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Xibi-ai*^ of pbilosopbi^. 
 
 EDITED BY J. H. MUIRHEAD, ALA. 
 
THE LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Tpie library of philosophy is in the first in- 
 stance a contribution to the History of Thought. While 
 much has been done in England in tracing the course of evo- 
 lution in nature, history, religion, and morality, comparatively 
 little has been done in tracing the development of thought 
 upon these and kindred subjects, and yet "the evolution of 
 opinion is part of the whole evolution." 
 
 This Library will deal mainly with Modern Philosophy, 
 partly because Ancient Philosophy has already had a fair share 
 of attention in this country through the labours of Grote, 
 Ferrier, and others, and more recently through translations 
 from Zeller ; partly because the Library does not profess to 
 give a complete history of thought. 
 
 By the co-operation of different writers in carrying out this 
 plan, it is hoped that a completeness and thoroughness of treat- 
 ment otherwise unattainable will be secured. It is believed, 
 also, that from writers mainly English and American fuller 
 consideration of English Philosophy than it has hitherto re- 
 ceived from the great German Histories of Philosophy may 
 be looked for. In the departments of Ethics, Economics, and 
 Politics, for instance, the contributions of English writers to 
 the common stock of theoretic discussion have been especially 
 valuable, and these subjects will accordingly have special pro- 
 minence in this undertaking. 
 
 Another feature in the plan of the Library is its arrange- 
 ment according to subjects rather than authors and dates, 
 enabling the writers to follow out and exhibit in a way 
 hitherto unattempted the results of the logical development of 
 particular lines of thought. 
 
 The historical portion of the Library is divided into two 
 sections, of which the first contains works upon the develop- 
 ment of particular schools of Philosophy, while the second ex- 
 hibits the hi.story of theory in particular departments. The 
 third series contains original contributions to Philo-sophy, and 
 the fourth translations of valuable foreign works. 
 
 To these has been added, by way of Introduction to the 
 whole Library, an English translation ofErdmann's "History 
 of Philosophy," long since recognised in Germany as the best. 
 
 J. H. MUIRHEAD, 
 
 General Edito7\ 
 
(Already Published.) 
 
 The History of Philosophy. By Dr. J. E. Erdjiaxn. 
 
 English Translatioii. Edited by PROFESSOR W. S. HoUGH, Minneapolis, 
 U.S.A., in 3 vols. Vols. i. and ii., each 15J. ; vol. iii. I2J-. 
 
 The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and its Pro- 
 gress IN Great Britain since 1825. By Otto Pfleiderer, D.D., Pro- 
 fessor of Theology in the University of Berlin. Translated by J. FREDERICK 
 Smith. 
 
 LIST OF WORKS IN PREPARATION. 
 FIRST SERIES:— 
 
 Early Idealism : Descartes to Leibnitz. By W. L. Courtney, M.A., Hon. 
 LL.D. (St. Andrew's), Fellow of New College, Oxford. 
 
 German Idealists : Kant to Hegel. By Wm. Wallace, Whyte Professor of 
 Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford. 
 
 Modern Realists : Herbart, Lotze, etc. By Andrew Seth, )iI.A., Professor 
 of Logic and English Literature, University of St. Andrew's. 
 
 Sensationalists : Locke to Mill. By W. S. Hough, Ph.M., Assistant Professor 
 of Mental and Moral Philosophy, University of Minnesota. 
 
 The Ethics of Idealism : Kant and Hegel. By Henry Jones, M.A., Pro- 
 fessor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, University College, Bangor. 
 
 The Utilitarians : Hume to Contemporary Writers. By W. R. Sorlev, M.A., 
 Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy in Uni- 
 versity College, Cardiff. 
 
 Moral Sense Writers : Shaftesbury to Martineau. By William Knight, 
 M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy, St. Andrew's, N.B. 
 
 Principle of Evolution in its Scientific and Philosophical Aspects : 
 By John Watson, LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of 
 Queen's College, Kingston, Canada. 
 
 SECOND SERIES:— 
 
 The History of Psychology : Empirical and Rational. By Robert Adamson, 
 
 M.A., LL.D., Professor of Logic and Political Economy, Owen's College, 
 
 Manchester. 
 The History of Politic.'^.l Philosophy. By D. G. Ritchie, M.A., Fellow 
 
 of Jesus College, Oxford. 
 Philosophy and Economics in their Historical Relations. By J. 
 
 BoNAR, M.A., LL.D. 
 The History of Esthetics. By Bernard Bosanquet, M.A., late Fellow 
 
 of University College, Oxford. 
 
 THIRD SERIES:— 
 
 The Theory of Ethics. By Edward Caird, LL.D., Professor of Moral 
 
 Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. 
 Epistemology, or the Theory of Knowledge. By James Ward, D.Sc, 
 
 LL.D.. Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 Principles of Psychology. By G. F. Stout, i\I.A., Fellow of St. John's 
 
 College, Cambridge. 
 Principles of Instrumental Logic. By John Dewey, Ph.D., Professor of 
 
 Philosophy in the University of Michigan. 
 
 FOURTH SERIES:— 
 
 Sigwart's Logic. Translated by Helen Dendy. 2 vols. 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & Co., LONDON. 
 MACMILLAN & Co., NEW YORK. 
 
ERDMANN'S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 NOTICES OF THE PRESS. 
 
 "A SPLENDID monument of patient labour, critical acumen, and admirable 
 methodical treatment. . . . It is not too much to predict that, for the library 
 of the savant, for the academical student, whose business it is to be primed in 
 the wisdom of the ages, and for the literary dilettante, who is nothing if not well 
 up in ' things that everybody ought to know,' these volumes will at once become a 
 necessity for purposes, at least, of reference, if not of actual study. . . . We 
 possses nothing that can bear any comparison with it in point of completeness." — 
 Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 " It is not necessary to speak of the great merits of Erdmann's History of 
 Philosophy. Its remarkable clearness and comprehensiveness are well known. 
 . . . The translation is a good, faithful rendering, and in some parts even 
 reaches a high literary level." — Professor John Watson in The Week, of Canada. 
 
 " It is matter of real congratulation, in the dearth still of original English or 
 American work over the whole field of historical philosophy, that by the side of the 
 one important German compend of this generation, the other, so well fitted to serve 
 as its complement, is now made accessible to the English-speaking student." — 
 J\Ii7id. 
 
 " It has been long known, highly esteemed, and in its successive editions has 
 sought to make itself more worthy of the success it has justly achieved. Erd- 
 mann's work is excellent. His history of mediaeval philosophy especially deserves 
 attention and praise for its comparative fulness and its admirable scholarship. 
 . . . It must prove a valuable and much-needed addition to our philosophical 
 works." — Scotsman. 
 
 " The combination of qualities necessary to produce a work of the scope and 
 grade of Erdmann's is rare. Industry, accuracy, and a fair degree of philosophic 
 understanding may give us a work like Ueberweg's ; but Erdmann's history, while 
 in no way superseding Ueberweg's as a hand book for general use, yet occupies a 
 different position. Erdmann wrote his book, not as a reference book, to give in 
 brief compass a digest of the writings of various authors, but as a genuine history 
 of philosophy, tracing in a genetic way the development of thought in its treat- 
 ment of philosophic problems. Its purpose is to develop philosophic intelligence 
 rather than to furnish information. When we add that, to the successful execution 
 of this intention, Erdmann unites a minute and exhaustive knowledge of philo- 
 sophic sources at first hand, equalled over the entire field of philosophy probably 
 by no other one man, we are in a condition to form some idea of the value of the 
 book. To the student who wishes, not simply a general idea of the course of 
 philosophy, nor a summary of what this and that man has said, but a somewhat 
 detailed knowledge of the evolution of thought, and of what this and the other 
 writer have contributed to it, Erdmann is indispensable ; there is no substitute." — 
 Professor John Dewey, in The Andover Review. 
 
 " It is a work that is at once compact enough for the ordinary student, and full 
 enough for the reader of literature. ... At once systematic and interesting." — 
 Journal of Education. 
 
 " The learning shown in it is large, the arrangement orderly, the mental candor 
 unusual, the point of view — that of Hegel— clear and frankly acknowledged, the 
 style perspicuous, and without affectation. These are excellences enough to make 
 a book of solidity and serviceableness. Erdmann's is something more ; it is a book 
 of a certain distinction. Homely as it usually is, on every page we encounter 
 not the dry-as-dust compiler, but a freshly working mind, full of sympathies and 
 beliefs, individual in its attitude, its processes, and its terms of expression. Strength 
 and honesty of personality give a winning impress to large scholarship." — Nation. 
 
THE 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY 
 
 IN GERMANY SINCE KANT, 
 
 AND ITS 
 
 PROGRESS IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. 
 
THE 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY 
 
 IN GERMANY SINCE KANT, 
 
 AND ITS 
 
 PROGRESS IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. 
 
 BY 
 
 OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D., 
 
 Professor of Theology in the University pj Berlin. 
 
 TRANSLATED UNDER THE AUTHOR'S SUPERVISION BY 
 
 J. FREDERICK SMITH. 
 
 LONDON : 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., 
 
 NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 
 
 ISQO. 
 
Butler Sc Tanner, 
 
 The Selwood Printing Works, 
 
 Fkome, and London. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Two years ago I was asked by the Editor of the Library 
 of Philosophy to write the volume tracing the Development 
 of Theology since Kant. According to the more precise 
 statement of its scope, the work was to deal principally with 
 the History of Modern Theology in Germany, but it was 
 desired that it should include an account of the Protestant 
 Theology of this century in other countries, particularly in 
 Great Britain. Although I did not shut my eyes to the 
 difficulties of the task, I resolved to undertake it, with the 
 hope that I might thereby contribute a little towards a better 
 mutual understanding between the German and English 
 nations, especially towards the removal of numerous prejudices 
 that still prevail in Great Britain with regard to the tendencies 
 of the German mind and make it difficult for Enelishmen to 
 form a just view of our national character and aims. 
 
 But no sooner was the work actually taken in hand than 
 the necessity appeared of a reduction of its scope within 
 narrower limits in several respects. An account of theology 
 outside Germany which should be at all satisfactory seemed 
 to me impossible without a study of it on the spot in the 
 respective countries. On this account I was compelled 
 to leave entirely out of my survey the Theology of Holland^ 
 and America, and to confine myself to that of Great 
 Britain. With British Theology I had for years kept myself 
 so far in touch that a sojourn of some weeks in England 
 and Scotland was sufficient, with the kind assistance of 
 
 1 I have made an exception in the case of the critical labours of Dr. 
 Kuenen, of Leyden, which have had a decided influence on the progress of 
 German Theology. This scientific annexation of the distinguished Theolo- 
 gian of the Netherlands will, I hope, be considered excusable. 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 friendly theologians there, to supply the gaps in my know- 
 ledge and enable me to make a survey of the develop- 
 ment of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology in Britain 
 during the present century ; though notwithstanding all the 
 pains I have bestowed upon the survey, I must fall back 
 upon the kind consideration of my British readers. 
 
 But even when the range of the work had been thus re- 
 duced, the extent of the matters to be dealt with exceeded the 
 limits of a volume of this series, so that I was obliged to lay 
 down definite lines in the selection of what really belongs to 
 my subject. As this is the development of theological thoitght, 
 everything that belongs to the department of practical church 
 life, such as ecclesiastico-political events and party conflicts, 
 or philanthropic movements of church societies, could at once 
 be excluded. It was more difficult to draw the line with 
 reference to non-theological science, particularly philosophy. 
 Philosophy has in various ways had so much influence on the 
 Theology of our century, that it is impossible quite to ignore 
 it in a history of the latter. I have therefore brought it 
 within the limits of my account so far, and only so far, as it 
 has exerted a direct influence on the development of Theo- 
 logy. From the nature of the case, the line drawn cannot be 
 so hard and fast that the concurrence of all readers in the 
 selection made is to be expected. And those readers who 
 may perhaps look for a more detailed treatment of the 
 Philosophy of Religion in Germany, may be referred to my 
 History of the Philosophy of Religion from Spinoza to the 
 Present Time, of which there is an English translation. 
 
 As regards the treatment of the materials, I have through- 
 out abstained from giving a complete, statistical enumeration 
 of all the writers and titles of books holding a place in the 
 theological literature of this century. Such a catalogue would 
 have served but little the purpose of this book. I have re- 
 garded it as far more appropriate to deal somewhat more 
 fully with the characteristic and important men and move- 
 ments, rather than by a mass of unimportant details to render 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 the survey of the course of development difficult. Further, 
 I dislike above all things that method of writing history 
 which presents nothing but the writer's subjective judgment 
 of people, without so much as allowing them to say what 
 their own opinions and views are. To take all men as what 
 they show themselves to be, is the only way in which we can 
 pay due regard to historical justice. 
 
 I have found but very few books to help me in my work. 
 For the period under review Dorner's History of Protestant 
 Theology is much too meagre. The books of Carl Schwarz 
 and Landerer on Recent Theology, unlike as they are as re- 
 gards style, the first being as brilliant as the second is dry, are 
 very much alike in this, that both have much more to say of 
 men than they allow men to say for themselves. In the survey 
 of English Theology, Dr. Tulloch's Movements of Religious 
 Tlwngkt has supplied me with useful points of observation, 
 at all events for some parts of my sketch. 
 
 OTTO PFLEIDERER. 
 
 Gross Lichterfelde, near Berlin. 
 
 EDITOR'S NOTE. 
 
 Dr. Pfleiderers work is not a translation in tlie ordinary sense. It 
 has been written for tlie Libraij of PJtilosopliy, and appears first in 
 English. This involves tJie disadvantage that tlie reader zvill not have 
 {as Jisually in translations') the original to which to refer in case of dmibt. 
 For this reason special care has been taken to secure a clear and acciLrate 
 rendering. The Authors MS. lias been translated into English by Mr. 
 J. Frederick Smith, whose ivork has been revised in proof by Dr. 
 Pfleiderer, by the translator, and by myself. 
 
 GENERAL EDITOR, 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Book I. 
 
 THE BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY IN GERMAN IDEALISTIC 
 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter I. Kant ... 3 
 
 ,, II. Herder . 21 
 
 ,, III. Schleiermaclier . ...... 44 
 
 „ IV. Fichte 57 
 
 ,, V. Schelling ........ 62 
 
 „ VI. Hegel 68 
 
 Book II, 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY UNDER THE 
 INFLUENCE OF IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Chapter I. The Theology of the School of Kant .... 85 
 
 „ II. The Theology of the School of Schleiermacher . . 103 
 
 „ III. Speculative Theology 131 
 
 „ IV. Eclectic Theologians 154 
 
 Book IIL 
 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. 
 Chapter I. New Testament Criticism and Exegesis. . . 209 
 
 ,, II. Old Testament Criticism and Exegesis . . .252 
 
 ,, III. History of the Church and of Dogma .... 277 
 
 Book IV. 
 
 A SURVEY OF THE PROGRESS OF THEOLOGY IN GREAT 
 BRITAIN SINCE 1825. 
 
 Chapter I. The Schools of Philosophy in their relation to Theology 303 
 „ II. Parties and Movements in Theology .... 355 
 
 Index 402 
 
BOOK I. 
 
 THE BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY IN GERMAN 
 IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 G. T. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 KANT. 
 
 In the year 1784 Kant wrote an essay upon the question, 
 What is Aufklarung ?^ In it he reviews the tendencies of 
 his age, and at the same time indicates in what sense he con- 
 siders them justifiable and is wilhng to further them. This 
 essay may be regarded as the programme of the task to 
 which German philosophy in Kant and his successors has 
 devoted itself. 
 
 "Free Thought," says Kant, "is the advance of man 
 beyond the state of voluntary immaturity. By immaturity is 
 meant, inability to use his own understanding except under 
 the guidance of another. The immaturity is voluntary when 
 the cause of it is not want of intelligence, but of resolution 
 and courage to use it without another's guidance. Sapere 
 aude ! Dare to use thy own understanding ! is therefore the 
 motto of Free Thought. If the question 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 as a whole are very far from possessing, or even from 
 being able to acquire, the power of making a sure and right 
 use of their own understandings in religious matters 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, or the abandon- 
 ment of the state of voluntary immaturity, are gradually be- 
 coming less. In this sense the present age is the age of Free 
 Thought, or the century of Frederick the Great." 
 
 1 Aufkldrung. Any translation of this terminus iechniais may mislead. 
 From Kant's authoritative definition of the thing, it appears that our English 
 " Free-thinking" substantially represents it. — Tr. 
 
4 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 It is only by slow degrees that the people generally can 
 reach Freedom of Thought. It is not by means of a revolu- 
 tion, which can never effect a real reform in habits of thought ; 
 a revolution only exchanges old prejudices for new, which 
 then, as much as the old ones, serve as leading-strings to the 
 unthinking crowd. The one proper method is the free use 
 of reason as a public right, whereby the wise are put in a 
 position to diffuse their superior intelligence and render it the 
 common property of all. To check the free public employ- 
 ment of reason, in the interests of any existing social institu- 
 tions or laws, would, in Kant's view, be " a sin against the 
 nature of man, the primary purpose of which consists in just 
 this advance in Free Thinking." Moreover, this public use 
 of reason by the learned, Kant argues, involves no danger, 
 inasmuch as it does not seek by any means to put an end to 
 the performance of civil duties or of the obligations imposed 
 on each man by his calling ; it was precisely under the veil 
 of severe civil discipline, as it existed in the State of Frederick, 
 that freedom of mind had more room to spread than is usually 
 the case where there is greater civil liberty. When once 
 however by freedom of thought the mental habits of a nation 
 have been so educated that it is rendered more capable of 
 freedom in action, this education finally reacts upon the 
 maxims of the government in such a way that it treats men 
 no longer as machines but in a manner suited to their true 
 dignity. 
 
 We see from this essay that Kant participated to the full 
 in the movement of his age towards Aufkldrung, but that he 
 gauged its meaning otherwise and more profoundly than did 
 his contemporaries. He is no less opposed to the complacent 
 vanity of the German popular philosophers, who thought that 
 they already possessed Aufkldrung — the truth in religion and 
 morals, — than he is to the radicalism of the French party of 
 progress, who imagined that they could reach the goal by 
 means of revolution, by abjuring in theory and practice all 
 existing beliefs and institutions. Of course, according to 
 Kant, mankind is bound to be rationally free and enlightened, 
 but they are not so as yet ; and will not become so by merely 
 discarding old prejudices, but only by a " true reform in habits 
 of thought," whereby they will be enabled to "make a sure 
 and right use " of their own understandings. To educate 
 mankind for this true employment of the understanding is 
 
Ch. I.] KANT. 5 
 
 the vocation of men of letters, and more especially of philo- 
 sophers, a task which was made possible in Frederick's State. 
 It is therefore not enough for men to learn to use their own 
 understanding ; they must also learn to use it rightly ; to help 
 them to do this is the primary and essential vocation of philo- 
 sophy as Kant understood it. But if we wish to ensure the 
 true use of the understanding by a method which is univer- 
 sally 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 every one is 
 possible only when based on laws which are involved in the 
 nature of the human mind as such, and have not been im- 
 ported into it from without through facts of experience which 
 must always be accidental and conditional. Kant is con- 
 vinced of the existence of such primary laws, involved in the 
 very constitution of the human mind. He looks upon them 
 as laws which do not arise from experience, but which are 
 rather prior to all experience, and, as determining its form, lie 
 at the root of all theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgments 
 out of which the world of consciousness is built up. He 
 has thrown this conviction into a scientific shape in the three 
 critiques, namely of the Pure and of the Practical Reason, 
 and of the Faculty of Judgment. On the one hand. Em- 
 pirical Philosophy had held that all knowledge arises purely 
 from without, from experienced perceptions, but had not been 
 able to explain the fact that experience always conforms to 
 law. Rationalistic Philosophy, again, had sought to derive all 
 knowledge from the constitution of the mind itself, from its 
 innate ideas, but had left out of consideration its dependence 
 upon experience, and had confounded the empty creations of 
 thought with reality. Once more, both the rival schools of 
 Empirical and Rationalistic philosophers had agreed at least in 
 regarding all knowledge as something given — whether from 
 without or from within — and the knowing mind as only its 
 passive recipient. Kant, on the contrary, taught that all cogni- 
 tion rests upon the union of the mind's activity and receptivity; 
 inasmuch as the material is given us in the multiformity of our 
 perceptions, sensations, and sense-affections ; but the formation 
 of this material into a system of knowledge is the work of our 
 own activity, this activity, in accordance with its own laws, 
 giving to the material the form of rationality, which consti- 
 tutes the truth of our cognition. In opposition, therefore, to 
 
BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 Rationalistic philosophy, Kant taught the dependence of the 
 act of cognition on the material supplied in experience in 
 space and time, and the impossibility of knowing the reality 
 {das Ding an sick) lying behind these facts of experience. In 
 opposition to Empirical philosophy, he taught that it is the 
 subject which, by means of its characteristic perception of 
 things under the forms of space and time and of the categories, 
 converts this chaotic material into the regular orderly world 
 called "experience"; and that in this respect the under- 
 standing itself is to be regarded as imposing laws on nature. 
 
 It was this latter conception, viz., of reason, both in theoreti- 
 cal knowledge and in practical judgments, imposing laws upon 
 itself, which was the essence of Kant's thought and the open- 
 ing of a new era of philosophy. Of this there can be no 
 doubt in the mind of any one who recognises the connexion 
 between the different parts of the system, and its relation to 
 the theories which preceded and followed it. It has, how- 
 ever, been widely supposed for some time, and particularly in 
 theological circles, that the main point in Kant's philosophy is 
 the limitation of human knowledge to phenomena, and the 
 proof that we cannot know anything of the region lying 
 beyond them. Nor can it be denied that Kant himself laid 
 great emphasis upon this side of his teaching, inasmuch as 
 this limitation of the speculative reason seemed to him the 
 preliminary basis of the unconditional character of the prac- 
 tical reason. Nevertheless this view is obviously erroneous ; 
 were it true, it would be impossible to say what claim to 
 originality Kant's philosophy possessed, and how it could lay 
 down the lines for future development. For a glance at 
 English philosophy prior to Kant shows that Locke, Berkeley, 
 and especially Hume, had limited our knowledge to the phe- 
 nomena of consciousness, and had pronounced the reference 
 of these phenomena to a trans-subjective reality a supposition 
 incapable of proof, and likewise valueless, on account of the 
 incognisability of the problematical external object. In the 
 case of Hume this was the necessary consequence of his scep- 
 tical dissolution of the idea of causation, in which he saw only 
 the expression of the customary transition of imagination 
 from one idea to another, a subjective fiction which could not 
 possibly carry us from the phenomena of consciousness to 
 trans-subjective reality. If, therefore, this negative side of 
 Kant's philosophy — the limitation of our knowledge to ex- 
 
Ch. I.] KANT. 7 
 
 perience — were the important part of it, it would have been 
 a repetition of that of his predecessor, Hume. Indeed, we 
 should be compelled to allow that, in point of consistency, 
 Kant was inferior to Hume, since he admittedly broke through 
 this limitation in several respects : he made things-in-them- 
 selves the causes of sensations or experience ; the freedom of 
 man's intelligible character the cause of actions in time ; God 
 the cause of the existence of the highest good, or of the unity 
 of the natural and moral worlds. He thus indisputably ex- 
 tended the category of causation to transcendental objects, in 
 spite of its presupposed limitation to the world of experience. 
 Such inconsistency would be quite incomprehensible if, as is 
 ordinarily supposed, this sceptical doctrine were the gist and 
 real object of Kant's theory of knowledge. The real state 
 of the case is as follows : Kant had been impressed by the 
 imposing character of Hume's sceptical philosophy, and had 
 adopted its doctrine of the incognisability of things-in-them- 
 selves ; this principle he had accepted prior to his own critical 
 inquiry into the forms of cognition inherent in the human 
 mind, but afterwards regarded as the result of this inquiry, 
 though, if he had undertaken the inquiry independently of 
 this preconceived opinion, he would have come to the oppo- 
 site conclusion. This timidity, which hesitated to leap, with 
 the aid of the idea of causality, the confines of the pheno- 
 mena of consciousness, and to lay hold of things-in-themselves, 
 was a legacy from the scepticism of Hume, from which Kant 
 was unable completely to free himself, even when, in oppo- 
 sition to Hume, he reasserted for the idea of causation its 
 rightful position as one of the fundamental a priori forms 
 of judgment. It was, therefore, not the desertion of Kant's 
 philosophy, but simply the true and necessary carrying out of 
 its speculative principle and most characteristic position, when 
 his successors rejected this sceptical limitation of our know- 
 ledge, and credited thought with the power of theoretically 
 conceiving Being, as well as of practically moulding it ; when, 
 in other words, they put an end to the Kantian dualism of the 
 Theoretical Reason, limited to the world of phenomena, and 
 the Practical Reason, dwelling in the world of the intelligible. 
 The Practical Philosophy of Kant is partly the complement, 
 partly the antithesis of his theoretical philosophy. In his theory 
 of knowledge he had aimed at proving that cognition is 
 governed by the a priori forms existing in the understanding. 
 
8 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I, 
 
 independently of experience, but for that very reason limited 
 the action of the mind in cognition to merely the formal work- 
 ing-up of given conceptions. Similarly, in order that the law 
 of moral action may possess unconditional and universal vali- 
 dity, it must, in Kant's view, be independent of experience, 
 and belong to the reason a priori, i.e., must be aiUonomous ; 
 it is as much the province of Reason as Practical to lay down 
 laws for action, as of the Speculative Reason to do this for 
 cognition ; but at the same time, if this practical law is to be 
 a priori, it must be limited to \h& form of action merely, and 
 must not include any object of desire since the will can be 
 influenced by an object of desire, only by the expectation of 
 pleasure, a motive which acts differently in different individuals, 
 and belongs to the lower sense-faculty of desire and hence 
 can never claim universal or unconditional validity. All 
 material principles, whatever their contents, are, according to 
 Kant, equally eudeemonistic; they depend upon self-love, or the 
 lower faculty of desire, and have only a subjective and empiri- 
 cally conditioned validity ; they are therefore merely pruden- 
 tial maxims, not pure laws of reason. The autonomous law, 
 characteristic of reason, must accordingly relate solely to the 
 general form of action, without the slightest admixture of 
 material motives, which would only sully its purity ; its com- 
 mand as the "Categorical Imperative" is: Act so that the 
 rule governing thy will may also always serve as the principle 
 of a universal legislation. 
 
 Thus far Kant's doctrine of the legislation of the practical 
 reason seems to form a complete parallel to that of the specu- 
 lative reason; but as soon as we look more closely at the rela- 
 tion of form and contents, an essential distinction becomes 
 apparent. Jn the sphere of knowledge, form and contents, 
 in spite of their different origin, are in no way really opposed, 
 but only exist for, and with each other ; we are compelled to 
 bring every object of sense-experience under the a priori 
 forms of intuition and of thought, and our sense-perceptions, 
 instead of being antagonistic to these forms, can only be 
 apprehended by their means. It is quite otherwise in the 
 sphere of action. The moral law is indeed the form of a 
 prio7-i validity, which we can and ought to apply as a criterion 
 to every object of sense-desire — i.e., to our empirical inclina- 
 tions and actions ; but we are by no means compelled to do 
 this ; we are able to follow the natural inclinations produced 
 
Ch. I.] KANT. 9 
 
 by the contents of our sense-experience, which so little 
 submit without resistance to this a priori form, that, in Kant's 
 view, they are invariably opposed to the law of reason, and so 
 produce a never-ending struggle between duty and inclination. 
 Hence the moral law is the form which, on the one hand, has 
 need of the contents supplied by the empirical desires, since 
 without them it would not reach action at all, and so the law 
 find no application ; but, on the other hand, this form is also 
 represented as involved in a ceaseless opposition and conflict 
 with their contents. This conception is plainly unrealisable ; 
 we cannot see how a moral law without contents, and simply 
 opposed to all empirical inclinations could ever become a 
 motive of action, or how definite obligatory actions could be 
 deduced from it. It is, no doubt, true that there is often a 
 conflict between duty and inclination, and that in this conflict 
 the claims of duty are the higher, and the only absolute ones ; 
 it is the great merit of Kant's moral philosophy to have 
 brought out this truth with all possible emphasis. But it is 
 equally certain that the letter of his theory is untenable. His 
 mistake lay in thinking that the law of reason must be made 
 purely formal to have unconditional validity, and in attributing 
 all actual motives of action, all inclinations, to sense-desire, 
 thus representing them as hostile to reason. In this way his 
 moral system acquired a harsh, ascetic character, exceeding 
 in rigour even that of the Stoics. The ground of this was 
 essentially the same in both cases : the absolute dualism 
 between reason and sensation, between man as an "intelligible" 
 being, endowed with freedom and reason, and man as a being 
 of sense endowed with natural desire. If the two are so com- 
 pletely disjoined as abstract anti-natural Idealism, which still 
 influenced Kant, maintained, we cannot understand how the 
 commands of reason could ever coincide with man's actual 
 wishes and actions. In order that anything may be a motive, 
 it must be a possible object of desire ; the moral law accor- 
 dingly can be a higher motive than single accidental inclina- 
 tions only by including a higher object, which, as uncondition- 
 ally valuable, is superior to all merely conditional ends. If, 
 however, the moral law includes a concrete end, it is no longer 
 purely formal ; it is no longer opposed to all inclinations, but 
 can itself become the object of reasonable inclination ; in that 
 case there is no longer the absolute dualism, asserted by Kant, 
 between man as desiring and man as thinking, and finally, 
 
lO BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 there is from the first an inner connection between the sense- 
 world of experience and the "intelligible world," which warrants 
 the hope of the synthesis of both in human action and cog- 
 nition. 
 
 In Kant himself we find several hints of this correction 
 of the purely formal and dualistic character of his moral 
 philosophy ; and these hints only need working out in order 
 to render the rational principle of this philosophy supreme 
 in the sphere of ethics. Kant was at bottom really held back 
 here only by the same want of courage in working out his 
 speculative principle as is traceable in his theory of know- 
 ledge ; the hindrance there was the influence of the scepti- 
 cism of Hume, here it was the dread of sullying the purity 
 of idealistic ethical principles, by a compromise with empirical 
 principles. His demand of a purely formal ethical principle 
 was violated by Kant himself even in the definition of moral 
 philosophy as the science of the ends of pure reason, and by 
 the deduction of the supreme, unconditionally desirable end 
 from the dignity of man as a rational being ; whence he 
 derived the formula of his First Principles of the Metaphysics 
 of Ethics : " Act so as to use humanity, both in thine own 
 person and in the person of every other man, always as an 
 end, never solely as a means." To treat humanity in each 
 individual as an end in itself, clearly means the recognition 
 of a general end of humanity, and making its realisation in 
 each man our object. Thus the moral law acquires as its 
 contents a definite material end, from which the particular 
 moral ends also may be deduced. This deduction can, how- 
 ever, only be made by means of empirical observation, both 
 of the capacities and faculties involved in the natures of man, 
 and of their employment and development as gathered from 
 history. From the admission of this empirical observation 
 Kant was deterred for the reasons given above, and was thus 
 prevented from utilising in science this pregnant formula. In 
 his theory of virtue he did, indeed, try to deduce the neces- 
 sity of our own personal perfection and of the happiness of 
 others as the two main divisions of the virtues. But it is 
 clear that he could not do this consistently with his own 
 premises. If, as he is elsewhere never tired of insisting, any 
 appeal to empirical motives derived from the desire for happi- 
 ness is a pollution of morality, it is difficult to see how to 
 seek the happiness of others can be reasonably made a duty ; 
 
Ch. I.] KANT. I I 
 
 for if happiness is in no respect a desirable moral end, the 
 happiness of others can no more than our own be such an 
 end ; while, conversely, if the happiness of others is to be 
 sought, it is not easy to see why our own should not be so 
 also, more especially in view of the Kantian principle of the 
 universal applicability of the moral rule — " what is right for 
 the one must also be fair for the other." When we add that 
 Kant, in the explanatory justification of his principle, has 
 already emphasised the evil effects which every one would 
 feel if his selfish conduct were made into a universal prin- 
 ciple, we can hardly dissent from those who consider that in 
 working out his moral system he did not remain true to the 
 rigour of his primary principle, but fell back into that utili- 
 tarianism which he so greatly abhors. This inconsistency was 
 only the natural result of the excessive rigour with which he 
 insisted on his d priori principle, until it became a system 
 of forms without contents, the defects of which necessitated 
 a recourse to alien points of view. 
 
 Kant exhibits, however, surprising points of agreement, 
 not only with the strictly philosophical, but also with the 
 theological utilitarianism of his time. In the Critique of Pure 
 Reason he had shown that the ideas of Freedom, Immor- 
 tality (soul), and God could not be objects of theoretical 
 knowledge, inasmuch as insoluble contradictions arise when- 
 ever a proof of them is attempted. But what is denied to the 
 speculative, can, he maintains, be grasped by the practical 
 reason. Though to the former the world of noumena lying 
 behind phenomena is closed, to the latter it is directly re- 
 vealed in the moral law, which makes man a citizen of the 
 "intelligible world" of freedom. From this position the 
 above ideas may be established as " Postulates," i.e., as pre- 
 suppositions which we feel compelled to make, not in order 
 to enlarge our knowledge, but in order to render possible the 
 realisation of the moral law. In the first place, we thus gain 
 the postulate of freedom as the basis of the reality of moral 
 law, just as this law is the basis of the cognisability of 
 freedom ; for, inasmuch as we otight to do the good, it follows 
 that we can do it. Nevertheless the moral law is perpetually 
 obstructed by the motives of sense-desire. These obstructions 
 it is able and bound to overcome more and more ; but can 
 never do this so completely that the law will be fully realised 
 in finite time ; hence its realisation demands the infinite 
 
1 2 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 duration of the individual, or immortality. Finally, reason 
 as a legislative faculty demands the realisation of an absolute 
 end or supreme good, which must embrace both perfect 
 virtue and a corresponding state of happiness, and happiness 
 not included in virtue, but dependent upon natural conditions 
 beyond our control. Hence arises the demand for a supreme 
 Cause, capable of bringing nature into harmony with the 
 moral law of rational beings, or of connecting happiness with 
 the virtue that deserves it ; in other words, the supreme good 
 proposed by reason demands the existence of God as the 
 condition of its possibility. Thus the transcendental ideas 
 are the objects of a "moral faith" rooted in reason. It is true 
 that by this faith the speculative reason receives no addition 
 to its knowledge, but by its critical precautions it can render 
 at least the negative service of keeping these ideas free from 
 anthropomorphic impurities and superstitious abuse. It has 
 indeed always been with good reason maintained that this 
 mode of establishing belief in the existence of God can with 
 difficulty be harmonized with the main principle of Kant's 
 ethics. If the moral law is throughout to have nothing to do 
 with sense-desire or happiness, it is hard to see how, on the 
 other hand, happiness can be pronounced an integral part 
 of the supreme good aimed at by reason and a divine cause 
 be demanded to produce it. The affinity of this train of 
 thought to theological utilitarianism is so obvious, that many 
 have not unreasonably seen in it a retrogression on the part 
 of Kant to the eudaemonistic point of view of the popular 
 philosophy,^ and that Kant's philosophical successors pre- 
 ferred to work out his speculative principle to its logical 
 results without his theological postulates. 
 
 Still, fully justified as these objections to the literal form 
 of Kant's postulate undoubtedly are, we cannot deny that 
 underneath it lay a true idea, which appears in a purer form 
 in the Critiqtte of Judgment. Kant here tries to find 
 some connecting link between the intelligible and sensible 
 worlds, between freedom and nature, in the idea of a teleology 
 common to both. In order to explain nature we find our- 
 
 1 Jacobi, Fichte, Herder, Schleiermacher, unanimously rejected Kant's line 
 of argument, sometimes in very strong terms. Of more recent authors, 
 compare the criticisms of Dilthey {Leben Scldeiermachers, I. 127, seq.), Bieder- 
 mann {Deutscldand im lijahr/i., II. 902), VVundt {Et/iik, 319, seq.). 
 
Ch. I.] KANT. 1 3 
 
 selves compelled to combine the principle of teleology with 
 the mechanical principle or causality ; for in organic nature 
 we see that the parts are determined by their relation to the 
 whole, are means to the inner end of the organism. To the 
 question, how the teleological explanation can be harmonised 
 with that of causality, Kant's answer is, in the first instance, 
 that the conception of ends in nature is not of such value as 
 to add to our knowledge of facts, but is only a regulative 
 principle for our reflective judgment ; it is primarily owing to 
 the structure of our subjective understanding merely that we 
 cannot help regarding nature as governed by final causes. 
 But Kant cannot rest in this sceptical subjectivity ; he teaches 
 that if the two principles are to be harmonised, they must be 
 combined under one supreme common principle, viz., in a 
 super-sensible substratum, or actual cause of nature ; of this 
 cause we must form a corresponding intellectual intuition, 
 that is to say, we conceive it as not merely causal, but as at 
 the same time the primal intellect, whose thought is not like 
 ours discursive, but necessarily intuitive (thinking the whole 
 simultaneously with its parts). It is true he does, at the same 
 time, again sceptically confess that objectively we can neither 
 assert nor deny the proposition that a Being, acting with a 
 view to ends, as the cause of the universe, is behind what 
 we rightly call the ends of nature ; but he considers it is 
 certain that, if we are to form judgments according to the 
 conditions of our reason, we are absolutely compelled to 
 regard a rational Being as the condition of the possibility 
 of ends in nature. But the observation of nature's ends is 
 not sufficient to enable us to further define this intelligent 
 First Cause ; we must under the guidance of teleology go 
 beyond Nature. Nature presents not only individual pro- 
 ducts adapted to ends, but forms a system of ends which 
 point to a supreme or final end. This final end can only be 
 man, who alone acts with conscious purpose and uses all 
 creatures as means to his ends. But man is not a final end, 
 for in so far as man is a part of Nature, his sensuous, pleasure- 
 seeking ends, are again dependent upon natural conditions, 
 and are in no way the object of Nature's special regard. On 
 the contrary, man is a final end only as a moral subject, as 
 proposing to himself unconditional ends by his supersensible 
 freedom of volition. His existence involves the supreme end, 
 to which all Nature is subordinate as means. It is from this 
 
1 4 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 conception of man's moral nature, as constituting the supreme 
 end of creation, that the study of Nature's ends must be 
 supplemented, whereby the greater validity and definiteness 
 of the argument for a supreme First Cause are secured, inas- 
 much as we must now think of this supreme Cause not only 
 as Intelligence, and as a legislator for Nature, but also as the 
 supreme Law-giver of a moral kingdom of ends. It is evident 
 that this inductive method of arriving at the idea of God 
 contrasts favourably with that given above ; whilst by the 
 first, God was postulated only for the dubious object of adding 
 happiness to our autonomous morality, by the latter. His 
 existence is inferred from a comprehensive survey of external 
 and internal experience as the necessary condition of a teleo- 
 logical system of things, uniting the natural and moral worlds 
 as means and end. This is a clear speculative conception, 
 which, shadowed forth by Leibnitz, in various forms runs 
 like a golden thread through the whole of Post- Kantian philo- 
 sophy. A corollary of this thought is, that man, not only as 
 a natural, but also as a moral being, is dependent upon the 
 Divine Cause of the universe, and that his autonomy must 
 therefore at the same time be an actual (not merely sub- 
 jectively conceived) theonomy. But of this inference, affecting 
 the very foundations of his philosophy, Kant would know 
 nothing ; however obviously it is suggested by the above line 
 of induction, he refused to recognise it, through fear of im- 
 pairing his idea of freedom ; and instead of it he finally gave 
 to his ethico-theological proof the form in which we find it in 
 the Critique of the Practical Reason (viz., that God is neces- 
 sary for the attainment of happiness, or in order to supple- 
 ment our inadequate power over sensible nature), and which 
 is open to the most serious objections. Here again we are 
 expressly reminded that God is the object only of a moral 
 faith, which must not be confounded with theoretical know- 
 ledge, nor made the basis of morality upon which it really 
 rests. 
 
 Morality becomes religion when what it shows to be the 
 end of man is conceived as also the end of the supreme Law- 
 giver and Creator, or God. Religion is thus the recognition 
 of all our duties as divine commands. The distinction be- 
 tween revealed and natural religion is stated by Kant to be, 
 that in the former, I must know a thing to be a divine com- 
 mand before I can recognise it as my duty ; in the latter, I 
 
Ch. I.] KANT. 1 5 
 
 must know it as my duty before I can consider it a command 
 of God. If a man holds revealed religion to be necessary, 
 he is a Supernaturalist ; if unnecessary, a Rationalist ; if 
 impossible, a Naturalist. As a fourth possibility, a religion 
 might conceivably be objectively natural and yet subjectively 
 revealed ; this would be the case if it were such that man 
 might have arrived at it by the unaided use of reason, but at 
 a later period ; hence revelation might be useful, or even 
 necessary for certain times and places, without being a per- 
 manent guarantee for the truth of the religion. The last is 
 Kant's supposition with regard to Christianity, as it had been 
 that of Lessing. But whence comes this, if only relative, 
 necessity for revelation ? And how are its contents to be 
 understood as in unison with reason ? These questions were 
 discussed by Kant in the works. Religion innerhalb der 
 Grenzen der blossen Vermmft (1793), and Ueber den Streit 
 der Fakultdten ( 1 798), in a style, whatever our opinion may 
 be in other respects, which is at all events far superior in 
 depth to the Aiifklarung of the popular philosophy. 
 
 What made Kant capable of a truer appreciation of the 
 doctrines of Christianity, was his deep moral earnestness. 
 The self-complacent optimism of the philosophy of the 
 Aufkldrung had lacked the recognition of evil as a serious 
 power in human life, while Kant made it the starting-point of 
 his religious philosophy. He considered it as incontestably 
 a fact of experience, that in our race there is inherent a 
 " radical evil," or an original tendency to evil, viz., the pre- 
 ponderance of self-love over pure reverence for law. This 
 wrong bias cannot be the result of inheritance from our first 
 parents, since moral qualities cannot be thus transmitted, but 
 are inseparable from the person. The source of this radical 
 evil, according to Kant, is rather to be sought in an " intelli- 
 gible act of freedom," which is not to be further explained. 
 The question, then, is, how this evil disposition can be 
 changed into a good one, Kant answers. Not by a gradual 
 reformation, but by a fundamental revolution of the man's 
 whole habit of thought, by a new birth. The problem is, to 
 awaken in the mind the idea of the moral perfection for which 
 we are from the first made. For this purpose, nothing is 
 more effectual than the contemplation of this idea in an his- 
 torical example of it of such surpassing moral grandeur as 
 can be beheld in Jesus. For this reason, we may look upon 
 
1 6 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 him as if the ideal of goodness had been presented in him in 
 flesh and blood, though we have not on that account any 
 reason to regard him as other than a man born in the course 
 of nature. The question, too, whether his historical per- 
 sonality altogether corresponded to the eternal ideal, is one 
 which we neither can nor need answer ; for, in any case, the 
 real object of our religious faith is not this historic man, but 
 the ideal of a humanity well-pleasing to God ; and since this 
 ideal is not our own creation, but given us in our super- 
 sensible nature, it may be conceived as the Son of God come 
 down from heaven. Whoever believes in this ideal Son of 
 God, to whom Jesus holds the relation of the representative 
 example — that is, whoever receives into his heart the moral 
 idea of a humanity pleasing to God, and lets it govern his life — 
 may believe that he is justified in the eyes of the Searcher of 
 Hearts, since the fundamental rightness of his disposition 
 covers the imperfection of the details of his life. Nor need 
 he have any anxiety with regard to the guilt of the past ; for 
 although the conception of the vicarious suffering of Christ as 
 a satisfaction for sinners is, if taken literally, untrue, inasmuch 
 as such a substitution cannot take place in the sphere of 
 morality, still the conception may be regarded as the sym- 
 bolical expression of the true idea, that in the daily pain of 
 self-discipline, obedience, and patience, the new man in us 
 suffers as it were vicariously for the old. Kant thus interprets 
 the Church's doctrine of the Atonement, as once for all made 
 by Christ, on the lines of Protestant mysticism, treating it as a 
 continual ethical process in the heart of the religious man — an 
 interpretation, the germs of which may be traced to the 
 Apostle Paul. But while the Christian doctrine of salvation 
 thus becomes an inward subjective experience of the heart, it 
 is by no means Kant's intention to depreciate, from an abstract 
 subjective point of view, the importance of the community. 
 He sees very clearly that the supremacy of the good principle 
 in the individual can only be assured when it is maintained in 
 the community around him. But this can be accomplished 
 only by the establishment and spread of a society having the 
 laws of virtue both as its basis and its end. Such an ethical 
 community, or " Kingdom of God," is distinguished from all 
 civil States, by being founded, not upon the laws of civil justice, 
 but upon the laws of personal virtue, and by having for its 
 sovereign, not a human potentate, but the Searcher of Hearts ; 
 
Ch. I.] KANT. I 7 
 
 and again by not being limited to a definite nation or country, 
 but embracing in principle the whole of mankind. Moreover, 
 this ideal ethical community is by no means identical with 
 historic ecclesiastical communities, for while it can be based 
 upon the faith of the reason alone, which is open to all alike, 
 the ecclesiastical societies are founded upon positive creeds, 
 which everywhere take different forms. 
 
 Having thus stated his view of religion, as it may be 
 ascertained within the limits of reason, Kant proceeds to the 
 critical investigation of the historical, or "statutory" forms 
 of religion. He here shows that he fully shared the unhis- 
 torical way of looking at things characteristic of the age of 
 the Anfkldrmig. The only explanation of the rise of the 
 positive religions he can give is the false notion of mankind, 
 that God demands special acts of ceremonial worship in 
 addition to the worship of a morally good life. This was the 
 origin of statutory religious regulations, which may for a time, 
 in proportion to their association with moral ideas, be useful 
 and even necessary as the means of inaugurating purely moral 
 religious teaching, but in the end become hindrances to 
 progress, and are therefore destined gradually to give place to 
 the pure religion of reason. In Kant's view, the abolition of 
 this servile belief, with the establishment of the sole authority 
 of moral faith, was inaugurated by Jesus ; but the real purpose 
 of Jesus was often misunderstood in the Church, and what he 
 originally intended to be simply preparatory means, was in 
 later times made fundamental ; whence arose much bigotry 
 and fanaticism. It was not until his own time, Kant thinks, 
 that the light at length fully shone forth after centuries of 
 darkness ; and he interprets the Christian hope of a final 
 consummation, when God shall be all in all, of this develop- 
 ment, then actually begun, of the true faith of reason out of tlie 
 wrappings of the historic faith. It is the duty of religious 
 teachers, Kant declared, to help on this development by 
 means of the interpretation of the Bible and a fresh inter- 
 pretation of the dogmas of the Church. At the end, he 
 turns to the criticism of special points, in which he thought 
 the danger of fanatical religious error and false worship 
 especially serious. The notion of divine "operations of 
 grace " he classes among those incomprehensible ideas of 
 which reason disputes neither the possibility, nor the reality, 
 nor even the necessity, but of which it can make no use 
 
 G. T. c 
 
l8 BASIS OK MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 either in speculation, owing to the impossibility of determin- 
 ing their characteristics, or in practice, since we can do 
 nothing to produce them. Elsewhere, however, he indicates 
 in what sense he is willing to accept the idea of divine grace, 
 viz., if it is understood to mean the supersensible principle of 
 good existing in our moral nature, which may be regarded 
 as a divinely imparted impulse towards the good, the capacity 
 for which has not been produced by our own effort, and which 
 can be thought of as grace. Similarly he distinguishes in the 
 means of grace between the true moral kernel and the ruder 
 husk. Prayer, regarded as a formal act of worship and the 
 statement of our wishes to a Being who needs no such state- 
 ment, he considers a vain superstition and fetishism ; but as 
 the expression of our heart's desire to be well-pleasing to God, 
 it is a valuable means of quickening good dispositions, and 
 especially as public prayer is an effective ethical observance, 
 calculated to awaken moral impulses in the members of a 
 community. In the same way. Baptism and the Lord's 
 Supper may be looked upon as ethical observances for the 
 public confession and quickening of the feelings of duty and 
 brotherly love in a community ; but to regard them as means 
 of grace in the sense that by these ceremonies the divine 
 favour might be flattered and won, would be a heathenish 
 superstition, and could only lead to contempt for virtue and 
 the greater influence of the priesthood as the dispensers of 
 grace. 
 
 In these utterances we cannot but recognise the lofty 
 moral earnestness which was the soul of the Kantian 
 philosophy and the main cause of its great and salutary effect 
 upon its time. But the same defects are here observable as 
 mark his moral philosophy : the onesidedness and inflexibility 
 of his speculative principle prevented him from being just to 
 those sides of man's nature which, while different from the 
 intellect, are not wholly irrational, and must on no account 
 be simply assigned to the lower sense-nature. I refer to the 
 emotions and the imagination. The religious life originates 
 and specially manifests itself in these very faculties of the 
 soul as its domain ; and we can therefore readily understand 
 why Kant could not take an impartial view of its natural and 
 characteristic phenomena. He was still held back by the 
 abstract intellectualism which was a universal failing of the 
 Aufkldrung. To correct this error and supply what was 
 
'Ch. I.] KANT. 19 
 
 lacking was the work of that party which had already protested, 
 on the lines of Rousseau, against this worship of the intellect, 
 and had proclaimed the rights of nature, of the heart, of the 
 unfettered imagination, and of passionate enthusiasm. The 
 party consisted of those allies in the " Storm and Stress " 
 movement whose youthful excesses of enthusiasm were so 
 modified and transformed in Herder and Goethe as to become 
 a new and richer ideal of humanity. 
 
 Moreover, Kant's religious philosophy was unsatisfactory 
 on account of the indefiniteness and uncertainty of its attitude 
 towards the decisive question of man's relation to God. If 
 religion consists, as it teaches, in regarding our duties as 
 divine commands, the question at once arises, whether this is 
 a purely subjective conception, or whether it is based upon an 
 objective truth. In the former case, we have the anthropo- 
 logical theory of religion, since developed by Feuerbach and 
 recent Positivism and Agnosticism ; in the latter, there arises 
 the further question, How can we arrive at a knowledge of 
 the divine will ? Now, the idea of revelation remains in Kant 
 a 720!t liquet ; he concedes its possibility, perhaps even its 
 necessity, and yet really leaves no room for it. If it is ad- 
 mitted, in the sense of an external announcement on the part 
 of God, as the theological Kantians wished, the fate of Kant's 
 fundamental principle of the autonomy of reason is at once 
 sealed. If, on the other hand, the divine revelation is con- 
 ceived as taking place within the human spirit, as in post- 
 Kantian speculation, it cannot reasonably be limited to the 
 practical and denied to the theoretical reason ; the human 
 spirit must then be conceived as standing generally as such in 
 so close a relation to the divine that the eternal nature of the 
 divine Reason must express and reveal itself in the regular 
 course of the mind's own activity. But this carries us not 
 only beyond the dualism of Kant's theory of knowledge, but 
 also beyond the moral abstraction of his merely rational faith, 
 and we are brought to an evolutionary idealism, as conceived 
 by Herder and Hegel, in which the manifold moral and 
 religious ideals of mankind take their place as integral mem- 
 bers in the process of the development of divine revelation. 
 
 Thus, in the Kantian philosophy there lay side by side the 
 germs of various tendencies of thought, which afterwards took 
 widely different directions. And it was precisely this wealth 
 of suggestions, which might be developed into totally distinct 
 
20 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 lines of thought, which constituted the vast importance of his 
 philosophy for his age, at the same time rendering the preser- 
 vation of its original form impossible. While no thinker of 
 the time remained uninfluenced by it, not one adopted it in its 
 entirety ; and it was precisely its most distinguished disciples 
 who advanced the furthest beyond it, and by developing its 
 principles and correcting its imperfections gained fruitful 
 points of view very helpful to a profounder understanding of 
 religion. 
 
CHAPTER II.. 
 
 HERDER. 
 
 In the year 1784 appeared the beginning of Herder's Ideas 
 on the Philosophy of History, whichi together with Kant's 
 CritiqiLe of Pure Reason, gives utterance, as JuHan Schmidt 
 justly considers, to the most important intellectual drift of the 
 century. In this book meet, as in a. focus, the combined 
 results of Herder's various philosophical labours, labours which 
 opened up new and magnificent points of view especially in 
 those branches of study which were depreciated by Kant, viz., 
 the emotional side of the life of the human soul and the 
 development of mankind under tke combined action of 
 natural and spiritual forces in history. In England Shaftes- 
 bury's philosophy of the moral sense had been the counterpart 
 of Hume's intellectual scepticism, and in France Rousseau's 
 Gospel of Nature, that of Voltaire's Enlightenment ; in the 
 same way in Germany Kant's analyzing thought was supple- 
 mented by the synthetic intuitions of Herder, and subjective 
 idealism, with its limitation to the analysis of the conscious- 
 ness of the subject, by historical realism, with its eager atten- 
 tion to the laws of human nature in the whole course of history. 
 Each of these modes of thought is evidently the complement 
 of the other ; and the right combination and fusion of the two 
 was the problem bequeathed by the i8th century, then clos- 
 ing, to the philosophy of the 19th, a problem the solution of 
 which is still far from completed. In order to understand what 
 is really new in the thought of the 19th century, we must look 
 at it as the synthesis of these two contrary tendencies, which 
 occupied the second half of the 18th century. 
 
 A concise account of Herder's position it is not easy to give, 
 for two reasons ; firstly, because his style has more of the 
 poetical, emotional, and rhetorical element than the clearness 
 and precision of science ; and secondly, because his views, 
 egpecially on religious questions, underwent repeated modifi- 
 
2 2 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. 1. 
 
 cations in the course of his literary labours. One unvarying 
 drift does indeed pervade all these variations — a protest 
 against the arrogance and poverty of the ■^(y^\A'ax Aiifkldrung, 
 which would let nothing pass but what was amenable to the 
 calculations of the common understanding, and, without any 
 sense for appreciating the productive forces and manifold 
 phenomena of human history, sought to force all truth into the 
 meagre moulds of its abstract intellectual conception. As a 
 true disciple of Hamann and Rousseau, Herder abhorred this 
 arid, levelling rationalism ; he sought to understand the unity 
 of all the powers of man's soul and the special nature of his 
 habits of feeling ; hence what interested him in poetry and 
 religion was not the abstract rule, the artificial form of the 
 schools, the doctrines of the Church, but the living feelings as 
 they found natural expression in the songs of the people and 
 the poetical picture-language of the oldest religious records. 
 As in poetry he preferred the primitive strength and beauty 
 of the songs of the people to the classicality of the schools, so 
 in religion he set the strength and beauty of the Bible above 
 the dogmatism of the Churches ; for this very reason it was to 
 him insufferable to see the Rationalists trying to thrust their 
 rigid intellectuality into the Bible, and by their artificial inter- 
 pretations dilute and dissipate both its religious strength and 
 its poetic charm. Herder throughout remained perfectly true 
 to himself in rejecting the Rationalists' arbitrary^ and unnatural 
 treatment of the language of the Bible, and in demanding of 
 the reader a loving sympathy with the special characteristics 
 of the Biblical writers, so as to catch their enthusiasm and 
 reproduce their poetical picture-language. He thereby ren- 
 dered lasting service, striking the most decisive blow at the 
 subjective arbitrariness of the Rationalistic methods of inter- 
 pretation, and preparing the way for the really scientific, 
 objective, and historical methods of Biblical study followed in 
 our own time. 
 
 On the other hand, it cannot be denied that within the 
 boundary lines of this position Herder wavered. During 
 the earlier and later periods of his life (in Riga and Weimar 
 respectively), his appreciation of the aesthetic beauty and ideal 
 truth of the Bible never kept him from criticising it in the 
 same fashion as the poetical literature and religious legends 
 of other nations, or from explaining it in accordance with the 
 psychological and historical conditions of its origin ; so that 
 
Cli. II.] HERDER. 
 
 he was compelled not to regard these legends, the rise of 
 which could be historically traced, as direct revelations of 
 God with objective truth. In one of his earliest works, the 
 fragment, Von Entstelmng und Fortpflanzung der ersten Re- 
 ligionsbegriffe, he adopts Hume's view, that fear was the 
 mother of religion, and that the earliest religion consisted in 
 the superstitious worship of harmful and beneficent deities, to 
 appease the wrath and win the favour of whom, men felt 
 bound to offer prayers, sacrifices, and ceremonies. When, 
 however, mankind had provided for their most pressing 
 needs, they began to speculate about the origin of things, 
 and to embody their ideas in cosmogonies and genealogies ; 
 thus the first rude religion, the name of which is in almost 
 all languages derived from fear, was followed by a kind of 
 historico-physical philosophy. The question of the origin of 
 the world received a mystical answer ; these primitive legends 
 took a completely national and local form ; they were clothed 
 in the rich figurative language of the senses ; they became 
 mythological poems. It is the work of the science of religion 
 to study the spirit of these mythological poems as charac- 
 teristic products of the individual nations. As a contribution 
 to this object. Herder wrote his Archdologie der Hebrder, 
 which combined in a common view his researches in the 
 earliest history of poetry and in the origins of religion. He 
 nowhere speaks in this work of a supernatural revelation ; in 
 the first chapters of Genesis he sees a national religious poem, 
 which must be understood, like Homer, in accordance with 
 its original spirit and meaning without any dogmatic bias. 
 We must transplant ourselves into Eastern habits of thought 
 in order to understand this poetical philosophy of nature ; but 
 light is also thrown upon it by similar imagery in modern 
 poetry, in Ossian, Shakespeare, and Klopstock. To treat 
 this Oriental national poetry as dogma, is contrary to all 
 canons of taste and reason ; it involves a violation of the 
 natural difference in the various mental faculties, mutilates 
 the intuitive emotions no less than the reason, and confounds 
 together all classes of philosophy and knowledge. God gives 
 us no revelation concerning natural science or metaphysics, 
 except by means of the power bestowed by Him upon the 
 human mind, of penetrating by its own force ever deeper 
 into the nature of His creation. 
 
