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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.
+
+WARD, WILFRID. _Life and Times of Cardinal Newman._ 2 vols. 5th ed.
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+DOLLINGER, J.J. IGNAZ VON. _Das Papstthum; Neubearbeitung von Janus: Der
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+GOUT, RAOUL. _L'Affaire Tyrrell._ Paris, 1910.
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+SABATIER, PAUL. _Modernism_. Transl., MILES. New York, 1908.
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+STANLEY, ARTHUR P. _The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold._ 2
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+BROOKE, STOPFORD A. _Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson._ 2
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+ABBOTT, EVELYN and CAMPBELL, LEWIS. _Life and Letters of Benjamin
+Jowett_. 2 vols. London, 1897.
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+DRUMMOND, JAMES, and UPTON, C.B. _Life and Letters of James Martineau._
+2 vols. London, 1902.
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+ALLEN, ALEXANDER V.G. _Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks._ 2 vols. New
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+MUNGER, THEODORE T. _Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian._ Boston,
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+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Edward Caldwell Moore, by Edward Moore
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