeavour as often as did
+Schleiermacher--more often and with less excuse. The might of the past
+is great. The lumber which he meekly carries along with him is
+surprising, as one feels his lack of meekness in the handling of the
+lumber which he recognised as such. The putting of new wine into old
+bottles is so often reprobated by Ritschl that the reader is justly
+surprised when he nevertheless recognises the bottles. The system is not
+'all of one piece'--distinctly not. There are places where the rent is
+certainly made worse by the old cloth on the new garment. The work taken
+as a whole is so bewildering that one finds himself asking, 'What is
+Ritschl's method?' If what is meant is not a question of detail, but of
+the total apprehension of the problem to be solved, the apprehension
+which we strove to outline above, then Ritschl's courageous and complete
+inversion of the ancient method, his demand that we proceed from the
+known to the unknown, is a contribution so great that all shortcomings
+in the execution of it are insignificant. His first volume deals with
+the history of the doctrine of justification, beginning with Anselm and
+Abelard. In it Ritschl's eminent qualities as historian come out. In it
+also his prejudices have their play. The second volume deals with the
+Biblical foundations for the doctrine. Ritschl was bred in the Tuebingen
+school. Yet here is much forced exegesis. Ritschl's positivistic view of
+the Scripture and of the whole question of revelation, was not congruous
+with his well-learned biblical criticism. The third volume is the
+constructive one. It is of immeasurably greater value than the other
+two. It is this third volume which has frequently been translated.
+
+In respect of his contention against metaphysics it is hardly necessary
+that we should go into detail. With his empirical and psychological
+point of departure, given above, most men will find themselves in entire
+sympathy. The confusion of religion, which is an experience, with dogma
+which is reasoning about it, and the acceptance of statements in
+Scripture which are metaphysical in nature, as if they were religious
+truths--these two things have, in time past, prevented many earnest
+thinkers from following the true road. When it comes to the constructive
+portion of his work, it is, of course, impossible for Ritschl to build
+without the theoretical supports which philosophy gives, or to follow up
+certain of the characteristic magnitudes of religion without following
+them into the realm of metaphysics, to which, quite as truly as to that
+of religion, they belong. It would be unjust to Ritschl to suppose that
+these facts were hidden from him.
+
+As to his attitude toward mysticism, there is a word to say. In the long
+history of religious thought those who have revolted against
+metaphysical interpretation, orthodox or unorthodox, have usually taken
+refuge in mysticism. Hither the prophet Augustine takes refuge when he
+would flee the ecclesiastic Augustine, himself. The Brethren of the Free
+Spirit, Tauler, a Kempis, Suso, the author of the _Theologia Germanica_,
+Molinos, Madame Gayon, illustrate the thing we mean. Ritschl had seen
+much of mysticism in pietist circles. He knew the history of the
+movement well. What impressed his sane mind was the fact that unhealthy
+minds have often claimed, as their revelation from God, an experience
+which might, with more truth, be assigned to almost any other source. He
+desired to cut off the possibility of what seemed to him often a tragic
+delusion. The margin of any mystical movement stretches out toward
+monstrosities and absurdities. For that matter, what prevents a Buddhist
+from declaring his thoughts and feelings to be Christianity? Indeed,
+Ritschl asks, why is not Buddhism as good as such Christianity? He is,
+therefore, suspicious of revelations which have nothing by which they
+can be measured and checked.
+
+The claim of mystics that they came, in communion with God, to the point
+where they have no need of Christ, seemed to him impious. There is no
+way of knowing that we are in fellowship with God, except by comparing
+what we feel that this fellowship has given us, with that which we
+historically learn that the fellowship with God gave to Christ. This is
+the sense and this the connexion in which Ritschl says that we cannot
+come to God save in and through the historic Christ as he is given us in
+the Gospels. The inner life, at least, which is there depicted for us
+is, in this outward and authoritative sense, our norm and guide.
+
+Large difficulties loom upon the horizon of this positivistic insistence
+upon history. Can we know the inner life of Christ well enough to use it
+thus as test in every, or even in any case? Does not the use of such a
+test, or of any test in this external way, take us out of the realm of
+the religion of the spirit? Men once said that the Church was their
+guide. Others said the Scripture was their guide. Now, in the sense of
+the outwardness of its authority, we repudiate even this. It rings
+devoutly if we say Christ is our guide. Yet, as Ritschl describes this
+guidance, in the exigency of his contention against mysticism, have we
+anything different? What becomes of Confucianists and Shintoists, who
+have never heard of the historic Christ? And all the while we have the
+sense of a query in our minds. Is it open to any man to repudiate
+mysticism absolutely and with contumely, and then leave us to discover
+that he does not mean mysticism as historians of every faith have
+understood it, but only the margin of evil which is apparently
+inseparable from it? That margin of evil others see and deplore. Against
+it other remedies have been suggested, as, for example, intelligence.
+Some would feel that in Ritschl's remedy the loss is greater than the
+gain.
+
+This historical character of revelation is so truly one of the fountain
+heads of the theology which takes its rise in Ritschl, that it deserves
+to be considered somewhat more at length. The Ritschlian movement has
+engaged a generation of more or less notable thinkers in the period
+since Ritschl's death. These have dissented at many points from
+Ritschl's views, diverged from his path and marked out courses of their
+own. We shall do well in the remainder of this chapter to attempt the
+delineation in terms, not exclusively of Ritschl, but of that which may
+with some laxity be styled Ritschlianism. The value judgments of
+religion indicate only the subjective form of religious knowledge, as
+the Ritschlians understand it. Faith, however, does not invent its own
+contents. Historical facts, composing the revelation, actually exist,
+quite independent of the use which the believer makes of them. No group
+of thinkers have more truly sought to draw near to the person of the
+historic Jesus. The historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, is the divine
+revelation. That sums up this aspect of the Ritschlian position. Some
+negative consequences of this position we have already noted. Let us
+turn to its positive significance.
+
+Herrmann is the one of the Ritschlians who has dealt with this matter
+not only with great clearness, but also with deep Christian feeling in
+his _Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_, 1886, and notably in his address,
+_Der Begriff der Offenbarung_, 1887. If the motive of religion were an
+intellectual curiosity, a verbal communication would suffice. As it is a
+practical necessity, this must be met by actual impulse in life. That
+passing out of the unhappiness of sin, into the peace and larger life
+which is salvation, does indeed imply the movement of God's spirit on
+our hearts, in conversion and thereafter. This is essentially mediated
+to us through the Scriptures, especially through those of the New
+Testament, because the New Testament contains the record of the
+personality of Jesus. In that our personality is filled with the spirit
+which breathes in him, our salvation is achieved. The image of Jesus
+which we receive acts upon us as something indubitably real. It
+vindicates itself as real, in that it takes hold upon our manhood. Of
+course, this assumes that the Church has been right in accepting the
+Gospels as historical. Herrmann candidly faces this question. Not every
+word or deed, he says, which is recorded concerning Jesus, belongs to
+this central and dynamic revelation of which we speak. We do not help
+men to see Jesus in a saving way if, on the strength of accounts in the
+New Testament, we insist concerning Jesus that he was born of a virgin,
+that he raised the dead, that he himself rose from the dead. We should
+not put these things before men with the declaration that they must
+assent to them. We must not try to persuade ourselves that that which
+acted upon the disciples as indubitably real must of necessity act
+similarly upon us. We are to allow ourselves to be seized and uplifted
+by that which, in our position, touches us as indubitably real. This is,
+in the first place, the moral character of Jesus. It is his inner life
+which, on the testimony of the disciples, meets us as something real and
+active in the world, as truly now as then. What are some facts of this
+inner life? The Jesus of the New Testament shows a firmness of religious
+conviction, a clearness of moral judgment, a purity and force of will,
+such as are not found united in any other figure in history. We have the
+image of a man who is conscious that he does not fall short of the ideal
+for which he offers himself. It is this consciousness which is yet
+united in him with the most perfect humility. He lives out his life and
+faces death in a confidence and independence which have never been
+approached. He has confidence that he can lift men to such a height that
+they also will partake with him in the highest good, through their full
+surrender to God and their life of love for their fellows.
+
+It is clear that Herrmann aims to bring to the front only those elements
+in the life of Jesus which are likely to prove most effectual in meeting
+the need and winning the faith of the men of our age. He would cast into
+the background those elements which are likely to awaken doubt and to
+hinder the approach of men's souls to God. For Herrmann himself the
+virgin birth has the significance that the spiritual life of Jesus did
+not proceed from the sinful race. But Herrmann admits that a man could
+hold even that without needing to allege that the physical life of Jesus
+did not come into being in the ordinary way. The distinction between the
+inner and outward life of Jesus, and the declaration that belief in the
+former alone is necessary, has the result of thus ridding us of
+questions which can scarcely fail to be present to the mind of every
+modern man. Yet it would be unjust to imply that this is the purpose.
+Quite the contrary, the distinction is logical for this theology.
+Redemption is an affair of the inner life of a man. It is the force of
+the inner life of the Redeemer which avails for it. It is from the
+belief that such an inner and spiritual life was once realised here on
+earth, that our own faith gathers strength, and gets guidance in the
+conflict for the salvation of our souls. The belief in the historicity
+of such an inner life is necessary. So Harnack also declares in his
+_Wesen des Christenthums_, 1900. It is noteworthy that in this connexion
+neither of these writers advances to a form of speculation concerning
+the exalted Christ, which in recent years has had some currency.
+According to this doctrine, there is ascribed to the risen and ascended
+Jesus an existence with God which is thought of in terms different from
+those which we associate with the idea of immortality. In other words,
+this continued existence of Christ as God is a counterpart of that
+existence before the incarnation, which the doctrine of the
+pre-existence alleged. But surely this speculation can have no better
+standing than that of the pre-existence.
+
+Sin in the language of religion is defection from the law of God. It is
+the transgression of the divine command. In what measure, therefore, the
+life of man can be thought of as sinful, depends upon his knowledge of
+the will of God. In Scripture, as in the legends of the early history of
+the race, this knowledge stands in intimate connexion with the witness
+to a primitive revelation. This thought has had a curious history. The
+ideas of mankind concerning God and his will have grown and changed as
+much as have any other ideas. The rudimentary idea of the good is
+probably of social origin. It first emerges in the conflict of men one
+with another. As the personalised ideal of conduct, the god then reacts
+upon conduct, as the conduct reacts upon the notion of the god. Only
+slowly has the ideal of the good been clarified. Only slowly have the
+gods been ethicised. 'An honest God is the noblest work of man.' The
+moralising and spiritualising of the idea of Jahve lies right upon the
+face of the Old Testament. The ascent of man on his ethical and
+spiritual side is as certain as is that on his physical side. Long
+struggle upward through ignorance, weakness, sin, gradual elevating of
+the standard of what ought to he, growingly successful effort to conform
+to that standard--this is what the history of the race has seen.
+
+Athwart this lies the traditional dogma. The dogma took up into itself a
+legend of the childhood of the world. It elaborated that which in
+Genesis is vague and poetic into a vast scheme which has passed as a
+sacred philosophy of history. It postulated an original revelation. It
+affirmed the created state of man as one of holiness before a fall. To
+the framers of the dogma, if sin is the transgression of God's will,
+then it must be in light of a revelation of that will. In the Scriptures
+we have vague intimations concerning God's will, growingly clearer
+knowledge of that will, evolving through history to Jesus. In the dogma
+we have this grand assumption of a paradisaic state of perfectness in
+which the will of God was from the beginning perfectly known.
+
+In the Platonic, as in the rabbinic, speculation the idea must precede
+the fact. Every step of progress is a defection from that idea. The
+dogma suffers from an insoluble contradiction within itself. It aims to
+give us the point of departure by which we are to recognise the nature
+of sin. At the same moment it would describe the perfection of man at
+which God has willed that by age-long struggle he should arrive. Now, if
+we place this perfection at the beginning of human history, before all
+human self-determination, we divest it of ethical quality. Whatever else
+it may be, it is not character. On the other hand, if we would make this
+perfection really that of moral character, then we cannot place it at
+the beginning of human history, but far down the course of the evolution
+of the higher human traits, of the consciousness of sin and of the
+struggle for redemption. It is not revelation from God, but naive
+imagination, later giving place to adventurous speculation concerning
+the origin of the universe, which we have in the doctrine of the
+primeval perfection of man. We do not really make earnest with our
+Christian claim that in Jesus we have our paramount revelation, until we
+admit this. It is through Jesus, and not from Adam that we know sin.
+
+So we might go on to say that the dogma of inherited guilt is a
+contradiction in terms. Disadvantage may be inherited, weakness,
+proclivity to sin, but not guilt, not sin in the sense of that which
+entails guilt. What entails guilt is action counter to the will of God
+which we know. That is always the act of the individual man myself. It
+cannot by any possibility be the act of another. It may be the
+consequence of the sins of my ancestors that I do moral evil without
+knowing it to be such. Even my fellows view this as a mitigation, if not
+as an exculpation. The very same act, however, which up to this point
+has been only an occasion for pity, becomes sin and entails guilt, when
+it passes through my own mind and will as a defection from a will of God
+in which I believe, and as a righteousness which I refuse. The confusion
+of guilt and sin in order to the inclusion of all under the need of
+salvation, as in the Augustinian scheme, ended in bewilderment and
+stultification of the moral sense. It caused men to despair of
+themselves and gravely to misrepresent God. It is no wonder if in the
+age of rationalism this dogma was largely done away with. The religious
+sense of sin was declared to be an hallucination. Nothing is more
+evident in the rationalist theology than its lack of the sense of sin.
+This alone is sufficient explanation of the impotency and inadequacy of
+that theology. Kant's doctrine of radical evil testifies to his deep
+sense that the rationalists were wrong. He could see also the
+impossibility of the ancient view. But he had no substitute. Hegel, much
+as he prided himself upon the restoration of dogma, viewed evil as only
+relative, good in the making. Schleiermacher made a beginning of
+construing the thought of sin from the point of view of the Christian
+consciousness. Ritschl was the first consistently to carry out
+Schleiermacher's idea, placing the Christian consciousness in the centre
+and claiming that the revelation of the righteousness of God and of the
+perfection of man is in Jesus. All men being sinners, there is a vast
+solidarity, which he describes as the Kingdom of Evil and sets over
+against the Kingdom of God, yet not so that the freedom or
+responsibility of man is impaired. God forgives all sin save that of
+wilful resistance to the spirit of the good. That is, Ritschl regards
+all sin, short of this last, as mainly ignorance and weakness. It is
+from Ritschl, and more particularly from Kaftan, that the phrases have
+been mainly taken which served as introduction to this paragraph.
+
+For the work of God through Christ, in the salvation of men from the
+guilt and power of sin, various terms have been used. Different aspects
+of the work have been described by different names. Redemption,
+regeneration, justification, reconciliation and election or
+predestination--these are the familiar words. This is the order in which
+the conceptions stand, if we take them as they occur in consciousness.
+Election then means nothing more than the ultimate reference to God of
+the mystery of an experience in which the believer already rejoices. On
+the other hand, in the dogma the order is reversed. Election must come
+first, since it is the decree of God upon which all depends. Redemption
+and reconciliation have, in Christian doctrine, been traditionally
+regarded as completed transactions, waiting indeed to be applied to the
+individual or appropriated by him through faith, but of themselves
+without relation to faith. Reconciliation was long thought of as that of
+an angry God to man. Especially was this last the characteristic view of
+the West, where juristic notions prevailed. Origen talked of a right of
+the devil over the soul of man until bought off by the sacrifice of
+Christ. This is pure paganism, of course. The doctrine of Anselm marks a
+great advance. It runs somewhat thus: The divine honour is offended in
+the sin of man. Satisfaction corresponding to the greatness of the guilt
+must be rendered. Man is under obligation to render this satisfaction;
+yet he is unable so to do. A sin against God is an infinite offence. It
+demands an infinite satisfaction. Man can render no satisfaction which
+is not finite. The way out of this dilemma is the incarnation of the
+divine Logos. For the god-man, as man, is entitled to bring this
+satisfaction for men. On the other hand, as God he is able so to do. In
+his death this satisfaction is embodied. He gave his life freely. God
+having received satisfaction through him demands nothing more from us.
+
+Abelard had, almost at the same time with Anselm, interpreted the death
+of Christ in far different fashion. It was a revelation of the love of
+God which wins men to love in turn. This notion of Abelard was far too
+subtle. The crass objective dogma of Anselm prevailed. The death of
+Christ was a sacrifice. The purpose was the propitiation of an angry
+God. The effect was that, on the side of God, a hindrance to man's
+salvation was removed. The doctrine accurately reflects the feudal ideas
+of the time which produced it. In Grotius was done away the notion of
+private right, which lies at the basis of the theory of Anselm. That of
+public duty took its place. A sovereign need not stand upon his offended
+honour, as in Anselm's thought. Still, he cannot, like a private
+citizen, freely forgive. He must maintain the dignity of his office, in
+order not to demoralise the world. The sufferings of Christ did not
+effect a necessary private satisfaction. They were an example which
+satisfied the moral order of the world. Apart from this change, the
+conception remains the same.
+
+As Kaftan argues, we can escape the dreadful externality and
+artificiality of this scheme, only as redemption and regeneration are
+brought back to their primary place in consciousness. These are the
+initial experiences in which we become aware of God's work through
+Christ in us and for us. The reconciliation is of us. The redemption is
+from our sins. The regeneration is to a new moral life. Through the
+influence of Jesus, reconciled on our part to God and believing in His
+unchanging love to us, we are translated into God's kingdom and live for
+the eternal in our present existence. Redemption is indeed the work of
+God through Christ, but it has intelligible parallel in the awakening of
+the life of the mind, or again of the spirit of self-sacrifice, through
+the personal influence of the wise and good. Salvation begins in such an
+awakening through the personal influence of the wisest and best. It is
+transformation of our personality through the personality of Jesus, by
+the personal God of truth, of goodness and of love. All that which God
+through Jesus has done for us is futile, save as we make the
+actualisation of our deliverance from sin our continuous and unceasing
+task. When this connexion of thought is broken through, we transfer the
+whole matter of salvation from the inner to the outer world and make of
+it a transaction independent of the moral life of man.
+
+Justification and reconciliation also are primarily acts and gifts of
+God. Justification is a forensic act. The sense is not that in
+justification we are made just. We are, so to say, temporarily thus
+regarded, not that leniency may become the occasion of a new offence,
+but that in grateful love we may make it the starting point of a new
+life. We must justify our justification. It is easy to see the
+objections to such a course on the part of a civil judge. He must
+consider the rights of others. It was this which brought Grotius and the
+rest, with the New England theologians down to Park, to feel that
+forgiveness could not be quite free. If we acknowledge that this
+symbolism of God as judge or sovereign is all symbolism, mere figure of
+speech, not fact at all, then that objection--and much else--falls away.
+If we assert that another figure of speech, that of God as Father, more
+perfectly suggests the relation of God and man, then forgiveness may be
+free. Then justification and forgiveness are only two words for one and
+the same idea. Then the nightmare of a God who would forgive and cannot,
+of a God who will forgive but may not justify until something further
+happens, is all done away. Then the relation of the death of Jesus to
+the forgiveness of our sins cannot be other than the relation of his
+life to that forgiveness. Both the one and the other are a revelation of
+the forgiving love of God. We may say that in his death the whole
+meaning of his life was gathered. We may say that his death was the
+consummation of his life, that without it his life would not have been
+what it is. This is, however, very far from being the ordinary statement
+of the relation of Jesus' death, either to his own life or to the
+forgiveness of our sins.
+
+The doctrinal tradition made much also of the deliverance from
+punishment which follows after the forgiveness of sin. In fact, in many
+forms of the dogma, it has been the escape from punishment which was
+chiefly had in mind. Along with the forensic notion of salvation we
+largely or wholly discard the notion of punishment. We retain only the
+sense that the consequence of continuing in sin is to become more
+sinful. God himself is powerless to prevent that. Punishment is
+immanent, vital, necessary. The penalty is gradually taken away if the
+sin itself is taken away--not otherwise. It returns with the sin, it
+continues in the sin, it is inseparable from the sin. Punishment is no
+longer the right word. Reward is not the true description of that
+growing better which is the consequence of being good. Reward or
+punishment as _quid pro quo_, as arbitrary assignments, as external
+equivalents, do not so much as belong to the world of ideas in which we
+move. For this view the idea that God laid upon Jesus penalties due to
+us, fades into thin air. Jesus could by no possibility have met the
+punishment of sin, except he himself had been a sinner. Then he must
+have met the punishment of his own sin and not that of others. That
+portion which one may gladly bear of the consequences of another's sin
+may rightfully be called by almost any other name. It cannot be called
+punishment since punishment is immanent. Even eternal death is not a
+judicial assignment for our obstinate sinfulness. Eternal death is the
+obstinate sinfulness, and the sinfulness the death.
+
+It must be evident that reconciliation can have, in this scheme, no
+meaning save that man's being reconciled to God. Jesus reveals a God who
+has no need to be reconciled to us. The alienation is not on the side of
+God. That, being alienated from God, man may imagine that God is hostile
+to him, is only the working of a familiar law of the human mind. The
+fiction of an angry God is the most awful survival among us of primitive
+paganism. That which Jesus by his revelation of God brought to pass was
+a true 'at-one-ment,' a causing of God and man to be at one again. To
+the word atonement, as currently pronounced, and as, until a half
+century ago, almost universally apprehended, the notion of that which is
+sacrificial attached. To the life and death of Jesus, as revelation of
+God and Saviour of men, we can no longer attach any sacrificial meaning
+whatsoever. There is indeed the perfectly general sense in which so
+beautiful a life and so heroic a death were, of course, a grand
+exemplification of self-sacrifice. Yet this is a sense so different from
+the other and in itself so obvious, that one hesitates to use the same
+word in the immediate context with that other, lest it should appear
+that the intention was to obscure rather than to make clear the meaning.
+For atonement in a sense different from that of reconciliation, we have
+no significance whatever. Reconciliation and atonement describe one and
+the same fact. In the dogma the words were as far as possible from being
+synonyms. They referred to two facts, the one of which was the means and
+essential prerequisite of the other. The vicarious sacrifice was the
+antecedent condition of the reconciling of God. In our thought it is not
+a reconciliation of God which is aimed at. No sacrifice is necessary. No
+sacrifice such as that postulated is possible. Of the reconciliation of
+man to God the only condition is the revelation of the love of God in
+the life and death of Jesus and the obedient acceptance of that
+revelation on the part of men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT
+
+
+It has been said that in Christian times the relation of philosophy and
+religion may be determined by the attitude of reason toward a single
+matter, namely, the churchly doctrine of revelation.[4] There are three
+possible relations of reason to this doctrine. First, it may be affirmed
+that the content of religion and theology is matter communicated to man
+in extraordinary fashion, truth otherwise unattainable, on which it is
+beyond the competence of reason to sit in judgment. We have then the two
+spheres arbitrarily separated. As regards their relation, theology is at
+first supreme. Reason is the handmaiden of faith. It is occupied in
+applying the principles which it receives at the hands of theology.
+These are the so-called Ages of Faith. Notably was this the attitude of
+the Middle Age. But in the long run either authoritative revelation,
+thus conceived, must extinguish reason altogether, or else reason must
+claim the whole man. After all, it is in virtue of his having some
+reason that man is the subject of revelation. He is continually asked to
+exercise his reason upon certain parts of the revelation, even by those
+who maintain that he must do so only within limits. It is only because
+there in a certain reasonableness in the conceptions of revealed
+religion that man has ever been able to make them his own or to find in
+them meaning and edification. This external relation of reason to
+revelation cannot continue. Nor can the encroachments of reason be met
+by temporary distinctions such as that between the natural and the
+supernatural. The antithesis to the natural is not the supernatural, but
+the unnatural. The antithesis to reason is not faith, but irrationality.
+The antithesis to human truth is not the divine truth. It is falsehood.
+
+[Footnote 4: Seth Pringle-Pattison, _The Philosophical Radicals_, p.
+216.]
+
+When men have made this discovery, a revulsion carries their minds to
+the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely, the position of
+extreme denial. It is an attitude of negation toward revelation, such as
+prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the
+eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges
+itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive
+religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of
+deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion
+of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely
+the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is
+that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable
+assumptions. Indeed, they may think it to be but the obstinate adherence
+to these assumptions minus the current morality. It is impossible that
+this shallow view should prevail. To overcome it, however, there is need
+of a philosophy which shall give not less, but greater scope to reason
+and at the same time an inward meaning to revelation.
+
+This brings us to the third possible position, to which the best
+thinkers of the nineteenth century have advanced. So long as deistic
+views of the relation of God to man and the world held the field,
+revelation meant something interjected _ab extra_ into the established
+order of things. The popular theology which so abhorred deism was yet
+essentially deistic in its notion of God and of his separation from the
+world. Men did not perceive that by thus separating God from the world
+they set up alongside of him a sphere and an activity to which his
+relations were transient and accidental. No wonder that other men,
+finding their satisfying activity within the sphere which was thus
+separated from God, came to think of this absentee God as an appendage
+to the scheme of things. But if man himself be inexplicable, save as
+sharing in the wider life of universal reason, if the process of history
+be realised as but the working out of an inherent divine purpose, the
+manifestation of an indwelling divine force, then revelation denotes no
+longer an interference with that evolution. It is a factor in that
+evolution. It is but the normal relation of the immanent spirit of God
+to the children of men at the crises of their fate. Then revelation is
+an experience of men precisely in the line and according to the method
+of all their nobler experiences. It is itself reasonable and moral.
+Inspiration is the normal and continuous effect of the contact of the
+God who is spirit with man who is spirit too. The relation is never
+broken. But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt.
+There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth of
+communion with God has been vouchsafed. To such persons and eras the
+religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to restrict
+the words 'revelation' and 'inspiration.' This restriction, however,
+signifies the separation of the grand experience from the ordinary, only
+in degree and not in kind. Such an experience was that of prophets and
+law-givers under the ancient covenant. Such an experience, in
+immeasurably greater degree, was that of Jesus himself. Such a
+turning-point in the life of the race was the advent of Christianity.
+The world has not been wrong in calling the documents of these
+revelations sacred books and in attributing to them divine authority. It
+has been largely wrong _in the manner in which it construed their
+authority_. It has been wholly wrong in imagining that the documents
+themselves were the revelation. They are merely the record _of a
+personal communion with the transcendent_. It was Lessing who first cast
+these fertile ideas into the soil of modern thought. They were never
+heartily taken up by Kant. One can think, however, with what enthusiasm
+men recurred to them after their postulates had been verified and the
+idea of God, of man and of the world which they implied, had been
+confirmed by Fichte and Schelling.
+
+In the philosophical movement, the outline of which we have suggested,
+what one may call the _nidus_ of a new faith in Scripture had been
+prepared. The quality had been forecast which the Scripture must be
+found to possess, if it were to retain its character as document of
+revelation. In those very same years the great movement of biblical
+criticism was gathering force which, in the course of the nineteenth
+century, was to prove by stringent literary and historical methods, what
+qualities the documents which we know as Scripture do possess. It was to
+prove in the most objective fashion that the Scripture does not possess
+those qualities which men had long assigned to it. It was to prove that,
+as a matter of fact, the literature does possess the qualities which the
+philosophic forecast, above hinted, required. It was thus actually to
+restore the Bible to an age in which many reasonable men had lost their
+faith in it. It was to give a genetic reconstruction of the literature
+and show the progress of the history which the Scripture enshrines.
+After a contest in which the very foundations of faith seemed to be
+removed, it was to afford a basis for a belief in Scripture and
+revelation as positive and secure as any which men ever enjoyed, with
+the advantage that it is a foundation upon which the modern man can and
+does securely build. The synchronism of the two endeavours is
+remarkable. The convergence upon one point, of studies starting, so to
+say, from opposite poles and having no apparent interest in common, is
+instructive. It is an illustration of that which Comte said, that all
+the great intellectual movements of a given time are but the
+manifestation of a common impulse, which pervades and possesses the
+minds of the men of that time.
+
+The attempt to rationalise the narrative of Scripture was no new one. It
+grew in intensity in the early years of the nineteenth century. The
+conflict which was presently precipitated concerned primarily the
+Gospels. It was natural that it should do so. These contain the most
+important Scripture narrative, that of the life of Jesus. Strauss had in
+good faith turned his attention to the Gospels, precisely because he
+felt their central importance. His generation was to learn that they
+presented also the greatest difficulties. The old rationalistic
+interpretation had started from the assumption that what we have in the
+gospel narrative is fact. Yet, of course, for the rationalists, the
+facts must be natural. They had the appearance of being supernatural
+only through the erroneous judgment of the narrators. It was for the
+interpreter to reduce everything which is related to its simple, natural
+cause. The water at Cana was certainly not turned into wine. It must
+have been brought by Jesus as a present and opened thus in jest. Jesus
+was, of course, begotten in the natural manner. A simple maiden must
+have been deceived. The execution of this task of the rationalising of
+the narratives by one Dr. Paulus, was the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
+claim. The most spiritual of the narratives, the finest flower of
+religious poetry, was thus turned into the meanest and most trivial
+incident without any religious significance whatsoever. The obtuseness
+of the procedure was exceeded only by its vulgarity.