 While these views are identical with those of Herder's 
 
24 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 most mature works, written while in Weimar, they differ 
 appreciably from the position he held during the middle 
 period of his life (while in Buckeburg). From being the 
 aesthetic archseologist of literature he then became more and 
 more the apologist of the supernatural. In his essay on 
 Die alteste U^'kunde des Menschengeschlechts, which be- 
 longs to this period, he still regards the account of the 
 creation in Genesis as a poem, but now it is a divine, and 
 not a human poem ; it is no longer an Oriental myth, but a 
 divine revelation. He does indeed still lay great stress upon 
 the sense-intuition of nature, that is, the sight of the dawning 
 day, which was in the prophet's mind ; but in order that this 
 everyday image might be interpreted as the type of the 
 creation of the world, the prophet must also have heard 
 the voice of a teacher, which could only have been that of 
 God himself. Thus positive teaching of God is found at 
 the beginning of all human history, and remains the super- 
 natural spring from which all human wisdom and poetry take 
 their rise. Even language, the natural origin of which 
 Herder had himself expounded with much penetration, is now 
 attributed to direct divine revelation, to definite instruction 
 given by God. This original revelation is, in his view, the 
 fundamental fact, the antithesis, as he vehemently proclaims, 
 of all the artificial ideas and hypothesis of philosophy ; he 
 himself forgetting, however, that this so-called fundamental 
 fact is itself only an hypothesis, and is mainly distinguished 
 from others by boldly leaving the paths of sober empirical 
 investigation to take refuge in the .region of miracle, where 
 imagination usurps the place of thought. With this essay on 
 Genesis we may compare a work which appeared soon after : 
 Erliiuterungen zum neuen Testament aus einer neueroffneten 
 morgenldndischen Quelle, in which the New Testament is 
 interpreted by the Zendavesta, Christ and his Apostles, as 
 Herder assumes, being versed in the wisdom of the Chaldees. 
 This work, like the last, contains a defence of the super- 
 natural element in the Bible on the lines of Lavater ; it main- 
 tains that all the miracles, from the miraculous birth of Jesus 
 to his ascension, were facts, though in such a way that 
 everywhere prominence is given to the spiritual truth of the 
 narrative. Herder did not reflect that this truth would not 
 be affected if the narrative were not actual history, but poetry 
 and legend ; the spiritual truth and beauty of a story was to 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 
 
 him a direct guarantee of its historical reality, or rather 
 appeared indistinguishable from it to his poetical imagination, 
 which was then at all events without the checks of the critical 
 intellect. As his biographer, Haym, aptly remarks : " He 
 rightly insists that we ought to read the New Testament in 
 the spirit of the New Testament itself, with a feeling and 
 sense of the greatness of its contents. But the greatness, the 
 deep religious and moral power of these writings, is too much 
 for him ; it carries him away and overpowers him. He loses 
 in consequence all the freedom in regard to these writings 
 which he had allowed himself in regard to poetical works. 
 Here, as in the old Testament, he has failed to grasp the 
 critical conception intermediate between poetry and faith — 
 the conception of the myth." 
 
 That in giving the rein absolutely to the anti-rationalistic 
 or mystical side of his nature, Herder could go so far as to 
 renounce his earlier scientific and critical views, can be easily 
 explained by his peculiar temperament and the influence of 
 friends, both male and female, while he was at Biickeburg ; 
 and it would be quite wrong to think, with Hettner, of any 
 conscious compromise from impure motives. We may, in 
 fact, say with Haym, that only by this " mystical and enthu- 
 siastic method of interpretation," was it possible to regain the 
 lost appreciation of religion as such, of the profoundly inward 
 force of the chief truths of Christianity, and of the original 
 meaning of the ancient words of our faith. Nevertheless, we 
 shall also do well to call to mind, with Julian Schmidt, the old 
 truth that all trifling with words must be avenged. This 
 mysticism of Herder's, in which aesthetic taste combined with 
 the noblest feeling and ideal pathos to drown the calm voice 
 of critical reason, was indubitably the beginning of that irra- 
 tional movement which was carried farther by Romanticism 
 and blossomed forth luxuriantly in the reactionary theology 
 of our century. But it is all the more interesting to observe 
 how Herder again rescued himself from this sandbank upon 
 which so many suffered shipwreck, and regained the right 
 track marked out for him by his true genius. It was under 
 the leadership of Lessing and Spinoza that he accomplished 
 this, though the altered surroundings of his position in 
 Weimar materially assisted the change. Herder had been 
 engaged in a friendly correspondence with Lessing for nearly 
 two years; and when, in February 1781, the news of Les- 
 
2 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 sing's death came upon him as a painful shock, he paid a 
 tribute to the memory of his friend, in which in enthusiastic 
 terms he eulogised him as " a noble truth-seeker, truth-finder, 
 and truth-champion," to whose nature no vice was so foreign 
 as cringing hypocrisy, false courtesy, or, above all, that weari- 
 some, sleepy rest in half the truth, which from the first eats 
 like rust and canker into men's minds, in all branches of 
 knowledge and inquiry. This was Herder's formal renuncia- 
 tion of theological fanaticism of every kind, not excepting 
 that which had disfigured his own writings of the Btickeburg 
 period. To the same date belongs the renewal of friendly 
 relations between Herder and Goethe, with its productive 
 mutual stimulus, as well as their study in common of the 
 philosophy of Spinoza. 
 
 Jacobi had hoped to gain Herder as an ally in the cam- 
 paign against Spinozism, having previously made a like 
 attempt with Lessing ; but the disappointment of his hopes 
 was even more decisive in Herder's case than it had been in 
 Lessing's. Herder confessed to him, that since he had busied 
 himself with philosophy he had become more and more con- 
 vinced of the truth of Lessing's saying, that as a matter of 
 fact no other philosophy than Spinoza's was quite consistent 
 with itself Not that he could in everything agree with 
 Spinoza, whose ideas were always undeveloped whenever his 
 relations with Descartes were unduly close. But Spinoza did 
 not deserve the traditional prejudice against him, which rested 
 upon a misunderstanding of his philosophy. The first mis- 
 take of the opponents of Spinoza, is to suppose he looks on 
 God as a nonentity, an abstract conception. On the contrary, 
 Spinoza's God is the most real and most active unity, who 
 alone says to himself, " I am that I am, and shall be in all 
 the changes of my manifestations what I shall be." " What 
 you people mean by ' existence outside the world ' I do not 
 understand. If God does not exist in the world, everywhere 
 without measure, wholly and individually, he exists nowhere. 
 Outside the world there is no space ; space is an abstraction 
 from experience, and arises when a world arises for us. 
 Limited personality is not less inapplicable to an infinite 
 Being, personality being to our minds inseparable from limi- 
 tation. In God this illusion disappears ; he is the highest, 
 most truly living, and most active One. God is not the world, 
 and the world is not God ; of this there can be no doubt. 
 
Ch II.] HERDEP. 27 
 
 But nothing can be gained, it seems to me, from your extra 
 and supra. When we speak of God, we must forget all our 
 idola of space and time, else our best efforts will be fruitless." 
 The sense in which he himself wished Spinoza's philosophy 
 to be understood, and in which he could make it his own, was 
 expounded by Herder in a little treatise entitled, Gott: Einige 
 Gesprache ilber Spinoza s Systeni (1787). He admits, in the 
 first place, that the ideas inherited from Cartesius, of Sub- 
 stance, Attributes, and Modes are unsatisfactory, and that the 
 mathematical method of proof is a mistake. These ideas must 
 have life put into them by Leibnitz's idea of Force. God 
 must therefore be conceived as "the underived, original, and 
 universal force, underlying and including all forces, most active 
 Being " ; attributes, as organic forces in which the Deity 
 manifests himself ; and all things, as the modifications or 
 active expressions, of the divine force. God, as the eternal 
 original Force, possesses not only infinite force of thought, but 
 also of operation ; in him, therefore, existence, operation, and 
 thought, or power, wisdom, and goodness, are indivisibly one. 
 He is therefore as far removed from blind necessity as from 
 any inoperative "deliberation and consultation, caprice, and 
 velleity." Anthropomorphic conceptions of this kind were, 
 with Leibnitz, merely the popular garb of his Theodicy, but 
 his successors made them of prime importance, and the basis 
 of all those physico-theological systems which resulted there- 
 from, which sought to reduce everything to the arbitrary will 
 of God, and to break the golden chain of nature, in order to 
 separate a few phenomena from the rest, and see, at this or 
 that point, an electric flash of arbitrary divine purpose. All 
 these delusions, in relation to which the holy name of God 
 ought not to be misused, are escaped by the modest student 
 of nature, who, though he does not divulge to us particular 
 measures decided on in the council-chambers of the divine 
 Will, observes instead the composition of actual things and the 
 laws implanted in their nature. While apparently forgetting 
 the purposes of God, he seeks and finds God in his totality, 
 in every object and point of creation, i.e., in everything an 
 essential truth, harmony, and beauty, without which it would 
 not and could not exist. Whoever could show men the laws 
 of nature, how what we see of the so-called animate and in- 
 animate creation works, lives, and acts according to an inner 
 necessity, the result of the interaction of forces in definite 
 
2 8 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 organs, would promote the noblest admiration, love, and 
 reverence for God, far more than the man who, as knowing 
 the counsels of God, preached that we have feet in order to 
 walk, and eyes in order to see, etc. Every true law of nature 
 discovered would thus be also a discovered rule of the eternal 
 divine Intelligence, whose thought alone can be truth, and 
 whose activity reality. 
 
 We thus see that Herder's conception of God is a combina- 
 tion of Spinoza's monism with Leibnitz's theism ; Spinoza's 
 substance becomes operative thinking force ; his modes of 
 substance become living forces, resembling Leibnitz's monads, 
 but operative as well as perceptive, whose harmony is there- 
 fore no longer, as in Leibnitz, pre-established, but is inherent 
 in the actual interaction of the forces. With Spinoza, Herder 
 rejects the external teleology of particular arbitrary purposes, 
 but with Leibnitz he recognises in necessity according to law 
 the internal adaptation of things to ends, in the laws of 
 nature the thoughts of God, in the golden chain of nature 
 the divine wisdom and goodness. Thus, Spinoza's natural- 
 istic mechanical system is transformed into a theistic opti- 
 mism, on the lines of Leibnitz and Shaftesbury. These two 
 thinkers are also followed in Herder's ethical demand — "the 
 attainment of the law of noble and beautiful necessity," and 
 the performance of duty as if it were not duty but nature, 
 happiness thus being included in virtue. Finally, Herder's 
 doctrine of God comprehends also his doctrine of immor- 
 tality and his philosophy of history, becoming a completely 
 optimistic system. If all life is force, death must everywhere 
 be only apparent death, merely the destruction of some ap- 
 pearance ; in ceaseless motion and eternal palingenesia, force 
 and the interaction of forces carry on their work ; but the 
 persistence of force is inconceivable without progress. In 
 the kingdom of God there is no standing still, still less any 
 going back ; it is a necessary law, that chaos should become 
 order, and latent capacities forces in operation. 
 
 In these thoughts, which Herder gathered from the three 
 philosophers, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, as the 
 quintessence of their systems, he found a conception of the 
 world in which he could rest ; and he was strengthened in his 
 belief by the complete and unconditional assent of Goethe. 
 From the standpoint of these views, shared and continually 
 discussed by the two friends, Herder's principal work, the 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 29 
 
 Ideen ziir Philosophie der Geschichte (1784- 1 791), was 
 written. The leading thought of the worlc is, that man is 
 the connecting link of two worlds. On the one hand, he is 
 the child of earth, the highest of its organic products ; on the 
 other, a citizen of the spiritual world of freedom. The book 
 begins, therefore, with a description of the earth, of its posi- 
 tion in the universe, and of the stages of the operations of 
 its organic forces — from the plant to the animal, from the 
 lower to the higher animals, and finally to man. With all the 
 great differences in these single organisms, nature seems "to 
 have formed them all after one chief type of organization ; and 
 man seems to be, as it were, the central figure of the animal 
 world, i.e., the most fully developed form in which the essen- 
 tial characteristics of all the species around him are exquisitely 
 combined." His upright carriage is man's most distinctive 
 characteristic, upon which depend the dexterity of his hands, 
 his power of language, and also his rationality ; for his reason 
 is not inborn like our instincts, but the acquired due propor- 
 tion between his powers, senses, and instincts. But if man 
 is the highest member of a progressive series of organic 
 forces, which have constructed the body as their organ, his 
 development cannot end with his appearance upon the earth ; 
 for the hmnanity to which we are destined is incompletely 
 realised upon earth, the end for which we exist points to 
 higher forms of development beyond our earthly life under 
 other cosmical conditions, for which we are to prepare our- 
 selves by cultivating the spiritual part of our nature, by 
 striving after truth, goodness, and godlike beauty. From 
 this glance at man's future development. Herder returns to 
 the description of his historical development on earth ; and the 
 stress which he lays on its dependence upon natural conditions 
 is so marked as to seem, if taken by itself, almost pure natural- 
 ism, to which, on the other hand, completely supernaturalistic 
 declarations form a strange contrast. Man stands in a double 
 relation of dependence, on the one hand to nature, and on 
 the other to the culture and traditions of society. But whence 
 came the first germs of the latter .'' Herder cannot find in 
 the natural development of man's rationality a satisfactory 
 answer to this question, but has recourse to an education by 
 higher superhuman influences ; the Elohim were the instruc- 
 tors of man, and from them he received language, the germ 
 of all culture. This transition from a natural to a super- 
 
30 BASTS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 natural explanation shows the insufficiency of that one-sided 
 empiricism, which will not, like Kant, regard reason as origi- 
 nating action, but only as a passive power of receptivity ; 
 hence it can only explain the first possession and employment 
 of reason by deriving it from foreign mystical sources. 
 
 Herder proceeds to depict the life of the nations in his- 
 tory, and shows how each nation strove to fulfil the common 
 destiny of man by attaining to humanity and happiness in the 
 special way determined by its natural character and geo- 
 graphical position. As to the details we need only draw atten- 
 tion to the strangely unfavourable judgment passed upon the 
 Jewish nation, whose religious superiority to other nations is 
 outweighed by its want of political culture and of any real 
 sense of honour and freedom. In the description of the 
 Greeks, on the contrary, prominence is given to the bright 
 points — their services to art and science and all human culture. 
 So, too, in describing Christianity, Herder does indeed pay a 
 tribute of the warmest admiration to the person of Jesus as 
 the prophet of the truest humanity ; but on the other hand 
 he lays such great emphasis upon the human errors, abuses, 
 and corruptions incorporated with the Christian religion ever 
 since its first diffusion, he so decisively condemns the ecclesias- 
 tical system of dogmas and state Christianity, and in particular 
 takes so adverse a view of the middle ages, as a time of the 
 darkest barbarism and inhumanity, that he almost seems to 
 have adopted in this connection the standpoint of the Azif- 
 kldrung, which he had before so passionately denounced. 
 The extent to which he still differed from it we shall see later 
 on, when we come to the final account of his religious views ; 
 but it is in any case undeniable that the point of view of the 
 Ideen Is not the same as that of his earlier writings. This 
 may be corroborated by a glance at the general principles of 
 his philosophy of history. 
 
 Herder wishes us to look at the history of mankind as 
 "simply the natural history of man's powers, actions, and 
 Impulses In relation to their time and place." Supernatural 
 forces and arbitrary fictitious purposes may no more be Intro- 
 duced Into the study of history than Into that of natural 
 science ; in both alike all phenomena must be explained by 
 their causes, not by any hypothetical ends. " The God whom 
 I seek In history, must be the same as the God in nature ; for 
 man is only a small part of the universe, and his history, like 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 
 
 that of the grub, is closely interwoven with the cell in which 
 he lives. In this history therefore all the laws of nature in- 
 volved in the nature of the case, must have validity ; and so 
 far from setting them aside, God, having established them, 
 reveals himself in them in their mighty power with a beauty 
 unchanging, wise, and beneficent." That things take place 
 from the necessity of natural law involves instead of excluding 
 an inner teleology. The most general law of nature, which 
 holds good also in history, is that out of confusion order should 
 arise, the conservative forces outweighing the destructive 
 ones. All life aims at producing a maximum and a proportion 
 of the forces that mutually limit each other, this being the 
 condition of the perfection and happiness of individuals, 
 nations, and the race. All disturbances of this effort to find a 
 condition of stable equilibrium are always in the end counter- 
 acted ; for in the struggle amongst the individual forces and 
 impulses, reason and fairness only last and are established by 
 the force of their own gravity. Hence we may hope " that 
 wherever men dwell, there will one day dwell rational and 
 happy men, happy not only by their own reason, but also by 
 the common rationality of all their brethren." According to 
 these views, the end of man's development, to be gained by 
 conflict and struggle, is a maximum and a rational harmony 
 of all his forces, together with the resulting happiness ; but 
 we also find other statements which seem to make the object 
 of nature to consist in that happiness which is found every- 
 where in every living thing, viz., simple consciousness of its 
 own existence. " If happiness is to be found upon earth, it 
 is in every sentient being. Nature has exhausted all possible 
 human forms upon the earth, in order that she might have 
 for each of them, in its time and place, some pleasure with 
 which to allure mortals through life. It is wrong to hold up 
 one ideal to mankind, as if all earlier generations before they 
 reached the ideal were to be branded with the stigma of im- 
 perfection. Nature everywhere contrives that with the need 
 there shall arise the possibility of its satisfaction. Those 
 nations to whom we think nature was but a cruel step-mother, 
 were perhaps the best- loved children ; cheerfulness, often 
 combined with thoughtlessness, a lively feeling of their own 
 well-being, constituted their happiness, destiny, and enjoyment 
 of life. Neither our head nor our heart was made for an 
 infinite variety of thoughts and feelings. How much too 
 
32 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 small would be the plan of creation, if every individual had 
 been created for what we call culture." 
 
 It cannot be denied that these sentences represent a na- 
 turalism like that of Rousseau, the logical result of which 
 would be to deprive culture of all value in comparison with 
 nature, and history of any divine purpose. But they do not 
 represent Herder's whole position ; they only contain a re- 
 action, carried to extremes, against the contrary one-sided 
 view of Kant. Kant had met Herder's Ideen with his own 
 Idceii zzi, einer allgeincincn Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher 
 Absicht (1784), according to which, the end of history consists 
 in an ideal condition of single States and cosmopolitan so- 
 ciety, to be attained by means of the conflicts and sacrifices of 
 the generations ; he had himself felt it to be a difficulty in this 
 view that the older generations seem to perform their weary 
 labour only for the sake of those coming after them, the latest 
 only enjoying the good fortune of dwelling in the building 
 at which so long a line of their ancestors had worked with no 
 object in view. What accentuates the harshness of this view 
 is, that, according to Kant himself, the ideal goal is never to 
 be attained, reason being able to control but never to destroy 
 the tendency to evil in the race. We must acknowledge the 
 justice of Herder's dissatisfaction with this view of Kant's ; 
 the doom of men to the lot of Tantalus in this form, to be 
 ever striving after the unattainable with eternally fruitless 
 toil, would, Herder contends, be unworthy both of man, — who, 
 as Kant also insists, ought never to be merely a means but 
 always at the same time an end In himself — and of the Creator, 
 who could not' deceive us by holding out a mere dream of 
 purpose. On the other hand, Kant was indisputably right in 
 asserting (as against Rousseau and Pierder) that the final end 
 of mankind can only be an Ideal of moral culture, not the 
 physical happiness of a state of nature, which would not 
 essentially differ from the condition of animals. Kant was 
 right in conceiving the end of humanity as consisting in an 
 ideal of society demanded by reason and to be realised by 
 means of freedom ; but his view of this Ideal was too much 
 an abstraction, the mere form of social life, and the mere 
 Thou shall to which no reality ever corresponds. Herder 
 rightly perceived that the ends of humanity cannot be external 
 to it, but must be realised In its existence as a whole, so that 
 no part can ever be merely a means to an end outside it ; but 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 
 
 he thus incurred the danger of taking too low a view of the end 
 and allowing the ideal of reason to sink to a life according to 
 jiatiLre. The solution of this antinomy can only be found in 
 the perception of the truth, that reason attains its absolute 
 ends in an infinite series of relative ideals, which are each 
 realised in the proper place and produce corresponding rela- 
 tive forms of happiness, while their imperfections act as 
 incentives to the attainment of ever loftier ideals. By this 
 conception of a development of reason itself in the course 
 of human history, Hegel effected the synthesis of these con- 
 flicting views, a synthesis which Herder doubtless himself had 
 vaguely caught sight of We see from this instructive 
 example how much critical idealism and historical realism (or 
 the theory of evolution) mutually need each other to supply 
 their defects. 
 
 The antagonism between Herder and Kant, which first 
 appears in the department of the philosophy of history, 
 Herder carried into all the chief points of the Kantian philo- 
 sophy in his later writings {" Meiakriiik" ; '' Kalligone" ; 
 " Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebrducken"). It is 
 worth while to look at this a little more closely, as character- 
 istically illustrating the two sides of modern thought. Herder 
 wishes to substitute for Kant's critique of the reason a 
 physiology of the cognitive faculties, which would explain the 
 evolution of the higher from the lower faculties. He rejects 
 the distinction between a purely receptive sensibility and 
 a purely spontaneous understanding, as also that between 
 the simple matter of experience and the a priori forms of 
 perception — space and time. These last, in Herder's view 
 the result of actual experience, being an abstraction from its 
 contents ; in themselves they are the objective forms in which 
 forces work and manifest themselves to us. Our sense-per- 
 ceptions are not given us as a chaotic multiplicity which our 
 spontaneity only afterwards and arbitrarily unifies without 
 reference to the object ; on the contrary, our senses, by virtue 
 of their own organic structure, give us a multiplicity reduced 
 to an ordered unity inherent in the object itself, recognised, 
 not created by us. Hence the understanding is not so spe- 
 cifically different from the sense-organism as Kant main- 
 tained, but operates as judgment and classification in all 
 sense-perceptions and in memory, not excepting even the 
 lowest sensation ; it is the same primary force of nature, show- 
 
 G. T. D 
 
34 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 ing itself here less clearly, there more distinctly and actively, 
 now in separate, then in a connected series of operations. 
 So too in the distinction between phenomena and noumena. 
 Herder can only see a delusion of the imagination, since the 
 true noumena must not be conceived as outside and behind 
 the phenomena, but as within and of them, viz., as the or- 
 ganising forces in organic processes ; to look for "the thing-in- 
 itself " behind the phenomenal world, is to look for the wood 
 behind the trees. Again, Herder is equally unable to follow 
 Kant in assigning freedom and necessity to the intelligible 
 and phenomenal worlds respectively ; on the contrary, the 
 two are the inseparable elements of the very nature of all 
 living force. In so far as forces act according to their own 
 nature, they are free ; in so far as they are limited by other 
 similarly free acting forces, there arise higher equations, 
 which we call laws of nature ; these do not destroy freely 
 acting forces, but presuppose them. Thus human freedom 
 also is only the highest force of our nature, which is free in 
 so far as by virtue of its self-determination it obeys our 
 nature's laws. On the other hand, it would be mere con- 
 fusion of thought to imagine a causality outside causality and 
 a nature outside nature. Specially emphatic is Herder's con- 
 demnation of the way in which Kant, in the dialectic of pure 
 reason, represents the idea of God as an illusion, which is 
 afterwards required again by the practical reason ; as if be- 
 sides the reason which proscribed this fiction there were a 
 second reason which could command its return from banish- 
 ment in the realm of the fabulous. This, says Herder, is 
 juggling with reason, and can neither lead to real conviction 
 nor to pure morality ; for a God thus postulated is no God at 
 all, but only a last resource for a destitute moral system, while 
 his existence is as problematical to the speculative reason as 
 the man in the moon. But to reason not divided against 
 itself God is certainly no problematical distant Being, whose 
 existence must first be artificially inferred, or, failing this, be 
 made a moral postulate. "On the contrary, he is the primal 
 Being, recognised by the reason as given in all being, the 
 primal force in all forces, the supreme reason of the world. 
 If there is a reason which is, and knows that it is, its own 
 cause, there is also a supreme reason which is and knows that 
 it is the cause of the unity of all things." 
 
 This is the same line of thought as we found in Herder's 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 35 
 
 essay on Spinoza. It does not essentially differ from Kant's 
 suggestion, in his Critique of Judgment, as to the divine 
 basis of the reign of law and purpose in the natural and moral 
 worlds. A reconciliation of the two points of view would, 
 therefore, seem not impossible, especially when we remember 
 Herder's statement elsewhere, that natural science only leads 
 to the conception of nature as the totality of order and form, 
 not directly to that God whom the religious mind desires to 
 find in creation, because he would satisfy its longing for life 
 and well-being. This involves the admission that the re- 
 ligious ideal of God and the metaphysical idea of a first cause 
 answer to the needs of two different sides of our mind, which 
 must not be directly identified. This was the truth contained 
 in Kant's distinction between the ideal of the practical reason 
 and the speculative idea of the unconditioned ; Kant's error, 
 against which Herder with good reason protested, lay in 
 representing this valid distinction as a deep and apparently 
 impassable gulf This is characteristic generally of the whole 
 antagonism between the two men ; the whole truth is nowhere 
 wholly on one side , each is strong just where the other is 
 weak. Kant's critical and analytical method was met by 
 Herder's bold, synthetical intuitions. In order to ensure to 
 the mind its active share in all cognition, Kant had ban- 
 ished its object to the dim, incognisable distance of das 
 Dingansich. Herder replied to this subjective theory by 
 maintaining that all cognition is only the recognition of what 
 is necessarily presupposed as given. Kant had separated 
 the various functions of the mind in cognition ; Herder 
 emphasised their unbroken connection as members in the 
 evolution of one and the same force. But Herder's theory 
 of cognition never ceased to vacillate in an ill-defined way 
 between a naive realism and a rational idealism. He slurred 
 over the antitheses, which Kant had laboured scientific- 
 ally to solve, by the help of an indefinite intermediate 
 idea. Herder's attempted correction of Kant could be 
 accomplished only by starting from his critical philosophy 
 and using its resources. This was, and still is, the task of 
 post-Kantian philosophy. 
 
 Having thus reviewed Herder's philosophical position in its 
 maturest stage, we come next to consider the form assumed 
 by his theory of religion in accordance with it. He expounded 
 his theory in a series of works, dealing partly with the Bible, 
 
2,6 Basis of modern theology. [Bk. i. 
 
 partly with dogmatic theology, between the years 1 793 and 
 1797. Their basal idea is much more nearly related to Kant's 
 philosophy of religion than Herder, in the heat of his polemic, 
 was able to see. The real difference is, that Kant's rational- 
 ism was softened by Herder's rich humanism, and brought by 
 the help of history nearer to ecclesiastical Christianity. Chris- 
 tianity is the ideal religion, and religioji is ideal humanity. 
 This is the ruling idea in these theological writings of the last 
 period of Herder's life. But in order to effect this equalisation 
 of religion and humanity, he does not, like Kant, work from 
 above downwards ; he does not construct a religion " within 
 the limits of reason," but he works upwards by the method of 
 historical study. It had always been one of his fundamental 
 convictions that Christianity is a history, an actual fact, an 
 object of experience, and that it can therefore be only rightly 
 understood by the aid of its historical docum^ents — through the 
 Bible. Hence the study of the Bible is the Alpha and Omega 
 of all theological studies. This view he had expressed with 
 eager enthusiastic warmth in his early Notes on the New 
 Testament and his Letters on the Study of Theology. But 
 now, while still remaining quite true to it, and as before giving 
 an sesthetic interpretation of the Gospels which halts mid-way 
 between rationalism and supernaturalism, an unmistakable 
 change has taken place in his method of exegesis. His in- 
 terest in the Gospel narratives had formerly been that of the 
 religious apologist ; but he is now at the same time the critical 
 historian, investigating the origin of the Gospels and their re- 
 lation to each other. Herder thus followed Semler, Lessing, 
 and Eichhorn in that scientific examination of the documents 
 of early Christianity which was fraught with such important 
 consequences to the theology of our century ; and though he 
 was still prejudiced in favour of the traditional authors of the 
 Gospels, he is nevertheless rich in subtle observations, espe- 
 cially with regard to the chronological order of the Gospels. 
 His keen eye discovered in the Gospel of Mark the oldest 
 written form of the apostolic tradition ; next in order he placed 
 the Gospel of the Hebrews. Both of these were used as 
 authorities by the Hellenist Luke in writing his history ; and 
 only subsequently appeared the Greek Gospel of Matthew, 
 consisting of a free translation and amplification of the Gospel 
 of the Hebrews. Last of all came the Gospel of John, as 
 " the echo of the older Gospels in a higher key." In it the 
 
Ch. 11.] HERDER. 37 
 
 Apostle John wished not only to expound, but also to purify 
 the Palestine gospel-tradition ; hence he narrated only a few 
 miracles, and even these only as symbols of the permanent 
 miracle of the person of Christ. Whilst the earlier Gospels 
 had still represented Christ as the Son of God in the narrower 
 sense, John sought to teach the higher conception of the Son 
 of God and Saviour of the world, and for this purpose made 
 his whole Gospel systematically the Gospel of the Spirit. 
 
 This is really a just description of the Fourth Gospel. But 
 a Gospel written with a dogmatic purpose, and standing in so 
 close a connection with the speculative movements of its time, 
 as Herder shows to be the case with this, cannot be an his- 
 torical authority for the life of Jesus. Obvious as this infer- 
 ence is, it was drawn neither by Herder nor by Schleiermacher 
 after him ; and it may be added that the latter was inferior to 
 his predecessor in insight into the peculiar character of this 
 Gospel. The inability to draw this conclusion was due in both 
 cases to sympathy, as idealistic theologians, with the spiritual 
 Gospel which converts history into ideas and ideas into history, 
 and thus, in a sense, furnishes the modern theologian with a 
 pattern for his semi-allegorical, semi-apologetical interpretation 
 of the Gospel narratives as " symbolic facts." For this reason 
 Herder, like Schleiermacher, entertained a pronounced pre- 
 ference for John's Gospel, because, — assuming its apostolic 
 authorship, — he thought he found in it the justification of his 
 own procedure in interpreting the gospel history in harmony 
 with his free idealising feeling, and in attributing everything 
 repugnant to it to the national and temporal limitations of the 
 narrators. Herder does not, it is true, carry this principle 
 out so consistently as Schleiermacher. In relation to the 
 gospel miracles, he is still unable to get beyond a strange 
 vacillation between their symbolical interpretation and ad- 
 herence to their real historical character. He quite agrees 
 with Lessing, that the truth of a doctrine cannot be dependent 
 upon miracle. " Was it necessary for fire to fall from heaven 
 2000 years ago in order that we may now see the bright sun ? 
 Must the laws of nature have been then suspended, if we are 
 now to be convinced of the internal necessity, truth, and 
 beauty of the moral and spiritual kingdom ? " Nevertheless, 
 Herder still regards at all events the three miracles of the 
 Baptism, Transfiguration, and Resurrection of Christ " as the 
 three bright spots in the celestial authentication of the con- 
 
38 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 secrated one;" for, he characteristically continues, "they have 
 a secret advocate in the human heart." Since the stories of 
 the miraculous appealed to his feelings and aesthetic taste, he 
 suppressed the doubts of his intellect, which had embraced, as 
 we have seen above, a philosophical view of the world in 
 which there was no place for miracles. It is not allowable, 
 therefore, to explain this surprising hesitancy and want of 
 clearness in Herder's treatment of the Biblical miracles simply 
 on the principle of accommodation, or from his fear of the de- 
 structive tendencies of the time ; but the reason of it must be 
 found in his whole mode of thought. It was always such an 
 essential peculiarity of his nature to look at ideas and actual 
 facts in closest conjunction, that he was unable in the case of 
 Biblical traditions to critically separate ideal contents from 
 historical realities ; in fact, he could scarcely understand that 
 this was required by science. Instead of explaining the re- 
 pugnant points in the miraculous narratives and dogmatic con- 
 ceptions of the Biblical writers by reference to their psycho- 
 logical origin in the religious and poetical motives of the 
 narrators or the community. Herder had recourse to a time- 
 honoured substitute for scientific criticism ; involuntarily and 
 unconsciously he recast the language of the Bible in the mould 
 of his own, he allegorised. The result of this procedure was 
 essentially the same as the " moral interpretation of the Bible " 
 demanded by Kant. Herder's fierce opposition to this latter 
 only proves that he did not see the divergence of his rational- 
 istic interpretation from the original sense of the text. The 
 Christs of the Synoptists, and of John, and of Paul, freed 
 respectively from the outer coverings of Nationality, of Alex- 
 andrian speculation, and of Pharisaic dogmatism, were all 
 made together to teach his Christianity of humanity, because 
 he was under the honest impression that he was thereby only 
 translating the meaning of the Biblical writers into the 
 language of our own time. This self-deception, though fatal 
 to the scientific value of his Biblical labours, was really use- 
 ful, and perhaps necessary to the practical success of his 
 attempted reconciliation of ecclesiastical traditions and modern 
 culture. Moreover, with all this, Herder was the immediate 
 precursor and kindred spirit of Schleiermacher, whose in- 
 fluence in the reconstruction of dogma was also closely con- 
 nected with the weakness of his historical criticism. 
 
 Like Lessing, Herder drew a distinction between Christ's 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 39 
 
 religion and the religion of which Christ is the object. Christ's 
 religion is the rule of salvation, supplied by the teaching and 
 life of Jesus in the perfect and universally valid form, viz., 
 " The knowledge of God as the Father, of man as his instru- 
 ment, of man's weakness as an object of grace and help, 
 of the divine in man, of the strength, purity, and nobility, 
 which must be roused and nourished. Love, therefore, — pre- 
 venient, pure, uniting, active, — is the only way of deliverance 
 from all evils that oppress man, the only motive power capable 
 of establishing a kingdom of God among men." Precisely 
 this, according to Herder, was the ruling idea of Jesus, and 
 the object of his life. "In his heart was written : God is my 
 Father and the Father of all men ; all men are brothers. To 
 this religion of humanity he dedicated his life, which he was 
 ready wholly to offer up, if his religion might be that of all men. 
 For it concerns the fundamental nature of our race^both its 
 original and final destiny. Through it the weaknesses of 
 mankind serve to call forth a nobler power ; every oppressive 
 evil, human wickedness even, becomes an incentive to its 
 own defeat. The truest humanity breathes in the few speeches 
 of Jesus which have come down to us ; it is nothing else 
 than humanity which he manifested in his life, and sealed by 
 his death, just as the chosen name by which he called himself 
 was the Son of Man. As a spiritual saviour of his race, he 
 sought to train up men of God, who would labour from pure 
 motives for the good of others and reign by their patience as 
 kings in the realm of truth and kindness. An object such 
 as this must evidently be the sole purpose of providence with 
 our race ; and all the wise and good on earth must and will 
 co-operate to this end, in proportion to the pureness of their 
 thought and endeavour ; for what other ideal could man have 
 of perfection and happiness on earth, save this universally 
 operative humanity ?" 
 
 According to Herder, therefore, the distinctive character of 
 Jesus was, that he bore in his heart the ideal of man as the 
 child of God, exemplified it in his life and death for our imitation, 
 and at the same time trained up men of God and established 
 a society of them, a kingdom of God among men, in which 
 will be realised the purpose of providence with our race. The 
 "Divine Sonship " of Christ is only another expression for 
 this ideal "man of God," who knows God as his Father and 
 all men as his brethren, and in self-sacrificing devotion to the 
 
40 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 good of men passively and actively fulfils the will of God. 
 Was not this fundamentally Kant's meaning when he de- 
 scribed Jesus as the pre-eminent representative example of the 
 idea of a race of men well-pleasing to God .'' Herder, indeed, 
 strongly denounced Kant's theory as " a romance, a mass of 
 misleading fictions, an ignoble perversion of Scripture," etc. ; 
 but this denunciation was doubtless primarily due to the 
 mistaken notion that Kant had wished to substitute a 
 personified idea for the historic Jesus. Herder's mistake was 
 rendered possible by Kant's method of expounding his posi- 
 tion, as his constructive rationalism led him to start from the 
 idea, and to connect the historical person of Jesus with it only 
 as an example ; while Herder started from the historical 
 person as the source of the Christian religion of humanity, and 
 portrayed the idea as the essence of the manifestation of this 
 person. The latter method is undoubtedly more advan- 
 tageous from the theological point of view ; but we must not 
 deny the philosopher the right of starting from the idea, with 
 its basis in the reason, and of accentuating the distinction be- 
 tween it and the historical person in whom it is presented 
 for imitation, though it does not derive from him its ultimate 
 origin. 
 
 Again, just as Kant had distinguished the pure moral faith 
 of the reason from the "statutory" faith of the Church, so Her- 
 der distinguishes the religion of Christ, identical with the pure 
 religion of humanity, from the religion of which Christ was 
 the object, or the " doctrines" about the two natures in Christ, 
 the legal conflict between Christ and Belial, the satisfaction 
 made by Christ's death, etc. Of these ecclesiastical dogmas. 
 Herder speaks much more contemptuously than Kant, calling 
 them childish questions, old second-hand phrases, masquerade 
 and hypocrisy ; for Kant had found a meaning even in these 
 doctrines, by interpreting them as symbols of the inner pro- 
 cesses of moral feeling. Herder's harsh judgment is no doubt 
 to be partially explained by his practical experience as teacher, 
 which showed him how many continue to cling to these husks 
 of dogma, and so never reach the true kernel itself. But it 
 was more especially the consequence of the optimism inherited 
 by Herder from Leibnitz, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau, and 
 shared by Goethe ; he was convinced of the essential good- 
 ness of human nature, and could only look upon evil as a 
 shadow, a weakness, which would of itself disappear with the 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 4 1 
 
 development of man's powers. Like Goethe, Herder was 
 incapable of appreciating the profound difference between idea 
 and actuality, duty and inclination, or the struggle of the good 
 and the bad principle, which was so important in Kant's ethics 
 and religious philosophy. Hence both of them found Kant's 
 doctrine of a " radical evil," which formed the basis of his 
 moral interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement and 
 justification, an incomprehensible stumbling-block. As the 
 natural consequence of this unqualified antagonism to the 
 dogmas of sin and salvation Herder found himself unable to 
 explain them; he regarded them as purely " arbitrary doc- 
 trines, having nothing to do with religion, which is an affair 
 of the heart," and even as " the tomb of religion." Herder did 
 not sufficiently consider that they could never have arisen and 
 influenced the Church, if they had not been the product and 
 the expression, — however imperfect, — of the heart's religious 
 energies, experiences, and needs ; and this to a large extent 
 explains the insignificance of Herder's direct influence on 
 theology. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, whose philo- 
 sophic views generally approached much more nearly Herder's 
 than Kant's, was nevertheless able to adopt and assimflate the 
 doctrines of sin and salvation, and was for this very reason 
 in a position to carry out that reconstruction of Protestant 
 theology at which Herder aimed. 
 
 Herder approaches Schleiermacher most nearly in his doc- 
 trine of the Holy Spirit, expounded in his discussion of the 
 third article of the Apostles' Creed, in the essays, Vom Geist 
 des Ckristenihtims, and Von ReliHon und Lehrmeimmzen. 
 By tracing historically the development of the idea of Holy 
 Spirit, he shows that its meaning in Christianity is nothing else 
 than the spirit of Christ, as animating and guiding the Chris- 
 tian Church and uniting all nations in the Kingdom of God. 
 He places it in contrast, not less to the dogmatic conception 
 of a personal principle inspiring man from without, than to the 
 philosophical idea of an autonomous legislation of the reason. 
 The idea of magical inspiration he had already strongly pro- 
 tested against in his BiHefe ilber das Studiinn der I'heologie. 
 Inspiration must not be conceived as either the depression or 
 as the wfld exaltation of our mental powers. " Can He who 
 made the eye be compelled to blind us in order that we may 
 see ? Can the Spirit, who animates creation and all our 
 powers, destroy them in order that in their stead he may pro- 
 
42 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. ' [Bk. I. 
 
 duce light within us ?" On the contrary, inspiration and en- 
 Hghtenment are the awakening of the noblest powers of the 
 mind ; perfectly undisturbed contemplation, calmest self-pos- 
 session, the most quietly effective truth, clear thoughts, en- 
 lightened views, happy resolves, pure actions — these are the 
 noblest gifts of the Spirit. The purest stage of revelation is 
 to see things as they are, face to face, without figures and 
 dreams. Least of all may we look for dark fanaticism in the 
 revelation of him whom John calls light-giving Reason mani- 
 fested on earth. His revelation, i.e., the truth which he clearly 
 saw and uttered, was deliverance from everything unnatural, 
 the restoration of mankind to the full use of its powers. 
 Wherefore what we have to do is to turn from everything 
 unnatural, from all magic, all bibliolatry, to nature and truth, 
 which is also the spirit of the Bible. 
 
 But, on the other hand, it is precisely this nature and truth 
 which Herder cannot find in the abstractions of philosophy. 
 " That egoism which of itself issues commands and derives all 
 its power to obey the law from the might of its own proud 
 formal dictatorship, can hardly be the Spirit of God ; for in a 
 formal legislation without contents, there is neither might nor 
 blessedness, neither life nor spirit. But it is life that impels 
 thee to what thou oughtest to do and to be. As in the realm 
 of nature a universal law assigns to each impulse its limits, 
 the observance of which limits leads to enjoyment, their dis- 
 regard to discomfort ; so the same law must be operative in the 
 realm of man's spiritual impulses. Here too watches a bene- 
 ficent spirit within us, awakening our slumbering powers, aveng- 
 ing their misuse, and saving us from excess. You may call it 
 reason, conscience, etc. ; the wise have ever recognised it as a 
 voice of God." It was this pure impulse in man which was 
 aroused by Christianity, not by the inculcation of virtue, for 
 thereby no impulse is roused, but by awakening love. Every 
 man has within him a good spirit, a divine voice, a canon and 
 criterion of truth ; not as a universal legislation for all rational 
 beings, but, as a definite and perfectly individual ideal of what 
 he himself is and ought to be. To become conscious of this 
 ideal, to acknowledge it, to obey its active impulse and con- 
 trolling limitations, this is living virtue ; in it each finds him- 
 self united to others in a fellowship of mutual activity, for no 
 impulse acts in isolation, and the noblest characteristic in man, 
 the impulse of all impulses, is love, the basis of all social life. 
 
Ch. II.] HERDER. 43 
 
 Herder therefore maintains that the Christian spirit is 
 neither the principle of magical inspiration nor simply the 
 legislative reason, but the inward impulse to truth and good- 
 ness, as the power of enthusiasm, truth, and love, which 
 does not merely command men to do the good, but is itself 
 operative, which does not issue a universal imperative, but 
 places before each his special individual ideal, and, as being 
 the purest impulse in men's nature, necessarily unites them 
 in social bonds. He opposed the abstractness and power- 
 lessness of Kantian ethics on the same lines as those on 
 which Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schiller, and others had tried to 
 remedy the incompleteness of the categorical imperative and 
 to restore to their proper place man's moral emotions and 
 impulses and individual needs. In conclusion, we may sum 
 up our view of the relation of Herder's philosophy of religion 
 to that of Kant in the words of Haym {Herder, H. 654) : 
 " Not only was Herder's religion of equity, goodness, and 
 loving-kindness larger-hearted than Kant's religion of rigid 
 duty, but it also fitted itself much better to the original docu- 
 ments, and, in fact, to the historical elements of Christianity 
 generally. Kant's religion of reason, with his principle of 
 moral interpretation, did violence to the words of the Bible 
 and the creeds ; Herder's religion of humanity put itself by a 
 little conciliation into accord with the words of Christ and 
 the apostles. Kant primarily impressed upon the intellectual 
 conceptions of the traditional religion a new moral form ; 
 Herder let intellectual conceptions alone, and, in opposition to 
 all dogmatic theology and all philosophical formulae, empha- 
 sised the inward contents of that religion, consisting in the 
 emotions and dispositions of the heart. Both aimed at purify- 
 ing and rationalising Christianity, the one by a morality of 
 pure reason, the other by a morality not less emotional than 
 rational." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 schleiermacher's period of romanticism. 
 
 Two years after Herder's book on Religion imd Lehrjuehi- 
 ungen, appeared the work of Schleiermacher, then a young 
 preacher in Beriin, Reden ilber die Religion an die Gebildeten 
 zmter ihren Verdchtern (1799). The object of the two books 
 was essentially the same ; they protested against religion 
 being confounded with the opinions of the schools, whether 
 theological or philosophical, and against its being mixed up 
 with politics ; in a word, against dogmatic and politico- 
 ecclesiastical Christianity. They insisted, on the other hand, 
 on the inwardness of the religious life, the immediateness of 
 religious feeling, and especially on the free play of religious 
 individuality. But the Romanticism of the younger writer 
 led him so to exaggerate this common drift that it became 
 unhistorical subjectivism and an exclusively emotional mys- 
 ticism, which Herder's many-sided humanism and historical 
 insight could never have approved. But in spite, or rather 
 because, of this extreme one-sidedness, Schleiermacher's book 
 made a deeper impression upon its time than Herder had 
 been able to produce with his own more moderate writings, 
 designed to effect a compromise between the extreme views. 
 To-day, the mystical, poetical, rhetorical language of the Reden 
 is hardly to our taste; but to the educated classes of his own 
 time, whose thoughts and feelings were those of idealistic 
 Romanticism, this language was intelligible, and well calculated 
 to bring home to them the peculiar value of religion, and, — 
 if not to accomplish the reconciliation of modern culture and 
 the ancient faith of the Church, — at any rate to prepare the 
 way and show its possibility. Though we' can find but little in 
 the paradoxical positions of these Reden which is permanent 
 and valuable as it stands, they are still historically important, 
 as containing the fertile germs, the refined and ripened 
 products of which we shall hereafter meet with in Schleier- 
 
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 45 
 
 macher's great work on dogmatics, which accomplished the 
 reconciliation of Herder's religion of humanity with the 
 doctrines of the Church. 
 
 That Schleiermacher's system is much more akin to 
 Herder's than to those of Kant, Fichte, or Schelling, is an 
 indisputable fact, hitherto always overlooked only because 
 Herder, standing mid-way between philosophers and theolo- 
 gians, has had the misfortune to be ignored by both parties as 
 not belonging to either of them. In his attack on the chief 
 positions of Kant's theory of religion, — the transcendental 
 postulates of freedom, immortality, and God, — we find Schleier- 
 macher in his earliest writings fighting side by side with 
 Herder. As Herder had rejected a causality outside causality, 
 and held freedom and necessity to be combined in the nature 
 of the rational will, i.e., the will determined by its own law 
 (comp. ante, p. 34), so Schleiermacher, in an essay on 
 freedom, substituted for Kant's dualism a psychological 
 determinism, according to which the will is determined by the 
 nature of the conceptions at any time present in the mind 
 as a whole. As Herder had condemned Kant's procedure in 
 basing his postulate of God on the conception of the supreme 
 good, so Schleiermacher, in a subtle analysis of this idea,^ 
 showed the untenability of Kant's definition of it as the 
 combination of virtue and happiness ; for happiness is by no 
 means a conception of the pure reason, being conditioned 
 by time and sensation, and hence cannot belong to 
 the " supreme good," either in a future world or in 
 this, for the "supreme good" means simply "the totality 
 of what is possible by the laws of pure reason." Moreover, 
 as Schleiermacher elsewhere remarks, according to Kant's 
 argument, which bases the belief in God and immortality 
 upon impure motives derived from the interests of happiness, 
 this belief must wane in good men as their motives wax 
 in purity. Further, as Herder had resorted to an idealised 
 Spinozism. as against the onesidedness of subjective idealism, 
 so Schleiermacher felt the necessity of combining, as mutual 
 correctives, Spinozism and the onesided idealism of Kant and 
 Fichte which made the universe merely the reflection of 
 our limitations, hoping thus to gain a " higher realism " as the 
 foundation of religion. Thus Spinoza's cognitio Dei intuitiva 
 
 1 In Dilthey, Beilagen, pp. 10-15. 
 
46 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 lies at the root both of Herder's and Schleiermacher's 
 conception of religion. Herder teaches that our reason must 
 recognise God as the primal Being in all being, the primal 
 Force in all forces, the supreme Reason in the world ; he 
 speaks of "a feeling of the invisible in the visible, of the 
 one in the many, of power in its effects, as the root of all 
 ideas of the reason " to which we must trace back the origin of 
 religion. With this, Schleiermacher almost verbally agrees, 
 pronouncing the "contemplation of the universe," and "the 
 feeling of the infinite in the finite " the pivot of religion. But 
 at this point appears a significant difference. Herder failed 
 definitely to distinguish the intuitive perception and recog- 
 nition of the revelation of God in the world and in men,, 
 either from thinking or iri particular from moral willing and 
 action ; hence he gives so wide a meaning to religion that it 
 is in danger of being lost in the indefiniteness of ideal 
 humanity, and to a large extent becomes equivalent to 
 morality ; Schleiermacher, on the other hand, in order to 
 ensure to religion its special sphere, drew so sharp a line 
 between the immediate sight and feeling of the infinite and 
 reflective thinking and the moral life, that religion seems to 
 be confined to the mystical emotions of the individual, and 
 its influence on the thoughts and actions of men, and there- 
 with its power of forming communities, to be destroyed. 
 With both thinkers religion is a matter of the heart, but it 
 is so with Herder in the sense that the heart's emotion is 
 one with conviction and purpose ; with Schleiermacher it 
 is so in the sense that the heart with its emotions with- 
 draws into its own mystical depths, fearing any freezing 
 contact with thought and purpose. This is the point of 
 contact between Schleiermacher and Romanticism, in which 
 the subjective idealism of philosophy had become the practical 
 cultus of the ego, more specifically the apotheosis of the heart 
 with its noble or ignoble feelings. Novalis was only 
 expressing the views of Schleiermacher as he then was, when 
 he said, "Religion arises whenever the heart comes to feel 
 itself; when it makes itself into an ideal object, and all absolute 
 feeling is religious." 
 
 In order to discover the origin of religion within the soul, 
 Schleiermacher, in the second Rede, refers to the moment 
 prior to all definite consciousness, in which the universe comes 
 into contact with our sensibility, when sense and object are 
 
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 47 
 
 Still one, not yet separated respectively into perception and 
 feeling. In spite of the poetical description of this moment 
 as " the direct betrothal, too holy for error or mistake, of the 
 universe with the incarnate reason in creative, productive 
 embrace," we cannot understand why in it should lie the 
 origin specially of religious states of mind, since this moment 
 is simply that of the direct affection of the senses, which is 
 the source of all perception and sensation. This difficulty 
 is not solved by what follows : " So far as your feeling ex- ; 
 presses the life and being common to you and the universe, 
 it constitutes your piety ; your sensations, and the effects upon 
 you of all the life surrounding you, are all elements, and the 
 sole elements, of religion ; there is no feeling which is not 
 religious, save such as indicates an unhealthy condition of 
 life." Here, as in the words of Novalis just quoted, feeling ' 
 and religion are simply identified ; and the facts are over- 
 looked, which can escape no impartial student of the religious 
 life, that there are feelings which, without being unhealthy, 
 have nothing to do with religion, and that religion has an 
 active side of conception and purpose, in addition to a passive 
 side of feeling. 
 
 But Schleiermacher speaks not only of feeling but also of 
 intuitions {Ansckammgen), which in the first edition of the 
 Reden hold the first place, even though afterwards subordi- 
 nated to feeling. The relation of the two is not clearly stated, 
 but it is plain that Schleiermacher could not ignore the 
 intuitions if he wished to state the definite contents of the 
 religious consciousness, and not rest satisfied with the complete 
 indefiniteness of feeling. The object of religious intuition is 
 indeed the universe, yet not directly as such, but in its finite 
 revelations in nature and human life. In nature it is not 
 masses of natural or beautiful forms, but laws which reveal 
 the divine unity and unchangeableness of the world, and 
 which therefore affect us religiously. Yet there the question 
 arises, whether the aesthetic view of nature is really so im- 
 material to religion, whether it does not affect the mind much 
 sooner than the intellectual view ; further, whether the reign 
 of law in nature is an object of direct intuition and not rather 
 the result of reflective thought. The external world can only 
 be understood by the internal, and this again only by the 
 contemplation of self in the mirror of mankind at large; whilst 
 the individual, when looked at from the moral point of view, is 
 
48 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 isolated and found wanting, as measured by the standard 
 of the ideal, religion discovers even here a characteristic life 
 and wonderful harmony of the whole. Leaving the whole 
 and contemplating himself, the devout man finds there too 
 the marks of the highest and the lowest, a compendium of 
 humanity. Further, even when intuition fails us, imaginative 
 presentiment can travel beyond nature and mankind, and 
 reach further forms of the universe. With these intuitions 
 are connected the religious feelings of humility, love, thank- 
 fulness, pity, remorse ; feelings which, Schleiermacher holds, 
 do not belong to morality but only to religion, since they do 
 not exist for the sake of some action, but are their own cause 
 and end, as factors of the highest and most inward life. These 
 feelings have a peculiar complexion in each religion, comparable 
 with the different styles and tastes in music ; and the character 
 of a religion is determined solely by this common element of 
 feeling, not by a system of propositions deducible from each 
 other and capable of logical concatenation. For this very 
 reason, everything in religion is equally true, as far as it is 
 the pure product of feeling and has not yet been moulded by 
 thought. The distinction of "true and false," therefore, does 
 not apply to religion at all ; every religion is true in its own 
 way, though it must not be forgotten that the whole realm of 
 religion is boundless, and can assume the most diverse shapes. 
 Religion is never intolerant, but only religious systems. The 
 mania for systems repudiates everything foreign to each, 
 while religion shuns the cold uniformity which would be fatal 
 to its divine profusion. It is only the adherents of the dead 
 letter, which religion rejects, that have filled the world with 
 the tumult of religious controversies : they who have had a true 
 vision of the Eternal were always peaceful souls, being either 
 alone with themselves and the Infinite, or, if they looked 
 around on others, gladly according to each his special 
 characteristics. To a devout soul, religion makes everything 
 holy and precious, even what is unholy and common, whether 
 corresponding to its own thought and action or not ; for 
 religion is the sworn foe of all pusillanimity and narrowness. 
 She cannot be held responsible for fanatical actions, simply 
 because she does not of herself impel to action at all. 
 Religious feeling is neither bound, nor permitted directly 
 to influence action ; it rather invites to peaceful, absorbing 
 enjoyment, than impels to external acts. Feelings and 
 
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 49 
 
 actions naturally form two concurrent series, " nothing 
 should be done at the instigation of religion ; but every- 
 thing with religion ; religious feelings should accompany 
 active life without intermission like a sacred melody." 
 
 We see that Schleiermacher is here pleading the cause of 
 a mystical religion of the heart ; a religion which is satisfied 
 with the peaceful absorbing enjoyment of its own feelings, and 
 does not think itself called upon to formulate either an intel- 
 lectual truth or a consistent system of dogmas, or to take 
 an active part in the world's life, thus with large-hearted toler- 
 ance giving free play to the thoughts and ways of mankind. 
 
 With all respect for this large-hearted humanity, we are 
 compelled to ask two questions : Firstly, how far does the 
 actual history of religion correspond to the description of it 
 here given ? Has any vigorous religion ever actually abstained 
 from laying claim to the exclusive possession of the truth, or 
 from giving expression to its emotions in corresponding deeds, 
 in energetic action upon the world ? Has not precisely the 
 early youth of all religions, when their enthusiasm was most 
 spontaneous and least controlled by reflection or confined in 
 systems, been marked also by the most intolerant self-assur- 
 ance, the most narrow exclusiveness, and the most passionate 
 zeal in proselytising ? And is the vehemence, distinguishing 
 disputes about religious dogmas from other conflicts of opinion, 
 due really to intellectual thought, and not rather to the pathos 
 of the emotions finding expression in these dogmas ? If it be 
 rejoined that it was not Schleiermacher's object to describe 
 the positive religions, but only the ideal religion, conceived 
 by him as the goal of historical development, this would at 
 once give rise to the further question. Can we accept it as 
 characteristic of the ideal religion, that it should be the self- 
 abandonment of each to the enjoyment of his individual feel- 
 ings, without seeking at all to influence the thought and action 
 of individuals, to say nothing of the community ? In fact, the 
 only conclusion to which we can come is, that this isolation, 
 favoured by Romanticism, of the emotional religion of the 
 individual heart is not less impossible, psychologically, than 
 unhistorical, inasmuch as it destroys all the social elements by 
 which religion has formed communities and become a power 
 in history. Schleiermacher, it is true, could not escape the 
 necessity of offering an explanation of the facts of the actual 
 formation of religious conceptions and religious societies, ac- 
 
 G. T. E 
 
50 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 companying every religion ; but the way in which he does 
 this serves rather to illustrate than to obviate the error of his 
 principle. 
 
 The dogmas and propositions which experience shows to 
 be connected with religion, are, according to Schleiermacher, 
 simply the result of the comparison of the emotions, and the 
 means of their expression and communication to others ; for 
 religion i4;self they are not necessary, but are only an adven- 
 titious creation of reflection. A man may have a great deal 
 of religion without the aid of such concepts as " miracle, in- 
 spiration, revelation," but reflection on and comparison of his 
 religious feelings necessarily put them in his way. Hence they 
 have an unlimited right in religion, but only as religious ex- 
 pressions for subjective states of feeling, the meaning of which 
 must not be extended to the sphere of metaphysics or morals. 
 "Miracle" is the religious name for an occurrence; the re- 
 ligious man recognises miracles not in a few only, but in all 
 occurrences. " Revelation " is any original and new com- 
 munication of the universe and its inmost life to man, giving 
 birth to a special class of intuitions and emotions. " Inspira- 
 tion " signifies the feeling of higher enthusiasm and freedom. 
 " Prophecy" is the presentiment foreshadowing and anticipat- 
 ing the further course of a present train of events. All these 
 terms therefore denote subjective experiences essential to all 
 religious life, and therefore present in some degree in every 
 religious man. Hence, since each man can and ought to 
 experience these things for himself, faith must not depend upon 
 external authority, at any rate only temporarily. " Not every 
 man who believes in sacred Scriptures has religion, but only 
 he who has a living and direct understanding of them, and 
 who, therefore, so far as he himself is concerned, can most 
 easily dispense with them." Finally, Schleiermacher dis- 
 cusses from the same point of view the concepts, God and 
 Immortality. These, too, he holds, are not presuppositions 
 and conditions of religious feeling, but the product of reflection 
 on it. Hence the form given to the concept of God is of 
 secondary importance ; it depends upon the bent of the 
 imagination, whether we think of the Spirit of the Universe 
 as free personality, or give up the personal idea of the Deity, 
 in humble consciousness of the limitations of personality ; in 
 any case, whichever conception a man adopts, the main ques- 
 tion is, whether he has a feeling of God, and this feeling of the 
 
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 51 
 
 Divine will always be better than his conception of it. (The 
 last point may certainly be conceded, although one may with 
 good reason urge against the rest, that our idea of God is 
 still of much greater importance to the content of religious 
 feeling, particularly to its ethical character, than Schleier- 
 macher was willing to admit.) To the ordinary idea of im- 
 mortality our apologist for religion is not so much indifferent 
 as hostile ; it seems to him irreligious rather than religious, 
 as betraying a clinging to the finite form of existence, whereas 
 personality ought rather even here to be renounced from love 
 to God, in order to live in the One and the All. " In the 
 midst of the finite to become one with the infinite, and to be 
 eternal in every moment, — this is the immortality of religion." 
 (We may let the mysticism of this view pass without sup- 
 posing that the last, or even a decisive, word has been pro- 
 nounced on the question of immortality.) 
 
 The third Discourse draws a very dark picture of the age ,' 
 of the Aufkldrung, the shallow utilitarianism of which stifled j 
 all sense of religion ; and the fourth proceeds to speak of 
 Church and priesthood, describing religious fellowship both 
 as it is and as it ought to be. The actual Church Schleier- 
 macher considers to be only an association of those who are 
 still seeking religion, in which all are supposed to receive, and 
 only one to give. It is therefore opposed in almost every 
 respect to the ideal religious community. Though indispens- 
 able at present as an institution for scholars and learners, 
 it suffers under unavoidable defects ; the authority and the 
 method of the transmission of religious doctrines inevitably 
 produce sectarianism, superstition, adherence to ceremonies, 
 and the distinction of priests and laity. All these evils are 
 made intolerable, and the real ruin of the Church brought about 
 by the interference of the State in the Church's life. Left to 
 itself, its imperfect condition would have led to the separation 
 of the true Church, the living members uniting in small societies 
 around leaders chosen by themselves. But these true inspired 
 members were excluded by the connection of Church and State 
 from the leadership of the community, and their place was 
 unworthily filled by officially appointed teachers, whose duty 
 was to educate the citizens in the habits of thought favourable 
 to orderly government. Besides this, articles of belief were 
 settled, and ceremonies enjoined, and the whole degraded into 
 a political institution. This state of things cannot be main- 
 
52 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 tained. " Away with all such connection between Church and 
 State ! I shall continue, like Cato, to reiterate this oracle until 
 the end, or until I see the connection annihilated." With the 
 end of our artificial culture and social system will have come 
 a time when, as in the sacred youth of the world, no other 
 society will be necessary to help men to be religious than that 
 of the devout home. There will no longer be any distinct 
 office of teacher, no difference between teacher and congre- 
 gation ; the calling of the minister will be a private occupation, 
 the temple a private room, an assembly of likeminded friends 
 will form the Church. Then only will the exalted fellowship 
 of truly religious souls spread in all directions, as an academy 
 of priests pursuing religion as an art and a study, as a circle 
 of brothers united by the closest ties of sentiment and mutual 
 understanding. Such was the ideal Church of Schleiermacher 
 in his early years, an ideal in which Moravian mysticism is 
 combined with Romantic exaggeration in fantastic idealism. 
 Herder, notwithstanding his equally great dislike of an official 
 State Christianity, took a far more sober view of the functions 
 of the Church in the moral education of the people. 
 
 The fifth Discourse treats of the Positive Religions. As 
 something infinite, religion can exist in the world only under 
 a multiplicity of specific manifestations, that is, in the various 
 positive religions, and not as an empty abstraction, such as the 
 so-called " natural religion" would be. The preference given 
 to the latter in his time, Schleiermacher thinks, was due simply 
 to the fact, that those to whom religion in general was ob- 
 noxious like that form of it best which is really not religion 
 at all, and has the fewest of its characteristics. So-called 
 "natural religion" is commonly so refined away, and so nearly 
 akin to metaphysics and ethics, as to exhibit few of the cha- 
 racteristic traits of religion. On the other hand, every positive 
 religion has a specific individual character. The character of 
 such a religion is not determined by its share of the totality 
 of religious views and feelings, for these may all be met with 
 in some form in every actual religion ; but each individual 
 religion is produced when some special view of the universe 
 is made a centre-point, and everything else subordinated to it. 
 In so far as each man can do this for himself, there would 
 naturally be as many individual religions as religious indi- 
 viduals. And, in fact, Schleiermacher explicitly says, Any 
 man who can fix the date of the birth of his religion, and trace 
 
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 53 
 
 its origin to the direct action upon him of the Deity, i.e., to 
 " revelation," has his own special and real religion. Here 
 everything is life and freedom and true natural development, 
 whereas in " natural religion " everything is abstract, and its 
 strength lies in the negation of what is positive and character- 
 istic ; it is like the soul that refused to come into the world, 
 because it wished to be not a definite man, but man in general. 
 This subjectivism, which resolves all connection between his- 
 torical religions into accidental individual phenomena, was 
 afterwards abandoned by Schleiermacher himself when he 
 sought to combine the claims of individuality with the import- 
 ant functions of the social element. 
 
 The development of religion Schleiermacher conceives as 
 following the successive stages (then erroneously accepted) 
 of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. In this connection 
 he has occasion to speak of pantheism, which he does not 
 regard as a special form of religion, but as a speculative 
 theory, quite reconcilable with true religious feeling, as long 
 as we do not understand by it a masked materialism. The 
 fundamental idea of Judaism Schleiermacher holds to be 
 retribution, which was only possible in the narrow field of 
 a limited national community ; its importance as preparatory to 
 Christianity he rates very low. " I hate in religion this idea 
 of historical relations ; each religion has its own eternal neces- 
 sity, and has always its own independent origin" — a statement 
 characteristic of Schleiermacher's want of historical insight, a 
 defect from which even his later theology is never quite free. 
 The fundamental idea of Christianity he considers to be, that 
 the corruption of the world, consisting in alienation from God, 
 is put an end to and a mediation is effected between the 
 finite and God by individual points, scattered over the whole, 
 in which both the Divine and the human are united. " Ruin 
 and salvation, enmity and mediation, these are the two in- 
 separably connected fundamental relations underlying this 
 habit of feeling, and determining the shape of the entire re- 
 ligious content and form of Christianity." That presupposition 
 of universal ungodliness is the cause of the polemical character 
 and the sense of " sorrow " which, Schleiermacher thinks, are 
 special characteristics of Christianity. But since Christianity 
 at the same time discerns in history constantly new dispensa- 
 tions on the part of God for retrieving this ruin, ever higher 
 revelations and mediators with a view of uniting the Divine 
 
54 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 and the human, it makes the history of religion itself the 
 material of religion and so raises religion as it were to a 
 higher power (just as, according to Schlegel, the poetry of 
 Romanticism, by taking the given forms of poetry itself as its 
 material, raises poetry to a higher power.) Of the founder of 
 Christianity it is further maintained, that the wonderful thing 
 about him was not so much the purity of his moral doctrine, 
 which only expressed what is common to him with all men who 
 have attained to full spiritual consciousness, nor his character, 
 combining exalted power with touching gentleness ; what was 
 truly divine in him was the clearness of his idea of the neces- 
 sity of a mediation between everything finite and God, or of 
 the necessity of redemption for man imprisoned in the finite. 
 "His consciousness of the directness of his knowledge of God 
 and of his existence in God, and of his power of arousing it 
 in others, was at the same time the consciousness of his medi- 
 atorial office and of his deity." " But never," adds Schleier- 
 macher, " did Jesus claim to be the only mediator " ; he never 
 required men to accept his ideas for the sake of his person, 
 but only the latter for the sake of the ideas ; he never repre- 
 sented the views and feelings which he communicated as the 
 totality of religion, neither did his disciples ever wish to limit 
 the absolute freedom of the revelation of the spirit ; and so 
 neither does the Bible forbid any other book to be or become 
 a Bible too. Christianity will last for ever in so far as there 
 will never be a time when no more mediators are needed ; but 
 nevertheless it repudiates the claim to be the sole and sove- 
 reign form of religion ; it wishes to see other younger, and, if 
 possible, stronger and nobler forms of religion springing up 
 beside it, and a prophetic mind could perhaps even now indi- 
 cate the point which must be the centre of communion with 
 the Deity for future generations. This view of the possibility 
 of a more perfect religion than Christianity Schleiermacher 
 afterwards limited to a continuous development within Chris- 
 tianity itself, just as in his later Glaubenslehre he no longer 
 regarded Christ as one mediator among several, but as the 
 only one whose consciousness of God was perfect and of 
 unceasing efficacy for the whole race. 
 
 We can easily understand that so original and paradoxical 
 a work as these "Discourses on Religion" would arouse 
 much opposition on all sides; in the narrow circle of the 
 author's Romantic friends only did it meet with approval, and 
 
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 5-5* 
 
 even there it was qualified. Of the various criticisms none 
 was more common, or more just, than that Schleiermacher had 
 overlooked the essential connection of religion with morality 
 and the basis of its importance socially. But any one whO' 
 was inclined on this account to accuse our apologist for reli- 
 gion of lacking true regard for ethics, was at once corrected' 
 by the appearance of his Monologen (1800), supplying the- 
 moral philosophy corresponding to the religious philosophy 
 of the Discourses. But the remarkable thing is, that while in^ 
 the latter he taught a religion independent of morality, in the 
 former he teaches a morality independent of religion. In both 
 cases the formal principle remains the same, viz., the self- 
 contemplation of the ego, freed from all extraneous hypo- ; 
 theses and limitations, the ego contemplating within itself the 
 forms of the spirit's life in their individual development and 
 also in their general laws. But in the first work the object 
 of self-contemplation was the ego as intuitive and emotional, 
 its passive relation to the universe being excited and de- 
 termined by impressions from it ; in the second, it is the ego 
 so far as it is conscious of its absolute freedom and shapes its 
 internal as well as the external world by spontaneous action. 
 In the one he teaches, with Spinoza, the complete dependence 
 of everything finite upon the One Infinite ; in the other he 
 makes, like Fichte, the ego itself the creative w~hofe, of which- 
 even the world is only the self-created mirror. Common to 
 both works is the individualistic form given to the ideal ; in the 
 one, it is required that every truly religious man should be 
 conscious of special revelations of the Deity, or feel himself a 
 special mirror of the universe ; and in the other that each man 
 should, in a manner peculiar to himself, represent in his own 
 person the nature of humanity and determine his inward 
 and outward action by the law of his own individual life with 
 a freedom unrestricted by anything external. Free and 
 harmonious culture by the independent development of our 
 own capacities and glad recognition of the peculiarities of 
 others, such is the principle of this theory of ethics, which 
 seeks to overcome the Kantian antithesis of duty and inclina- 
 tion by conceiving the moral law, not as a universal imperative, 
 but as arising in each individual as a special vital impulse 
 which need only be followed purely and uninterruptedly in 
 order to contribute a chord to the harmony of the moral 
 world. It cannot be disputed that this aesthetic and humanis- 
 
56 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. 1. 
 
 tic ethical principle, adopted also by the Jacobis and Herder, 
 Goethe and Schiller, embodies an important truth as against 
 the one-sided rigorism of Kant ; but it is equally indisputable 
 that it does not contain the whole truth, and, if exclusively 
 pursued, may lead to dangers of a different and more serious 
 kind than did the Kantian ethics, especially when we re- 
 member the practical fruits of this principle in the circles of 
 Romanticism, which cast their dark shadows even into 
 Schleiermacher's life. The defects of the whole school may 
 be stated in a few words : it falls to properly recognise the 
 dependence of the individual on its historic conditions and the 
 obligations of the individual towards the historic aims and 
 objects of society. This indicates what is needed to supply 
 subjective idealism with its true objective, i.e., social, comple- 
 ment, and to correct the strange separation of religion and 
 morals, as if unrelated to each other, inasmuch as religion 
 shows the possibility of the reconciliation of both, as present- 
 ing in God the common source of individual freedom and social 
 obligation. 
 
 The conversion of subjective into objective idealism was 
 carried out by Kant's successors in various directions ; by 
 Fichte in the direction of Ethical Idealism, the original ethical 
 atheism of which afterwards became a mystical pantheism ; by 
 Schelling in the direction of a philosophy of nature, which 
 was afterwards transformed into theosophy ; by Hegel in the 
 form of Logical Idealism, with the incorporation of the theory 
 of historical evolution. Since these systems as philosophical 
 theories, especially the two last, affected theology in various 
 ways, it will be necessary for us to take a brief survey of them. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 J. G. fichte's ethical idealism. 
 
 The years at the close of the last century in which Herder 
 wrote his books against Kant, and Schleiermacher his Dis- 
 courses on Religion and his Monologues, witnessed also the 
 controversy on Fichte's atheism. This controversy was both 
 the occasion of the philosopher's removal from Jena, the strong- 
 hold of the Kantian philosophy, to Berlin, the stronghold of 
 Romanticism, and, at the same time, of the reconstruction of 
 his philosophy. It was provoked by Fichte's essay, Ueber 
 den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine s^ottliche Wcltrerierunsi 
 (1798), in which he affirmed that faith in our ethical vocation 
 and in the moral order of the world, as the necessary pre- 
 supposition for the accomplishment of our moral vocation in 
 the world, is the only true faith, maintaining at the same time 
 the impossibility of tracing this moral order back to God as its 
 cause. Fichte followed in Kant's footsteps, in so far as the 
 latter had based religious faith on faith in our moral vocation, 
 which is at the same time the vocation of the world ; but whilst 
 Kant made man's inability to bring nature into harmony with 
 his moral vocation the ground of the postulate of God, to supply 
 this want of human power, Fichte considered this postulate 
 not only as superfluous, but even as impossible, since a God 
 acting in the interests of happiness would appear desirable to 
 the physical man only, but would do dishonour to our moral 
 reason, and therefore be really an idol. Hence in his Ap- 
 pellation an das Publikum gegen die Anklage des Athetsmus 
 (1799), Fichte declared that his accusers, who wished to have 
 a God for the satisfaction of their desire for happiness, were 
 the real atheists. 
 
 This rejection of Kant's dogmatic postulates was a necessary 
 consequence of the logical rigour of Fichte's idealism, both 
 practical and theoretical. From the autonomy of the practical 
 reason he inferred that it was itself sufficient to work out its 
 self-imposed aims, not needing to have its freedom supple- 
 
"58 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 mented by divine aid ; and he gave full effect to Kant's asser- 
 tion that the understanding legislates for nature ; he set aside 
 the " thing-in-itself " which had in Kant confined the indepen- 
 dent activity of cognition by making it dependent on an object, 
 and declared it the self-imposed limitation of the active ego. 
 Thus the world which forms the content of our consciousness 
 was made absolutely, in form and matter, the simple product 
 of our consciousness, the unsubstantial image of our creative 
 imagination. And just as the active ego, by its acts of reflec- 
 tion, is the free creator of its world, so its freedom or, what is 
 identical with it, its moral vocation, is also the end and pur- 
 pose of this world. The world, says Fichte, is nothing but 
 " the material of our duty clothed in forms of sense," an object 
 which, in itself unreal, is only conceived by the ego as the 
 inevitable material for the action of its moral freedom. This 
 thorough-going subjective idealism is quite reconcilable with 
 ethical idealism as long as the non-ego created by the concep- 
 tion of the ego does not go beyond nature ; for whether this is 
 something real or only an unreal phantom of my imagination 
 matters very little to ethical purpose and action ; it might 
 even seem conducive to the moral grandeur of mind to strip 
 nature of its substantiality and degrade it to the unreal and 
 impotent product of the mind's representative functions. But 
 what if the non-ego include other human beings as well as 
 nature } Are these also, as belonging to the content of my 
 consciousness, only the product of my consciousness, only the 
 self-imposed limitation and means of the employment of my 
 freedom 'i Without doubt this pronounced " solipsism " would 
 be the ultimate logical issue of subjective idealism ; but it 
 would also be the end of all moral convictions, for to theoreti- 
 cal solipsism could only correspond an unqualified practical 
 egoism. It is extremely characteristic of Fichte's speculative 
 thought, that it was not any theoretical consideration, such as 
 the objection of unsophisticated common sense, but simply 
 and solely this moral abyss that quelled the proud daring of 
 his subjective idealism, and led to the introduction of a trans- 
 cendental object. 
 
 We first meet with this change of view in the treatise On 
 Die Bestimmung des Menscken (1800). In it too the final 
 result of the philosophy of pure knowledge is still asserted to 
 be, that the sense-world is only the conception in which all 
 finite rational beings agree, depending upon the common 
 
Ch. IV.] riCHTE. 59 
 
 limitation of their reason. But, he goes on to ask, what could 
 limit reason except what is itself reason, and what could limit 
 all finite reason except the infinite reason ? This universal 
 agreement with regard to the world of sense, as the sphere of 
 our duty, and hence our necessary and antecedently given 
 starting-point, is as incomprehensible as our agreement with 
 regard to the products of our mutual freedom, and is the result 
 of the One eternalinfinite Will. But in that case belief in our 
 duty is really belief in God, his rationality and faithfulness ; 
 he creates in our minds the feelings, perceptions, and laws of 
 thought constituting the world of our consciousness. All our 
 life is his life, our thoughts, so far as they are good and true, 
 are thought in him. From this point of view the world too 
 is seen in a new light : though the earlier idealism remains, 
 with its negation of a dead mass, a material nature, and a blind 
 destiny, it is no longer the ego that creates the world by its 
 imagination, but it is the life of God that is visible to the 
 religious eye, no less in the outer than in the inner world; the 
 world is no longer the unreal shadow of my perfectly free and 
 absolute ego, but the manifold appearance of the one divine 
 life and light, of which I see the reflection within me and 
 without, in the whole realm of kindred spirits with like con- 
 ceptions and feelings. In this way subjective idealism is 
 transformed into a mystical pantheism, most nearly akin to 
 that idealised Spinozism found in Herder and Schleiermacher. 
 But what in Herder was put forward dogmatically in opposi- 
 tion to Kant's critical philosophy, is in Fichte the result of 
 the logical following out of critical idealism itself Fichte's 
 philosophy fell in with the tendency of the time, and helped 
 on new developments of thought, whilst Herder's had the 
 stream against it and remained unnoticed. 
 
 Fichte's change of view necessarily gave quite a new shape 
 to his theory of religion. His former stiff moralism, accord- 
 ing to which the only possible creed is a cheerful fulfilment of 
 duty in active life, gave place to a religious mysticism quite 
 averse to active life. In his Grundzilgen des gegenwdrtigen 
 Ze?Va//£r5 ( 1 804), where the stern condemnation of the Auf- 
 kldrung follows quite the track of Romanticism, religion is 
 said to consist, not in any form of action, but in the view of 
 the world as the differentiated manifestation of the one divine 
 Being, or a metaphysic of the supersensible with the corres- 
 ponding disposition of the heart ; the love of the religious 
 
6o BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 man is rooted in the one divine basal life, and hence he is 
 raised both above the imperative laws and the low pains of 
 nature, and every moment he is in immediate full possession 
 of eternal life with all its blessedness. The nature of religion 
 is more fully expounded and more definitely marked off from 
 ethics and metaphysics in the work Anweisung zitni seligen 
 Leben (1806). In it Fichte distinguishes five ways of re- 
 garding the world : the lowest is the ordinary realistic view of 
 the senses. The second is that of imperative law, finding 
 the ground and purpose of the phenomenal world in a regu- 
 lative law (Kant's position). The view of true morality ranks 
 higher ; according to it, the law is not merely imperative, but 
 also creative, a vital impulse constituting the man swayed 
 by it the image and revelation of the divine Being (position 
 of Jacobi and the great poets). The fourth view is that of 
 religion, which beholds in all manifestations of the true and 
 good, the one life of God, and, by feeling, has experience of 
 it, as the power of holy life and love. Lastly, the fifth view 
 is that of science, which raises the connection of the finite 
 with the one divine life, directly felt in faith, into a matter 
 of knowledge, and makes it the object of clear conviction. 
 Religion shares with this scientific view of the world the 
 characteristic of not being directly active but contemplative, a 
 peaceful view, remaining within the heart and not directly in- 
 citing to any definite action ; religion is, however, superior to 
 science in this particular, that it does not confine itself to con- 
 templation but becomes a practical energy, the will to do all 
 and every duty as the will of God for us and in us ; religion 
 is, in a word, the love of God, in which man feels God within 
 him as a quickening spirit, and surrenders his whole personality 
 to God. Fichte, it is true, describes this devout love of God, 
 just like Spinoza, as absorption into God, as being fused and 
 blended with him, so that it is really God's own love to 
 Himself, which becomes conscious in man in the form of 
 feeling. But even as this mystical oneness with God, 
 Fichte's ethical idealism remains in so far intact, that the 
 devout love of God is by no means exhausted in inactive 
 emotion or calm contemplation, but is represented as the 
 source of a joyful and active love of man ; "moral action 
 flows from it as quietly and calmly as the light from the sun." 
 But this love founded on religion does not love everything 
 in man without distinction ; it hates everything base and 
 
Ch. IV.] FICHTE. 6 1 
 
 mean, but believes in the existence and the development of 
 the divine germ in every man, and so becomes the source of 
 glad and hopeful labour for the elevation of the human race. 
 Thus this warm and optimistic enthusiasm for humanity, based 
 upon religious feeling, formed in the end the meeting-point of 
 Kant's disciple Fichte and his opponent Herder ; and in pro- 
 portion as Schleiermacher rose above the aesthetic subjectivity 
 of Romanticism, he too ranged himself definitely on their side; 
 so that these three noble thinkers stand at the opening of 
 the century as joint prophets of that truth which was to be 
 the distinctive sign of the coming generations. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 schelling's philosophy of nature and theosophy. 
 
 In the same year as Fichte's work on Die Bestimmung des 
 Mensc/ien, appeared Schelling's System des transcenden- 
 talen Idealismiis (1800), in which the objective ideahsm, first 
 suggested in Fichte's work, was reduced to a system. This 
 philosophy also claimed to be idealism, for it enunciated 
 the principle, that all knowledge must be deduced from 
 consciousness, by making the action of intelligence the object 
 of intellectual contemplation. But just as Fichte had dis- 
 tinguished the absolute from the finite ego, which he conceived 
 as the differentiated manifestation of the one divine life, so 
 Schelling's Intelligence, by whose action the world is to be 
 explained, is not only the human but the absolute Intelligence, 
 and its action is not simply to produce ideal conceptions but 
 to create the real world of nature and history. On the other 
 hand, this divine Intelligence must not be thought of as apart 
 from that of the human ego, but is related to it as the whole 
 to a part or the original to a copy ; and thus, Schelling holds, 
 we can regard the functions of consciousness producing our 
 ideal world as the copies and symbols of the forces and laws 
 conditioning the generative process of the real world. If 
 nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature, it appeared 
 possible to explain the genesis of the real world, or nature 
 outside us, by the contemplation of the action of the ego in 
 forming propositions and definitions, in the same way as 
 Fichte's theory of science ( Wissenschaftslehre) had explained 
 the genesis of the world of consciousness. This is what 
 Schelling tried to do in the first part of his System des trans- 
 cendentaleii Idealismus. By the method of the Fichtean 
 deduction of consciousness a philosophy of nature is pro- 
 pounded, in which the genesis of nature is traced in an 
 ascending scale from the elemental forces of matter to the 
 production of organic animal and conscious life. The second 
 part supplies the corresponding practical philosophy, dealing 
 with the action of human freedom in history. But in this 
 
 63 
 
Ch. v.] SCHELLING. 63 
 
 action of individual free agents law or necessity prevails un- 
 consciously, by means of which, from the play of the volition 
 of individuals, there is ultimately produced an harmonious 
 order, undesigned by them. This implies that all free action 
 is ultimately based upon some common element guiding the 
 orderly development of the whole. Such a synthesis, or pre- 
 established harmony, of the subjective and objective, of 
 conscious freedom and unconscious necessity, must depend 
 upon something higher than either, which can only be the 
 absolute identity oi both. It is the " eternally unconscious " 
 which is the root of all intelligences and the basis of law and 
 order in their freedom, but which, being absolutely simple, can 
 never be the object of knowledge but only of faith. At no 
 point in history is it visibly manifested, but it is revealed con 
 tinually throughout its whole course. But can we not some- 
 where get a direct intuition of this harmony of freedom and 
 necessity ? Certainly, answers Schelling, following Kant's 
 Critique of Judgment, viz., in art. In artistic creation 
 conscious and unconscious action so far coincide that the artistic 
 product, though the work of freedom, is the end aimed at by 
 nature's necessity. The infinite harmony striven after in the 
 endless chain of historical acts, has become a finite manifesta- 
 tion in the beauty of the work of art. In aesthetic contem- 
 plation is objectively reflected the original identity of the 
 conscious and unconscious, of nature and freedom, underlying 
 all separations of them in consciousness. 
 
 When the absolute Identity had once been thus raised 
 above the ego and nature as their higher unity and common 
 basis, it was an easy step to formulate the new " Philosophy of 
 Identity," in which consciousness was no longer taken as the 
 starting-point, as in the transcendental philosophy, but the 
 Absolute implied in it. Moreover, in his form of treatment 
 Schelling went over from Kant to Dogmatism, as Fichte had 
 gone over to Spinoza. As Spinoza in his Ethics begins 
 at once without any deduction, with the definition of Sub- 
 stance, in order to draw deductions from it, so Schelling now 
 starts with the proposition, that absolute reason is the in- 
 difference of subjective and objective. It is the end of all 
 antitheses, it is the world as the eternal and unchanging unity 
 of the real and the ideal. Hence the Absolute cannot be 
 grasped by reflection, by analytic or synthetic thought, but 
 only by "intellectual intuition," which, as the copy of the 
 
64 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I 
 
 absolute, is likewise itself the unity of the ideal and real. By 
 this method, which he pronounces the only truly philosophic 
 one, Schelling attempts to derive differentiated Being from 
 the unity of the absolute Identity. That this attempt was fore- 
 doomed to failure is manifest ; if it lies at all within the range 
 of our powers of knowledge, to trace the genesis of the world 
 from the Absolute (which must be denied), this would in 
 any case be rendered least possible by the assumption of this 
 empty abstract conception of the Absolute as the simple in- 
 difference of opposites ; how by its means the rich variety of 
 the real world could be explained, is quite inconceivable. 
 This was felt soon after by Schelling himself, and it led him 
 to a theosophic reconstruction of his philosophy of Identity, 
 though he only replaced one error by another, or rather sub- 
 stituted mythological poetry for philosophic thought. Before 
 following this further step of Schelling's, we must glance at 
 his theory of religion, as developed from the more sober point 
 of view of the philosophy of Identity. 
 
 In his treatise Methode des akademischen Studinms 
 (1803) Schelling has occasion to speak of religion, and treats 
 it, unlike Schleiermacher, not from the subjective and psycho- 
 logical, but from the objective and historical point of view. 
 In accordance with the then universally accepted philosophy of 
 history, he makes history begin with a golden age of inno- 
 cence, the unity of man with nature. Thereupon followed, 
 after a universal fall, the epoch of disruption between mind 
 and nature, of the painful consciousness of misery and guilt. 
 The reconciliation of this disruption by faith in Providence 
 began with Christianity, the central idea of which is God be- 
 come man, in the sense that "the eternal Son, born of the being 
 of the Father of all things, is the finite itself as it is in the 
 eternal contemplation of God, and which appears as a suffer- 
 ing God subject to the conditions of time, who in his highest 
 manifestation, that is in Christ, closes the world of the finite 
 and opens that of the infinite, or the reign of the spirit." The 
 Incarnation must not, therefore, be regarded as an individual 
 event in time ; it would in that case have no meaning, since 
 God is above all time ; but it is an incarnation from eternity ; 
 and though Christ is its highest point, and so also the be- 
 ginning of its complete realisation, the perfect intelligibility, 
 as historical events, of the rise of Christianity and of the 
 person Jesus remains unimpaired thereby. Thus Schelling 
 
Ch. v.] SCHELLING. 65 
 
 wishes in general clearly to distinguish the idea of Christianity, 
 which can only be known from its entire history, from its 
 first appearance as attested in the Biblical writings, and for this 
 very reason advocates the free historical interpretation of these 
 writings. Since the Christian idea is not dependent upon this 
 one event, but is universal and absolute, it cannot, says 
 Schelling, make any difference to its truth whether we 
 consider the books of the Bible authentic or not, whether 
 their narratives record actual events or Jewish myths, or 
 even whether their matter conforms to the idea of Christianity 
 or not ; if Christianity had not always been considered a 
 merely temporal phenomenon, we should have made much 
 more progress towards the historical appreciation of the 
 important documents relating to its origin. The task before us 
 cannot be to restore these original forms, as the Aufklarung 
 supposes, but to set the eternal idea free from the wrappings 
 which have hitherto enveloped it, and to enable its ideal kernel 
 to shape for itself new forms in the spirit of the present, a task 
 to which the existing relations of philosophy and poetry to 
 religion already point. In this distinction between the per- 
 manent idea in Christianity and its perishable envelope, and in 
 the demand for the free development of the former out of the 
 latter, Schelling is in complete agreement with Lessing and 
 Herder, Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher ; but whilst these 
 thinkers found the idea of Christianity in moral or religious 
 humanism, Schelling sought it in a speculative theory of the 
 relation of the finite to the infinite, and thus entered upon the 
 disastrous path of the intellectualistic theory of religion which 
 was further developed by Hegel. Connected with this was 
 Schelling's depreciation of the value of the historical side of 
 Christianity, especially of the early Biblical records, which 
 suffers him almost to sever all connection with ecclesiastical 
 Christianity. Herder, with a true instinct, had already pro- 
 tested against a similar error on the part of Kant ; and we 
 shall see later that Schleiermacher's theology was indebted to 
 this effort to effect a closer union between idea and history for 
 its superiority over the idealistic philosophy of religion and 
 for its profounder influence on the life of the Church. 
 
 The problem of the explanation of the finite from the 
 infinite never ceased to occupy Schelling after the formulation 
 of his philosophy of identity in 1801. The consciousness of 
 his failure to solve it is already betrayed in his treatise on 
 
 G. T. F 
 
66 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 Philosophie 7md Religion (1804), where the genesis of the 
 world from God is explained by the aid of the Platonic myth 
 of the declension of the ideas or souls from the divine unity. 
 That this explanation explains nothing is evident ; for the 
 possibility of a declension presupposes the existence of the 
 finite. The possibility of such a declension remained incon- 
 ceivable as long as the conception of the absolute was adhered 
 to as pure and simple identity. An alteration of this concep- 
 tion was therefore necessary on internal grounds, but it was 
 actually brought about by Schelling's study of the theosophy 
 of Jakob Bohme, one of the fundamental principles of which 
 was, that God is not a simple but a living unity, comprehend- 
 ing distinctions within itself. From this new point of view 
 Schelling wrote his Untersuchiingen ilber das Wesen der 
 menschlicken Freiheit (1809). The indifference of opposites, 
 he now teaches, is not as yet God's actual being, but only its 
 primal source (or Urgrimd, to use Bohme's term). This 
 unity differentiates God himself into the antitheses of nature 
 and intelligence, which only when combined constitute the 
 actual life of God. Moreover, nature in God, as in us, pre- 
 cedes intelligence as its Basis, and without it personality is as 
 little conceivable in God as in us ; for personality depends 
 upon the combination of a self-contained principle with an in- 
 dependent Basis, This nature in God is as such simply a 
 blind, unreasoning instinct. By it we can explain the residue 
 of reality never resolvable into reason, the irregularities under- 
 lying all order in the world, as a chaos never wholly subdued. 
 The desire for reconciliation on the part of this dark Basis 
 produces reason, which, when united with the instinct of 
 nature, becomes free, creative, almighty will, and reduces to 
 order the forces of chaos. But since the blind will of this 
 Basis continually reacts, and only gradually gives way to 
 reason, the conversion of nature into spirit can only proceed 
 by degrees in the various grades of the natural world. All 
 beings, as springing from the dark Basis in God, have an 
 individual will of their own ; but, as also originating in God's 
 reason, a universal will. From the increase and disunion of 
 these two forces in man results evil, which has thus poten- 
 tially its origin in the Basis of God, but actually in man's own 
 act in separating himself from the Universal will by an act of 
 self-determination out of time, and by that act simultaneously 
 determining his individual character, which is manifested in 
 
Ch. v.] SCHELLING. 67 
 
 his life in time. On the struggle of these two principles turns 
 the world's history. After the primitive age of natural in- 
 nocence, the will of the Basis, or natural self-will, obtains the 
 supremacy in the age of heathenism, till the divine light, or 
 the word of the divine Reason, appears in a personal mediator 
 for the restoration of the connection of creation with God. 
 Then the struggle between the divine and dsemoniacal king- 
 doms reaches its height; but in this struggle the physical glory 
 of the old world passes away, and God reveals himself in 
 the new world as the victorious spirit of the good. The goal 
 of history is the reconciliation of the natural self-will and the 
 universal will in love, which is the higher unity of both, and 
 by which alone God can really be all in all. 
 
 While we must acknowledge that this theosophy contains 
 profound ideas, which have influenced theological and philo- 
 sophical thinkers (Baader, Martensen, Rothe, Schopenhauer), 
 we still cannot deny that these ideas are mixed up with much 
 mythological poetry, which fails to satisfy either philosophical 
 thought or the religious consciousness. The notion of the 
 divine Intelligence issuing from a dark Basis of nature and 
 blind instinct grates upon religious feeling as a reminiscence 
 of heathen theogonies, by which the spiritual and ethical 
 purity of the Christian idea of God would be marred. This 
 defect remains substantially uncorrected in the final form of 
 Schelling's philosophy, though on this point the philosopher 
 designedly adheres very closely to the terminology of ecclesi- 
 astical dogmatics. As this "philosophy of mythology and 
 revelation " was only published after Schelling's death, about 
 the middle of this century, and has had no influence upon the 
 development of theology, any account of it is foreign to our 
 purpose. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Hegel's logical evolutionary idealism. 
 
 Hegel started from the earlier of Schelling's positions. He 
 agreed with his fellow Swabian and fellow-student that the 
 subject of philosophy is not merely phenomena, or the con- 
 sciousness of the ego, but the Absolute, which unfolds the 
 wealth of its content in the world of nature and history. 
 Hegel, however, conceived the Absolute, not as the " indif- 
 ference " of nature and spirit, but as spirit itself, which, as 
 the rational source of nature, must be prior to nature ; while, 
 as the self-existent spirit of the conscious subject, it must 
 have proceeded from nature. Spinoza had conceived the 
 Absolute as Substance, Fichte as Ego or Subject, while 
 Schelling had blended these antitheses in his neutral " In- 
 difference." Hegel agreed with Schelling in his neutralisation 
 of opposites in the higher unity of the Absolute, but argued 
 that this unity must not be simply asserted without proof, "as 
 if shot from a pistol " ; but the thing needed was to show how 
 Substance, or self-existent Reason, can become a subject, by 
 evolving its correlate nature, and passing through it, generate 
 itself as a subject or self-conscious spirit. Passive " indif- 
 ference," excluding opposites, is thus changed into the self- 
 development of spirit, passing through its opposite to a unity 
 at once destroying and preserving the opposition. In con- 
 junction with this change in matter there is an alteration in 
 method. Hegel was indeed at one with Schelling as to the 
 unsatisfactoriness of the philosophy of reflection, which pro- 
 ceeded from the antithesis of thought and being, and was 
 accordingly incapable of apprehending being itself, and could 
 never get beyond the antitheses of finite and infinite, appear- 
 ance and actual being, world and God. But he was as much 
 opposed to the " intellectual intuition " which Schelling wished 
 to substitute for rational reflection as the sole philosophical 
 method. This intellectual intuition, which is really an aesthetic 
 condition of mind most nearly akin to Schleiermacher's reli- 
 
 68 
 
Ch. VL] HEGEL. 69 
 
 gious intuition of the universe, cannot, Hegel argues, be the 
 basis of philosophy, which is concerned with concepts, and 
 is therefore the matter of thought. Only philosophic thought 
 must not be something abstract, perpetuating the antitheses 
 in their hostile exclusiveness, but something concrete, resolv- 
 ing antitheses and tracing concepts in their process through 
 their opposite. If thought, according to the philosophy of 
 identity, is one with being, and if the essential nature of the 
 absolute Spirit consists in living development, then, Hegel 
 infers, the philosophic method of thought must also consist in 
 the dialectical development of concepts ; hence the philosopher 
 has to imitate in the dialectical method the self-development 
 of the absolute Reason ; or, more strictly, his attitude is that 
 of a spectator observing the objective active process of pure 
 thought, this self- development of the absolute idea through 
 the process of the world's self-genesis. All the capriciousness 
 of merely subjective thinking is thereby excluded ; it is the 
 logical necessity of absolute Reason, as it develops into reality, 
 which is reproduced in the philosopher's thought. Herein, 
 according to Hegel, consists the only truly "rational" thought, 
 which combines the analytical reflection of the understanding 
 with synthetic intuition, in order to carry the absolute unity 
 of the one through the oppositions of the other up to the 
 derivative unity of the "concrete idea." Hegel thus supple- 
 mented and corrected Schelling's intuitive method by Fichte's 
 dialectical reflection ; from Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre he 
 took the general plan of his dialectic, the movement of thought 
 through Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; but what in Fichte 
 was the movement of the subjective consciousness to the 
 formation of its ideal world, became in Hegel the movement 
 of absolute Thought, the self-development of which into the 
 world of actuality repeats itself in the movement of the dialec- 
 tical thought of the philosopher to the formiation of his system. 
 Here, as in Fichte, the world is simply the product of the 
 development of logical thought, though not, as in Fichte, of 
 the thought of the ego, but of the absolute Spirit ; it is not 
 subjective, but absolute logical idealism. But in contradis- 
 tinction to Schelling, for whom the Absolute was passive 
 identity and intuition the method of philosophical knowledge, 
 Hegel's logical idealism is at the same time evohttioiiary in 
 two senses ; the actual is the evolution of the absolute Reason 
 in and through nature and history, and philosophy is the 
 
JO BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 imitation of this evolution in the dialectical movement of 
 ideas. 
 
 The Hegelian philosophy was the most logical and most 
 fruitful working out of the idealism which proceeded from 
 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which made the understanding 
 the lawgiver of nature. It was natural that this philosophy 
 should produce an immense impression upon its time, and that 
 it should be looked upon as containing the solution of all 
 problems. It gave the thinking mind the exalted conscious- 
 ness of perfectly comprehending the world, of fixing the place 
 in its system of ideas for all the realities of nature and history, 
 and of constructing a priori all the laws of phenomena in 
 conformity with the laws of thought. And to the practical 
 mind it gave the reassuring certainty that its sublimest ideas 
 were not merely subjective postulates and imperatives never 
 to be actually realised, but the eternal truths of reason, which, 
 as the all-ruling Power, infallibly carries out its plans in the 
 world of reality, and has realised itself in the past, and will 
 continue to do so in the future. The proposition that the 
 rational is actual, and the actual rational, expressed a more 
 optimistic faith in the reign of reason in the world than any 
 other philosophical system since Leibnitz had offered. In 
 this ideal optimism a generation weary of endless discussion 
 found the longed-for reconciliation of the intense but unprac- 
 ticable and disappointed idealism of the i8th century with 
 the actual forces of history, whose awful realities idealistic 
 enthusiasts had been compelled, by the great events of the 
 time, to remember and respect. If reason is everywhere 
 the deepest basis and the guiding law of r^eality, it need no 
 longer be looked for, as Kant taught, in a Golden Age of 
 the future, in an Eternal Peace which seemed never coming, 
 in a perfect condition of civil and political society, not as yet 
 discovered ; and equally little in a Golden Age of the past, 
 in a happy state of nature, in which Rousseau and, to some 
 extent, even Herder, had revelled. From all such super- 
 natural and extravagant speculations, toward which an age 
 of enthusiasm had directed its gaze in hope or sorrow, to the 
 disregard of the historical world, Hegel called his contem- 
 poraries back to the firm ground of the historical life of man, 
 and showed them how a loving eye might there discover 
 undreamed-of stores of rational ideas and working ideals, in 
 which at all times and in every nation the sovereign Reason 
 
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 71 
 
 of the world had been able to attain its lofty ends, half uncon- 
 sciously to man himself ; though each end, as soon as reached, 
 must be seen to be but an imperfect stage in the development, 
 and must serve as means to a yet higher end. From this 
 standpoint a far profounder view could be taken of history, 
 and a far juster estimate formed of its varied phenomena. In 
 fact, no other branch of study owes to Hegel so much as 
 historical inquiry. The arbitrary treatment of details which, 
 in the case of Hegel and his immediate disciples, crept in, 
 under the influence of his philosophical idea, had of course to 
 be corrected by more exact historians ; but the lasting gain 
 is rich and manifold. It is a deeper insight into historical life 
 generally, as an orderly development of the one common spirit 
 of nations and ages, ruled by ideas, and aiming at necessary 
 common ends ; it is a more penetrating glance, through the 
 confused play of phenomena, into the essence of man and 
 things, into the dominant thoughts which are the controlling 
 motives underlying even the apparent discord of individual 
 passions ; it is the unprejudiced appreciation of the necessity 
 even of the oppositions and conflicts, the errors and passions 
 of men, because, as Hegel says, with Heraclitus, war is the 
 father of all things, and only through the strife of partial rights 
 and one-sided truths can the whole truth of the idea gradually 
 struggle into existence ; it is finally an intelligent reverence 
 for the heroic figures in history, in whom is embodied the 
 genius of nations or ages, who, as instruments of a higher 
 power, have roused the thought slumbering in the souls of all, 
 have given it clear expression, and in mighty deed have sum- 
 moned it to life. No such historians as Leopold Ranke, or 
 Thomas Carlyle, or Christian Ferdinand Baur are conceivable 
 without the Hegelian philosophy of history. 
 
 This profoundly suggestive conception of history has been 
 of especial service in the departments of religious and ecclesi- 
 astical historical study. Hegel teaches us to see in the 
 history of religion an orderly development of divine revela- 
 tion in man's consciousness of God, a development in which 
 no point is wholly without truth, though none has the whole 
 pure truth ; gradually divine truth reveals itself to the human 
 consciousness in ever greater purity, but always veiled under 
 Imperfect conceptions and symbols. The positive religions 
 are accordingly neither inventions of human caprice and 
 cunning nor expressions of the accidental emotions of in- 
 
72 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 dividual devout souls ; but, like law and custom, art and 
 science, they are necessary creations of the peculiar common 
 spirit of the different nations, and can therefore be properly 
 understood only in close connection with the general history 
 of the development of human society. Christianity is so far 
 an exception, that in it the spirit, not of a single nation only 
 but of mankind as a whole, becomes conscious of its essential 
 relation to God, and it is thus the absolute religion of revealed 
 truth ; though in it, too, this truth is always clothed and en- 
 veloped in conceptions which are more or less inadequate to 
 the idea. When once the whole history of the pre-Christian 
 and Christian religions is conceived as the religious spirit in 
 the process of evolution, having divine reason for its source 
 and human reason, — i.e., man's true consciousness of his rela- 
 tion to God, — for its end, the opposition between rational faith 
 neglecting history and historic faith contrary to reason, — which 
 was the point at issue between the Aufkldrung and its 
 opponents, — is then perceived to be a misleading abstraction 
 which must be replaced by rational historic faith and historical 
 rational faith. Thus Hegel's philosophy of religion, like his 
 philosophy of law and history, seeks to reconcile the claims 
 of personal freedom of thought with the claims of an authority 
 that has grown up in the course of history and acquired valid- 
 ity in society ; it seeks to mediate between subjective and 
 objective reason, between personal liberty and reverence for 
 the social forces of history. 
 
 We must not, however, omit to look at the dark as well as 
 the bright side of Hegel's logical idealism. The assertion of 
 the rationality of everything actual was so one-sidedly opti- 
 mistic as necessarily to produce the reaction of Schopen- 
 hauer's pessimism. Hegel's optimism led to a sluggish 
 conservatism, a passive tolerance of the existing state of 
 things simply because it exists ; it could be fair and tolerant 
 towards all historical phenomena except the Aitfkldrimg and 
 its rationalistic criticism of tradition ; its dislike of abstract 
 subjectivism might be carried so far as to reinstate faith in 
 every authority, no matter how irrational ; and these results 
 of his system were so obvious that, though not intended by 
 Hegel himself they at once showed themselves in his school 
 and disastrously perpetuated and increased the confusion of 
 ideas produced by Romanticism. But apart from these prac- 
 tical consequences, the question arises, Is the foundation of 
 
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 73 
 
 this absolute logical idealism sound? Is the position tenable, 
 that thought and being are identical and the whole world only 
 the self-evolution of pure thought ? Hegel makes the transi- 
 tion from logic, the region of pure thought, to the world of 
 reality by means of the proposition that the idea externates 
 itself and evolves nature from itself as its correlate ; but this 
 is really a phrase that explains nothing, to which Schelling 
 (like Fichte) unanswerably replied, that it is impossible to 
 deduce the real from a mere idea. But if this proposition is 
 untenable, the whole foundation of logical idealism is cut from 
 under it, the identification of the real evolution of the world 
 with the logical evolution of ideas is made impossible, the 
 dialectical method based on the identification is a failure, the 
 whole system which stands or falls with this method is doomed, 
 and a radical reform of idealism unavoidable. To this extent 
 the reaction of post-Hegelian empiricism was fully justified, 
 provided only that it did not go so far as again to deny alto- 
 gether the ideal element in knowledge and philosophy, and 
 so surrender the lasting results of the Kantian critical philo- 
 sophy. We shall return again to this point in another con- 
 nection. 
 
 The exclusively logical character of Hegel's philosophy, 
 with its resolution of all life into conceptual relations and 
 processes of thought, is the ground of the weakness of Hegel's 
 theory of religion, viz., its intellectual character, its exclusive 
 accentuation of the religious concept, and its failure to see 
 that religion is essentially a matter of the heart. According 
 to Hegel, religion has the same subject-matter as philosophy, 
 yet not, like the latter, in the form of logical concepts, but of 
 intuitions ( Vorstelhmgeii) in which the truth is conveyed for 
 the world at large ; religion is therefore to a certain extent 
 an exoteric philosophy for the general community, while philo- 
 sophy is the esoteric knowledge of the truth of religion. The 
 common content of both is "the knowledge possessed by the 
 finite spirit of its nature as absolute spirit," which also pre- 
 supposes " the absolute spirit's knowledge of itself in the finite 
 spirit," a self-communication or revelation of the divine spirit 
 in the human. But man's knowledge of the God revealing 
 Himself in him is not reached at once in a final and complete 
 form ; it is developed in a gradual advance of the conscious- 
 ness from the worthlessness and slavery of our natural existence 
 to the truth and freedom of a spirit at one with God. This 
 
74 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 necessary process of self-deliverance from bondage to nature, 
 of coming to oneself and becoming conscious of our divine 
 nature, furnishes the proof of the truth of religion and of its 
 foundation in man's nature. In his description of this de- 
 velopment of the religious consciousness Hegel distinguishes 
 three stages — feeling, intuition, thought {Gefilhl, Vorstelhmg, 
 Gcdanke). Feeling he describes as the immediate form in 
 which a content of consciousness is made ours ; and he is far 
 from disputing that the true content of religion, in order to be 
 our personal possession, must be an emotion, must be in the 
 heart, as the permanent seat of feeling and willing. But this 
 direct form, feeling, must not be regarded as the whole of re- 
 ligion, or as its distinctive excellence. For this form can have 
 the most various contents, the basest as well as the highest, the 
 truest as well as the most worthless. "As the object of feel- 
 ing, God is in nothing superior to the worst thing ; the king- 
 liest flower springs from the same soil as the most rampant 
 weed." Feeling Hegel does not even regard as specifically 
 human, but as the sense-form of consciousness common to 
 men and animals ; in it only the individual subjectivity asserts 
 itself, desiring merely its own enjoyment, instead of forgetting 
 self and living in objective thought and action. Hence feel- 
 ing, though the necessary lowest grade in consciousness, is 
 one that must be overcome and superseded by intuition and 
 thought. (This view of feeling is clearly based upon a false 
 psychology, connected with the fundamental error of logical 
 idealism ; instead of recognising the co-ordination and inter- 
 action of the emotional and the rational side of our spiritual 
 nature, the former is made a subordinate stage of the latter, 
 which is plainly contrary to all experience and eminently pre- 
 judicial to a true appreciation of religious experience.) 
 
 By intuition, or inward perception, consciousness, according 
 to Hegel's further description of the religious process, con- 
 verts the content, with which it was directly united in feeling, 
 into an object distinct from the subject. Intuition uses sense- 
 forms derived from direct perception, but in order to convey 
 spiritual truth, a higher rational sense ; it is therefore truth 
 under sense-symbols. It presents spirit, which transcends 
 time and space, as subject to the conditions of time and space 
 {e.g. in sacred history), or under a multiplicity of contradictory 
 conditions {e.g. man's freedom and dependence), each of which 
 taken by itself is accidental and irrational, since only in their 
 
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 75 
 
 unity can we perceive their truth as phases of the one Spirit. 
 Hence intuition is an inadequate form of truth, and must be 
 replaced by conceptual thought. But in thought Hegel again 
 distinguishes the reflection of the understanding from truly 
 rational or speculative thought. The former perpetuates the 
 opposition of infinite and finite, nature and spirit, etc., and 
 cannot effect their union. But thereby the infinite, conceived 
 as outside and beyond the finite, is itself limited and so made 
 finite ; and the ego, conscious of itself as the author of this act 
 of limitation, appears itself to be the Infinite; the antitheses 
 change places, the humble consciousness of finiteness becomes 
 proud self-deification (comp. Feuerbach's anthropologism). 
 But religion demands a point of view which shall be both the 
 negation of the ego in its self-centred isolation and at the same 
 time the affirmation of its true self in God. These conditions 
 are fulfilled by speculative thought, which includes the finite, 
 as an element of the divine life, and the infinite, as the living 
 process by which it first becomes and then ceases to be finite. 
 If the absolute self-conscious spirit thus appears from our 
 finite point of view as a result which has been brought about 
 by nature and finite spirit, in reality it is the Alpha, the 
 necessarily presupposed basis of the finite world. God is 
 the unity of the natural and the spiritual, yet not such a unity 
 as to place the two on an equality, for the unity is spirit, not 
 some tertmmqiiid in which both are neutralised. God is, on 
 the one hand (as finite) one side of the antithesis, and again 
 (as absolute) that which includes the other side, and so is the 
 unity of both (nature and finite spirit). This clearly indicates 
 the difference between Hegel's speculative idea of God and 
 Schelling's Absolute as the identity of spirit and nature ; the 
 latter is the neutral identity in which both sides of the anti- 
 thesis are equally absorbed ; Hegel's Absolute is the spiritual 
 principle which creates and dominates the antithesis, not so 
 as to be related in the same way to both sides, but so as to 
 make nature, as its own correlate, an instrument for the pur- 
 pose of the spirit in which it reproduces itself. It cannot be 
 denied that this conception of God is at least more allied to 
 theism than to what is generally understood by " pantheism." 
 So far undoubtedly Hegel was to some extent justified in 
 maintaining that there was no material contradiction between 
 his philosophy and Christian dogma ; though we cannot deny 
 that he optimistically underrated the difference. 
 
76 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 Hegel's Philosophy of Religion most nearly approaches 
 Christian doctrine in the profound chapter on worship, which 
 he regards as the active union of man with God by the 
 voluntary surrender of himself to the divine revelation ex- 
 perienced within him. Worship is primarily an inward act, 
 or faith, this living communion of the ego with God. It may 
 begin from some external witness or authority, but then it is 
 only formal faith ; true faith has as its basis and subject- 
 matter nothing accidental or merely traditional, but the living 
 witness of the spirit. " The non-spiritual cannot by its nature 
 constitute the subject-matter of faith. If God speaks, he 
 speaks spiritually, for spirit reveals itself to spirit only." The 
 end and aim of worship is self-sacrifice, self-renunciation, and 
 the appropriation of the divine grace as the real strength of 
 our own goodness, as the Holy Spirit. This inward senti- 
 ment then finds its expression in moral action also ; hence 
 religious faith and worship have everywhere the profoundest 
 influence upon the habits and laws of society ; want of freedom 
 in religion leads to want of freedom in the State ; freedom in 
 the State and not in religion leads to conflicts, such as have 
 arisen between the modern State and the Catholic Church. In 
 this recognition of the historical and social importance of re- 
 ligion Hegel's religious philosophy compares favourably with 
 Schleiermacher's subjective mysticism. 
 
 After discussing, in the first part of his Philosophy of 
 Religion, the nature of religion in general, Hegel proceeds in 
 the second part to speak of " specific religion," i.e., religion in 
 its pre-Christian forms. These various positive religions are 
 partial representations of special elements in the idea of re- 
 ligion, not indeed adequate to it, but necessary stages in its 
 evolution. Hegel distinguishes immediate religion, or the 
 religion of nature, corresponding to the childhood of humanity ; 
 then the religion of spiritual individuality, corresponding to 
 the period of youth, or of growing spiritual freedom ; to this 
 class belong the religion of the sublime (the Jewish), of the 
 beautiful (the Greek), and of the expedient (the Roman). 
 Finally comes " the absolute religion," or Christianity, in 
 which the idea itself finds manifestation ; Hegel also calls it 
 " the revealed religion," because in it God is known as He who 
 reveals himself in our spirit as truth and love ; and again " the 
 religion of truth and freedom," because in it the spirit re- 
 cognises itself in its true nature and thus at the same time 
 
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. ']'] 
 
 attains its freedom. In his account of Christianity he treats 
 of God, firstly, /gr .ye, as He is in eternity (kingdom of the 
 Father) ; then in His manifestation in history (kingdom of the 
 Son) ; lastly, in His return from manifestation into Himself, 
 in the process of reconciliation, or as the spirit of the Church, 
 which is the eternal in time. We must look rather more 
 closely at this philosophy of Christianity, as we shall often 
 meet traces of it in the history of theology. 
 
 Hegel regards the Church's doctrine of the Trinity as 
 supplying the stages of the speculative idea of God ; the self- 
 contained unity, self-differentiation, and the absorption of 
 the difference into the concrete identity of the differentiated 
 one. Of the three Persons, he expressly states that they 
 must not be taken literally, but as the figurative expression of 
 the true thought — that God is not abstract unity, the identity 
 without difference conceived by the understanding, or the 
 supermundane omnipotence of the Jewish religion, but 
 " eternal love," which is itself when in its correlative. This 
 nature of God is a mystery to the sensuous mode of thought 
 and to the understanding, clinging to differences as final, but 
 not to the reason, which finds in all life a continual generation 
 and destruction of contradiction, and therefore an analogy of 
 the triune life of God. It is easy to see that this speculative 
 interpretation of the Trinity is nearly identical with that given 
 by Lessing and Schelling, according to which the Son is the 
 world as an object of the divine thought, the intelligible world, 
 called also in Philo the Son of God. 
 
 The element of difference, already implicit in the nature of 
 God, comes into definite existence in nature, the correlative 
 in which spirit alienates itself, and completes itself in man as 
 conscious disunion. The orthodox doctrine of the original 
 state and fall of the first man, Hegel says, must be taken as 
 the symbol of what holds of man generally as such. The 
 idea of man, his design and function, is to be spirit, to think 
 and to will rationally, to learn to know God and nature ; but 
 if this idea of man is imagined to be his original condition in 
 time, this is a mythical notion. For by its very nature spirit 
 cannot be actually existent from the beginning. At first it is 
 still absorbed in nature, and must, therefore, in order actually 
 to become rational thought and free will, withdraw itself 
 from nature and come into conflict with it. An original direct 
 union with nature, so far from being a condition of superiority, 
 
75 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 is the condition of barbarism and wild desire, unworthy of 
 spirit, and diametrically opposed to its higher vocation. To 
 this animal insensibility, to the want of moral consciousness, 
 must be ascribed the innocence of man as the child of nature. 
 The loss of this was therefore not at all an irremediable mis- 
 fortune, but a divine necessity. The ever-recurring history 
 of man's freedom is that of his progress from this insensibility 
 of his earliest years to the light of consciousness, or more 
 particularly, that he learns to know good and evil. This ad- 
 vance from naive consciousness to moral consciousness, with 
 its contradiction between will and duty, its guilt and remorse, 
 its discipline and labour, does indeed at first seem to be a 
 calamity ; but this is only one side of the matter ; the other 
 side is, that within this calamity lies the source of the remedy. 
 Evil therefore did not spring from the accidental act of the 
 first man, nor is it transmitted by inheritance to his descend- 
 ants, but is involved, without any mediation whatsoever, in 
 the freedom of each individual as the first mode of its 
 appearance. For freedom arises solely through consciousness, 
 and consciousness is the act of the disunion of the ego, as in- 
 dividual will, from the universal and rational will. In this dis- 
 union within, and in relation to everything else, both freedom 
 and evil have their seat ; it is the source of moral disease and 
 also of its cure, of the reconciliation of the contradiction. 
 
 Like the contradiction, the reconciliation can only take 
 place by a process within the human spirit. Still Hegel finds 
 a sufficient reason for its being conceived in the creed of the 
 Christian Church as the external history of the incarnation of 
 God in Christ, as the atoning death of the God-man. For 
 the reconciliation cannot be produced from within man 
 himself by his subjective will and action, which never gets 
 beyond the contradiction ; but the consciousness must be 
 brought to look at and in faith appropriate the reconciliation 
 as a supposition certain in itself, as the objective truth of 
 mankind's actual reconciliation with God and by God as 
 reconciling love. Man can feel himself reconciled with God 
 and received into union with Him only when he sees in God 
 a being no longer foreign to himself and keeping mankind at 
 a distance, but Spirit and Love, in which man's nature as spirit 
 and free is also affirmed. But this unity of the divine and 
 human nature can become an immediate certainty in the 
 religious man only when it takes the form of God appearing 
 
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 79 
 
 to him as man and man as God, and indeed in the contempla- 
 tion of a concrete person in whom both are conjoined ; thus 
 the orthodox conception of the deity and humanity of 
 Christ, is explained as an inner necessity of the religious con- 
 sciousness in its Christian stage. Still Hegel is by no means 
 of opinion that the historical Christ was really a supernatural 
 being in the sense of the dogma of the two natures, but he 
 holds the historical Jesus to be essentially a man, who was 
 conscious of being himself one with the divine will, and in 
 this consciousness of union with God proclaimed, in the 
 language of inspiration, the highest religious truths ; by his 
 teaching and life he brought home to men, as the truth and 
 the necessary foundation of their religious consciousness, the 
 doctrine that God is not supermundane and far off, but 
 present in his kingdom, that He is love, and that the certainty 
 of this must be realised in each man's own breast. But it 
 was by faith only that the words of the man Jesus were 
 rightly and spiritually understood ; and this spiritual faith was 
 the fruit of Christ's death. His death was the crucial point 
 in the development of the Christian consciousness, when the 
 great transition was effected from faith in a mere man to faith 
 in the God-man, for it brought clearly before men's minds 
 the truth of the unity of the divine and human natures. And 
 it was just because this consciousness of the reconciliation of 
 God with the world, so fundamental to the Christian faith, 
 dawned upon the Church in its full spiritual significance only 
 after the death of Jesus, that Christians came to regard this 
 death itself as the central point of the reconciliation, and 
 beheld in it the absolute love, which in the finite itself over- 
 comes the finite — death, and so negatives again this negation. 
 But though it was intelligible and, looked at historically, 
 necessary, that the Christian Church should contemplate the 
 idea of reconciliation in the form of a particular occurrence in 
 history, it was nevertheless an incongruity to conceive what 
 was really eternal and of universal validity as having happened 
 once only and in the case of one individual. This incongruity 
 was in the first instance partially corrected by the two addi- 
 tional doctrines of Christ's second advent and of the mission 
 and perpetual presence of the Holy Spirit. By these two 
 conceptions the limitation to one external event put upon the 
 idea of reconciliation in the history of Christ was removed, 
 the reconciliation being made universal, perpetual, and inward, 
 
8o BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 just as the one fall of the first man was supplemented by the 
 idea of all men's inheritance of Adam's sin. This addition 
 was indeed only an external correction, one partial conception 
 being added on to another equally partial. The essential 
 thing, the real advance from the outward to the inward, can 
 only come to pass by individual Christians personally going 
 through this history or process, which they conceived at first 
 as a divine history external to them and enacted for their 
 sakes. By the enactment of the reconciliation as a subjective 
 process in individuals themselves is realised the Christian 
 Church. The Church is the institution having for its object 
 that men come to the truth, and that the Holy Ghost become 
 in them a living power, the knowledge and desire of the truth. 
 The means of attaining this object is doctrine, in which the 
 Church develops into conceptions (dogmas) the truth origin- 
 ally given as the direct witness of the spirit. Baptism 
 declares that the world into which the child enters is not a 
 hostile one, but the Church, in which evil is, as such, already 
 overcome and God reconciled. It only remains for the 
 individual to form himself upon the Church, by education and 
 practice, and to habituate himself to the goodness and truth 
 already existing in it. This constitutes his regeneration. 
 The spirit is not directly and without mediation what it is 
 designed to be ; the natural heart, by which man is held 
 captive, is the foe to be striven against. The work of the 
 Church is this very education of the spirit, so that truth may 
 become more and more inwardly one with the man, with his 
 will, and so his own personal knowledge and volition. Here 
 we have no mere naked obligation, progress without an end, 
 endeavour never to be fulfilled, as in the Kantian philosophy. 
 Here evil is known to be in itself already overcome in the 
 spirit (the Holy Spirit of the Church) ; and if the individual 
 only makes his own will good by means of this Spirit, by 
 believing in the reconciliation already accomplished, evil has 
 for him personally disappeared and sin is felt to have been 
 forgiven. This act is, on the one hand, the act of the 
 individual, who sacrifices his self-will (dies with Christ), on 
 the other, the act of the divine Spirit within him, which is the 
 spirit of the individual so far as he has faith. In the Lord's 
 Supper the Church celebrates this presence of God in the 
 immediate self-consciousness of believers. But this reconcilia- 
 tion, accomplished in worship, as an inward certainty in the 
 
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 8 1 
 
 depths of the soul, must make itself felt in the world of nature 
 and society. Moreover, the freedom of the spirit reconciled 
 to God must be active, not merely a negative, monkish re- 
 nunciation of the world, but must work positively, in permeating 
 all secular interests with the Holy Spirit, and in moulding the 
 world after the pattern of eternal truth. The harmonising of 
 true religion with true secularity is effected in morals and 
 science, which are the realisation of reason in the will and 
 knowledge of society. 
 