+
+
+STRAUSS
+
+
+On the other hand, as Pfleiderer has said, we must remember the
+difficulty which beset the men of that age. Their general culture made
+it difficult for them to accept the miraculous element in the gospel
+narrative as it stood. Yet their theory of Scripture gave them no notion
+as to any other way in which the narratives might be understood. The men
+had never asked themselves how the narratives arose. In the preface to
+his _Leben Jesu_, Strauss said: 'Orthodox and rationalists alike
+proceed from the false assumption that we have always in the Gospels
+testimony, sometimes even that of eye-witnesses, to fact. They are,
+therefore, reduced to asking themselves what can have been the real and
+natural fact which is here witnessed to in such extraordinary way. We
+have to realise,' Strauss proceeds, 'that the narrators testify
+sometimes, not to outward facts, but to ideas, often most poetical and
+beautiful ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had
+unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions
+upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time
+and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not
+falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive,
+and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within
+the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in
+narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of
+spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic
+statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had appreciated that
+particular episodes, like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection,
+might have some such explanation as this. No one had ever undertaken to
+apply this method consistently, from one end to the other of the gospel
+narrative. What was of more significance, no one had clearly defined the
+conception of legend. Strauss was sure that in the application of this
+notion to certain portions of the Scripture no irreverence was shown. No
+moral taint was involved. Nothing which could detract from the reverence
+in which we hold the Scripture was implied. Rather, in his view, the
+history of Jesus is more wonderful than ever, when some, at least, of
+its elements are viewed in this way, when they are seen as the product
+of the poetic spirit, working all unconsciously at a certain level of
+culture and under the impulse of a great enthusiasm.
+
+There is no doubt that Strauss, who was at that time an earnest
+Christian, felt the relief from certain difficulties in the biography of
+Jesus which this theory affords. He put it forth in all sincerity as
+affording to others like relief. He said that while rationalists and
+supernaturalists alike, by their methods, sacrificed the divine content
+of the story and clung only to its form, his hypothesis sacrificed the
+historicity of the narrative form, but kept the eternal and spiritual
+truth. In his opinion, the lapse of a single generation was enough to
+give room for this process of the growth of the legendary elements which
+have found place in the written Gospels which we have. Ideas entertained
+by primitive Christians relative to their lost Master, have been, all
+unwittingly, transformed into facts and woven into the tale of his
+career. The legends of a people are in their basal elements never the
+work of a single individual. They are never intentionally produced. The
+imperceptible growth of a joint creative work of this kind was possible,
+however, only on the supposition that oral tradition was, for a time,
+the means of transmission of the reminiscences of Jesus. Strauss'
+explanation of his theory has been given above, to some extent in his
+own words. We may see how he understood himself. We may appreciate also
+the genuineness of the religious spirit of his work. At the same time
+the thorough-going way in which he applied his principle, the relentless
+march of his argument, the character of his results, must sometimes have
+been startling even to himself. They certainly startled others. The
+effect of his work was instantaneous and immense. It was not at all the
+effect which he anticipated. The issue of the furious controversy which
+broke out was disastrous both to Strauss' professional career and to his
+whole temperament and character.
+
+David Friedrich Strauss was born in 1808 in Ludwigsburg in Wuerttemberg.
+He studied in Tuebingen and in Berlin. He became an instructor in the
+theological faculty in Tuebingen in 1832. He published his _Leben Jesu_
+in 1835. He was almost at once removed from his portion. In 1836 he
+withdrew altogether from the professorial career. His answer to his
+critics, written in 1837, was in bitter tone. More conciliatory was his
+book, _Ueber Vergaengliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum_, published in
+1839. Indeed there were some concessions in the third edition of his
+_Leben Jesu_ in 1838, but these were all repudiated in 1840. His _Leben
+Jesu fuer das deutsche Volk_, published in 1866 was the effort to
+popularise that which he had done. It is, however, in point of method,
+superior to his earlier work, Comments were met with even greater
+bitterness. Finally, not long before his death in 1874, he published
+_Der Alte und der Neue Glaube_, in which he definitely broke with
+Christianity altogether and went over to materialism and pessimism.
+
+Pfleiderer, who had personal acquaintance with Strauss and held him in
+regard, once wrote: 'Strauss' error did not lie in his regarding some of
+the gospel stories as legends, and some of the narratives of the
+miraculous as symbols of ideal truths. So far Strauss was right. The
+contribution which he made is one which we have all appropriated and
+built upon. His error lay in his looking for those religious truths
+which are thus symbolised, outside of religion itself, in adventurous
+metaphysical speculations. He did not seek them in the facts of the
+devout heart and moral will, as these are illustrated in the actual life
+of Jesus.' If Strauss, after the disintegration in criticism of certain
+elements in the biography of Jesus, had given us a positive picture of
+Jesus as the ideal of religious character and ethical force, his work
+would indeed have been attacked. But it would have outlived the attack
+and conferred a very great benefit. It conferred a great benefit as it
+was, although not the benefit which Strauss supposed. The benefit which
+it really conferred was in its critical method, and not at all in its
+results.
+
+Of the mass of polemic and apologetic literature which Strauss' _Leben
+Jesu_ called forth, little is at this distance worth the mentioning.
+Ullmann, who was far more appreciative than most of his adversaries,
+points out the real weakness of Strauss' work. That weakness lay in the
+failure to draw any distinction between the historical and the mythical.
+He threatened to dissolve the whole history into myth. He had no sense
+for the ethical element in the personality and teaching of Jesus nor of
+the creative force which this must have exerted. Ullmann says with
+cogency that, according to Strauss, the Church created its Christ
+virtually out of pure imagination. But we are then left with the query:
+What created the Church? To this query Strauss has absolutely no answer
+to give. The answer is, says Ullmann, that the ethical personality of
+Jesus created the Church. This ethical personality is thus a supreme
+historic fact and a sublime historic cause, to which we must endeavour
+to penetrate, if need be through the veil of legend. The old
+rationalists had made themselves ridiculous by their effort to explain
+everything in some natural way. Strauss and his followers often appeared
+frivolous, since, according to them, there was little left to be
+explained. If a portion of the narrative presented a difficulty, it was
+declared mythical. What was needed was such a discrimination between the
+legendary and historical elements in the Gospels as could be reached
+only by patient, painstaking study of the actual historical quality and
+standing of the documents. No adequate study of this kind had ever been
+undertaken. Strauss did not undertake it, nor even perceive that it was
+to be undertaken. There had been many men of vast learning in textual
+and philological criticism. Here, however, a new sort of critique was
+applied to a problem which had but just now been revealed in all its
+length and breadth. The establishing of the principles of this
+historical criticism--the so-called Higher Criticism--was the herculean
+task of the generation following Strauss. To the development of that
+science another Tuebingen professor, Baur, made permanent contribution.
+With Strauss himself, sadder than the ruin of his career, was the
+tragedy of the uprooting of his faith. This tragedy followed in many
+places in the wake of the recognition of Strauss' fatal half-truth.
+
+
+BAUR
+
+
+Baur, Strauss' own teacher in Tuebingen, afterward famous as biblical
+critic and church-historian, said of Strauss' book, that through it was
+revealed in startling fashion to that generation of scholars, how little
+real knowledge they had of the problem which the Gospels present. To
+Baur it was clear that if advance was to be made beyond Strauss'
+negative results, the criticism of the gospel history must wait upon an
+adequate criticism of the documents which are our sources for that
+history. Strauss' failure had brought home to the minds of men the fact
+that there were certain preliminary studies which must needs be taken
+up. Meantime the other work must wait. As one surveys the literature of
+the next thirty years this fact stands out. Many apologetic lives of
+Jesus had to be written in reply to Strauss. But they are almost
+completely negligible. No constructive work was done in this field until
+nearly a generation had passed.
+
+Since all history, said Baur, before it reaches us must pass through the
+medium of a narrator, our first question as to the gospel history is
+not, what objective reality can be accorded to the narrative itself.
+There is a previous question. This concerns the relation of the
+narrative to the narrator. It might be very difficult for us to make up
+our minds as to what it was that, in a given case, the witness saw. We
+have not material for such a judgment. We have probably much evidence,
+up and down his writings, as to what sort of man the witness was, in
+what manner he would be likely to see anything and with what personal
+equation he would relate that which he saw. Baur would seem to have been
+the first vigorously and consistently to apply this principle to the
+gospel narratives. Before we can penetrate deeply into the meaning of an
+author we must know, if we may, his purpose in writing. Every author
+belongs to the time in which he lives. The greater the importance of his
+subject for the parties and struggles of his day, the safer is the
+assumption that both he and his work will bear the impress of these
+struggles. He will represent the interests of one or another of the
+parties. His work will have a tendency of some kind. This was one of
+Baur's oft-used words--the tendency of a writer and of his work. We must
+ascertain that tendency. The explanation of many things both in the form
+and substance of a writing would be given could we but know that. The
+letters of Paul, for example, are written in palpable advocacy of
+opinions which were bitterly opposed by other apostles. The biographies
+of Jesus suggest that they also represent, the one this tendency, the
+other that. We have no cause to assert that this trait of which we speak
+implies conscious distortion of the facts which the author would relate.
+The simple-minded are generally those least aware of the bias in the
+working of their own minds. It is obvious that until we have reckoned
+with such elements as these, we cannot truly judge of that which the
+Gospels say. To the elaboration of the principles of this historical
+criticism Baur gave the labour of his life. His biblical work alone
+would have been epoch-making.
+
+Ferdinand Christian Baur was born in 1793 in Schmieden, near Stuttgart.
+He became a professor in Tuebingen in 1826 and died there in 1860. He was
+an ardent disciple of Hegel. His greatest work was surely in the field
+of the history of dogma. His works, _Die Christliche Lehre von der
+Vereoehnung_, 1838, _Die Christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und
+Menschwerdung Gottes_, 1841-1843, his _Lehrbuch der Christlichen
+Dogmengeschichte_, 1847, together constitute a contribution to which
+Harnack's work in our own time alone furnishes a parallel. Baur had
+begun his thorough biblical studies before the publication of Strauss'
+book. The direction of those studies was more than ever confirmed by his
+insight of the shortcomings of Strauss' work. Very characteristically
+also he had begun his investigations, not at the most difficult point,
+that of the Gospels, as Strauss had done, but at the easiest point, the
+Epistles of Paul. As early as 1831 he had published a tractate, _Die
+Christus-Partei in der Corinthischen Gemeinde_. In that book he had
+delineated the bitter contest between Paul and the Judaising element in
+the Apostolic Church which opposed Paul whithersoever he went. In 1835
+his disquisition, _Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe_, appeared. In the
+teachings of these letters he discovered the antithesis to the gnostic
+heresies of the second century. He thought also that the stage of
+organisation of the Church which they imply, accorded better with this
+supposition than with that of their apostolic authorship. The same
+general theme is treated in a much larger way in Baur's _Paulus, der
+Apostel Jesu Christi_, in 1845. Here the results of his study of the
+book of the Acts are combined with those of his inquiries as to the
+Pauline Epistles. In the history of the apostolic age men had been
+accustomed to see the evidence only of peace and harmony. Baur sought to
+show that the period had been one of fierce struggle, between the narrow
+Judaic and legalistic form of faith in the Messiah and that conception,
+introduced by Paul, of a world-religion free from the law. Out of this
+conflict, which lasted a hundred and fifty years, went forth the
+Catholic Church. The monuments of this struggle and witnesses of this
+process of growth are the New Testament writings, most of which were
+produced in the second century. The only documents which we have which
+were written before A.D. 70, were the four great Epistles of Paul, those
+to the Galatians, to the Romans, and to the Corinthians, together with
+the Apocalypse.
+
+Many details in Baur's view are now seen to have been overstated and
+others false. Yet this was the first time that a true historical method
+had been applied to the New Testament literature as a whole. Baur's
+contribution lay in the originality of his conception of Christianity,
+in his emphasis upon Paul, in his realisation of the magnitude of the
+struggle which Paul inaugurated against Jewish prejudices in the
+primitive Church. In his idea, the issue of that struggle was, on the
+one hand, the freeing of Christianity from Judaism and on the other, the
+developing of Christian thought into a system of dogma and of the
+scattered Christian communities into an organised Church. The Fourth
+Gospel contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the
+gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy. The
+Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily in the
+phenomenal world in the person of Jesus. It enters into conflict with
+the darkness and evil of the world. This speculation is but thinly
+clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus. That an account completely
+dominated by speculative motives gives but slight guarantee of
+historical truth, was for Baur self-evident. The author remains unknown,
+the age uncertain. The book, however, can hardly have appeared before
+the time of the Montanist movement, that is, toward the end of the
+second century. Scholars now rate far more highly than did Baur the
+element of genuine Johannine tradition which may lie behind the Fourth
+Gospel and account for its name. They do not find traces of Montanism or
+of paschal controversies. But the main contention stands. The Fourth
+Gospel represents the beginning of elaborate reflexion upon the life and
+work of Jesus. It is what it is because of the fusion of the ethical and
+spiritual content of the revelation in the personality of Jesus, with
+metaphysical abstractions and philosophical interpretation.
+
+Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he offered of
+the problem which the synoptic Gospels present. His opinions are of no
+interest except as showing that he too worked diligently upon a question
+which for a long time seemed only to grow in complexity and which has
+busied scholars practically from Baur's day to our own. His zeal here
+also to discover dogmatic purposes led him astray. The _Tendenzkritik_
+had its own tendencies. The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness.
+Baur had the kind of ear which hears grass grow. There is much
+overstrained acumen. Many radically false conclusions are reached by
+prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the last
+analysis is that of Hegel. Everything is to be explained on the
+principle of antithesis. Again, the assumption of conscious purpose in
+everything which men do or write is a grave exaggeration. It is often in
+contradiction of that wonderful unconsciousness with which men and
+institutions move to the fulfilment of a purpose for the good, the
+purpose of God, into which their own life is grandly taken up. To make
+each phase of such a movement the contribution of some one man's scheme
+or endeavour is, as was once said, to make God act like a professor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The method of this book is that it seeks to deal only with men who have
+inaugurated movements, or marked some turning-point in their course
+which has proved of more than usual significance. The compass of the
+book demands such a limitation. But by this method whole chapters in the
+life of learning are passed over, in which the substance of achievement
+has been the carrying out of a plan of which we have been able to note
+only the inception. There is a sense in which the carrying out of a plan
+is both more difficult and more worthy than the mere setting it in
+motion. When one thinks of the labour and patience which have been
+expended, for example, upon the problem of the Gospels in the past
+seventy years, those truths come home to us. When one reminds himself of
+the hypotheses which have been made but to be abandoned, which have yet
+had the value that they at least indicated the area within which
+solutions do not lie,--when one thinks of the wellnigh immeasurable toil
+by which we have been led to large results which now seem secure, one is
+made to realise that the conditions of the advance of science are, for
+theologians, not different from those which obtain for scholars who, in
+any other field, would establish truth and lead men. In a general way,
+however, it may be said that the course of opinion in these two
+generations, in reference to such questions as those of the dates and
+authorship of the New Testament writings, has been one of rather
+noteworthy retrogression from many of the Tuebingen positions. Harnack's
+_Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1893, and his _Chronologie
+der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1897, present a marked contrast to
+Baur's scheme.
+
+
+THE CANON
+
+
+The minds of New Testament scholars in the last generation have been
+engaged with a question which, in its full significance, was hardly
+present to the attention of Baur's school. It is the question of the New
+Testament as a whole. It is the question as to the time and manner and
+motives of the gathering together of the separate writings into a canon
+of Scripture which, despite the diversity of its elements, exerted its
+influence as a unit and to which an authority was ascribed, which the
+particular writings cannot originally have had. When and how did the
+Christians come to have a sacred book which they placed on an equality
+with the Old Testament, which last they had taken over from the
+synagogue? How did they choose the writings which were to belong to this
+new collection? Why did they reject books which we know were read for
+edification in the early churches? Deeper even than the question of the
+growth of the collection is that of the growth of the apprehension
+concerning it. This apprehension of these twenty-seven different
+writings as constituting the sole document of Christian revelation,
+given by the Holy Spirit, the identical holy book of the Christian
+Church, gave to the book a significance altogether different from that
+which its constituent elements must have had for men to whom they had
+appeared as but the natural literary deposit of the religious movement
+of the apostolic age. This apprehension took possession of the mind of
+the Christian community. It was made the subject of deliverances by
+councils of the Church. How did this great transformation take place?
+Was it an isolated achievement, or was it part of a general movement?
+Did not this development of life in the Christian communities which gave
+them a New Testament belong to an evolution which gave them also the
+so-called Apostles' Creed and a monarchical organisation of the Church
+and the beginnings of a ritual of worship?
+
+It is clear that we have here a question of greatest moment. With the
+rise of this idea of the canon, with the assigning to this body of
+literature the character of Scripture, we have the beginning of the
+larger mastery which the New Testament has exerted over the minds and
+life of men. Compared with this question, investigations as to the
+authorship and as to the time, place and circumstance of the production
+of particular books, came, for the time, to occupy a secondary rank. As
+they have emerged again, they wear a new aspect and are approached in a
+different spirit. The writings are revealed as belonging to a far larger
+context, that of the whole body of the Christian literature of the age.
+It in no way follows from that which we have said that the body of
+documents, which ultimately found themselves together in the New
+Testament, have not a unity other than the outward one which was by
+consensus of opinion or conciliar decree imposed upon them. They do
+represent, in the large and in varying degrees, an inward and spiritual
+unity. There was an inspiration of the main body of these writings, the
+outward condition of which, at all events, was the nearness of their
+writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the consequence of which
+was the unique relation which the more important of these documents
+historically bore to the formation of the Christian Church. There was a
+heaven which lay about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly
+faded into the common light of day. That heaven was the spirit of the
+Master himself. The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the
+first pure illumination of that spirit. But the churchmen who made the
+canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave mistaken
+reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless were right. They
+gave what they considered sound external reasons. They alleged apostolic
+authorship. They should have been content with internal evidence and
+spiritual effectiveness. The apostles had come, in the mind of the early
+Church, to occupy a place of unique distinction. Writings long enshrined
+in affection for their potent influence, but whose origin had not been
+much considered, were now assigned to apostles, that they might have
+authority and distinction. The theory of the canon came after the fact.
+The theory was often wrong. The canon had been, in the main and in its
+inward principle, soundly constituted. Modern critics reversed the
+process. They began where the Church Fathers left off. They tore down
+first that which had been last built up. Modern criticism, too, passed
+through a period in which points like those of authorship and date of
+Gospels and Epistles seemed the only ones to be considered. The results
+being here often negative, complete disintegration of the canon seemed
+threatened, through discovery of errors in the processes by which the
+canon had been outwardly built up. Men realise now that that was a
+mistake.
+
+Two things have been gained in this discussion. There is first the
+recognition that the canon is a growth. The holy book and the conception
+of its holiness, as well, were evolved. Christianity was not primarily a
+book-religion save in the sense that almost all Christians revered the
+Old Testament. Other writings than those which we esteem canonical were
+long used in churches. Some of those afterward canonical were not used
+in all the churches. In similar fashion we have learned that identical
+statements of faith were not current in the earliest churches. Nor was
+there one uniform system of organisation and government. There was a
+time concerning which we cannot accurately use the word Church. There
+were churches, very simple, worshipping communities. But the Church, as
+outward magnitude, as triumphant organisation, grew. So there were many
+creeds or, at least, informally accredited and current beginnings of
+doctrine. By and by there was a formally accepted creed. So there were
+first dearly loved memorials of Jesus and letters of apostolic men. Only
+by and by was there a New Testament. The first gain is the recognition
+of this state of things. The second follows. It is the recognition that,
+despite a sense in which this literature is unique, there is also a
+sense in which it is but a part of the whole body of early Christian
+literature. From the exact and exhaustive study of the early Christian
+literature as a whole, we are to expect a clearer understanding and a
+juster estimate of the canonical part of it. It is not easy to say to
+whom we have to ascribe the discovery and elaboration of these truths.
+The historians of dogma have done much for this body of opinion. The
+historians of Christian literature have perhaps done more. Students of
+institutions and of the canon law have had their share. Baur had more
+than an inkling of the true state of things. But by far the most
+conspicuous teacher of our generation, in two at least of these
+particular fields, has been Harnack. In his lifelong labour upon the
+sources of Christian history, he had come upon this question of the
+canon again and again. In his _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_,
+1887-1890, 4te. Aufl., 1910, the view of the canon, which was given
+above, is absolutely fundamental. In his _Geschichte der altchristlichen
+Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1893, and _Chronologic der allchristlichen
+Literatur_, 1897-1904, the evidence is offered in rich detail. It was in
+his tractate, _Das Neue Testament um das Jahr_ 200, 1889, that he
+contended for the later date against Zahn, who had urged that the
+outline of the New Testament was established and the conception of it as
+Scripture present, by the end of the first century. Harnack argues that
+the decision practically shaped itself between the time of Justin
+Martyr, c. A.D. 150, and that of Irenaeus, c. A.D. 180. The studies of
+the last twenty years have more and more confirmed this view.
+
+
+LIFE OF JESUS
+
+
+We said that the work of Strauss revealed nothing so clearly as the
+ignorance of his time concerning the documents of the early Christian
+movement. The labours of Baur and of his followers were directed toward
+overcoming this difficulty. Suddenly the public interest was stirred,
+and the earlier excitement recalled by the publication of a new life of
+Jesus. The author was a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, at one time a candidate
+for the priesthood in the Roman Church. He was a man of learning and
+literary skill, who made his _Vie de Jesus_, which appeared in 1863, the
+starting-point for a series of historical works under the general title,
+_Les Origines de Christianisme_. In the next year appeared Strauss'
+popular work, _Leben Jesu fuer das deutsche Volk_. In 1864 was published
+also Weizsaecker's contribution to the life of Christ, his
+_Untersuchungen ueber die evangelische Geschichte_. To the same year
+belonged Schenkel's _Charakterbild Jesu_. In the years from 1867-1872
+appeared Keim's _Geschichte Jesu von Nazara_. There is something very
+striking in this recurrence to the topic. After ail, this was the point
+for the sake of which those laborious investigations had been
+undertaken. This was and is the theme of undying religious interest, the
+character and career of the Nazarene. Renan's philosophical studies had
+been mainly in English, studies of Locke and Hume. But Herder also had
+been his beloved guide. For his biblical and oriental studies he had
+turned almost exclusively to the Germans. There is a deep religious
+spirit in the work of the period of his conflict with the Church. The
+enthusiasm for Christ sustained him in his struggle. Of the days before
+he withdrew from the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant
+like a professor in Halle or Tuebingen.' French was at that time a
+language much better known in the world at large, particularly the
+English-speaking world, than was German. Renan's book had great art and
+charm. It took a place almost at once as a bit of world-literature. The
+number of editions in French and of translations into other languages is
+amazing. Beyond question, the critical position was made known through
+Renan to multitudes who would never have been reached by the German
+works which were really Renan's authorities. It is idle to say with
+Pfleiderer that it is a pity that, having possessed so much learning,
+Renan had not possessed more. That is not quite the point. The book has
+much breadth and solidity of learning. Yet Renan has scarcely the
+historian's quality. His work is a work of art. It has the halo of
+romance. Imagination and poetical feeling make it in a measure what it
+is.
+
+Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany. He set out for the
+priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages and
+history. He made long sojourn in the East. He spoke of Palestine as
+having been to him a fifth Gospel. He became Professor of Hebrew in the
+_College de France_. He was suspended from his office in 1863, and
+permitted to read again only in 1871. He had formally separated himself
+from the Roman Church in 1845. He was a member of the Academy. His
+diction is unsurpassed. He died in 1894. In his own phrase, he sought to
+bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life
+of his people. He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then
+as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but
+doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to
+his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never
+was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes.
+He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of
+mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or
+an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet
+enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or
+period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than
+the scant records acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.
+
+Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate. This was the
+fact which, by all these biographies of Jesus, was brought home to men's
+minds. Keim's book, the most learned of those mentioned, is hardly more
+than a vast collection of material for the history of Jesus' age, which
+has now been largely superseded by Schuerer's _Geschichte des Judischen
+Volkes im Zeitalier Jesu Christi_, 2 Bde., 1886-1890. There have been
+again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the great
+problem. Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the eighties lives
+of Jesus which, especially the former, are noteworthy in their treatment
+of the critical material. They do not for a moment face the question of
+the person of Christ. The same remark might be made, almost without
+exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in
+England and America. The best books of recent years are Albert Reville's
+_Jesus de Nazareth_, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's _Leben Jesu_, 1901. So
+great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they
+urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic recognition
+of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here rendered, in a
+calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling of his theme.
+Meantime new questions have arisen, questions of the relation of Jesus
+to Messianism, like those touched upon by Wrede in his _Das Messias
+Geheimniss in den Evangelien_, 1901, and questions as to the
+eschatological trait in Jesus' own teaching. Schweitzer's book, _Von
+Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung_, 1906, not
+merely sets forth this deeply interesting chapter in the history of the
+thought of modern men, but has also serious interpretative value in
+itself. For English readers Sanday's _Life of Christ in Recent
+Research_, 1907, follows the descriptive aspect, at least, of the same
+purpose with Schweitzer's book, covering, however, only the last twenty
+years.
+
+It is characteristic that Ritschl, notwithstanding his emphasis upon the
+historical Jesus, asserted the impossibility of a biography of Jesus.
+The understanding of Jesus is through faith. For Wrede, on the other
+hand, such a biography is impossible because of the nature of our
+sources. Not alone are they scant, but they are not biographical. They
+are apologetic, propagandist, interested in everything except those
+problems which a biographer must raise. The last few years have even
+conjured up the question whether Jesus ever lived. One may say with all
+simplicity, that the question has, of course, as much rightfulness as
+has any other question any man could raise. The somewhat extended
+discussion has, however, done nothing to make evident how it could
+arise, save in minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in
+historical research. The conditions which beset us when we ask for a
+biography of Jesus that shall answer scientific requirement are not
+essentially different from those which meet us in the case of any other
+personage equally remote in point of time, and equally woven about--if
+any such have been--by the love and devotion of men. Bousset's little
+book, _Was Wissen wir von Jesus?_ 1904, convinces a quiet mind that we
+know a good deal. Qualities in the personality of Jesus obviously worked
+in transcendent measure to call out devotion. No understanding of
+history is adequate which has no place for the unfathomed in
+personality. Exactly because we ourselves share this devotion, we could
+earnestly wish that the situation as to the biography of Jesus were
+other than it is.
+
+
+THE OLD TESTAMENT
+
+
+We have spoken thus far as if the whole biblical-critical problem had
+been that of the New Testament. In reality the same impulses which had
+opened up that question to the minds of men had set them working upon
+the problem of the Old Testament as well. We have seen how the
+Christians made for themselves a canon of the New Testament. By the
+force of that conception of the canon, and through the belief that,
+almost in a literal sense, God was the author of the whole book, the
+obvious differences among the writings had been obscured. Men forgot the
+evolution through which the writings had passed. The same thing had
+happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the
+rabbis before the Christian movement. When the Christians took over the
+Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book
+wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel
+had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation of the old
+covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament became a Christian
+book. Not merely were the Christian facts prophesied in the Old
+Testament, but its doctrines also were implied. Almost down to modern
+times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove
+doctrine and sustain theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are
+cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference. What we
+have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic
+Puritan divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.
+
+The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the
+one which we have described in reference to the New. Of course, elder
+scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic
+authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman Catholic
+scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of
+inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth
+views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a
+revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of
+considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which
+would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which
+would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth
+of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the
+religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the
+true relation of Judaism to Christianity.
+
+In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss' _Leben Jesu_ saw the
+light, Wilhelm Vatke published his _Religion des Alten Testaments_.
+Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in Berlin in 1830, was professor
+extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full
+professorship. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public
+attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work had
+caused. Reuss in Strassburg was working on the same lines, but published
+the main body of his results much later.
+
+The truth for which these scholars and others like them argued, worked
+its way slowly by force of its own merit. Perhaps it was due to this
+fact that the development of Old Testament critical views was subject to
+a fluctuation less marked than that which characterised the case of the
+New Testament. It is not necessary to describe the earlier stages of the
+discussion in Vatke's own terms. To his honour be it said that the views
+which he thus early enunciated were in no small degree identical with
+those which were in masterful fashion substantiated in Holland by Kuenen
+about 1870, in Germany by Wellhausen after 1878, and made known to
+English readers by Robertson Smith In 1881.
+
+Budde has shown in his _Kanon des Alten Testaments_, 1900, that the Old
+Testament which lies before us finished and complete, assumed its
+present form only as the result of the growth of several centuries. At
+the beginning of this process of the canonisation stands that strange
+event, the sudden appearance of a holy book of the law under King
+Josiah, in 621 B.C. The end of the process, through the decisions of the
+scribes, falls after the destruction of Jerusalem, possibly even in the
+second century. Lagarde seems to have proved that the rabbis of the
+second century succeeded in destroying all copies of the Scripture which
+differed from the standard then set up. This state of things has
+enormously increased a difficulty which was already great enough, that
+of the detection and separation of the various elements of which many of
+the books in this ancient literature are made up. Certain books of the
+New Testament also present the problem of the discrimination of elements
+of different ages, which have been wrought together into the documents
+as we now have them, in a way that almost defies our skill to disengage.
+The synoptic Gospels are, of course, the great example. The book of the
+Acts presents a problem of the same kind. But the Pentateuch, or rather
+Hexateuch, the historical books in less degree, the writings even of
+some of the prophets, the codes which formulate the law and ritual, are
+composites which have been whole centuries in the making and remaking.
+There was no such thing as right of authorship in ancient Israel, little
+of it in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popular or
+priestly property. Histories were newly narrated, laws enlarged and
+rearranged, prophecies attributed to conspicuous persons. All this took
+place not in deliberate intention to pervert historic truth, but because
+there was no interest in historic truth and no conception of it. The
+rewriting of a nation's history from the point of view of its priesthood
+bore, to the ancient Israelite, beyond question, an aspect altogether
+different from that which the same transaction would bear to us. The
+difficulty of the separation of these materials, great in any case, is
+enhanced by the fact alluded to, that we have none but internal
+evidence. The success of the achievement, and the unanimity attained
+with reference to the most significant questions, is one of the marvels
+of the life of learning of our age.
+
+In the Jewish tradition it had been assumed that the Mosaic law was
+written down in the wilderness. Then, in the times of the Judges and of
+the Kings, the historical books took shape, with David's Psalms and the
+wise words of Solomon. At the end of the period of the Kings we have the
+prophetic literature and finally Ezra and Nehemiah. De Wette had
+disputed this order, but Wellhausen in his _Prolegomena zur Geshichte
+Israels_, 1883, may be said to have proved that this view was no longer
+tenable. Men ask, could the law, or even any greater part of it, have
+been given to nomads in the wilderness? Do not all parts of it assume a
+settled state of society and an agricultural life? Do the historical
+books from Judges to the II. Kings know anything about the law? Are the
+practices of worship which they imply consonant with the supposition
+that the law was in force? How is it that that law appears both under
+Josiah and again under Ezra, as something new, thus far unknown, and yet
+as ruling the religious life of the people from that day forth? It seems
+impossible to escape the conclusion that only after Josiah's
+reformation, more completely after the restoration under Ezra, did the
+religion of the law exist. The centralisation of worship at one point,
+such as the book of Deuteronomy demands, seems to have been the thing
+achieved by the reform under Josiah. The establishment of the priestly
+hierarchy such as the code ordains was the issue of the religious
+revolution wrought in Ezra's time. To put it differently, the so-called
+_Book of the Covenant, the nucleus of the law-giving_, itself implies
+the multiplicity of the places of worship. Deuteronomy demands the
+centralisation of the worship as something which is yet to take place.
+The priestly Code declares that the limitation of worship to one place
+was a fact already in the time of the journeys of Israel in the
+wilderness. It is assumed that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared
+the almost universal worship of the stars. Moses may indeed have
+concluded a covenant between his people and Jahve, their God, hallowing
+the judicial and moral life of the people, bringing these into relation
+to the divine will. Jahve was a holy God whose will was to guide the
+people coming up out of the degradation of nature-worship. That part of
+the people held to the old nature-worship is evident in the time of
+Elijah. The history of Israel is not that of defection from a pure
+revelation. It is the history of a gradual attainment of purer
+revelation, of enlargement in the application of it, of discovery of new
+principles contained in it. It is the history also of the decline of
+spiritual religion. The zeal of the prophets against the ceremonial
+worship shows that. Their protest reveals at that early date the
+beginning of that antithesis which had become so sharp in Jesus' time.
+
+This determination of the relative positions of law and prophets was the
+first step in the reconstruction of the history, both of the nation of
+Israel and of its literature. At the beginning, as in every literature,
+are songs of war and victory, of praise and grief, hymns, even riddles
+and phrases of magic. Everywhere poetry precedes prose. Then come myths
+relating to the worship and tales of the fathers and heroes. Elements of
+both these sorts are embedded in the simple chronicles which began now
+to be written, primitive historical works, such as those of the Jahvist
+and Elohist, of the narrators of the deeds of the judges and of David
+and of Saul. Perhaps at this point belong the earliest attempts at
+fixing the tradition of family and clan rights, and of the regulation of
+personal conduct, as in the Book of the Covenant. Then comes the great
+outburst of the prophetic spirit, the preaching of an age of great
+religious revival. Then follows the law, with its minute regulation of
+all details of life upon which would depend the favour of the God who
+had brought punishment upon the people in the exile. The prophecy runs
+on into apocalyptic like that of the book of Daniel. The contact with
+the outside world makes possible a phase of literature such as that to
+which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The deepening of the
+inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms, some of which are
+credibly assigned to a period so late as that of the Maccabees.
+
+In this which has been said of the literature we have the clue also for
+the reconstruction of the nation's history. The naive assumption in the
+writing of all history had once been that one must begin with the
+beginning. But to Wellhausen, Stade, Eduard Meyer and Kittel and
+Cornill, it has been clear that the history of the earliest times is the
+most uncertain. It is the least adapted to furnish a secure point of
+departure for historical inquiry. There exist for it usually no
+contemporary authorities, or only such as are of problematical worth.
+This earliest period constitutes a problem, the solution of which, so
+far as any solution is possible, can be hoped for only through approach
+from the side of ascertained facts. We must start from a period which is
+historically known. For the history of the Hebrews, this is the time of
+the first prophets of whom we have written records, or from whom we have
+written prophecies. We get from these, as also from the earliest direct
+attempts at history writing, only that conception of Israel's
+pre-historic life which was entertained in prophetic circles in the
+eighth century. We learn the heroic legends in the interpretation which
+the prophets put upon them. We have still to seek to interpret them for
+ourselves. We must begin in the middle and work both backward and
+forward. Such a view of the history of Israel affords every opportunity
+for the connecting of the history and religion of Israel with those of
+the other Semite stocks. Some of these have in recent years been
+discovered to offer extraordinary parallels to that which the Old
+Testament relates.
+
+
+THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE
+
+
+When speaking of Baur's contribution to New Testament criticism, we
+alluded to his historical works. He was in a distinct sense a reformer
+of the method of the writing of church history. To us the notions of the
+historical and of that which is genetic are identical. Of course, naive
+religious chronicles do not meet that test. A glance at the histories
+produced by the age of rationalism will show that these also fall short
+of it. The perception of the relativity of institutions like the papacy
+is here wholly wanting. Men and things are brought summarily to the bar
+of the wisdom of the author's year of grace. They are approved or
+condemned by this criterion. For Baur, all things had come to pass in
+the process of the great life of the world. There must have been a
+rationale of their becoming. It is for the historian with sympathy and
+imagination to find out what their inherent reason was. One other thing
+distinguishes Baur as church historian from his predecessors. He
+realised that before one can delineate one must investigate. One must go
+to the sources. One must estimate the value of those sources. One must
+have ground in the sources for every judgment. Baur was himself a great
+investigator. Yet the movement for the investigation of the sources of
+biblical and ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has
+gone on to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the
+foundations of Baur's own work as precarious, the results at which he
+arrived as unwarranted. New documents have come to light since his day.
+Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of learning as to
+the literature of the Christian origins has been vastly changed. There
+is still another other thing to say concerning Baur. He was a Hegelian.
+He has the disposition always to interpret the movements of the
+religious spirit in the sense of philosophical ideas. He frankly says
+that without speculation every historical investigation remains but a
+play upon the surface of things. Baur's fault was that in his search
+for, or rather in his confident discovery of, the great connecting
+forces of history, the biographical element, the significance of
+personality, threatened altogether to disappear. The force in the
+history was the absolute, the immanent divine will. The method
+everywhere was that of advance by contrasts and antagonisms. One gets an
+impression, for example, that the Nicene dogma became what it did by the
+might of the idea, that it could not by any possibility have had any
+other issue.
+
+The foil to much of this in Baur's own age was represented in the work
+of Neander, a converted Jew, professor of church history in Berlin, who
+exerted great influence upon a generation of English and American
+scholars. He was not an investigator of sources. He had no talent for
+the task. He was a delineator, one of the last of the great painters of
+history, if one may so describe the type. He had imagination, sympathy,
+a devout spirit. His great trait was his insight into personality. He
+wrote history with the biographical interest. He almost resolves history
+into a series of biographical types. He has too little sense for the
+connexion of things, for the laws of the evolution of the religious
+spirit. The great dramatic elements tend to disappear behind the
+emotions of individuals. The old delineators were before the age of
+investigation. Since that impulse became masterful, some historians have
+been completely absorbed in the effort to make contribution to this
+investigation. Others, with a sense of the impossibility of mastering
+the results of investigation in all fields, have lost the zeal for the
+writing of church history on a great scale. They have contented
+themselves with producing monographs upon some particular subject, in
+which, at the most, they may hope to embody all that is known as to some
+specific question.
+
+We spoke above of the new conception of the relation of the canonical
+literature of the New Testament to the extracanonical. We alluded to the
+new sense of the continuity of the history of the apostolic churches
+with that of the Church of the succeeding age. The influence of these
+ideas has been to set all problems here involved in a new light. Until
+1886 it might have been said with truth that we had no good history of
+the apostolic age. In that year Weizsaecker's book, _Das Apostolische
+Zeitalter der Christlichen Kirche_, admirably filled the place. A part
+of the problem of the historian of the apostolic age is difficult for
+the same reason which was given when we were speaking of the biography
+of Jesus. Our materials are inadequate. First with the beginning of the
+activities of Paul have we sources of the first rank. The relation of
+statements in the Pauline letters to data in the book of the Acts was
+one of the earliest problems which the Tuebingen school set itself. An
+attempt to write the biography of Paul reminds us sharply of our
+limitations. We know almost nothing of Paul prior to his conversion, or
+subsequent to the enigmatical breaking off of the account of the
+beginnings of his work at Rome. Harnack's _Mission und Ausbreitung des
+Christenthums_, 1902 (translated, Moffatt, 1908), takes up the work of
+Paul's successors in that cardinal activity. It offers, strange as it
+may seem, the first discussion of the dissemination of Christianity
+which has dealt adequately with the sources. It gives also a picture of
+the world into which the Christian movement went. It emphasises anew the
+truth which has for a generation past grown in men's apprehension that
+there is no possibility of understanding Christianity, except against
+the background of the religious life and thought of the world into which
+it came. Christianity had vital relation, at every step of its progress,
+to the religious movements and impulses of the ancient world, especially
+in those centres of civilisation which Paul singled out for his
+endeavour and which remained the centres of the Christian growth. It was
+an age which has often been summarily described as corrupt. Despite its
+corruption, or possibly because it was corrupt, it gives evidence,
+however, of religious stirring, of strong ethical reaction, of spiritual
+endeavour rarely paralleled. In the Roman Empire everything travelled.
+Religions travelled. In the centres of civilisation there was scarcely a
+faith of mankind which had not its votaries.
+
+It was an age of religious syncretism, of hospitality to diverse
+religious ideas, of the commingling of those ideas. These things
+facilitated the progress of Christianity. They made certain that if the
+Christian movement had in it the divine vitality which men claimed, it
+would one day conquer the world. Equally, they made certain that, as the
+very condition of this conquest, Christianity would be itself
+transformed. This it is which has happened in the evolution of
+Christianity from its very earliest stages and in all phases of its
+life. Of any given rite, opinion or institution, of the many which have
+passed for almost two millenniums unchallenged under the Christian name,
+men about us are now asking: But how much of it is Christian? In what
+measure have we to think of it as derived from some other source, and
+representing the accommodation and assimilation of Christianity to its
+environment in process of its work? What is Christianity? Not
+unnaturally the ancient Church looked with satisfaction upon the great
+change which passed over Christianity when Constantine suddenly made
+that which had been the faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the
+religion of the world. The Fathers can have thought thus only because
+their minds rested upon that which was outward and spectacular. Not
+unnaturally the metamorphosis in the inward nature of Christianity which
+had taken place a century and a quarter earlier was hidden from their
+eyes. In truth, by that earlier and subtler transformation Christianity
+had passed permanently beyond the stage in which it had been
+preponderantly a moral and spiritual enthusiasm, with its centre and
+authority in the person of Jesus. It became a system and an institution,
+with a canon of New Testament Scripture, a monarchical organisation and
+a rule of faith which was formulated in the Apostles' Creed.
+
+To Baur the truth as to the conflict of Paul with the Judaisers had
+meant much. He thought, therefore, with reference to the rise of
+priesthood and ritual among the Christians, to the emphasis on Scripture
+in the fashion of the scribes, to the insistence upon rules and dogmas
+after the manner of the Pharisees, that they were but the evidence of
+the decline and defeat of Paul's free spirit and of the resurgence of
+Judaism in Christianity. He sought to explain the rise of the episcopal
+organisation by the example of the synagogue. Ritschl in his _Entstehung
+der alt-catholischen Kirche_, 1857, had seen that Baur's theory could
+not be true. Christianity did not fall back into Judaism. It went
+forward to embrace the Hellenic and Roman world. The institutions,
+dogmas, practices of that which, after A.D. 200, may with propriety be
+called the Catholic Church, are the fruit of that embrace. There was
+here a falling off from primitive and spiritual Christianity. But it was
+not a falling back into Judaism. There were priests and scribes and
+Pharisees with other names elsewhere. The phenomenon of the waning of
+the original enthusiasm of a period of religious revelation has been a
+frequent one. Christianity on a grand scale illustrated this phenomenon
+anew. Harnack has elaborated this thesis with unexampled brilliancy and
+power. He has supported it with a learning in which he has no rival and
+with a religious interest which not even hostile critics would deny. The
+phrase, 'the Hellenisation of Christianity,' might almost be taken as
+the motto of the work to which he owes his fame.
+
+
+HARNACK
+
+
+Adolf Harnack was born in 1851 in Dorpat, in one of the Baltic provinces
+of Russia. His father, Theodosius Harnack, was professor of pastoral
+theology in the University of Dorpat. Harnack studied in Leipzig and
+began to teach there in 1874. He was called to the chair of church
+history in Giessen in 1879. In 1886 he removed to Marburg and in 1889 to
+Berlin. Harnack's earlier published work was almost entirely in the
+field of the study of the sources and materials of early church history.
+His first book, published in 1873, was an inquiry as to the sources for
+the history of Gnosticism. His _Patrum Apostolicorum Opera_, 1876,
+prepared by him jointly with von Gehhardt and Zahn, was in a way only a
+forecast of the great collection, _Texte und Untersuchungen zur
+Geschickte der alt-christlichen Literatur_, begun in 1882, upon which
+numbers of scholars have worked together with him. The collection has
+already more than thirty-five volumes. In his own two works, _Die
+Geschichte der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1893, and _Die
+Chronologie der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1897, are
+deposited the results of his reflexion on the mass of this material. His
+_Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament_, 1906, etc., should not
+be overlooked. He has had the good fortune to be among those who have
+discovered manuscripts of importance. He has had to do with the Prussian
+Academy's edition of the Greek Fathers. A list of his published works,
+which was prepared in connexion with the celebration of his sixtieth
+birthday in 1911, bears witness to his amazing diligence and fertility.
+He was for thirty-five years associated with Schurer in the publication
+of the _Theologische Literaturzeitung_. He has filled important posts in
+the Church and under the government. To this must be added an activity
+as a teacher which has placed a whole generation of students from every
+portion of the world under undying obligation. One speaks with reserve
+of the living, but surely no man of our generation has done more to make
+the history of which we write.
+
+Harnack's epoch-making work was his _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_,
+1886-88, fourth edition, 1910. The book met, almost from the moment of
+its appearance, with the realisation of the magnitude of that which had
+been achieved. It rested upon a fresh and independent study of the
+sources. It departed from the mechanism which had made the old treatises
+upon the history of doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to
+the full how many influences other than theological had had part in the
+development of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and
+practice, and of external circumstances on the history of thought. His
+history of doctrine has thus a breadth and human quality never before
+attained. Philosophy, worship, morals, the development of Church
+government and of the canon, the common interests and passions of the
+age and those of the individual participants, are all made tributary to
+his delineation.
+
+Harnack cannot share Baur's view that the triumph of the
+Logos-Christology at Nicaea and Chalcedon was inevitable. A certain
+historic naturalness of the movement he would concede, the world on
+which Christianity entered being what it was. He is aware, however, that
+many elements other than Christian have entered into the development. He
+has phrased his apprehension thus. That Hellenisation of Christianity
+which Gnosticism represented, and against which, in this, its acute
+form, the Church contended was, after all, the same thing which, by
+slower process and more unconsciously, befell the Church itself. That
+pure moral enthusiasm and inspiration which had been the gist of the
+Christian movement, in its endeavour to appropriate the world, had been
+appropriated by the world in far greater measure than its adherents
+knew. It had taken up its mission to change the world. It had dreamed
+that while changing the world it had itself remained unchanged. The
+world was changed, the world of life, of feeling and of thought. But
+Christianity was also changed. It had conquered the world. It had no
+perception of the fact that it illustrated the old law that the
+conquered give laws to the conquerors. It had fused the ancient culture
+with the flame of its inspiration. It did not appreciate the degree in
+which the elements of that ancient culture now coloured its far-shining
+flame. It had been a maker of history. Meantime it had been unmade and
+remade by its own history. It confidently carried back its canon, dogma,
+organisation, to Christ and the apostles. It did not realise that the
+very fact that it could find these things natural and declare them
+ancient, proved with conclusiveness that it had itself departed from the
+standard of Christ and the apostles. It esteemed that these were its
+defences against the world. It little dreamed that they were, by their
+very existence, the evidence of the fact that the Church had not
+defended itself against the world. Its dogma was the Hellenisation of
+its thought. Its organisation was the Romanising of its life. Its canon
+and ritual were the externalising, and conventionalising of its spirit
+and enthusiasm. These are positive and constructive statements of
+Harnack's main position.
+
+When, however, they are turned about and stated negatively, these
+statements all convey, more or less, the impression that the advance of
+Christianity had been its destruction, and the evolution of dogma had
+been a defection from Christ. This is the aspect of the contention which
+gave hostile critics opportunity to say that we have before us the
+history of the loss of Christianity. Harnack himself has many sentences
+which superficially will bear that construction. Hatch had said in his
+brilliant book, _The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the
+Christian Church_, 1891, that the domestication of Greek philosophy in
+the Church signified a defection from the Sermon on the Mount. The
+centre of gravity of the Gospel was changed from life to doctrine, from
+morals to metaphysics, from goodness to orthodoxy. The change was
+portentous. The aspect of pessimism is, however, removed when one
+recognises the inevitableness of some such process, if Christianity was
+ever to wield an influence in the world at all. Again, one must consider
+that the process of the recovery of pure Christianity must begin at
+exactly this point, namely, with the recognition of how much in current
+Christianity is extraneous. It must begin with the sloughing off of
+these extraneous elements, with the recovery of the sense for that which
+original Christianity was. Such a recovery would be the setting free
+again of the power of the religion itself.
+
+The constant touchstone and point of reference for every stage of the
+history of the Church must be the gospel of Jesus. But what was the
+gospel of Jesus? In what way did the very earliest Christians apprehend
+that gospel? This question is far more difficult for us to answer than
+it was for those to whom the New Testament was a closed body of
+literature, externally differentiated from all other, and with a
+miraculous inspiration extending uniformly to every phrase in any book.
+These men would have said that they had but to find the proper
+combination of the sacred phrases. But we acknowledge that the central
+inspiration was the personality of Jesus. The books possess this
+inspiration in varying degree. Certain of the books have distinctly
+begun the fusion of Christian with other elements. They themselves
+represent the first stages of the history of doctrine. We acknowledge
+that those utterances of Jesus which have been preserved for us, shaped
+themselves by the antitheses in which Jesus stood. There is much about
+them that is palpably incidental, practically relevant and
+unquestionably only relative. In a large sense, much of the meaning of
+the gospel has to be gathered out of the evidence of the operation of
+its spirit in subsequent ages of the Christian Church, and from remoter
+aspects of the influence of Jesus on the world. Thus the very conception
+of the gospel of Jesus becomes inevitably more or less subjective. It
+becomes an ideal construction. The identification of this ideal with the
+original gospel proclamation becomes precarious. We seem to move in a
+circle. We derive the ideal from the history, and then judge the history
+by the ideal.
+
+Is there any escape from this situation, short of the return to the
+authority of Church or Scripture in the ancient sense? Furthermore, even
+the men to whom the gospel was in the strictest sense a letter,
+identified the gospel with their own private interpretation of this
+letter. Certainly the followers of Ritschl who will acknowledge no
+traits of the gospel save those of which they find direct witness in the
+Gospels, thus ignore that the Gospels are themselves interpretations.
+This undue stress upon the documents which we are fortunate enough to
+possess, makes us forget the limitations of these documents. We tend
+thus to exaggerate that which must be only incidental, as, for example,
+the Jewish element, in the teaching of Jesus. We thus underrate phases
+of Jesus' teaching which, no doubt, a man like Paul would have
+apprehended better than did the evangelists themselves. In truth, in
+Harnack's own delineation of the teaching of Jesus, those elements of it
+which found their way to expression in Paul, or again in the fourth
+Gospel, are rather underrated than overstated, in the author's anxiety
+to exclude elements which are acknowledged to be interpretative in their
+nature. We are driven, in some measure, to seek to find out what the
+gospel was from the way in which the earliest Christians took it up. We
+return ever afresh to questions nearly unanswerable from the materials
+at hand. What was the central principle in the shaping of the earliest
+stages of the new community, both as to its thought and life? Was it the
+longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the striving after the
+righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it the faith of the
+Messiah, the reverence for the Messiah, directed to the person of Jesus?
+What word dominated the preaching? Was it that the Kingdom of God was
+near, that the Son of Man would come? Or was it that in Jesus Messiah
+has come? What was the demand upon the hearer? Was it, Repent, or was
+it, Believe on the Lord Jesus, or was it both, and which had the greater
+emphasis? Was the name of Jesus used in the formulas of worship before
+the time of Paul? What do we know about prayer in the name of Jesus, or
+baptism in that name, or miracles in the name of Jesus, or of the Lord's
+Supper and the conception of the Lord as present with his disciples in
+the rite? Was this revering of Jesus, which was fast moving toward a
+worship of him, the inner motive force of the whole construction of the
+dogma of his person and of the trinity?
+
+In the second volume Harnack treats of the development primarily of the
+Christological and trinitarian dogma, from the fourth to the seventh
+centuries. The dramatic interest of the narrative exceeds anything which
+has been written on this theme. A debate which to most modern men is
+remote and abstruse almost to the point of unintelligibility, and of
+which many of the external aspects are disheartening in the extreme, is
+here brought before us in something of the reasonableness which it must
+have had for those who took part in it. Tertullian shaped the problem
+and established the nomenclature for the Christological solution which
+the Orient two hundred years later made its own. It was he who, from the
+point of view of the Jurist, rather than of the philosopher, gave the
+words 'person' and 'substance,' which continually occur in this
+discussion, the meaning which in the Nicene Creed they bear. Most
+brilliant is Harnack's characterisation of Arius and Athanasius. In
+Arius the notion of the Son of God is altogether done away. Only the
+name remains. The victory of Arianism would have resolved Christianity
+into cosmology and formal ethics. It would have destroyed it as
+religion. Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce
+controversy had drifted cannot be better illustrated than by one
+undisputed fact. Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character
+as a religion of the living communion of God with man, is yet the
+theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the
+recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared. The purpose of the
+redemption is to bring men into community of life with God. But
+Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and
+from above, of a divine nature. He subordinated everything to this idea.
+The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that
+the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the
+possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His incarnation, his
+manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a
+mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous
+endowment. The Christ, who was God, lifts men up to godhood. They become
+God. These phrases are of course capable of ethical and intelligible
+meaning. The development of the doctrine, however, threw the emphasis
+upon the metaphysical and miraculous aspects of the work. It gloried in
+the fact that the presence of divine and human, two natures in one
+person forever, was unintelligible. In the end it came to pass that the
+enthusiastic assent to that which defied explanation became the very
+mark of a humble and submissive faith. One reads the so-called
+Athanasian Creed, and hears the ring of its determination to exact
+assent. It had long since been clear to these Catholics and churchmen
+that, with the mere authority of Scripture, it was not possible to
+defend Christianity against the heretics. The heresies read their
+heresies out of the Bible. The orthodox read orthodoxy from the same
+page. Marcion had proved that, in the very days when the canon took its
+shape. There must be an authority to define the interpretation of the
+Scripture. Those who would share the benefits which the Church dispensed
+must assent unconditionally to the terms of membership.
+
+All these questions were veiled for the early Christians behind the
+question of the kind of Christ in whom their hearts believed. With all
+that we have said about the reprehensible admixture of the metaphysical
+element in the dogma, with all the accusation which we bring concerning
+acute or gradual Hellenisation, secularisation and defection from the
+Christ, we ought not to hide from ourselves that in this gigantic
+struggle there were real religious interests at stake, and that for the
+men of both parties. Dimly, or perhaps vividly, the man of either party
+felt that the conception of the Christ which he was fighting for was
+congruous with the conception of religion which he had, or felt that he
+must have. It is this religious issue, everywhere present, which gives
+dignity to a struggle which otherwise does often sadly lack it. There
+are two religious views of the person of Christ which have stood, from
+the beginning, the one over against the other.[5] The one saw in Jesus
+of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special calling as the Messianic
+King, endued with special powers, lifted above all men ever known, yet a
+man, completely subject to God in faith, obedience and prayer. This view
+is surely sustained by many of Jesus' own words and deeds. It shines
+through the testimony of the men who followed him. Even the belief in
+his resurrection and his second coming did not altogether do away with
+it. The other view saw in him a new God who, descending from God,
+brought mysterious powers for the redemption of mankind into the world,
+and after short obscuring of his glory, returned to the abode of God,
+where he had been before. From this belief come all the hymns and
+prayers to Jesus as to God, all miracles and exorcisms in his name.
+
+[Footnote 5: Wernle, _Einfzhrung in das Theologische Studium_, 1908, v.
+204.]
+
+In the long run, the simpler view did not maintain itself. If false gods
+and demons were expelled, it was the God Jesus who expelled them. The
+more modest faith believed that in the man Jesus, being such an one as
+he was, men had received the greatest gift which the love of God had to
+bestow. In turn the believer felt the assurance that he also was a child
+of God, and in the spirit of Jesus was to realise that sonship.
+Syncretist religions suggested other thoughts. We see that already even
+in the synoptic tradition the calling upon the name of Jesus had found
+place. One wonders whether that first apprehension ever stood alone in
+its purity. The Gentile Churches founded by Paul, at all events, had no
+such simple trust. Equally, the second form of faith seems never to have
+been able to stand alone in its peculiar quality. Some of the gnostic
+sects had it. Marcion again is our example. The new God Jesus had
+nothing to do with the cruel God of the Old Testament. He supplanted the
+old God and became the only God. In the Church the new God, come down
+from heaven, must be set in relation with the long-known God of Israel.
+No less, must he stand in relation to the simple hero of the Gospels
+with his human traits. The problem of theological reflexion was to find
+the right middle course, to keep the divine Christ in harmony, on the
+one side, with monotheism, and on the other, with the picture which the
+Gospels gave. Belief knew nothing of these contradictions. The same
+simple soul thanked God for Jesus with his sorrows and his sympathy, as
+man's guide and helper, and again prayed to Jesus because he seemed too
+wonderful to be a man. The same kind of faith achieves the same
+wondering and touching combination to-day, after two thousand years.
+With thought comes trouble. Reflexion wears itself out upon the
+insoluble difficulty, the impossible combination, the flat
+contradiction, which the two views present, so soon as they are clearly
+seen.
+
+In the earliest Christian writings the fruit of this reflexion lies
+before us in this form:--The Creator of worlds, the mediator, the lord
+of angels and demons, the Logos which was God and is our Saviour, was
+yet a humble son of man, undergoing suffering and death, having laid
+aside his divine glory. This picture is made with materials which the
+canonical writings themselves afford. Theological study had henceforth
+nothing to do but to avoid extremes and seek to make this image, which
+reflexion upon two polar opposites had yielded, as nearly thinkable as
+possible. It has been said that the trinitarian doctrine is not in the
+New Testament, that it was later elaborated by a different kind of mind.
+This is not true. But the inference is precisely the contrary of that
+which defenders of the dogma would formerly have drawn from this
+concession. The same kind of mind, or rather the same two kinds of mind,
+are at work in the New Testament. Both of the religious elements above
+suggested are in the Gospels and Epistles. The New Testament presents
+attempts at their combination. Either form may be found in the
+literature of the later age. If we ask ourselves, What is that in Jesus
+which gives us the sense of redemption, surely we should answer, It is
+his glad and confident resting in the love of God the Father. It is his
+courage, his faith in men, which becomes our faith in ourselves. It is
+his wonderful mingling of purity and love of righteousness with love of
+those who have sinned. You may find this in the ancient literature, as
+the Fathers describe that to which their souls cling. But this is not
+the point of view from which the dogma is organised. The Nicene
+Christology is not to be understood from this approach. The cry of a
+dying civilisation after power and light and life, the feeling that
+these might come to it, streaming down as it were, from above, as a
+physical, a mechanical, a magical deliverance, this is the frame within
+which is set what is here said of the help and redemption wrought by
+Christ. The resurrection and the incarnation are the points at which
+this streaming in of the divine light and power upon a darkened world is
+felt.
+
+That religion seemed the highest, that interpretation of Christianity
+the truest, the absolute one, which could boast that it possessed the
+power of the Almighty through his physical union with men. He who
+contended that Jesus was God, contended therewith for a power which
+could come upon men and make them in some sense one with God. This is
+the view which has been almost exclusively held in the Greek Church. It
+is the view which has run under and through and around the other
+conception in the Roman and Protestant Churches. The sense that
+salvation is inward, moral, spiritual, has rarely indeed been absent
+from Christendom. It would be preposterous to allege that it had. Yet
+this sense has been overlaid and underrun and shot through with that
+other and disparate idea of salvation, as of a pure bestowment,
+something achieved apart from us, or, if one may so say, some alteration
+of ourselves upon other than moral and spiritual terms. The conception
+of the person Christ shows the same uncertainty. Or rather, with a given
+view of the nature of religion and salvation, the corresponding view of
+Christ is certain. In the age-long and world-wide contest over the
+trinitarian formula, with all that is saddening in the struggle and all
+that was misleading in the issue, it is because we see men struggling to
+come into the clear as to these two meanings of religion, that the
+contest has such absorbing interest. Men have been right in declining to
+call that religion in which a man saves himself. They have been wrong in
+esteeming that they were then only saved of God or Christ when they were
+saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened
+when one no longer holds that God and men are mutually exclusive
+conceptions. It is God working within us who saves, the God who in Jesus
+worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the world has
+never seen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
+
+
+By the middle of the nineteenth century the empirical sciences had
+undergone vast expansion in the study of detail and in the discovery of
+principles. Men felt the necessity of some adequate discussion of the
+relation of these sciences one to another and of their unity. There was
+need of the organisation of the mass of knowledge, largely new and ever
+increasing, which the sciences furnished. It lay in the logic of the
+case that some of these attempts should advance the bold claim to deal
+with all knowledge whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a
+whole. Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages,
+had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great metaphysical
+systems had offered theories of the universe as a whole. Both had
+professed to include all facts. Notoriously both theology and
+metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate fashion with the material
+world, in the study of which the sciences were now achieving great
+results. Indeed, the methods current and authoritative with theologians
+and metaphysicians had actually prevented study of the physical
+universe. Both of these had invaded areas of fact to which their methods
+had no application and uttered dicta which had no relation to truth. The
+very life of the sciences depended upon deliverance from this bondage.