 Thus the Hegelian philosophy of religion ends as it began, 
 with the conviction that religion and Christianity, if taken in 
 a deep and free spiritual sense, so far from being antagonistic 
 to secular culture and knowledge, really form their source, 
 foundation, and motive power, and, on the other hand, find 
 in them their consummation, confirmation, and choicest fruit. 
 Kant's idealistic philosophy had started with the emancipation 
 of thought from the fetters of external authority, demanded 
 by the Aufkidrung, and with his sketch of " a religion within 
 the limits of pure reason." But even Kant, bold critic as he 
 was, had warned men not to confound Aufkidrung with 
 radical revolution, but to seek it in a just and orderly use of 
 the understanding ; and he had arrived by his investigation of 
 the laws of reason at a point of view which was so far superior 
 in ethical depth to the popular philosophy, and so essentially 
 in touch with the Christian view of the world, that he was 
 even able in his theory of religion to undertake what was 
 really a defence of Christian doctrines, at any rate in respect 
 of their ethical contents. Herder and Schleiermacher did 
 justice to religious emotion and intuitive imagination, which 
 Kant had slighted, and at the same time attempted to connect 
 ideal religion more closely with the historical facts and the 
 Biblical records of Christianity ; still these thinkers (we are 
 here speaking only of Schleiermacher's early period of 
 Romanticism) were too much shut in by the horizon of a 
 subjective piety to attain to a full appreciation of the historical 
 development of Christianity. This was the side from which 
 Schelling attacked the problem ; like the ancient Gnostics, he 
 tried to explain Christianity, from the most comprehensive 
 point of view, as a phase of the general development of the 
 world, not however without falling again into the Gnostics' 
 error of resolving religion into cosmo-mythological processes. 
 Hegel carefully avoided everything like Gnostic mythology, 
 
 G. T. G 
 
82 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I. 
 
 but carried on the great task of applying an objective historical 
 method to the study of religion. Herein lay his strength and 
 his lasting importance, while he was weak in the psychological 
 analysis of the religious consciousness and the emotions in- 
 fluencing it. But though his theology, and even more that of 
 his disciples, needed to be supplemented in this respect by 
 the school of Schleiermacher, it was of great importance that 
 Hegel clearly pointed out that the history of religion is a 
 development of the rational spirit, under the guidance of ideas, 
 and a development in closest connection with all other sides 
 of social life. He thus accomplished what Herder had 
 demanded, and an advance of the abstract subjectivity and 
 the poor external pragmatism of the Aiifkldrung was thereby 
 finally checked. 
 
BOOK II. 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY UNDER 
 THE INFLUENCE OF IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE SCHOOL OF KANT. 
 
 The Kantian philosophy influenced the whole theology of its 
 time, but in very various ways, according as the one or the 
 Other of the tendencies of thought involved in it was followed 
 by theologians, — whether it happened to be the sceptical,, or the 
 moral and rationalistic, or the theological utilitarian side of 
 the system. The theological postulates based on utilitarian 
 considerations, in which Kant, sceptic and rigorous moralist as 
 he was, made conciliatory advances to popular thought, offered 
 both to the conservative supernaturalists and the Wolfian 
 neologists of the Aiifkldrung a welcome means of approach- 
 ing this new philosophy and connecting themselves with it. 
 In other respects the former of these parties adopted the 
 scepticism of Kant's theoretical critique, and made it the 
 foundation of their historical dogmatism, while they either 
 simply rejected or else greatly limited the autonomous rational- 
 ism of the practical reason ; the neologists, on the contrary, 
 adopted Kant's rational ethics and ethical theory of religion, 
 though they toned down the rigour of his ethics, on the lines 
 of theological and philosophical utilitarianism, and tried, with 
 more or less success, to bring the rationalism of his religious 
 system into closer connection with historical Christianity. 
 Hence originated the various shades of the Rationalistic theo- 
 logy derived from the school of Kant. It alone concerns us 
 here ; while the use made of the Kantian criticism in the cause 
 of ecclesiastical and Biblical orthodoxy was so foreign to the 
 spirit of this philosophy, and had so little influence on the 
 development of theology, that we are justified in dismissing it 
 with a passing mention. 
 
 We may notice as a curiosity that many theologians, both 
 Protestant and Catholic, beheld in Kant's distinction between 
 phenomena and noumena and his limitation of knowledge to 
 the former, the means of rescuing the orthodox system from 
 the onslaughts of neological doubt. Though in the world of 
 
 H 
 
86 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 phenomena three persons are not equal to one person, and 
 one person cannot have two natures, still, they argued, the 
 possibility of this cannot be disputed in the case of the Divine 
 Persons, since they belong to the noumena, of which we know 
 nothing except that in this realm everything is in all respects 
 different from what prevails in the case of phenomena. A 
 similar position was held by Storr and his colleagues and 
 disciples, the so-called older Tubingen school, who exercised 
 greater freedom with regard to ecclesiastical dogmas, but held 
 all the more strictly to Biblical supernaturalism, which they 
 rested upon the traditional theory of inspiration. They main- 
 tained their Biblical system against all the objections and 
 doubts of the AufkVdrtmg by an appeal to the Kantian philo- 
 sophy ; since, according to the critical philosophy, reason itself 
 admits its inability to know anything of the supersensible, it 
 has logically no right to protest against what has been made 
 known to us concerning supersensible things by historical 
 revelation ; with regard to the practical reason, Kant himself 
 allows that it demands a requiting Deity for the satisfaction 
 of our desire for happiness, and is therefore in its own interest 
 called upon to receive upon authority the historical revelation 
 concerning God and his government of the world. Hence 
 the truth of the Biblical doctrines stands higher than the 
 critique of the speculative reason which confesses its own 
 incompetence, and accords with the demands of the practical 
 reason ; it has therefore nothing to fear and nothing to expect 
 from philosophy, but rests entirely upon the positive authority 
 of a supernatural revelation, which has only to be first histori- 
 cally proved and then reduced to a system. Storr did this by 
 putting together a dogmatic system, in the fashion of a mosaic, 
 from detached Biblical texts, without caring for any other 
 proof of his propositions, either by appealing to philosophy 
 or to the religious consciousness. We cannot but recognise 
 the strength of this position, which meets all rationalistic 
 objections by a sceptical depreciation of reason ; in all periods 
 this standpoint of faith, founded purely upon authority, has 
 been popular, but especially in those when philosophic thought 
 was at a low ebb owing to the overweening flights of previous 
 speculation. Its weak point is the unhistorical arbitrariness 
 with which individual passages of Scripture, torn from their 
 context, are used in proof of a system which is foreign to 
 them, because unknown to any of the Biblical writers. This 
 
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 87 
 
 method of using the Scriptures as one uniform code of doc- 
 trine quite ignores the peculiarities and variety of the religious 
 habit of thought of the Biblical authors, so different in point 
 of time, place, and character. Hence this Biblical dogmatism 
 could not survive a really historical examination of the Scrip- 
 tures, such as was undertaken by the later Tubingen school. 
 History had been the sole basis of the system of the older 
 Tubingen school, and by means of history it was overthrown 
 by the younger Tubingen school. Profound thinkers, like the 
 youthful Schelling, had, indeed, before this clearly perceived 
 how little this application of the Kantian philosophy to the 
 service of theological dogmatism accorded with its real mean- 
 ing and spirit ; his ridicule of these pseudo-Kantians was not 
 undeserved ; and dislike of this movement may well have 
 been one of the motives which soon began to lead Schelling 
 himself to subordinate, and this too absolutely, the critical to 
 the speculative side of Kant's system. 
 
 The thinker whose position was nearest that of Kant's 
 philosophy of religion was the theologian and philosopher 
 TiEFTRUNK. He held that the only possible foundation for a 
 religion with any claim to universal truth is the consciousness 
 of unconditional freedom and autonomy, by which we raise 
 ourselves above the world of sense and become members of a 
 world of spirits, or, indeed, even gods, as he says in the 
 hyperbolical language of the then prevalent idealism, and 
 differ from God, the supreme head of all intelligences, only in 
 degree, not in kind ; we have the same will and the same law 
 as God, our existence and independent activity are alike un- 
 conditional, and we have by our own will an infinite object in 
 our holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, which is also the object 
 of God. But whilst God is pure intelligence and therefore 
 his power of good is equal to his will of it, we are at the 
 same time creatures of sense, and our power of " execution on 
 that account falls short of our autonomous reason. Thus the law 
 of reason becomes a command to which both our sensuous 
 inclination and the external world of sense are often opposed. 
 Hence as intelligences we are supreme, and have no other 
 reason for obeying the moral law than the demands of the 
 dignity of our own personality. If we could satisfy this law 
 in its infinitude, we should be all-sufficient in ourselves and 
 have no need of a God. But as in reality it is our personal 
 worth only that wholly depends upon our own will, while our 
 
88 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 circumstantial well-being is not in our own power, inasmuch 
 as though we ought by merit to claim happiness we cannot 
 accord it to ourselves, we are led to acknowledge God, who 
 solves the contradiction between our ethical sovereignty and 
 our natural dependence by making all things subsidiary to the 
 end of created spirits and assigning them a natural condition 
 corresponding to their personal merit. Here, just as in Kant, 
 the existence of God and his government of the world are 
 postulated to make up for our want of power over nature, 
 while our moral nature, taken in itself, is conceived as so abso- 
 lute as in its self-sufficiency to have no need of God. It is 
 true that from this point of view faith in God, as thus estab- 
 lished, our reason itself, and its autonomy, are traced back to 
 a divine origin, but still the relation of the pre-supposed 
 sovereign autonomy to the divine legislation is not made 
 clear ; ethical idealism and the religious mode of thought have 
 no necessary connection, but move in parallel lines, sometimes 
 supplementing and sometimes restricting each other. — Though 
 the idea of God cannot be established by speculation, its 
 certainty is grounded on ethical necessities of thought, for 
 it forms the condition of the possibility of the supreme good, 
 in which we are by our moral nature compelled to believe. 
 Nor, again, is the further determination of our idea of God 
 possible by the methods of ontology, but by those of ethical 
 analogy — by our reasoning analogically from our own moral 
 causality to the relation of the divine causality to the world, 
 whereby we are able, at any rate symbolically, to describe the 
 action though not the nature of God, his moral attributes, 
 holiness, justice, goodness, and wisdom being first inferred, 
 and then the ontological ones deduced. The doctrine of the 
 Trinity is interpreted, with Kant, of the threefold relation of 
 God — as Creator and Lawgiver, as Ruler, and as Judge. 
 Further, the belief in immortality is rested, in Kantian fashion, 
 upon its being the condition of the possibility of endless moral 
 progress. 
 
 These doctrines, according to Tieftrunk, make up the 
 essential contents of every religion, no religion being univer- 
 sally valid save as it rests upon the principle, cognisable by 
 reason, of freedom and the moral law. From this he infers 
 that Rationalism alone meets the requirements of religion ; 
 for religion does not originate in feeling, but solely in the 
 spontaneity of the knowing faculty, and is therefore valuable 
 
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 89 
 
 only when the product of perfect insight and thorough convic- 
 tion. "Religious feelings must be produced by knowledge, and 
 not vice versa ; the perception of the moral law, of the existence 
 of God, and of our own immortality, is the first step, and pro- 
 duces in us an interest, which, as resulting from our recogni- 
 tion of these truths, we can call a religious emotion." But 
 the theologian Tieftrunk could not rest satisfied with this 
 formal and self-sufficient Rationalism. He endeavoured to 
 find an opening for historical religion and its claim to 
 revelation. In the first place, he showed in general that a 
 revelation is logically conceivable and morally probable on the 
 supposition of a declension of human morality so profound as 
 to be remediable only by a direct divine proclamation of the 
 moral law, together with the necessary outward means of 
 securing its observance. Among the latter he includes mira- 
 cles wrought on nature, which are considered quite possible, 
 as the sensible effects of a supersensible cause, as our own 
 free will operates in the world of sense as intelligible causality. 
 When once supernaturalism, after its repulse at the hands of 
 arrogant Rationalism, had thus been re-admitted by a back- 
 door, it maintained its position, at any rate so far as the 
 Christian religion is based, upon the historical testimony of 
 the Biblical writings. Since these satisfy the moral criteria, 
 a prion necessary, of a divine revelation, their acceptance 
 may be regarded as rationally justified. Still, Tieftrunk is far 
 from constructing upon this foundation a positive system 
 of Biblical dogmas after the manner of Storr's. On the 
 contrary, he holds that the content of revealed religion is 
 the same as that of natural religion, inasmuch as the 
 essence of ,the teaching of Jesus consists in the love of 
 God and of our neighbour, which is equivalent to Kant's 
 "joyful recognition and observance of the moral law as a 
 divine command." He cannot however but see that even the 
 revealed religion of the Bible (not to speak of the theology of 
 the Church) contains some things beyond natural religion. 
 Though in what this addition consists, and what is its value 
 and importance for us, are questions to which this Rationalism 
 can give only confused and indefinite answers. 
 
 The Rationalists Ammon, Bretschneider, Wegscheider, 
 and Rohr sought to keep in closer touch, to some extent, with 
 the historical theology of the Protestant churches, and were 
 thus enabled to exercise a more widespread influence on the 
 
90 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 thought of the churches. In their theological manuals it was 
 their custom to begin with an historical sketch of the develop- 
 ment of the various doctrines in the Bible, the Fathers, and 
 the Protestant creeds, and only then to state their own view 
 in the form of a final judgment. This method had several 
 advantages : in the first place, it involved a full historical 
 statement of the facts of the case, and thus put the student in 
 a position to form an independent opinion from his knowledge 
 of the actual materials ; and secondly, it brought clearly out 
 the mutability of dogmatic conceptions, and their dependence 
 in every case upon contemporary thought, and thus destroyed 
 a naive faith in the infallible authority of a particular form of 
 doctrine, and established the right of the present to form an 
 opinion, from its own point of view, on the dogmatic decisions 
 of past ages, and to restate them in more adequate forms. 
 This procedure constitutes both the justification and the his- 
 torical merit of these theologians, who have been too uncere- 
 moniously and disdainfully dismissed by the later conservative 
 theology. By their learned and impartial presentation of the 
 history of dogmas they trained up a generation of scientific 
 and liberal-minded theologians such as we do not afterwards 
 meet with in equal numbers. And with regard to the conclu- 
 sions they themselves drew from the history of doctrine, we 
 must recognise not only their intelligent clearness and manly 
 honesty, but also their profound moral earnestness, their sin- 
 cere piety, and their living trust in God ; in other words, a 
 disposition of mind which could justly claim to be Christian 
 piety, even though it did not adequately represent the specifi- 
 cally Christian doctrines of salvation, and on that account 
 could not satisfy profounder religious needs. In any case this 
 theological school has as much historical justification as any 
 other, and it is undeniable that its representatives in the first 
 half of our century presented Christianity to the great majority 
 of the German people in the form most intelligible to them, 
 and did better work in the cause of quiet, practical Christi- 
 anity than many of those who from the proud position of 
 a reactionary theology, artificially conformed to the creeds, 
 assumed the right to condemn these men. 
 
 By its juster appreciation of the importance of the historical 
 element in religion, this post-Kantian Rationalism contrasts 
 favourably with Kant's unhistorical Rationalism. While Kant 
 had held everything positive which goes beyond the moral 
 
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 91 
 
 faith of reason to be simply " statutory," the product of man's 
 imagination and caprice, Ammon pronounced the positive re- 
 hgion of the Bible divinely revealed, inasmuch as, while not 
 contradicting natural religion, it still did not originate solely 
 in the reason common to all men, but was imparted by divine 
 Providence through definite historical persons and events to 
 supplement and confirm the truths of natural religion. Hence 
 the relation of natural to positive religion resembles that of 
 the universal moral consciousness to the definite morals and 
 laws of individual nations, or that of the common constitution 
 of men as men to the special unfolding of it in history. 
 From this very useful point of view Bretschneider explained 
 the relation of a general and a special revelation : the former 
 lays the foundation of religious knowledge in the constitution 
 of the world and of our nature, the latter extends and de- 
 velops this foundation by gradually educating us to a higher 
 wisdom. The need of special revelation is owing to the 
 mind's need of education, or to the fact that our knowledge of 
 God, as well as our knowledge of the world, can only gradu- 
 ally arise and be made perfect. Revelation and reason come 
 from the same source — the divine Logos, and hence cannot 
 contradict each other. But revelation is related to reason as 
 religious education is to the individual ; it does not give 
 religious ideas all at once in their complete form, but at first 
 only in general outlines and without a clear perception of their 
 foundations, as truths to be received on authority ; but by de- 
 grees reason, led and growing strong in the leading strings of 
 authority, attains to a clearer and purer comprehension of 
 religious ideas, and to a perception of their inward truth and 
 agreement with the nature of the world and of man. The 
 very fact that immediate revelation harmonises with the uni- 
 versal revelation, and really de\'elops further religious ideas, is 
 the final proof of its divine origin ; while its possibility cannot, 
 according to Bretschneider, be denied, since the Spirit of God 
 pervades all creation, including therefore the human spirit, 
 and hence is able to impart illumination to it, though this is 
 always conditioned by men's general culture and knowledge 
 of the world. 
 
 Whilst therefore Ammon and Bretschneider, neither of 
 whom remained uninfluenced by the advanced thought of their 
 time, held the idea of revelation in such a way as to avoid an 
 absolute antithesis between the divine immediateness and the 
 
92 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 historical medium, and so between the supernatural and the 
 natural, Wegschelder and Rohr, who were unable to escape 
 from the narrowing abstract rationalistic habit of thought of 
 the 1 8th century, pressed the antithesis to the point of direct 
 contradiction, denying altogether supernatural revelation. 
 Their reasons were psychological and metaphysical : man 
 possesses in his reason a power adequate for the knowledge 
 of everything required by his vocation. It is the renunciation 
 of the true dignity of man to suppose, with a denial of that 
 rational power, a foreign and supernatural authority. To call 
 in a supernatural cause contradicts the laws of our thought, 
 according to which we are compelled to trace all phenomena 
 to a cause within the natural connection of things, and are 
 unable to state any indications whatever of any other cause. 
 Any supernatural Interference would be a magical disturbance 
 of the rational connection of our thought and of our mental 
 life generally, would expose us to all kinds of fanaticism, and 
 also in particular lame or destroy our moral activities, which 
 are based upon rational conviction. Finally, the supposition 
 of supernatural Interference, by which the orderly course of 
 nature would be interrupted, Is opposed to the true idea of 
 God — his unchangeable omnipotence and infinite wisdom, 
 which have so arranged the world that it needs no miraculous 
 Interventions and Improvements. The notion of a super- 
 natural and direct revelation must be ascribed therefore to 
 men's way of regarding things, when they do not know the 
 natural causes of certain occurrences, and on that account deny 
 their existence, whilst improved knowledge shows in every 
 case that what was supposed to be supernatural can be quite 
 well explained from natural causes. The idea of revela- 
 tion is nevertheless retained, but It must be conceived as 
 mediate and natural, being founded in the constitution and 
 government of the world. In creation and providence. Thus 
 the true religion, Christianity, in particular, is based upon 
 an historical arrangement of divine Providence, under which 
 Jesus preached the idea of a reason Inspired by true religion, 
 and personally represented, as it were In a mirror, the divine 
 reason. Accordingly between Christianity and Rationalism 
 there exists complete accord. 
 
 It cannot be questioned that these reasons for Rationalism, 
 if the antithesis between It and supernaturalism is once ac- 
 cepted In this absolute form, have been logically thought out, 
 
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 93 
 
 and they retain at all events their validity in opposition to 
 abstract supernaturalism, which sets aside the laws of reason 
 and the creation. The only question is whether that exclusive 
 conception of the relation of the natural and the supernatural 
 is required, and whether in it the characteristic experiences 
 of the religious life are taken into account. Or whether these 
 facts, when conceived as they are, do not rather point to a 
 view of God's relation to man and the world such as allows 
 man to experience the action of God within the natural and 
 spiritual order of the world, the supernatural and the natural 
 thus ceasing to be exclusive, and only different and comple- 
 mentary aspects of the religious relation. But the unyielding 
 intellectuality of a Wegscheider and Rohr was in its self-satis- 
 faction impervious to this deeper view of the matter which 
 might have reconciled the antitheses. And the unyielding 
 intolerance of the two men toward new and deeper tendencies 
 in theology (Schleiermacher, Marheinike, Hase) has done 
 much to discredit Rationalism in the public view, and to give 
 currency to an opinion of it which really did it injustice by 
 superciliously failing to recognise its relative truth. In this is 
 conveyed the lesson, which it is well to lay to heart, that the 
 religious consciousness of the churches has no sympathy what- 
 ever with the domineering arrogance of any heresy which seeks 
 to proclaim its own frigid intellectuality as the one valid canon 
 and the infallible authority in matters of faith. This will be 
 repeated in every period when a doctrinaire pedantry tries, 
 with the ridiculous claim of possessing the only true system 
 of doctrine, to force itself upon the churches. And we must 
 add that it is precisely true theological science which, perceiv- 
 ing the irreconcilability of any such claim with the proper 
 nature of theology, must most thoroughly justify the protest 
 and the practical consciousness of the churches. 
 
 The inspiration of the Scriptures Wegscheider finds in the 
 fact that their authors, under Divine guidance, committed to 
 writing their teaching on religion, which, like their good 
 thoughts generally, they traced back with devout feeling to 
 God's will and operation ; and these their writings, although 
 designed only for the readers of their day, are of such a nature 
 that the doctrines of the Christian religion can still be drawn 
 from them, even though they must be adapted to the en- 
 lightenment of a more educated age. Jesus himself (John vii. 
 17) declared that the doctrine communicated by him was 
 
94 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 divine, in so far as its divine nature can be readily perceived 
 and understood by the truly devout and upright. It is, how- 
 ever, divine also because it was first discovered and handed 
 down non sine munine. For the Omnipresent God is far from 
 no one who earnestly seeks him and is prepared to carry out 
 his counsels. And who was ever more deserving of his 
 help, or ever enjoyed more marked proofs of the favour of 
 divine Providence, than the founder of the Christian religion ? 
 As regards the person of Jesus, the Gospel story of his 
 supernatural birth must be considered a pious legend of Jew- 
 ish origin, having also its parallels in many other nations ; and 
 with it all assertions of the miraculous nature of Jesus fall to 
 the ground ; but this is not the case with the conviction that 
 his remarkable endowments and powers, as well as the con- 
 ditions of the age favourable to their development and em- 
 ployment, must be ascribed to God as their cause. Of the 
 ecclesiastical doctrine of the two natures in Christ, there are, 
 Wegscheider does not wish to deny, some germs in the Bibli- 
 cal writings ; but since in its developed form the doctrine 
 gives no assistance to virtue, and in fact is in the highest 
 degree detrimental to the influence of the example of Jesus, 
 which was given for our imitation, besides wholly contra- 
 dicting sound reason and some plain passages of Scripture, 
 it is best to adhere to the more simple form of doctrine by 
 revering and imitating Jesus as truly a Divine delegate, in- 
 terpreter of the Divine will, prototype of men destined to be 
 filled with true religion and virtue, who was himself full of 
 the Divine {iiumen, delov), and placed before us in this capa- 
 city a dignity not without God. Against the ecclesiastical 
 doctrine of the substitutionary satisfaction of the death of 
 Christ, the objections of a theological and moral character 
 which had been urged from the time of the Socinians are 
 brought forward, and to them others are added of a cosmo- 
 logical nature : it is difficult to suppose, he holds, that in the 
 second person of the Trinity God himself, the Governor of 
 innumerable sidereal systems, should have determined to 
 descend in a human form to this earth, such a tiny part of the 
 universe, to suffer death at the hands of the Jews, and there- 
 by to offer himself as a propitiatory sacrifice to himself. A 
 thought which gives expression to the undoubtedly just feel- 
 ing that the Christian consciousness has not remained unin- 
 fluenced by the Copernican theory, and must abandon anti- 
 
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 95 
 
 quated mythological ideas. Moreover, Wegscheider is suffi- 
 ciently unprejudiced to perceive that the doctrine of satisfaction 
 cannot by fair exegesis be wholly eliminated from the Scrip- 
 tures ; he looks upon it as conveying Christian truth in a form 
 suited to the times of the apostles, and to which a certain 
 psedagogical value still attaches for some minds, while on the 
 other hand more advanced minds are entitled, on the ground 
 of other forms of Scriptural teaching, to regard the doctrine 
 as a mere symbol, intended to indicate that by a faithful ob- 
 servance of the religion taught by Jesus and attested by his 
 death, we shall be pleasing to God without any further sacri- 
 fices and ceremonies. The doctrine of the atonement may 
 also be interpreted as a symbol of the love of God and Christ 
 to men, or of the consecration of a new religion as a new 
 covenant between God and men. With regard to these 
 criticisms of the doctrine of the atoning work of Christ, we 
 must allow, as undoubtedly just, that various religious motives 
 are represented in it which we can accept as valuable, though 
 we are able to give expression to them in another form. 
 Moreover, precisely the deepest religious element in the doc- 
 trine, which was also adumbrated in the Pauline germs of it, had 
 been previously much better expressed by Kant in his ethical 
 idealistic version of the dogma, than by any of his successors 
 amongst the theologians, who none of them penetrated so far 
 as he beneath the mere surface of the matter. The same was 
 the case with respect to the doctrine of salvation. Presup- 
 posing the fact of a " radical evil," Kant had pronounced not 
 merely a reformation of morals, but a change of mind and 
 principle, or a "regeneration" of the entire man, the condi- 
 tion under which we may hope to be regarded by God as 
 good, the Searcher of hearts accepting the good principles 
 instead of the actual perfect goodness which can never exist : 
 and with this Kant had connected the Protestant doctrine of 
 justification by faith. The theologians of the school under 
 consideration continued, it is true, to lay great stress upon 
 feeling and disposition as opposed to external and individual 
 acts, and looked upon this as the pivot of Protestant soterio- 
 logy ; but that this good disposition is something profoundly 
 different from the natural selfish mind, and is based upon a 
 radical transformation of the mind, they did not teach, because, 
 unlike Kant, they regarded men as by nature essentially good 
 and only in part morally enfeebled and impeded by sensuous- 
 
96 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 ness or bad example. By this view the BibHcal and ecclesi- 
 astical distinction between the natural and the new man was 
 in their case softened down to a gradual moral reformation, 
 under which a man may feel assured of the Divine approba- 
 tion according to the measure of his worthiness. And it can 
 hardly be disputed that but poor provision is thereby made 
 to meet either the moral earnestness of ideal requirements or 
 the religious need of an assured salvation and a quieted con- 
 science — two objects which the Protestant doctrine of justifi- 
 cation by faith is intended to secure. Kant's teaching was 
 more profound and was in closer touch with the Protestant 
 soteriology than the post-Kantian Rationalism ; as Fichte and 
 Schleiermacher show, a development of Kant's moral and re- 
 ligious philosophy in the direction of religious mysticism was 
 possible ; but from the Kantian Rationalists it was rather a 
 retrogressive turn in the direction of the popular philosophy 
 that it actually received. 
 
 This school could not for long satisfy the newly awakened 
 and deeper religious feeling, and had accordingly to make 
 room for a more profound mode of thought. At the same 
 time, it had not merely done good service in its day in freeing 
 the churches from the curse of an intolerant dogmatism, but 
 there is conveyed a lasting lesson, worthy to be laid to heart 
 now not less than then, in the words of Wegscheider, in the 
 preface of his Instihitiones Theologies: "In the interpre- 
 tation and criticism of the opinions and doctrines of early 
 times, theologians ought to take greatest care to combine the 
 use of sound reason with the results of the learning of so 
 many centuries. Then only will they follow in the footsteps 
 of the great Reformers, who in their noble struggle against 
 so many injurious errors never claimed themselves to have 
 made an end of all inquiry, and never grudged to their 
 successors progress in religious knowledge. The teachers 
 of the Church ought particularly to endeavour to communi- 
 cate to the people the teaching of Christ and his Apostles 
 regarding God and duty in all its purity ; to show that the 
 truth of this teaching does not depend on ancient dogmatic 
 formulas and pedantic interpretations of Biblical passages, 
 but is borne out by the properly developed nature of our own 
 mind ; to no longer try to defend forms of doctrine which 
 were adapted only for the thought of certain people and 
 times, but gradually to lay them aside and adopt a simple 
 
Ch. I.] THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE. 97 
 
 form of teaching, such as is indicated in the New Testament 
 itself ; to permit the sparls;s of true morality and piety to flash 
 from the light of genuine Christian doctrine, instead of 
 offering the smoke of ancient opinions as the light of know- 
 ledge ! " We honour the genuine Protestant love of truth 
 which finds utterance in such words ; we still acknowledge 
 the vocation proposed to theology by those men ; but, 
 certainly, in the meantime we have learnt that the fulfilment 
 of this vocation is far more difficult than they thought, that it 
 presupposes both more thorough historical inquiry and more 
 profound insight into the facts and laws of the religious and 
 moral life than they could command. For this reason we 
 have not only grown more cautious in our criticisms of what 
 is old, but also more patient with its adherents, than was the 
 habit of the Rationalism of the Kantian school. 
 
 The transition from the rationalistic theology of the Kantian 
 school to the theology of Schleiermacher was made by De 
 Wette, who adopted the philosophic standpoint of the semi- 
 Kantian Fries, who desired to complete the Kantian critical 
 system in an anthropological direction. All our knowledge, 
 Fries and De Wette taught, is limited to the world of 
 phenomena, which is directly perceived in space and time, 
 and has to be reduced to concepts by the understanding. 
 But this " philosophy of the understanding " is not the true 
 one, for beyond it is the world of ideas demanded by the 
 reason ; these ideas are not objects of knowledge, but of 
 faith: namely, the idea of imperishable being, or of the soul, of 
 absolute independent power, or of freedom, and of the unity 
 of the absolute Whole, or of all-conditioning cause — God. 
 These ideas have no connection which can be philosophically 
 proved with the phenomenal world which is the object of 
 our knowledge, but they are in complete contradiction to it, 
 since our experience presents everywhere only the finite and 
 incomplete, nowhere the eternal and infinite. Nevertheless 
 we feel that these ideas have full truth and unconditional 
 certainty. It is true they must never be assigned a place 
 in our philosophy of the understanding, which has to do 
 solely with the mechanism of finite causes and effects ; but 
 they form the foundation of our higher or " ideal philosophy," 
 which arises when we, by means of emotional presentiment, 
 bring those ideas to bear upon the world, and judge of the 
 world aesthetically and religiously in their light. The religious 
 
 g.t. h 
 
98 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 ideas are of themselves, when conceived by the speculative 
 faculty, without life, inasmuch as they arise only by the nega- 
 tion of finite limitations, that is, by means of the abstraction 
 of reality ; but they obtain their positive significance, and 
 become of value in life when they are taken up by the 
 emotions, and clothed in the picture-language of the poetic and 
 symbolising imagination. All religious propositions with which 
 theology is occupied must therefore be carefully distinguished 
 from intellectual knowledge, as they are part of the ideal 
 view of the world, and only the symbolical expression of 
 surmising feeling. It is to the erroneous confusion of this 
 ideal philosophy, expressing itself in symbols, with intellectual 
 knowledge, that all dogmatism and scholasticism must be 
 ascribed. And dogmatism misunderstands as much the 
 nature of religious feeling as of knowledge, whilst to it is owing 
 the endless conflict between faith and knowledge, which can 
 be set at rest only if both are completely separated, — know- 
 ledge being confined to the world of experience, faith being 
 directed to the ideal world, and comprehended under the 
 sesthetic view of things. In particular three kinds of aesthetico- 
 religious feeling must be distinguished : enthusiasm, kindled 
 by the idea of the personal dignity and immortal destination 
 of man, and also by the view of the beauty of nature, and of 
 the reign of purpose in history ; submission, which, under the 
 feeling of one's own imperfection, rises above the evils of the 
 world to faith in the higher spiritual realm of things, which 
 blooms in eternal undimmed beauty beyond the imperfections 
 and fragments of terrestrial things ; lastly, the feeling of 
 worship, which quickens the idea of God into the idea of 
 eternal Goodness, guiding all things for the best, and recti- 
 fying all confusion ; while for the understanding the idea of 
 God is nothing more than the empty form of absolute Unity. 
 To these three religious feelings, to which correspond, De 
 Wette holds, the sesthetic ideas of the epic, the drama, and 
 the lyric, all religious statements must be referred, in such 
 a way as to be symbols of the feelings, and find in them the 
 test of their truth. In this consists the true function ot 
 theology. It is not its business to substitute for dogmas its 
 own speculations or mere moral doctrine (after the manner 
 of the Kantians), but in the first instance to give an historical 
 account of them, and then to interpret them in accordance 
 with their religious symbolism. Figures and symbols must 
 
Ch. I.] THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE. 99 
 
 not be dispensed with, for we always want them in the repre- 
 sentation of religious feelings, and do best to adhere to the 
 figura;tive language which we have inherited. ■ But it must be 
 set free from the fetters of intellectual abstractions, and re- 
 stored to aesthetic intuition. This is the goal at which Pro- 
 testantism must finally arrive. When scientific criticism has 
 succeeded in releasing religion from the misleading influence 
 of the understanding, it leaves it to the rule of religious feeling 
 and its handmaid — art. 
 
 De Wette has laboured to recast dogmatic theology from 
 this point of view in such a way that we cannot withhold from 
 him the praise of having done his best to reconcile the just 
 claims of religious feeling with those of rational thought, 
 although it must be confessed that his attempted reconcilia- 
 tion was led too much by subjective considerations of taste, 
 without the needed objective foundation, to hold its place 
 beside the theology of Schleiermacher, with its profounder 
 structure. At the same time, it is well worth while even now 
 to take a glance at his mode of treating the leading ideas of 
 dogmatic theology.^ 
 
 Divine revelation we find in every religious phenomenon 
 which so impresses us with the power of the religious truth 
 and beauty conveyed in it as to make us feel ourselves lifted 
 beyond ourselves and our own spiritual capacity. That Chris- 
 tianity is a divine revelation, is an ideal judgment, which 
 cannot be proved by evidence of the understanding, though 
 theological reflection has to show its general necessity ; just 
 as a judgment of taste regarding the beauty of a work of art 
 cannot be proved, though it can be so far established as to be 
 shown to satisfy the requirements of art. In doing this the 
 content of this revelation must be first examined, to see what 
 relation it holds to reason, with which nothing good and 
 beautiful can be in opposition, as otherwise man would come 
 into collision with himself Inasmuch, therefore, as it will 
 be found that nothing has been prescribed in Christianity but 
 the eternal ideas of reason in their greatest purity and fulness, 
 the belief in it as a revelation is thereby justified. Rationalism 
 is accordingly itself nothing else than the philosophical view 
 of faith in revelation, in so far that we must acknowledge a 
 revelation in whatever furthers in an important degree the 
 
 We follow his work, Ueber Religion mid Theologie, 2nd ed., 182 1. 
 
rOO DEVELOPMENT OF DOCMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 historical development of the religious mind, such as has been 
 the case with Christianity in the very highest degree. The 
 doctrine of inspiration is likewise only a form of expressing 
 the fact that the Biblical writers were animated by holy 
 enthusiasm, without however possessing infallible wisdom, 
 which, moreover, is a matter belonginof to the understanding. 
 Canomcity, in the religious sense, may be ascribed to those 
 writings which contain divine truth, and is therefore indepen- 
 dent of the historical view of the Biblical books. 
 
 The part of dogmatics which deals with general principles 
 must be criticised strictly in accordance with the speculative 
 and ethical ideas of philosophy. Definitions of the Divine 
 attributes must be referred to the philosophical ideas of God, 
 without sacrificing their virtue as popular symbols. The 
 Mosaic myth of the creation may pass as a figurative repre- 
 sentation of the truth that the world is eternally postulated 
 by the divine omnipotence. Angels and devils are mytho- 
 logical figures which may be retained in sacred symbolism 
 and art, though neither historical nor metaphysical truth may 
 be looked for in them. The doctrine of the Trinity must be 
 interpreted as the forms of the revelation of God, whether 
 in the world generally, when Son and Spirit can be referred 
 respectively to the formal and the real principle of the 
 universe, or in the Christian revelation in particular, the 
 doctrine then containing the truth of the different views of 
 God (though in the false scholastic conception of these views 
 as persons), giving expression to the superiority of Christi- 
 anity to Judaism and Heathenism. Of the anthropological 
 doctrines, the myth of the Fall must be regarded as a symbol 
 of what is always taking place in each man. On the one 
 hand, it is correct that we must look upon our propensity to 
 evil as guilt, and that we are unable, with all our moral effort, 
 to attain to inward peace, inasmuch as we cannot rise to true 
 holiness. On the other hand, it is a dogmatic exaggeration 
 to deny that man has any power to do good ; such a doctrine 
 overlooks the fact that there is in man an inward moral 
 power, which, it is true, requires to be aroused from without 
 in order to act. In so far, therefore, man stands in need 
 of salvation, of divine grace. Yet the Holy Spirit and 
 human reason must not be conceived as opposed to each 
 other, but the latter subordinated to the former ; grace and 
 freedom are two views taken from different standpoints, the 
 
Ch. I.] THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE. lOI 
 
 former belonging to faith, the latter to observation and 
 reflection, while both are correct and are not mutually ex- 
 clusive. Election and reprobation is at the same time the 
 work of God and man, though God's not according to his 
 absolute will, but according to his relative operation within 
 the historical world of sinful men. The dogma of the two 
 natures in Christ as a conception is a contradiction, but easily 
 admits of reduction to these two views : in relation to nature, 
 Jesus is a man, but regarded aesthetically and in relation to 
 the ideal, he is God ; and as both ways of regarding him 
 are at bottom one, so he is but one person, the God-man, not 
 two persons. " Away, therefore, with those barren dogmatic 
 formulas, of which, moreover, the Bible and the people's 
 faith know nothing ! Let Christ be regarded as a divine 
 messenger, as God-man, as the image of God ; let us not be 
 too stingy with our glorification of him, let us not too anxiously 
 weigh our expressions ! At the same time, we mOst not 
 forget that we are dealing not with truths of the intellect, 
 but simply with religious ideality {Schonkeit), and whoever 
 speaks of this subject to the people, let him never do it with- 
 out the elevation and the warmth of devout enthusiasm." 
 While hitherto the history of this dogma has been occupied 
 with the conflict of truth with beauty, from this time forth 
 " the period must follow in which beauty will maintain its 
 claims side by side with truth." (De Wette correctly per- 
 ceives that the essence of Christological controversies is about 
 the relation of the historical and the ideal, but the problem is 
 not solved by the simple comparison of the intellectual, or true, 
 and the ideal, or sesthetic view.) The doctrine of the atonement 
 is only a beautiful, sesthetico-religious symbol of the thought 
 that Christ has restored to our sin-troubled hearts inward peace, 
 so that we can look up to God, the holy Judge, with confidence. 
 As in Christ all ideas take an historical and personal form, 
 so also this highest idea of atonement, in order that the whole 
 life of humanity might be mirrored in him. As in his death, 
 suffered for us, he represented the highest moral perfection 
 and the complete victory of the spirit over the flesh and sin, 
 we may make this our own by faith in him ; he raises us to 
 his own height, as we with him set ourselves free from the 
 rule of the flesh ; and this assurance gives us peace of mind, 
 so that we no longer dread God, but are sure of his grace. 
 The idea of sacrifice in this connection is to be understood 
 
102 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 finly ill the sense of a moral example and type of purified 
 and pardoned humanity. The doctrine of justification by faith 
 contains the religious truth, unrecognised by modern moral 
 theology, that man cannot be saved by his own merit, which 
 is as nothing before God's holiness, but alone by the grace 
 of God. The doctrines of eschatology must be interpreted 
 as symbolical mythology, which have at their basis the truths 
 of anthropology and soteriology (eternal life, the victory of 
 good in the kingdom of God). 
 
 It appears from these dogmatic views, as well as from the 
 excellent hints for practical theologians, that De Wette occu- 
 pied as free a position as the Rationalists with regard to the 
 literal authority of the creeds of the Church, but that he sought 
 to give their due value to the religious feelings, which the 
 Rationalists had not done, and, with a more unfettered mind 
 towards history, to maintain the connexion of the present life 
 of the Church with the past. It may be regarded as a defect 
 from the point of view of a scientific theology, that he tried to 
 effect this only by means of an eesthetical treatment of the 
 dogmas in question, which was often somewhat confused ; but 
 for the practical purposes of theology, which he always kept 
 in view, the advantages of his method of treatment may well 
 have exceeded its disadvantages. In this respect De Wette 
 occupies a position nearest to Herder in his relation to the 
 Rationalists ; and, of our contemporary theologians, Hase is 
 the spirit nearest of kin to him. And in the prosperity of the 
 churches of Thuringia lies the best proof that the prospects 
 of that church are not unpromising, which follows in the 
 course marked out by Herder, De Wette, and Hase. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERJIACHEr's " GLAUBENSLEHRE " 
 
 AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 Whilst Rationalists and Supernaturalists carried on tlieir 
 warfare with each other, without either side being able to 
 gain the victory, because both represented a partial truth and 
 shared false premises, a stronger than either came upon them, 
 who struck into new courses. I refer to Schleiermacher, from 
 whose work, Der christlichc Glanbe nach den Griindslitzen der 
 evangelischen Kirche im Zrisamnienhang dargestellt ( i st ed. , 
 1821 ; 2nd ed., 1831), dates an epoch in the history of modern 
 theology. The error common to both of these contending par- 
 ties had been that they conceived the Christian faith as a num- 
 ber of traditionary doctrines which appeared to stand in such 
 hopeless opposition to the rational thought of modern times 
 that one of the two must make room for the other ; the endless 
 contention being— which of the two must yield, and how far ? 
 Schleiermacher took the ground from under this contention 
 by removing its main pre-supposition. The Christian faith, 
 as he showed, does not consist in any number of positive doc- 
 trinal propositions such as have arisen from intellectual reflec- 
 tion upon that faith ; this faith is not a doctrine, or a system 
 of doctrines, but a condition of devout feeling, a fact accord- 
 ingly of inward experience, neither produced by thought nor 
 depending on its existence, but, like all experience, simply an 
 object to be observed and described. He took up, therefore, 
 a position opposed to the standpoint of the Supernaturalists, 
 on the one hand, by conceiving the Christian faith not as a 
 doctrinal authority given us from without, but as an inward 
 condition of our own self-consciousness, which must be con- 
 nected with the remaining contents of our consciousness and 
 the laws of our mind. On this point Schleiermacher occupies 
 completely the position of modern idealism, for which there 
 can be no truth that does not rise out of and answer to the 
 human mind. On the other hand, he maintained, in opposition 
 
I04 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 to the Rationalists, the view that the Christian faith is not a 
 product of rational thinking, but a condition of the heart, a 
 feeling preceding thought and supplied independently of it ; 
 moreover, a feeling not of the devout individual only, but of 
 the Christian, or specifically of the Protestant, Church ; accord- 
 ingly a fact not merely of individual experience, but of the 
 common experience of a historical community ; an experience, 
 therefore, which, like all positive experiences in history, must 
 be received and intelligently described, while it cannot and may 
 not be reasoned away. 
 
 From the basis of religious experience, therefore, Schleier- 
 macher seeks to give an account of the Christian faith, sup- 
 posing all along that his own religious experience is essentially 
 the same as that of the Christian Church, at all events in the 
 Protestant form of it. That this supposition can be taken as 
 correct only with very considerable limitation, is what might 
 be expected in the case of a man whose religious nature had 
 been in his youth nurtured in the peculiar form of piety of the 
 Moravian community, and whose mind had been formed by 
 the study of Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling, 
 and who in his first work, his Discotirses on Religion, had 
 appeared as a disciple of Romanticism, with its thoroughly 
 modern form of thought. It may be allowed that in the two 
 decades which lapsed between his Discourses and his Glaubens- 
 lehre, Schleiermacher had thrown off the extravagances of 
 Romanticism, and had brought his entire mode of thought 
 much more into accord with the faith of the Church : still, it 
 cannot be doubted, and his Glaubenslehre shows it most plainly, 
 that the varied elements of his rich education had a far-reaching 
 influence upon his religious consciousness ; so that his religious 
 feeling differed from that of the Church in some character- 
 istic points. Accordingly, in spite of all his honest effort to 
 harmonise and bring into one the individual and the com- 
 mon elements, his Glaubenslehre, which proceeds from this 
 subjective experience, retains everywhere a marked indivi- 
 dual character which could not make any direct claim to 
 general acceptance in the Church. However, we must not on 
 this account reproach Schleiermacher, when we remember that 
 the same objection would in some degree have to be made to 
 every attempt to give an account of the Christian faith from 
 the standpoint of the present ; in fact, it must be pronounced 
 really one of Schleiermacher's merits, that by his example he 
 
Ch. 11.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. IO5 
 
 asserted the claims of individuality to a place in theology also, 
 and put an end to the miserable delusion of a sole and exclu- 
 sive possession of the truth. It is true that the perception 
 of this is yet far from being universal ; but I venture boldly 
 to assert that in future it will be regarded as a principal cri- 
 terion of true theological education, that the theologian should 
 remain conscious of the individuality of his way of looking at 
 things, and should renounce all claims to doctrinal authority of 
 universal validity. 
 
 The individual character of Schleiermacher's theological 
 system appears forthwith in his definition of religion, which 
 had great influence also upon his doctrine of God. Religion, 
 he teaches, is " the feeling of absolute dependence"; in our 
 relation to the world our consciousness is always divided be- 
 tween a feeling of relative freedom and a feeling of relative 
 dependence, according as our active or passive states of mind 
 predominate ; but when we rise above the interchange of these 
 relative states of feeling to the unity of the higher conscious- 
 ness, we get the feeling of an absolute dependence, which 
 is one with the consciousness of God ; inasmuch as the source 
 of this feeling, in which the antithesis of relative freedom and 
 dependence vanishes, can only be the unconditioned cause of 
 all conditioned interaction of beings, that is — God. Acute as 
 this deduction is, it cannot be said that it describes accurately 
 or fully the nature of the religious feeling, particularly in its 
 Christian form. The religious feeling of reverence contains, 
 together with the sense of dependence on God, the sense of 
 obligation towards him, and of relationship and of exaltation 
 to him ; in this devout consciousness there is in addition to 
 the feeling of passive dependence also the feeling of moral 
 alliance, and accordingly of a free relation of the will ; where- 
 by the idea of God also obtains a much richer content than 
 that of mere causality ; at the same time the immediate reli- 
 gious feeling can receive a different qualitative characterisa- 
 tion, as the basis of the difference in relative value of the 
 feelings belonging to various stages of religion ; whilst in the 
 case of Schleiermacher's simple feeling of dependence nothing 
 more is possible than a qtiantitative difference in the degree 
 of strength possessed by the religious feeling in proportion to 
 the secular consciousness. But it is clear that a merely quanti- 
 tative estimate of the religious feeling, according to the strength 
 of its presence in consciousness, is not sufficient for the deter- 
 
I06 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 mination of its qualitative value ; otherwise the devout feeling, 
 for instance, of a Mohammedan would be equal to that of a 
 Christian. If we ask how Schleiermacher came to give such 
 a meagre account of religious feeling, emphasising what may 
 be called the physical side of dependence on an infinite cause, 
 to the neglect of the moral side, represented in the feeling of 
 alliance with a voluntary power related spiritually to ourselves, 
 we can hardly be wrong in tracing the origin of this defect to 
 the influence of the philosophy of Spinoza, whose cognitio 
 Dei mtidtiva is nothing else than the reference of all finite 
 phenomena to the necessary causality of God, — that is, the feel- 
 ing of our dependence upon it. This supposition is confirmed 
 by Schleiermacher's doctrine of God, which is connected with 
 his imperfect theory of the nature of religion. 
 
 Having based his system of belief upon devout states of 
 feeling, of which he is conscious as a member of the Church, 
 for Schleiermacher the questions with which apologetics had 
 usually been occupied lose their relative importance and appear 
 in an entirely new light. Above all the Scriptures cannot, from 
 his position, be any longer regarded as the foundation of faith. 
 In the introduction to his dogmatic system, Schleiermacher 
 hardly comes to speak of them at all, but deals with them under 
 the head of the Church's means of grace. He regards them as 
 a product of the Holy Spirit in as far as the latter is the common- 
 spirit iyGcmeingeisi) of the Church. This spirit has borne 
 witness to Christ in the apostolic writings, not essentially 
 otherwise than in later writings, only more at first hand, and 
 more under the immediate impression of the Apostles' per- 
 sonal acquaintance with Jesus, such as the men of a later 
 generation did not enjoy. On this account the writings of 
 the New Testament possess a special dignity as normative 
 for all subsequent accounts of Christianity ; but not so the 
 writings of the Old Testament ; since the connexion of Chris- 
 tianity with the religion of the Old Testament is, according to 
 Schleiermacher, only very loose and indirect. Speaking gene- 
 rally, it is not the reputation of the Scriptures upon which 
 faith in Christ rests, but this faith must be pre-supposed before 
 a special reputation can be assigned to the Scriptures. Least 
 of all may this reputation be based upon their inspiration, for 
 supposing even that the latter could be proved from the New 
 Testament writings, the conviction of it would still be very 
 far from Christian faith, and could by no means directly pro- 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. IO7 
 
 duce it, since this faith can proceed only from the total impres- 
 sion of the personality of Jesus. The normative dignity of the 
 New Testament writings rests solely upon the fact that that 
 impression can be obtained from them, that they, therefore, 
 truly transmit the image of Christ. On the other hand, the 
 reports they contain of external miracles, which Jesus is said 
 to have done or been the subject of, are matter for criticism. 
 The miracles cannot be regarded, according to the usual 
 habit, as supports of Christian faith, for the simple reason 
 that they presuppose the latter, and must be understood 
 by means of it. For as Christian faith finds in Christ the 
 highest revelation, miracles may reasonably be expected of 
 him (though they can be called such only relatively, as con- 
 taining something extraordinary for contemporary knowledge 
 of the connexion between physical and mental life), without 
 at all taking them out of the realm of the regular and orderly 
 phenomena of nature. Though Schleiermacher nowhere 
 offers an express critique of the traditional doctrine of miracles, 
 whether of the actuality or the possibility of the recorded 
 miracles, he still lays down the general principle that in the 
 interests of religion the necessity can never arise of regarding 
 an event as taken out of its connexion with nature in conse- 
 quence of its dependence on God. Even the miracles at the 
 beginning and the end of the life of Jesus, which are so often 
 looked upon in the Church as the foundation of faith in Christ, 
 do not form, according to Schleiermacher, an essential part of 
 faith in the person of Jesus, since his disciples already pos- 
 sessed this faith, although they still knew nothing of those 
 particular miracles. 
 
 At the same time Schleiermacher does not altogether reject 
 the idea of the miraculous, or the supernatural, or revelation. 
 All these terms represent in his view facts of religious experi- 
 ence which exceed ordinary experience ; but inasmuch as they 
 are experiences of the religious emotions, which, it must be 
 remembered, are part of human nature, they must also have a 
 side related to nature, and can accordingly be supernatural only 
 in a relative sense. By revelation he understands the origi- 
 nality of a religious phenomenon, whether it be in a personality 
 or in life, of such moment as to form the foundation of a reli 
 gious community : this definition excludes both external com- 
 munication and tradition, and also intentional invention and 
 reflection, while it includes divine communication and promul- 
 
Io8 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. U. 
 
 gation. Only this communication must not be regarded as in 
 the first instance a didactic influence upon the mind in the form 
 of knowledge, but as the peculiar and extraordinary effect pro- 
 duced by the total impression of a personality upon the general 
 consciousness of those who come within its range ; which does 
 not exclude direct instruction, but includes it only as one factor 
 amongst others. In heathenism, too, such personalities must be 
 looked upon as revelations of God,' in whom the divine is like- 
 wise typically made known in an original manner, and such as 
 cannot be explained from the immediate historical surroundings. 
 Yet every such revelation is still only something relative, since 
 only the universe as a whole could be called the absolute reve- 
 lation, every individual phenomenon, however original it may 
 be, being intelligible only from the general condition of the 
 community to which it belongs. In any case, therefore, no 
 claim of absolute truth can be made for any revelation, since 
 this would involve a manifestation of God as he is in himself, 
 whilst an effective manifestation of him can only give expres- 
 sion to what he is in his relation to us. This is true also 
 of Christianity. Its origin in the person of Jesus is super- 
 natural in so far as the peculiar spiritual contents of his per- 
 son cannot be explained from the natural surroundings of his 
 life, but can have proceeded only from the general source of 
 spiritual life by a creative act of God. But this supernatural 
 origin is at the same time natural, in so far as the rise of a 
 higher original life must be conceived as the effect of a power 
 of development inherent in the race, a power which finds 
 expression, in conformity with divinely ordered laws, though 
 laws hidden from us, in certain men at certain points, that by 
 them the rest of mankind may be helped onwards. As the 
 highest development of the spiritual power of our race, the 
 unique phenomenon of Christ is not an absolute, but only 
 a relative miracle. In the same way, that which is "above 
 reason " in Christianity consists only in Its transcending the or- 
 dinary human reason, not In its exceeding the rational faculties 
 of mankind at large, Christianity being in reality their highest 
 perfection. And, again, the doctrinal propositions of the 
 Christian faith are in so far beyond reason as their religious 
 content is not evolved from rational reflection, but is given as 
 a special experience, which, like every other similar experience, 
 can be received only by a love willing to behold It ; but they 
 are at the same time perfectly rational, in as far as they must 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. IO9 
 
 conform to the same laws of logical thought to which all other 
 propositions are subject. 
 
 In these statements the relation of Schleiermacher to Ration- 
 alism and Supernaturalism is very plainly presented. With 
 the former he rejects the absolute miracle, and looks upon 
 Christianity as a productof human nature, of its original spiritual 
 energy, yet — and thereby he goes over to the position of the 
 latter — not as the product of ordinary thought and reflection, 
 but as an original creation of the highest development of 
 man's rational nature ; and moreover, as an unique historical 
 phenomenon, which is embodied in the person of the Saviour, 
 and has accordingly to be acknowledged as a positive fact of 
 revelation. Christian faith is, therefore, according to Schleier- 
 macher, not merely faith in universal religious or moral truths, 
 but in the historical person of Jesus as the Saviour, whose 
 characteristic influence is to produce in us the Christian con- 
 sciousness of salvation. And hereby the business of Christian 
 theology becomes for Schleiermacher even more positive than 
 for the Supernaturalists of that time : it has, according to him, 
 to describe faith In Christ as the Saviour, as given in the 
 Christian Church, and to draw it out connectedly into the 
 various doctrinal propositions therein implied : but it has 
 nothing to do with other sciences and philosophy. Dog- 
 matic propositions, he demands, ought to be "the outcome of 
 the observation of religious states of feeling," and ought on no 
 account to be mixed up nor confounded with speculative 
 propositions which are due to quite different interests. " Dog- 
 matic theology will never stand as firmly upon its basis as the 
 physical sciences have long done upon theirs, till the separation 
 of the two kinds of propositions is so complete that such a 
 strange question, for instance, as whether the same proposition 
 can be true in philosophy and false in theology, could not arise, 
 for the reason that a proposition cannot occur in the one in 
 the same form as it occurs in the other, but the difference must 
 be presupposed however great the similarity may seem to be." 
 " The Protestant Church is convinced that the special shape 
 peculiar to its doctrinal propositions is quite independent of 
 all schools of philosophy, and does not owe its origin at all to 
 any speculative interest, but solely to the satisfaction of im- 
 mediate self-consciousness by means of the genuine and 
 unadulterated institution of Christ." Neither will Schleier- 
 macher admit that at the beginning of the formation of 
 
IIO DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 Christian doctrine speculation had any influence on the subject- 
 matter of dogmatic propositions ; an opinion with which no 
 historian of the present day will agree, seeing the influence of 
 Greek speculation is plain enough in the theology of Paul or 
 John! 
 
 We have not here to ask whether the rigid separation of 
 theology from philosophy demanded by Schleiermacher is 
 possible, but whether he himself fully carried it out. So far 
 as the form of his doctrinal propositions goes, this is undoubt- 
 edly the case ; he carefully avoids all reference to philosophical 
 matter, and all direct and declared dependence on philosophical 
 schools and systems. Still, no one can fail to see that not 
 only his own philosophical education generally, but also a 
 definite philosophical system, exerted a profound influence 
 upon his theology. Nor could his critical distinction between 
 the form of ecclesiastical doctrine and its religious subject- 
 matter, his appeal from the traditionary objects of faith to 
 the religious subject's own inner life as the source of their 
 origin, be conceivable apart from the school of critical idealism. 
 And how could we explain the wide departure of Schleier- 
 macher's doctrine regarding God and the world from that in 
 vogue in the Church, and its close approach to the doctrine of 
 Spinoza, if it had really been deduced simply from the con- 
 sideration of the religious feelings of Christians ? Strauss, 
 we must allow, was right when he said,^ " None of the leading 
 propositions of the first part of Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre 
 can be fully understood save as they are re-translated into the 
 formulae of Spinoza, from which they were originally taken. 
 The relation of God to the world (which forms the basis of 
 his entire theology), according to which both God and world 
 are conceived as equal magnitudes, only that the former is the 
 absolute and undivided unity, while the latter is the unity divided 
 and differentiated, can be explained only from the relation of 
 the natura natiirans to the natiira nahirata of Spinoza." 
 