+The record of that deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in
+the history of thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment
+which long oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming
+victory had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their
+opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin. There was with
+some a disposition to deny that there exists an area of knowledge to
+which the methods of metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This
+was Comte's contention. Others conceded that there might be such an
+area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the
+theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that,
+concerning the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for
+example, God and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method
+of the physical sciences would give. They fell back upon Kant's
+distinction of the two reasons and two worlds. They exaggerated the
+sharpness of that distinction. They learned that the claim of
+agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind
+which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure. Indeed, if one may
+take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this was not the
+intent of some of the scientists in their strong assertion of
+agnosticism. Spencer's later work reveals that he had no disposition to
+deny that there are foundations for belief in a world lying behind the
+phenomenal, and from which the latter gets its meaning.
+
+Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was
+achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which
+Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested. This was the
+great development of the social sciences. Every aspect of the life of
+man, including religion itself, has been drawn within the area of the
+social sciences. To all these subjects, including religion, there have
+been applied empirical methods which have the closest analogy with those
+which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a
+science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a
+place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The
+ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the
+same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of consciousness
+are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and classify the
+phenomena of the religious life of the race in all lands and in all
+ages. A science of religions is taking its place among the other
+sciences. It is as purely an inductive science as is any other. The
+history of religions and the philosophy of religion are being rewritten
+from this point of view.
+
+In the first lines of this chapter we spoke of the empirical sciences,
+meaning the sciences of the material world. It is clear, however, that
+the sciences of mind, of morals and of religion have now become
+empirical sciences. They have their basis in experience, the experience
+of individuals and the experience of masses of men, of ages of
+observable human life. They all proceed by the method of observation and
+inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is a unity of method as
+between the natural and social and psychical sciences, the reach of
+which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of
+psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to
+conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the
+psychical is a vanishing distinction. Science comes nearer to offering
+an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs
+of this chapter would imply. But it does so by including religion, not
+by excluding it. No one would any longer think of citing Kant's
+distinction of two reasons and two worlds in the sense of establishing a
+city of refuge into which the persecuted might flee. Kant rendered
+incomparable service by making clear two poles of thought. Yet we must
+realise how the space between is filled with the gradations of an
+absolute continuity of activity. Man has but one reason. This may
+conceivably operate upon appropriate material in one or the other of
+these polar fashions. It does operate in infinite variations of degree,
+in unity with itself, after both fashions, at all times and upon all
+materials.
+
+Positivism was a system. Agnosticism was at least a phase of thought.
+The broadening of the conception of science and the invasion of every
+area of life by a science thus broadly conceived, has been an influence
+less tangible than those others but not, therefore, less effective.
+Positivism was bitterly hostile to Christianity, though, in the mind of
+Comte himself and of a few others, it produced a curious substitute,
+possessing many of the marks of Roman Catholicism. The name 'agnostic'
+was so loosely used that one must say that the contention was hostile to
+religion in the minds of some and not of others. The new movement for an
+inclusive science is not hostile to religion. Yet it will transform
+current conceptions of religion as those others never did. In proportion
+as it is scientific, it cannot be hostile. It may at most be
+indifferent. Nevertheless, in the long run, few will choose the theme of
+religion for the scientific labour of life who have not some interest in
+religion. Men of these three classes have accepted the doctrine of
+evolution. Comte thought he had discovered it. Spencer and those for
+whom we have taken him as type, did service in the elaboration of it. To
+the men of our third group, the truth of evolution seems no longer
+debatable. Here too, in the word 'evolution,' we have a term which has
+been used with laxity. It corresponds to a notion which has only
+gradually been evolved. Its implications were at first by no means
+understood. It was associated with a mechanical view of the universe
+which was diametrically opposed to its truth. Still, there could not be
+a doubt that the doctrine contravened those ideas as to the origin of
+the world, and more particularly of man, of the relations of species,
+and especially of the human species to other forms of animal life, which
+had immemorially prevailed in Christian circles and which had the
+witness of the Scriptures on their behalf. If we were to attempt, with
+acknowledged latitude, to name a book whose import might be said to be
+cardinal for the whole movement treated of in this chapter, that book
+would be Darwin's _Origin of Species_, which was published in 1859.
+
+Long before Darwin the creation legend had been recognised as such. The
+astronomy of the seventeenth century had removed the earth from its
+central position. The geology of the eighteenth had shown how long must
+have been the ages of the laying down of the earth's strata. The
+question of the descent of man, however, brought home the significance
+of evolution for religion more forcibly than any other aspect of the
+debate had done. There were scientific men of distinction who were not
+convinced of the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis. To most Christian
+men the theory seemed to leave no unique distinction or spiritual
+quality for man. It seemed to render impossible faith in the Scriptures
+as revelation. To many it seemed that the whole issue as between a
+spiritual and a purely materialistic view of the universe was involved.
+Particularly was this true of the English-speaking peoples.
+
+One other factor in the transformation of the Christian view needs to be
+dwelt upon. It is less theoretical than those upon which we have dwelt.
+It is the influence of socialism, taking that word in its largest sense.
+An industrial civilisation has developed both the good and the evil of
+individualism in incredible degree. The unity of society which the
+feudal system and the Church gave to Europe in the Middle Age had been
+destroyed. The individualism and democracy which were essential to
+Protestantism notoriously aided the civil and social revolution, but the
+centrifugal forces were too great. Initiative has been wonderful, but
+cohesion is lacking. Democracy is yet far from being realised. The civil
+liberations which were the great crises of the western world from 1640
+to 1830 appear now to many as deprived of their fruit. Governments
+undertake on behalf of subjects that which formerly no government would
+have dreamed of doing. The demand is that the Church, too, become a
+factor in the furtherance of the outward and present welfare of mankind.
+If that meant the call to love and charity it would be an old refrain.
+That is exactly what it does not mean. It means the attack upon evils
+which make charity necessary. It means the taking up into the
+idealisation of religion the endeavour to redress all wrongs, to do away
+with all evils, to confer all goods, to create a new world and not, as
+heretofore, mainly at least, a new soul in the midst of the old world.
+No one can deny either the magnitude of the evils which it is sought to
+remedy, or the greatness of the goal which is thus set before religion.
+The volume of religious and Christian literature devoted to these social
+questions is immense. It is revolutionary in its effect. For, after all,
+the very gist of religion has been held to be that it deals primarily
+with the inner life and the transcendent world. That it has dealt with
+the problem of the inner life and transcendent world in such a manner as
+to retard, or even only not to further, the other aspects of man's life
+is indeed a grave indictment. That it should, however, see ends in the
+outer life and present world as ends fully sufficient in themselves,
+that it should cease to set these in the light of the eternal, is that
+it should cease to be religion. The physical and social sciences have
+given to men an outward setting in the world, a basis of power and
+happiness such as men never have enjoyed. Yet the tragic failure of our
+civilisation to give to vast multitudes that power and happiness, is the
+proof that something more than the outward basis is needed. The success
+of our civilisation is its failure.
+
+This is by no means a recurrence to the old antithesis of religion and
+civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements. On the contrary,
+it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics
+are not two worlds, but merely different aspects of the same world.
+Therewith it is not alleged that religion has not a specific
+contribution to make.
+
+
+POSITIVISM
+
+
+The permanent influence of that phase of thought which called itself
+Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which numbered
+among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart Mill, George Henry
+Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be
+said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of
+which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be
+dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, _Coura de
+Philosophie Positive_, appeared between the years 1830 and 1842. Littre
+was his chief French interpreter. But the history of the positivist
+movement belongs to the history of English philosophical and religious
+thought, rather than to that of France.
+
+Comte was born at Montpellier in 1798, of a family of intense Roman
+Catholic piety. He showed at school a precocity which might bear
+comparison with Mill's. Expelled from school, cast off by his parents,
+dismissed by the elder Casimir Perier, whose secretary he had been, he
+eked out a living by tutoring in mathematics. Friends of his philosophy
+rallied to his support. He never occupied a post comparable with his
+genius. He was unhappy in his marriage. He passed through a period of
+mental aberration, due, perhaps, to the strain under which he worked. He
+did not regain his liberty without an experience which embittered him
+against the Church. During the fourteen years of the production of his
+book he cut himself off from any reading save that of current scientific
+discovery. He came under the influence of Madame Vaux, whom, after her
+death, he idolised even more than before. For the problem which, in the
+earlier portion of his work, he set himself, that namely, of the
+organising of the sciences into a compact body of doctrine, he possessed
+extraordinary gifts. Later, he took on rather the air of a high priest
+of humanity, legislating concerning a new religion. It is but fair to
+say that at this point Littre and many others parted company with Comte.
+He developed a habit and practice ascetic in its rigour and mystic in
+its devotion to the positivists' religion--the worship of humanity. He
+was the friend and counsellor of working-men and agitators, of little
+children, of the poor and miserable. He ended his rather pathetic and
+turbulent career in 1857, gathering a few disciples about his bed as he
+remembered that Socrates had done.
+
+Comte begins with the natural sciences and postulates the doctrine of
+evolution. To the definition of this doctrine he makes some interesting
+approaches. The discussion of the order and arrangement of the various
+sciences and of their characteristic differences is wonderful in its
+insight and suggestiveness. He asserts that in the study of nature we
+are concerned solely with the facts before us and the relations which
+connect those facts. We have nothing to do with the supposed essence or
+hidden nature and meaning of those facts. Facts and the invariable laws
+which govern them are the only legitimate objects of pursuit. Comte
+infers that because we can know, in this sense, only phenomena and their
+relations, we should in consequence guard against illusions which creep
+in again if we so much as use the words principle, or cause, or will, or
+force. By phenomena must be understood objects of perception, to the
+exclusion, for example, of psychological changes reputed to be known in
+self-consciousness. That there is no knowledge but of the physical, that
+there is no knowing except by perception--this is ever reiterated as
+self-evident. Even psychology, resting as it does largely upon the
+observation of the self by the self, must be illusive. Physiology, or
+even phrenology, with the value of which Comte was much impressed, must
+take its place. Every object of knowledge is other than the knowing
+subject. Whatever else the mind knows, it can never know itself. By
+invincible necessity the human mind can observe all phenomena except its
+own. Commenting upon this, James Martineau observed: 'We have had in the
+history of thought numerous forms of idealism which construed all
+outward phenomena as mere appearances within the mind. We have hitherto
+had no strictly corresponding materialism, which claimed certainty for
+the outer world precisely because it was foreign to ourselves.' Man is
+the highest product of nature, the highest stage of nature's most mature
+and complex form. Man as individual is nothing more. Physiology gives us
+not merely his external constitution and one set of relations. It is the
+whole science of man. There is no study of mind in which its actions and
+states can be contemplated apart from the physical basis in conjunction
+with which mind exists.
+
+Thus far man has been treated only biologically, as individual. We must
+advance to man in society. Almost one half of Comte's bulky work is
+devoted to this side of the inquiry. Social phenomena are a class
+complex beyond any which have yet been investigated. So much is this the
+case and so difficult is the problem presented, that Comte felt
+constrained in some degree to change his method. We proceed from
+experience, from data in fact, as before. But the facts are not mere
+illustrations of the so called laws of individual human nature. Social
+facts are the results also of situations which represent the accumulated
+influence of past generations. In this, as against Bentham, for example,
+with his endless recurrence to human nature, as he called it, Comte was
+right. Comte thus first gave the study of history its place in
+sociology. In this study of history and sociology, the collective
+phenomena are more accessible to us and better known by us, than are the
+parts of which they are composed. We therefore proceed here from the
+general to the particular, not from the particular to the general, as in
+research of the kinds previously named. The state of every part of the
+social organisation is ultimately connected with the contemporaneous
+state of all the other parts. Philosophy, science, the fine arts,
+commerce, navigation, government, are all in close mutual dependence.
+When any considerable change takes place in one, we may know that a
+parallel change has preceded or will follow in the others. The progress
+of society is not the aggregate of partial changes, but the product of a
+single impulse acting through all the partial agencies. It can therefore
+be most easily traced by studying all together. These are the main
+principles of sociological investigation as set forth by Comte, some of
+them as they have been phrased by Mill.
+
+The most sweeping exemplification of the axiom last alluded to, as to
+parallel changes, is Comte's so-called law of the three states of
+civilisation. Under this law, he asserts, the whole historical evolution
+can be summed up. It is as certain as the law of gravitation. Everything
+in human society has passed, as has the individual man, through the
+theological and then through the metaphysical stage, and so arrives at
+the positive stage. In this last stage of thought nothing either of
+superstition or of speculation will survive. Theology and metaphysics
+Comte repeatedly characterises as the two successive stages of
+nescience, unavoidable as preludes to science. Equally unavoidable is it
+that science shall ultimately prevail in their place. The advance of
+science having once begun, there is no possibility but that it will
+ultimately possess itself of all. One hears the echo of this confidence
+in Haeckel also. There is a persistence about the denial of any
+knowledge whatsoever that goes beyond external facts, which ill comports
+with the pretensions of positivism to be a philosophy. For its final
+claim is not that it is content to rest in experimental science. On the
+contrary, it would transform this science into a homogeneous doctrine
+which is able to explain everything in the universe. This is but a _tour
+de force_. The promise is fulfilled through the denial of the reality of
+everything which science cannot explain. Comte was never willing to face
+the fact that the very existence of knowledge has a noumenal as well as
+a phenomenal side. The reasonableness of the universe is certainly a
+conception which we bring to the observation of nature. If we did not
+thus bring it with us, no mere observation of nature would ever give it
+to us. It is impossible for science to get rid of the conception of
+force, and ultimately of cause. There can be no phenomenon which is not
+a manifestation of something. The very nomenclature falls into hopeless
+confusion without these conceptions. Yet the moment we touch them we
+transcend science and pass into the realm of philosophy. It is mere
+juggling with words to say that our science has now become a philosophy.
+
+The adjective 'positive' contains the same fallacy. Apparently Comte
+meant by the choice of it to convey the sense that he would limit
+research to phenomena in their orders of resemblance, co-existence and
+succession. But to call the inquiry into phenomena positive, in the
+sense that it alone deals with reality, to imply that the inquiry into
+causes deals with that which has no reality, is to beg the question.
+This is not a premise with which he may set out in the evolution of his
+system.
+
+Comte denied the accusation of materialism and atheism. He did the first
+only by changing the meaning of the term materialism. Materialism the
+world has supposed to be the view of man's condition and destiny which
+makes these to begin and end in nature. That certainly was Comte's view.
+The accusation of atheism also he avoids by a mere play on words. He is
+not without a God. Humanity is God. Mankind is the positivist's Supreme.
+Altruism takes the place of devotion. The devotion so long wasted upon a
+mere creature of the imagination, to whom it could do no good, he would
+now give to men who sorely need it and can obviously profit by it.
+Surely the antithesis between nature and the supernatural, in the form
+in which Comte argues against it, is now abandoned by thoughtful people.
+Equally the antithesis of altruism to the service of God is perverse. It
+arouses one's pity that Comte should not have seen how, in true religion
+these two things coalesce.
+
+Moreover, this deification of mankind, in so far as it is not a sounding
+phrase, is an absurdity. When Comte says, for example, that the
+authority of humanity must take the place of that of God, he has
+recognised that religion must have authority. Indeed, the whole social
+order must have authority. However, this is not for him, as we are
+accustomed to say, the authority of the truth and of the right. There is
+no such abstraction as the truth, coming to various manifestations.
+There is no such thing as right, apart from relatively right concrete
+measures. There is no larger being indwelling in men. Society, humanity
+in its collective capacity, must, if need be, override the individual.
+Yet Comte despises the mere rule of majorities. The majority which he
+would have rule is that of those who have the scientific mind. We may
+admit that in this he aims at the supremacy of truth. But, in fact, he
+prepares the way for a doctrinaire tyranny which, of all forms of
+government, might easily turn out to be the worst which a long-suffering
+humanity has yet endured.
+
+In the end, we are told, love is to take the place of force. Humanity is
+present to us first in our mothers, wives and daughters. For these it is
+present in their fathers, husbands, sons. From this primary circle love
+widens and worship extends as hearts enlarge. It is the prayer to
+humanity which first rises above the mere selfishness of the sort to get
+something out of God. Remembrance in the hearts of those who loved us
+and owe something to us is the only worthy form of immortality. Clearly
+it is only the caricature of prayer or of the desire of immortality
+which rises before Comte's mind as the thing to be escaped. For this
+caricature religious men, both Catholic and Protestant, without doubt,
+gave him cause. There were to be seven sacraments, corresponding to
+seven significant epochs in a man's career. There were to be priests for
+the performance of these sacraments and for the inculcation of the
+doctrines of positivism. There were to be temples of humanity, affording
+opportunity for and reminder of this worship. In each temple there was
+to be set up the symbol of the positivist religion, a woman of thirty
+years with her little son in her arms. Littre spoke bitterly of the
+positivist religion as a lapse of the author into his old aberration.
+This religion was certainly regarded as negligible by many to whom his
+system as a whole meant a great deal. At least, it is an interesting
+example, as is also his transformation of science into a philosophy, of
+the resurgence of valid elements in life, even in the case of a man who
+has made it his boast to do away with them.
+
+
+NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM
+
+
+We may take Spencer as representative of a group of men who, after the
+middle of the nineteenth century, laboured enthusiastically to set forth
+evolutionary and naturalistic theories of the universe. These theories
+had also, for the most part, the common trait that they professed
+agnosticism as to all that lay beyond the reach of the
+natural-scientific methods, in which the authors were adept. Both Ward
+and Boutroux accept Spencer as such a type. Agnosticism for obvious
+reasons could be no system. Naturalism is a tendency in interpretation
+of the universe which has many ramifications. There is no intention of
+making the reference to one man's work do more than serve as
+introduction to the field.
+
+Spencer was eager in denial that he had been influenced by Comte. Yet
+there is a certain reminder of Comte in Spencer's monumental endeavour
+to systematise the whole mass of modern scientific knowledge, under the
+general title of 'A Synthetic Philosophy.' He would show the unity of
+the sciences and their common principles or, rather, the one great
+common principle which they all illustrate, the doctrine of evolution,
+as this had taken shape since the time of Darwin. Since 1904 we have an
+autobiography of Herbert Spencer, which, to be sure, seems largely to
+have been written prior to 1889. The book is interesting, as well in the
+light which it throws upon the expansion of the sciences and the
+development of the doctrine of evolution in those years, as in the
+revelation of the personal traits of the man himself. Concerning these
+Tolstoi wrote to a friend, apropos of a gift of the book: 'In
+autobiographies the most important psychological phenomena are often
+revealed quite independently of the author's will.'
+
+Spencer was born in 1820 in Derby, the son of a schoolmaster. He came of
+Nonconformist ancestry of most marked individuality. His early education
+was irregular and inadequate. Before he reached the age of seventeen his
+reading had been immense. He worked with an engineer in the period of
+the building of the railways in the Midlands. He always retained his
+interest in inventions. He wrote for the newspapers and magazines and
+definitely launched upon a literary career. At the age of thirty he
+published his first book, on _Social Statics_. He made friends among the
+most notable men and women of his age. So early as 1855 he was the
+victim of a disease of the heart which never left him. It was on his
+recovery from his first grave attack that he shaped the plan which
+henceforth held him, of organising the modern sciences and incorporating
+them into what he called a synthetic philosophy. There was immense
+increase in actual knowledge and in the power of his reflection on that
+knowledge, as the years went by. A generation elapsed between the
+publication of his _First Principles_ and the conclusion of his more
+formal literary labours. There is something captivating about a man's
+life, the energy of which remains so little impaired that he esteems it
+better to write a new book, covering some untouched portion of his
+scheme, than to give to an earlier volume the revision which in the
+light of his matured convictions it may need. His philosophical
+limitations he never transcended. He does not so naively offer a
+substitute for philosophy as does Comte. But he was no master in
+philosophy. There is a reflexion of the consciousness of this fact in
+his agnosticism.
+
+That the effort of the agnostic contention has been great, and on the
+whole salutary, few would deny. Spencer's own later work shows that his
+declaration, that the absolute which lies behind the universe is
+unknowable, is to be taken with considerable qualification. It is only a
+relative unknowableness which he predicates. Moreover, before Spencer's
+death, the doctrine of evolution had made itself profoundly felt in the
+discussion of all aspects of life, including that of religion. There
+seemed no longer any reason for the barrier between science and religion
+which Spencer had once thought requisite.
+
+The epithet agnostic, as applied to a certain attitude of scientific
+mind, is just, as over against excessive claims to valid knowledge made,
+now by theology and now by speculative philosophy. It is hardly
+descriptive in any absolute sense. Spencer had coined the rather
+fortunate illustration which describes science as a gradually increasing
+sphere, such that every addition to its surface does but bring us into
+more extensive contact with surrounding nescience. Even upon this
+illustration Ward has commented that the metaphor is misleading. The
+continent of our knowledge is not merely bounded by an ocean of
+ignorance. It is intersected and cut up by straits and seas of
+ignorance. The author of _Ecce Coelum_ has declared: 'Things die out
+under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see,
+unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our
+most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient unknown has
+become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men have a more
+rigorous sense of what constitutes knowledge.
+
+They have reckoned more strictly with the methods by which alone secure
+and solid knowledge may be attained. They have undisguised scepticism as
+to alleged knowledge not arrived at in those ways. It was the working of
+these motives which gave to the labours of the middle of the nineteenth
+century so prevailingly the aspect of denial, the character which
+Carlyle described as an everlasting No. This was but a preparatory
+stage, a retrogression for a new and firmer advance.
+
+In the sense of the recognition of our ignorance and of a becoming
+modesty of affirmation, over against the mystery into which all our
+thought runs out, we cannot reject the correction which agnosticism has
+administered. It is a fact which has had disastrous consequences, that
+precisely the department of thought, namely the religious, which one
+might suppose would most have reminded men of the outlying mystery, that
+phase of life whose very atmosphere is mystery, has most often been
+guilty of arrant dogmatism. It has been thus guilty upon the basis of
+the claim that it possessed a revelation. It has allowed itself
+unlimited licence of affirmation concerning the most remote and
+difficult matters. It has alleged miraculously communicated information
+concerning those matters. It has clothed with a divine
+authoritativeness, overriding the mature reflexion and laborious
+investigation of learned men, that which was, after all, nothing but the
+innocent imaginings of the childhood of the race. In this good sense of
+a parallel to that agnosticism which scientists profess for themselves
+within their own appointed realm, there is a religious agnosticism which
+is one of the best fruits of the labour of the age. It is not that
+religious men have abandoned the thought of revelation. They apprehended
+more justly the nature of revelation. They confess that there is much
+ignorance which revelation does not mitigate. _Exeunt omnia in
+mysterium_. They are prepared to say concerning many of the dicta of
+religiosity, that they cannot affirm their truth. They are prepared to
+say concerning the experience of God and the soul, that they know these
+with an indefeasible certitude. This just and wholesome attitude toward
+religious truth is only a corollary of the attitude which science has
+taught us toward all truth whatsoever.
+
+The strictly philosophic term phenomenon, to which science has taken so
+kindly, is in itself an explicit avowal of something beyond the
+phenomenal. Spencer is careful to insist upon this relation of the
+phenomenal to the noumenal. His _Synthetic Philosophy_ opens with an
+exposition of this non-relative or absolute, without which the relative
+itself becomes contradictory. It is an essential part of Spencer's
+doctrine to maintain that our consciousness of the absolute, indefinite
+as it is, is positive and not negative. 'Though the absolute cannot in
+any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing, yet we
+find that its positive existence is a necessary datum of consciousness.
+The belief which this datum of consciousness constitutes has a higher
+warrant than any other belief whatsoever.' In short, the absolute or
+noumenal, according to Spencer, though not known as the phenomenal or
+relative is known, is so far from being for knowledge a pure blank, that
+the phenomenal, which is said to be known, is in the strict sense
+inconceivable without it. This actuality behind appearances, without
+which appearances are unthinkable, is by Spencer identified with that
+ultimate verity upon which religion ever insists. Religion itself is a
+phenomenon, and the source and secret of most complex and interesting
+phenomena. It has always been of the greatest importance in the history
+of mankind. It has been able to hold its own in face of the attacks of
+science. It must contain an element of truth. All religions, however,
+assert that their God is for us not altogether cognisable, that God is a
+great mystery. The higher their rank, the more do they acknowledge this.
+It is by the flippant invasion of this mystery that the popular
+religiosity offends. It talks of God as if he were a man in the next
+street. It does not distinguish between merely imaginative fetches into
+the truth, and presumably accurate definition of that truth. Equally,
+the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions of
+the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are
+consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know and
+are involved in contradiction with themselves. But the results of modern
+physics and chemistry reveal, as the constant element in all phenomena,
+force. This manifests itself in various forms which are interchangeable,
+while amid all these changes the force remains the same. This latter
+must be regarded as the reality, and basis of all that is relative and
+phenomenal. The entire universe is to be explained from the movements of
+this absolute force. The phenomena of nature and of mental life come
+under the same general laws of matter, motion, and force.
+
+Spencer's doctrine, as here stated, is not adequate to account for the
+world of mental life or adapted to serve as the basis of a
+reconciliation of science and religion. It does not carry us beyond
+materialism. Spencer's real intention was directed to something higher
+than that. If the absolute is to be conceived at all, it is as a
+necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. If we get the idea of
+force from the experience of our own power of volition, is it not
+natural to think of mind-force as the prius of physical force, and not
+the reverse? Accordingly, the absolute force, basis of all specific
+forces, would be mind and will. The doctrine of evolution would
+harmonise perfectly with these inferences. But it would have to become
+idealistic evolution, as in Schelling, instead of materialistic, as in
+Comte. We are obliged, Spencer owns, to refer the phenomenal world of
+law and order to a first cause. He says that this first cause is
+incomprehensible. Yet he further says, when the question of attributing
+personality to this first cause is raised, that the choice is not
+between personality and something lower. It is between personality and
+something higher. To this may belong a mode of being as much
+transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion.
+It is strange, he says, that men should suppose the highest worship to
+lie in assimilating the object of worship to themselves. And yet, again,
+in one of the latest of his works he writes: 'Unexpected as it will be
+to most of my readers, I must assert that the power which manifests
+itself in consciousness is but a differently conditioned form of the
+power which manifests itself beyond consciousness. The conception to
+which the exploration of nature everywhere tends is much less that of a
+universe of dead matter than that of a universe everywhere alive.'
+
+Similar is the issue in the reflexion of Huxley. Agnosticism had at
+first been asserted in relation to the spiritual and the teleological.
+It ended in fastening upon the material and mechanical. After all, says
+Huxley, in one of his essays:--'What do we know of this terrible matter,
+except as a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our
+own consciousness? Again, what do we know of that spirit over whose
+threatened extinction by matter so great lamentation has now arisen,
+except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of
+states of our consciousness?' He concedes that matter is inconceivable
+apart from mind, but that mind is not inconceivable apart from matter.
+He concedes that the conception of universal and necessary law is an
+ideal. It is an invention of the mind's own devising. It is not a
+physical fact. In brief, taking agnostic naturalism just as it seemed
+disposed a generation ago to present itself, it now appears as if it had
+been turned exactly inside out. Instead of the physical world being
+primary and fundamental and the mental world secondary, if not
+altogether problematical, the precise converse is true.
+
+Nature, as science regards it, may be described as a system whose parts,
+be they simple or complex, are wholly governed by universal laws.
+Knowledge of these laws is an indispensable condition of that control of
+nature upon which human welfare in so large degree depends. But this
+reign of law is an hypothesis. It is not an axiom which it would be
+absurd to deny. It is not an obvious fact, thrust upon us whether we
+will or no. Experiences are possible without the conception of law and
+order. The fruit of experience in knowledge is not possible without it.
+That is only to say that the reason why we assume that nature is a
+connected system of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are
+self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the notion
+of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which we must
+eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical science
+perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a glance at the
+history, and particularly at the popular literature, of science affords
+the interesting spectacle of the rise of an hallucination, the growth of
+a habit of mythological speech, which is truly surprising. We begin to
+hear of self-existent laws which reign supreme and bind nature fast in
+fact. By this learned substitution for God, it was once confidently
+assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical
+shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge. Rather, it would appear
+that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of
+myth-making and fetish worship--the homage to the fetish of law. Even
+the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,'
+says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we
+do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no
+causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If
+we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language of
+rational beings, laws of nature are to be spoken of as self-existent and
+independent of the phenomena which they are said to govern, such
+language must be merely analogous to the manner in which we often speak
+of the civil law. We say the law does that which we know the executive
+does. But the thorough-going naturalist cast off these implications as
+the last rags of a creed outworn. Physicists were fond of talking of the
+movement of molecules, just as the ancient astrologers imagined that the
+planets had souls and guided their own courses. We had supposed that
+this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of
+speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a
+smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which
+it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and
+self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and
+lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have
+given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other natural
+agencies, palpable and ready to hand for the explanation of everything,
+in the myth-making period of science which living men can still
+remember, have by this time paled. They have become simply various
+manifestations of one underlying spiritual energy, which is indeed
+beyond our perception.[6] When Comte said that the universe could not
+rest upon will, because then it would be arbitrary, incalculable,
+subject to caprice, one feels the humour and pathos of it. Comte's
+experience with will, his own and that of others, had evidently been too
+largely of that sad sort. Real freedom consists in conformity to what
+ought to be. In God, whom we conceive as perfect, this conformity is
+complete. With us it remains an ideal. Were we the creatures of a blind
+mechanical necessity there could be no talk of ideal standards and no
+meaning in reason at all.
+
+[Footnote 6: Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. p. 248.]
+
+
+EVOLUTION
+
+
+In the progress of the thought of the generation, say, from 1870 to the
+present day, the conception of evolution has been much changed. The
+doctrine of evolution has itself been largely evolved within that
+period. The application of it has become familiar in fields of which
+there was at first no thought. The bearing of the acceptance of it upon
+religion has been seen to be quite different from that which was at
+first supposed. The advocacy of the doctrine was at first associated
+with the claims of naturalism or positivism. Wider applications of the
+doctrine and deeper insight into its meaning have done away with this
+misunderstanding. Evolution, as originally understood, was as far as
+possible from suggesting anything mechanical. By the term was meant
+primarily the gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic
+beginning to its mature and final stage. This adult form was regarded
+not merely as the goal actually reached through successive stages of
+growth. It was conceived as the end aimed at, and achieved through the
+force of some vital or ideal principle shaping the plastic material and
+directing the process of growth. In short, evolution implied ideal ends
+controlling physical means. Yet we find with Spencer, as prevailingly
+also with others in the study of the natural sciences, the ideas of end
+and of cause looked at askance. They are regarded an outside the pale of
+the natural sciences. In a very definite sense that is true. The logical
+consequence of this admission should be merely the recognition that the
+idea of evolution as developed in the natural sciences cannot be the
+whole idea.
+
+The entire history of anything, Spencer tells us, must include its
+appearance out of the imperceptible, and its disappearance again into
+the imperceptible. Be it a single object, or the whole universe, an
+account which begins with it in a concrete form, or leaves off with its
+concrete form, is incomplete. He uses a familiar instance, that of a
+cloud appearing when vapour drifts over a cold mountain top, and again
+disappearing when it emerges into warmer air. The cloud emerges from the
+imperceptible as heat is dissipated. It is dissolved again as heat is
+absorbed and the watery particles evaporate. Spencer esteems this an
+analogue of the appearance of the universe itself, according to the
+nebular hypothesis. Yet assuredly, as the cloud presupposes vapours
+which had previously condensed, and the vapour clouds that had
+previously evaporated, and as clouds dissolve in one place even at the
+moment that they are forming in another, so we are told of nebulae which
+are in every phase of advance or of decline. To ask which was first,
+solid masses or nebulous haze, is much like recurring to the riddle of
+the hen and the egg. Still, we are told, we have but to extend our
+thought beyond this emergence and subsidence of sidereal systems, of
+continents, nations, men, to find a permanent totality made up of
+transient individuals in every stage of change. The physical assumption
+with which Spencer sets out is that the mass of the universe and its
+energy are fixed in quantity. All the phenomena of evolution are
+included in the conservation of this matter and force.
+
+Besides the criticism which was offered above, that the mere law of the
+persistence of force does not initiate our series, there is a further
+objection. Even within the series, once it has been started, this law of
+the persistence of force is solely a quantitative law. When energy is
+transformed there is an equivalence between the new form and the old. Of
+the reasons for the direction evolution takes, for the permanence of
+that direction once it has been taken, so that the sequence of forms is
+a progression, the explication of a latent nature--of all this, the mere
+law of the persistence of force gives us no explanation whatever. The
+change at random from one form of manifestation to another might be a
+striking illustration of the law of the persistence of force, but it
+would be the contradiction of evolution. The very notion of evolution is
+that of the sequence of forms, so that something is expressed or
+achieved. That achievement implies more than the mere force. Or rather,
+it involves a quality of the force with which the language of mechanism
+does not reckon. It assumes the idea which gives direction to the force,
+an ideal quality of the force.
+
+Unquestionably that which men sought to be rid of was the idea of
+purpose in nature, in the old sense of design in the mind of God,
+external to the material universe, of force exerted upon nature from
+without, so as to cause nature to conform to the design of its 'Great
+Original,' in Addison's high phrase. In this effort, however, the
+reducing of all to mere force and permutation of force, not merely
+explains nothing, but contradicts facts which stare us in the face. It
+deprives evolution of the quality which makes it evolution. To put in
+this incongruous quality at the beginning, because we find it necessary
+at the end, is, to say the least, naive. To deny that we have put it in,
+to insist that in the marvellous sequence we have only an illustration
+of mechanism and of conservation of force, is perverse. We passed
+through an era in which some said that they did not believe in God;
+everything was accounted for by evolution. In so far as they meant that
+they did not believe in the God of deism and of much traditional
+theology, they did not stand alone in this claim. In so far as they
+meant by evolution mere mechanism, they explained nothing and destroyed
+the notion of evolution besides. In so far as they meant more than mere
+mechanism, they lapsed into the company of the scientific myth-makers to
+whom we alluded above. They attributed to their abstraction, evolution,
+qualities which other people found in the forms of the universe viewed
+as the manifestation of an immanent God. Only by so doing were they able
+to ascribe to evolution that which other people describe as the work of
+God. At this level the controversy becomes one simply about words.
+
+Of course, the great illumination as to the meaning of evolution has
+come with its application to many fields besides the physical. Darwin
+was certainly the great inaugurator of the evolutionary movement in
+England. Still, Darwin's problem was strictly limited. The impression is
+widespread that the biological evolutionary theories were first
+developed, and furnished the basis for the others. Yet both Hegel and
+Comte, not to speak of Schelling, were far more interested in the
+intellectual and historical, the ethical and social aspects of the
+question. Both Hegel and Comte were, whether rightly or wrongly, rather
+contemptuous of the appeal to biology and organic life. Both had the
+sense that they used a great figure of speech when they spoke of society
+as an organism, and compared the working of institutions to biological
+functions. This is indeed the question. It is a question over which
+Spencer sets himself lightly. He passes back and forth between organic
+evolution and the ethical, economic, and social movements which are
+described by the same term, as if we were in possession of a perfectly
+safe analogy, or rather as if we were assured of an identical principle.
+Much that is already archaic in Spencer's economic and social, his
+historical and ethical, not to say his religious, chapters is due to the
+influence of this fact. Of his own mind it was true that he had come to
+the doctrine of evolution from the physical side. He brought to his
+other subjects a more or less developed method of operating with the
+conception. He never fully realised how new subjects would alter the
+method and transform the conception. Spencerian evolution is an
+assertion of the all-sufficiency of natural law. The authority of
+conscience is but the experience of law-abiding and dutiful generations
+flowing in our veins. The public weal has hold over us, because the
+happiness and misery of past ages are inherited by us.
+
+It marked a great departure when Huxley began vigorously to dissent from
+these views. According to him evolutionary science has done nothing for
+ethics. Men become ethical only as they set themselves against the
+principles embodied in the evolutionary process of the world. Evolution
+is the struggle for existence. It is preposterous to say that man became
+good by succeeding in the struggle for existence. Instead of the old
+single movement, as in Spencer, straight from the nebula to the saint,
+Huxley has place for suffering. Suffering is most intense in man
+precisely under conditions most essential to the evolution of his nobler
+powers. The loss of ease or money may be gain in character. The cosmical
+process is not only full of pain. It is full of mercilessness and of
+wickedness. Good has been evolved, but so has evil. The fittest may have
+survived. There is no guarantee that they are the best. The continual
+struggle against our fellows poisons our higher life. It will hardly do
+to say with Huxley that the ethical struggle is the reverse of the
+cosmical process. Nevertheless, we have here a most interesting
+transformation in thought.
+
+These ideas and principles, as is well known, were elaborated and
+advanced upon in a very popular book, Drummond's _Ascent of Man_, 1894.
+Even the title was a happy and suggestive one. Struggle for life is a
+fact, but it is not the whole fact. It is balanced by the struggle for
+the life of others. This latter reaches far down into the levels of what
+we call brute life. Its divinest reach is only the fulfilment of the
+real nature of humanity. It is the living with men which develops the
+moral in man. The prolongation of infancy in the higher species has had
+to do with the development of moral nature. So only that we hold a
+sufficiently deep view of reason, provided we see clearly that reason
+transforms, perfects, makes new what we inherit from the beast, we need
+not fear for morality, though it should universally be taught that
+morality came into being by the slow and gradual fashioning of brute
+impulse.
+
+Benjamin Kidd in his _Social Evolution_, 1895, has reverted again to
+extreme Darwinism in morals and sociology. The law is that of unceasing
+struggle. Reason does not teach us to moderate the struggle. It but
+sharpens the conflict. All religions are praeter-rational, Christianity
+most of all, in being the most altruistic. Kidd, not without reason,
+comments bitterly upon Spencer's Utopia, the passage of militarism into
+industrialism. The struggle in industrialism is fiercer than ever.
+Reason affects the animal nature of man for the worse. Clearly conscious
+of what he is doing, man objects to sacrificing himself for his family
+or tribe. Instinct might lead an ape to do that. Intelligence warns a
+man against it. Reason is cruel beyond anything dreamed of in the beast.
+That portion of the community which loves to hear the abuse of reason,
+rejoiced to hear this phrase. They rejoiced when they heard that
+religion was the only remedy, and that religion was ultra-rational,
+contra-rational, supernatural, in this new sense. How one comes by it,
+or how one can rationally justify the yielding of allegiance to it, is
+not clear. One must indeed have the will to believe if one believes on
+these terms.
+
+These again are but examples. They convey but a superficial impression
+of the effort to apply the conception of evolution to the moral and
+religious life of man. All this has taken place, of course, in a far
+larger setting that of the endeavour to elaborate the evolutionary view
+of politics and of the state, of economics and of trade, of social life
+and institutions, of culture and civilisation in every aspect. This
+elaboration and reiteration of the doctrine of evolution sometimes
+wearies us. It is but the unwearied following of the main clue to the
+riddle of the universe which the age has given us. It is nothing more
+and nothing less than the endeavour to apprehend the ideal life, no
+longer as something held out to us, set up before us, but also as
+something working within us, realising itself through us and among us.
+To deny the affinity of this with religion would be fatuous and also
+futile. Temporarily, at least, and to many interests of religion, it
+would be fatal.
+
+
+MIRACLES
+
+
+It must be evident that the total view of the universe which the
+acceptance of the doctrine of evolution implies, has had effect in the
+diminution of the acuteness of the question concerning miracles. It
+certainly gives to that question a new form. A philosophy which asserts
+the constant presence of God in nature and the whole life of the world,
+a criticism which has given us a truer notion of the documents which
+record the biblical miracles, the reverent sense of ignorance which our
+increasing knowledge affords, have tended to diminish the dogmatism of
+men on either side of the debate. The contention on behalf of the
+miracle, in the traditional sense of the word, once seemed the bulwark
+of positive religion, the distinction between the man who was satisfied
+with a naturalistic explanation of the universe and one whose devout
+soul asked for something more. On the other hand, the contention against
+the miracle appeared to be a necessary corollary of the notion of a law
+and order which are inviolable throughout the universe. Furthermore,
+many men have come of themselves to the conclusion for which
+Schleiermacher long ago contended. Whatever may be theoretically
+determined concerning miracles, yet the miracle can never again be
+regarded as among the foundations of faith. This is for the simplest of
+reasons. The belief in a miracle presupposes faith. It is the faith
+which sustains the miracle, and not the miracle the faith. Jesus is to
+men the incomparable moral and spiritual magnitude which he is, not on
+the evidence of some unparalleled things physical which it is alleged he
+did. Quite the contrary, it is the immediate impression of the moral and
+spiritual wonder which Jesus is, that prepares what credence we can
+gather for the wonders which it is declared he did. This is a transfer
+of emphasis, a redistribution of weight in the structure of our thought,
+the relief of which many appreciate who have not reasoned the matter
+through for themselves.
+
+Schleiermacher had said, and Herrmann and others repeat the thought,
+that, as the Christian faith finds in Christ the highest revelation,
+miracles may reasonably be expected of him. Nevertheless, he adds, these
+deeds can be called miracles or esteemed extraordinary, only as
+containing something which was beyond contemporary knowledge of the
+regular and orderly connexion between physical and spiritual life.
+Therewith, it must be evident, that the notion of the miraculous is
+fundamentally changed. So it comes to pass that we have a book like
+Mackintosh's _Natural History of the Christian Religion_, 1894, whose
+avowed purpose is to do away with the miraculous altogether. Of course,
+the author means the traditional notion of the miraculous, according to
+which it is the essence of arbitrariness and the negation of law. It is
+not that he has less sense for the divine life of the world, or for the
+quality of Christianity as revelation. On the other hand, we have a book
+like Percy Gardner's _Exploratio Evangelica_, 1899. With the most
+searching criticism of the narratives of some miracles, there is
+reverent confession, on the author's part, that he is baffled by the
+reports of others. There is recognition of unknown possibilities in the
+case of a character like that of Jesus. It is not that Gardner has a
+less stringent sense of fact and of the inexorableness of law than has
+Mackintosh or an ardent physicist. The problem is reduced to that of the
+choice of expression. We are not able to withhold a justification of the
+scholar who declares: We must not say that we believe in the miraculous.
+This language is sure to be appropriated by those who still take their
+departure from the old dualism, now hopelessly obsolete, for which a
+breach of the law of nature was the crowning evidence of the love of
+God. On the other hand, the assertion that we do not believe in the
+miraculous will easily be taken by some to mean the denial of the whole
+sense of the nearness and power and love of God, and of the unimagined
+possibilities of such a moral nature as was that of Christ. It is to be
+repeated that we have here a mere difference as to terms. The debate is
+no longer about ideas.
+
+The traditional notion of the miracle arose out of the confusion of two
+series of ideas which, in the last analysis, have nothing to do with
+each other. On the one hand, there is the conception of law and order,
+of cause and effect, of the unbroken connexion of nature. On the other
+hand is the thought of the divine purpose in the life of the world and
+of the individual. By the aid of that first sequence of thoughts we find
+ourselves in the universe and interpret the world of fact to ourselves.
+Yet in the other sequence lies the essence of religion. The two
+sequences may perfectly well coexist in the same mind. Out of the
+attempt to combine them nothing clear or satisfying can issue. If one
+should be, to-day, brought face to face with a fact which was alleged to
+be a miracle, his instinctive effort would be, nevertheless, to seek to
+find its cause, to establish for it a connexion in the natural order. In
+the ancient world men did not argue thus, nor in the modern world until
+less than two hundred years ago. The presumption of the order of nature
+had not assumed for them the proportions which it has for us. For us it
+is overwhelming, self-evident. Therewith is not involved that we lack
+belief in a divine purpose for the world and for the individual life.
+
+We do not deny that there are laws of nature of which we have no
+experience, facts which we do not understand, events which, if they
+should occur, would stand before us as unique. Still, the decisive thing
+is, that in face of such an event, instead of viewing it quite simply as
+a divine intervention, as men used to do, we, with equal simplicity and
+no less devoutness, conceive that same event as only an illustration of
+a connexion in nature which we do not understand. There is no inherent
+reason why we may not understand it. When we do understand it, there
+will be nothing more about it that is conceivably miraculous. There will
+be then no longer a unique quality attaching to the event. Therewith
+ends the possible significance of such an event as proof of divine
+intervention for our especial help. We have but a connexion in nature
+such that, whether understood or not, if it were to recur, the event
+would recur.
+
+The miracles which are related in the Scripture may be divided for our
+consideration into three classes. To the first class belong most of
+those which are related in the Old Testament, but some also which are
+conspicuous in the New Testament. They are, in some cases, the poetical
+and imaginative representation of the profoundest religious ideas. So
+soon as one openly concedes this, when there is no longer any necessity
+either to attack or to defend the miracle in question, one is in a
+position to acknowledge how deep and wonderful the thoughts often are
+and how beautiful the form in which they are conveyed. It is through
+imagination and symbolism that we are able to convey the subtlest
+meanings which we have. Still more was this the case with men of an
+earlier age. In the second place, the narratives of miracles are, some
+of them, of such a sort that we may say that an event or circumstance in
+nature has been obviously apprehended in naive fashion. This by no means
+forbids us to interpret that same event in quite a different way. The
+men of former time, exactly in proportion as they had less sense of the
+order of nature than have we, so were they also far readier to assume
+the immediate forthputting of the power of God. This was true not merely
+of the uneducated. It is difficult, or even impossible, for us to find
+out what the event was. Fact and apprehension are inextricably
+interwoven. That which really happened is concealed from us by the tale
+which had intended to reveal it. In the third place, there are many
+cases in the history of Jesus, and some in that of the apostles and
+prophets, in which that which is related moves in the borderland between
+body and soul, spirit and matter, the region of the influence of will,
+one's own or that of another, over physical conditions. Concerning such
+cases we are disposed, far more than were men even a few years ago, to
+concede that there is much that is by no means yet investigated, and the
+soundest judgment we can form is far from being sure. Even if we
+recognise to the full the lamentable resurgence of outworn superstitions
+and stupidities, which again pass current among us for an unhappy
+moment, if we detect the questionable or manifestly evil consequences of
+certain uses made or alleged of psychic influence, yet still we are not
+always in a position to say, with certainty, what is true in tales of
+healing which we hear in our own day. There are certain of the
+statements concerning Jesus' healing power and action which are
+absolutely baffling. They can be eliminated from the narrative only by a
+procedure which might just as well eliminate the narrative. In many of
+the narratives there may be much that is true. In some all may be as
+related. In Jesus' time, on the witness of the Scripture itself, it was
+assumed as something no one questioned, that miraculous deeds were
+performed, not alone by Jesus and the apostles, but by many others, and
+not always even by the good. Such deeds were performed through the power
+of evil spirits as well as by the power of God. To imagine that the
+working of miracles proved that Jesus came from God, is the most patent
+importation of a modern apologetic notion into the area of ancient
+thought. We must remember that Jesus himself laid no great weight upon
+the miracles which we assume that he believed he wrought, and some of
+which we may believe that he did work. Many he performed with hesitation
+and desired so far as possible to conceal.
+
+Even if we were in a position at one point or another in the life of
+Jesus to defend the traditional assumptions concerning the miraculous,
+yet it must be evident how opposed it is to right reason, to lay stress
+on the abstract necessity of belief in the miraculous. The traditional
+conception of the miraculous is done away for us. This is not at all by
+the fact that we are in a position to say with Matthew Arnold: 'The
+trouble with miracles is that they never happen.' We do not know enough
+to say that. To stake all on the assertion of the impossibility of
+so-called miracles is as foolish as to stake much on the affirmation of
+their actuality. The connexion of nature is only an induction. This can
+never be complete. The real question is both more complex and also more
+simple. The question is whether, even if an event, the most unparalleled
+of those related in the Gospels or outside of them, should be proved
+before our very eyes to have taken place, the question is whether we
+should believe it to have been a miracle in the traditional sense, an
+event in which the actual--not the known, but the possible--order of
+nature had been broken through, and in the old sense, God had
+arbitrarily supervened.
+
+Allowed that the event were, in our own experience and in the known
+experience of the race, unparalleled, yet it would never occur to us to
+suppose but that there was a law of this case, also, a connexion in
+nature in which, as work of God, it occurred, and in which, if the
+conditions were repeated, it would recur. We should unceasingly
+endeavour through observation, reflexion, and new knowledge, to show how
+we might subordinate this event in the connexion of nature which we
+assume. We should feel that we knew more, and not less, of God, if we
+should succeed. And if our effort should prove altogether futile, we
+should be no less sure that such natural connexion exists. This is
+because nature is for us the revelation of the divine. The divine, we
+assume, has a natural order of working. Its inviolability is the
+divinest thing about it. It is through this sequence of ideas that we
+are in a position to deny, not facts which may be inexplicable, but the
+traditional conception of the miracle. For surely no one needs to be
+told that this is not the conception of the miracle which has existed in
+the minds of the devout, and equally of the undevout, from the beginning
+of thought until the present day.
+
+However, there is nothing in all of this which hinders us from believing
+with a full heart in the love and grace and care of God, in his holy and
+redeeming purpose for mankind and for the individual. It is true that
+this belief cannot any longer retain its naive and childish form. It is
+true that it demands of a man far more of moral force, of ethical and
+spiritual mastery, of insight and firm will, to sustain the belief in
+the purpose of God for himself and for all men, when a man believes that
+he sees and feels God only in and through nature and history, through
+personal consciousness and the personal consciousness of Jesus. It is
+true that it has, apparently, been easier for men to think of God as
+outside and above his world, and of themselves as separated from their
+fellows by his special providence. It is more difficult, through glad
+and intelligent subjection to all laws of nature and of history, to
+achieve the education of one's spirit, to make good one's inner
+deliverance from the world, to aid others in the same struggle and to
+set them on their way to God. Men grow uncertain within themselves,
+because they say that traditional religion has apprehended the matter in
+a different way. This is true. It is also misleading. Whatever miracles
+Jesus may have performed, no one can say that he performed them to make
+life easier for himself, to escape the common lot, to avoid struggle, to
+evade suffering and disgraceful death. On the contrary, in genuine human
+self-distrust, but also in genuine heroism, he gave himself to his
+vocation, accepting all that went therewith, and finished the work of
+God which he had made his own. This is the more wonderful because it lay
+so much nearer to him than it can lie to us, to pray for special
+evidence of the love of God and to set his faith on the receiving of it.
+He had not the conception of the relation of God to nature and history
+which we have.
+
+We may well view the modern tendency to belief in healings through
+prayer, suggestion and faith, as an intelligible, an interesting, and in
+part, a touching manifestation. Of course there is mingled with it much
+dense ignorance, some superstition and even deception. Yet behind such a
+phenomenon there is meaning. Men of this mind make earnest with the
+thought that God cares for them. Without that thought there is no
+religion. They have been taught to find the evidence of God's love and
+care in the unusual. They are quite logical. It has been a weak point of
+the traditional belief that men have said that in the time of Christ
+there were miracles, but since that time, no more. Why not, if we can
+only in spirit come near to Christ and God? They are quite logical also
+in that they have repudiated modern science. To be sure, no
+inconsiderable part of them use the word science continually.
+
+But the very esoteric quality of their science is that it means
+something which no one else ever understood that it meant. In reality
+their breach with science is more radical than their breach with
+Christianity. They feel the contradiction in which most men are bound
+fast, who will let science have its way, up to a certain point, but who
+beyond that, would retain the miracle. Dimly the former appreciate that
+this position is impossible. They leave it to other men to become
+altogether scientific if they wish. For themselves they prefer to remain
+religious. What a revival of ancient superstitions they have brought to
+pass, is obvious. Still we shall never get beyond such adventurous and
+preposterous endeavours to rescue that which is inestimably precious in
+religion, until the false antithesis between reason and faith, the lying
+contradiction between the providence of God and the order of nature, is
+overcome. Some science mankind apparently must have. Altogether without
+religion the majority, it would seem, will never be. How these are
+related, the one to the other, not every one sees. Many attempt their
+admixture in unhappy ways. They might try letting them stand in peace as
+complement and supplement the one to the other. Still better, they may
+perhaps some day see how each penetrates, permeates and glorifies the
+other.
+
+
+THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
+
+
+We said that the last generation had been characterised by an unexampled
+concentration of intellectual interest upon problems presented by the
+social sciences. With this has gone an unrivalled earnestness in the
+interpretation of religion as a social force. The great religious
+enthusiasm has been that of the application of Christianity to the
+social aspects of life. This effort has furnished most of the watchwords
+of religious teaching. It has laid vigorous, not to say violent, hands
+on religious institutions. It has given a new perspective to effort and
+a new impulse to devotion. The revival of religion in our age has taken
+this direction, with an exclusiveness which has had both good and evil
+consequences. Yet, before all, it should be made clear that it
+constitutes a religious revival. Some are deploring the prostrate
+condition of spiritual interests. If one judged only by conventional
+standards, they have much evidence upon their side. Some are seeking to
+galvanise religious life by recurrence to evangelistic methods
+successfully operative half a century ago. The outstanding fact is that
+the age shows immense religious vitality, so soon as one concedes that
+it must be allowed to show its vitality in its own way. It is the age of
+the social question. One must be ignorant indeed of the activity of the
+churches and of the productivity of religious thinkers, if he does not
+own that in Christian circles also no questions are so rife as these.
+Whether the panaceas have been all wise or profitable may be questioned.
+Whether the interest has not been even excessive and one-sided, whether
+the accusation has not been occasionally unjust and the self-accusation
+morbid, these are questions which it might be possible in some quarters
+to ask. This is, however, only another form of proof of what we say. The
+religious interest in social questions has not been aroused primarily by
+intellectual and scientific impulses, nor fostered mainly by doctrinaire
+discussion. On the contrary, the initiative has been from the practical
+side. It has been a question of life and service. If anything, one often
+misses the scientific note in the flood of semi-religious literature
+relating to this theme, the realisation that, to do well, it is often
+profitable to think. Yet there is effort to mediate the best results of
+social-scientific thinking, through clerical education and directly to
+the laity. On the other hand, a deep sense of ethical and spiritual
+responsibility is prevalent among thinkers upon social topics.
+
+Often indeed has the quality of Christianity been observed which is here
+exemplified. Each succeeding age has read into Christ's teachings, or
+drawn out from his example, the special meaning which that generation,
+or that social level, or that individual man had need to draw. To them
+in their enthusiasm it has often seemed as if this were the only lesson
+reasonable men could draw. Nothing could be more enlightening than is
+reflexion upon this reading of the ever-changing ideals of man's life
+into Christianity, or of Christianity into the ever-advancing ideals of
+man's life. This chameleonlike quality of Christianity is the farthest
+possible remove from the changelessness which men love to attribute to
+religion. It is the most wonderful quality which Christianity possesses.
+It is precisely because of the recognition of this capacity for change
+that one may safely argue the continuance of Christianity in the world.
+Yet also because of this recognition, one is put upon his guard against
+joining too easily in the clamour that a past apprehension of religion
+was altogether wrong, or that a new and urgent one, in its exclusive
+emphasis and its entirety, is right. Our age is haunted by the sense of
+terrific social and economic inequalities which prevail. It has set its
+heart upon the elimination of those inequalities. It is an age whose
+disrespect for religion is in some part due to the fact that religion
+has not done away with these inequalities. It is an age which is
+immediately interested in an interpretation of religion which will make
+central the contention that, before all things else, these inequalities
+must be done away. If religion can be made a means of every man's
+getting his share of the blessings of this world, well and good. If not,
+there are many men and women to whom religion seems utterly meaningless.
+
+This sentence hardly overstates the case. It is the challenge of the age
+to religion to do something which the age profoundly needs, and which
+religion under its age-long dominant apprehension has not conspicuously
+done, nor even on a great scale attempted. It is the challenge to
+religion to undertake a work of surpassing grandeur--nothing less than
+the actualisation of the whole ideal of the life of man. Religious men
+respond with the quickened and conscientious conviction, not indeed that
+they have laid too great an emphasis upon the spiritual, but that under
+a dualistic conception of God and man and world, they have never
+sufficiently realised that the spiritual is to be realised in the
+material, the ideal in and not apart from the actual, the eternal in and
+not after the temporal. Yet with that oscillatory quality which belongs
+to human movements, especially where old wrongs and errors have come
+deeply to be felt, a part of the literature of the contention shows
+marked tendency to extremes. A religion in the body must become a
+religion of the body. A Christianity of the social state runs risk of
+being apprehended as merely one more means for compassing outward and
+material ends. Religion does stand for the inner life and the
+transcendent world, only not an inner life through the neglect of the
+outer, or a transcendent world in some far-off star or after an aeon or
+two. There might be meaning in the argument that, exactly because so
+many other forces in our age do make for the realisation of the outer
+life and present world with an effectiveness and success which no
+previous age has ever dreamed, there is the more reason, and not the
+less, why religion should still be religion. Exactly this is the
+contention of Eueken in one of the most significant contributions of
+recent years to the philosophy of religion, his _Wahrheitsgehalt der
+Religion_, 1901, transl. Jones, 1911. The very source and cause of the
+sure recovery of religion in our age will be the experience of the
+futility, the bankruptcy, of a civilisation without faith. No nobler
+argument has been heard in our time for the spiritual meaning of
+religion, with the fullest recognition of all its other meanings.
+
+The modern emphasis on the social aspects of religion may be said to
+have been first clearly expressed in Seeley's _Ecce Homo_, 1867. The
+pith of the book is in this phrase: 'To reorganise society and to bind
+the members of it together by the closest ties was the business of
+Jesus' life.' Allusion has been made to Fremantle's _The World as the
+Subject of Redemption_, 1885. Worthy of note is also Fairbairn's
+_Religion in History and Modern Life_, 1894; pre-eminently so is
+Bosanquet's _The Civilisation of Christendom_, 1893. Westcott's
+_Incarnation and Common Life_, 1893, contains utterances of weight.
+Peabody, in his book, _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_, 1905, has
+given, on the whole, the best resume of the discussion. He conveys
+incidentally an impression of the body of literature produced in recent
+years, in which it is assumed, sometimes with embitterment, that the
+centre of gravity of Christianity is outside the Church. Sell, in the
+very title of his illuminating little book, _Christenthum und
+Weltgeschichte seit der Reformation: das Christenthum in seiner
+Entwickelung ueber die Kirche hinaus_, 1910, records an impression, which
+is widespread and true, that the characteristic mark of modern
+Christianity is that it has transcended the organs and agencies
+officially created for it. It has become non-ecclesiastical, if not
+actually hostile to the Church. It has permeated the world in unexpected
+fashion and does the deeds of Christianity, though rather eager to avoid
+the name. The anti-clericalism of the Latin countries is not
+unintelligible, the anti-ecclesiasticism of the Teutonic not without a
+cause. German socialism, ever since Karl Marx, has been fundamentally
+antagonistic to any religion whatsoever. It is purely secularist in
+tone. This is also a strained situation, liable to become perverse. That
+part of the Christian Church which understands itself, rejoices in
+nothing so much as in the fact that the spirit of Christ is so widely
+disseminated, his influence felt by many who do not know what influence
+it is which they feel, his work done by vast numbers who would never
+call themselves his workers. That part of the Church is not therewith
+convinced but that there is need of the Church as institution, and of
+those who are consciously disciples of Jesus in the world.