 In a note in his Glmibenslekre, Schleiermacher incidentally 
 throws out the passing but pregnant remark, that pantheism 
 is consistent with religion if it is only meant to represent 
 some form of theism, and the word is not simply a masked 
 materialistic negation of theism. " If we keep pantheism to 
 the customary formula, One and All, even then God and the 
 
 1 Charakteristiken und Kritiken, ^. i56. 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. Ill 
 
 world remain distinct, at least in point of function ; and there- 
 fore a pantheist of this kind, when he regards himself as part 
 of the world, feels himself with this All dependent on that 
 which is the One." There can be no doubt but that Schleier- 
 macher has here characterised his own view of God and the 
 world, as it is presented best of all in his Dialektik, but plainly 
 enough in his Glaubenslehre. At the beginning of his work, 
 in the deduction of the idea of God from the feeling of 
 dependence, Schleiermacher lays emphasis on the point that 
 the word " God" is only an expression for the " whence" of 
 our absolute dependence, but is by no means given or to be 
 conceived as an object : to conceive of God apart from the 
 world would be empty mythology. God is the correlative 
 unity to the multiplicity presented as the world. Creation and 
 Preservation are forms of expression for the eternal causality 
 or omnipotence of God, which is so completely represented in 
 the totality of being, that in the divine omnipotence there is 
 no excess of potentiality beyond the totality of the actual, nor 
 in the latter anything in excess of the former. Omnipotence 
 and the totality of natural causes are commensurate, the former 
 never coming in the place of the latter to meet a defect, but 
 everything exists and arises solely and wholly by means of the 
 natural system of things ; so that each thing existing by virtue 
 of all, and all things entirely by the divine omnipotence, all 
 things undivided subsist through one. This is, in fact, an 
 exact formulation of the " immanence" of God as taught by 
 Spinoza. But Schleiermacher holds not only Spinoza's theory 
 of immanence, but also his idea of substance, with its simple 
 unity of being and operation to the exclusion of all definitions. 
 In his view the divine attributes do not denote any distinc- 
 tions in God, or even so much as an objective difference in his 
 relation to the world ; which would be to conceive God as a 
 multitude of functions, and therewith, Schleiermacher thinks, 
 to bring God into the region of antitheses ; but they denote 
 only the various modes in which we refer our feeling of depen- 
 dence to God, different aspects in which God's causality (in 
 itself simple) presents itself to our consciousness. That is, 
 as neither in time nor space, but as conditioning both, this 
 divine causality is his omnipresence and eternity ; as in extent 
 one with the totality of natural causes, though differing in 
 form, it is^ his omnipotence ; as living or spiritual causality, it 
 is called his omniscience ; in relation to our moral conscious 
 
112 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 ness, it is his holiness or justice, inasmuch as together with 
 sin we have conscience, and connect the feeling of guilt with 
 evil — and both in virtue of divine arrangement ; in relation 
 to the consciousness of salvation, the divine causality becomes 
 love and wisdom. All these distinctions, therefore, are con- 
 fined to the human consciousness of God, and have no founda- 
 tion in the objective nature of God, which does not admit of 
 any distinctive qualifications, as they would only contradict the 
 infinity of God, according to Schleiermacher ; in full agree- 
 ment with Spinoza's canon, Omnis determinatio est negatio. 
 An absolutely simple causality of this kind, in which there is 
 no distinction between posse and facere, facere and velle, velle 
 and scire, nor any succession of acts and states, but everything 
 is simply one eternal act, is at all events not a personality, 
 nor can it scarcely be thought of as spiritual being, having 
 nothing in common with anything which constitutes for us the 
 spiritual ; it is in reality simply operative power, like Spinoza's 
 substance. From the first it has been remarked that this 
 conception of God fails to meet the need of the Christian 
 religious consciousness ; nor was Schleiermacher able to bring 
 it into harmony with the religious consciousness in any other 
 way than by reducing the latter to the mere feeling of depen- 
 dence, thereby detracting from its moral side as we saw above 
 (p. 105), It is therefore certain that Schleiermacher cannot be 
 regarded as the unprejudiced interpreter of the universal, still 
 less of the Christian, religious experience, in his treatment of 
 the primary ideas of religion and God, but that he has reduced 
 them to the dimensions of his philosophical system. 
 
 And how did he possibly find a transition from this basis 
 to the Christian faith, and make the account of this, rather 
 Spinozistic than Christian, conception of God a description of 
 the religious consciousness of the Christian community .-* By 
 identifying the antithesis between the consciousness of God 
 and sense-consciousness (answering to the opposition in 
 Spinoza of the reason to the imagination) with that between 
 sin and salvation of the Christian consciousness. This 
 identification was effected thus : the predominance of the 
 sense-consciousness over the consciousness of God, or the 
 hindrance of the latter by the former, becomes to us the 
 consciousness of sin and religious unhappiness, or the need of 
 salvation ; while, on the contrary, the predominance of the 
 God-consciousness over the sense-consciousness, in which 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. II3 
 
 every act of the latter is determined by the former, becomes 
 to us the consciousness of the removal of that hindrance, or 
 of salvation, of the strength and blessedness of the higher 
 self-consciousness. Between the one and the other of these 
 two states of feeling lies the entire life of the religious 
 consciousness. But while the condition of the hindered con- 
 sciousness of God is the general experience of mankind, the 
 condition of the delivered and unhindered consciousness is the 
 special experience of the Christian Church, and is the operation 
 of its Founder. Thus what is primarily a difference within 
 consciousness becomes likewise an objective difference between 
 mankind in its natural condition, as needing salvation, and 
 mankind as Christian and saved. It is easy to perceive that 
 these conditions, described by Schleiermacher as "sin and 
 salvation," are really what Spinoza described, in the last two 
 books of his Ethics as the servittis et libertas humana, and 
 what is by Kant called the supremacy of the lower, sensuous, 
 and of the higher, rational, desires. The difference is simply 
 that the transition from the one condition to the other is in the 
 view of the philosophers made as a psychological and ethical 
 process within the consciousness and by virtue of its natural 
 human constitution ; whilst in the system of our theologian the 
 change appears as an historical process in the consciousness 
 of human society, having its origin and effective cause in a 
 definite point of human history. If it is true that the human 
 race is the macrocosmic type of individual life, the right to 
 identify the various states of the religious personal conscious- 
 ness with the different phases of the historical development of 
 humanity cannot be disputed ; but then neither can the logical 
 inference be avoided, that the same laws and forces which 
 condition the change of states in the individual will also 
 produce the analogous change in the historical life of the race, 
 without calling in the aid of special and unique causes alien 
 to all customary experience. We shall subsequently see 
 what treatment this inference met with in Schleiermacher's 
 theological system. 
 
 The antithesis of sin and salvation, or grace, is made by 
 Schleiermacher the basis of the disposition of the second br 
 special part of his treatise, after he had in the first part 
 treated of the religious consciousness without reference to this 
 antithesis, or the fundamental questions of God and the uni- 
 verse and the original perfection of man. In each part the 
 
 G. T. I 
 
114 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 materials are arranged so that the religious consciousness as 
 such is first described, and then the doctrines concerning the 
 world and God that are therein implied. As regards the 
 doctrine concerning God, there is the disadvantage in this 
 arrangement, that the doctrine is nowhere dealt with con- 
 nectedly, but only in fragments here and there ; which, it must 
 be allowed, offered the advantage of veiling the want of an 
 objective conception of God. In other respects this arrange- 
 ment involves a number of difficulties : for instance, the 
 Christology falls under the account of the Christian conscious- 
 ness, whilst it ought surely to have an historical object as its 
 subject-matter ; again, the doctrine of the Church is placed 
 under the declarations of the Christian consciousness regard- 
 ing the world. The eschatology is handled in loose connec- 
 tion with the rest of the work as a " prophetic article." 
 
 Sin, Schleiermacher describes as the opposition of the flesh 
 to the spirit, as the hindrance of the higher self-conscious- 
 ness, or God-consciousness, by the lower, sensuous or finite 
 consciousness. It has its natural rise in the priority of man's 
 sensuous development to his spiritual development, and of 
 his intellectual development to his power of will. It is there- 
 fore the inevitable outcome of human nature as such, and not 
 an external inheritance from Adam. By the first sin of the 
 first parents no alteration of the nature of the human race was 
 brought about, which would have been impossible, but that 
 first sin was only the first appearance of the sinfulness which 
 is a property of human nature as such, and was to be looked 
 for in the first parents. The ecclesiastical doctrine of two 
 consecutive states, stahts integritatis and status corriiptionis, 
 must therefore be interpreted as the two sides of man's original 
 perfection, both of which always belong contemporaneously 
 to our nature, or of the endowment with God-consciousness and 
 of an original sinfulness, or sensuous weakness. Rational as 
 this re-interpretation of the traditional doctrines of the primi- 
 tive state and the fall undoubtedly is, it must be remarked that 
 Schleiermacher's view of the nature of sin is as unsatisfactory 
 as the essentially similar view of Spinoza, according to 
 which evil is only defective power in the reason over sense- 
 affections ; whereas a true analysis of the moral consciousness, 
 uninfluenced by philosophical prepossessions, will always 
 discover in evil a conflict of the selfish individual will with the 
 obligations of the law of the whole, and therein a self-contradic- 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I 15 
 
 tion within the mind itself, not merely a contradiction between 
 mind and sense. With great dialectical acuteness, Schleier- 
 macher brings the other traditionary articles under this head 
 into accord with his totally different premises. He adopts 
 without reserve the position that the sinfulness inherent in the 
 nature of the human race must be regarded as a total inability 
 to do good, which, while it must not be exaggerated so as to 
 cancel the capability of salvation, is still so far infinite that it 
 cannot be completely removed even by the power of salvation. 
 Guilt must also, according to Schleiermacher, attach to original 
 or hereditary sin, it being reckoned not to each man in his 
 individual capacity, but to the race as the common guilt of a 
 common act ; so that the consciousness of it always involves 
 at the same time the general human need of salvation. Finally, 
 Schleiermacher goes even a step beyond the traditionary 
 doctrines in maintaining that actual sin proceeds to such 
 an extent from original sin, that in the entire sinful race 
 not a single moment occurs in which contradiction of the 
 God-consciousness is wholly absent. Accordingly the dif- 
 ference in point of merit amongst men must not, according 
 to him, be sought in the various degrees of their sin, but 
 solely in their nearer or more distant relation to salvation ; 
 an assertion in which appears the same subordination as 
 in Spinoza of the moral point of view to that abstract level- 
 ling conception of evil as the general malum m.etaphysicum 
 of the finite. 
 
 Schleiermacher's soteriology starts from the position, that 
 we are conscious in the Christian community that our God-con- 
 sciousness constantly advances so as to gradually overcome the 
 hindrances proceeding from the sense-consciousness, attended 
 by the corresponding approach to the condition of blessedness. 
 But since this advancement cannot originate in the life of sin 
 common to humanity, where nothing but unhappiness is 
 developed, it must, Schleiermacher argues, have its origin in 
 the new common life of the community founded by Jesus, and 
 be accordingly traced back to the saving activity of Jesus as its 
 cause. The question arises therefore. To be the cause of such 
 an effect, what must the person of Jesus have been ? The 
 answer is : Our experience as Christians of the increasing 
 strength of our God-consciousness could proceed from the 
 person of Jesus only if this consciousness was actually present 
 in him in absolute measure ; that is, only if the ideal type of 
 
Il6 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 religion was in him historical, and his entire life was that of 
 the religious model, person and idea in his case perfectly 
 corresponding. As this typical, model man, according to 
 Schleiermacher's exposition, Christ was distinguished from all 
 other men by his essential sinlessness and absolute perfection, 
 which excluded not only all actual sin, but also all possibility 
 of it, and accordingly everything like a moral struggle ; and 
 further, by his freedom from error, having never himself 
 originated an erroneous notion, nor adopted one from others 
 as one of his convictions. This perfect God-consciousness 
 of Christ must be regarded as properly God in him, and as 
 the one perfect revelation of God in the human race. In 
 this respect his person was a miraculous phenomenon in the 
 common life of sin, not to be explained by that life itself, but 
 only by a new creative act of God, which may be called a 
 second creation, or rather completion of creation, being really 
 one with the first creation, as part of the same universal system 
 of nature. It is this only — that the phenomenon of Christ 
 had its cause in a creative act, or an original attainment of 
 the human race as unaffected by sin,^ — which Schleiermacher 
 regards as the true essence of the doctrines of the supernatural 
 origin of his life ; while, on the other hand, the suspension of 
 the natural parental participation in the origination of his life 
 adds nothing of essential moment to the matter. In general, 
 the miraculous in the person of Jesus must not be conceived 
 in such a way as to negative the sameness of his nature and 
 ours. Though it may trace its origin to the miraculous (in 
 the above sense), the complete historical character of his 
 subsequent life must still be held fast. To this belongs the 
 gradual unfolding of his powers, including the spiritual ones, 
 save that this will have proceeded without contradictions and 
 struggles, as the constant and regular passage from the in- 
 nocence of childhood to full spiritual vigour ; further, his 
 specific nationality, the qualification of his ideas and actions 
 by the habits of thought of his nation and his age, although 
 it is not allowed that his personal activity, but only his re- 
 ceptivity, was subject to this limitation. In so far, Schleier- 
 macher grants that further progress in advance of the 
 historical form of the appearance of Jesus, as this was con- 
 ditioned by temporal and national limitations, is not only 
 possible, but a fact ; but this is not an advance beyond his 
 essential nature, which will, on the contrary, be only more 
 
Ch. 11.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. II7 
 
 and more fully brought out by the progressive development 
 of the Christian world. Schleiermacher thus makes evidently 
 the well-known distinction between the ideal principle which 
 was revealed in Jesus and the form the principle takes as a 
 historical phenomenon. In the communication of the principle 
 itself consists the work of Christ : his work as Saviour is 
 that of imparting to others the strength of his consciousness 
 of God ; his work as Reconciler is the communication of the 
 happiness of this consciousness ; effects which were at first 
 the immediate work of Christ, but subsequently could only 
 be produced by the continued operation of his spirit and 
 example in the mind of believers. To the ecclesiastical dogma 
 of vicarious satisfaction, Schleiermacher attaches the following 
 meaning : Christ made satisfaction in so far that a source of 
 inexhaustible blessing was opened in his person and activity 
 as Founder of the Church ; but this satisfaction is not vicarious, 
 inasmuch as the blessing of it belongs only to those who also 
 enter into fellowship with Christ ; to his sufferings, on the 
 other hand, a vicarious character attaches, since by virtue of 
 his sinlessness, his own person would have been beyond the 
 reach of the universal calamity connected with sin ; but this 
 form of substitution is not satisfaction, individuals in the 
 Christian community having, as we all know, still themselves 
 to suffer. In other words, Schleiermacher rejects the idea of 
 a transcendental reconciliation through the atoning sufferings 
 of Christ as the representative of mankind before God, and 
 puts in its place the historical view of the matter, according 
 to which Christ by the total impression of his personality 
 had such a strengthening and beatifying influence on men's 
 religious consciousness that they felt themselves saved and 
 reconciled, that is, delivered, or gradually being delivered, 
 from the hindering and miserable contradiction between the 
 higher and lower self-consciousness, It is this stronger con- 
 sciousness of God, proceeding from Christ, which, as the 
 consciousness of the Christian community, is the "holy Spirit." 
 As the God-consciousness of Christ is the divine in him, so 
 the holy Spirit " is the union of the Divine Being with human 
 nature in the form of the common spirit of the community, as 
 animating the collective life of believers." The holy Spirit, 
 therefore, is the same saving principle in the community that 
 primarily appeared in the person of Jesus in the form of an 
 individual life ; and the saving work of this principle is the 
 
Il8 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 production, in those individuals who open themselves re- 
 ceptively to it, of a life of invigorated and felicitated God- 
 consciousness similar to that which was typically present in 
 Jesus. In this consists "conversion and justification," the 
 two aspects of " regeneration," in which a new religious con- 
 sciousness is produced in the believer by the common Chris- 
 tian spirit of the community, and a new life, or " sanctification," 
 is prepared for. 
 
 Looked at from this point, Schleiermacher's soteriology 
 does not in principle differ from Kant's philosophical doctrine, 
 and that of his followers, according to which the victory of 
 the good principle over the bad, or of reason over sense, is 
 effected by " faith in the ideal Son of God," — that is, by the 
 reception of the divine idea of man into the heart and the 
 quickening of the divine spirit in man. In both systems 
 salvation is an inward process in man, the deliverance of his 
 higher divine being from the hindrances of his lower nature ; 
 and both agree also in regarding this inward deliverance and 
 renewal in the individual life as evoked and sustained by the 
 moral community, the foundation of which must be traced to 
 Jesus. There is, finally, agreement in regarding this common 
 spirit of the higher religious and moral life as having proceeded 
 from the Founder of this community with original energy and 
 purity, and as therefore to be beheld in his person as in a 
 typical example for imitation. But while the philosophers 
 generally go no further, and see no cause for supposing that 
 the relation of this ideal principle to the human personality in 
 the person of Jesus was essentially different from what it is 
 in other men, Schleiermacher feels obliged to trace the origin 
 of this common Christian spirit to a personality of unique 
 perfection, or sinlessness and freedom from error. But he 
 has failed to show either the congruity of this supposition 
 with the sameness of Christ's nature and ours or any good 
 ground for the logical necessity of the supposition itself. For 
 all that he alleges with regard to the experiences of the Chris- 
 tian community as to the common spirit of a strengthened 
 and felicitated God-consciousness — experiences which con- 
 fessedly never go beyond a relative approximation to perfection 
 and felicity — by no means presupposes an origin of absolute 
 quantitative perfection of God-consciousness, the psychological 
 possibility of which is exceedingly problematic ; but that 
 experience is fully accounted for on the* supposition of the in- 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. II9 
 
 ward qualitative truth of the God-consciousness which is present 
 in the community as a fact of experience. Schleiermacher 
 had previously himself acknowledged that the inward quali- 
 tative truth of a religious principle must not be at once con- 
 founded with the personal perfection of its first preacher. In 
 his Discourses he had pronounced the confounding of the 
 fundamental fact in which a religion takes its rise with the 
 fundamental idea of this religion itself a " great mistake," 
 which has misled almost everybody and given a false direction 
 to the view of almost all religions. But it cannot be denied 
 that this mistake lies at the basis of his own dogmatic theory 
 of the ideal person of Christ. That he could thus deceive him- 
 self on this point may be psychologically explained from the 
 peculiar personal wants of his religious nature, in which the 
 Moravian impressions of his early days continued to operate. 
 And for the practical value of his theological system that error 
 worked advantageously, without doubt, helping as it did 
 to bring it Into line with ecclesiastical tradition. It is true 
 that what was in Schleiermacher's case an inconsequence, 
 based on individual peculiarities, was made by others the 
 principal thing and the starting-point of a positive retrograde 
 movement in dogmatics. 
 
 It remains to state the chief points of Schleiermacher's 
 doctrine of the Ckrirck, its essential characteristics, and its 
 origin and consummation. He rejects the traditionary distinc- 
 tion between the visible and the invisible Church, as contra- 
 dictory terminology ; for what is invisible is not actually the 
 Church, and what is the Church is not invisible. The proper 
 meaning of this distinction he finds very justly in the re- 
 lation of the operative Christian spirit in the Church to the 
 natural, sinful elements, or the world, still present in it, — 
 that is, in the opposition of the spirit and the flesh, transferred 
 to the whole body of the Church. It is only to the first aspect 
 of the Church that the predicates of unity, universality, sanc- 
 tity, and infallibility are to be applied ; to the historical form 
 of it, on the other hand, only so far as it is actually approxi- 
 mating to its ideal. Amongst the means of grace, "prayer 
 in the name of Christ " is admirably handled. It represents 
 the common desire and will of the Church as directed to the 
 consummation of the kingdom of God, and its presentiment 
 of what is truly salutary, having in so far the promise of being 
 heard. But this must not be conceived as involving anything 
 
I20 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 approaching a magical influence upon the divine will, such 
 prayer having simply a strengthening effect upon the pray- 
 ing community itself. The sacraments are treated from the 
 standpoint of the union of the Lutheran and the Reformed 
 (Calvinistic and Helvetian) confessions ; with a rejection of 
 extreme views, various forms of the idea of a sacrament are 
 admitted ; Schleiermacher's own view approaches most closely 
 the spiritual form of the Reformed confessions. Under infant 
 baptism, the addition to the rite, which has importance pri- 
 marily for the Church only, of a personal confession on the 
 part of the candidate on reaching the adult age (confirmation) 
 is demanded, as necessary for completing the sacramental 
 means of grace. 
 
 To the most subtle and acute portions of his work belongs 
 his treatment of the doctrine of election. As early as 1819, 
 Schleiermacher had published an essay in defence of the 
 Calvinistic doctrine on this head, the fundamental ideas of 
 which are worked out in his Glaubenslehre in a somewhat 
 modified form and with more of an eirenical than apologetic 
 purpose. The distinction between elect and non-elect is based 
 certainly upon " divine predetermination, which may not be 
 made dependent on foreknowledge, as thereby the divine 
 causality would be made conditional ; at the same time the 
 articles of predetermination and foreknowledge have equal 
 right to be retained side by side, inasmuch as they represent 
 simply different ways of looking at the same thing." (This- 
 reminds us of the way in which Spinoza, in his Theologico- 
 Political Treatise, explains the divine determination as identi- 
 cal with the divine knowledge.) Nevertheless, Schleiermacher 
 relieves the harshness of the Calvinistic doctrine by limiting 
 the dualism of elect and non-elect to the historical form of 
 the kingdom of God, and denying its validity as the definitive 
 end of things. In the course of historical development, it is 
 a necessary law that all cannot be at the same time received 
 into the Christian community, but some are preferred to 
 others, who are for the time put back. This distinction is 
 founded on the general relation of the kingdom of God to the 
 world, and is accordingly presupposed in the divine order of 
 things. But it is not an absolute, but only a relative differ- 
 ence, between an earlier and a later reception into the sphere 
 of the operations of divine grace. This temporary difference 
 will sometime cease in a final universal salvation ;' with this 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 12 1 
 
 consolatory outlook faith rises above the apparent harshness 
 of the doctrine of election, without in any way letting go the 
 unconditionality of the divine decrees. 
 
 With these prophetic glances into the future of the con- 
 summation of the Church, " the prophetic articles," as 
 Schleiermacher entitles his eschatological sections, are occu- 
 pied more closely. At the commencement he makes the general 
 observation, that the description of the perfected condition of 
 the Church, since it does not arrive in the course of human 
 life on the earth, is directly of use only as the model towards 
 which we ought to approximate. He then proceeds to say of 
 the belief in personal immortality, that it is not connected in 
 general with faith in God, for it was possible to expound the 
 latter without reference to it. It is also possible to conceive 
 a resignation of individual immortality based, not upon a 
 materialistic denial of the spirit, but upon a humble conscious- 
 ness of the limitation of all individual life ; with such a view, 
 the supremacy of the God-consciousness would be perfectly 
 consistent, while it would also require the purest morality and 
 spirituality of life. On the other hand, there may be an irre- 
 ligious, eudaemonistic form of faith in immortality : for instance, 
 " whenever the faith is postulated on behalf of retribution 
 only." "If, therefore, it must be admitted that the continu- 
 ance of personal existence may be rejected in a form prompted 
 more thoroughly by godliness than is the case with other 
 forms of its adoption, the connexion of this belief with the 
 consciousness of God as such cannot be maintained." But 
 though fiaith in immortality is not directly connected with 
 faith in God, it is still connected with faith in Christ, in 
 so far as Christ's promise of the lasting fellowship of his 
 followers with himself presupposes, not only his, but also 
 our own personal immortality (but this is probably only a 
 less simple form of the truth, that the hope of immortality is 
 based upon the Christian consciousness of the indestructible 
 salvation of the devout children of God). As regards the 
 conceptions of the Church as to the future life and the con- 
 summation of all things, in Schleiermacher's opinion, they 
 ought to have a place in dogmatic theology only as " ten- 
 tative efforts of an insufficiently authorised faculty of surmise 
 {Ahnungsvermogen), in conjunction with the reasons for and the 
 considerations against them." The difficulties of the doctrines 
 appear to him especially that the conceptions formed of the 
 
122 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 consummated condition of the whole Church, and again of 
 the perfected condition of individual souls after death, nowhere 
 fully agree together ; it is as difficult to conceive of the con- 
 summated Church, after the analogy of the present one, as in 
 continual development, as it is to think of it as completed and 
 so without movement, the latter condition presenting no ends 
 for active work for one another. The only course left for us, 
 therefore, in this matter is to put the imagination, to whose 
 sphere all these things that are foreign to our present experi- 
 ence pertain, under the protection of exegetical science, and 
 to work up the materials which it supplies. 
 
 At the end of the work is added a section on the Trinity. 
 It follows of itself from what has already been said on 
 Schleiermacher's doctrine as to the divine attributes, that he 
 could not acknowledge hypostatic distinctions in the Divine 
 Being. His dialectical critique of the ecclesiastical doctrine 
 of the Trinity is as admirable as the historical estimate of the 
 various motives which led to the construction of this doctrine 
 is unsatisfactory. It is undoubtedly correct that the doctrine 
 is not a direct utterance as to the Christian self-consciousness, 
 but only a combination of several of such, — namely, of our 
 union with God by the revelation of Christ, and by the com- 
 mon spirit of the Christian Church. Schleiermacher explains, 
 therefore, the Trinity modalistically of the various forms of 
 the revelation of God, and justifies his procedure by an appeal 
 to the early example of the Sabelllans. 
 
 The entire theology of the last half-century, as far as it seeks 
 at all to remain in touch with critical thought, has been in 
 some degree or other influenced by the theological system of 
 Schleiermacher. But of the numbers who called themselves 
 disciples of Schleiermacher, it has been only a very few who 
 have succeeded in maintaining that combination of keen logical 
 thinking, inward devoutness of feeling, and close sympathy 
 with the life of the Church, which constituted the chief char- 
 acteristics of the master. In the case of the majority, the 
 requirements of their personal devout feeling, and still more 
 regard to the real or supposed wants of the churches, pre- 
 vailed to such an extent as to lead them to put on one side 
 the critical element in the theology of Schleiermacher, and to 
 use his formulse rather for the purpose of hiding or modifying 
 the difficulties of the supranaturalistic theology than to en- 
 courage them to advance beyond the old standpoint along the 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I 23 
 
 new paths of the master. It is true this "positive mediating 
 theology " {positive Vcrinittlungstheologie) rendered the ser- 
 vice to Church hfe of softening the old antitheses, of bringing 
 parties nearer to each other, and, in opposition to the narrow- 
 ness of strict confessionalism, of giving effect in the Church 
 to a certain breadth of religious views, together with warmth 
 of devout feeling. But as regards scientific theology, it marks, 
 in general, not so much an advance beyond as a falling back 
 behind Schleiermacher, even though we must admit that in 
 some points its divergence from him was justified. 
 
 In the System der christlichen Lekre, by Carl Immanuel 
 Nitzsch, in the Dogmatik (left unfinished) of Twesten, in Ull- 
 mann's works on the Sinlessness of Christ and the Nature of 
 Christianity, in Julius Mtiller's book on Sin, and in other 
 representatives of this school, the prevailing aim is to save as 
 much as possible of the traditional matter of the ecclesiastical 
 dogmas, while softening down their offensive features by forms 
 of expression borrowed from Schleiermacher's theology. Nor 
 in this effort was there wanting, on the part of the above- 
 named theologians, either learning or dialectical ingenuity : 
 what they lacked was critical power and simple thoroughness 
 and consistency of logical thought. The one amongst them 
 who possessed most independence of thought was Nitzsch ; 
 but his desire to be profound caused him to sacrifice clearness, 
 and his affected brevity often issued in oracular ambiguity. 
 He took as his starting-point the fundamental thought of 
 Schleiermacher, that religion is not doctrine but life, direct 
 consciousness, feeling. At the same time he sought to bring 
 religious feeling into closer connexion with knowledge and 
 volition than Schleiermacher had done ; he laid special stress 
 — and justly — on the recognition of a necessary and radical 
 union of religion with morality, treating both dogmatics and 
 ethics together accordingly in his System der christlichen 
 Lehre. In his exposition of the idea of revelation, the origi- 
 nality, the new beginning of a religious phenomenon in the life 
 of humanity, is made the prime feature, and then follows what 
 promises to be an extension of the idea so as to embrace 
 heathen religions, as far as they can be conceived as an 
 education for Christianity ; but, after all, this preparation for 
 Christianity was only negative and ideal, while the positive 
 and real preparation is to be found only in the facts and events 
 of Old Testament history. With the supranaturalists, Nitzsch 
 
I 24 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 places miracles and prophecies principally amongst the specific 
 facts of revelation. Miracles are to be regarded as super- 
 natural, creative acts ; yet not as unnatural or contrary to law, 
 but only as a higher nature in the lower one. Indeed, he does 
 not hesitate to say, " Miracles and nature, though distinct, 
 cannot be separated ; for the complete idea of nature involves 
 that of miracle, and the true idea of miracle that of nature." 
 Irreconcilable conceptions are to be reconciled by thus playing 
 fast and loose with words ! So with reference to prophecy, at 
 first the rational point of view is presented, that prophecy has 
 essentially to do with the divine in history and relates to the 
 kingdom of God as a whole, not to the details of outward 
 events. Nevertheless, prediction of single events of the 
 future, though only to a "moderate" extent, must not be 
 excluded from prophecy. The fulfilment of prophecy, how- 
 ever, must not be conceived as a complete "consequence," 
 but as an analogical or typical correspondence, which admit 
 also of a repeated and gradual fulfilment. That is, we have 
 the confusion of two totally opposite points of view : on the 
 one hand, development in accordance with law, and on the 
 other, a supernatural prediction of accidental details. For 
 Scripture, too, Nitzsch demands a "completely unique union 
 of the divine word with the human, a quite peculiar economy," 
 by which the miraculous character of an infallible authority 
 is secured to the Bible. Thus in his Prolegomena, to go no 
 further, the standpoint of Schleiermacher is absolutely put 
 back to that of the su,pranaturalists ; and the same thing 
 occurs in the body of the work, especially in his Christology. 
 TwESTEN, it is true, excels Nitzsch in the formal clearness of 
 his reasoning, though the material weakness of his incon- 
 gruous principles is thereby made only the more obvious. 
 His Dogmatik der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, of 
 which, however, only the first part, as far as the doctrine of 
 the angels, has appeared, is a surprising attempt to deduce the 
 ideas of the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century from the 
 religious feelings -of the modern consciousness, in which 
 attempt not all the arts of a sophistic scholasticism avail to 
 bridge the wide chasm which parts the two points of view. 
 In Julius Muller the scholasticism was carried so far as to 
 revive the ancient Gnostic theory of the fall of man before 
 all time, a theory which found no favour amongst his theo- 
 logical friends. Other representatives of this supranaturalistic 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 12$ 
 
 Mediating Theology will come before us subsequently, either 
 amongst the apologists in opposition to Strauss, or amongst 
 the speculative eclectics. 
 
 The only theologian among the immediate pupils of 
 Schleiermacher who has taken up his ideas in their purity and 
 developed them with independence, is Alexander Schweizer. 
 The significance which he ascribes to his master's Glaubeiislehre, 
 and the direction in which he seeks to farther develop it, he 
 has clearly stated in the introductory paragraph of his own 
 Christliche Glaubenslehre nach protestantisclien Grundsdtzen 
 (1863-73). "The distinctive nature of Schleiermacher's 
 theological system is a subjectivity open and free towards the 
 true objectivity, or an objectivity such as can really live in the 
 devout subject and make itself felt as the truth. That which 
 marks the present stage of our development in the Church, 
 which has been far more widely reached than is openly 
 confessed, is not Schleiermacher's person and his dogmatic 
 labours, but the freedom in appropriating traditional dogmas 
 which was evinced by him as an obligation upon our time 
 generally, and which has since Schleiermacher been still more 
 urgently imposed upon us as a duty. Unmistakably our age 
 needs and demands a free development of theology as well as 
 of piety, of congregations as well as of the Church, a free, 
 independent sphere for the religious life, a system of religious 
 belief which represents the faith that is really believed and 
 believable, a conscious advance beyond dogmatism and 
 dogmatics." Theology must not take its matter merely from 
 the Scriptures, nor merely from the ecclesiastical creeds, nor 
 again merely from the reason, in so far as it has not been 
 brought under the influence of Christian experience ; but from 
 the faith itself of the Protestant Church, that is, the devout 
 consciousness, as far as it has been brought under the influence 
 of the general experience of the Protestant Church in its 
 historical development. The common Christian life of the 
 churches is the sphere in which alone Christian experiences 
 can adequately arise. Our faith is based upon Christian experi- 
 ence. It is accordingly never merely feeling, but always like- 
 wise thought and impulse, i.e., tends to pass into doctrine and 
 action, especially as the feeling itself arises in consequence 
 of doctrine and action, or is produced and determined in 
 us as Christian feeling. Although religious feeling is the 
 primary and original element of subjective piety, on the other 
 
126 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 hand it is neither an isolated thing, inasmuch as it can only be 
 made intelligible by its expression in doctrine and practice, 
 nor is it what it is save through the influence of the religious 
 practices and teaching by which we are surrounded. As little 
 as the non-ego can be construed from the pure ego can a 
 definite, clear, and complete system of faith be deduced from 
 the devout ego, that is, from the emotions of the ego which 
 we call feelings, without the incorporation, consciously or 
 unconsciously, of the objective experiences of the Church 
 which are represented in its doctrines. It is true that 
 Schleiermacher desired this, but he identified his own devout 
 feelings too much with those of the Church. It is an 
 excellence of Schwelzer's Glaubenslehre that a definite dis- 
 tinction is drawn in it between subjective and objective faith, 
 and a mutual interaction and regulation of both is maintained. 
 Connected with this is a further difference by which Schweizer 
 gave fuller development to the theology of Schleiermacher on 
 the speculative side. If devout feeling is the source from 
 which doctrines are derived, it cannot be also the canon by 
 which these doctrinal statements are to be judged. For this 
 purpose devout feeling is an element too indefinite, variable, 
 purely subjective, with regard to which it is impossible to be 
 sufficiently certain either as to the measure of its agreement 
 with the feeling of the Church or as to its intrinsic truth. 
 Not only must its place in the development of Christian piety 
 be in each case proved, a condition which Schleiermacher did 
 not sufficiently observe, but it must also be determined from 
 another side than the historical one — by the ideal of religion 
 itself, since we are by Christian experience placed in a position 
 to find and recognise that ideal. The moral and religious 
 perfection of man is an ideal which lives within our souls, 
 having been aroused and fostered by Christian experience 
 especially, and taking definite shape in our conceptions, it 
 helps to determine our religious feelings also. Whatever 
 contradicts this ideal in our traditionary religion cannot be to 
 us the truth ; Christianity, whatever impure and perishable 
 accretions may have sometimes accidently adhered to it, is 
 essentially one with the ideal of perfect religion, and must 
 therefore take the form called for by this ideal as well as by 
 Christian experience. As in objective knowledge generally, 
 the truth is established by the agreement of empirical 
 observation with the idea obtained by the speculative method, 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I 2/ 
 
 SO in religion certain truth is reached by the agreement of 
 experience with the rehgious idea. The excellence of 
 Christianity, which guarantees for it imperishable duration, is 
 that in its essential matter it coincides with the idea of perfect 
 religion, and simply seeks to realise it. Christianity comes to 
 its true self, not in the reason of rationalism, but in the ideal 
 of perfect piety. The one proper canon of truth, to be 
 followed by theology in its criticism of traditionary matter, is 
 to compare the historical form with the idea, and to require 
 the approximation of the former to the latter. It is precisely 
 the excellence of this canon of truth that it is not one so 
 definitely formulated as, for instance, the Apostles' Creed ; 
 for no period is in a position to produce an infallible formula 
 to serve as the canon of truth for all the future. This canon 
 must be itself subject to improvement, advancing with 
 universal and Christian knowledge. The ideal of perfect 
 godliness will be perceived more purely and fully in proportion 
 as Christian experience advances, since our ideals are brought 
 to life and full consciousness by means of the experience that 
 answers to them. Guidance into more truth takes place in the 
 interaction of progressive Christian experience and of the 
 ideal of absolute religion and morality, rendered growingly 
 perfect through that experience, so that whatever does not 
 satisfy that ideal cannot be genuinely Christian, however long 
 it may have dogmatic currency. 
 
 These are the principles of genuine Protestantism, and at 
 the same time of genuine modern scientific theology. The 
 ideal factor, the idea which lives within us of the perfect 
 religion, is recognised, together with the factor of experience 
 in the consciousness of the Church, as the canon of truth in 
 the construction of theological doctrines, and it is at the same 
 time acknowledged that this religious ideal is not always the 
 same, or to be put into an exact formula for all time, but 
 develops, advances, and deepens. Such principles cut the 
 ground from under dogmatism in every form, not only the 
 dogmatism of orthodoxy, but also of rationalism and specula- 
 tion, while they clear the way for a treatment of theological 
 doctrines which is both conservative and free, in which the 
 valuable elements of past development are preserved and the 
 course is opened and the direction shown for progressive 
 development in the future. Schweizer accordingly declines 
 to place dogmatic theology (as Schleiermacher desired) in 
 
128 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 the division of ecclesiastical statistics, as a historical science, 
 but assigns to it, no less than to ethics, as essential the duty 
 of preparing for and directing the future development of faith. 
 
 In accordance with these principles, Schweizer puts the 
 various doctrines in a form which is not less productive 
 religiously than rational. The dignity of Scripture, he 
 maintains, must be asserted in opposition to ecclesiastical 
 tradition, to fanatical claimants of special illumination, and to 
 abstract reason uninfluenced by Christianity. But if this 
 authority is carried to excess and urged against reason 
 generally, even when brought under the influence of Christian 
 experience ; or if it is applied to scientific matters, whether in 
 the department of historical criticism or of the physical world, 
 it must cease to serve the truth, and could only give rise to 
 error by presenting non-religious matters as religious, and 
 thereby promoting superstition. The Scriptures supply what 
 is necessary for salvation, in a form abundantly recognis- 
 able by the Christian community in its free development, 
 precisely when exegesis acknowledges no binding canon in 
 tradition. Nor is the authority of the Scriptures based upon 
 a mechanical, or any other supernatural inspiration of their 
 contents, but simply upon their recognisable value and the 
 historical position of their authors. 
 
 In Schweizer's hands the doctrine of God likewise takes a 
 more satisfactory form than in Schleiermacher's system. 
 Instead of going back, as his master had done, to the philo- 
 sophy of Spinoza, Schweizer recurs to the theology of the 
 Calvinistic Church, in which the unconditioned and universal 
 causality of God, as the basis of the certainty of salvation, is 
 made the centre point of the theological system. Schweizer 
 had previously traced minutely the historical development of 
 the central doctrines of the Reformed Church, and makes use of 
 his historical and critical inquiries in his Glaubenslehre. He 
 defines God as the living cause whose operation is the founda- 
 tion of the world as one of law and order. The world of 
 nature and the world of moral order, with the life of salvation 
 in the kingdom of God, are absolutely dependent on God ; 
 and they are thus dependent as ordered worlds, so that their 
 order is never interrupted by their dependence on him, but 
 is caused and preserved thereby. In the order of nature, 
 God's omnipotence and omniscience, eternity and omni- 
 presence, are manifested ; in the order of the moral world his 
 
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I 29 
 
 holiness, truth, and righteousness ; in the life of salvation in 
 the kingdom of God, his paternal love and wisdom, which 
 called into existence by Christ the religion of salvation, 
 prepared for by the religion of nature and the religion of law, 
 and which guide and consummate its course in conformity 
 with a necessary historical order. The truth of the doctrine 
 of predestination is found in the unconditional dependence 
 upon divine grace of the entire course amongst men of the 
 Christian life of salvation ; but the Augustinian and Calvinistic 
 doctrine of the divine decrees, with its particularism and 
 definitive dualism, must be given up. For the grace of the 
 religion of salvation is in its object and effect designed for 
 all mankind, though it is made particular in its historical 
 realisation, not producing effect all at once upon all, and the 
 same effect upon all, since, as its operations are spiritual, it 
 exerts no compulsion, but allows of resistance. But notwith- 
 standing this particularism in its historical operation, the 
 divine grace, which is in itself universal, cannot suffer a final 
 dualism of the saved and the unsaved. This Judaistic con- 
 ception must not interfere with the Christian hope of the 
 perfect consummation of the appropriated salvation in eternity. 
 In this monistic consummation of the divine work of salvation, 
 Schweizer recognises the true logical consequence of the 
 position taken by Zwingli as to the preordination of sin in 
 the eternal purposes of God, in view of salvation, in support 
 of which Romans ix.-xi. may be quoted. 
 
 Schweizer's Christology is, like Schleiermacher's, based 
 upon the Christian consciousness, but with a much more 
 cautious use of the historical documents. He starts from the 
 position, that according to the supposition underlying our 
 Christian consciousness, Christianity is that historical religion 
 in which the idea of religion is presented and realised, so that 
 in that idea nothing is contained which could not be realised 
 in Christianity. Thence he infers that the idea of man as one 
 with God must be embodied in Christ, must shine unchecked 
 through his whole manifestation, so that with and in Christ 
 the ideal of religion is brought home to our consciousness. 
 " We behold in him the pure image of the divine life in 
 human form, without going so far as to identify absolutely the 
 ideal and the historical Christ." For the Hellenistic concep- 
 tions of a divine and human nature, and of three persons in 
 the Godhead, must be substituted those of our modern 
 
 G. T. K 
 
130 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 thinkers — idea and manifestation, eternal and temporal, being 
 and historical realisation. If we apply these ideas to Christ- 
 ology and Pneumatology, our definitions will become much 
 more intelligible, harmonising both sides of the relation with- 
 out the surrender of the one or the other, or the confounding 
 of both. Not until dogmatic Christology and Pneumatology 
 have passed in our belief into an ethical and religious Christ- 
 ology and Pneumatology, will this problem, proposed from the 
 very first by the Reformation, find its solution. A special 
 point on which Schweizer worked out more definitely sugges- 
 tions of Schleiermacher's is the parallel between Christology 
 and Pneumatology, the Holy Spirit bearing just the same 
 relation to the Church as in Christ the idea to its manifesta- 
 tion. The Church then appears as the Christ widened into 
 the historical life of the community, Christ as the original 
 representation of the common spirit of the Church, or of the 
 ideal religion. When it is added that this religion was 
 founded and historically prepared for in mankind from the 
 beginning, it follows that in Christ the ideal destination of 
 humanity first reached full realisation, and that Christianity is 
 therefore essentially one with the ideal of human nature ; a 
 view to which Zwingli had already prophetically pointed, and 
 in which the thought of Protestant philosophers and theo- 
 logians is found in full accord. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 
 
 Hegel's religious philosophy was from the first a.Jantis bifrons, 
 from which accordingly the theology to which it gave birth 
 was developed in two contrary directions. The assumption of 
 the identity of religious and philosophical truth produced a 
 strongly conservative attitude towards ecclesiastical dogma ; 
 while if stress was laid on the distinction between them — that 
 religion gives us truth only in the imperfect form of intuitions 
 or percepts, but philosophy in the perfect form of concepts, — 
 the obvious inference was that religion, as the lower stage, 
 must be resolved into and replaced by the higher stage of phi- 
 losophy. The conservative attitude was exclusively taken by 
 Hegel's school during the master's lifetime, and was predomi- 
 nant for long afterwards. " This school," according to Baur's 
 admirable critique,^ "was enamoured of the opinion, which it 
 either entertained itself, or wished others at all events to enter- 
 tain of it, that between its philosophy and Christianity there 
 was an affinity and harmony such as no other philosophy had 
 been able to boast of. If this philosophy had its Trinity, why 
 should it not likewise have its Incarnate God, its Reconciliation, 
 and similar dogmas } To speak of an Incarnate God sounded 
 to the Hegelian school speculatively as profound as it was 
 edifying to the Christian ; while Schleiermacher had spoken 
 only of a "Saviour," now the Hegelian school, as if conscious 
 of a certain priestly dignity, put its profoundest significance 
 into the doctrine of a " God-man." But how little the chasm 
 separating the God-man of philosophy from the God-man of 
 the Church was realised, may be best seen in the theology of 
 Marheineke. After speaking philosophically of the unity of 
 the divine and human nature, of the former as the truth and 
 the latter as the reality, he makes the transition to the his- 
 torical personage in perfect good faith, by simply saying that 
 
 ^ Kirchengeschichie, vol. v. p. 378. 
 
132 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGV. [Bk. II. 
 
 "the unity of God and man was historically realised in the 
 person of Jesus Christ." So too in Daub's Theologumena, the 
 incarnation of God and the redemption of the world is in 
 the first place deduced as an eternal truth from the idea of 
 God in the following manner : God's eternal self-contemplation 
 must be identical with human reason, and God's eternal 
 activity consists in bringing back the world from its finiteness, 
 the result of its apostasy, to the unity of his infinite Being, — 
 the world of nature by the natural method of the death of the 
 individual, but mankind by the spiritual method of religion, as 
 exaltation above the emptiness of the finite to the infinite. 
 The importance of Christ, Daub considered to be that he 
 exhibited this eternal incarnation of God and redemption of 
 the world in his own person, as an historical fact, on which 
 account he was himself the God-man in a unique sense, his 
 death the sacrifice redeeming the world, his life a continual 
 miracle and full of miracles. It was quite after the style of 
 this romantic and uncritical speculative method to connect the 
 metaphysical ideas, which had been arrived at by means of 
 philosophical dialectic, directly with the persons and events of 
 the Gospel narratives, thus raising these above the region of 
 ordinary experience into that of the supernatural, and regard- 
 ing the most absurd assertions as philosophically justified. 
 Daub had become so hopelessly addicted to this perverse prin- 
 ciple that he deduced not only Jesus as the embodiment of the 
 philosophical idea of the union of God and man, but also Judas 
 Iscariot as the embodiment of the idea of a rival god, or 
 Satan. We of this generation find the confusion of ideas 
 underlying such deductions so incomprehensible that it is hard 
 to avoid unfairness in our estimate of the individual theologians 
 of this class, especially when they carry their disdain of the 
 sound human understanding so far as to ascribe with Daub, 
 in the very title of his last book (1833), rational doubts 
 respecting the dogmas and legends of the Church simply to 
 criminal self-seeking. 
 
 The credit of having chased away the mists and clouds of 
 dogmatic illusions such as these, and of restoring to the critical 
 understanding its rights, belongs to the Swabian theologian, 
 David Friedrich Strauss. Two previous works upon Im- 
 mortality, the authors of which, Richter and Feuerbach, were 
 reckoned among the Hegelian school, had indeed, by the 
 radically negative conclusions therein reached by the appli- 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 133 
 
 cation of this philosophy, shaken the confidence generally felt 
 in Hegelian orthodoxy ; but since the other adherents of the 
 school were active in protesting against these negative infer- 
 ences, such isolated efforts produced no very important effect. 
 When, however, Strauss brought the heavy artillery of his 
 criticism, distinguished equally by learning and penetration, to 
 bear first on the historical foundations of dogma and then on 
 dogma itself, the unsubstantial fabric of Hegelian dogmatism 
 was within a few years completely destroyed. The first and 
 greatest shock was given by Strauss's work on the life of 
 Jesus, which will occupy us in the next book. As the polemi- 
 cal literature which his Life of Jesus provoked was chiefly 
 occupied with dogmatical reflections and speculation, rather 
 than with historical criticism, Strauss was induced to supple- 
 ment it by a further critical work on the history of Christian 
 dogmas, bearing the title. Die christliche Glaiibenslehre in 
 threr geschichtlichen Entwickelung und ijn Kanipf Tnit der 
 modernen Wissenschaft" (1840-41). The strong point of the 
 book is its acute and ingenious application of the principle 
 that the history of dogma is its destruction and the story of 
 the process of its dissolution. Strauss himself, in his preface, 
 characterises his method in the forcible words : " Individual 
 subjective criticism is a water-pipe which any boy may close 
 for a time ; objective criticism, as it is accomplished in the 
 course of centuries, advances like a foaming torrent against 
 which all sluices and dams are powerless." In the same pre- 
 face he thus describes the object of his work : " Its purpose is 
 — if the profane figure is allowable — to do for the science of 
 dogmatics what the balance-sheet does for a commercial house. 
 If the firm is not made directly the richer by it, it learns 
 exactly what its resources are : and that is often as valuable as 
 an actual increase of them. Such a survey of our dogmatic 
 property is in our days rendered the more urgently necessary 
 in proportion as the majority of theologians entertain the 
 greatest illusions on the subject. The depreciation of the old 
 theological stock-in-trade made by the criticism and polemics of 
 the last two centuries is greatly underrated ; and on the other 
 hand,^ the doubtful assistance supposed to be derived from the 
 emotional theology and mystical philosophy of the present 
 century is much over-estimated. It is generally imagined 
 that the greater part of the lawsuits which are pending with 
 regard to those depreciations have been won, and that there 
 
134 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 is certainty of the greatest profits from these newly opened 
 resources. But it is not impossible that these suits should all 
 be lost in a single day, and if then these new mines should 
 also disappoint expectations, failure would be inevitable. 
 Reason enough, surely, to know in time, after careful calcu- 
 lation, the relation of the credit to the debit side of the 
 account ! " The result of this balancing of accounts, Strauss 
 declares to be the complete bankruptcy of the Christian faith ; 
 neither is it merely the dogmatic formulae of the theology of 
 the Church that are subject to this process of dissolution, but, 
 Strauss holds, that with them the Christian religion must pass 
 away, and even religion in general. This marked precipitation 
 was only possible in the case of a man in whose nature 
 religious feeling was much weaker than critical intellect, and 
 who had besides grown accustomed in the Hegelian school to 
 that intellectualism which makes knowledge everything and all 
 other vital functions nothing, and in which particularly religion 
 was regarded only as theoretical and bound to stand or fall 
 with a particular theory. Strauss's study of Schleiermacher 
 might have preserved him from this gross error ; but great 
 as was his acumen in descrying Schleiermacher's dogmatic 
 weaknesses, he was quite unable to understand the importance 
 of Schleiermacher's theory of religion, and the justice of the 
 distinction between religion and theology. In general, the 
 overweening self-confidence of "absolute knowledge" fostered 
 in Hegel's school had materially tended to accentuate the 
 negative radicalism of Strauss's criticism. Whoever imagines 
 himself to possess the key to all the riddles of the world in the 
 formulae of his philosophical school, will very naturally pass a 
 much more negative sentence upon all attempts to form a con- 
 ception of the world from a religious point of view, than the 
 man who humbly recognises the relativity of all our knowledge 
 and is under no illusion with regard to the value of the for- 
 mulae of all systems. The absolute and irreconcilable an- 
 tagonism between philosophy and theology which Strauss 
 tries to show, in the case of each dogma, is the final result of 
 the historical process, arises unavoidably then only when 
 both the philosopher and the theologian make the same mistake 
 of embracing a dogmatism which propounds its formula; as 
 infallible truths. This is indisputably the case to a marked 
 degree with the Hegelian-Straussian philosophy of "absolute 
 knowledge." But since this dogmatism is the opposite of 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 135 
 
 scientific, the radicalism of Strauss's History of Dogmatics 
 evidently cannot decide the general question of the relation of 
 religion and science. 
 
 The final consequences of Strauss's position were inferred 
 by Feuerbach. Strauss did not go beyond an idealistic 
 pantheism, which, while it gave up the God of religion, at 
 least assumed a universal spiritual principle, an " idea" which 
 realises itself in the finite, evolves nature from itself and 
 becomes conscious of itself in man ; and in this Feuerbach 
 recognised a remnant of mysticism which must be got rid of ; 
 the Absolute above man he declared to be an empty abstrac- 
 tion, the really Absolute or Divine is man himself All and 
 every system of theology, not excepting speculative theology, 
 must therefore be superseded by anthropology. But if man 
 alone is divine, how can he come to believe in and worship a 
 God .'' Feuerbach answers that the conception of God is an 
 illusion, formed of the wishes of the heart and of the poetic 
 imagination. The gods are Wiinschwesen, i.e., the wishes 
 and ideals of the human heart objectified by the imagination. 
 In them man contemplates his own nature, not as it really is, 
 held in by the limitation of the world, but as he wishes it to 
 be, as the unlimited omnipotence of feeling. Religious faith 
 is the self-assurance of the heart demanding the satisfaction 
 of its desires. A miracle is the realisation (of course the 
 imagined realisation) of a supernatural wish. Christ is the 
 omnipotence of subjectivity, the reality of all the wishes of 
 the heart ; the conception of an incarnate God is the disclosure 
 of the truth, that the nature of God is simply man. So also 
 the Christian heaven means, just like the Christian God, the 
 fulfilment of all wishes. Immortality is the testament of 
 religion, in which it makes its last will ; as heaven is the 
 unfolded nature of the Deity, it is also the frankest declara- 
 tion of the inmost thoughts of religion. 
 
 Feuerbach stands at the head of those who hold religion 
 to be an idealistic fiction without actual truth, viz., the modern 
 Positivists and Agnostics. But while the latter with cautious 
 scepticism decline to deal with the metaphysical questions as 
 to the origin of the world and of man, Feuerbach only aban- 
 doned the idealistic dogmatism of his Hegelian school to 
 adopt that of materialism. He held that only what is cognis- 
 able by the senses, what is material, is real ; even in man the 
 spiritual is only an effect of the sensible, the sole reality ; 
 
136 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 '' der Mensch isi, was er t'ssi," man is what he eais, was 
 finally Feuerbach's watchword. It follows of course that 
 from this cynical point of view religion can only be regarded 
 as a foolish aberration, a kind of mental disorder; but since 
 by the same hypothesis the other objects of man's spiritual 
 endeavour, morality, art and science, must lose all their mean- 
 ing and value, this position is really self-destructive. For if 
 man is only a material product of nature, like a plant or an 
 animal, it is inconceivable why he should come to form moral 
 ideas of any kind, or to propose scientific views on any ques- 
 tion. The naturalistic point of view adopted by Feuerbach 
 could logically lead only to the rejection of a// ideas and 
 ideals, or to pure nihilism and solipsism, as is clearly shown 
 in Max Stirner's notorious book, Der Einzige und sein Eigen- 
 tkuni. The same holds good of the last book in which Strauss 
 laid before the world his final confession of faith, Der alte 
 tntd der neue Glaiibe, 1872. Like Feuerbach, he abandoned 
 the dogmatism of idealism for that of naturalism, undeterred 
 by the logical inconsistencies of naturalism and the difficulties 
 of Feuerbach's theory of knowledge. On the principles of 
 modern natural science, he now believed himself able to 
 explain the world as a mechanism of blind material forces, 
 without any final cause, and hence without any spiritual prin- 
 ciple ; nevertheless he sought to acknowledge reason and 
 goodness in the universe, and honour them with a certain 
 piety. Man he considered a part of nature, developed from 
 the ape by Darwinian selection ; nevertheless he required 
 him never to forget that he was man, and not merely a part 
 of nature, that in him nature had not merely striven upwards, 
 but even to surpass herself; he must therefore be guided in 
 his action by the idea of the race, and by the consciousness of 
 mutual obligation seek to mitigate the cruel struggle for exist- 
 ence, although as a part of nature he cannot wholly avoid it. 
 It comes to this then, man is a part and again not a part of 
 nature ; the product of an aimless mechanical natural process, 
 and yet a product in which nature has striven to surpass her- 
 self! The struggle for existence, the right of the stronger, is 
 the only law ruling the world, and yet man is bound to be 
 guided by the altruistic principle of the idea of the race ! The 
 new creed which includes such gross contradictions, without 
 even attemping their solution, can hardly claim more scientific 
 importance than any one of the old confessions of faith. In 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 137 
 
 point of fact, both philosophy and theology soon passed from 
 Strauss's last book to the order of the day. His earlier con- 
 tributions to historical criticism ought not however to be 
 forgotten. We shall speak of them in the next book. 
 
 But neither the right nor the left wing of the Hegelian 
 school permanently enriched dogmatic theology, owing to the 
 weakness of the former in historical criticism, and of the latter 
 in the appreciation of religious facts. On the other hand, we 
 have to mention a number of men who, avoiding these two 
 extremes, tried to gain by the aid of speculative philosophy a 
 profounder conception of the Christian faith. The most im- 
 portant works in this connexion are three : Biedermann s 
 Christliche Dogmatik, Weisse s Philosophische Dogmatik, and 
 Rot he s Theologische Ethik. Their common feature is a 
 speculative theism and a theistic and theological view of 
 history, in which the facts as well as the ideas and ideals of 
 Christianity find a place. 
 
 At the time of Alois Emanuel Biedermann's youth scien- 
 tific and ecclesiastical circles had been deeply stirred by the 
 Hegelian philosophy and Straussian criticism. Both pro- 
 foundly affected him and greatly enriched his thought, without 
 robbing him of his freedom and individuality. He never was 
 an Hegelian in the strict sense of the school, but from the 
 first regarded Hegel's characteristic method of a/rwrz dialectic 
 as an error and as the untenable weakness of the system, and 
 tried to correct it by a less ambitious departure from experi- 
 ence. Still, he saw profound truth in the fundamental principle 
 of the Hegelian philosophy, that reason is in everything 
 which exists and occurs, and must, as the creative nature of 
 things, be comprehended by our own rational thought. He 
 likewise recognised the great importance of Strauss's critical 
 labours, although he early perceived that the limitation of 
 Strauss's powers lay in the fact that he could not rise above the 
 critical dissolution of the conceptions of ecclesiastical tradition 
 to the speculative recognition and presentation of the religious 
 truth contained in them, Biedermann regarded criticism, in 
 which he was equal to Strauss in point of rigour, as only one 
 half of the problem to be solved ; the other, and certainly not 
 less important half, being to formulate as conceptual know- 
 ledge the content of religious truth after it has been purified in 
 the crucible of critical analysis. To make this positive addi- 
 tion to Strauss's negative results, he regarded as his own life- 
 
138 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 work, to the accomplishment of which he devoted the labours 
 of his best years. The result of these labours is contained 
 in his chief work, Die Ckristliche Dogmatik, the first edition 
 of which appeared in 1868, and the second in 1884-5, en- 
 larged by a philosophical introduction in which is expounded the 
 theory of knowledge underlying his metaphysics and theology. 
 This theory of knowledge occupies a peculiar position 
 intermediary between Hegel's logical idealism and Spinoza's 
 parallelism of extended and thinking Being as the two sides 
 of the one substance. Biedermann holds firmly to the He- 
 gelian principle that the substance of spirit is logical Being, 
 and hence can be wholly and entirely comprehended in logical 
 categories, both in respect of the infinite spirit, or God, and 
 of the finite spirit, or man. But he does not hold that the 
 logical Being of spirit includes within it all Being, and that 
 the world is only the development and manifestation of the 
 absolute logical idea ; nor does he think that we can construct 
 and logically deduce the world by means of an a priori dia- 
 lectic. On the contrary, he teaches that spiritual or ideal 
 Being is never given us other than with and in sensuous or 
 material Being, and only in such a way that they are by 
 nature antithetical — the one, logical Being, is outside space 
 and time ; the other, material Being, spatial and temporal, but 
 both are combined with and in each other to form the one whole 
 reality. The problem of cognition accordingly is, in the case 
 of any content of consciousness, so to distinguish the ideal 
 Being from the material Being, in combination with which it 
 exists, as to make clear both the antithesis of their respective 
 natures, and at the same time the indivisible unity of their 
 substance. This abstraction of logical Being from material 
 Being, and the comprehension of the former, as the ideal 
 content of experience, in purely logical categories, is what 
 Biedermann means by " pure thought." This theory of cog- 
 nition is the foundation of his metaphysics ; from it follow, 
 in his view, the answers to the most important questions re- 
 garding soul and body, God and world. On this very account 
 we must not refrain from stating the grave objections to which 
 the theory is open. In the first place, we must ob-serve that 
 the conception " ideal Being " is ambiguous, since it denotes 
 sometimes thinking Being ^ (spirit, consciousness), sometimes 
 
 ' denkendes Sein. 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 139 
 
 Being thought^ (conception, relation, law). Now it is cer- 
 tainly wrong to say that thinking Being, i.e., being which 
 thinks, is merely logical Being, since the same Being which 
 thinks also wills and feels ; for this reason we cannot anteced- 
 ently expect that this thinking Being, or spirit, will be com- 
 prehended purely and entirely in logical categories. Neither 
 can we assent to the proposition that ideal or spiritual Being 
 is timeless, while temporal Being as such is physical or 
 material ; Being thought, as the idea of a triangle, of spirit, 
 or of history, is indeed timeless ; but thinking Being, or spirit 
 itself, is never given us in experience as timeless Being, but 
 always as the consciousness of our ego taking place in time. 
 Whether this peculiarity of occurring in time, which always 
 attaches to the Being of spirit in our experience, is accidental 
 and can be dispensed with in thought, is a difficult question, 
 and has been variously answered ; but whatever answer be 
 given, at any rate the identification of spiritual with timeless 
 Being can never be taken for granted as an unquestionable 
 axiom. Further, with regard to the fundamental principle of 
 this theory of knowledge, viz., the parallelism of ideal and 
 material Being as the two inseparable sides of one substantial 
 reality, I remark, firstly, that this view, derived from Spinoza, 
 cannot be deduced from the analysis of our consciousness, 
 since direct experience is always entirely a phenomenon of 
 consciousness, and hence ideal Being, from which we after- 
 wards mediately infer the existence of an external material 
 Being. Secondly, as a psychological hypothesis this theory 
 is not calculated satisfactorily to explain the relation of body 
 and soul without doing violence to the facts of experience. 
 Thirdly, as a metaphysical hypothesis it is equally unfitted to 
 explain the relation of the world to God ; for if the world 
 is both spiritual and material Being, we cannot see how it 
 should have its foundation in a purely spiritual God ; vice 
 versa, if with Biedermann we accept the latter hypothesis, we 
 should expect the reduction of material Being in some way to 
 spiritual Being, and not the co-ordination of the two as from 
 the first opposite in nature. Hegel's monism of absolute 
 Spirit, and Spinoza's dualism of Thought and Extension, are 
 theories too contradictory to admit of combination in a single 
 system. Biedermann most likely recognised the one-sided 
 
 ' gedachtes Sein. 
 