+
+By far the largest question, however, which is raised in this connexion,
+is one different from any thus far intimated. It is, perhaps, the last
+question one would have expected the literature of the social movement
+to raise. It is, namely, the question of the individual. Ever since the
+middle of the eighteenth century a sort of universalistic optimism, to
+which the individual is sacrificed, has obtained. Within the period of
+which this book treats the world has won an enlargement of horizon of
+which it never dreamed. It has gained a forecast of the future of
+culture and civilisation which is beyond imagination. The access of
+comfort makes men at home in the world as they never were at home. There
+has been set a value on this life which life never had before. The
+succession of discoveries and applications of discovery makes it seem as
+if there were to be no end in this direction. From Rousseau to Spencer
+men have elaborated the view that the historical process cannot really
+issue in anything else than in ever higher stages of perfection and of
+happiness. They postulate a continuous enhancement of energy and a
+steady perfecting of intellectual and moral quality. As the goal of
+evolution appears an ideal condition which is either indefinitely
+remote, that is, which gives room for the bliss of infinite progress in
+its direction, or else a definitely attainable condition, which would
+have within itself the conditions of perpetuity.
+
+The resistlessness with which this new view of the life of civilisation
+has won acknowledgment from men of all classes is amazing. It rests upon
+a belief in the self-sufficiency and the all-sufficiency of the life of
+this world, of the bearings of which it may be assumed that few of its
+votaries are aware. In reality this view cannot by any possibility be
+described as the result of knowledge. On the contrary, it is a venture
+of faith. It is the peculiar, the very characteristic and suggestive
+form which the faith of our age takes. Men believe in this indefinite
+progress of the world and of mankind, because without postulating such
+progress they do not see how they can assume the absolute worth of an
+activity which is yet the only thing which has any interest to most of
+them. Under this view one can assign to the individual life a definite
+significance, only upon the supposition that the individual is the organ
+of realisation of a part of this progress of mankind. All happiness and
+suffering, all changes in knowledge and manner of conduct, are supposed
+to have no worth each for itself or for the sake of the individual, but
+only for their relation to the movement as a whole. Surely this is an
+illusion. Exactly that in which the characteristic quality of the world
+and of life is found, the individual personalities, the single
+generations, the concrete events--these lose, in this view, their own
+particular worth. What can possibly be the worth of a whole of which the
+parts have no worth? We have here but a parallel on a huge scale of that
+deadly trait in our own private lives, according to which it makes no
+difference what we are doing, so only that we are doing, or whither we
+are going, so only that we cease not to go, or what our noise is all
+about, so only that there be no end of the noise. Certainly no one can
+establish the value of the evolutionary process in and of itself.
+
+If the movement as a whole has no definite end that has absolute worth,
+then it has no worth except as the stages, the individual factors
+included in it, attain to something within themselves which is of
+increasing worth. If the movement achieves this, then it has worth, not
+otherwise. We may illustrate this question by asking ourselves
+concerning the existence and significance of suffering and of the evil
+and of the bad which are in the world, in their relation to this
+tendency to indefinite progress which is supposed to be inherent in
+civilisation. On this theory we have to say that the suffering of the
+individual is necessary for the development and perfecting of the whole.
+As over against the whole the individual has no right to make demands as
+to welfare or happiness. The bad also becomes only relative. In the
+movement taken as a whole, it is probably unavoidable. In any case it is
+negligible, since the movement is irresistible. All ethical values are
+absorbed in the dynamic ones, all personal values in the collective
+ones. Surely the sole intelligent question about any civilisation is,
+what sort of men does it produce. If it produces worthless individuals,
+it is so far forth a worthless civilisation. If it has sacrificed many
+worthy men in order to produce this ignoble result, then it is more
+obviously ignoble than ever.
+
+Furthermore, this notion of an inherent necessity and an irresistible
+tendency to progress is a chimera. The progress of mankind is a task. It
+is something to which the worthy human spirit is called upon to make
+contribution. The unworthy never hear the call. Progress is not a
+natural necessity. It is an ethical obligation. It is a task which has
+been fulfilled by previous generations in varying degrees of
+perfectness. It will be participated in by succeeding generations with
+varying degrees of wisdom and success. But as to there being anything
+autonomous about it, this is sheer hallucination, myth-making again, on
+the part of those who boast that they despise the myth,
+miracle-mongering on the part of those who have abjured the miracle,
+nonsense on the part of those who boast that they alone are sane. There
+is no ultimate source of civilisation but the individual, as there is
+also no issue of civilisation but in individuals. Men, characters,
+personalities, are the makers of it. Men are the product which is made.
+The higher stages and achievements of the life of society have come to
+pass always and only upon condition that single personalities have
+recognised the problem, seen their individual duty and known how to
+inspire others with enthusiasm. Periods of decline are always those in
+which this personal element cannot make itself felt. Democracies and
+periods of the intensity of emphasis upon the social movement, tend
+directly to the depression and suppression of personality.[7] Such
+reflexions will have served their purpose if they give us some clear
+sense of what we have to understand as the effect of the social movement
+on religion. They may give also some forecast of the effect of real
+religion on the social movement. For religion is the relation of God and
+personality. It can be social only in the sense that society, in all its
+normal relations, is the sphere within which that relation of God and
+personality is to be wrought out.
+
+[Footnote 7: Siebeck, _Religionsphilosophie_, 1893, s. 407.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES: ACTION AND REACTION
+
+
+In those aspects of our subject with which we have thus far dealt,
+leadership has been largely with the Germans. Effort was indeed made in
+the chapter on the sciences to illustrate the progress of thought by
+reference to British writers. In this department the original and
+creative contribution of British authors was great. There were, however,
+also in the earlier portion of the nineteenth century movements of
+religious thought in Great Britain and America related to some of those
+which we have previously considered. Moreover, one of the most
+influential movements of English religious thought, the so-called Oxford
+Movement, with the Anglo-Catholic revival which it introduced, was of a
+reactionary tendency. It has seemed, therefore, feasible to append to
+this chapter that which we must briefly say concerning the general
+movement of reaction which marked the century. This reactionary movement
+has indeed everywhere run parallel to the one which we have endeavoured
+to record. It has often with vigour run counter to our movement. It has
+revealed the working of earnest and sometimes anxious minds in
+directions opposed to those which we have been studying. No one can fail
+to be aware that there has been a great Catholic revival in the
+nineteenth century. That revival has had place in the Roman Catholic
+countries of the Continent as well. It was in order to include the
+privilege of reference to these aspects of our subject that this chapter
+was given a double title. Yet in no country has the nineteenth century
+so favourably altered the position of the Roman Catholic Church as in
+England. In no country has a Church which has been esteemed to be
+Protestant been so much influenced by Catholic ideas. This again is a
+reason for including our reference to the reaction here.
+
+According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy may be said to
+have begun in Great Britain in the year 1825, with the publication of
+Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_. In Coleridge's _Confessions of an
+Enquiring Spirit_, published six years after his death in 1834, we have
+a suggestion of the biblical-critical movement which was beginning to
+shape itself in Germany. In the same years we have evidence in the works
+of Erskine and the early writings of Campbell, that in Scotland
+theologians were thinking on Schleiermacher's lines. In those same years
+books of more or less marked rationalistic tendency were put forth by
+the Oriel School. Finally, with Pusey's _Assize Sermon_, in 1833, Newman
+felt that the movement later to be called Tractarian had begun. We shall
+not be wrong, therefore, in saying that the decade following 1825 saw
+the beginnings in Britain of more formal reflexion upon all the aspects
+of the theme with which we are concerned.
+
+What went before that, however, in the way of liberal religious
+thinking, though informal in its nature, should not be ignored. It was
+the work of the poets of the end of the eighteenth and of the beginning
+of the nineteenth centuries. The culmination of the great revolt against
+the traditional in state and society and against the conventional in
+religion, had been voiced in Britain largely by the poets. So vigorous
+was this utterance and so effective, that some have spoken of the
+contribution of the English poets to the theological reconstruction. It
+is certain that the utterances of the poets tended greatly to the
+dissemination of the new ideas. There was in Great Britain no such unity
+as we have observed among the Germans, either of the movement as a whole
+or in its various parts. There was a consecution nothing less than
+marvellous in the work of the philosophers from Kant to Hegel. There was
+a theological sequence from Schleiermacher to Ritschl. There was an
+unceasing critical advance from the days of Strauss. There was nothing
+resembling this in the work of the English-speaking people. The
+contributions were for a long time only sporadic. The movement had no
+inclusiveness. There was no aspect of a solid front in the advance. In
+the department of the sciences only was the situation different. In a
+way, therefore, it will be necessary in this chapter merely to single
+out individuals, to note points of conflict, one and another, all along
+the great line of advance. Or, to put it differently, it will be
+possible to pursue a chronological arrangement which would have been
+bewildering in our study heretofore. With the one great division between
+the progressive spirits and the men of the reaction, it will be possible
+to speak of philosophers, critics and theologians together, among their
+own contemporaries, and so to follow the century as it advances.
+
+In the closing years of the eighteenth century in England what claimed
+to be a rational supernaturalism prevailed. Men sought to combine faith
+in revealed religion with the empirical philosophy of Locke. They
+conceived God and his relation to the world under deistical forms. The
+educated often lacked in singular degree all deeper religious feeling.
+They were averse to mysticism and spurned enthusiasm. Utilitarian
+considerations, which formed the practical side of the empirical
+philosophy, played a prominent part also in orthodox belief. The theory
+of the universe which obtained among the religious is seen at its worst
+in some of the volumes of the Warburton Lectures, and at its best
+perhaps in Butler's _Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion_. The
+character and views of the clergy and of the ruling class among the
+laity of the Church of England, early in the nineteenth century, are
+pictured with love and humour in Trollope's novels. They form the
+background in many of George Eliot's books, where, in more mordant
+manner, both their strength and weaknesses are shown. Even the remarks
+which introduce Dean Church's _Oxford Movement_, 1891, in which the
+churchly element is dealt with in deep affection, give anything but an
+inspiring view.
+
+The contrast with this would-be rational and unemotional religious
+respectability of the upper classes was furnished, for masses of the
+people, in the quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after
+the manner of the Methodists. But the Methodism of the earlier age had
+as good as no intellectual relations whatsoever. The Wesleys and
+Whitefield had indeed influenced a considerable portion of the Anglican
+communion. Their pietistic trait, combined, for the most part, with a
+Calvinism which Wesley abhorred and an old-fashioned low church feeling
+with which also Wesley had no sympathy, shows itself in the so-called
+evangelical party which was strong before 1830. This evangelical
+movement in the Church of England manifested deep religious feeling, it
+put forth zealous philanthropic effort, it had among its representatives
+men and women of great beauty of personal character and piety. Yet it
+was completely cut off from any living relation to the thought of the
+age. There was among its representatives no spirit of theological
+inquiry. There was, if anything, less probability of theological
+reconstruction, from this quarter, than from the circles of the older
+German pietism, with which this English evangelicalism of the time of
+the later Georges had not a little in common. There had been a great
+enthusiasm for humanity at the opening of the period of the French
+Revolution, but the excesses and atrocities of the Revolution had
+profoundly shocked the English mind. There was abroad something of the
+same sense for the return to nature, and of the greatness of man, which
+moved Schiller and Goethe. The exponents of it were, however, almost
+exclusively the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron. There was
+nothing which combined these various elements as parts of a great whole.
+Britain had stood outside the area of the Revolution, and yet had put
+forth stupendous efforts, ultimately successful, to make an end of the
+revolutionary era and of the Napoleonic despotism. This tended perhaps
+to give to Britons some natural satisfaction in the British Constitution
+and the established Church which flourished under it. Finally, while men
+on the Continent were devising holy alliances and other chimeras of the
+sort, England was precipitated into the earlier acute stages of the
+industrial revolution in which she has led the European nations and
+still leads. This fact explains a certain preoccupation of the British
+mind with questions remote from theological reconstruction or religious
+speculation.
+
+
+THE POETS
+
+
+It may now sound like a contradiction if we assert that the years from
+1780 to 1830 constitute the era of the noblest English poetry since the
+times of great Elizabeth. The social direction of the new theology of
+the present day, with its cry against every kind of injustice, with its
+claim of an equal opportunity for a happy life for every man--this was
+the forecast of Cowper, as it had been of Blake. To Blake all outward
+infallible authority of books or churches was iniquitous. He was at
+daggers drawn with every doctrine which set limit to the freedom of all
+men to love God, or which could doubt that God had loved all men. Jesus
+alone had seen the true thing. God was a father, every man his child.
+Long before 1789, Burns was filled with the new ideas of the freedom and
+brotherhood of man, with zeal for the overthrow of unjust privilege. He
+had spoken in imperishable words of the holiness of the common life. He
+had come into contact with the most dreadful consequences of Calvinism.
+He has pilloried these mercilessly in his 'Holy Tulzie' and in his 'Holy
+Willie's Prayer.' Such poems must have shaken Calvinism more than a
+thousand liberal sermons could have done. What Coleridge might have done
+in this field, had he not so early turned to prose, it is not easy to
+say. The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction, fundamental
+to his later philosophy, that all the new ideas concerning men and the
+world are a revelation of God. Wordsworth seems never consciously to
+have broken with the current theology. His view of the natural glory and
+goodness of humanity, especially among the poor and simple, has not much
+relation to that theology. His view of nature, not as created of God. in
+the conventional sense, but as itself filled with God, of God as
+conscious of himself at every point of nature's being, has still less.
+Man and nature are but different manifestations of the one soul of all.
+Byron's contribution to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a
+negative sort. It was destructive rather than constructive. Among the
+conventions and hypocrisies of society there were none which he more
+utterly despised than those of religion and the Church as he saw these.
+There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks. But there is a
+difference. Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current
+religion. Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.
+Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron thought he had none.
+Posterity has felt that he had much. His attack was made in a reckless
+bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the truth of many things which
+he said is now overwhelmingly obvious. Shelley began with being what he
+called an atheist. He ended with being what we call an agnostic, whose
+pure poetic spirit carried him far into the realm of the highest
+idealism. The existence of a conscious will within the universe is not
+quite thinkable. Yet immortal love pervades the whole. Immortality is
+improbable, but his highest flights continually imply it. He is sure
+that when any theology violates the primary human affections, it
+tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become
+good. The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss
+later called 'the old faith and the new,' or, as Arnold phrased it, were
+'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,' found
+their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough. From the
+time of the opening of Tennyson's work, the poets, not by destruction
+but by construction, not in opposition to religion but in harmony with
+it, have built up new doctrines of God and man and aided incalculably in
+preparing the way for a new and nobler theology. In the latter part of
+the nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in England who did
+more to read all of the vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher
+faith, and to fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of
+knowledge, than did Browning. Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a
+little of the noblest conviction of the age. And what shall one say of
+Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and
+Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who have spoken, often with consummate
+power and beauty, that which one never says at all without faith and
+rarely says well without art?
+
+
+COLERIDGE
+
+
+Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at his father's vicarage,
+Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire. He was the tenth child of his parents,
+weak in frame, always suffering much. He was a student at Christ's
+Hospital, London, where he was properly bullied, then at Jesus College,
+Cambridge, where he did not take his degree. For some happy years he
+lived in the Lake region and was the friend of Wordsworth and Southey.
+He studied in Goettingen, a thing almost unheard of in his time. The
+years 1798 to 1813 were indeed spent in utter misery, through the opium
+habit which he had contracted while seeking relief from rheumatic pain.
+He wrote and taught and talked in Highgate from 1814 to 1834. He had
+planned great works which never took shape. For a brief period he
+severed his connexion with the English Church, coming under Unitarian
+influence. He then reverted to the relation in which his ecclesiastical
+instincts were satisfied. We read his _Aids to Reflection_ and his
+_Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, and wonder how they can ever have
+exerted a great influence. Nevertheless, they were fresh and stimulating
+in their time. That Coleridge was a power, we have testimony from men
+differing among themselves so widely as do Hare, Sterling, Newman and
+John Stuart Mill. He was a master of style. He had insight and breadth.
+Tulloch says of the _Aids_, that it is a book which none but a thinker
+upon divine things will ever like. Not all even of these have liked it.
+Inexcusably fragmentary it sometimes seems. One is fain to ask: What
+right has any man to publish a scrap-book of his musings? Coleridge had
+the ambition to lay anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. The
+_Aids_ were but of the nature of prolegomena. For substance his
+philosophy went back to Locke and Hume and to the Cambridge Platonists.
+He had learned of Kant and Schleiermacher as well. He was no
+metaphysician, but a keen interpreter of spiritual facts, who himself
+had been quickened by a particularly painful experience. He saw in
+Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of our
+spiritual being and the remedy for its disorder. The evangelical
+tradition brought religion to a man from without. It took no account of
+man's spiritual constitution, beyond the fact that he was a sinner and
+in danger of hell. Coleridge set out, not from sin alone, but from the
+whole deep basis of spiritual capacity and responsibility upon which sin
+rests. He asserts experience. We are as sure of the capacity for the
+good and of the experience of the good as we can be of the evil. The
+case is similar as to the truth. There are aspects of truth which
+transcend our powers. We use words without meaning when we talk of the
+plans of a being who is neither an object for our senses nor a part of
+our self-consciousness. All truth must be capable of being rendered into
+words conformable to reason. Theologians had declared their doctrines
+true or false without reference to the subjective standard of judgment.
+Coleridge contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data,
+but upon inward experience. The authority of Scripture is in its
+truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human reason
+and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The doctrine of an
+atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too comes within the
+range of spiritual experience. The apostolic language took colour from
+the traditions concerning sacrifice. Much has been taken by the Church
+as literal dogmatic statement which should be taken as more figure of
+speech, borrowed from Jewish sources.
+
+Coleridge feared that his thoughts concerning Scripture might, if
+published, do more harm than good. They were printed first in 1840.
+Their writing goes back into the period long before the conflict raised
+by Strauss. There is not much here that one might not have learned from
+Herder and Lessing. Utterances of Whately and Arnold showed that minds
+in England were waking. But Coleridge's utterances rest consistently
+upon the philosophy of religion and theory of dogma which have been
+above implied. They are more significant than are mere flashes of
+generous insight, like those of the men named. The notion of verbal
+inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures could not
+possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had made
+itself felt. The rabbinical idea was bound to disappear. A truer sense
+of the conditions attending the origins and progress of civilisation and
+of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social
+ideas advance, brought of necessity a changed idea of the nature of
+Scripture and revelation. Its literature must be read as literature, its
+history as history. For the answer in our hearts to the spirit in the
+Book, Coleridge used the phrase: 'It finds me.' 'Whatever finds me bears
+witness to itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Ghost. In the
+Bible there is more that finds me than in all the other books which I
+have read.' Still, there is much in the Bible that does not find me. It
+is full of contradictions, both moral and historical. Are we to regard
+these as all equally inspired? The Scripture itself does not claim that.
+Besides, what good would it do us to claim that the original documents
+were inerrant, unless we could claim also that they had been inerrantly
+transmitted? Apparently Coleridge thought that no one would ever claim
+that. Coleridge wrote also concerning the Church. His volume on _The
+Constitution of Church and State_ appeared in 1830. It is the least
+satisfactory of his works. The vacillation of Coleridge's own course
+showed that upon this point his mind was never clear. Arnold also,
+though in a somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that
+Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State
+in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. If Thomas
+Arnold's moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save this
+theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be expected from
+Coleridge.
+
+
+THE ORIEL SCHOOL
+
+
+It has often happened in the history of the English universities that a
+given college has become, through its body of tutors and students,
+through its common-room talk and literary work, the centre, for the
+time, of a movement of thought which gives leadership to the college. In
+this manner it has been customary to speak of the group of men who,
+before the rise of the Oxford Movement, gathered at Oriel College, as
+the Oriel School. Newman and Keble were both Oriel tutors. The Oriel men
+were of distinctly liberal tendency. There were men of note among them.
+There was Whately, Archbishop of Dublin after 1831, and Copleston, from
+whom both Keble and Newman owned that they learned much. There was
+Arnold, subsequently Headmaster of Rugby. There was Hampden, Professor
+of Divinity after 1836. The school was called from its liberalism the
+Noetic school. Whether this epithet contained more of satire or of
+complacency it is difficult to say. These men arrested attention and
+filled some of the older academic and ecclesiastical heads with alarm.
+Without disrespect one may say that it is difficult now to understand
+the commotion which they made. Arnold had a truly beautiful character.
+What he might have done as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford
+was never revealed, for he died in 1842. Whately, viewed as a noetic,
+appears commonplace.
+
+Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was Hampden.
+In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the title of _The Scholastic
+Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology_, he
+assailed what had long been the very bulwark of traditionalism. His idea
+was to show how the vast fabric of scholastic theology had grown up,
+particularly what contributions had been made to it in the Middle Age.
+The traditional dogma is a structure reared upon the logical terminology
+of the patristic and mediaeval schools. It has little foundation in
+Scripture and no response in the religious consciousness. We have here
+the application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our
+own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were not
+wrong in saying that his method would dissolve, not merely that
+particular system of theology, but all creeds and theologies whatsoever.
+Patristic, mediaeval Catholic theology and scholastic Protestantism, no
+less, would go down before it. A pamphlet attributed to Newman,
+published in 1836, precipitated a discussion which, for bitterness, has
+rarely been surpassed in the melancholy history of theological dispute.
+The excitement went to almost unheard of lengths. In the controversy the
+Archbishop, Dr. Howley, made but a poor figure. The Duke of Wellington
+did not add to his fame. Wilberforce and Newman never cleared themselves
+of the suspicion of indirectness. This was, however, after the opening
+of the Oxford Movement.
+
+
+ERSKINE AND CAMPBELL
+
+
+The period from 1820 to 1850 was one of religious and intellectual
+activity in Scotland as well. Tulloch depicts with a Scotsman's
+patriotism the movement which centres about the names of Erskine and
+Campbell. Pfleiderer also judges that their contribution was as
+significant as any made to dogmatic theology in Great Britain in the
+nineteenth century. They achieved the same reconstruction of the
+doctrine of salvation which had been effected by Kant and
+Schleiermacher. At their hands the doctrine was rescued from that
+forensic externality into which Calvinism had degenerated. It was given
+again its quality of ethical inwardness, and based directly upon
+religious experience. High Lutheranism had issued in the same
+externality in Germany before Kant and Schleiermacher, and the New
+England theology before Channing and Bushnell. The merits of Christ
+achieved an external salvation, of which a man became participant
+practically upon condition of assent to certain propositions. Similarly,
+in the Catholic revival, salvation was conceived as an external and
+future good, of which a man became participant through the sacraments
+applied to him by priests in apostolical succession. In point of
+externality there was not much to choose between views which were felt
+to be radically opposed the one to the other.
+
+Erskine was not a man theologically educated. He led a peculiarly
+secluded life. He was an advocate by profession, but, withdrawing from
+that career, virtually gave himself up to meditation. Campbell was a
+minister of the Established Church of Scotland in a remote village, Row,
+upon the Gare Loch. When he was convicted of heresy and driven from the
+ministry, he also devoted himself to study and authorship. Both men seem
+to have come to their results largely from the application of their own
+sound religious sense to the Scriptures. That the Scottish Church should
+have rejected the truth for which these men contended was the heaviest
+blow which it could have inflicted on itself. Thereby it arrested its
+own healthy development. It perpetuated its traditional view, somewhat
+as New England orthodoxy was given a new lease of life through the
+partisanship which the Unitarian schism engendered. The matter was not
+mended at the time of the great rupture of the Scottish Church in 1843.
+That body which broke away from the Establishment, and achieved a purely
+ecclesiastical control of its own clergy, won, indeed, by this means the
+name of the Free Church, though, in point of theological opinion, it was
+far from representing the more free and progressive element. Tulloch
+pays a beautiful tribute to the character of Erskine, whom he knew.
+Quiet, brooding, introspective, he read his Bible and his own soul, and
+with singular purity of intuition generalised from his own experience.
+Therewith is described, however, both the power and the limitation of
+his work. His first book was entitled _Remarks on the Internal Evidence
+for the Truth of Revealed Religion_, 1820. The title itself is
+suggestive of the revolution through which the mind both of Erskine and
+of his age was passing. His book, _The Unconditional Freeness of the
+Gospel_, appeared in 1828; _The Brazen Serpent_ in 1831. Men have
+confounded forgiveness and pardon. They have made pardon equivalent to
+salvation. But salvation is character. Forgiveness is only one of the
+means of it. Salvation is not a future good. It is a present fellowship
+with God. It is sanctification of character by means of our labour and
+God's love. The fall was the rise of the spirit of freedom. Fallen man
+can never be saved except through glad surrender of his childish
+independence to the truth and goodness of God. Yet that surrender is the
+preservation and enlargement of our independence. It is the secret of
+true self-realisation. The sufferings of Christ reveal God's holy love.
+It is not as if God's love had been purchased by the sufferings of his
+Son. On the contrary, it is man who needs to believe in God's love, and
+so be reconciled to the God whom he has feared and hated. Christ
+overcomes sin by obediently enduring the suffering which sin naturally
+entails. He endures it in pure love of his brethren. Man must overcome
+sin in the same way.
+
+Campbell published, so late as 1856, his great work _The Nature of the
+Atonement and its Relation to the Remission of Sins and Eternal Life_.
+It was the matured result of the reflections of a quarter of a century,
+spent partly in enforced retirement after 1831. Campbell maintains
+unequivocally that the sacrifice of Christ cannot be understood as a
+punishment due to man's sin, meted out to Christ in man's stead. Viewed
+retrospectively, Christ's work in the atonement is but the highest
+example of a law otherwise universally operative. No man can work
+redemption for his fellows except by entering into their condition, as
+if everything in that condition were his own, though much of it may be
+in no sense his due. It is freely borne by him because of his
+identification of himself with them. Campbell lingers in the myth of
+Christ's being the federal head of the humanity. There is something
+pathetic in the struggle of his mind to save phrases and the
+paraphernalia of an ancient view which, however, his fundamental
+principle rendered obsolete, He struggles to save the word satisfaction,
+though it means nothing in his system save that God is satisfied as he
+contemplates the character of Christ. Prospectively considered, the
+sacrifice of Christ effects salvation by its moral power over men in
+example and inspiration. Vicarious sacrifice, the result of which was
+merely imputed, would leave the sinner just where he was before. It is
+an empty fiction. But the spectacle of suffering freely undertaken for
+our sakes discovers the treasures of the divine image in man. The love
+of God and a man's own resolve make him in the end, in fact, that which
+he has always been in capacity and destiny, a child of God, possessed of
+the secret of a growing righteousness, which is itself salvation.
+
+
+MAURICE
+
+
+Scottish books seem to have been but little read in England in that day.
+It was Maurice who first made the substance of Campbell's teaching known
+in England. Frederick Denison Maurice was the son of a Unitarian
+minister, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, at a time when it was
+impossible for a Nonconformist to obtain a degree. He was ordained a
+priest of the Church of England in 1834, even suffering himself to be
+baptised again. He was chaplain of Lincoln's Inn and Professor of
+Theology in King's College, London. After 1866 he was Professor of Moral
+Philosophy in Cambridge, though his life-work was over. At the heart of
+Maurice's theology lies the contention to which he gave the name of
+universal redemption. Christ's work is for every man. Every man is
+indeed in Christ. Man's unhappiness lies only in the fact that he will
+not own this fact and live accordingly. Man as man is the child of God.
+He cannot undo that fact or alter that relation if he would. He does not
+need to become a child of God, as the phrase has been. He needs only to
+recognise that he already is such a child. He can never cease to bear
+this relationship. He can only refuse to fulfil it. With other words
+Erskine and Coleridge and Schleiermacher had said this same thing.
+
+For the rest, one may speak briefly of Maurice. He was animated by the
+strongest desire for Church unity, but at the back of his mind lay a
+conception of the Church and an insistence upon uniformity which made
+unity impossible. In the light of his own inheritance his ecclesiastical
+positivism seems strange. Perhaps it was the course of his experience
+which made this irrational positivism natural. Few men in his generation
+suffered greater persecutions under the unwarranted supposition on the
+part of contemporaries that he had a liberal mind. In reality, few men
+in his generation had less of a quality which, had he possessed it,
+would have given him peace and joy even in the midst of his
+persecutions. The casual remark above made concerning Campbell is true
+in enhanced degree of Maurice. A large part of the industry of a very
+industrious life was devoted to the effort to convince others and
+himself that those few really wonderful glimpses of spiritual truth
+which he had, had no disastrous consequences for an inherited system of
+thought in which they certainly did not take their rise. His name was
+connected with the social enthusiasm that inaugurated a new movement in
+England which will claim attention in another paragraph.
+
+
+CHANNING
+
+
+Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology which took
+place in America also, upon the same general lines which we have seen in
+Schleiermacher and in Campbell. The typical figure here, the protagonist
+of the movement, is William Ellery Channing. It may be doubted whether
+there has ever been a civilisation more completely controlled by its
+Church and ministers, or a culture more entirely dominated by theology,
+than were those of New England until the middle of the eighteenth
+century. There had been indeed a marked decline in religious life. The
+history of the Great Awakening shows that. Remonstrances against the
+Great Awakening show also how men's minds were moving away from the
+theory of the universe which the theology of that movement implied. One
+cannot say that in the preaching of Hopkins there is an appreciable
+relaxation of the Edwardsian scheme. Interestingly enough, it was in
+Newport that Channing was born and with Hopkins that he associated until
+the time of his licensure to preach in 1802. Many thought that Channing
+would stand with the most stringent of the orthodox. Deism and
+rationalism had made themselves felt in America after the Revolution.
+Channing, during his years in Harvard College, can hardly have failed to
+come into contact with the criticism of religion from this side. There
+is no such clear influence of current rationalism upon Channing as, for
+example, upon Schleiermacher. Yet here in the West, which most Europeans
+thought of as a wilderness, circumstances brought about the launching of
+this man upon the career of a liberal religious thinker, when as yet
+Schleiermacher had hardly advanced beyond the position of the
+_Discourses_, when Erskine had not yet written a line and Campbell was
+still a child. Channing became minister of the Federal Street Church in
+Boston in 1803. The appointment of Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity
+in Harvard College took place in 1805. That appointment was the first
+clear indication of the liberal party's strength. Channing's Baltimore
+Address was delivered in 1819. He died in 1847.
+
+In the schism among the Congregational Churches in New England, which
+before 1819 apparently had come to be regarded by both parties as
+remediless, Channing took the side of the opposition to Calvinistic
+orthodoxy. He developed qualities as controversialist and leader which
+the gentler aspect of his early years had hardly led men to suspect.
+This American liberal movement had been referred to by Belsham as
+related to English Unitarianism. After 1815, in this country, by its
+opponents at least, the movement was consistently called Unitarian.
+Channing did with zeal contend against the traditional doctrine of the
+atonement and of the trinity. On the other hand, he saw in Christ the
+perfect revelation of God to humanity and at the same time the ideal of
+humanity. He believed in Jesus' sinlessness and in his miracles,
+especially in his resurrection. The keynote of Channing's character and
+convictions is found in his sense of the inherent greatness of man. Of
+this feeling his entire system is but the unfolding. It was early and
+deliberately adopted by him as a fundamental faith. It remained the
+immovable centre of his reverence and trust amid all the inroads of
+doubt and sorrow. Political interest was as natural to Channing's
+earlier manhood as it had been to Fichte in the emergency of the
+Fatherland. Similarly, in the later years of his life, when evils
+connected with slavery had made themselves felt, his participation in
+the abolitionist agitation showed the same enthusiasm and practical
+bent. He had his dream of communism, his perception of the evils of our
+industrial system, his contempt for charity in place of economic remedy.
+All was for man, all rested upon supreme faith in man. That man is
+endowed with knowledge of the right and with the power to realise it,
+was a fundamental maxim. Hence arose Channing's assertion of free-will.
+The denial of free-will renders the sentiment of duty but illusory. In
+the conscience there is both a revelation and a type of God. Its
+suggestions, by the very authority they carry with them, declare
+themselves to be God's law. God, concurring with our highest nature,
+present in its action, can be thought of only after the pattern which he
+gives us in ourselves. Whatever revelation God makes of himself, he must
+deal with us as with free beings living under natural laws. Revelation
+must be merely supplementary to those laws. Everything arbitrary and
+magical, everything which despairs of us or insults us as moral agents,
+everything which does not address itself to us through reason and
+conscience, must be excluded from the intercourse between God and man.
+What the doctrines of salvation and atonement, of the person of Christ
+and of the influence of the Holy Spirit, as construed from this centre
+would be, may without difficulty be surmised. The whole of Channing's
+teaching is bathed in an atmosphere of the reverent love of God which is
+the very source of his enthusiasm for man.
+
+
+BUSHNELL
+
+
+A very different man was Horace Bushnell, born in the year of Channing's
+licensure, 1802. He was not bred under the influence of the strict
+Calvinism of his day. His father was an Arminian. Edwards had made
+Arminians detested in New England. His mother had been reared in the
+Episcopal Church. She was of Huguenot origin. When about seventeen,
+while tending a carding-machine, he wrote a paper in which he
+endeavoured to bring Calvinism into logical coherence and, in the
+interest of sound reason, to correct St. Paul's willingness to be
+accursed for the sake of his brethren. He graduated from Yale College in
+1827. He taught there while studying law after 1829. He describes
+himself at this period as sound in ethics and sceptical in religion, the
+soundness of his morals being due to nature and training, the
+scepticism, to the theology in which he was involved. His law studies
+were complete, yet he turned to the ministry. He had been born on the
+orthodox side of the great contention in which Channing was a leader of
+the liberals in the days of which we speak. He never saw any reason to
+change this relation. His clerical colleagues, for half a life-time,
+sought to change it for him. In 1833 he was ordained and installed as
+minister of the North Church in Hartford, a pastorate which he never
+left. The process of disintegration of the orthodox body was continuing.
+There was almost as much rancour between the old and the new orthodoxy
+as between orthodox and Unitarians themselves. Almost before his career
+was well begun an incurable disease fastened itself upon him. Not much
+later, all the severity of theological strife befell him. Between these
+two we have to think of him doing his work and keeping his sense of
+humour.
+
+His earliest book of consequence was on _Christian Nurture_, published
+in 1846. Consistent Calvinism presupposes in its converts mature years.
+Even an adult must pass through waters deep for him. He is not a sinful
+child of the Father. He is a being totally depraved and damned to
+everlasting punishment. God becomes his Father only after he is
+redeemed. The revivalists' theory Bushnell bitterly opposed. It made of
+religion a transcendental matter which belonged on the outside of life,
+a kind of miraculous epidemic. He repudiated the prevailing
+individualism. He anticipated much that is now being said concerning
+heredity, environment and subconsciousness. He revived the sense of the
+Church in which Puritanism had been so sadly lacking. The book is a
+classic, one of the rich treasures which the nineteenth century offers
+to the twentieth.
+
+Bushnell, so far as one can judge, had no knowledge of Kant. He is,
+nevertheless, dealing with Kant's own problem, of the theory of
+knowledge, in his rather diffuse 'Dissertation on Language,' which is
+prefixed to the volume which bears the title _God in Christ_, 1849. He
+was following his living principle, the reference of doctrine to
+conscience. God must be a 'right God.' Dogma must make no assertion
+concerning God which will not stand this test. Not alone does the dogma
+make such assertions. The Scripture makes them as well. How can this be?
+What is the relation of language to thought and of thought to fact? How
+can the language of Scripture be explained, and yet the reality of the
+revelation not be explained away? There is a touching interest which
+attaches to this Hartford minister, working out, alone and clumsily, a
+problem the solution of which the greatest minds of the age had been
+gradually bringing to perfection for three-quarters of a century.
+
+In the year 1848 Bushnell was invited to give addresses at the
+Commencements of three divinity schools: that at Harvard, then
+unqualifiedly Unitarian; that at Andover, where the battle with
+Unitarianism had been fought; and that at Yale, where Bushnell had been
+trained. The address at Cambridge was on the subject of _the Atonement_;
+the one at New Haven on _the Divinity of Christ_, including Bushnell's
+doctrine of the trinity; the one at Andover on _Dogma and Spirit_, a
+plea for the cessation of strife. He says squarely of the old school
+theories of the atonement, which represent Christ as suffering the
+penalty of the law in our stead: 'They are capable, one and all of them,
+of no light in which they do not offend some right sentiment of our
+moral being. If the great Redeemer, in the excess of his goodness,
+consents to receive the penal woes of the world in his person, and if
+that offer is accepted, what does it signify, save that God will have
+his modicum of suffering somehow; and if he lets the guilty go he will
+yet satisfy himself out of the innocent?' The vicariousness of love, the
+identification of the sufferer with the sinner, in the sense that the
+Saviour is involved by his desire to help us in the woes which naturally
+follow sin, this Bushnell mightily affirmed. Yet there is no pretence
+that he used vicariousness or satisfaction in the same sense in which
+his adversaries did. He is magnificently free from all such indirection.
+In the New Haven address there is this same combination of fire and
+light. The chief theological value of the doctrine of the trinity, as
+maintained by the New England Calvinistic teachers, had been to furnish
+the _dramatis personae_ for the doctrine of the atonement. In the
+speculation as to the negotiation of this substitutionary transaction,
+the language of the theologians had degenerated into stark tritheism.
+Edwards, describing the councils of the trinity, spoke of the three
+persons as 'they.' Bushnell saw that any proper view of the unity of God
+made the forensic idea of the atonement incredible. He sought to replace
+the ontological notion of the trinity by that of a trinity of
+revelation, which held for him the practical truths by which his faith
+was nourished, and yet avoided the contradictions which the other
+doctrine presented both to reason and faith. Bushnell would have been
+far from claiming that he was the first to make this fight. The American
+Unitarians had been making it for more than a generation. The Unitarian
+protest was wholesome. It was magnificent. It was providential, but it
+paused in negation. It never advanced to construction. Bushnell's
+significance is not that he fought this battle, but that he fought it
+from the ranks of the orthodox Church. He fought it with a personal
+equipment which Channing had not had. He was decades later in his work.
+He took up the central religious problem when Channing's successors were
+following either Emerson or Parker.
+
+The Andover address consisted in the statement of Bushnell's views of
+the causes which had led to the schism in the New England Church. A
+single quotation may give the key-note of the discourse:--'We had on our
+side an article of the creed which asserted a metaphysical trinity. That
+made the assertion of the metaphysical unity inevitable and desirable.
+We had theories of atonement, of depravity, of original sin, which
+required the appearance of antagonistic theories. On our side,
+theological culture was so limited that we took what was really only our
+own opinion for the unalterable truth of God. On the other side, it was
+so limited that men, perceiving the insufficiency of dogma, took the
+opposite contention with the same seriousness and totality of
+conviction. They asserted liberty, as indeed they must, to vindicate
+their revolt. They produced, meantime, the most intensely human and, in
+that sense, the most intensely opinionated religion ever invented.'
+
+
+THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL
+
+
+The Oxford Movement has been spoken of as a reaction against the
+so-called Oriel Movement, a conservative tendency over against an
+intellectualist and progressive one. In a measure the personal
+animosities within the Oxford circle may be accounted for in this way.
+The Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one hand, in the
+going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great
+revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands
+in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular
+movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it
+was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social
+aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the
+Enlightenment and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but
+complex. It was a revolt of the conservative spirit from the new ideals
+which had been suddenly translated into portentous realities. It was
+marked everywhere by hatred of the eighteenth century with all its ways
+and works. On the one side we have the revolutionary thesis, the rights
+of man, the authority of reason, the watchwords liberty, equality,
+fraternity. On the other side stood forth those who were prepared to
+assert the meaning of community, the continuity of history, spiritual as
+well as civil authority as the basis of order, and order as the
+condition of the highest good. In literature the tendency appears as
+romanticism, in politics as legitimism, in religion as ultramontanism.
+Le Maistre with his _L'Eglise gallicane du Pape_; Chateaubriand with his
+_Genie du Christianisme_; Lamennais with his _Essai sur l'Indifference
+en Matiere, de Religion_, were, from 1820 to 1860, the exponents of a
+view which has had prodigious consequences for France and Italy. The
+romantic movement arose outside of Catholicism. It was impersonated in
+Herder. Friedrich Schlegel, Werner and others went over to the Roman
+Church. The political reaction was specifically Latin and Catholic. In
+the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to have a mission again. Divine
+right in the State must be restored through the Church. The Catholic
+apologetic saw the Revolution as only the logical conclusion of the
+premises of the Reformation. The religious revolt of the sixteenth
+century, the philosophical revolt of the seventeenth, the political
+revolt of the eighteenth, the social revolt of the nineteenth, are all
+parts of one dreadful sequence. As the Church lifted up the world after
+the first flood of the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world
+after the devastations made by the more terrible barbarians of the
+eighteenth century. England had indeed stood a little outside of the
+cyclone which had devastated the world from Coronna to Moscow and from
+the Channel to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting down
+the revolution. Only God's goodness had preserved England. The logic of
+Puritanism would have been the same. Indeed, in England the State was
+weaker and worse than were the states upon the Continent. For since 1688
+it had been a popular and constitutional monarchy. In Frederick
+William's phrase, its sovereign took his crown from the gutter. The
+Church was through and through Erastian, a creature of the State.
+Bishops were made by party representatives. Acts like the Reform Bills,
+the course of the Government in the matter of the Irish Church, were
+steps which would surely bring England to the pass which France had
+reached in 1789. The source of such acts was wrong. It was with the
+people. It was in men, not in God. It was in reason, not in authority.
+It would be difficult to overstate the strength of this reactionary
+sentiment in important circles in England at the end of the third decade
+of the nineteenth century.
+
+
+THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
+
+
+In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to made of the Oxford
+Movement or the Catholic revival a movement of life, ecclesiastical,
+social and political as well, its history falls outside the purpose of
+this book. We proposed to deal with the history of thought. Reactionary
+movements have frequently got on without much thought. They have left
+little deposit of their own in the realm of ideas. Their avowed
+principle has been that of recurrence to that which has already been
+thought, of fidelity to ideas which have long prevailed. This is the
+reason why the conservatives have not a large place in such a sketch as
+this. It is not that their writings have not often been full of high
+learning and of the subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas
+about which they reason do not belong to the history of the nineteenth
+century. They belong, on the earnest contention of the conservatives
+themselves--those of Protestants, to the history of the Reformation--and
+of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman, to the history of the early or
+mediaeval Church.
+
+Nevertheless, when with passionate conviction a great man, taking the
+reactionary course, thinks the problem through again from his own point
+of view, then we have a real phenomenon in the history of contemporary
+thought. When such an one wrestles before God to give reason to himself
+and to his fellows for the faith that is in him, then the reactionary's
+reasoning is as imposing and suggestive as is any other. He leaves in
+his work an intellectual deposit which must be considered. He makes a
+contribution which must be reckoned with, even more seriously, perhaps,
+by those who dissent from it than by those who may agree with it. Such
+deposit Newman and the Tractarian movement certainly did make. They
+offered a rationale of the reaction. They gave to the Catholic revival a
+standing in the world of ideas, not merely in the world of action.
+Whether their reasoning has weight to-day, is a question upon which
+opinion is divided. Yet Newman and his compeers, by their character and
+standing, by their distinctively English qualities and by the road of
+reason which they took in the defence of Catholic principles, made
+Catholicism English again, in a sense in which it had not been English
+for three hundred years. Yet though Newman brought to the Roman Church
+in England, on his conversion to it, a prestige and qualities which in
+that communion were unequalled, he was never _persona grata_ in that
+Church. Outwardly the Roman Catholic revival in England was not in large
+measure due to Newman and his arguments. It was due far more to men like
+Wiseman and Manning, who were not men of argument but of deeds.
+
+
+NEWMAN
+
+
+John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. His
+mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic influence.
+Through study especially, of Romaine _On Faith_ he became the subject of
+an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he wrote: 'I am still more
+certain of it than that I have hands and feet.' Thomas Scott, the
+evangelical, moved him. Before he was sixteen he made a collection of
+Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the trinity. From Newton _On
+the Prophecies_ he learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ--a
+doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year
+1843. In his _Apologia_, 1865, he declares: 'From the age of fifteen,
+dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter
+into the idea of any other sort of religion.' At the age of twenty-one,
+two years after he had taken his degree, he came under very different
+influences. He passed from Trinity College to a fellowship in Oriel. To
+use his own phrase, he drifted in the direction of liberalism. He was
+touched by Whately. He was too logical, and also too dogmatic, to be
+satisfied with Whately's position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley
+says: 'Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he
+would go. It is not certain that he himself knew.' Francis W. Newman,
+Newman's brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own
+years of stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was
+profoundly uncongenial to him.
+
+The year 1827, in which Keble's _Christian Year_ was published, saw
+another change in Newman's views. Illness and bereavement came to him
+with awakening effect. He made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude.
+Froude brought Newman and Keble together. Henceforth Newman bore no more
+traces either of evangelicalism or of liberalism. Of Froude it is
+difficult to speak with confidence. His brother, James Anthony Froude,
+the historian, author of the _Nemesis of Faith_, 1848, says that he was
+gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic. Newman speaks of him with almost
+boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons, published after his death
+in 1836, make the impression neither of learning nor judgment. Clearly
+he had charm. Possibly he talked himself into a common-room reputation.
+Newman says: 'Froude made me look with admiration toward the Church of
+Rome.' Keble never had felt the liberalism through which Newman had
+passed. Cradled as the Church of England had been in Puritanism, the
+latter was to him simply evil. Opinions differing from his own were not
+simply mistaken, they were sinful. He conceived no religious truth
+outside the Church of England. In the _Christian Year_ one perceives an
+influence which Newman strongly felt. It was that of the idea of the
+sacramental significance of all natural objects or events. Pusey became
+professor of Hebrew in 1830. He lent the movement academic standing,
+which the others could not give. He had been in Germany, and had
+published an _Inquiry into the Rationalist Character of German
+Theology_, 1825. He hardly did more than expose the ignorance of Rose.
+He was himself denounced as a German rationalist who dared to speak of a
+new era in theology. Pusey, mourning the defection of Newman, whom he
+deeply loved, gathered in 1846 the forces of the Anglo-Catholics and
+continued in some sense a leader to the end of his long life in 1882.
+
+The course of political events was fretting the Conservatives
+intolerably. The agitation for the Reform Bill was taking shape. Sir
+Robert Peel, the member for Oxford, had introduced a Bill for the
+emancipation of the Roman Catholics. There was violent commotion in
+Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the measure. In 1830 there
+was revolution in France. In England the Whigs had come into power.
+Newman's mind was excited in the last degree. 'The vital question,' he
+says, 'is this, how are we to keep the Church of England from being
+liberalised?' At the end of 1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together.
+On this journey, as he lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he
+wrote his immortal hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' He came home assured that
+he had a work to do. Keble's Assize Sermon on the _National Apostasy_,
+preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman's return to Oxford,
+kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing. Newman
+conceived the idea of the _Tracts for the Times_ as a means of
+expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which deeply moved
+him. 'From the first,' he says, 'my battle was with liberalism. By
+liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle. Secondly, my aim was the
+assertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite
+religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the
+assertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.'
+Newman grew greatly in personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St.
+Mary's exerted spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at
+his best. All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His
+insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous
+play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble
+and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the
+question. Pusey began the _Library of the Fathers_, the most elaborate
+literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than
+the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the
+movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the
+_Tracts_. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did
+not insist. Newman's own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course
+which was still open to it.
+
+Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense
+that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that
+it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible
+source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective
+and fallible expressions? Newman's own studies in criticism, by no means
+profound, led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him
+of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible
+Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these
+there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying
+something of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to
+labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One
+must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the
+mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from
+without.
+
+According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been
+impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement,
+this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The
+intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in
+religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of
+intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority,
+if religion is to be saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly
+sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had
+a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his
+negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of
+the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning
+of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which
+to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely,
+religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one
+ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed
+that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the
+contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he
+says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because
+religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was
+the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute.
+The soul was of God. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his
+own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He
+dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him.
+The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must
+have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.
+
+His whole book, _The Grammar of Assent_, 1870, is pervaded by the
+intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives,
+determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the
+succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole aim of the work is
+to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason
+into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which
+reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective
+validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it. Again, he
+is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses. Had not
+Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl
+seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it
+within the realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end
+by different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen
+concerning Mephistopheles: 'He says the same thing with the pastor, only
+in different words.' Newman says the same words, but means a different
+thing.
+
+Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and
+Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the worthlessness of
+mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear
+Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible. 'The Church's
+infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to
+preserve religion in the world. Outside the Catholic Church all things
+tend to atheism. The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist,
+able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the
+all-dissolving scepticism of the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my
+belief in God. If I should be asked why I believe in God, I should
+answer, because I believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in
+myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a
+personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.' These
+passages are mainly taken from the _Apologia_, written long after Newman
+had gone over to the Roman Church. They perfectly describe the attitude
+of his mind toward the Anglican Church, so long as he believed this, and
+not the Roman, to be the true Church. He had once thought that a man
+could hold a position midway between the Protestantism which he
+repudiated and the Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the
+_via media_ so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts
+about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to
+overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies
+cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and
+universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the _Tracts_,
+_Tract Ninety_, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One
+must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles.
+This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in
+the communication of religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself
+to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of
+holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said
+must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do
+not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is,
+in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else
+how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their
+reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be
+uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with
+the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important
+article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of
+the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest
+against the tract. Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident
+to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was
+gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed
+as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and
+established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the
+parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he
+was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest
+Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.
+
+It is a strange thing that in his _Essay on the Development of Christian
+Doctrine_, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced
+substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many things
+concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds
+conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole
+dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman
+entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have
+foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious,
+because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine
+ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an
+infallible authority outside of the development must have existed from
+the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development
+from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems
+incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same
+argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic
+history. Similar is the case with the argument of the _Grammar of
+Assent_. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its
+contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the
+contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think
+brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief
+ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It
+is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that
+would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act
+of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite,
+the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which
+might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality.
+One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty.
+Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in
+Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his
+followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the
+Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the
+first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of
+Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put
+forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day.
+Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead,
+ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long
+lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering
+give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman
+lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible
+Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.
+
+[Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.]
+
+
+MODERNISM
+
+
+It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the
+reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the
+Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the
+Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those
+countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had free play. The
+alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised
+religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a
+position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and
+better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth
+century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the
+movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical,
+low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of
+the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its
+relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is
+another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must
+have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman
+and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual
+factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the
+effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of
+reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry
+Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not
+to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree
+of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments
+had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally
+through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they
+assert, then in the last analysis what they assert is truth. If one has
+given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason, then it is
+querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority do not comport
+with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest interest in the
+struggle as to the instance in which this authority is to be lodged.
+This interest attaches to the age-long struggle between Pope and
+Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of Doellinger, Dupanloup,
+Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once the Church has spoken there is,
+for the advocate of authoritative religion, no logic but to submit.
+
+Similarly as to the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, which
+forecast the present conflict concerning Modernism. The _Syllabus_ had a
+different atmosphere from that which any Englishman in the sixties would
+have given it. Had not Newman, however, made passionate warfare on the
+liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees?
+Was Gladstone's attitude intelligible? The contrast of two principles in
+life and religion, the principles of authority and of the spirit, is
+being brought home to men's consciousness as it has never been before.
+One reads _Il Santo_ and learns concerning the death of Fogazzaro, one
+looks into the literature relating to Tyrrell, one sees the fate of
+Loisy, comparing the really majestic achievement in his works and the
+spirit of his _Simple Reflections_ with the _Encyclical Pascendi_, 1907.
+One understands why these men have done what they could to remain within
+the Roman Church. One recalls the attitude of Doellinger to the
+inauguration of the Old Catholic Movement, reflects upon the relative
+futility of the Old Catholic Church, and upon the position of Hyacinthe
+Loyson. One appreciates the feeling of these men that it is impossible,
+from without, to influence as they would the Church which they have
+loved. The present difficulty of influencing it from within seems almost
+insuperable. The history of Modernism as an effective contention in the
+world of Christian thought seems scarcely begun. The opposition to
+Modernism is not yet a part of the history of thought.
+
+
+ROBERTSON
+
+
+In no life are reflected more perfectly the spiritual conflicts of the
+fifth decade of the nineteenth century than in that of Frederick W.
+Robertson. No mind worked itself more triumphantly out of these
+difficulties. Descended from a family of Scottish soldiers, evangelical
+in piety, a student in Oxford in 1837, repelled by the Oxford Movement,
+he undertook his ministry under a morbid sense of responsibility. He
+reacted violently against his evangelicalism. He travelled abroad, read
+enormously, was plunged into an agony which threatened mentally to undo
+him. He took his charge at Brighton in 1847, still only thirty-one years
+old, and at once shone forth in the splendour of his genius. A martyr to
+disease and petty persecution, dying at thirty-seven, he yet left the
+impress of one of the greatest preachers whom the Church of England has
+produced. He left no formal literary work such as he had designed. Of
+his sermons we have almost none from his own manuscripts. Yet his
+influence is to-day almost as intense as when the sermons were
+delivered. It is, before all, the wealth and depth of his thought, the
+reality of the content of the sermons, which commands admiration. They
+are a classic refutation of the remark that one cannot preach theology.
+Out of them, even in their fragmentary state, a well-articulated system
+might be made. He brought to his age the living message of a man upon
+whom the best light of his age had shone.
+
+
+PHILLIPS BROOKS
+
+
+Something of the same sort may be said concerning Phillips Brooks. He
+inherited on his father's side the sober rationalism and the humane and
+secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his mother's side the
+intensity of evangelical pietism with the Calvinistic form of thought.
+The conflict of these opposing tendencies in New England was at that
+time so great that Brooks's parents sought refuge with the low-church
+element in the Episcopal Church. Brooks's education at Harvard College,
+where he took his degree in 1855, as also at Alexandria, and still more,
+his reading and experience, made him sympathetic with that which, in
+England in those years, was called the Broad Church party. He was deeply
+influenced by Campbell and Maurice. Later well known in England, he was
+the compeer of the best spirits of his generation there. Deepened by the
+experience of the great war, he held in succession two pulpits of large
+influence, dying as Bishop of Massachusetts in 1893. There is a
+theological note about his preaching, as in the case of Robertson. Often
+it is the same note. Brooks had passed through no such crisis as had
+Robertson. He had flowered into the greatness of rational belief. His
+sermons are a contribution to the thinking of his age. We have much
+finished material of this kind from his own hand, and a book or two
+besides. His service through many years as preacher to his university
+was of inestimable worth. The presentation of ever-advancing thought to
+a great public constituency is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is
+also one of the most necessary. The fusion of such thoughtfulness with
+spiritual impulse has rarely been more perfectly achieved than in the
+preaching of Phillips Brooks.
+
+
+THE BROAD CHURCH
+
+
+We have used the phrase, the Broad Church party. Stanley had employed
+the adjective to describe the real character of the English Church, over
+against the antithesis of the Low Church and the High. The designation
+adhered to a group of which Stanley was himself a type. They were not
+bound together in a party. They had no ecclesiastical end in view. They
+were of a common spirit. It was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still
+less was it that of the Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had
+manifested. It aimed to hold the faith with an open mind in all the
+intellectual movement of the age. Maurice should be enumerated here,
+with reservations. Kingsley beyond question belonged to this group.
+There was great ardour among them for the improvement of social
+conditions, a sense of the social mission of Christianity. There grew up
+what was called a Christian Socialist movement, which, however, never
+attained or sought a political standing. The Broad Church movement
+seemed, at one time, assured of ascendancy in the Church of England. Its
+aims appeared congruous with the spirit of the times. Yet Dean Fremantle
+esteems himself perhaps the last survivor of an illustrious company.
+
+The men who in 1860 published the volume known as _Essays and Reviews_
+would be classed with the Broad Church. In its authorship were
+associated seven scholars, mostly Oxford men. Some one described _Essays
+and Reviews_ as the _Tract Ninety_ of the Broad Church. It stirred
+public sentiment and brought the authors into conflict with authority in
+a somewhat similar way. The living antagonism of the Broad Church was
+surely with the Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the
+most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy,
+touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of
+Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of Scripture.' It
+hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the controversy then
+precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's adherence to Platonic
+studies instead of his devoting himself to theology. The most decisive
+of the papers was that of Baden Powell on the 'Study of the Evidences of
+Christianity.' It was mainly a discussion of the miracle. It was radical
+and conclusive. The essay closes with an allusion to Darwin's _Origin of
+Species_, which had then just appeared. Baden Powell died shortly after
+its publication. The fight came on Rowland Williams's paper upon
+Bunson's _Biblical Researches_. It was really upon the prophecies and
+their use in 'Christian Evidences.' Baron Bunsen was not a great
+archaeologist, but he brought to the attention of English readers that
+which was being done in Germany in this field. Williams used the
+archaeological material to rectify the current theological notions
+concerning ancient history. A certain type of English mind has always
+shown zeal for the interpretation of prophecy. Williams's thesis,
+briefly put, was this: the Bible does not always give the history of the
+past with accuracy; it does not give the history of the future at all;
+prophecy means spiritual teaching, not secular prognostication. A reader
+of our day may naturally feel that Wilson, with his paper on the
+'National Church,' made the greatest contribution. He built indeed upon
+Coleridge, but he had a larger horizon. He knew the arguments of the
+great Frenchmen of his day and of their English imitators who, in Benn's
+phrase, narrowed and perverted the ideal of a world-wide humanity into
+that of a Church founded on dogmas and administered by clericals. Wilson
+argued that in Jesus' teaching the basis of the religious community is
+ethical. The Church is but the instrument for carrying out the will of
+God as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of God
+must extend beyond the limits of the Church's activity, however widely
+these are drawn. There arose a violent agitation. Williams and Wilson
+were prosecuted. The case was tried in the Court of Arches. Williams was
+defended by no less a person than Fitzjames Stephen. The two divines
+were sentenced to a year's suspension. This decision was reversed by the
+Lord Chancellor. Fitzjames Stephen had argued that if the men most
+interested in the church, namely, its clergy, are the only men who
+may be punished for serious discussion of the facts and truths of
+religion, then respect on the part of the world for the Church is at an
+end. By this discussion the English clergy, even if Anglo-Catholic, are
+in a very different position from the Roman priests, over whom
+encyclicals, even if not executed, are always suspended.