140 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 character of absolute logical idealism, and its need of amend- 
 ment from the side of actual experience ; but in having 
 recourse, with this object in view, to Spinoza's dualism of 
 thinking and corporeal Being, he grafted a foreign and an- 
 tagonistic shoot upon the trunk of idealism, and left unremoved 
 Hegel's fundamental defect, his abstract logical formalism. 
 Still, by this alteration Biedermann attained one object — a 
 more definite distinction between God and the world, thus 
 the substitution of theism for pantheism, though still in too 
 abstract a form ; and to do this was an essential condition for 
 a right view of religion. 
 
 The investigation of the nature of religion was improved 
 in the second edition of Biedermann's work by the psycho- 
 logical description of it being placed before the inquiry into 
 its metaphysical basis. Biedermann defines Religion as the 
 endeavour of the human ego to rise above the limiting nega- 
 tions of the world as the scene of its natural life by appealing 
 to a Power raised above such limitation, in order by its help to 
 obtain deliverance ; it is produced by anything which discloses 
 the opposition between man's demands of life and the limita- 
 tion he experiences. The psychical form of this endeavour is 
 Faith, in which all the elementary functions of the personal 
 spirit are harmoniously combined : a feeling of dependence 
 and mundane limitation as the point of departure, and of 
 freedom as the goal of the act of appeal, a conception of an 
 infinite Power above man, a desire to rise to this Power, with 
 a longing for deliverance from the cramping limitations of the 
 world. This whole act of the man, theoretical and practical in 
 one, constitutes real "religious faith "; while "faith" in the sense 
 of mere theoretical belief is not a religious act at all. Precisely 
 because religious faith is something other than a mere form of 
 secondary knowledge, it can never be rendered obsolete and 
 replaced by any higher kind of knowledge, such as philosophy. 
 Philosophy can exercise a purifying influence upon the theo- 
 retical side of religion, — on the various modes of conceiving the 
 contents of faith, — but can never replace the distinctly reli- 
 gious act of faith itself — the practical elevation of the man to 
 God. By this means Biedermann secured himself against the 
 Hegelian confusion of religion and philosophy, which had led 
 Strauss to the fatal step of annulling the former by means of the 
 latter, and strictly guarded the indefeasible rights of the reli- 
 gious life against all encroachments on the part of knowledge. 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. I4I 
 
 But Biedermann does not end with the psychological de- 
 scription of religion. Though this has its proximate source 
 in the nature of man himself, as finite spirit, the appeal of his 
 soul to God is incomprehensible without the metaphysical 
 supposition of relations on God's part with man ; the fact of 
 religion presupposes the existence and self-revelation of God. 
 The legitimacy of this presupposition, of which the religious 
 consciousness has an immediate certainty, is shown by the 
 reasoning intellect in the "proofs of the existence of God"; 
 and then the idea of God is put into a " pure " — i.e., abstractly 
 logical — formula, as follows: "The absoluteness of the spirit- 
 ual Being of God consists therein, that the actus purus of his 
 self-sufficient existence within himself is the non-temporal and 
 non-spatial condition, i.e., the eternal and omnipresent source, 
 of the temporal and spatial process of the finite world." God 
 is the source of the world, not by temporal act of creation out 
 of nothing, but in that by a non-temporal method he produces 
 from himself the material being of the world, and makes it 
 external to himself. The latter expression is intended defi- 
 nitely to provide against any pantheistic confusion of God and 
 world ; but, it must be confessed, the conception of the abso- 
 lute Spirit producing from himself, and making external to 
 himself, a material world, the nature of which is antithetical 
 to his own spirituality, is as unrealisable in thought as the 
 Church's idea of creation, which lays no claim to logical truth. 
 Moreover, in Biedermann's case this claim rests upon a de- 
 lusion ; the categories of [Insichseins) existence within self, 
 and making external to self {Aussersichsetzens), evidently be- 
 long to the intuition of space, and are therefore by no means 
 purely logical, but figurative expressions, which are not purer 
 but only much less significant than the expressions usually 
 borrowed from the analogy of the human spirit. Biedermann's 
 rejection of this one possible way of arriving at positive 
 (though, of course, always relative) statements about God, 
 ostensibly in the interests of " pure thought," which, it is said, 
 can lay claim to absolute appropriateness, was not the strength 
 but the weakness of his theology, betraying his bondage to 
 the logical formalism and dogmatism of the Hegelian school. 
 
 Biedermann discusses at length the nature of divine revela- 
 tion. It Is a process within the human spirit, effected by God, 
 in which man's spiritual activities are not set aside but raised 
 above their finite limitation, so as to experience the divine. 
 
142 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 More particularly, we may distinguish three elements in the 
 divine revelation : it appears as the basis of man's spiritual life 
 in his bent to rationality ( Vernunftrieb), as the law of his 
 spiritual life in his conscience, and as the force securing its 
 normal realisation in his religious and moral freedom. This 
 latter is the properly religious revelation, which takes place in 
 the faith of the religious man as illumination, blessedness, and 
 sanctification. These zVzzyarrtf experiences of the religious spirit 
 are the effect therefore of direct divine action or revelation, 
 and in this consists the only revelation properly so called ; on 
 the other hand, things lying behind or outside them, whether 
 external events or history or sacred scriptures or ceremonial 
 observances, are in themselves only phenomena of mans life 
 of faith ; though a natural confusion of the external and de- 
 rived with the inward and primary causes them to be looked 
 upon as direct divine revelations, and gives them in the faith 
 of the Church a position of unchangeable divine authority 
 given once for all. Hence we have the principle of super- 
 natural authority common to all positive religions, and their 
 tendency to strictly preserve anything traditional as having 
 ostensibly come directly from God. This failure of super- 
 naturalism to recognise the natural side of historical religion 
 is corrected by Rationalism, which calls attention to the natural 
 historical conditions of all religious phenomena, but on the 
 other hand exaggerates the truth of this observation by treat- 
 ing everything in religion as a merely natural product of the 
 human mind, and quite dispensing with the divine factor. The 
 problem of critical and speculative theology Biedermann con- 
 siders to be to preserve such a mean between the two ex- 
 tremes that the supernatural or divine, and the natural or 
 human come to be recognised as the two inseparably united 
 sides of every revelation and throughout the whole history of 
 religion. Biedermann has also applied this principle to the 
 Christian tradition and to the solution of the great questions 
 of Christology, of the nature and value of the Bible, and of the 
 creeds of the Church. 
 
 The Christian religion, he teaches, had its historical source 
 in the person of Jesus, while its essential nature or principle is 
 to be found " in the religious relation as it is presented to us 
 in the religious consciousness of Jesus as a new fact of revela- 
 tion determining his whole personality and at the same time 
 creating faith in that personality." We can therefore call the 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. I43 
 
 religious personality of Jesus the essential principle of Chris- 
 tianity, meaning by this that the new saving influence on man- 
 kind with this new object of faith, was simply the characteristic 
 religious consciousness of this person, which took the form of 
 the consciousness of sonship to the heavenly Father. Un- 
 doubtedly this personal consciousness of Jesus points to a 
 divine revelation, and so far was miraculous, but only in the 
 relative sense, not as something transcending the constitution 
 of humanity, but as itself the highest fulfilment of the religious 
 and moral destiny of the race ; in Jesus the religious truth that 
 we are all called to be sons of God became, with immediate 
 freshness and force, the content of our knowledge and feeling 
 and a motive-power in our will ; in this sense he is the Son of 
 God and the Saviour /car' e^o-x^iv. But when the Church con- 
 verted this relative miracle of the original religious personality 
 of Jesus into a miracle pure and simple, the superhuman person 
 of the God-man from heaven, it did so in consequence of the 
 above-mentioned psychological " law of identification," ac- 
 cording to which the divine source of revelation gets directly 
 identified with the human means of its manifestation. Bieder- 
 mann considers it to be the business of dogmatic Christology 
 to correct this optical illusion from which all its difficulties 
 spring, to discriminate between the person of Jesus and the 
 Christian principle, the spirit or the ideal of life, the idea of 
 Christianity, and to do this in such a way as neither to con- 
 found the two nor to abstractly separate them, but rather to 
 present the person as the historical embodiment of the prin- 
 ciple, and the principle as the ideal significance of the person. 
 In this idea of the business of Christology, Biedermann is in 
 substantial accord with the theory of Alexander Schweizer 
 above noticed, though the theories are somewhat differently 
 formulated. 
 
 Our theologian adopts a similar course in describing the 
 Reformation. Here too he distinguishes the principle from 
 its historical manifestation in the formation of the Reformed 
 churches. The former consists in a fundamental tendency of 
 the Christian spirit, which always exists in the Church, be- 
 cause belonging to the essence of Christianity — the tendency 
 to react against its own misrepresentation in the Church, and 
 to maintain its peculiar truth in contradistinction to the lower 
 stages represented by the religions of nature and of law. The 
 Reformation gave dogmatic expression to this tendency in the 
 
144 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 " formal principle" of the sole authority of the word of God, 
 and in the "material principle" of justification from grace 
 alone and through faith. But when tihe Churches of the Pro- 
 testant confessions were formed, it was only the practical 
 religious importance of this principle that was recognised, and 
 the consequences involved in it were not worked out. It was 
 indeed historically unavoidable and justifiable in itself to go 
 back for a knowledge of Christian truth behind the tradition 
 of the Church to the Scriptures as historically the original 
 source of this knowledge. But this historical appreciation of 
 the Scriptures did not suffice ; they were regarded as " the 
 word of God " absolutely, and infallible divine authority was 
 consequently ascribed to them. Thereby the traditional 
 Catholic theory of authority was in principle still adhered to, 
 and only the form of the authority changed, though in a way 
 which might be regarded as an advance. But there was only 
 a relative difference between the Protestant's principle of 
 Scripture and the Catholic's principle of tradition. Equally 
 opposed to the essence of Protestantism was the elevation of 
 ecclesiastical forms of doctrine of historic growth to the posi- 
 tion of symbolic statements of unconditional authority. What 
 is really Protestant is simply the continual regeneration of 
 doctrinal theology out of the living principle of Christianity by 
 means of the scientific criticism of the previous development 
 of dogma. 
 
 This is the task of theological science which must not be 
 hindered by any theory of inspiration. On the contrary, theo- 
 logy has to distinguish in the Scriptures, no less than in the 
 creeds, between the ideal truth as the lasting kernel and the 
 historically conditioned wrappings in which it appears in the 
 Biblical and ecclesiastical forms of doctrine. Biedermann 
 has sought to do this. He gives an account first of the whole 
 system of Biblical theology, and next of the theology of the 
 Church with its central christological dogmas ; he then pro- 
 ceeds to critically analyse these dogmas, and finally presents 
 their pure ideal content in a systematic form. This mode of 
 treatment has the advantage of furnishing a strictly objective 
 account of the Biblical and ecclesiastical doctrines, the histori- 
 cal account being kept separate from the theologian's own 
 critical and speculative estimate of it ; but it combines the 
 double disadvantage, that each individual doctrine is treated of 
 in various parts of the book, thus rendering a connected view 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 145 
 
 less easy, and that the positive result, the pure logical 
 essence of the historical subject-matter and its critical analysis, 
 proves to be very much too meagre and vague to help the 
 Church of the present day to understand its faith. It is true 
 that this defect is the consequence, not only of the form of 
 treatment, but also of the theory of knowledge before con- 
 sidered. The metaphysics and psychology based upon this 
 theory exercise also an influence for evil upon the matter of his 
 eschatology : a consequence of it is the denial of the immor- 
 tality of the soul, since according to this theory the soul must 
 be conceived only as the ideal side of the body and together 
 with it, but not as an independent entity. It is clear that the 
 Christian Church cannot accept this theory without cutting 
 itself off from its whole past history ; and such a demand may 
 be the more readily rejected in proportion as it is also 
 scientifically inadmissible, — for it depends upon the unde- 
 monstrable assumptions of a philosophical dogmatism. This 
 dependence is the weak side of Biedermann's work, which in 
 other respects contains so much that is excellent. 
 
 Christian Hermann Weisse also belonged at first to Hegel's 
 school, but probably perceived the error of logical idealism, and 
 tried to correct it in a manner which bears close resemblance in 
 many respects to the theosophy of Schelling's later years and 
 of Baader, while his system is not without the originality of 
 genius, and contains an abundance of profound and fertile 
 thoughts. The fact that his Philosophische Dogmatik oder 
 Philosophie des Christenthums has notwithstanding had no 
 important influence upon theology, may be explained partly by 
 Weisse's heavy style, partly by the little sympathy his purely 
 deductive method meets with in the bent of our time towards 
 empirical induction. To do Weisse justice, it must not be 
 forgotten that his speculative reasoning, in all departments, in- 
 cluding religion, commands a wide knowledge of the empirical 
 subject-matter, and that he succeeds in working up this into 
 his deductive statement in a most suggestive manner. 
 
 Weisse's Philosophische Dogmatik begins with a specula- 
 tive construction of the nature of God, in which his departure 
 from Hegel's logical idealism at once becomes apparent. The 
 divine Reason, in which the eternal and necessary truths of 
 reason are contained as an intelligible world, is, according to 
 Weisse, not the whole nature of the Deity, but only the first 
 element or stage of it, the primary possibility of all Being, but 
 
 G. t. l 
 
146 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 not as yet reality. To reason and its necessary thoughts we 
 must add the divine Heart {Geiniith), in which the divine Hfe, 
 as sentient and perceptive, begets a profusion of forms which 
 prefigure the ideal types of the world ; and from this profuse 
 creation of inward thoughts and figures there arises, thirdly, 
 the divine Will, which freely works upon this given material, 
 and so actualises the nature of God as personality and love. 
 The identification of these three elements, or stages, with the 
 Persons of the Trinity is a concession to dogmatic theology 
 for which Weisse could quote precedents from the history of 
 dogma ; but the conception of the self-realisation of God as 
 a process in time preceding the creation of the world, is open 
 to graver objections, and reminds us strongly of Gnostic 
 mythology. The creation of the world, too, Weisse represents 
 as a series of acts beginning and continuing in time, the first of 
 which was the formation of matter, or the chaotic fundamental 
 forces, which proceeded from the divine Will by its action on 
 the ante-creative products of his " nature " (or his heart), and 
 formed the material for God's further organising and shaping 
 activity as creator. From the nature of matter thus conceived 
 Weisse explains the metaphysical necessity of evil in the world. 
 The matter of the world, as the externalised will of God, which 
 has put itself in antithesis to his personal will, possesses a dis- 
 tinct spontaneity of creature-existence which passes into a real 
 antagonism to the inwardness and blessedness of God, and 
 hence is the common root of both physical and moral evil. 
 Just as matter, though generated by God, presents notwith- 
 standing, as something relatively independent, an antithesis 
 to his personal will, so God cannot all at once and by a fiat of 
 will put an end to the evil involved in matter, but can only 
 gradually end the misery unavoidably involved in every fresh 
 birth of living creatures, by the progressive creative activity 
 of his loving will, and transform it into gladness. To this pre- 
 human evil, having its final metaphysical source in the self-will 
 of the creature as such, Weisse refers ideas commonly held of 
 the devil. Similarly the first origination of sin in the personal 
 creature is, according to him, not to be sought so much in 
 conscious acts of will, as in the genesis before time of the per- 
 sonal will out of the natural spontaneity of individual beings. 
 These are, at any rate, profoundly suggestive thoughts, which 
 a serious and earnest theology cannot pass over with indiffer- 
 ence. 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 147 
 
 The process of creation, which reaches its climax in the 
 generation of rational creatures, is continued in the process of 
 the history of civilisation and religion, which must be regarded 
 as a continual " incarnation of God," in the sense that human 
 nature is transformed from earthly nature to one in the image 
 of God, and the ideal " Son-Man " is realised in the human 
 race. The history of religion Weisse conceives as beginning 
 in a consciousness of God, which in its essence is spiritual and 
 with an ethical content, but vacillates between unity and plu- 
 rality, spirituality and a sensuous form. From this undeter- 
 mined beginning, either monotheism or polytheism might be 
 developed. The fact of the priority of the latter development 
 in heathen national religions is explained by the psychological 
 law that the activities of the imagination and the heart are 
 earlier in the ascendant than those of the conscious will. Pro- 
 gress in the mythological age consisted partly in the refine- 
 ment of the aesthetic form of the myths — in conjunction with 
 the general development of each people — partly in the ethic- 
 ising of their religious contents. From the first the physical 
 and ethical permeated mythology, it is true ; but while at the 
 beginning the physical predominated, the emphasis was after- 
 wards laid on the ethical ; the sensuous materials of the intui- 
 tive imagination were more and more freely melted down into 
 the form of their ideal content, quite independent of the direct 
 phenomena of nature ; the gods of nature were personified 
 and brought into connection with man's moral life. Hence we 
 cannot deny the moral and religious value of the mythological 
 religions, particularly the Grecian ; Weisse does not hesitate 
 to say that in them was already at work the same power of 
 God to save and sanctify which ecclesiastical dogmatism wishes 
 us to regard as the sole property of the so-called revealed re- 
 ligions in the stricter sense. And he rightly adduces in favour 
 of this broad human view the early Christian doctrine of the 
 pre-Christian mission of the divine Logos. Though the re- 
 ligion of the Old Testament is a revelation in a higher sense, 
 yet it is not this in such a way as to justify the exclusion of 
 the polytheistic religions from the common idea of the incarna- 
 tion of the divine. But what from the first distinguished the 
 Hebrews' conceptions of God was their subordination of the 
 imagination, the source of myths, to the ethical power of will, 
 the source of history. The legislation of Moses was a typical 
 act of liberation, inasmuch as it showed mankind that its 
 
148 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. 11. 
 
 divine \'ocation was to rise above nature to a moral order of 
 life. This conception of God was then freed from its national 
 limitation, and the universal religious ideal prefigured in the 
 teaching of the prophets, which may be compared to the 
 teaching of Greek philosophy and of the Mysteries ; for this 
 too had risen in the Platonic " Idea of the Good " to the rank 
 of a monotheistic principle, and in the doctrine of immortality 
 of the Mysteries to an ethical spiritualisation of religious hopes 
 and ideals. 
 
 This universal historical process of the incarnation of God, 
 or the realisation of the " Son-Humanity," is consummated in 
 Jesus, who combined and gathered up the historical conditions 
 into an act of personal consciousness. This permeation of the 
 human nature by the divine, whereby the man Jesus became 
 above all other mortals the instrument of the highest revelation 
 of God, the personal " Son-Man," must not be understood 
 mythically as a physical event, but as an ethical miracle accom- 
 plished in the soul of this unique personality. The peculiar 
 characteristics of the personality of Jesus may be summed up 
 by saying that he was endowed with genius in the highest 
 sense of the word, analogous to that of all those historical per- 
 sonalities who have been originators in the realm of religion, 
 in particular the prophets of Israel, though in the case of Jesus 
 we must suppose an extraordinary intensification of the gifts 
 of talent and genius. Religious experience was intensified in 
 him to the absolute power of an inward revelation which first 
 raised the historical revelation of God in the human race to 
 its summit of perfection ; for this revelation, for the first time 
 concentrating in consciousness the whole truth of the idea of 
 God, completely permeating the heart and will of the entire 
 personality, presented a person before the eyes of the world, 
 who, within the limits of humanity, exhibited purely and com- 
 pletely the image of God. This is the same Christology as 
 that of A. Schweizer and Biedermann, above described ; with 
 the latter Weisse shares the speculative framework of his 
 Christology, and with the former the more definite delineation 
 of the historical character ; common to him with both is the 
 rejection of the mythically supernatural, and the translation of 
 it into ethical ideality in the domain of history. 
 
 Very closely allied to Weisse's speculations is Richard 
 Rothe's Tkeologiscke Etkik{ist(td. 1845-8 ; 2nded. 1864 sq.). 
 His method also is deductive construction by means of specu- 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 149 
 
 lative ideas, resulting in a Christian system of philosophy, 
 to which the supernaturalism of the Bible, the theosophy of 
 Schelling and Oetinger, and the theology of Schleiermacher 
 have been made to contribute. The combination of these 
 diverse elements in a systematic whole forms a work of art of 
 too peculiar a character to admit of its being used as a general 
 authority, but the charm of which consists in its being the 
 product and reflection of a rich and noble mind, a profound 
 thinker, a vivid imagination, and a truly devout soul. 
 
 Rothe himself describes his method as follows : speculative 
 thought, when engaged in speculation, closes its eye abso- 
 lutely to everything without, and looks solely into itself; it 
 follows only the dialectical necessity under which every idea 
 produces new ones from its own fertility. It is not till after- 
 wards, when speculation has completed its construction, that 
 the consideration of reality has to be added, as the test of the 
 conformity or nonconformity of the results of speculation with 
 the actual condition of the world ; if the latter be the case, 
 the mistake must be looked for in the manipulation of the 
 ideas. Rothe therefore fully shares the formal principle of 
 the Hegelian school — its dialectical method ; his results how- 
 ever differ widely from those of this school, and approximate 
 very closely to Schelling's theosophy and Schleiermacher's 
 theology ; and this is owing partly to the peculiar distinction 
 drawn by him between philosophical and theological specula- 
 tion, according to which the contents and drift of the latter 
 are from the first quite different from those of the former. 
 Philosophical speculation must, Rothe thinks, start from the 
 pure consciousness of the ego, from this formal act of thinking 
 self, abstracted from all content ; theological speculation, on 
 the contrary, must start from the consciousness of God, which 
 in its immediate certainty is co-ordinate with self-consciousness, 
 and is therefore adapted to be the starting-point of an indepen- 
 dent system of speculation entirely parallel to the philosophical 
 one; an assertion which is exposed to the objection of being an 
 unionrid^d peiiiio principii, and has nowhere found acceptance. 
 We must however see how Rothe constructs his system on 
 the basis of this principle professedly free from assumptions. 
 
 The conception of the absolute as the "self-determined" 
 involves the distinction of potentiality and actuality. Hence 
 we must think of pure potentiality, indeterminate and indif- 
 ferent Being, as the first thing in the Deity. From this hidden 
 
150 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 source the actuality of God springs in the double form of per- 
 sonality and nature ; and originally Rothe had made nature 
 in God the cause and therefore the antecedent of his person- 
 ality ; but in his second edition he makes God's personality 
 rise directly from his potentiality and determine the further pro- 
 cess of his self-actualisation ; though, it must be acknowledged, 
 that a clear conception of this is impossible, since we have no 
 analogy in man's personality to guide us. The similarity of 
 this speculative conception of God to that formulated by 
 Weisse is at once evident, though Rothe does not wish, 
 like Weisse, that the three elements or stages of the divine 
 nature should be identified with the three Persons of the 
 ecclesiastical dogma of the Trinity, but pronounces the con- 
 nexion to be altogether remote and unessential. From God's 
 affirmation of himself as ego, Rothe further deduces his simul- 
 taneous affirmation of his non-ego, at first, as existing in- 
 voluntarily in thought only ; but when God actualises this 
 imagined non-ego by a free act of will, it becomes pure matter. 
 This is for God a limitation of his absoluteness (though created 
 by himself), which as such he strives to abolish, but cannot 
 simply negative, since it is necessarily implied in his ego. 
 Hence his active relation to matter can only consist in intro- 
 ducing spirit into it, thus raising it to the position of his alter 
 ego, created spirit. This fashioning of undivine matter into 
 the organ of the divine spirit is the continuous process of 
 creation, which may be conceived as the continuous " becoming 
 of the world " ( Weltwerdung), or, in relation to its goal, as 
 more definitely " the incarnation i^Menschwe^'dimg) of God 
 within the limits of material existence." But inasmuch as 
 this creative activity in organising matter is at each stage 
 dependent on the previously created things as its means, and 
 in the last instance on matter as its substratum, it cannot be 
 purely absolute. This is the ground of the want of complete- 
 ness in every stage of the world, and of the imperfection of its 
 condition at all times. All evil in the world, including moral 
 evil or wickedness, has its final source therefore, according to 
 Rothe as well as Weisse, in the never wholly vanquished 
 antagonism which the distinct life of matter presents to the 
 will of God. And this is true not only of the present epoch 
 of the world, but of all future ones ; for every new period of 
 creation will again have to contend with the dross of matter 
 inherited from the one before it. Hence Rothe, like Origen, 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. I5I 
 
 maintains that the end of the world is always followed by a 
 new period of creation. 
 
 Rothe's conception of the ethical vocation of mankind is 
 closely connected with these cosmological speculations. Just 
 as the spiritualisation of material elements is the purpose of 
 the perpetual creative work of God, so the ethical vocation of 
 the personal creature is the appropriation of material nature 
 by means of his self-determination determining nature. Man 
 is by self-determination to become a personal character, but at 
 the same time by cultivating nature he is to become lord of 
 the world. Hence if God's purpose with the world is identical 
 with the progressive civilisation of historical humanity, the 
 normal ethical action of the latter must be identical with 
 religion, for it is action performed in fellowship with God, 
 who influences and directs man's growing personality, and for 
 the purpose of God, whose will is to occupy the world as 
 personality. From this Rothe infers that morality and piety 
 in their normal development are co-extensive, and that a piety 
 without morality would be an abstract, phantom piety. In 
 particular, " Christian piety is absolutely identical with pure 
 and complete morality," and hence its community, the Church, 
 is identical with the ethical community, the State. At present, 
 it is true, as the moral has not reached its true normal condition, 
 and the ethical community has not yet fully developed into 
 a universal organism of states, this is only an ideal to be aimed 
 at, and not immediately realisable ; but even now it must be 
 the final end determining our moral and religious develop- 
 ment. 
 
 These fundamental principles of his theological speculation 
 Rothe consistently followed out in relation to practical church 
 politics. He opposed every form of ecclesiasticism that lacks 
 moral stamina, that pietistically shuns the world or is hier- 
 archically hostile to it, and insisted on practical Christianity ; 
 with fine breadth of mind he recognised all that is true and 
 good in modern culture, in art and science, in the intercourse 
 of nations, and in cultivated society ; Christianity and true 
 humanity ought not only to form a close alliance, but Chris- 
 tianity ought to become absolutely moral and human, and 
 humanity absolutely religious and Christian. Undoubtedly 
 noble principles, which in any case retain their truth, even if 
 we object to the formula of the " absolute equivalence and 
 coincidence of religion and morality, Church and State," on 
 
152 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 account of the psychological and social difference of the two 
 spheres, and though we regard Rothe's eschatological forecast 
 of the future as a transcendental fiction. 
 
 For in spite of the rationality of Rothe's view of the moral 
 vocation of mankind, he still distinctly accepts the super- 
 naturalism of the Biblical and ecclesiastical doctrines. Though 
 regarding sin as an unavoidable passage in the course of the 
 moral development of personality out of nature, he still believes 
 that pre-Christian humanity fell a prey to an abnormal develop- 
 ment, to sinful depravity, from which it could only be delivered 
 and restored to its normal moral condition by a miraculous 
 act on the part of God, resuming the interrupted creation and 
 beginning it afresh, viz., by the sending of the supernatural 
 person of the second Adam in Jesus of Nazareth. This 
 second Adam, Rothe held, had necessarily to come into the 
 world in a purely supernatural way, springing indeed from 
 natural humanity, yet not called into being by its own develop- 
 ment and in the ordinary way, but by a creative act of God 
 upon it, which was absolutely miraculous ; the Saviour had to 
 be born of a woman, though not begotten by a man, but 
 created by God. Only thus, Rothe thought, could he be the 
 second Adam and begin the normal moral development of 
 mankind. He was not indeed from the first actually a divine 
 person, but became such in the course of his life in consequence 
 of his supernatural birth. For from the first moment of his 
 personal life God entered into a relation of real union with 
 him, in order by means of his moral development to dwell in 
 him in ever closer approximation to absolute unity. The 
 course of his life was therefore a continual process of Man 
 becoming God and God becoming Man. This was completed 
 in the resurrection and the elevation of Christ to the divine 
 sovereignty of the world, which he at present exercises by his 
 spiritual presence in Christendom, until on his visible return 
 to earth he will establish the perfect kingdom of God. 
 Together with Christ will appear the saints, clothed then 
 with a spiritual body, the bodies of the pious upon the earth 
 will be made spiritual, while the ungodly will be given up to 
 judgment, i.e., to total destruction. Finally, the terrestrial 
 world will also be spiritualised and placed in communication 
 with the heavenly spheres. Thus the kingdom of earth be- 
 comes the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 We shall not here inquire how far these doctrines are con- 
 
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 153 
 
 sistent with the speculative premises of the system. It is 
 certain that Rothe's heart and imagination clung as firmly to 
 this miraculous world of faith as his energetic ethical mind 
 insisted on moral action and the reconciliation of Christianity 
 with the culture of our time. We may say there dwelt two 
 souls within his breast ; yet the two were united in him so 
 as to form a complete harmonious personality, and it was just 
 this which enabled him to generously tolerate and acknow- 
 ledge the very various tendencies of the Christianity of to- 
 day. " To the pure all things are pure," and Rothe was 
 one of the purest. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 
 
 Under this head I include a series of theologians, belonging 
 to the most recent past and the present, who in spite of the 
 difference of their results possess the common characteristic of 
 trying to reconcile the faith of the Church with their own 
 thought and that of their contemporaries, without making their 
 faith dependent upon the hypotheses and formulae of a definite 
 philosophical system. At this point I wish expressly to pre- 
 mise that I do not in any way use the adjective " eclectic " in 
 a derogatory sense. In philosophy, it is true, the word has 
 usually such a sense, because from a philosopher we are wont 
 to demand a harmonious system based on a definite funda- 
 mental principle, and giving a scientific account of the world, 
 and hence we regard the eclectic method of philosophising, 
 which tries to combine thoughts derived from various quarters, 
 as defective. Even in the case of philosophy, however, we 
 might object, that precisely the most important and fruitful 
 contributions to it have derived the most varied elements 
 from previous philosophers, and have never been more than 
 partially successful in thoroughly combining them ; so that 
 even in philosophy our unfavourable judgment ought not to 
 condemn the eclectic method as such, but only unsatisfactory 
 attempts to reconcile contrary modes of thought. Much more 
 will this hold in the case of theology, which is not intended 
 to construct systematic scientific explanations of the world, but 
 to exhibit the belief of a particular Church for the practical 
 purposes of its ministers at a particular time. If we consider 
 that the theology of the Church is the product of its history 
 during eighteen centuries, enriched with contributions from 
 the most various minds, we must admit at all events that here, 
 in a much greater degree than in philosophy, systematic unity 
 can never be more than an approximately attainable ideal. If 
 we further consider that the needs of the Church of to-day, 
 
 for which the theologian must work, are of the most various 
 
 154 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. I55 
 
 kinds, and that their variety grows with the Church's wealth 
 in individual religious life, we shall come to the conclusion, 
 that a theology sacrificing this diversity of religious interests 
 and forces in an attempt to work out in systematic form a 
 definite and limited principle, fulfils its task worse than a 
 theology maintaining an eclectic attitude towards the various 
 philosophical systems, and contenting itself with rendering 
 the Church's belief intelligible and useful to the general edu- 
 cated thought of the day. This is confirmed by experience. 
 In proportion as a theology is dependent upon one particular 
 philosophical system, it is certain to be wrecked upon the 
 limitations of the latter, for its influence is confined to the 
 narrow circle of the adherents of the system, and to the short 
 period it is in vogue. The more, on the other hand, the theo- 
 logian succeeds in giving expression to the religious and 
 ethical ideal existing in the mind of the Church with a breadth 
 of view and a freedom of treatment which recognises fully the 
 (relative) justice of the claims of the various existing modes 
 of thought and belief, the greater will be his success in pre- 
 senting to extended circles the means of a common religious 
 understanding, a symbol therefore of the community of faith, 
 which always exists in spite of all differences. It is, however, 
 evident that the theological works which aim at eclectically 
 reconciling the old and the new, according to the needs of the 
 Churches of to-day, must not be measured by the standard of 
 strict theological science. These theologians are right in so 
 far as they succeed in finding for the faith of the fathers an 
 expression intelligible and acceptable to the present genera- 
 tion ; where they are wrong is when any of them confounds the 
 conditional truth of his dogmatic statements with an uncon- 
 ditional and universal truth, and in his dogmatic arrogance 
 disputes the equal justification of other presentations of it. I 
 shall therefore, I think, be justified in confining myself to an 
 objective review of the characteristic opinions of the individual 
 theologians of this class, without attempting a critical estimate 
 of them. I also purposely refrain from arranging them ac- 
 cording to their dogmatic schools : the only difference of a 
 general nature among these mediating eclectics is that with 
 some of them a conservative fear of breaking with ecclesias- 
 tical tradition is predominant, and with others a free recasting 
 and development of this tradition. But this is an altogether 
 indefinite distinction ; for even the conservative reproduction 
 
156 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 of ecclesiastical dogma necessitates in some measure a recast- 
 ing of its original meaning, and even the liberal development 
 of it is not intended to break the continuity of the historic 
 growth of the Church's creed, and involves therefore to some 
 extent an " accommodation " to tradition. I shall begin with 
 those mediating theologians who have the greatest affinity 
 with the speculative theologians already discussed, while 
 differing from them in that their speculative thinking is not 
 so much an end in itself as the form in which the given 
 ecclesiastical dogmas can be best exhibited with such modifi- 
 cations as the times demand. 
 
 The most important of these theologians, and the type of 
 the whole school, was indisputably Isaac August Dorner, 
 who possessed a deeply reflective Swabian nature, profound 
 religious earnestness, and a vivid sense of the need of sounding 
 by thought the depths of the truths of Christianity dear to his 
 heart. His youth was passed during the time of the great 
 disturbance in the Church created by Strauss's Leben Jesu. 
 While he was repelled by the negative result of this criticism, 
 his love of truth and fairness was equally opposed to the 
 tumultuous mode in which its opponents replied to it, with 
 their superficial apologies, or even appeals to ecclesiastical and 
 political force. His view was that the business of scientific 
 theology is to bring the Christological problem, propounded 
 by Strauss, nearer to a solution. From the historical re- 
 searches undertaken for this end came his great contribution 
 to the history of Christology, Entwicklimgsgeschichte der 
 Lehre von der Person Christi (1856), a work in which the 
 author's profound learning, objectivity of judgment, and fine 
 appreciation of the moving ideas of history were shown, as 
 was universally acknowledged. This book was followed later 
 by another Important historical work, his Geschichte der pro- 
 testantischen Theologie (1867). Like Alexander Schweizer, 
 Dorner developed and elaborated his own convictions by his 
 diligent and loving study of the history of the Church's 
 thought and belief He gave these convictions permanent 
 form in his two principal treatises, Christliche Glaiibenslehre, 
 and Christliche Sittenlehre, the former of which appeared 
 shortly before his death (i 879-8 1\ while the latter was post- 
 humously edited by his son (1886). 
 
 Dorner's Glaubenslehre is a work extremely rich In thought 
 and matter. It takes the reader through a mass of historical 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 157 
 
 material by the examination and discussion of the various 
 opinions of ancient and modern teachers, and so leads up to 
 the author's own view, which is mostly one intermediate be- 
 tween the opposite extremes, and appears as a more or less 
 successful synthesis of antagonistic theses. Of his method, 
 Dorner speaks as follows: "The method of Christian dogmatic 
 theology must be not simply productive, but rather reproduc- 
 tive ; still it must not be merely empirical and reflective, but 
 also constructive and progressive. When the enlightened 
 Christian mind is in harmony by its faith and experience with 
 objective Christianity, which faith knows to be its own origin, 
 and which is also attested by the Scriptures and the scriptural 
 faith of the Church, then such a mind has to justify and 
 develop its religious knowledge in a systematic form." This 
 is practically the same principle as that adopted by Alexander 
 Schweizer ; and the considerable difference in the results of 
 the two men only proves that this method, while a very 
 valuable one, allows great latitude of individual opinion 
 as to what constitutes objective Christianity, and from the 
 nature of the case must always do so. The arrangement of 
 Dorner's book is singular. After a lengthy introduction, a 
 kind of religious phenomenology, leading successively through 
 the different points of view of doubt and of hesitation to that 
 of Christian faith, there follows, in the first part, the discus- 
 sion of the general fundamental Christian doctrines — God, 
 his nature and relation to the world ; man, his nature and 
 original condition ; and finally, religion, as the unity of God 
 and man, resting on divine revelation, realised in the his- 
 torical religions, and perfected in the historical appearance of 
 the God-man Christ. Then comes, in the second and special 
 part, the doctrine of sin, its nature and origin, and its con- 
 nection with the devil and death, and of Christian salvation, 
 based on Christ's person and work on earth and in heaven, 
 realised in the Church or the kingdom of the Holy Spirit, and 
 to be consummated in the eternity beyond. It is character- 
 istic of Dorner that he treats the doctrine of Christ as the 
 God-man among the general fundamental doctrines, placing it 
 before the special doctrines concerning the historical Christ 
 and his work of salvation. The incarnation of God [Gott- 
 menschheii) he regards as a speculative idea of the nature of 
 an a priori truth, following from the nature of God and man, 
 which would necessarily have been realised in history, if there 
 
158 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 had been no abnormal development of mankind in sin, which 
 was not therefore the condition of the appearance of Christ 
 the God-man, but only of his historical mission of salvation. 
 This arrangement has, however, the disadvantage of breaking 
 up the doctrine of man, the accounts of his original state and 
 of his sin being separated by the description of the historical 
 development of religion and revelation until the appearance of 
 the God-man. 
 
 The doctrine of God is treated by Dorner with special 
 thoroughness, and contains valuable thoughts. He rejects 
 the idea of the complete cognisability, as well as of the abso- 
 lute incognisability of God ; our knowledge of God is always 
 incomplete, growing, and relative, but is not therefore untrue. 
 Again, the scientific examination of our belief in God is 
 neither impossible nor unnecessary ; what is indeed primarily 
 an immediate religious certainty, can and ought to be raised 
 to a conviction with a scientific justification. This falls to 
 be done in the section treating of the so-called proofs of the 
 existence of God, though these must be so presented as to 
 contain at the same time the doctrine of the divine nature and 
 attributes. At each stage of the line of proof the idea of God 
 is enriched with some new element, from the metaphysical at- 
 tributes of infinitude, omnipresence, and eternity, to the wisdom 
 involving moral purposes, while each successive aspect thus 
 gained of our conception of God is also shown to be the 
 determining principle of some particular religion — the pro- 
 cesses of dialectic and history being thus made to run parallel, 
 evidently owing to Hegelian influences. Of the details we 
 must notice Dorner's view of the eternity of God, which he 
 says must not be so conceived as to imply that for God time 
 does not exist, making history a mere semblance without 
 truth ; but the unchangeableness of God's nature does not 
 exclude a changed relation to changes in time, a variation 
 of his knowledge in the course of time ; the immutability 
 {Sichselbstgleichheit) of God must not be understood in so 
 abstract a sense as to negative his life. Of the spiritual 
 attributes of God justice is placed first, and defined as 
 God's maintenance of his honour, which, as the absolute 
 standard of all value, is the source of right in the world ; 
 God's justice consists in the ethically good as the absolutely 
 valuable, and secures for it its absolute and unique rights. 
 Absolute intelligence, or omniscience and wisdom, is repre- 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 59 
 
 sented as derived from ethical perfection, to indicate that, 
 like everything else, intelligence in the last resort is only a 
 subordinate instrument of moral goodness. The question as 
 to the compatibility of God's self-maintenance, as absolute 
 intelligence and personality, with his self-impartation and 
 immanence in the world, leads to the doctrine of the divine 
 Trinity, which is precisely the Christian synthesis of this 
 antithesis of transcendence and immanence, or of God's just 
 self-maintenance and his loving self-impartation to the world. 
 The essence of every religion is expressed in its conception of 
 God, and thus Christianity by its doctrine of the Trinity has 
 secured itself against both the abstract monotheism of Judaism 
 and the polytheism and pantheism of heathendom. The two 
 Unitarian heresies, Arianism and Sabellianism, were the 
 effects of the imperfections of Jewish deism and heathen poly- 
 theism, the former denying the true communion of God and 
 man, the latter the holy exaltation of God above the sinful 
 world. Christian Gnosis rose above both these errors by its 
 conception of the holy love of God, of which the doctrine of 
 the Trinity is the exposition. From this point of view Dor- 
 ner constructs an ethical Trinity : the ethically Necessary, the 
 ethically Free, and the Love uniting both, form the three aspects 
 of the one absolute Personality ; each of these three " modes 
 of being " participates in the personality of God, but is not 
 itself a separate personality, for the absolute personality can 
 only be one. In this way the ecclesiastical dogma of the 
 Trinity is interpreted from the point of view of a speculative 
 theism, bearing the closest resemblance to that of Weisse. 
 
 The eternal love of God creates a free world, distinct 
 from God, to establish a communion of love with itself. 
 Being an organism with varied elements, this world is 
 intended to be the copy of the triune life of God. The 
 creation out of nothing means that the matter and form of 
 the world are alike wholly derived from God ; but this 
 derivation must not be conceived as having had a beginning 
 in time. The conceptions "creation" and "preservation" 
 must neither be confounded nor separated from each other. 
 Preservation is the continued action of the divine creative 
 will, though in such a way that the secondary causality 
 imparted to the creature itself becomes the means for its own 
 self-reproduction, so that the created world, by reason of the 
 all-pervading omnipotence, is also the cause of itself. If we 
 
l6o DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 define creation and preservation teleologically, they lead to 
 the conception of a Providence partly ruling existing things, 
 partly creating nevi^ ones. Its final end is a kingdom of moral 
 spirits, governed by holy love ; the freedom of the creature, 
 not fettered by the universal plan, but, as foreknown, is made 
 a part of that plan. Man, on the one hand belonging to 
 nature, and on the other rising above nature as an immortal 
 spirit, is in the image of God. partly as his original birth- 
 right, and partly as his true destination ; he cannot therefore 
 be a mere product of nature, but his existence presupposes a 
 fresh creative act of God. Man, though good by his original 
 creation, became the cause of evil by an act of freewill, of 
 which no further explanation can be given ; the evil became 
 the permanent corruption of human nature, and as such was 
 by the laws of heredity transmitted from the first parents to 
 all mankind. This inherited racial sin involves a general 
 need of salvation, but is not personal guilt, and does not 
 decide a man's definitive merit or final destiny, which depends 
 upon his personal decision. The restoration of the image of 
 God, marred by sin in the human race, was only possible by 
 the incarnation of God in the Son. 
 
 But this incarnation, as the completion of the revelation of 
 God, was also necessary in it.self independently of sin, since 
 mankind was from the first created to arrive at perfection by 
 communion with God. Hence Dorner had previously con- 
 nected with the doctrine of man's nature, as created in the 
 image of God, the doctrine of the unity of God and man in 
 religion. God being love, imparts himself to man, and man 
 is spiritually able to receive the communication ; the reality of 
 this impartation and reception affirmed as a unity is religion. 
 Religion is primarily realised not in one of the spiritual 
 faculties, but in the man as a whole, or in the heart; as Dorner 
 very characteristically seeks to prove, not by psychological 
 considerations, but from the fact that God as personality is an 
 indivisible spiritual whole. To God's manifestation of himself 
 in his sovereign power and his will, there corresponds on 
 man's side a primary consciousness of absolute dependence 
 upon God and devotion to him, by reason of which man is 
 filled with divine life in knowledge, freedom, and blessedness. 
 Since religion is not simply a subjective action, but pre- 
 supposes an approach of God to man, it implicitly contains 
 the idea of revelation. Revelation is a creative act of God 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. l6l 
 
 upon the human heart, and its distinctive marks are originahty 
 or novelty, constancy and universaHty, positiveness and 
 gradual growth. The ideas "supernatural" and "natural," 
 " immediate " and " mediate " in relation to revelation must 
 not be thought of as exclusive and contradictory, but, as 
 from Schleiermacher's point of view, as the two aspects of 
 every revelation. As regards its form, revelation is partly 
 the outward manifestation of the divine power as interfering 
 in the system of nature (miracles), partly its inward working 
 upon the human spirit (inspiration). The possibility of 
 miracles must be conceded for the sake of the freedom of God 
 in relation to the world, and in virtue of the breadth and 
 elasticity of natural law ; their necessity follows from their 
 importance in authenticating revelation. Very characteristic 
 of Dorner's mode of thought, which is emotional and poetical 
 rather than strictly intellectual, is the sentence, " Every 
 uncorrupted soul rejoices in the miraculous. It is the part of 
 prose to hate the miraculous, of poetry to love it ; of true 
 poetry, of course, which does not create vain phantoms of the 
 imagination, but loves to contemplate the realised ideal, the 
 higher, more perfect, and therefore poetical stage of spiritual 
 freedom, when it is in harmony with nature :" — a sentence which 
 reminds us of the utterances of Romanticism, e.g., the " magical 
 idealism" of Novalis. Inspiration is the spiritual miracle 
 performed on the spirit as a whole, increasing its strength and 
 purity, or, more particularly, it is enthusiasm [Begeisterung) 
 and enlightenment with regard to truth, for the purpose of 
 establishing permanent religious fellowship. The primary 
 seat of inspiration must not be sought in books, but in men, 
 and must not be separated from the general history of 
 revelation. But though no specific difference can be proved 
 between men endowed with the spirit and inspired men ; still 
 of the latter it is a distinctive and indeed unique characteristic, 
 by virtue of their being vehicles of revelation, that without 
 being personally absolutely incapable of error, they are yet 
 preserved from it in their teaching and preaching, and 
 proclaim only unerring truth, even in historical details, as the 
 word of God. Thus after approaching a freer rational view, 
 Dorner returns to the old ecclesiastical doctrine of the absolute 
 inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, a concession to eccle- 
 siastical dogma which was fatal to his position with regard 
 to scientific Biblical criticism. 
 
 G. T. M 
 
1 62 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. 11. 
 
 Revelation, and therefore religion too, reaches in the first 
 instance perfection in a single being, who, as the "absolute 
 God-man," is the Revealer pure and simple ; but as the 
 perfect man after the image of God, is the instrument of 
 securing the perfection of the world, The necessity of the 
 incarnation does not depend merely upon sinful humanity's 
 need of redemption, but is demanded apart from it by the 
 vocation of mankind to reach full communion with God, and 
 to form a united organism under a central head ; for such 
 a universal head, in whom all the limitations of human 
 individuality are done away, can only be a man in whom 
 God's communication of himself to mankind is absolutely 
 and universally realised, or in whom God as Logos has 
 become man. Indeed, the God-man, as the absolute 
 pneumatic personality of universal spiritual power, is not 
 merely the head of men, but also of angels, his kingdom 
 includes all ranks of spirits, and perfects their conscious 
 unity. Finally, Christianity claims to be the absolute religion, 
 which necessitates an absolute God-man as the permanent 
 centre of this religion. That this intrinsically necessary 
 incarnation actually took place in Jesus of Nazareth is 
 historically proved by his holy personality, his witness to 
 himself and his work, as well as by the changes still being 
 wrought in mankind by his influence. The question as to the 
 manner in which God's incarnation in Jesus must be conceived 
 as taking place, is the business of theological speculation 
 to answer. On the basis of the historical development of 
 Christology, Dorner constructs a theory of his own, of which 
 the following is an outline. The subject of the incarnation 
 is " God as Logos," i.e., not a personal Logos hypostatically 
 distinct from God the Father, but God himself in his loving 
 will to reveal and communicate himself to mankind. That 
 the Logos "became flesh" must not be understood to mean 
 that he assumed human flesh as a garment, or even changed 
 himself into a man, for he would then only have acted the 
 part of a man, without having become a man ; it rather means 
 that God, as Logos, bestowed not merely his own power, but 
 his absolute self, upon the human person of Jesus, from the 
 moment of his birth in ever-growing measure, while the 
 personality of Jesus received this impartation of the divine 
 life with increasing power and receptivity in the course of 
 his free personal life, becoming ever more completely 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 63 
 
 possessed and filled by God, till his human being became at 
 last absolutely and indissolubly one with the divine mode of 
 being of the Logos. The conscience and the Christian 
 witness of the Spirit — that is, of course, the moral and 
 religious consciousness in its Christian ideality — is mentioned 
 as having analogy to this union of human knowledge and 
 will with the divine : whence we might infer that the person 
 of Christ must be conceived as the first and archetypal 
 manifestation of the Christian ideal of piety and morality. But 
 this inference, however natural, would not quite represent 
 Dorner's view, according to which Christ is not a mere 
 individual like others, but differs from all empirical individuals 
 in representing the general idea of the human race, freed not 
 only from sin, but also from the limitations and incomplete- 
 ness of other individuals ; in a word, he is " the central in- 
 dividual," ordained to be the centre, not only of humanity, but 
 also of the whole realm of spirits, being in consequence the 
 eternal celestial sovereign, and the personal judge of the world 
 at his second coming to consummate the kingdom of God. 
 The motives of this Christology of Dorner are plain ; he 
 wishes to do fuller justice than is done by the ecclesiastical 
 doctrine to the human and ethical side of the person of Christ, 
 and at the same time retain as much as possible of its 
 transcendental metaphysics ; whether he has satisfactorily 
 accomplished this, in particular whether a central individual 
 coincident with the idea of the race is conceivable in actual 
 history, is a question I will in this place only suggest. The 
 same holds good of Dorner's treatment of the doctrine of 
 the work of Christ, in which he follows the ecclesiastical 
 tradition still more closely than in his doctrine of Christ's 
 person, not orAy formally in the doctrine of three offices, but 
 materially, especially on the central point — the atonement by 
 vicarious satisfaction. Dorner teaches that when Christ put 
 himself in the place of mankind, in order, in his own feeling 
 of pain, to bear the divine displeasure against the guilt of 
 the race, he made himself an offering for us to the punitive 
 justice of God, and thereby became for the world the perfect 
 surety, for whose sake God can grant, not only freedom 
 from punishment, but even blessedness. — That Christ's three 
 offices are perpetuated in the corresponding offices of the 
 Church, is a valuable remark of Dorner's, which might 
 naturally have suggested a retrospective modification of his 
 
164 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 doctrine of Christ's work. — Finally, we must mention that in 
 his doctrine of justification, Dorner defended the strictly 
 Lutheran theory against Hengstenberg's more rationalistic 
 form of it. We can, however, trace a certain hesitation on 
 Dorner's part with regard to the decisive question, whether 
 the ground of justification is the objective merit of Christ to 
 which the believer's relation is simply receptive, or not rather 
 subjective faith itself as the frame of mind pleasing to God, 
 and, therefore, in principle, the beginning of a new life. 
 Dorner's concern as a churchman for the objectivity of the 
 work of redemption, inclines him to the former view ; his 
 personal concern for the ethical conception of the Christian 
 life of faith to the latter. 
 
 On the latter point characteristic words of Dorner's are 
 found in his correspondence with Martensen : " The ethical 
 idea is now all-important. . . . More and more I see 
 Schleiermacher's peculiar greatness, and his unique position 
 among modern princes of science, in virtue of his thorough 
 blending of ethics and dogmatics. This will be a mine of 
 wealth for the times which are now at hand." What Dorner 
 commends in Schleiermacher characterises also the fundamental 
 principle of his own theology ; he tried to blend dogmatics 
 and ethics, and renovate theology and the Church by the 
 ethical idea of personal freedom in God. In this he is in 
 complete accord with Rothe. The excellence of this object, 
 and the purity and fervour of his devotion to it, will keep 
 Dorner's memory in honour, however we may judge of the 
 success of his attempts at dogmatic mediation and the tenability 
 of his particular doctrinal views. 
 
 The Danish theologian Martensen, with whom Dorner was 
 connected in a long and close friendship, represented a similar 
 mediating speculative position, but differed from Dorner in 
 his way of treating theological doctrines. Dorner had arrived 
 at his results by the process of dialectical reflection upon the 
 various forms of doctrine of ancient and modern theologians ; 
 but in Martensen the historical method is put quite into the 
 background in favour of independent speculation, which indeed 
 everywhere presupposes the ecclesiastical dogmas, specially 
 those of Lutheranism, but tries to skilfully combine them with 
 the ideas of Bohme's and Baader's theosophy. The problem 
 of dogmatic theology Martensen holds to be the synthesis of 
 the Christian consciousness of redemption and revelation, or 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 65 
 
 the reproduction of revealed divine wisdom in our conception 
 of the Christian idea of truth, which ought to comprehend 
 the subjective and the objective, the human and the divine 
 side of Christianity. This idea dogmatic theology has to grasp 
 and develop, showing not only the coherence of its given 
 matter, but also its possibility and basis, and logically recon- 
 ciling the antitheses in the unity of the idea. This method was 
 suggestively pursued by Martensen himself, though we cannot 
 deny that his efforts at reconciliation often suffer much from 
 obscurity of conception, owing to the want of a rational intro- 
 ductory criticism. We often get the impression of brilliant 
 speculative fireworks, throwing a peculiar light on the Church's 
 dogmas, without making obscure questions really plainer. 
 With the antitheses of nature and spirit, ethical and cosmical, 
 personal and impersonal, he presents a dialectical exhibition 
 which rather confuses than instructs the sober understanding. 
 A few of the chief examples will serve to characterise this 
 method. 
 
 On the one hand, the fact is specially emphasised that Christi- 
 anity is an ethical, historical religion, belonging to the world 
 of spirit, language, conscience, freedom, and personality. 
 Christianity is essentially Christ himself But on the other 
 hand, Christ must not be conceived as essentially an ethical 
 (or, to use our author's usual term, moral) and historical being 
 simply, not as simply the new Adam, but as the centre of the 
 whole world, of all spirits, and of nature. Schleiermacher's 
 error lay in overlooking Christ's trinitarian pre-existence and 
 his cosmical position. The Logos is, it is true, primarily, in 
 Martensen as in Philo, simply the ideal world of the divine 
 consciousness ; but he maintains that the superiority of Christi- 
 anity lies in its making this idea as thought into a thinking 
 principle side by side with God, into the second hypostatical 
 ego of the Son ; just as the will, which raises the necessary 
 content of thought to the freedom of love, must be conceived 
 as a third ego, the hypostasis of the Spirit. Thus the Trinity 
 is constructed by the discrimination of different elements in 
 the divine life, and the transformation of them in the process 
 into independent persons. Dorner had proceeded more 
 cautiously. 
 
 In his doctrine of the creation, Martensen well remarks that 
 we must combine the heathen point of view of cosmogony, or 
 the world's evolution of itself, with the Jewish view of its free 
 
1 66 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 creation ; the world is both nature and creature ; regarded as 
 the former, it is eternal and necessary ; as the latter, it had 
 a beginning in time, and was the product of freedom, so that 
 in its further development also it is exposed to the free inter- 
 ference of divine miraculous power. How this conception 
 of the supernatural side of creation can be combined in thought 
 with the idea of nature, or the self-evolution of the world, 
 Martensen did not succeed in explaining. 
 
 Very characteristic is Martensen's doctrine as to angels and 
 devils. They must not be conceived merely and primarily as 
 personal, but as ideas and powers in the life of nature and of 
 peoples, intermediate between imagined personifications and 
 real personal beings, but sometimes becoming real persons, 
 ministering spirits in the kingdom of God. In particular, the 
 devil is really the universal principle of cosmical self-existence 
 in its antagonism to God ; being a principle, he has not a 
 self-existing personality, but has only a nascent personality, 
 which "as such is intermediate between existence and non- 
 existence, personality and personification, actuality and possi- 
 bility, ' being ' and ' signification.' " The principle only reaches 
 personality in individual creatures, though not merely in 
 human, but also in superhuman spirits ; among the latter is one 
 in whom the principle of evil is so hypostatised as to make him 
 its central revelation, and therefore the personal centre and 
 head of the kingdom of evil — the personal devil or Antichrist 
 of the Bible. He may be regarded as the younger brother 
 of the Son of God, Christ, and his personal rival throughout 
 the history of revelation. In the snake of the Garden of Eden 
 he was still as it were in swaddling clothes ; then his strength 
 grew more and more, until simultaneously with the revelation 
 of the Logos in Christ, he gained possession of the sovereignty 
 of this world. Although already conquered by Christ, he will 
 continue to exercise his power and craft until the last decisive 
 struggle with the returning King of heaven. Thus our Gnostic 
 theologian regards the personifications, by means of which 
 the poetical imagination vividly realised the warring forces of 
 the world's history, as objective realities, though he cannot 
 quite forget their origin in the creative power of the imagina- 
 tion ; the " hovering " of these strange figures between 
 personification and personality is the mark of this theology, 
 with its oscillation between poetical imagery and really definite 
 thought. 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 167 
 
 The temptation of the first parents in Paradise he explains 
 psychologically, by the antagonistic fundamental impulses of 
 human nature, and also metaphysically, by the contrary super- 
 human powers — God and the cosmical principle. The Mosaic 
 account of the Fall we must regard as "a combination of history 
 and sacred symbolism, a figurative description of an actual 
 fact," that is, not merely as the symbol of a general, ever- 
 recurring event, but as an historical fact from the earliest 
 times ; though, again, not as this fact itself, as it actually 
 occurred, but only as an emblem or symbol of it. This justi- 
 fies the free allegorising of all the individual features of the 
 narrative, while still preserving its character as traditional 
 history in opposition to the mythological interpretation in 
 current criticism. How these two conceptions are to be united 
 is however not made clear. 
 