+
+Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Equipped
+mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest self-devotion, he had
+been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the process of the translation
+of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had come to reflect upon the problem
+which the Old Testament presents. In a manner which is altogether
+marvellous he worked out critical conclusions parallel to those of Old
+Testament scholars on the Continent. He was never really an expert, but
+in his main contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite
+severe pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such
+guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that biblical
+studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a development
+in which scholars of these nations are not behind the best scholars of
+the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson Smith in Edinburgh and of
+Dr. Briggs in New York have now little living interest. Yet biblical
+studies in Scotland and America were incalculably furthered by those
+discussions. The publication of a book like _Supernatural Religion_,
+1872, illustrates a proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal
+circles, for taking up a contention just when those who made it and have
+lived with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch
+and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to
+warrant the assertions above made.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service rendered
+to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and interpretation
+of religion at the hands of literary men. That country and age may be
+esteemed fortunate in which religion occupies a place such that it
+compels the attention of men of genius. In the history of culture this
+has by no means always been the case. That these men do not always speak
+the language of edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite
+worth is that the largest minds of the generation shall engage
+themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought concerning
+Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for example, of
+Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold--to mention only types.
+
+
+CARLYLE
+
+
+Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the Border;
+his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his mother with her
+frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he learned Latin, 'the
+priestliest man I ever beheld in any ecclesiastical guise.' The picture
+of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the
+Church. Such had been his mother's prayer. He took his arts course in
+Edinburgh. In the university, he says, 'there was much talk about
+progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young
+looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.'
+He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had
+arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the man
+for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become intellectually
+incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely miserable, bordering
+upon despair. He has described his spiritual deliverance: 'Precisely
+that befel me which the Methodists call their conversion, the
+deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth
+a sacred flame of joy in me.' With _Sartor Resartus_ his message to the
+world began. It was printed in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833, but not
+published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher
+embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his
+message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message.
+Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London
+or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was
+done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of
+body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.
+
+He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to be
+alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes needless.
+Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he desired he in no
+small measure achieved--that his readers should be arrested and feel
+themselves face to face with reality. His startling intuition, his
+intellectual uprightness, his grasp upon things as they are, his passion
+for what ought to be, made a great impression upon his age. It was in
+itself a religious influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of
+sternest truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His
+injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a
+social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler
+meaning than they had had before. His _French Revolution_, his papers on
+_Chartism_, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from
+1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth
+of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work. In his
+brooding sympathy with the downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the
+social movement. He felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no
+one has told us with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our
+democratic institutions. His word was a great corrective for much
+'rose-water' optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is,
+however, often lacking. The mythology of an absentee God had faded from
+him. Yet the God who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the
+sun in the heavens, was a God over the world, to judge it inexorably.
+Again, it is not difficult to accumulate evidence in his words which
+looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the religious benefit of
+pantheism, the sense that God is in his world, Carlyle often loses.
+
+Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it difficult to
+realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a different look. Carlyle
+was never weary of pouring out the vials of his contempt on
+'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was
+a man more opposed to the idea of a godless world, in which man is his
+own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence.
+His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and
+absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort
+to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in
+the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or
+superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable appeal to
+him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was
+imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superstitions and
+hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty was so ineffable, all
+effort to approach him so unworthy, that almost instinctively he would
+call upon the man who made the effort, to desist. So magnificent, all
+his life long, had been his protest against the credulity and stupidity
+of men, against beliefs which assert the impossible and blink the facts,
+that, for himself, the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to
+say, in their naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were
+half-querulously denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should
+be found credulous and self-deceived. From this titan labouring at the
+foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the
+Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at ships as they
+pass by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was Carlyle's
+friend.
+
+
+EMERSON
+
+
+Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these
+voices--Newman, Carlyle, Goethe--there came to us in the Oxford of my
+youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear and pure
+voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new and moving
+and unforgetable as those others. Lowell has described the apparition of
+Emerson to your young generation here. He was your Newman, your man of
+soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your
+heart and imagination.' Then he quotes as one of the most memorable
+passages in English speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the
+divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
+the connection of events. Great men have always done so, confiding
+themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying a perception
+which was stirring in their hearts, working through their hands,
+dominating their whole being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim
+insistence upon labour and righteousness but of his scorn of happiness,
+and then says: 'But Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness
+and veracity. In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope,
+that was Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the
+spirit is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the
+spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this
+Emerson was great.'
+
+Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers of New England churches. He
+inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue,
+sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his
+ideals was modified by the glow of transcendentalism which passed over
+parts of New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century,
+but the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced
+them and lived them, was the Puritan spirit, only elevated, enlarged and
+beautified by the poetic temperament. Taking his degree from Harvard in
+1821, despising school teaching, stirred by the passion for spiritual
+leadership, the ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its
+satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the Divinity School in Harvard to
+prepare himself for the Unitarian ministry. In 1829 he became associate
+minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. He arrived at the
+conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Jesus to be a
+permanent sacrament. He found his congregation, not unnaturally,
+reluctant to agree with him. He therefore retired from the pastoral
+office. He was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His task
+was to befriend and guide the inner life of man. The influences of this
+period in his life have been enumerated as the liberating philosophy of
+Coleridge, the mystical vision of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of
+Wordsworth, the stimulating essays of Carlyle. His address before the
+graduating class of the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838 was an
+impassioned protest against what he called the defects of historical
+Christianity, its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus,
+its failure to explore the moral nature of man. He made a daring plea
+for absolute self-reliance and new inspiration in religion: 'In the soul
+let redemption be sought. Refuse the good models, even those which are
+sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you. Acquaint
+men at first hand with deity.' He never could have been the power he was
+by the force of his negations. His power lay in the wealth, the variety,
+the beauty and insight with which he set forth the positive side of his
+doctrine of the greatness of man, of the presence of God in man, of the
+divineness of life, of God's judgment and mercy in the order of the
+world. One sees both the power and the limitation of Emerson's religious
+teaching. At the root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not
+philosophise. He was always passing from the principle to its
+application. He could not systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable
+tendency to the lapidary style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy
+in fragments, just as one finds his interpretation of religion in
+flashes of marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either,
+in Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for it or not.
+
+
+ARNOLD
+
+
+What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself? Without doubt the twenty
+years by which Arnold was Newman's junior at Oxford made a great
+difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and of the
+English world of letters, at the time when Arnold's mind was maturing.
+He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman. His mind was hardly one
+to appreciate the whole force of that spell. He was at Oxford too early
+for the full understanding of the limits within which alone the
+scientific conception of the world can be said to be true. Arnold often
+boasted that he was no metaphysician. He really need never have
+mentioned the fact. The assumption that whatever is true can be verified
+in the sense of the precise kind of verification which science implies
+is a very serious mistake. Yet his whole intellectual strength was
+devoted to the sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion,
+but certainly that of noble conduct, and to the assertion of the elation
+of duty and the joy of righteousness. With all the scorn that Arnold
+pours upon the trust which we place in God's love, he yet holds to the
+conviction that 'the power without ourselves which makes for
+righteousness' is one upon which we may in rapture rely.
+
+Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such as ours, which will
+take nothing for granted, but must verify everything, Christianity, in
+the old form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and
+miraculous events, is no longer tenable. We must confine ourselves to
+such ethical truths as can be verified by experience. We must reject
+everything which goes beyond these. Religion has no more to do with
+supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy. It has nothing to
+do with either. It has to do with conduct. It is folly to make religion
+depend upon the conviction of the existence of an intelligent and moral
+governor of the universe, as the theologians have done. For the object
+of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not
+ourselves which makes for righteousness.' So soon as we go beyond this,
+we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief,
+_aberglaube_, which always revenges itself. These are the main
+contentions of his book, _Literature and Dogma_, 1875.
+
+One feels the value of Arnold's recall to the sense of the literary
+character of the Scriptural documents, as urged in his book, _Saint Paul
+and Protestantism_, 1870, and again to the sense of the influence which
+the imagination of mankind has had upon religion. One feels the truth of
+his assertion of our ignorance. One feels Arnold's own deep earnestness.
+It was his concern that reason and the will of God should prevail.
+Though he was primarily a literary man, yet his great interest was in
+religion. One feels so sincerely that his main conclusion is sound, that
+it is the more trying that his statement of it should be often so
+perverse and his method of sustaining it so precarious. It is quite
+certain that the idea of the Eternal not ourselves which makes for
+righteousness is far from being the clear idea which Arnold claims. It
+is far from being an idea derived from experience or verifiable in
+experience, in the sense which he asserts. It seems positively
+incredible that Arnold did not know that with this conception he passed
+the boundary of the realm of science and entered the realm of
+metaphysics, which he so abhorred.
+
+He was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby. He was educated at
+Winchester and Rugby and at Balliol College. He was Professor of Poetry
+in Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was an inspector of schools. The years
+of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways which were
+wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of
+Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory
+of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless
+personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which
+has absolutely passed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a
+distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a
+grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mrs.
+Humphry Ward, in her novels, has dealt largely with problems of
+religious life, and more particularly of religious thoughtfulness. She
+has done for her generation, in her measure, that which George Eliot did
+for hers.
+
+
+MARTINEAU
+
+As the chapter and the book draw to their close we can think of no man
+whose life more nearly spanned the century, or whose work touched more
+fruitfully almost every aspect of Christian thoughtfulness than did that
+of James Martineau. We can think of no man who gathered into himself
+more fully the significant theological tendencies of the age, or whose
+utterance entitles him to be listened to more reverently as seer and
+saint. He was born in 1805. He was bred as an engineer. He fulfilled for
+years the calling of minister and preacher. He gradually exchanged this
+for the activity of a professor. He was a religious philosopher in the
+old sense, but he was also a critic and historian. His position with
+reference to the New Testament was partly antiquated before his _Seat of
+Authority in Religion_, 1890, made its appearance. Evolutionism never
+became with him a coherent and consistent assumption. Ethics never
+altogether got rid of the innate ideas. The social movement left him
+almost untouched. Yet, despite all this, he was in some sense a
+representative progressive theologian of the century.
+
+There is a parallel between Newman and Martineau. Both busied themselves
+with the problem of authority. Criticism had been fatal to the
+apprehension which both had inherited concerning the authority of
+Scripture. From that point onward they took divergent courses. The
+arguments which touched the infallible and oracular authority of
+Scripture, for Newman established that of the Church; for Martineau they
+had destroyed that of the Church four hundred years ago. Martineau's
+sense, even of the authority of Jesus, reverent as it is, is yet no
+pietistic and mystical view. The authority of Jesus is that of the truth
+which he speaks, of the goodness which dwells in him, of God himself and
+God alone. A real interest in the sciences and true learning in some of
+them made Martineau able to write that wonderful chapter in his _Seat of
+Authority_, which he entitled 'God in Nature.' Newman could see in
+nature, at most a sacramental suggestion, a symbol of transcendental
+truth.
+
+The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England belonged to
+the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of British Unitarianism
+came. The righteousness of a persecuted race had left an austere impress
+upon their domestic and social life. Intellectually they inherited the
+advanced liberalism of their day. Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had
+been of the most fervent sort. She reacted violently against it in later
+years. She had little of the politic temper and gentleness of her
+brother. She described one of her own later works as the last word of
+philosophic atheism. James was, and always remained, of deepest
+sensitiveness and reverence and of a gentleness which stood in high
+contrast with his powers of conflict, if necessity arose. Out of
+Martineau's years as preacher in Liverpool and London came two books of
+rare devotional quality, _Endeavours after the Christian Life_, 1843 and
+1847, and _Hours of Thought on Sacred Things_, 1873 and 1879. Almost all
+his life he was identified with Manchester College, as a student when
+the college was located at York, as a teacher when it returned to
+Manchester and again when it was removed to London. With its removal to
+Oxford, accomplished in 1889, he had not fully sympathised. He believed
+that the university itself must some day do justice to the education of
+men for the ministry in other churches than the Anglican. He was eighty
+years old when he published his _Types of Ethical Theory_, eighty-two
+when he gave to the world his _Study of Religion_, eighty-five when his
+_Seat of Authority_ saw the light. The effect of this postponement of
+publication was not wholly good. The books represented marvellous
+learning and ripeness of reflection. But they belong to a period
+anterior to the dates they bear upon their title-pages. Martineau's
+education and his early professional experience put him in touch with
+the advancing sciences. In the days when most men of progressive spirit
+were carried off their feet, when materialism was flaunted in men's
+faces and the defence of religion was largely in the hands of those who
+knew nothing of the sciences, Martineau was not moved. He saw the end
+from the beginning. There is nothing finer in his latest work than his
+early essays--'Nature and God,' 'Science, Nescience and Faith,' and
+'Religion as affected by Modern Materialism.' He died in 1900 in his
+ninety-fifth year.
+
+It is difficult to speak of the living in these pages. Personal
+relations enforce reserve and brevity. Nevertheless, no one can think of
+Manchester College and Martineau without being reminded of Mansfield
+College and of Fairbairn, a Scotchman, but of the Independent Church. He
+also was both teacher and preacher all his days, leader of the movement
+which brought Mansfield College from Birmingham to Oxford, by the
+confession both of Anglicans and of Non-conformists the most learned man
+in his subjects in the Oxford of his time, an historian, touched by the
+social enthusiasm, but a religious philosopher, _par excellence_. His
+_Religion and Modern Life_, 1894, his _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_,
+1899, his _Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, 1893, his _Philosophy of
+the Christian Religion_, 1902, and his _Studies in Religion and
+Theology_, 1910, indicate the wideness of his sympathies and the scope
+of the application, of his powers. If imitation is homage, grateful
+acknowledgment is here made of rich spoil taken from his books.
+
+Philosophy took a new turn in Britain after the middle of the decade of
+the sixties. It began to be conceded that Locke and Hume were dead. Had
+Mill really appreciated that fact he might have been a philosopher more
+fruitful and influential than he was. Sir William Hamilton was dead.
+Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism to conjure the most absurdly
+positivistic faith, had left thinking men more exposed to scepticism, if
+possible, than they had been before. When Hegel was thought in Germany
+to be obsolete, and everywhere the cry was 'back to Kant,' some Scotch
+and English scholars, the two Cairds and Seth Pringle-Pattison, with
+Thomas Hill Green, made a modified Hegelianism current in Great Britain.
+They led by this path in the introduction of their countrymen to later
+German idealism. By this introduction philosophy in both Britain and
+America has greatly gained. Despite these facts, John Caird's
+_Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, 1880, is still only a
+religious philosophy. It is not a philosophy of religion. His
+_Fundamental Ideas of Christianity_, 1896, hardly escapes the old
+antitheses among which theological discussion moved, say, thirty years
+ago. Edward Caird's _Critical Philosophy of Kant_, 1889, and especially
+his _Evolution of Religion_, 1892, marked the coming change more
+definitely than did any of the labours of his brother. Thomas Hill Green
+gave great promise in his _Introduction to Hume_, 1885, his _Prolegomena
+to Ethics_, 1883, and still more in essays and papers scattered through
+the volumes edited by Nettleship after Green's death. His contribution
+to religious discussion was such as to make his untimely end to be
+deeply deplored. Seth Pringle-Pattison's early work, _The Development
+from Kant to Hegel_, 1881, still has great worth. His _Hegelianism and
+Personality_, 1893, deals with one aspect of the topic which needs ever
+again to be explored, because of the psychological basis which in
+religious discussion is now assumed.
+
+
+JAMES
+
+
+The greatest contribution of America to religious discussion in recent
+years is surely William James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_,
+1902. The book is unreservedly acknowledged in Britain, and in Germany
+as well, to be the best which we yet have upon the psychology of
+religion. Not only so, it gives a new intimation as to what psychology
+of religion means. It blazes a path along which investigators are
+eagerly following. Boyce, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in
+1911, declared James to be the third representative philosopher whom
+America has produced. He had the form of philosophy as Emerson never
+had. He could realise whither he was going, as Emerson in his
+intuitiveness never did. He criticised the dominant monism in most
+pregnant way. He recurred to the problems which dualism owned but could
+not solve. We cannot call the new scheme dualism. The world does not go
+back. Yet James made an over-confident generation feel that the
+centuries to which dualism had seemed reasonable were not so completely
+without intelligence as has been supposed by some. No philosophy may
+claim completeness as an interpretation of the universe. No more
+conclusive proof of this judgment could be asked than is given quite
+unintentionally in Haeckel's _Weltrathsel_.
+
+At no point is this recall more earnest than in James's dealing with the
+antithesis of good and evil. The reaction of the mind of the race, and
+primarily of individuals, upon the fact of evil, men's consciousness of
+evil in themselves, their desire to be rid of it, their belief that
+there is a deliverance from it and that they have found that
+deliverance, is for James the point of departure for the study of the
+actual phenomena and the active principle of religion. The truest
+psychological and philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the
+experience of conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most
+men have, at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity
+for God which is unfulfilled, of a relation to God unrealised, which is
+broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that their
+own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the sense also
+that something without themselves empowers them to attempt this recovery
+and to persevere in the attempt. The psychology of religion is thus put
+in the forefront. The vast masses of material of this sort which the
+religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either
+actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and
+obscured the facts. The experience is the fact. The best science the
+world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact.
+This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's
+book. James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian
+theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began to
+lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in
+1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He died in 1910.
+
+When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed
+investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but
+imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true
+worthlessness. We know very little about primitive man. What we learn as
+to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part
+from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living,
+thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is
+not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of
+the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from
+earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is
+perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which
+never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students.
+Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by
+later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience
+which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always
+claimed. The modern man is not to be converted after the pattern which
+it is alleged that his grandfather followed. For, first, there is the
+question as to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern. And
+beyond that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the
+grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience of
+the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious admixture of
+knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century, which would occasion
+characteristic differences. The modern saint is not asked to be a saint
+like Francis. In the first place, how do we know what Francis was like?
+In the second place, the experience of Francis may be most easily
+understood by the aid of modern experience of true revolt from
+worldliness and of consecration to self-sacrifice, as these exist among
+us, with, of course, the proper background furnished by the history of
+the thirteenth century. Souls are one. Our souls may be, at least in
+some measure, known to ourselves. Even the souls of some of our fellows
+may be measurably known to us. What are the facts of the religious
+experience? How do souls react in face of the eternal? The experience of
+religion, the experience of the fatherhood of God, of the sonship of
+man, of the moving of the spirit, is surely one experience. How did even
+Christ's great soul react, experience, work, will, and suffer? By what
+possible means can we ever know how he reacted, worked, willed,
+suffered? In the literature we learn only how men thought that he
+reacted. We must inquire of our own souls. To be sure, Christ belonged
+to the first century, and we live in the twentieth. It is possible for
+us to learn something of the first century and of the concrete outward
+conditions which caused his life to take the shape which it did. We
+learn this by strict historical research. Assuredly the supreme measure
+in which the spirit of all truth and goodness once took possession of
+the Nazarene, remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable.
+Dwelling in Jesus, that spirit made through him a revelation of the
+divine such as the world has never seen. Yet that mystery leads forth
+along the path of that which is intelligible. And, in another sense,
+even such religious experience as we ourselves may have, poor though it
+be and sadly limited, leads back into the same mystery.
+
+It was with this contention that religion is a fact of the inner life of
+man, that it is to be understood through consciousness, that it is
+essentially and absolutely reasonable and yet belongs to the
+transcendental world, it was with this contention that, in the person of
+Immanuel Kant, the history of modern religious thought began. It is with
+this contention, in one of its newest and most far-reaching applications
+in the work of William James, that this history continues. For no one
+can think of the number of questions which recent years have raised,
+without realising that this history is by no means concluded. It is
+conceivable that the changes which the twentieth century will bring may
+be as noteworthy as those which the nineteenth century has seen. At
+least we may be grateful that so great and sure a foundation has been
+laid.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+WERNLE, PAUL. _Einfuehrung in das theologische Studium._ Tuebingen, 2.
+Aufl., 1911.
+
+DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 1. _Geschichte der
+Christlichen Religion_, v. Wellhausen, Juelieber, Harnack u. A., 2. Aufl.
+Berlin, 1909.
+
+DIE KULTUR DER GEGENWART. Th. I., Abth. iv. 2. _Systematische
+Christliche Religion_, v. Troeltsch, Herrmann, Holtzmann u. A., 2. Aufl.
+Berlin, 1909.
+
+PFLEIDERER, OTTO. _The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant,
+and its Progress in Great Britain since_ 1825. Transl., J. FREDERICK
+SMITH. London, 1893.
+
+LICHTENBERGER, F. _Histoire des Idees Religieuses en Allemagne despuis
+le milieu du XVIII' siecle a nos jours._ Paris, 1873. Transl., with
+notes, W. HASTIE. Edinburgh, 1889.
+
+ADENEY, W.F. _A Century of Progress in Religious Life and Thought._
+London, 1901.
+
+HARNACK, ADOLF. _Das Wesen des Christenthums._ Berlin, 1900. Transl.,
+_What is Christianity?_ T.B. SAUNDERS. London, 1901.
+
+STEPHEN, LESLIE. _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century._
+2 vols. London, 3rd ed., 1902.
+
+TROELTSCH, ERNST. Art. 'Deismus' in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyclopaedie fuer
+Protestantische Theologie und Kirche._ 3. Aufl. Leipzig, 4. Bd., 1898,
+s. 532 f.: art. 'Aufklaerung,' 2. Bd., 1897, s. 225 f.: art. 'Idealismus,
+deutscher,' 8. Bd., 1900, s. 612 f.
+
+MIRBT, CARL. Art. 'Pietiamus' in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencydopaedie_, 15.
+Bd., 1904, s. 774 f.
+
+RITSCHL, ALBRECHT. _Geschichte des Pietismus_, 3 Bde. Bonn, 1880-1886.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+WINDELBAND, W. _Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie in ihrem
+Zusammenhang mit der allgemeinen Kultur und den besouderen
+Wissenschaften._ 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1899.
+
+HOeFFDING, HAROLD. _Geschichte der neueren Philosophie._ Uebersetzt v.
+Bendixen. 2 Bde. Leipzig, 1896.
+
+EUCKEN, RUDOLF. _Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker._ 8. Anfl.
+Leipzig, 1909. Transl., _The Problem of Human Life as viewed _by the
+Great Thinkers_, by W.S. HOUGH and W.R. BOYCE GIBSON. New York, 1910.
+
+PRINGLE-PATTISON, A. SETH. _The Development from Kant to Hegel._ London,
+1881.
+
+DREWS, ARTHUR. _Die Deutsche Spekulation seit Kant_ 2 Bde. Berlin, 1893.
+
+ROYCE, JOSIAH. _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy._ Boston, 1893. _The
+Religious Aspect of Philosophy._ Boston, 1885. _The World and the
+Individual._ 2 vols. New York, 1901 and 1904.
+
+PAULSEN, FRIEDRICH. _Immanuel Kant, sein Leben und seine Lehre._
+Stuttgart, 3. Aufl., 1899. Transl., CREIGHTON AND LEFEVER. New York,
+1902.
+
+CAIRD, EDWARD. _A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant_: with an
+Historical Introduction. Glasgow, 1877.
+
+FISCHER, KUNO. _Hegels Leben, Werke und Lehre._ 2 Bde. Heidelberg, 1901.
+
+SIEBECK, HERMANN. _Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie._ Freiburg, 1893.
+
+EUCKEN, RUDOLF. _Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion._ Leipzig, 4. Aufl.,
+1906. Transl., JONES. London, 1911.
+
+TIELE, C.P. _Compendium der Religionsgeschichte._ Uebersetzt v. Weber.
+3. Aufl. umgearbeitet v. Soederblom. Breslau, 1903.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+VON FRANK, H.R. _Geschichte und Kritik der neueren Theologie
+insbesondere der systematischen seit Schleiermacher._ Hrsg, v.
+Schaarschmidt. Eriangen, 1898.
+
+SCHWARZ, CARL. _Zur Gesehichte der neuiten Theologie._ Leipzig, 4.
+Aufl., 1869.
+
+KATTENBUSCH, FERDINAND. _Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl._ Giessen, 1892.
+
+BROWN, WILLIAM ADAMS. _The Essence of Christianity: a Study in the
+ History of Definition._ New York, 1902.
+
+DILTHEY, WILHELM. _Leben Schleiermachers_, 1. Bd. Berlin, 1870.
+
+GASS, WILHELM. _Geschichte der Protestantischen Dogmatik_, 4 Bde.
+Leipzig, 1854-67.
+
+GARVIE, ALFRED. _The Ritschlian Theology_, 2nd ed. Edinburgh, 1902.
+
+HERRMANN, W. _Der evangeliche Glaube und die Theologie Albrecht
+Ritschls._ Marburg, 1896.
+
+PFLEIDERER, OTTO. _Die Ritschlche Theologie kritiech beleuchtet._
+Braunschweig, 1891.
+
+KAFTAN, JULIUS. _Dogmatik._ Tuebingen, 4. Aufl., 1901.
+
+STEVENS, GEORGE B. _The Christian Doctrine of Salvation._ New York,
+1905.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+CARPENTER, J. ESTLIN. _The Bible in the Nineteenth Century._ London,
+1903.
+
+GARDNER, Percy. _A Historic View of the New Testament._ London,1901.
+
+JUeLICHER, ADOLF. _Einleitung in das Neue Testament._ Freiliurg, 6.
+Aufl., 1906. Transl., Miss Janet Ward. 1904.
+
+MOORE, EDWARD CALDWELL. _The New Testament in the Christian Church._ New
+York, 1904.
+
+LIKTZMANN, HANS. _Wie wurden die Buecher des neuen Testaments heilige
+Schrift?_ Tuebingen, 1907.
+
+LOISY, A. _L'Ecangile el I'Eglise._ Paris, 2nd ed., 1903. Transl.,
+London, 1904.
+
+WERNLE, PAUL. _Die Anfaenge unserer Religion._ Tuebingen, 1901.
+
+SCHWEITZER, ALBERT. _Von Reimarus zu Wrede, eine Geschichte der
+Leben-Jesu-Forschung._ Tuebingen, 1906.
+
+SANDAY, WILLIAM. _The Life of Christ in Recent Research._ Oxford, 1907.
+
+HOLTZMANN, OSKAR. _Neu-Testamentliche Zeitgeschichte._ Freiburg, 2.
+Aufl., 1906.
+
+DRIVER, SAMUEL B. _Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament._
+Edinburgh, 2nd ed., 1909.
+
+WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS. _Prolegomena sur Geschichte Israels._ Berlin, 5.
+Aufl., 1899.
+
+BUDDE, KARL._The Religion of Israel to the Exile._ New York, 1899.
+
+KAUTSCH, E. _Abriss der Geschichte des alt-tentamentlichen Schriftthums
+in seiner 'Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments.'_ Freiburg, 1894.
+Transl., J.J. TAYLOR, and published separately, New York, 1899.
+
+SMITH, W. ROBERTSON. _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church._ Glasgow,
+2nd ed., 1892. _The Prophets of Israel_, 2nd ed., 1892.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+MEHZ, JOHH. _A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century._
+Vols. 1 and 2, Edinburgh, 1904 and 1903.
+
+WHITE, ANDREW D. _The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
+Christendom._ 2 vols. New York, 1896.
+
+OTTO, RUDOLF. _Naturalistisehe und religioese Weltansicht._ Tuebingen, 2.
+Aufl., 1909.
+
+WARD, JAMES. _Naturalism and Agnosticism._ 2 vols. London, 1899.
+
+FLINT, ROBERT. _Agnosticism._ Edinburgh, 1903.
+
+TULLOCH, JOHN. _Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion._ Edinburgh,
+1884.
+
+MARTINEAU, JAMES. _Essays, Reviews and Addresses._ Vols. 1 and 3 London,
+1890.
+
+BOUTROUX, EMILE. _Science et Religion dans la Philosophie
+contemporaine._ Paris, 1008. Transl., NIELD. London, 1909.
+
+FLINT, ROBERT. _Socialism._ London, 1895.
+
+PEABODY, FRANCIS G. _Jesus Christ and the Social Question._ New York,
+1905.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+HUNT, JOHN. _Religious Thought in England in the Nineteenth Century._
+London, 1896.
+
+TULLOCH, JOHN. _Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the
+Nineteenth Century._ London, 1885.
+
+BENN, ALFRED WILLIAM. _The History of English Rationalism in the
+Nineteenth Century._ 2 vols. London, 1906.
+
+HUTTON, RICHARD H. _Essays on some of the Modern Guides to English
+Thought in Matters of Faith._ London, 1900.
+
+MELLONE, SIDNEY H. _Leaders of Religious Thought in the Nineteenth
+Century._ Edinburgh, 1902.
+
+BROOKE, STOPFORD A. _Theology in the English Poets._ London, 1896.
+
+SCUDDER, VIDA D. _The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets_.
+Boston, 1899.
+
+CHURCH, R.W. _The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833-1845._ London,
+1904.
+
+FAIRBAIRN, ANDREW M. _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican._ New York, 1899.
+
+WARD, WILFRID. _Life and Times of Cardinal Newman._ 2 vols. 5th ed.
+London, 1900.
+
+WARD, WILFRID. _Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman._ 2 vols. London,
+1912.
+
+DOLLINGER, J.J. IGNAZ VON. _Das Papstthum; Neubearbeitung von Janus: Der
+Papst und das Concil, von J. Friedrich._ Muenchen, 1892.
+
+GOUT, RAOUL. _L'Affaire Tyrrell._ Paris, 1910.
+
+SABATIER, PAUL. _Modernism_. Transl., MILES. New York, 1908.
+
+STANLEY, ARTHUR P. _The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold._ 2
+vols. London, 13th ed., 1882.
+
+BROOKE, STOPFORD A. _Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson._ 2
+vols. London, 1891.
+
+ABBOTT, EVELYN and CAMPBELL, LEWIS. _Life and Letters of Benjamin
+Jowett_. 2 vols. London, 1897.
+
+DRUMMOND, JAMES, and UPTON, C.B. _Life and Letters of James Martineau._
+2 vols. London, 1902.
+
+ALLEN, ALEXANDER V.G. _Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks._ 2 vols. New
+York, 1900.
+
+MUNGER, THEODORE T. _Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian._ Boston,
+1899.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Edward Caldwell Moore, by Edward Moore
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