 In his Christology, Martensen vigorously demands the 
 reality of the incarnation of God and the union of the two 
 natures in the God-man, as against all mythical and mystical 
 rationalism and idealism. But in order to secure the unity 
 and gradual development of the person of Christ, Martensen 
 revises the ecclesiastical doctrine, partly by postulating (with 
 Liebner) an act of self-renunciation {kenosis) on the part of 
 the Logos, whereby his divine attributes were reduced to 
 the measure of the human, and partly by maintaining (with 
 Dorner) a gradual growth of the germ of divine life planted 
 in the human child from the unconscious possibility to the 
 conscious reality of an ego at once human and divine. This 
 certainly avoids the stumbling-block of the ecclesiastical doc- 
 trine of the two natures, a twofold life in Christ, but substitutes 
 for it a "twofold life" in the Logos, in that "as the pure 
 Logos of the Deity it works throughout nature, which is filled 
 by its presence," and at the same time, as the Logos incarnate 
 in Christ, has a humanly limited form of existence, and only 
 gradually rises from the unconsciousness of the potential ego 
 to the consciousness of itself. It is not clear how this life that 
 is humanly developing and that life eternally existing are com- 
 bined in the unity of the same personal Logos ; but the pur- 
 pose of this artificial reasoning is to show that we must 
 recognise in Christ not merely an ideal man, but the " centre 
 of the universe," the cosmical mediator of the consummation 
 of the whole kingdom of nature and of spirits, which is of 
 importance to our author on account of his doctrine of the 
 
1 68 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 sacraments and his eschatology. He further teaches that 
 Christ's birth was both truly human and also a true super- 
 human miracle ; that his life as man cannot be conceived with- 
 out a national colouring, but that he was without the natural 
 limitation attaching to every nationality ; that, since he was 
 subject to human temptation, we must assume the possibility 
 of his sinning, though, on account of the divine source of 
 his life, this possibility could never become actual, and was 
 therefore in fact equivalent to the impossibility of his sinning. 
 The work of reconciliation belonging to Christ's high priestly 
 office must be interpreted not merely as a reconciliation of 
 man to God, but as a reconciliation of God himself Recon- 
 ciliation may be defined as the removal of an antithesis in 
 the process of God's revelation of himself, viz., the antithesis 
 between his love and his justice. " Although these attri- 
 butes are essentially one, there is on account of sin a certain 
 disagreement between them in the divine nature. For, in 
 spite of God's eternal love of the world, his actual relation to 
 it is not one of love, but only one of holiness and justice, an 
 antithetical relation, since the unity it involves is hindered 
 and kept down." This contradiction can be removed only by 
 the vicarious satisfaction of the Son of God. The necessity 
 of such an objective vicarious expiation is, it is true, again 
 rendered problematical by the subsequent discussion, according 
 to which the subjective consciousness of reconciliation is the 
 effect of the new birth, and of faith, which Martensen regards 
 as the germinal beginning of the new man. Accordingly, the 
 actual reconciliation appears as a psychological process in 
 consciousness, in consequence of the ethical change in the 
 human mind ; so that, after all, the necessity for a reconcilia- 
 tion once for all by Christ's satisfaction is not made clear. 
 
 The same hesitation between an ethical and non-ethical 
 point of view recurs finally in a specially surprising form in 
 Martensen's teaching on the Sacraments. Baptism is primarily 
 the pledge of divine grace in view of future faith ; but it is 
 more than this : it is also, in truth, the beginning of the 
 Christian life, since it " involves, not indeed personal, but 
 substantial and essential regeneration." It is an objective 
 mystery, in which creative grace establishes a new relation of 
 being between God and man, " incorporating " the latter's 
 unconscious nature "into Christ, not psychologically merely, 
 but organically, not figuratively only, but essentially." Since 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 169 
 
 in the case of a child this cannot, of course, be done by 
 ethical means, a physical influence is the only remaining 
 method, and accordingly Martensen does not hesitate to speak 
 of "a holy nature-mystery." How this mystery is to be con- 
 ceived without having recourse to magic is not explained. 
 In the same way, Martensen sees in the Lord's Supper " the 
 inseparable union of a holy spirit-mystery, and a holy nature- 
 mystery," since not only Christ's spirituality, but also his 
 corporality is offered as food, not only for the soul, but for 
 the whole new man, accordingly for that future man of the 
 resurrection also, who is already germinating in secret, and 
 this food is received by all, including the unbelieving. To 
 the old objection of the Zwinglian school, that we cannot 
 think of Christ's body as omnipresent, he returns the not very 
 luminous answer, that we must conceive of heaven as where 
 the glorified Christ is; not as a material place, a "where" 
 according to the ideas of our present sense-perception, but 
 still as " a more definite ' where,' " where cosmic life is com- 
 pletely filled by God. 
 
 We see that Martensen's method of speculation never 
 belies its character ; it dazzles by its brilliant antitheses and 
 bold syntheses, but generally leaves us wholly uncertain as to 
 how we are actually to combine the contradictory sides in 
 thought ; dogmatic thought and imaginative contemplation 
 combine to form a Romantic twilight, from which the critical 
 understanding departs unsatisfied. 
 
 Of much greater value than his Dogmatik, is Martensen's 
 Ethik, in two volumes, in which the versatile theologian's 
 wide knowledge of life and the world is shown in an 
 attractive form. The general lines of this book are best 
 characterised in Martensen's own words in a letter to Dorner : 
 "The onesided views against which we have to contend are 
 those of onesided ecclesiasticism, and onesided individualism. 
 Both negative the great problem of the modern age — the 
 living union of Christianity and humanism. For a nomistic 
 ecclesiasticism which suppresses all intellectual, and especially 
 all scientific freedom, and an individualism which tries to 
 isolate Christianity, and separate it from the varied spheres 
 of human life, are alike un-Christian and inhuman. The 
 problem will continue to be the presentation in life and 
 doctrine of this union and combination of Christianity and 
 genuine and free humanity." 
 
I 70 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 From Martensen, we pass to the theologian most nearly- 
 resembling him in spirit, Johann Peter Lange, a man of rich 
 imagination and varied culture, who tried to defend and 
 renovate ecclesiastical dogma by theosophical speculation. 
 His Dogmatik (1849-51) contains many fruitful and sug- 
 gestive thoughts, which, however, are hidden under such a 
 mass of bold figures and strange fancies, and suffer so much 
 from want of clearness of presentation, that they did not 
 produce any lasting effect. He affirms the true principle that 
 theology must start from a knowledge of man's nature. But 
 his procedure consists rather in an ingenious playing with 
 analogies than in logical inference from ascertained facts. 
 In the pneumatic, or regenerate man, he finds a threefold 
 consciousness, and therein a copy of the Trinity, the Persons 
 of which are to be conceived as threefold forms or centres of 
 consciousness ; each form of consciousness is the whole con- 
 sciousness of the divine nature, yet each is fundamentally 
 different from the others ; regarded ideally, it is another 
 person, but regarded really another form of personality. 
 Since religion is deducible from our conceptions of God and 
 man as their real interaction for the purpose of their union, 
 the incarnation is an eternal truth which influenced the whole 
 history of mankind, being as it were gradually realised, until 
 it found its absolute reality in the individual God-man Jesus. 
 Hence, in order rightly to understand the religious importance 
 of this person, we must consider his historical life altogether 
 in the light of the absolute idea. The possibility of the in- 
 carnation must be explained from the nature of man : " Man 
 in the God-man is not an individual man, but the man who 
 takes humanity up into himself, just as humanity has taken 
 nature up into itself. Only so does he come into coincident 
 relation with the divine as self-conditioned, and as the Son 
 of God with human conditionality. The man in the God-man 
 comprehends the eternal Becoming of the whole world, as it 
 proceeds from God, according to the potentiality of his nature. 
 He is, therefore, essentially the real transition of the process 
 of being through the completed Becoming to absolute Being, 
 and hence the fit organ of the Son of God after his ideal 
 entrance upon absolute Becoming. He is conditioned 
 unconditionality, which is identical with unconditioned con- 
 ditionality, the divine man who takes up into himself the 
 human God." It cannot be said that this explanation makes 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. I "] I 
 
 the matter very plain. Peculiar to Lange's Christology, is 
 the reference to the psychological distinction of " day and 
 night consciouness " and the related idea of "genius." Genius, 
 he well remarks, is a permanent form in which the "day 
 consciousness" receives inspirations from the "night con- 
 sciousness," which, as a rule, is a closed world to the ethical 
 " day consciousness," and makes its existence known only in 
 certain special influences. The application of this analogy 
 from the general theory of the soul to the person of Jesus 
 was calculated to explain several points ; but Lange leaves 
 the matter in considerable obscurity, when he says, "The 
 ethical consciousness of Christ's human development was 
 based on the infinitude of his night consciousness, like the 
 lotos flower on the lake ; and this latter consciousness was 
 not the eternal form of consciousness of the Logos per sc, 
 but it was the night side of the universal human consciousness 
 which the Logos had assumed with his incarnation. It was 
 the infinite plastic educative thought of the Son of Man in 
 his personal conditionality, that is, the human form which 
 the eternal Son could assume, without suffering any obscu- 
 ration of his eternal consciousness." In spite of all analogies 
 from general experience, in spite of all the ideal and real 
 preparation and mediation, Lange leaves the individual per- 
 son of the God-man Jesus as " the absolute miracle," and his 
 life on earth as a series of miracles. Lange deduces seven 
 chief miracles from the seven-fold miraculous nature of the 
 God-man. In discussing them he lays stress on the ideal, 
 spiritually symbolical meaning of the narratives, but insists 
 equally upon their proper historical character, because, as he 
 holds, the ideal would otherwise be conceived in a false 
 abstraction, without the real. He follows the same method 
 in the case of the Old Testament legends. The garden of 
 Eden, for example, is ideal nature in general, but at the 
 same time a definite place ; the tree of knowledge in the 
 garden is an actual historical tree, no less than an ideal 
 symbol of the seductive charm of the pleasures of nature ; 
 the cherub with the flaming sword was both a real angel, with 
 an ethereal celestial body, and a symbol of lost innocence ; 
 and in general, Christianity presupposes, not only the 
 subjective, but also the objective truth of the appearances of 
 angels and demons. The devil, in Lange's, as in Martensen's 
 view, is an ambiguous term : on the one hand, the symbol 
 
172 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 of absolute evil as a principle, and on the other, a personal 
 evil spirit, or fallen angel, and as such not absolutely evil, 
 but only evil in a great and ever-increasing degree. The 
 Apocalyptic eschatological world-drama is, of course, inter- 
 preted by our theologian quite realistically. 
 
 In Dorner, Martensen, and Lange, speculation and 
 ecclesiastical dogma preserved a certain equilibrium. But 
 neology spread among members of those circles which had 
 undertaken the defence of ecclesiastical, and in particular of 
 Lutheran, dogma; so that they too must be included, to some 
 extent, among the Eclectics. It is especially on the doctrines 
 of Christ's person and work that the Erlangen Lutheran 
 theology deviated from orthodoxy. 
 
 The perception of the inconceivability of the complete 
 humanity and human development of Jesus on the sup- 
 position that the divine Logos in his full personality was 
 present in him, led the Erlangen theologian Thomasius to 
 the so-called " Kenotic Christology." He held that with the 
 incarnation, the Logos renounced the relative attributes of 
 deity, which he considered as not necessarily belonging to the 
 divine nature — omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, 
 in order to assume the limited form of the existence of Jesus ; 
 only in the course of the life of Jesus did the Logos make an 
 actuality the absoluteness of action and knowledge which had 
 been voluntarily surrendered or reduced to an inoperative 
 potentiality. But inasmuch as during this kenosis the Logos 
 is supposed not to have given up his personal ego, nor ceased 
 to form part of the Trinity, we get the difficult conception 
 that, though in Jesus the divine self-consciousness of the 
 Logos existed, it was not as divine, because it is supposed 
 not to be omniscient and almighty. Hence Gess was more 
 logical in maintaining a kenosis on the part of the divine 
 Logos to such an extent that he completely renounced his 
 self-consciousness, and converted it into the human soul of 
 Jesus. By virtue of his subordination to the Father he was, 
 it is said, able to surrender to him his personality, and by 
 virtue of his kinship with the human soul, which is in the 
 image of God, he was able to convert himself into such a 
 soul, which potentially bears within it the fulness of all the 
 divine powers, but can only by a gradual development 
 become actually able to use them. Jesus, therefore, was 
 from the first a potential but not actual God, and was con- 
 
Ch. IV.] F.CLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 "] 2> 
 
 sequently capable of a human development. During this 
 development, his Logos-consciousness occasionally flashed 
 through the human limitations, in recollection of his pre- 
 existence, but ordinarily it remained only the latent ground 
 of the development of his human consciousness, which rose 
 step by step to complete identity with the divine Logos- 
 consciousness, whereby, and not before, the man Jesus 
 was received into the complete unity of the life of the 
 Trinity. The opponents of this theory rightly remarked that 
 it deviated widely from the orthodox doctrine of God and 
 Christ, in representing the life of the Trinity as interrupted 
 and deprived of its second person by the conversion of the 
 Logos into the human soul of Jesus during the latter's life 
 on earth, and in regarding Jesus as only a potential but not 
 actual God-man ; but for us the chief interest lies in the fact 
 that the theory is evidently on the point of quite breaking 
 away from the ecclesiastical dogma, and taking the side of the 
 speculative theory, according to which the universal capacity 
 for the divine, the innate destiny and vocation of every 
 human soul, was typically realised in Jesus. 
 
 Still further removed from orthodoxy was the teaching of 
 the Erlangen theologian. Christian von Hofmann. His 
 doctrine of the Atonement was the most prominent though 
 not the only instance of his heterodoxy, and hence was the 
 first object of attack on the part of orthodox theologians. 
 Hofmann, indeed, only wished to teach old truth in a new 
 form, but a glance at his system shows the serious extent of 
 the neology in his teaching. A vein of modern Rationalism 
 runs through his theology, but it is concealed, by means of 
 an artificial dialectic, behind a supernaturalism rather Biblical 
 than ecclesiastical. His theological system is given in his 
 two chief works, Weissagung und Erfillhmg and Der Schrift- 
 beweis (1852-56), to which may be added his collected Schutz- 
 schviften, containing an exposition and defence of his system 
 against ecclesiastical attacks. 
 
 Hofmann, exactly like Schleiermacher, bases his theology 
 upon the inward experience of the facts of personal Chris- 
 tianity. This experience he attempts to develop into a 
 system of organically connected statements, in which every 
 individual fact is to find its definite and necessary place as an 
 historical presupposition or inference. And the Schriftbeweis, 
 or proof from Scripture, he holds to consist precisely in show- 
 
1 74 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 ing that Biblical history and doctrine as a whole finds its 
 proper place in the systematic development of the facts which 
 make us Christians ; it is not that certain dogmatic proposi- 
 tions are to be proved by individual texts of Scripture, but 
 the Biblical history of revelation as a whole, from the creation 
 to the consummation of the world, is to be explained from the 
 point of view of the necessary premises of our experience of 
 Christianity, and inferences from it. It need not be said that 
 the subjective conception of Christian experience thus acquires 
 fundamental importance in the interpretation and explanation 
 of the history, and that arbitrary and violent expedients are 
 not always avoided in the case of important points. At 
 bottom this Schriftbeweis is the supernaturalistic counterpart 
 of Hegel's Philosophy of History ; both pursue the same 
 method of deducing history from a priori ideas, philosophical 
 ideas in the one case, theological in the other ; both connect 
 historical events with transcendental relations : the one, with 
 the movement of the idea through the antithesis of its ele- 
 ments to the unity of the concept and of reality ; the other, 
 with the movement of the Persons of the Trinity through 
 antithetical modes of existence to the unity of love and 
 blessedness. 
 
 The fellowship with God into which we know that we have 
 been admitted through Christ has, Hofmann teaches, the 
 divine Trinity as its eternal condition. For the self-deter- 
 mination of the divine love beyond itself, having for its object 
 the gradually evolving man of God, i.e., historical humanity, 
 presupposes an eternal self-determination on the part of God 
 within himself having as its object the eternal man of God, 
 or the Son of God (who is accordingly not really God at all, 
 or a Person in the Trinitarian nature of God, but the pre- 
 existent ideal man, something like the Pauline Christ). God's 
 eternal will of love, or his inward divine relation to his Son, 
 is accomplished in the history which transpires between him 
 and mankind. This history has a threefold beginning : one 
 given to it by God, one given to it by itself, and one a fresh 
 beginning, annulling the latter and completing the former, 
 God having appointed his Son for this. Since the final end 
 of the divine will is the man Jesus, mankind necessarily began 
 in a single man, Eve being taken therefore from her husband. 
 The original state of mankind was a state of actual and true, 
 though only incipient, holiness and blessedness, not excluding 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 175 
 
 the possibility of self-determination in opposition to God. 
 The source of the first sin, however, did not lie in man, but 
 outside him, in the temptation of Satan, who was able to 
 deceive the woman. This brought mankind into a state the 
 reverse of life from God, under the necessity of death and 
 the seductive influences of Satan. Still there existed the 
 possibility of divine counter-influence, prophetically testified 
 to in the revelation of God to Israel, and fully realised in the 
 incarnation of the eternal Son. His entrance into the humanity 
 derived from Adam was for it the realisation of God's eternal 
 will of love, since he was the beginner and originator of per- 
 fect fellowship with God for the same humanity which had 
 in its sin made a beginning opposed to the holiness of God, 
 and frustrating God's work of love. At the same time, how- 
 ever, his inward divine relation to the Father became involved 
 in the most extreme antithesis possible to it without cancelling 
 itself For as having become a member of Adamite human- 
 ity, the Son was bound to an obedience to the Father which 
 involved undergoing the consequences of God's anger inflicted 
 upon the sinful race. But the sinfulness of the human race 
 inherited from Adam could not possibly be shared by the Son, 
 from the fact that his incarnation was a deed of holy self- 
 determination, to the accomplishment of which nothing was 
 necessary on man's part except obedient faith in the divine 
 word of promise on the part of the woman destined to con- 
 ceive him. His human action could then only be the con- 
 tinuation, by means of a sinless human nature, of the holy 
 self-determination by which he had become man. 
 
 The acquisition of righteousness for mankind by Jesus was 
 the effect of his entire holy life, from his incarnation to his 
 death. It began by his assuming human nature in a sinless 
 state as his own, thus making a new beginning in opposition 
 to the sin of Adam. It was continued in the harmony of all 
 he did with the will of God, expressed in consequence of sin 
 in the form of the law, which demanded obedience to the 
 various ordinances of man's social life. It was consummated 
 by enduring the enmity of men in his fidelity to the divine 
 will, preserving his holiness to the end in suffering as well 
 as in action. The death of Jesus was therefore not a 
 vicarious atoning sacrifice to the divine punitive righteousness, 
 but an " occurrence " resulting from the historical position of 
 affairs, and which became the deed of Jesus by virtue of his 
 
I 76 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 voluntary submission to it. But just as this thing which hap- 
 pened to him was not the suffering of what sinful humanity 
 would have had to suffer, so the thing which he accomplished 
 was not what humanity ought to have done, but it was the 
 obedience of the divinely ordained Saviour to his own voca- 
 tion. The abandonment of the Son by the Father to the 
 hostile power of men and the devil brought the history trans- 
 acting between God and the second beginner of mankind to 
 a conclusion, which was at the same time the conclusion of 
 the previous history of mankind conditioned by sin. For in 
 his maintenance of the office of mediator in opposition to the 
 enmity born of sin lay likewise his deed of satisfaction for the 
 sin of Adamite humanity, that is, the actual realisation of the 
 relation to God which had been desired and brought about by 
 God, a relation for which sin no longer exists, and which is holi- 
 ness alone. This whole act of God we call the redemption of 
 mankind, irrespective of its effects upon individuals, because 
 it sanctified and glorified human nature in the person of Christ. 
 Its sanctification was its salvation from sin ; its glorification 
 its salvation from death. This glorification was accomplished 
 by the raising of Christ from the dead, by which he entered 
 upon a new kind of human life, in which his human nature 
 was the perfect instrument of his unconditional fellowship with 
 the Father. Christ's work of salvation was an expiation of 
 sin, not in the sense that the Triune God had claimed some- 
 thing as a recompense for the wrong done him, but in the 
 sense that for the benefit of the human race he displayed his 
 eternally holy love, which seeks not its own, but what is 
 another's. The salvation of the world is not based upon the 
 Triune God having been appeased, but upon the Son having 
 accomplished that in relation to the Father which only the 
 Holy One was able to accomplish, but not sinful mankind for 
 itself Only in this sense can his work be called vicarious. 
 The result of this history, commencing with Christ's incarna- 
 tion and completed by his death and resurrection, is that the 
 relation of the Father to the Son is henceforth also the relation 
 of God to the humanity beginning anew in the Son, a relation 
 which is henceforth not determined by the sin of the race of 
 Adam, but by the righteousness of the Son. But participa- 
 tion in this new relation to God is open to us only when, by 
 virtue of the working of the Holy Ghost, which makes us 
 certain of this change accomplished once for all, we are re- 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 77 
 
 solved to belong to the humanity begun afresh in Christ, and 
 therefore to make our own, not only the forgiveness of its 
 sins, but also its life unto God. It is the righteousness of the 
 Son which renders mankind the object of the divine approval; 
 and it is by acting up to the relation to God existing in his 
 person that the individual man becomes certain of its existence, 
 and its existence for him. What he thus becomes certain of 
 is the beginning of a new humanity, though this only becomes 
 such for him by his attaching himself to it as soon as he is 
 certain of its existence. 
 
 The near kinship of this theory of salvation to that of 
 Schleiermacher will be at once perceived. The fundamental 
 principles are the same as those recurring in all rationalistic 
 theology since Kant, only here they are, by a somewhat arti- 
 ficial dialectic, so interwoven with Biblical supernaturalism as 
 to appear to be the result of the Schriftbeweis. We may even 
 admit that they have points of support in Biblical teaching, 
 although not exactly in accord with true Pauline doctrine. 
 At any rate, we must admit the theologian's right to em- 
 phasise some sides of Biblical teaching neglected by ecclesias- 
 tical theology, and to make use of them for his own rational 
 conception of the dogma. But Hofmann's opponents were 
 quite right in asserting the essential difference between his 
 theory of the Atonement and that of Anselm and Luther ; and 
 Hofmann's wish to represent his teaching as essentially in 
 accordance with the dogma of the Confessions can only be 
 called a piece of strange self-deception. But this want of 
 honesty towards himself and others, this concealment of the 
 heresy of which he was really guilty, is so general a weakness 
 among theologians, that we must not press it too much in 
 relation to individuals. 
 
 The lines of Hofmann are followed by Daniel Schenkel in 
 his Dogmatik (1858-9), though he is a step further removed 
 from ecclesiastical dogma. He starts from man's self-con- 
 sciousness as involving the three fundamental facts of man's 
 need of salvation, the divine bestowal of salvation, and the 
 completion of salvation in the Church, these facts being 
 directly given in experience. He blames Schleiermacher for 
 emphasising the subjective side of the truth of salvation, the 
 facts of the religious consciousness, to the detriment of the 
 objective side, the facts of God's personal bestowal of salva- 
 tion. (Though how the " facts of salvation," which are only 
 
 G. T. N 
 
178 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 historically known, can at the same time be directly given 
 in the religious consciousness, Schenkel does not explain, 
 and throughout his book we can trace the effects of this 
 failure to distinguish between direct facts of the religious 
 consciousness and their conditions, which are only indirectly 
 inferred or historically knowable.) The truth of the facts of 
 salvation can be established in three ways : first, by their 
 answering to a human need of salvation ; secondly, by their 
 containing a fresh communication of himself by God to man ; 
 thirdly, by their being the basis of a progressive develop- 
 ment of the Christian community with regard to salvation. 
 
 Above all Schenkel, not without reason, maintains that 
 theology requires a thorough revision of the idea of religion, 
 which lies at the root of all its propositions. In spite of 
 Schleiermacher's great merit in distinguishing religion from 
 knowledge and conduct, his definition of religion is unsatis- 
 factory, as confusing the religious and aesthetic functions by 
 the identification of religion with emotion, and so overlooking 
 its ethical character. Schenkel, for his part, thinks he has 
 discovered a specifically religious organ in the conscience, 
 quite distinct from reason, will, and emotion ; for while in the 
 latter our self-consciousness involves only relation to the world, 
 in the conscience we are conscious of ourselves in primal and 
 direct relation to God. The primary religious function of 
 conscience is the consciousness that God is personally present 
 in us, but that our original normal relation to God is dis- 
 turbed by the distracting consciousness of the world, and that 
 we therefore stand in need of the restoration by God of our 
 normal relation to him. It is plain that this theory represents 
 religious convictions of a very complicated origin as the 
 original content of conscience, and from the first substi- 
 tutes dogmatic presuppositions for a psychological analysis of 
 facts ; but, setting aside his totally inadequate deduction, we 
 must recognise the justice and value of Schenkel's attempt 
 to show " the synthesis of the religious and ethical factors" 
 from the nature of the religious spirit itself, and thus to 
 secure from the first the indissoluble connexion of religious 
 and moral truths. 
 
 In treating of revelation, Schenkel complains of the want 
 of a distinction in the older dogmatic theologians between 
 the act and the record of revelation ; for while the former 
 is a direct working of God on the human conscience, this 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 79 
 
 absolute divine act of communication becomes, by its incor- 
 poration with human activity, a human and historically con- 
 ditioned record of revelation, which on that very account 
 can never be absolutely perfect, nor completed in past history, 
 since God's revelation of himself is always continued in the 
 historical development of salvation. Of " miracles," Schenkel 
 speaks very variously : on the one hand, he says, with 
 Schleiermacher, that from the religious point of view all 
 phenomena depend upon the divine causality, while from 
 the rational point of view they are at the same time explic- 
 able from the uniformity of nature, thus doing away with 
 miracles in the proper sense ; on the other hand, he main- 
 tains that specific miracles are creative modifications by God 
 of the uniformity of finite nature, mysteriously introducing 
 something new into the world, though it afterwards obeys 
 natural laws, since, e.g., the loaves miraculously multiplied 
 stilled the people's hunger like ordinary bread. Schenkel 
 was evidently not clear as to the essence of the question ; 
 his objection to Schleiermacher is unmeaning. Of inspira- 
 tion, Schenkel says that it originates directly from God, but 
 is continued through human instrumentality, so that we must 
 admit the imperfection of the individual inspirations during 
 the formation of the whole record of revelation. Still it is 
 not enough to say that the Scriptures contain the word of 
 God ; we must also say that they are the word of God, though 
 not all the individual words of the Bible are this, but the 
 Bible as a whole. Schenkel's method of proof from Scripture 
 corresponds to this conception of its authority ; he interprets 
 the passages in the Bible so that they agree with the affir- 
 mations of his " conscience," and where that is impossible, 
 he has recourse to the supposition of the Biblical teacher's 
 accommodating himself to the conceptions of the people, e.g.. 
 In the doctrine of the devil; an unprejudiced historical estimate 
 of the Bible is unknown to Schenkel. 
 
 Accordingly the historical truth of the whole Biblical his- 
 tory from the creation of the world onwards is maintained by 
 Schenkel for conscience' sake. In speaking of the Fall he 
 does indeed quote Nitzsch, to the effect that it Is "a true 
 but not an external history "; nevertheless it must be regarded 
 as having taken place as an external fact at some time. In 
 particular the belief In the historical trustworthiness of the 
 Gospel narratives of miracles, from the supernatural Birth 
 
l8p DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 to the Ascension, is represented as a demand of " conscience," 
 and thus historical criticism is indirectly charged with want 
 of conscience ! Schenkel does indeed, as a fact, allow himself 
 several departures from Biblical statements of doctrine, but 
 he always endeavours by artificial interpretations to produce 
 the appearance of complete agreement {e.£:, in the case of 
 the Johannine Christology, of the Pauline doctrine of sin and 
 atonement). On the other hand, he in many points openly 
 and expressly opposes ecclesiastical dogmas, and censures 
 others, e.g:, Hofmann, for trying to conceal their heterodoxy, 
 forgetting that he is himself in precisely the same position 
 with regard to the Scriptures. 
 
 Schenkel sees the fundamental error of the ecclesiastical 
 Christology in the fact that it has never been able to acknow- 
 ledge the real humanity of Christ ; and the source of this error 
 he holds to be that it assumed the personal Logos, the second 
 Person of the Trinity, to have been the principle constituting 
 the person of Christ. Hence he begins his reconstruction 
 with the doctrine of the Trinity. It is not a triple personality 
 in God which is testified to by conscience and Scripture, but 
 a triple relationship of God to the world, and hence a triple 
 consciousness of God in relation to the world. " God as 
 the Father rests in the eternal source of creation ; as the 
 Son he issues from his absolute source and enters the life of 
 the world, without himself becoming finite, and reflects the 
 eternal image of the world within himself ; as the Holy Spirit 
 he transforms the life of the finite back into his absolute 
 source, in such a way that this life ceases to be solely for the 
 finite and comes to be for God, i.e., for divine and eternal 
 purposes." The Logos is therefore not a person, but the idea 
 of the world eternally thought in God's self-consciousness, 
 reaching its highest form in the idea of a perfect man. Only 
 in this ideal, not in a real personal, sense can we maintain 
 Christ's pre-existence, and only in this sense must we under- 
 stand the Biblical statements with respect to it. " Christ 
 had indeed an eternal pre-existence in God, in so far that 
 the Father had chosen him from all eternity to represent the 
 idea of man within the limits of the historical development 
 of the human race. The Logos, as the eternal, conscious, 
 divine idea of humanity, really became flesh, i.e., had historical 
 existence as a human person." The perfected archetype of 
 humanity and the complete image of the deity realised them- 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. l8l 
 
 selves historically in Christ. In respect of his personal 
 nature, Christ did not differ from other men, as would have 
 been the case if he had had within him the personality of 
 the Logos with absolute attributes. Still he is as an indi- 
 vidual different from others, in that he is the spiritual centre 
 in which mankind is eternally one ; in him God conceives 
 and contemplates mankind from all eternity as a whole, as a 
 logical and ethical unity. Hence in the conception of Christ's 
 true humanity is involved that of his true Deity. For just 
 as it is the prerogative of every man to be historically in 
 time related to God in his conscience, so it is Christ's pre- 
 rogative above all other men to be eternally directly related 
 to God, and to be conscious of himself as the man in whom 
 the idea of humanity is realised as it was known and willed 
 in God before all time. In this sense we may say that God 
 himself, and nothing less, became man in Christ, because he 
 is the self-revelation of the eternal God, that is, of his eternal 
 will directed towards the world and humanity. As the self- 
 revelation of God within the limits of a human life, he is the 
 representative of Deity to mankind ; as the personal exempli- 
 fication of a true and perfect man, he is the representative of 
 mankind in relation to Deity ; in conjunction with both, he is 
 the eternal mediator and surety, binding mankind to God and 
 assuring it of salvation. 
 
 The atonement wrought by Christ consisted in the restora- 
 tion of the fellowship of mankind with God, disturbed by sin, 
 and the cancelling of the effects of sin, guilt, and punishment. 
 This result was only possible by the manifestation in his own 
 person of the ethical perfection of human nature, and especi 
 ally by his condemnation of sin in its weakness, and revealing 
 his divine self-sacrificing love in all its glory by his suffering 
 and death. God regards this ethically perfect sacrifice not 
 simply as an individual act, but as the common deed of man- 
 kind generally as represented in Christ, and hence looks 
 upon mankind in general as if the normal development begun 
 in it by Christ were already finished ; which is the more 
 natural as this atonement was eternally willed and historically 
 accomplished by God himself Thus Schenkel rejects, with 
 Hofmann and Schleiermacher, the ecclesiastical doctrine of a 
 vicarious satisfaction made to the punitive divine justice, and 
 holds that the atoning element was rather that Christ by 
 his holy life, attested by his death, made amends for the sin 
 
l82 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 of mankind, i.e., actually overcame it and destroyed it at its 
 root, and thereby gave God the pledge of a life of humanity 
 vi^ell-pleasing to him. This triumph over the supremacy of 
 sin put an end to the cause of the discord between God and 
 mankind, and rendered it possible for God to look upon 
 mankind as if the new development of life, begun in principle, 
 was already actually accomplished. Christ's deed was vica- 
 rious only in the sense that his suffering and action exempli- 
 fied by anticipation what we are bound to suffer and do in 
 fellowship with him. But when the work of atonement has 
 once been comprehended, "with the help of the conscience," 
 as a truly ethical deed, salvation, i.e., the individual appro- 
 priation of the effects of the atonement on the part of each 
 individual, must necessarily also be ethically conceived. 
 Salvation can no longer be supposed to consist in the impu- 
 tation to a man of another's merits, faith being merely the 
 passive acceptance of this justifying sentence of God. On 
 the contrary, the new life won, in principle, for mankind by 
 Christ, must be practically realised in each individual ; and 
 this is done by faith, inasmuch as faith is the central activity 
 of man's conscience in relation to God. Faith is the subjective 
 condition of justification, inasmuch as the man by virtue of 
 this change in his conscience, participates in the atoning per- 
 sonal life of Christ, and has received into his heart the new 
 divine principle of life exemplified in Christ. This beginning 
 of a new life in the believer, God imputes to him as if it were 
 already completed ; he regards it on account of the perfection 
 of the principle active in it (the personal life of Christ), 
 proleptically, as if it were itself already perfect. 
 
 The close connexion of this doctrine of atonement and of 
 justification with the fundamental principles of Kant's philo- 
 sophy of religion is very plain ; the difference is only that what 
 Kant called the ideal of a humanity pleasing to God, Jesus 
 being the conspicuous example of it, is here identified with 
 the ideal person of Christ ; but in both cases it is by receiving 
 this ideal into his own heart that the man becomes good in 
 principle, and thus righteous before God, in spite of his 
 asting empirical imperfection. That Jesus was not only the 
 model but also the creative cause of this ethical and religious 
 process, while the society which he founded was its social 
 mediate cause, is the theological addition to the Kantian 
 theory made as early as Schleiermacher, and which we have 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 83 
 
 met with in various phases in the discussion of this group of 
 theologians. 
 
 Most nearly akin to Hofmann and Schenkel is the theo- 
 logian Albrecht Ritschl ; with Schenkel he lays special 
 stress on the ethical element, with Hofmann he emphasises 
 the historical and social element, and claims with him to be 
 a true Lutheran ; he is distinguished from both by the peculi- 
 arity of his epistemology and his method, which he eclectically 
 derived from Kant and Lotze. In his book, Metaphysik 
 und Theologie, he very emphatically opposed the " bad episte- 
 mology and metaphysics" of previous theology, and offered 
 his own as the foundation of an altogether new theology. 
 
 On a closer inspection, however, this, his famous theory of 
 cognition, is seen to be only a dilettante confusion of the 
 irreconcilable views of subjective idealism, which resolves 
 things into phenomena of consciousness, and common-sense 
 realism, which looks upon the phenomena of consciousness 
 as things themselves, admitting no distinction between 
 phenomena as perceived by us and the being of things in 
 themselves ; a confusion to which the nearest parallel is the 
 semi-idealistic, semi-materialistic theory of the Neo-Kantian 
 Lange, author of the Geschichte des Materialisimis {2nd ed. 
 1873), which enjoyed a brief celebrity as having supplied, it was 
 thought, a justification of the sceptical tendencies of the time. 
 We may, moreover, conjecture that Ritschl did not make 
 this theory of cognition the basis of his theology from the 
 first, but rather propounded it subsequently, in its defence. 
 In spite of its intrinsic worthlessness, it is well calculated to 
 furnish this theology, in its wavering between the subjective 
 dissolution of the objects of theology and the affirmation of 
 their objective reality, with an appearance of scientific justifi- 
 cation having a certain attraction at least for amateurs in 
 these questions. 
 
 Ritschl expounded his theological system in the third 
 volume of his principal work, Recldfertigmig inid Versohimng, 
 of which the first and second volumes had contained the 
 history of the dogma and its Biblical-theological premises 
 respectively. The third volume appeared in three editions, 
 between 1874 and 1888, differing in some points from each 
 other. Indeed, a careful comparison of the later presenta- 
 tions with the earlier shows an increasing advance in the 
 direction of speculative scepticism and historical dogmatism. 
 
184 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 Religion was defined by Ritschl in the first edition as the 
 " common recognition of the dependence of man on God," 
 or, more precisely, " as our view of the world from the basis 
 of the idea of God and our estimate of ourselves from 
 our sense of dependence upon God in relation to the world." 
 The peculiarity of the religious view of the world he 
 holds to be that it involves the conception of a whole, 
 while theoretical knowledge in philosophy and the special 
 sciences is limited to the general and particular laws of nature 
 and spirit, and cannot by its methods of experience and 
 observation attain to the conception of the world as a unity 
 and a whole. Wherever philosophy has claimed by its methods 
 to construct a view of the universe, we should rather discern 
 an impulse of religion, which philosophy must distinguish as 
 specifically different from its own object of systematic know- 
 ledge. Conflicts between religion and science are to be avoided 
 by religion retaining as its privilege the right of viewing the 
 world in its unity, and by science Hmiting itself to the particular 
 phenomena of the world. Afterwards, on the other hand, 
 Ritschl admitted that philosophy also treated of the world 
 as a whole, with the object of comprehending it under one 
 supreme law. Hence the distinction between religious and 
 scientific knowledge Is not to be sought in its object, but in 
 the sphere of the subject, viz., in the difference in the attitude 
 of the subject towards the object. For religion, he now 
 states, " is occupied with judgments of value ( Wert hurt he He)" 
 i.e., with conceptions of our relation to the world which are 
 of moment solely according to their value in awakening 
 feelings of pleasure or pain as our dominion over the world 
 is furthered or checked. "In all religion, by the help of the 
 sublime spiritual Power which man adores, the solution is 
 attempted of the contradiction in which man finds himselt 
 placed as a part of the natural world and as a spiritual person 
 ality with its claim to sovereignty over nature. For in his 
 position he is a part of nature, in subjection to it, dependent 
 upon and checked by other things, but as spirit he is moved 
 by the impulse to maintain his independence against external 
 things. In these circumstances arises religion as a belief in 
 superior spiritual powers by whose help the deficiencies in 
 man's own power are supplied." All religion seeks to supple- 
 ment, by means of the idea of God, man's sense of personal 
 dignity in the face of the hindrances of the world ; this idea 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 85 
 
 of God is "the ideal bond between the particular view of the 
 world and the vocation of man to attain goods [Gilter) or the 
 highest good (happiness.) " ' The thought of God must be 
 treated in Christian theology solely as a judgment of value, or 
 as a conception valuable for the attainment of goods. This is 
 the same theory of religion as the well-known one of Feuer- 
 bach: the gods are the " Wunschwesen" invented by man from 
 his practical need of a supplement to his own powerlessness 
 over nature. But while the pathological explanation of the idea 
 of God by motives of human feeling was intended by Feuer- 
 bach to deny the truth of this idea in an objective sense, and 
 to affirm its purely imaginary character, the theory is directed 
 by Ritschl to the exactly opposite conclusion, that the 
 emotional value of the conception of God for the preservation 
 of man's sense of personal dignity is also the warrant of its 
 truth. That this warrant is not sufficient to insure to 
 theology a knowledge of speculative truth and the character 
 of a science, had indeed been formerly fully recognised by 
 Ritschl himself, who had therefore in his first edition still 
 held the necessity and possibility of an independent proof 
 of the existence of God, founded upon the general data of 
 the human mind ; as such he had regarded the ethical proof 
 as stated in Kant's Critique of Judgment, and had expressly 
 declared that the "acceptance of the idea of God on that proof 
 was no practical belief (as Kant had thought), but an act of 
 speculative cognition," by which the general rationality of the 
 Christian view of the world is established and thereby the 
 possibility of a scientific theology secured, while such a theo- 
 logy would be impossible if the idea of God could not be 
 established to the satisfaction of speculative knowledge also 
 as its necessary basis. In the third edition, on the other 
 hand, this position is altogether abandoned ; we now read 
 " this acceptance of the idea of God is, as Kant remarks, a 
 practical belief, and not an act of speculative cognition." In 
 justification of this change of view, it is alleged that it is 
 the work of theology to preserve the distinctive character of 
 the idea of God, that it is allowable to use it only in judgments 
 of value. Hence theoretical proofs of the idea of God are 
 doomed to failure, "because their professed results, even if 
 true, do not accord with the Christian thought of God, in that 
 
 1 Seligkeit. 
 
1 86 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 they fail to express its value for men, in particular for men as 
 sinners." Thus while Ritschl formerly recognised that a 
 scientific and universally valid justification of the belief in 
 God, and consequently of theology, cannot consist merely in 
 an inference from the religious view of the world to its inner 
 coherence, but must be based upon independent and univer- 
 sal data of the human mind, he now, on the contrary, pro- 
 nounces the theoretical method of proof objectionable in not 
 being confined to Christian judgments of value, or in aiming 
 to be not only simple practical belief, but also independent 
 theoretical knowledge. We see from this how, from the sub- 
 jective conception of religion, is deduced the limitation of the 
 science of religion, or theology, to the sphere of judgments of 
 value, or subjective truth, and the abandonment on principle 
 of all attempts to attain objective truth valid for the knowing 
 mind in general. 
 
 In accordance with his principle that the Christian thought 
 of God must be put forward only in judgments of value, 
 Ritschl teaches that God should be thought of only as love. 
 All metaphysical statements regarding God's absoluteness, his 
 existence through himself, in himself, and for himself, must be 
 rejected as "heathenish metaphysics," connected with the false 
 theory of knowledge which maintains the existence of things 
 irrespective of our conception of them. The idealistic subjec- 
 tification of the idea of God on the lines of Feuerbach seems 
 a necessary consequence of this. Such is not, however, 
 Ritschl's intention ; on the contrary, he seeks to conceive of 
 the personality of God as objectively real. That this involves 
 the assertion of an absolute existence of God in himself, as 
 distinguished from his existence in relation to us, or his love, 
 is plain, but is not admitted by Ritschl. He says that the 
 attribute of personality is only the form for God's love. If 
 this proposition were taken strictly, it would finally come to 
 mean that our conception of the personality of God is the 
 form under which we personify love as " God," which is the 
 view of Feuerbach and the Positivists. But Ritschl does 
 not mean this ; indeed, he speaks also of an " intrinsic purpose 
 of God," ' into which God takes up the purpose of the world, 
 or which he realises in the education of the human race for 
 the kingdom of God. But such a purpose is a relation of the 
 
 1 Selbstzweck Gottes. 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 87 
 
 will to itself, and therefore presupposes a being which is not 
 solely love, that is, existing for others, but exists also as a 
 subject in and for itself This inner self-subsistence of God, 
 with his loving communication of himself, is not merely a 
 necessary metaphysical conception, but also of great religious 
 importance, since it is the foundation, as Dorner has well 
 remarked, of the Biblical conception of God's holiness and 
 righteousness, which in the teaching of the Bible and the 
 Church is inseparable from that of his love. But this side of 
 the idea of God is altogether neglected by Ritschl. He 
 says : "In comparison with the conception of love there is 
 no other of equal value. In particular this holds of the con- 
 ception of holiness, which in its Old Testament sense is, for 
 several reasons, not valid in Christianity, and the use of which 
 in the New Testament is obscure." And with regard to God's 
 righteousness, in which, according to Biblical doctrine, his 
 holiness is actively shown, Ritschl (like Hofmann) considers 
 that it is " his action for the salvation of the members of his 
 religious community, and is identical in fact with grace." 
 
 This is connected with Ritschl's peculiar doctrine of sin. 
 He altogether rejects the idea of original sin, because it 
 assumes that there is a will previous to its individual acts ; an 
 assumption related to the false doctrine of things in them- 
 selves, and because the hypothesis of an innate evil tendency 
 makes both responsibility and education impossible. The 
 latter demands the exactly opposite hypothesis, " that the 
 general though still indefinite impulse towards good exists in 
 the child, although it is not guided by a general insight into 
 the good, and not yet tested by the various relations of life." 
 F"or the conception of original sin we must, therefore, substi- 
 tute that of the " kingdom of sin," i.e., of the collective unity 
 of free actions opposed to the purpose of the kingdom of God, 
 and of the inclinations acquired thereby. The law of sin in 
 the will is not a natural loss of its freedom, but is a consequence 
 of the necessary reaction of every act of the will upon the 
 direction of the power of volition. Accordingly the unchecked 
 repetition of selfish determinations of the will produces a ten- 
 dency to selfishness, and the sin is then transmitted from one 
 individual to another by the interaction of their conduct in 
 society. Ritschl has not indeed shown how any selfish deter- 
 minations of the will at all can be explained, if there exists in 
 the child by nature only an indefinite impulse towards good ; 
 
1 88 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 for the attempt to explain it from ignorance is certainly un- 
 satisfactory. Ritschl holds, namely, that ignorance, as ex- 
 perience proves in the case of children, is " a very momentous 
 factor in the origination and development of sin ; " and further, 
 that it is "the essential condition of the conflicts of the will 
 with the order of society as the rule of goodness, and also the 
 condition of the fixity of the will in its resistance to this order." 
 It may easily be seen how litde this explanation accords with 
 experience, of which a very different account is given even by 
 the heathen poet {Nitinmr in vetiht7n), and above all by the 
 Aposde Paul (Rom. vii.). In Ritschl's case also, this treat- 
 ment of sin as ignorance is not so much the result of actual 
 observation as a postulate of his doctrine of God and recon- 
 ciliation. To the regulative conception of God corresponds, 
 he says, the distinction between the two stages of sin — an im- 
 perfect stage, not excluding the capability for redemption, and 
 a completed stage, consisting in a final purpose of opposition 
 to the known will of God. Since the latter is only a hypo- 
 thetical possibility, of which we can nowhere assume the 
 reality, all actual sin of mankind is confined to the former 
 stage, and this is regarded by God as " the relative stage of 
 ignorance." The artificial method by which Ritschl tries to 
 harmonise his theory with the statements of the Bible, may be 
 here passed over as valueless. 
 
 The correlative to the love of God is the kingdom of God, 
 inasmuch as it is the union of men for mutual and common 
 action from the motive of love, which action, as correlative to 
 the purpose of God himself, and as the specific operation of 
 God, is the perfect revelation of the fact that God is love. In 
 the precise development of this thought there is again a 
 noticeable difference between the first and the later editions 
 of Ritschl's work. In the first the Christian idea of the king- 
 dom of God is the highest stage of ethical society among men, 
 though removed from the earlier preparatory stages to no 
 greater degree than these from each other. It is more perfect 
 in virtue of its greater extent, but is not essentially different 
 in kind, since the pre-Christian forms of society (family, friend- 
 ship, nationality) originated in love. And since, as is then 
 stated, this union of men, wherever realised, must always be 
 regarded as dependent upon God, and as the effect and reve- 
 lation of His love, the conception of a universal revelation of 
 God throughout all human history is evidently presupposed. 
 
Ch. IV,] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 89 
 
 since this history has never been without ethical fellowship 
 and love. In the later editions, on the other hand, the com- 
 parison of the Christian kingdom of God with the preparatory 
 stages of ethical society in history is omitted, and the love of 
 God is exclusively confined to the historical Christian Church, 
 which, by acknowledging Christ as its Lord, itself comes to 
 stand in the same relation as he to God. Whereas it was 
 formerly maintained that " God loves the httman race from the 
 point of view of its vocation to the kingdom of God," we are 
 now told that " God is love as revealing himself through his 
 Son to the Church founded by the latter in order to educate 
 it for the kingdom of God " ; and whereas we were then told 
 that all ethical union originated in love, and that all action 
 from love must always and everywhere be regarded as de- 
 pendent on God, and as the effect of the revelation of his 
 love, it is now stated that " All love of man originates accord- 
 ing to Christian ideas in the revelation of God in Christ." 
 From these statements it would directly follow that before 
 Christ there was neither a revelation of God nor an ethical 
 association of men. If that be so, from what source were 
 religion and morality in pre-Christian humanity derived .'' This 
 Ritschl has never explained. Simply to deny that it had any 
 religion or morality, would lead to a pessimism more extreme 
 than that of Augustine, and would strangely contradict Rit- 
 schl's optimistic view of the goodness of human nature. 
 Finally, it is evident that the limitation of the divine revela- 
 tion solely to the person of Jesus, whose historical connection 
 with the religion of Israel is undeniable, verges close upon 
 the denial of revelation altogether. Thus ultra dogmatism in 
 the end leads to the opposite extreme, as has actually been 
 exemplified in Ritschl's disciple. Bender. 
 
 In his Christology, Ritschl starts from the principle that in 
 a personal life what is real and actual consists of spiritual 
 effects and nothing else. By this means the Christological 
 problem is much simplified. Not only the dogma of the two 
 natures, but the whole metaphysical background of ecclesias- 
 tical Christology is thus got rid of, even more decisively than 
 in Schleiermacher's theology, and replaced by an historical 
 view of the subject. In strange contrast with this, Ritschl 
 nevertheless continues to speak with orthodox theology of the 
 deity of Christ. It is true this term has for him an altogether 
 different meaning. It is the expression of our estimate of 
 
igo DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 Jesus, of our trustful acknowledgment of the unique value 
 of vi^hat his life effected for our salvation, but is not meant to 
 predicate any metaphysical characteristic of his nature what- 
 ever, or any transcendental unity of his nature with God. The 
 predication of the deity of Christ sums up his unmistakable 
 importance as the perfect revealer of God and as the manifest 
 type of spiritual supremacy over the world. Our religious 
 estimate of Christ must be tested by the connection of his 
 action in the world with his religious convictions and with his 
 ethical motives. It has no direct reference to his presumptive 
 possession of innate qualifications and capacities, for Christ 
 does not influence us thus, but morally and religiously only. 
 Jesus is the representative of the perfect spiritual religion, 
 standing in a reciprocal relation of union with the God who is 
 the originator and final end of the world. This involved his re- 
 cognition of God's divinest purpose, the union of men by love, 
 as the task of his own life, whereby he experienced that in- 
 dependence of the world which the members of his Church 
 ought to come to share with him. The peculiar value of his 
 life on earth gains the character of a permanent rule by serving 
 as a pattern for our religious and ethical vocation. This 
 authority, which either excludes all other standards or else 
 subordinates them to itself, and which is also the ultimate regu- 
 lative principle of all human trust in God, is equivalent in value 
 to his deity. On the other hand, metaphysical attributes of 
 deity cannot be ascribed to him for the simple reason that they 
 are altogether outside the religious method of cognition, which 
 is concerned only with judgments of value. So too the passages 
 of Scripture from which Christ's personal pre-existence has 
 been inferred, are only to be understood in the sense that, in 
 the thought and will of God, Christ from the beginning was 
 the head of the community of the kingdom of God, which is 
 the object of the world. The Johannine formula of the Word 
 becoming flesh, means that the Word, which is the general 
 form of divine revelation, became in him a human person, i.e., 
 that he is the perfect revelation of God. 
 
 While it follows from this that the doctrine of Christ's work 
 must not be separated from that of his person, Ritschl further 
 rejects the usual dogmatic distinction of his threefold office as 
 prophet, priest, and king. In order to form a single compre- 
 hensive conception of Christ's work, we must regard it from 
 the point of view of his vocation. Now, this vocation was the 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 19 1 
 
 foundation of the kingdom of God, or of the universal ethical 
 association of men as the divine object of the world. But 
 since, as the founder of the kingdom of God in the world, or 
 the representative of God's moral sovereignty over men, he is 
 unique in comparison with all other men who have received 
 from him the same purpose, he is the factor in the world in 
 whose intrinsic purpose God, in a creative way, gives effect 
 to, and manifests his own intrinsic purpose, so that all his 
 actions in fulfilment of his vocation constitute the revelation of 
 God, present and perfect, in him ; or, in other words, he is one 
 in whom the Word of God is a human person. This theory 
 gives the consistent ethical and religious estimate of Christ, 
 and thus the christological problem of theology is solved. It 
 is not the business of theology to inquire how the person of 
 Christ came from God, and came to be that which is the sub- 
 ject of our ethical and religious estimate, especially as the 
 problem lies beyond the possible range of inquiry. The 
 grace and faithfulness of Christ in the fulfilment of his voca- 
 tion, and the elevation of his spiritual aims beyond the limited 
 and natural motives of the world, constitute the elements of 
 his historical appearance which are comprehended in the 
 attribute of his deity. Looked at with reference to man, this 
 patience and faithfulness of Christ is the result of his devotion 
 to his calling of realising the kingdom of God among men 
 as their supermundane destination, supported by his special 
 knowledge of God ; with reference to the divine Being, this 
 human life appears as the completed revelation of God, since 
 the final purpose of the world, to which Christ's life is de- 
 voted, is founded in God's inner purpose, or in his will of love. 
 For the complete definition of Christ's deity the further sup- 
 position is required that his grace and faithfulness and world- 
 subduing patience have produced as their effect the society 
 of the kingdom of God, with analogous attributes. This is 
 evidently equivalent to saying that the "deity " of Christ con- 
 sists in the original exemplification and communication of the 
 same true piety and morality in which consists also the 
 " deity," or better, the fellowship with God, the divine son- 
 ship and divine likeness of Christians. This is the same 
 thought as that found in the whole of Schleiermacher's school, 
 except that the latter usually express it more simply, being less 
 painfully anxious to keep to the ecclesiastical term, to which 
 from this position, really no just claim can be made. 
 
192 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 There can be no such thing as special priestly functions on 
 the part of Christ which are not included in those of his 
 general vocation. If Christ is to be conceived as priest, he 
 is so fundamentally because as the Son of God he stood in 
 the closest communion of purpose with God, and carried this 
 out in every moment of his life, since every act and word in 
 his life's work, until his voluntary and patient suffering of 
 death, sprang from his religious relation to God. The juridical 
 conception of a satisfaction of God's punitive righteousness 
 offends against the design of religion, since law and religion 
 are contradictory standards of action, and the assumption that 
 in God righteousness and grace tend in opposite directions, 
 is irreligious, the unity of the divine will being the inviolable 
 condition of all trust in God. Even if we agree with Ritschl's 
 rejection of the theory of satisfaction, we cannot approve of his 
 unsympathetic judgment of the Pauline and orthodox doctrine 
 of the atonement ; we cannot but see in this an illustration of 
 that Rationalistic dogmatism which is neither able nor willing 
 to appreciate objectively, from a given religious point of view, 
 the historical and psychological conditions of dogmatic con- 
 ceptions, or to admit their relative validity for such a point of 
 view. In respect of this intolerant dogmatism, Ritschl's 
 theology marks a return to the weakest side of that Rational- 
 ism which he has so severely censured. 
 
 Not specially the death of Christ, which is only the com- 
 prehensive term to express his religious union with God, as 
 preserved throughout his life, but his work in his vocation 
 generally, brings about the forgiveness of sins, or justifica- 
 tion, or. atonement. These synonymous conceptions are 
 predicable of the Christian society in the sense that in it 
 there exists a union of men with God, in spite of their sins and 
 of the accentuation of their feeling of guilt. The standard 
 and historical source of this union is Christ's union with God, 
 which he preserved in the faithful execution of his vocation to 
 found the kingdom of God. For the grace and faithfulness 
 of God, which is the ultimate efficient cause of the forgiveness 
 of sin, is made manifest solely by the purpose which controlled 
 all Christ's work of conducting men into such a relation to 
 God as should save them from sin and gather them under the 
 moral rule of God. From this point is first deduced the 
 formula, that God makes the union of the members of 
 Christ's Church with Christ the condition of admitting them 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 193 
 
 to a union with himself. But this proposition (which agrees 
 with Schleiermacher's doctrine of salvation) receives forthwith 
 in Ritschl an important modification. He maintains (though 
 on the basis of very arbitrary exegesis) that it is historically 
 certain that Christ conceived not individuals but the society 
 to be founded by him and represented in the twelve apostles, 
 as the direct object of the forgiveness of sins which he was to 
 grant. Hence he pronounces Schleiermacher's formula wrong, 
 that in Protestantism the relation of the individual to the 
 Church depends on his relation to Christ, while in Catholic- 
 ism the converse holds good ; for in the case of Protestant 
 Christians also the right relation to Christ is conditioned, not 
 only historically (which is self-evident) but ideally, by the 
 fellowship of believers, since no action of Christ upon men is 
 conceivable except in accordance with the antecedent purpose 
 of Christ to found a society. Schleiermacher's formula is only 
 the reflection of the pietistical disintegration of the idea of a 
 church, which dated from the individualistic theory of salvation 
 in the Lutheran theology, but was not in harmony with Luther's 
 own view (according to his Short Catechism). As in the pur- 
 pose of Christ the guarantee of a universal forgiveness of sins 
 and the foundation of his Church were equivalent ideas, so in 
 the result of his work it is the same thing to be certain ot 
 having one's sins forgiven and to belong to Christ's commu- 
 nity. The forgiveness of sins or reconciliation is possessed 
 by the individual only as a member of the religious society ot 
 Christ, in consequence of the immeasurable interaction of his 
 own personal freedom and the determining influence of the 
 society. It is not by an individual imitation of Christ that 
 we become assured of salvation, as pietists and mystics 
 held, including Schleiermacher and his followers, for all 
 imitation of Christ in the proper sense is rendered impos- 
 sible by the difference of the special conditions of his life from 
 those of the members of his Church ; but we are warranted 
 in the assurance of being children of God by belonging 
 to the society founded by Christ. Moreover, love to God 
 and Christ is not an apt description of the religious function 
 of the individual, for we might understand by it " an imagi- 
 nary private relation to God and Christ," bearing the char- 
 acter of indifference to the world or of fleeing from it. In 
 these statements Ritschl's social positivism and his dislike of 
 the mystical element in religion is carried to such extremes 
 G. T. 
 
194 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGV. [Bk. II. 
 
 as plainly to do violence to essential interests of Christian 
 piety. 
 
 The justification possessed by the Christian as a member of 
 Christ's community is attested practically by his freedom or 
 dominion over the world. This is not to be understood in 
 the empirical sense but ideally, though not therefore any the 
 less a reality. It is, in general, in faith in God's providence 
 that the religious dominion over the world is exercised ; for 
 in the view of the world as a unity, under the idea of God as 
 our Father, and in the corresponding estimate of ourselves, all 
 things and events are regarded as means to our good. Under 
 this Christian belief in providence Ritschl appears to include 
 also the hypothesis of " miracles." He puts both in contrast, 
 as the general teleological and the miraculous view of the uni- 
 verse, with the scientific view, and he seeks to deprive the oppo- 
 sition of the latter (which is however not directed against the 
 teleological, but only against the miraculous view) of its force 
 by reference to the incompleteness of our scientific knowledge 
 of the world and to the immediate certainty of the feeling of 
 personal worth expressing itself in the belief in providence. 
 He warmly opposes the view of the theology of the Aufkldr- 
 nng, that the belief in providence is a part of natural religion 
 or of general scientific culture. He holds that, on the con- 
 trary, confident trust in God is exclusively the contribution of 
 the Christian religion, since it rests upon the assurance of 
 Christ's Church of our reconciliation to God ; a statement 
 which, considering the innumerable expressions of trust in 
 God in non-Christian religions, particularly in the Old Testa- 
 ment, requires considerable modification ; it is related to the 
 statement above considered, that God has revealed himself as 
 love only in Christ ; in this case, as in others, a difference of 
 degree is made an exclusive peculiarity, which is simply un- 
 historical dogmatism. There are however several good points 
 in Ritschl's detailed account of the Christian belief in provi- 
 dence : as that it must approve itself in patience and humility 
 amid all the vicissitudes of life, and that it is shown in Chris- 
 tian prayer, which is chiefly thanksgiving or humble recogni- 
 tion of the divine rule. Finally, the moral perfection of the 
 community of the kingdom of God is deduced from its re- 
 ligious view of the world, and it is shown that it manifests itself 
 primarily in the faithfulness of the individual to his calling, 
 since moral action in a calling is the form of each man's total 
 
Ch. IV.]. ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 195 
 
 contribution to the kingdom of God. In this way freedom 
 is realised in law. But freedom is identical in kind with the 
 religious functions of belief in providence, patience, humility, 
 and prayer, in which, in consequence of the Reconciliation, 
 the individual becomes assured of his value as part of a 
 whole in comparison with the world. The two spheres of 
 morals and religion are so connected that neither can exist 
 without the other. In the religious dominion over this world 
 lies the present blessednesss of eternal life. But the moral 
 formation of character also has eternal life for its object, since 
 the certainty to the person of the indestructibility of spiritual 
 existence is always connected with the experience of the 
 value of the ethical and religious character. Thus it is equally 
 important to assert that the eternal life is given by God in 
 the reconciliation through Christ, and that the completion of 
 our salvation is attained by the development of the ethico- 
 religious character and by the perfection in its kind of our life- 
 work in our vocation. In spite of all this the moral and the 
 religious sides of Christianity are not brought into a perfectly 
 harmonious unity by Ritschl, as is seen in the remarkable 
 statement that we must take both points of view alternately 
 (viz. that of moral freedom and that of dependence upon God), 
 an evident admission that the two are mutually exclusive. 
 This is the inevitable consequence of his conception of re- 
 ligion as supplementing our freedom. The external dualism 
 between moral freedom and the religious feeling of depen- 
 dence thus introduced from the first runs like a red thread 
 through the whole of his theology, and is in particular 
 the real cause of his dislike of religious mysticism, in which 
 freedom is felt in experience to be realised not along with but 
 in dependence, the difference of the two being thus brought 
 into a harmonious unity. 
 
 Among the opponents of Ritschl's theology, Lipsius oc- 
 cupies a prominent place, and all the more that, to a certain 
 extent, he shares Ritschl's epistemological principles. He 
 maintains with Kant the limitation of our knowledge to the 
 realm of experience, to our external and internal perceptions 
 and their logical combination so as to form regular relations 
 of natural an,d spiritual existence ; and he denies the possibility 
 of a metaphysical knowledge of the transcendental, which, he 
 holds, inevitably involves contradictions. But while Ritschl's 
 school constructs an insurmountable barrier between our 
 
196 DEVELOr.MENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 theoretical knowledge of the universe and our ethico-religious 
 certainty, Lipsius demands a connected and consistent theory 
 of the universe, which shall comprehend the entire realm of 
 our experience as a whole. He rejects the doctrine of dualism 
 in a truth, one division of which would be confined to "judg- 
 ments of value," and be unconnected with our theoretical 
 knowledge of the external world. The possibility and neces- 
 sity of combining the results of our scientific knowledge with 
 the declarations of our ethico-religious experience, so as to form 
 a consistent philosophy, is based, according to Lipsius, upon 
 the unity of the personal ego, which on the one hand knows 
 the world scientifically, and on the other regards it as the 
 means of realising the ethico-religious object of its life. The 
 former is effected by the study of the causal connection of 
 external and internal events, and the latter by referring them 
 teleologically to the ethical subject and its vocation. Neither 
 of these modes of looking at things can be reduced to the 
 other, neither employed indifferently to supplement the de- 
 ficiencies of the other ; only in their mutual relation do they 
 yield the whole of reality for us. Moreover, they must not 
 be placed externally side by side in such a way that the one 
 would be limited to the life of nature, and the other to that of 
 history, but the sphere of teleology extends likewise into nature, 
 and that of causality into history. Nevertheless, it is the 
 sphere of the historical and ethical life of humanity which first 
 elevates the teleology imperfectly traced in nature to the 
 position of a prime factor in the construction of our philosophy 
 of things. No one can be compelled by the method of scien- 
 tific proof to recognise the teleological unity of the world ; it 
 is the personal feeling of moral obligation which leads to the 
 belief in a moral order of the world superior to the order of 
 nature. But this ethical certainty must not be allowed to make 
 us indifferent to the natural conditions of the moral life, which 
 can only fulfil its vocation by their means. This justifies the 
 rule as to method, as rigidly keeping the causal, or empirical, 
 and the teleological, or ideal, view of the world clearly distinct, as, 
 again, of connecting them as the two sides of the same thing. 
 By the application of this method by Lipsius to dogmatic theo- 
 logy, it assumed in his hands the form of an ethico-religious phi- 
 losophy of life and the world, which as such is throughout teleo- 
 logical, but which must also remain in thorough harmony with 
 the empirical or causal point of \'iew of theoretical science. 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 197 
 
 Lipsius defines religion as the solution of the riddle pre- 
 sented by the contradiction of our empirical determination by 
 nature to our ethical vocation. Religion does not primarily 
 concern society, but the individual, though the individual only 
 in virtue of his necessarily seeking religious fellowship ; it is 
 thus the most individual and at the same time the most uni- 
 versal of man's concerns. Its empirical motive lies in man's 
 instinct of self-preservation, which seeks help from a super- 
 natural power, and for this purpose enters into a personal 
 relation with it, ranging upwards from reverent dread to child- 
 like trust and thankful love. But the ultimate source even of 
 the elementary form of the feeling, as well as of its advance 
 from natural to ethical religion, is the supersensible nature of 
 man, or his " transcendental freedom," which both determines 
 the entire course of his ethical development, and also leads 
 him to enter into religious relations. For this freedom can 
 only be realised in a transcendental dependence upon a free 
 Will, such as contains both the creative source of man's 
 capacity for transcendental freedom and the power to realise 
 it by rising above the determination by nature. Inasmuch 
 as the religious man, by rising to a Will above nature, becomes 
 conscious of the action of this same Will in his own spirit, we 
 have here the root of all belief in revelation. On its meta- 
 physical side, therefore, religion is a real mutual relation 
 between God and man, the home of which is the personal 
 spiritual life of the latter ; revelation and religion are therefore 
 convertible terms. The reality of this mutual relation consists 
 in a personal fellowship of faith, experienced in the intercourse 
 of prayer ; its manner lies beyond the analysis of the under- 
 standing, and constitutes the mystery of religion. As stages 
 of religion, Lipsius distinguishes natural religion, ethical re- 
 ligion in its legal form, and the religion of salvation, in which 
 the divine Will is revealed not merely as an imperious law, 
 but as love delivering from sin and evil. This highest stage 
 is realised in Christianity. 
 
 In Christianity we must distinguish between the character- 
 istic fundamental religious relation and the fundamental his- 
 torical fact ; the former is made actual by the latter, — that is, 
 in the historical person of Christ ; but the value of the latter 
 to us lies in its being the vehicle of that fundamental relation, 
 — that is, the sonship of man to God, which as such involves 
 his participation in the kingdom of God as God's final purpose 
 
198 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 for the world. His sonship to God is subjectively conditioned 
 by penitence and faith, and is objectively based upon God's 
 reconciling and redeeming grace. This is, therefore, the 
 specifically religious good, to the acquirement of which Chris- 
 tianity is the vehicle, and it is primarily the highest good for 
 the individual. The ethical association of men under the idea 
 of the kingdom of God, which is the ethical and social side of 
 Christianity, is subordinate to its religious and individual side. 
 The Christian's religious experience of his sonship to God is 
 the subject-matter of the Christian faith with regard to God, 
 man, and the world ; this contains no theoretical truths as to 
 the objective nature of God and the world, but primarily only 
 descriptions of the experienced relations of God to the religious 
 man and to his world, though including declarations as to the 
 supersensible realities of which faith is assured. This faith, 
 with its declarations, is derived from the teleological contem- 
 plation, peculiar to the Christian, of the divine action in nature 
 and history, and the course of his own life, a way of regarding 
 the divine activity which, though it does not rest on speculative 
 (causal) knowledge, must not be inconsistent with it. Theo- 
 logical doctrines are therefore not mere descriptions of sub- 
 jective devout states of consciousness, nor mere judgments of 
 value, with no corresponding judgments of being ; but they 
 are descriptions of objective relations between God, man, and 
 the world, based upon subjective religious experiences, which are 
 associated with the feeling of their being of the highest value 
 for the subject. 
 
 All the declarations of the Christian faith have their objec- 
 tive foundation in the revelation of God in Christ, of which 
 the New Testament writings are the documentary authorities. 
 Revelation is God's manifestation of himself for man. It takes 
 place by various stages — in the order of nature, in the moral 
 order of the world, and in the order of salvation, which stages 
 must be conceived as included in God's eternal plan of the 
 world. The subject-matter of the highest, or Christian revela- 
 tion, is not the kingdom of God, the announcement of which 
 was not brought by Christ as something new, but it is God's 
 saving and reconciling designs towards man, including the 
 ethical idea of the kingdom of God as the necessary conse- 
 quence of the fellowship of love between God and his children. 
 Nor does the guarantee of the truth of the Christian revelation 
 consist in the individual being a member of the community 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 199 
 
 which possesses reconciliation and redemption, but in his per- 
 sonally appropriating by faith these saving blessings revealed 
 in the Gospel, and thus obtaining the immediate personal ex- 
 perience of his reconciliation to God. This immediate personal 
 certainty of salvation, in virtue of its resting upon the witness 
 of the spirit, is the true centre and heart of Christian piety, its 
 mystery not to be theoretically proved, but practically ex- 
 perienced, like the experience of the moral law, which is 
 equally undemonstrable empirically, and yet is the foundation 
 of the whole moral life. Still, the individual certainty of sal- 
 vation is preserved from the suspicion of being subjective self- 
 deception by its known agreement with the similar experience 
 of the whole Christian society. 
 
 These are the fundamental principles of Lipsius' theology, 
 as expounded in his AbJiandhingen zur Dogmatik, and in his 
 work. Philosophic 7md Religion. From his more special trea- 
 tise {^Lehrbiich dcr cvaiig. prot. Dogmatik, 1876 ; 2nd ed., 1879) 
 we may here notice his treatment of the dogmas ^ of God, 
 Christ, Justification, and the Church. 
 
 The divine Trias of revelation must have its foundation 
 in the divine nature. But our thought has no possible means 
 of arriving at any logically tenable conclusion as to internal 
 distinctions in the transcendental divine nature, much less as 
 to personal distinctions in the Trinity. All such attempts lead 
 to mythological conceptions. Similar difficulties arise from 
 the application of the idea of the Absolute to the Christian 
 idea of God. It is, it is true, an unavoidable necessity of our 
 thought to conceive God as in fact absolute, i.e. as raised 
 above the world of time and space ; only as the absolute cause 
 is he the almighty creator and ruler of his world. But the 
 ethical view of the world demands, again, that we should con- 
 ceive the absolute source of the world as personal, i.e. accord- 
 ing to the analogy of our human consciousness. For the 
 source of the world of nature and of spirit cannot be less than 
 spirit, and real spirit is personal, self-conscious, and self- 
 determining spirit. Nevertheless, it is impossible for our 
 thought to show how personality can be consistent with ab- 
 soluteness. Personality is arrived at via eminentice, absolute- 
 ness via negationis ; but these two methods yield no coherent 
 
 1 I do not give his exposition of these doctrines in the words of the text 
 of the above work, but according to the author's most recent personal explana- 
 tions. 
 
200 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II. 
 
 conception, but a double series of statements, which we cannot 
 see how to bring into unity. A personal consciousness and 
 will, not confined by the limitations of time, is as inconceivable 
 to us as it is impossible for us, on the other hand, to think of 
 the divine knowledge and will as conditioned by time. Space 
 and time are indeed the forms in which God reveals himself, 
 and which are therefore for him no more mere appearance 
 than the variety of his particular acts of will. But our thought 
 cannot reconcile the participation of the divine knowledge 
 and action in the temporal and spatial distinctions of earthly 
 life with the elevation of the divine nature above the world 
 and time. The pretended speculative solutions of this and 
 similar difficulties are only apparent. We can therefore apply 
 the conception of the absolute to God only as a critical canon 
 or rule which serves to prevent us, in our figurative use of 
 human analogies, from making finite our idea of God, by con- 
 tinually reminding us of the purely symbolic validity of these 
 statements about God. The idea of an infinite consciousness 
 and will remains indeed a necessity of our thought, but is only 
 a Grcnzbcoriff^ a conception containing no adequate know- 
 ledge of God's nature and attributes. The religious value of 
 the theological ideas of the divine attributes consists, on the 
 other hand, in their being descriptions, based on religious 
 experience, of the action of the divine Will upon us and our 
 world. The Christian faith regards the existence and course 
 of the world from the teleological point of view as the means 
 of securing the divine purpose of the world — without prejudice 
 to the scientific causal theory of the world. The same course 
 of the world must be placed entirely under the point of view 
 of natural causation, and also entirely under that of a divine 
 purpose, since the divine teleology manifests itself as the power 
 immanent in the course of nature. This distinction between 
 the causal connection of all events and their teleological con- 
 trol by the overruling divine Will justifies also the religious 
 belief in miracles, which as such are never empirically demon- 
 strable, but from the teleological point of view are an actual 
 proof of a special divine intervention. The belief in provi- 
 dence is indeed inseparably connected with every religious 
 theory of the world, and therefore not peculiar to Christianity, 
 but it reaches its perfection only by means of the Christian 
 consciousness of salvation. Not that the Christian was the 
 first to refer every event to the purposes of the divine king- 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 20I 
 
 dom — that was done in the Old Testament — but because he 
 first recognised the infinite value of every human soul as an 
 object of special divine care. 
 
 In the doctrine of the person and work of the Saviour, the 
 empirical must likewise be distinguished from the religious 
 mode of regarding them. The former regards the Saviour 
 as the historical founder of the Christian religion, the personal 
 representative and source of the new religious principle ani- 
 mating the Christian Church. The latter recognises in him 
 the personal revelation of God's will to save the individual 
 and human society. For the former, Jesus Christ is only 
 historically important ; for the latter, he has also a direct 
 religious significance. The object of faith is always primarily 
 the eternal good which God, by Christ, gives to believers as 
 their own. It is not, however, an eternal idea or truth of the 
 reason that is illustrated in the person of Jesus, but God's 
 eternal will of love become in Christ an historical act of love. 
 The revelation of saving and reconciling grace in Christ is 
 not merely a proclamation but a revelation by deed. The 
 reconciliation is not simply the liberation of the human 
 spirit from its mistrust of God, arising from its ignorance, but 
 primarily the reconciliation of God to man, an actual new 
 relation entered into by God with mankind, and revealed by 
 him in the consciousness of believers. This new relation is 
 eternally based upon God's plan of salvation, the goal to 
 which the divine governance of human history has always 
 been directed ; but it was only historically realised when the 
 historical conditions were given. These were on the one hand 
 the actual realisation of a perfect life of harmony with God 
 (perfect righteousness), and on the other, humble submission 
 to the connection between sin and misery established by God 
 for the common life of the human race, and the consequent 
 recognition of the divine sentence upon sin (perfect satis- 
 faction). The Christian faith affirms both to have been 
 vicariously accomplished in Christ's sufferings and death, not 
 in the sense of legal substitution, but in the sense of action 
 and passion on the part of the new humanity in its personal 
 head. As the head of the new humanity, Christ is its repre- 
 sentative with God ; mankind is reconciled to him in so far 
 as it enters by means of faith into communion with Christ. 
 On the other hand, Christ, in virtue of the reconciliation of 
 God and man being actually accomplished in him, is the repre- 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOeV. [Bk. II. 
 
 sentative of God in relation to men, the bearer of the divine 
 revelation to them, proclaiming as a fact the reconciliation 
 actually accomplished by him. This position of Christ as 
 mediator between God and man is described in ecclesiastical 
 tradition by metaphysical statements about the union of the 
 divine and human natures in Christ's person, and about a 
 transcendental work of reconciliation accomplished by Christ 
 in relation to God, by which God himself was delivered from 
 a conflict between his mercy and justice. In both points these 
 theories transgress the limits imposed upon human know- 
 ledge ; and it is of minor importance that the philosophical 
 means used to establish these theologoumena were borrowed 
 partly from Platonic eclectic speculations, partly from the legal 
 conceptions of the middle ages. These theologoumena must 
 be employed in theology simply as figurative expressions, and 
 any higher claim necessarily turns them into mythology. The 
 Christian faith is content to speak of God being in a unique 
 manner in Christ, in the sense that in his personal con- 
 sciousness and life-work was actually accomplished the revela- 
 tion of the love of God as seeking the salvation of mankind. 
 Historically considered, Christ's life-work must be regarded 
 from the ethical point of view of his personal vocation to 
 found the society in which is realised the kingdom of God, by 
 life in harmony with God gradually overcoming the power of 
 sin. Reconciliation thus appears as the consequence of 
 salvation. But the Christian faith is not content with this. 
 That the founder of the society is its pattern has not been 
 historically demonstrated, the " sinlessness " of Christ remains 
 from this position a mere possibility. On the other hand, 
 from the teleological point of view it is simply included in the 
 statement of the belief that Christ is the personal revelation 
 of the divine love. For God can be perfectly revealed only 
 in a man religiously and ethically perfect, and one, therefore, 
 altogether fitted to be the pure organ of his revelation. This 
 holiness of Christ is the specifically religious miracle. God 
 reconciles the world to himself by creating in Christ a new- 
 man, in whom mankind appears in the perfection desired by 
 God, and therefore as reconciled to God. This reconciliation 
 invoh'es salvation, viz. the foundation of a new moral and 
 religious life of humanity, in which the power of sin and the 
 world is gradually vanquished. 
 
 The appropriation of salvation is accomplished from the 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC ^lEDIATIXG THEOLOGIANS. 2O3 
 
 empirical point of view as a psychological ethical process, 
 the chief elements in which are penitence and faith. The 
 religious and teleological description of this process is that it 
 is the self-attestation of the divine spirit in the human spirit, 
 which the latter experiences as the communication of divine 
 comfort and strength. As distinguished from the idea of the 
 kingdom in the Old Testament, the society of Christ's king- 
 dom is based upon the believer's personal sonship to God ; to 
 make his personal state of grace sure is the first concern of 
 each individual believer, membership in the kingdom of God 
 being involved in this. In the state of grace justification 
 denotes the religious side, the appropriation of reconciliation ; 
 regeneration the ethical side, the appropriation of salvation. 
 Justification, regarded as a divine act, is the declaration of the 
 will of God that the penitent and believing sinner shall not 
 be excluded from communion with him ; but this act of 
 justification is identical with the consciousness of justification 
 in the soul of the believer ; these are the two inseparable sides 
 of the same process, which consists in the acceptance of the 
 Gospel message of grace. Regeneration, as the fundamental 
 ethical renewal of the man, is — logically, though not tem- 
 porally — the consequence of his justification. From the 
 psychological point of view, a change of mind must have 
 begun before the faith to appropriate justification could exist ; 
 nevertheless we are right in teleologically regarding regener- 
 ation as the fruit of justification, viz. as the inward working 
 of the same spirit of God that had before assured man of his 
 sonship to God ; for only from this assurance can spring the 
 power of joyful fulfilment of the divine will and the religious 
 freedom of elevation above the world. The witness of the 
 Holy Spirit, and being led by the Holy Spirit, are connected 
 as cause and effect. The fellowship of the believer with 
 God, viewed empirically, is simply a harmony of will, but 
 teleologically considered, it is the actual indwelling of the 
 divine spirit in man, unio mystica. 
 
 With regard to the Church also we must distinguish 
 between the empirical or historical conception of it, as the 
 society of those confessing the Christian faith, organised in 
 external forms, and the religious and teleological idea of the 
 communion of saints, which is an object of faith. The identi- 
 fication of the former with the latter is the fundamental error 
 of Roman Catholicism. The Church can never be called a 
 
204 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IL 
 
 divine institution in any other sense than that of being a 
 community in which the Spirit of God, by means of the word, 
 produces and fosters the Christian hfe of salvation. As the 
 educator of individuals into the Christian faith, she is the 
 mother of believers. Only those who, under her educating 
 influence, have attained to a life of personal communion with 
 Christ and God, are living members of the community ot 
 believers ; thus (Ritschl notwithstanding) Schleiermacher's 
 statement holds good, that according to the Protestant faith, 
 communion with the Church is conditioned by that with 
 Christ, and not vice versa. In the ministration of the word 
 and sacraments we have from the empirical point of view, 
 ecclesiastical functions which are signs and symbols of the 
 faith animating the Church. From a religious or teleological 
 point of view, they are signs and pledges of divine grace, by- 
 means of which the Holy Spirit produces faith, and com- 
 municates the blessings which the signs signify. The kingdom 
 of God is primarily a divine gift, and only secondarily a 
 human vocation ; it is, therefore, not an empirical but a religious 
 conception. The peculiar blessing possessed by the members 
 of the kingdom is sonship to God, attained by justification 
 and regeneration ; the personal certainty of this brings with it 
 participation in the kingdom of God, but membership in the 
 Church is not identical with membership in the kingdom of 
 God. In actual history, the kingdom of God appears in the 
 advancing moral organisation of the whole of human life 
 under the guiding principle of love to God and the brethren. 
 Beyond the historical and always relative realisation of the 
 kingdom of God, faith pictures the ideal of its eternal con- 
 summation, both for the individual and for the race. As to 
 how this is to be, we can have no conception, and therefore 
 no possible knowledge. Individual immortality can be scien- 
 tifically neither proved nor refuted. But viewed teleologically 
 the belief in immortality has its roots in the same self- 
 assertion of the ego in opposition to the forces of external 
 nature as gives birth to both the moral and the religious 
 theory of the universe. 
 
 The similarity of Lipsius's theology with that of De 
 Wette is obvious ; Lipsius, thanks to a profounder analysis 
 of the religious spirit, presents, however, a more subtle and 
 satisfactory method of harmonising the two distinct methods 
 of looking at the phenomena than did his predecessor. The 
 
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 205 
 
 reconciliation of our present knowledge of nature and history 
 with the religious faith handed down in the Church, and 
 imparted to us in our education, will remain in the future the 
 perpetual problem of theology. It is evident that its for- 
 mulae, from the very fact of their having this practical object, 
 cannot claim to be scientific propositions, valid universally 
 and for all time. A sound tact, giving prominence to what is 
 for us religiously essential, and putting into the background 
 what is antiquated, will, perhaps, prove better able to solve 
 the problem than a rigorously systematic method. In this 
 respect, we must finally mention Hase's Evangelisch-protes- 
 tantische Doginatik, the six editions of which are sufficient 
 proof of its usefulness. Its value lies partly in the full 
 and judiciously chosen historical materials prefixed to each 
 dogma, and partly in the skill, caution, and tact, with which 
 the permanent religious significance of various dogmas is 
 discussed. This allows, it is true, large latitude to the 
 personal taste of the author, with his high religious and 
 scientific culture. But where was this otherwise with a 
 theological manual, which was not intended to be a mere 
 book of the symbols of the Church ? The proper and strictly 
 scientific work of modern theology does not and cannot lie 
 in the field of dogmatic theology, but in that of historical 
 research. 
 
BOOK III. 
 
 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 
 
 The year 1835 marked an era in our scientific knowledge of 
 the Biblical foundations of Christianity. In it appeared David 
 Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, Christian Ferdinand Baur's 
 work on the Pastoral Epistles, and Wilhelm Vatke's history 
 of the religion of the Old Testament, three works containing 
 the germs of the researches of our own day into the Old and 
 New Testament writings. These works did not of course 
 come down from heaven, but were to a certain extent the 
 result of the labours of older critics. Still, the difference 
 between them and earlier works is so fundamental, the new 
 element in them is so predominant and of such moment, that 
 we are justified in dating from them the special character ot 
 the Biblical criticism of to-day. We shall first take a brief 
 glance at the state of New Testament criticism in the first 
 three decades of this century. 
 
 The principle enunciated by Semler, Lessing, and Herder, 
 that the books of the Bible must be read and criticised as 
 human productions, was systematically applied by Eichhorn. 
 He saw that the New Testament epistles were not all written 
 by the apostles whose names they bear, that 2 Peter and Jude 
 are not genuine, and that the Epistles to Timothy and Titus 
 do not come direct from Paul. Of special importance was his 
 hypothesis as to the synoptic Gospels. The problem as to 
 how their frequent verbal agreement in conjunction with their 
 discrepancies can be explained, he believed himself able to 
 solve by the hypothesis of a primary Aramaic Gospel, of 
 which various translations and editions were at first current, 
 and from which at a later time sprang our canonical Gospels. 
 Instead of this primitive written Gospel, Gieseler regarded 
 oral tradition as the common source, an hypothesis which 
 explained the differences between the Gospels more easily but 
 made their agreement in details more difficult. Schleiermacher 
 combined both hypotheses, by assuming along with the oral 
 
 G.T. ^°" p 
 
2IO lilBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 tradition a number of small written accounts {'' Dicgeseis"), by 
 the collection and combination of which our synoptic Gospels 
 were formed. The Gospel of Matthew even does not, in his 
 view, come directly from the Apostle Matthew as its author, 
 but is only based upon a collection of speeches made by him 
 (the Xo'yia of Papias). The Gospel according to Mark is 
 derived from Matthew's and Luke's Gospels, both of them 
 being used alternately. The Johannine Gospel only is the 
 authentic production of one author, and was composed by 
 John the apostle and eye-witness ; and as the earliest 
 authority for the life of Jesus it is always to be preferred to 
 the synoptists. The authority of the great theologian Schleier- 
 macher secured for this theory for a long time wide acceptance. 
 It must however be remarked, that of all conceivable com- 
 binations it is the most erroneous, and is a complete subversion 
 of the real state of the case, since Mark's Gospel is not the 
 latest but the earliest, and John's Gospel not the earliest but 
 the latest, and throughout dependent on Mark and Luke. 
 Historical instinct was not Schleiermacher's strong point, and 
 his preference for the Fourth Gospel did not rest upon historical 
 grounds but upon his theological postulates and his sympathy, 
 as one of the Romanticists, with the Johannine idea of Christ. 
 Schleiermacher ought to have learnt better from Herder, who, 
 though he regarded the Fourth Gospel as apostolic, still 
 possessed enough historical insight to see in it "the echo of 
 the earlier Gospels in a higher key," while he regarded Mark's 
 Gospel and that of the Hebrews as the earliest, from which 
 was derived first Luke's and then Matthew's Gospel (after 
 the destruction of Jerusalem), and finally, a generation later, 
 the Gospel of John. Herder was, in my opinion, perfectly 
 right in this determination of the order (though not of the 
 date) of the Gospels ; that his view was ignored by theo- 
 logians was a great hindrance to the clearing up of this im- 
 portant problem ; on this, as perhaps on other points, that 
 Herder was eclipsed by the overwhelming authority of 
 Schleiermacher had injurious effects upon the healthy de- 
 velopment of German theology. So too Schleiermacher's 
 denial of the genuineness of the first Epistle to Timothy, 
 while he accepted the second and the Epistle to Titus as 
 genuine, must be considered a very doubtful service to science, 
 when we remember that Eichhorn, and still more De Wette, 
 had a truer perception of the un- Pauline character common 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 I I 
 
 to the three plainly connected epistles. De Wette was, after 
 Semler and Herder, the most important Protestant Biblical 
 critic before 1835. He was the only critic quite free from 
 dogmatic prejudices, and unequalled for profound learning, 
 keen insight, and fine linguistic perception. Yet neither was 
 he able to arrive at satisfactory and thoroughly consistent 
 results. His critical method was too purely subjective and 
 formal, founded upon matters of taste and individual con- 
 siderations such as might be met by others of pretty much 
 the same weight ; he paid no proper regard to the general 
 character of a book and its place in the history of the early 
 development of Christian doctrines. Hence he generally 
 remained in doubt, unable to arrive at any final result ; this was 
 the case with the problem of the Gospels. Ephesians and the 
 Pastoral Episdes he considered as certainly not genuine, as 
 also the Apocalypse and 2 Peter ; but what was the advantage 
 of knowing that these works do not come from the authors 
 whose names they traditionally bear, if nothing positive was 
 ascertained as to their date, or character, or the ecclesiastical 
 circle to which they belonged, or the purpose they were 
 intended to perform for their time and surroundings ? In 
 fact this critical method, which was employed by De Wette 
 in its best form, was purely negative, and was therefore 
 only preliminary to the main aim, — a positive insight into the 
 historical origin of the various New Testament writings and 
 their importance in the history of primitive Christianity. 
 This was accomplished by the critical labours of Baur 
 and the investigators directly or indirectly stimulated by 
 him. 
 
 Along with the investigation of the origin of the New 
 Testament writings, a critique of the Gospel narratives was 
 carried on by Rationalistic theologians. But neither was this 
 more satisfactory in its method or its results. Dr. Paulus, the 
 best known representative of the Rationalistic interpretation 
 of the Gospel narratives, started from the principle that in the 
 Gospels we must look for nothing but actual facts, not for 
 poetry or legends, and that these facts were natural and not 
 supernatural events, and that they had acquired the appear- 
 ance of supernatural occurrences, or miracles, pardy through 
 the errors of commentators, pardy through the erroneous 
 apprehension and judgment of the narrators. The task of 
 the scientific commentator is to get rid of this false appearance 
 
212 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 and to see in the stories of the evangelists simple events with 
 natural causes. The execution of this task by Dr. Paulus 
 himself was such that we do not know whether to wonder 
 most at his learning and ingenuity or his ineptitude and want 
 of taste. He turns the finest of the Gospel narratives, the 
 blossoms of the noblest religious poetry, by his "natural" 
 interpretation, into the most trivial, commonplace incidents, 
 without any deeper meaning or religious significance. Indeed, 
 in not a few places he is even guilty of an absolute meanness 
 in his interpretations, almost on a par with the notorious 
 theories of a "priestly fraud." Thus the narrative of the 
 supernatural birth of Jesus is reduced to a deception cun- 
 ningly practised upon the Virgin Mary. The occurrence at 
 Christ's baptism was that the clouds just then accidentally 
 opened and a flying dove appeared in the blue sky. The 
 devil that tempted him in the wilderness was an agent pro- 
 vocaiciir sent out by the Pharisees. The plan of Jesus was 
 essentially the political one of restoring the temporal splendour 
 of the Israelitish theocracy and placing himself as the Messiah- 
 king at its head ; it was not till after the failure of this attempt 
 that he confined himself to an ethical kingdom of God. His 
 miracles of healing were successful cures, the medical means 
 applied being generally ignored by the narrators. The in- 
 stances of restoration to life were only from apparent death. 
 The walking of Jesus on the sea was his walking by the sea 
 on the shore. The miraculous draught of fishes was the 
 result of the good advice given by Jesus to the dispirited 
 fishermen. The multiplication of loaves at the feeding of the 
 multitude in the wilderness was the effect of the good example 
 of Jesus in giving away his store of food, which was followed 
 by the rest of those present who had any. The change of the 
 water into wine at Cana was a marriage jest, Jesus giving the 
 present of wine he had brought for the married pair in this 
 humorous way. The resurrection of Jesus himself was an 
 awakening from an apparent death by tetanus ; his ascension, 
 his retirement in his subsequent illness into the summit of 
 the mountains, the mist serving to take him from the sight 
 of those beholding his departure. 
 
 That this interpretation of the Gospels, which everywhere 
 retains the husk and surrenders the religious kernel, was 
 countenanced even by orthodox theologians in many instances, 
 and accepted, at any rate partially, by Schleiermacher too in 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 213 
 
 his lectures on the " Life of Jesus," can only be accounted for 
 by remembering the difficult position of the theologians of 
 that time, whose general culture made a naive belief in the 
 reality of actual miracles impossible, while their historical 
 criticism was still fettered by the supposition that at least one 
 or the other of the Gospels came direct from an eye-witness 
 and had therefore to claim an historical character for all its 
 narratives. The rescue of theology out of this blind alley by 
 a thorough and consistent, instead of a halting criticism, getting 
 rid of the fettering suppositions and clearing the way for a 
 .scientific study of the origins of Christianity, was the work of 
 Strauss. 
 
 In the preface to his Leben Jesu, Strauss places his own 
 position as the "mythical" in contrast with the positions of 
 orthodoxy and Rationalism in the following terms : " Orthodox 
 exegesis started with the twofold assumption that the Gospels 
 contained firstly history, and secondly supernatural history ; 
 then Rationalism rejected the second of these assumptions, 
 only to cling more firmly to the first — that these books had in 
 them pure, though natural, history. Science cannot stop thus 
 half-way, but the first assumption also must be dropped, and 
 the question examined whether and how far we stand in the 
 Gospels upon historical ground." The mythical theory, he 
 continues, had already been variously applied to the gospel 
 history, but neither in its pure form nor to its full extent ; too 
 much history was always expected in details, in spite of the 
 acknowledged mythical character of the Gospels in general. 
 Moreover, the application of this theory had always been too 
 limited ; mythical elements were, indeed, admitted in the 
 narratives of the childhood of Jesus, and again at the close of 
 his life, but not in the intermediate narrative, the history 
 of his public ministry. This limitation is untenable ; it is not 
 permissible to enter the evangelical history by the splendid 
 portal of myth and leave it by a similar one, and for what lies 
 between rest satisfied with the crooked and weary paths of a 
 natural explanation. " The author's method is to apply the 
 principle of myth to the whole extent of the story of the life 
 of Jesus, to find mythical narratives, or at least embellishments, 
 scattered throughout all its parts." 
 
 In justification of this method, Strauss appeals to the similar 
 allegorical interpretation in the ancient Church, e.g. in Origen. 
 While the method of natural explanation of the Rationalists 
 
2 14 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 and Naturalists sacrificed the divine content of the sacred 
 story and clung to its empty historical form, the mythical, like 
 the allegorical, method prefers, on the contrary, to sacrifice the 
 historical reality of the narrative and keep its absolute (eternal 
 and spiritual) truth. If Supernaturalists cannot make up their 
 minds to this, they only prove that, like children, they much pre- 
 fer the painted historical shell, even if emptied of all divine con- 
 tents, to the richest content when divested of its coloured cover- 
 ing. He then goes on to defend this method against objections 
 which were partly due to misconception of the nature of myth, 
 as if it were an artificial product of intentional invention, 
 and partly based on the supposed incredibility of unhistorical 
 legends becoming incorporated in Gospels composed so early 
 and in part by eye-witnesses. This objection would, Strauss 
 says, be a serious one if the assumption as to the Gospels were 
 correct. But the assumption rests neither on internal nor on 
 external grounds, since neither in the case of the first nor of 
 the fourth Gospel do we possess testimony early enough to 
 assure us of their authorship by the apostles Matthew and 
 John. In the absence of such testimony we are at liberty to 
 assume an Interval of at least thirty years between the death 
 of Jesus and the origin of our Gospels ; and that this interval 
 is sufficient to explain the rise of myths is placed beyond all 
 doubt by the actual analogy of profane history {e.g. Herodo- 
 tus). If any one still insists that an historical period like that 
 in which the public life of Jesus was passed renders the forma- 
 tion of myths concerning it impossible, the reply is, that a 
 great personality, especially if connected with a revolution pro- 
 foundly affecting the life of man, soon becomes the centre of 
 an unhistoric halo of mythical glorification, even in the most 
 matter-of-fact period of history. " Conceive a recently estab- 
 lished community, revering its founder with all the more 
 enthusiasm on account of his unexpected and tragic removal 
 from his work ; a community impregnated with a mass of new 
 ideas which were destined to transform the world ; a com- 
 munity of orientals, chiefly unlearned people, who therefore 
 could not appropriate and express those ideas in the abstract 
 conceptual forms of the understanding, but only as symbols 
 and stories in the concrete fashion of the imagination. When 
 all this is remembered, one can perceive that under these cir- 
 cumstances there must necessarily have arisen what actually 
 did arise, viz. a series of sacred narratives fitted to bring vividly 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 I 5 
 
 before the mind the whole mass of new ideas, started by Jesus, 
 and of old ones, applied to him, cast in the form of particular 
 incidents in his life. The simple historical structure of the 
 life of Jesus was hung with the most varied and suggestive 
 tapestry of devout reflections and fancies, all the ideas enter- 
 tained by primitive Christianity relative to its lost Master 
 being transformed into facts and woven into the course of his 
 life. The most abundant material for this mythical ornamen- 
 tation was furnished by the Old Testament, in which the first 
 Christian community, composed chiefly of Jewish converts, 
 lived and breathed. Jesus, as the greatest prophet, must have 
 gathered up and surpassed in his life and deeds everything 
 that the ancient prophets had done and experienced ; he, as 
 the restorer of the Hebrew religion, could not be in anything 
 inferior to the first law-giver ; in him, finally, as the Messiah, 
 must have been fulfilled all the Messianic prophecies of the 
 Old Testament ; he had inevitably to meet the ideal of the 
 Messiah as already conceived by the Jews, so far as the de- 
 partures from this ideal which were made in known historical 
 actions and speeches allowed. It ought in our time to be 
 unnecessary to remark that this transference of what was ex- 
 pected into the history of what actually took place, and in 
 general the mythical embellishment of the life of Jesus, was 
 not the work of premeditated deceit and cunning invention. 
 The legends of a people or of a religious sect are in their 
 genuine elements never the work of a single person, but of the 
 generalised individual of the community, and hence are never 
 consciously or intentionally produced. The imperceptible 
 growth of a joint creative work of this kind is made possible 
 by oral tradition being the medium of communication." 
 
 I have given Strauss's description and defence of his method 
 in his own words, in order at the same time to give a speci- 
 men of the lucidity and beauty of his style and exposition. 
 This mastery of form has no doubt contributed much to the 
 profound and far-reaching effect of the book ; this was, how- 
 ever, much more due to the inexorable logic with which the 
 critic worked out his task in all parts of the gospel history. 
 " In this book all previous critical researches into the life of 
 Jesus meet ; but they are at the same time completed, more 
 exact, more pointed, and reduced to one fundamental prin- 
 ciple. This Iron necessity of the method, carried through like 
 a process of nature, this cold, passionless objectivity, in which 
 
2 [6 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 the author is sunk in his work and is only the calculator setting 
 down and summing up the various accounts before him, was 
 what made the book so impressive, or perhaps rather so 
 terrible. It had about it the cold indifference of fate ; in the 
 criticism of the gospel history the balance had been struck, 
 and the verdict was bankruptcy. The gospel history had 
 from all sides already felt the teeth of criticism ; it was here 
 shown that its very heart had been reached. The effect of 
 this work was immense." ^ 
 
 Such an effect Strauss himself had not anticipated. The 
 panic of the theological and lay world, which saw in Strauss's 
 criticism nothing less than the destruction of the Christian 
 faith, was all the more surprising to him as he had not in- 
 tended anything of the kind. According to his assurance 
 in the preface, which deserves full credit, his conviction had 
 rather been that the inner kernel of the Christian faith was 
 quite independent of his critical investigations. " Christ's 
 supernatural birth, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, 
 remain eternal truths, however much their reality as historic 
 facts may be called in question. This certainty alone can lend 
 to our criticism calmness and dignity, and distinguish it from 
 the naturalistic criticism of former centuries, which thought to 
 overturn the religious truth with the historic fact, and had 
 therefore inevitably a frivolous character. The dogmatic 
 content of the life of Jesus will be shown to be untouched in 
 an appendix to this work. In the meantime, may the calm- 
 ness and coolness with which in the course of it criticism 
 undertakes apparently dangerous operations, be attributed 
 solely to the assured conviction that none of these things 
 harm the Christian faith." 
 
 The appendix to the second volume, thus announced, under- 
 took the dogmatic restoration of what criticism had destroyed. 
 Unlike the naturalist and freethinker of earlier times, the critic 
 of the nineteenth century should be filled with reverence for 
 every religion, and should in particular be conscious of the 
 identity of the highest religion, the Christian, with philosophi- 
 cal truth. There then follows a critical sketch of the historical 
 development of Christological dogma, the truth contained in 
 which is finally given in the following speculative form : — 
 "When mankind is once sufficiently developed to have as its 
 
 1 Schwarz, Ziir Gesdi. d. neuestcn ThcoL, p. 97, sq. 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 1 7 
 
 religion the truth that God is man and man of divine race, this 
 truth, since religion is the form assumed by truth for the 
 ordinary mind, must be shown in a manner comprehensible by 
 all as a sensible certainty, i.e. a human individual must arise 
 who is regarded as the present God. Inasmuch as this God- 
 man unites in himself the heavenly divine nature and the 
 earthly human ego, he can be said to have the divine spirit as 
 his father and a human mother ; inasmuch as his ego reflects 
 itself not in itself, but in the absolute substance, seeks to be 
 nothing for itself, but to exist for God alone, he is the sinless 
 and perfect one ; as a man of divine nature he is the power 
 over nature and the performer of miracles ; but as God 
 in human form, he is dependent upon nature, subject to its 
 wants and pains, is in the condition of humiliation. Will he 
 have to pay nature the last tribute also .'' Does not the fact 
 that human nature is subject to death falsify the belief that it 
 is one with the divine ? No ; the God-man dies, showing that 
 God has not shrunk from becoming man fully ; that he does 
 not disdain to descend to the lowest depths of the finite, since 
 he can find the way back to himself even thence, and in the 
 most complete self-abnegation can yet remain identical with 
 himself More precisely, since the God-man as man's spirit 
 reflected in its infinitude, stands in contrast to man as cling- 
 ing to his finiteness, this involves an opposition and conflict, 
 and the death of the God-man is necessarily made a violent 
 one at the hands of sinners, physical suffering being thus sup 
 plemented by the moral pain of insult and accusation of guilt. 
 If God thus finds the way from heaven to the tomb, there 
 must also be a way to be found for man from the tomb to 
 heaven ; the death of the Prince of Life is the life of mortal 
 man. By his very appearance in the world as God-man, God 
 showed himself reconciled to the world ; or more exactly, by 
 laying aside in death his subjection to nature, he showed the 
 way by which he eternally accomplishes the reconciliation, 
 viz. by emptying himself and voluntarily assuming subjection 
 to nature, and then annulling it to remain identical with him- 
 self Since the death of the God-man only puts an end to his 
 self-abnegation and humiliation, it is really his elevation and 
 return to God ; thus in the nature of things death is followed 
 by resurrection and ascension." 
 
 We can well understand that Strauss, as the disciple of 
 Hegel, could honestly believe that by this allegorical interpre- 
 
2l8 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 tatlon of Christ's appearance as a figure of humanity and its 
 metaphysical relation to the Absolute, he had restored " dog- 
 matically what he had destroyed critically," but we can under- 
 stand equally well the energetic protest of the Christian world 
 against such a compensation for its loss. Strauss had in fact 
 deluded himself and his case had in it a tragic element, in that 
 he shared this delusion with the chief philosophy of his time, 
 and cannot therefore be made personally responsible for it, 
 while its disastrous consequences were borne by him person- 
 ally more than by any other man. It was the fundamental error 
 of the Hegelian philosophy to suppose that the truth of re- 
 ligion consists in the logical consciousness of metaphysical 
 relations, thus totally overlooking its actual nature, consisting, 
 as it does, in emotional and volitional processes ; and this 
 error led Strauss to think he had found the essence of faith in 
 Christ in metaphysical statements about the human race, which 
 really did not so much as touch the sphere of religious faith, 
 much less exhaust its highest truth. Strauss's mistake did not 
 therefore lie in regarding the gospel stories of miracles as 
 symbols of ideal truths — that they are really this could be 
 easily proved from the New Testament itself ; but his mistake 
 lay in looking for these truths outside religion, instead of 
 within it, in metaphysical categories of doubtful value for 
 knowledge, instead of in the facts of the devout heart and 
 moral will, in which the saving and gladdening effects of our 
 religion are found. If he had paid more regard to these 
 religious and moral truths, the "deliverances of the devout 
 consciousness," as Schleiermacher called them, this would of 
 itself have led him to see further, that the historical Jesus was 
 not merely an accidentally chosen type and example of these 
 truths, but their original creative type and their historic source. 
 If the historical Jesus had been thus brought into an inner and 
 essential relation to the religious and moral idea of Chris- 
 tianity, as its pioneer and prophet, justice would have been 
 done to his religious importance, which is quite lost sight of in 
 Strauss's allegorising, since there is no sort of inner connec- 
 tion between the philosophical ideas in which he looked for the 
 essence of the belief in Christ and the person of Jesus himself. 
 However, if Strauss, after the critical disintegration of the 
 legends of miracles, had given us a positive picture of the 
 ideal life of Jesus as a religious and ethical character, and had 
 offered this to Christendom as the permanent kernel in place 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 219 
 
 of the husks which criticism had destroyed, his scientific work 
 would of course still have been attacked, but not with that 
 passionate bitterness which proved so disastrous not only 
 to Strauss's outward life, but also to his inner development, 
 alienating for ever from Church and theology a man of great 
 talent and a courageous spirit of inquiry. We of to-day, 
 separated by half a century from those years of the Straussian 
 movement, can only look back upon it with unfeigned regret 
 at the tragic fate dooming such a powerful and noble mind to 
 failure, partly because the time was not ripe properly to receive 
 what was true and valid in Strauss's critical labours, partly also 
 because he was himself still fettered by the false, and in this 
 case fatally mistaken, assumptions of the philosophical intel- 
 lectualism of the time. 
 
 Of the mass of polemical literature evoked by Strauss's 
 work, only three books are important for our purpose : 
 Neander's Leben Jesu (1837), Ullmann's Historisch oder 
 niythisch ? and Weisse's Die evangelische Geschichte, kritisch 
 7md philosopkisch bearbeitet (1838). The first two of 
 the writers just mentioned belonged to the mediating school of 
 Schlelermacher, which, with all its supernaturallstic leanings, 
 made too many concessions to criticism to be able to condemn 
 Strauss's line of procedure unconditionally. Strauss offered 
 as a motto, aptly descriptive of Neander's book, the words, 
 " Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief" Neander, unable 
 wholly to accept or to dispense with miracles, takes refuge 
 in an emasculated conception of miracle ; a miracle he holds 
 to be not anti-natural but supernatural, as resting on higher 
 laws, at present unknown, the sign of a higher order of 
 creative forces acting in our nature, which the ordinary 
 order of nature has by the divine wisdom been eternally pre- 
 destined to receive. We must also assume various degrees 
 of the supernatural, a less degree in miracles of healing than 
 in some other kinds. Yet even these latter are a little 
 softened down. The water at Cana was not changed into 
 actual wine, but properties merely like those of wine were 
 imparted to It, In the same way as mineral waters have them. 
 In the cases of raising the dead there is always (even John 
 xi.) the possibility of only an apparent death. The miraculous 
 star of the Magi Is explained as a natural conjunction of 
 planets, which only gave occasion for the journey, but did 
 not show the way. The phenomenon at the baptism of Jesus 
 
220 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 is represented as a vision, the story of the temptation as an 
 allegory. In this way the most striking miracles were either 
 partially or entirely got rid of, though others were still 
 retained, in particular the resurrection of Christ himself Such 
 an illogical method of procedure was evidently no refutation 
 of Strauss's criticism ; the book was important only as showing 
 how impossible a naive belief in the gospel narratives had 
 become for a theologian affected by the thought of the time, 
 and how important it had therefore become for theological 
 science to take up a fresh position with regard to these 
 records. 
 
 Ulljiann penetrated more deeply than Neander into the 
 heart of the question. He admits that in the Gospels legends 
 of an essentially symbolic character do occur, but it does not 
 follow from this that everything is mythical ; it is precisely 
 the problem to determine exactly the boundaries of the his- 
 torical and the mythical. Ullmann holds — and without doubt 
 rightly — that Strauss's work failed chiefly in not doing this, 
 but in confining itself to the mere negation of the traditions. 
 Strauss's net result, as Ullmann acutely remarks, amounts to 
 this, that the Church invented Christ ; but this makes the 
 history of Christianity incomprehensible. We ought rather 
 to infer from this actual fact, which has changed the course of 
 the world, that there was a corresponding cause, which can 
 only be found in the personality of Christ, the Founder of the 
 Church. Strauss, Ullmann argues, had underrated or ignored 
 this personality, because his own philosophical assumptions 
 involved the antecedent conviction that the idea does not 
 fully manifest itself in a single individual, but is only un- 
 folded in the race as a whole. In reply to this assumption, 
 it must be urged, that as an historical fact geniuses do appear 
 from time to time in all departments of mental life, in whom 
 ideas are embodied typically and perfectly, the idea of art, 
 for example, in some of its forms. In a Homer, Sophocles, 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Raphael, Handel, etc., the idea of their 
 respective arts is fully given in a single example, and a 
 supreme standard is set up for all who come after to aim at. 
 Much more must this be possible in the sphere of religion. 
 Though revelation may be common to all nations and times, 
 it necessarily tends to concentrate itself at one supreme point 
 of the religious development of mankind, and this point is 
 the ideal, sinless Christ. 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 22 1 
 
 Amongst all the books written against him, Strauss treated 
 that of Ullmann with the most respect, making, in fact, some 
 not inconsiderable concessions to it. To the dilemma pro- 
 pounded by Ullmann, whether Christ created the Church or 
 the Church invented Christ, Strauss replied, not without 
 reason, that the alternatives are not mutually exclusive ; even 
 if the Church had been created by the power of the person- 
 ality of Jesus, it might still, in return, have transformed and 
 adorned the idea of Christ by the aid of its mythical concep- 
 tions and hopes. Nevertheless, in his book, published shortly 
 afterwards, Vergdngliches und Bleibendes. Zwei friedliche 
 Blatter (1838-39), Strauss allowed the justice of Ullmann's 
 objection so far as to admit that man's religious life is 
 related to the rest of his life as the centre of a circle to its 
 circumference, and that in religion Christ was supreme, and 
 was so far above other founders of religions as to be un- 
 surpassable for all time. For it was in him that the unity 
 of the divine and human first became a matter of conscious- 
 ness, and this with such creative power as to supply the need 
 of all who came after him. He therefore now, with Ullmann, 
 recognised Christ as a religious genius historically unique, 
 only he refused to follow Ullmann and Schleiermacher in con- 
 verting this uniqueness of genius into absolute perfection, 
 thus raising it altogether above the plane of history. But 
 assuming that this position of Strauss was in itself a tenable 
 one, its weakness lay in his method of proving this grandeur 
 of Christ ; for it is clear that the philosophical consciousness 01 
 the unity of the divine and human can scarcely be ascribed to 
 the Johannine Jesus, and at any rate not to the historical Jesus 
 of the synoptic Gospels. The error, which was bound to prove 
 fatal to this eirenical position, lay in the attempt to find Christ's 
 greatness in a philosophical idea, instead of in the unique 
 character of his religious and moral consciousness and work. 
 And in order to be able to ascribe that philosophical conscious- 
 ness to Christ with an appearance of historical justification, 
 he was guilty of the blunder of admitting the possible genuine- 
 ness of the Johannine Gospel and of treating it as an his- 
 torical authority. This produced a wavering uncertainty in 
 the third edition of his Leben Jesu, in unpleasing contrast 
 to the unflinching logic and clearness of the earlier editions, 
 while the possibility of thus creating a favourable impression 
 upon the theological public was lessened by the not unfounded 
 
222 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 suspicion that personal motives of expediency had helped to 
 produce these partial concessions. Strauss himself retraced 
 this false step in the fourth edition, which appeared shortly 
 after, and thus brought the question back to its original posi- 
 tion. But this wavering had at any rate shown the totally 
 inadequate treatment by Strauss of the fundamental question 
 for a life of Jesus, as to the historical value of the documentary 
 sources, and their relation to each other. The necessity there- 
 fore was shown of a scientific investigation of the question. 
 
 This was first supplied, and in a very thorough manner, by 
 Hermann Weisse. He says in the preface to his Evan- 
 gelise he Gcschichte (1838), that he had from the first welcomed 
 Strauss's work as not an injurious one but a helpful contri- 
 bution to true Christian knowledge and insight, which belongs 
 not to the past but to the future, inasmuch as the book had 
 carried through the unpleasant task of destructive criticism 
 so thoroughly as to gi\'e us all the more courage for the 
 attempt to substitute something positive for what criticism 
 had swept away. With this view, Weisse starts with a 
 detailed investigation of the literary relations of the Gospels, 
 and comes, to his own surprise, to the conclusion that Mark's 
 Gospel must be placed before the others in point of origin- 
 ality and age ; a conclusion so opposed to the then universal 
 view that it required considerable courage to make it the 
 basis of an account of the gospel history. The same view 
 was simultaneously defended by a compatriot of Weisse, the 
 Saxon clergyman Wilke, in an exhaustive treatise. Still the 
 view could only slowly and with difficulty make any way at first 
 against the twofold prejudice in favour of John and Matthew, 
 and afterwards against that in favour of Matthew ; it has 
 now been accepted by the majority of theologians ; and the 
 acceptance of the priority of Mark and the late origin of the 
 Gospels of Matthew and of John as among the assured 
 results of Biblical criticism is apparently only a question of 
 time. Notwithstanding Weisse's success in determining the 
 relation of the synoptic Gospels to each other and to that of 
 John, he took up an untenable half-way position with regard 
 to the latter. He considered it to be the work of a disciple 
 of the apostle John, having no claim to direct historical 
 accuracy, but still based, in its speeches at any rate, upon 
 historical reminiscences of the apostle, which, however, 
 received a strong subjective colouring both in the apostle's 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 223 
 
 mind and in the process of literary composition by his disciple. 
 The unity and symmetrical plan of the whole composition 
 of John's Gospel were not recognised by Weisse ; Baur's 
 indication of them sealed the fate of Weisse's semi-critical 
 hypothesis. But while Weisse was certainly corrected by Baur 
 on the question of the Fourth Gospel, he was as certainly 
 superior to Baur in taking the right view of the synoptists. 
 
 In his estimate of the evangelical narratives Weisse fully 
 agrees with Strauss in the negative conclusion, that every- 
 thing really miraculous, in which the laws of nature, valid for 
 all history, are alleged to have been broken by the absolute 
 spirit, is to be regarded as unnatural and on that account as 
 unhistorical. " Before an act of the Deity completely viola- 
 ting the laws of nature and history, before a miracle in this 
 properly unhistorical and anti-natural sense, we could only take 
 up an attitude of vacant unreasoning resignation." Weisse, 
 too, believes that in these narratives we must look for religious 
 myths. But he is by no means satisfied with Strauss's ex- 
 planation of them ; they are not to be explained, as Strauss 
 thought, by a mechanical transference to the Messiah Jesus 
 of conceptions and legends already given in the Old Testa- 
 ment, but they are the special product of the religious spirit 
 of Christianity, which expressed in them symbolically its 
 ideal truth, as the fulfilment of all previous Jewish and 
 heathen anticipations. Thus Weisse interprets the stories of 1 
 miracles purely as religious allegories, involuntarily invented 
 by the imagination of the primitive community, which did not 
 distinguish between the poetic form and the ideal content. 
 Weisse rightly urged that this method of exegesis is much less 
 offensive than Strauss's to the religious feeling of the present 
 time. " For whatever is illustrated in a legend permeated 
 with the true subject-matter, with the idea of the sacred 
 history, must be itself religious, essentially sacred. The 
 historical revelation of God in the Gospels loses not a whit 
 of its sacred content if a part of this content ceases to be 
 regarded as an immediate fact of such a kind that the Deity 
 appears in it as treating his own noblest work rather in jest 
 than in earnest. On the contrary, this revelation gains when 
 the Gospels are recognised as the productions of rich spiritual 
 genius, in which the circle of men, to whom the divine reve- 
 lation of Christianity was first addressed, deposited a pro- 
 ductive, creative consciousness of the divine spirit, descended 
 
224 EIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 into their midst, and of the manner of his working. It was 
 a consciousness such as this which found its thoroughly 
 appropriate expression in the sacred legends." It is certain 
 that this way of looking at the Gospel narratives, in con- 
 junction with a penetrating investigation of the literary rela- 
 tions and value of the authorities, first indicated the course 
 by which theology might hope to leave behind it Strauss's 
 purely negative criticism and obtain a positive understanding 
 of the Gospels. The further pursuit of this method by the 
 Tubingen School led to very important results. 
 
 The best, most just and most thorough estimate of Strauss's 
 book was that given by his Tubingen teacher, the famous critic 
 and ecclesiastical historian, Ferdinand Christian Baur, in 
 the introduction to his book, Kritische Untersuchuno;cn iiber 
 die kanonischen Evangelicn, ihr Verhaltniss zu cinandcr, ihrcii 
 Charakter jmd Ursprimg. Baur finds both Strauss's strength 
 and his weakness in his thoroughly logical negative criticism, 
 which revealed the baselessness of our supposed knowledge of 
 the Gospels, and showed us our ignorance of the real historic 
 truth, thus preparing the way for true knowledge. To quote 
 his own words, " Like all works of true originality and genius, 
 Strauss's book has the great merit of being before and yet the 
 child of its time. It gathered up the critical inquiries on the 
 life of Jesus with their results from every quarter, in order 
 to present their naked ultimate issue and form them into a 
 single whole, by a more vigorous method of proof, by defining 
 what had been left indefinite, and by supplying existing 
 deficiencies. Thus the book became the living centre of the 
 whole critical movement of the time, which alone explains its 
 immense effect. Strauss was hated because the spirit of the 
 time could not endure its own picture, which he held up to it 
 in faithful, clearly drawn outlines. I n this reflection of itself the 
 age became conscious of much of which it before had had no 
 distinct idea, coming to perceive its contradictions and incon- 
 sistencies and false assumptions ; in a word, its complete want 
 of true knowledge. Let us frankly admit the facts of the case, 
 and rest assured that, instead of going on for ever with vague 
 and empty polemics, it is time to look at Strauss's criticism as 
 a product of its time, and to understand how, in the then 
 existing stage of criticism, it was not only a possible but also 
 a necessary phenomenon. What result could be reached 
 from the investigations then carried on into the origin and 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 225 
 
 mutual relation of the Gospels, except a purely negative one ? 
 One opinion was opposed by another, taken together the 
 opinions were mutually contradictory and destructive, and any 
 certainty was impossible. It was, in fact, just as Strauss 
 himself said, in the darkness produced by the extinguishing 
 of all supposed historical lights by criticism, the eye had 
 gradually to learn to distinguish individual objects. Strauss's 
 work was intended to begin this process, by leading men out 
 of the general darkness into the clear day of historical know- 
 ledge. But it introduced a new era not in virtue of this 
 positive but of its negative side ; its chief merit lay not in 
 the knowledge which it brought to light, but in the want of 
 knowledge of which it made men conscious. This is the 
 truly historical importance of Strauss's critique. Its greatest 
 merit will always consist in having shown the condition of 
 historical knowledge of the gospel history at the time, and in 
 having done this from a pure love of truth, without prejudice 
 or assumption, without mercy or consideration, and it must 
 be allowed with cold severity. Every step the work takes 
 beyond this seems to lie outside its true province. But the 
 spirit of an age resists with all its might the proof of its 
 ignorance in a matter of its knowledge of which it had long 
 been so certain. Instead of recognising what had to be 
 recognised, if any progress was to be made, all possible 
 attempts were made to create fresh illusions as to the true 
 state of the case, by reviving long antiquated hypotheses, by 
 theological charlatanism, by using all the motives of a false 
 party spirit. But a higher certainty as to the truth of the 
 gospel history can only be attained by recognising, on the 
 basis of Strauss's criticism, our previous knowledge as no 
 knowledge at all. When all our previous knowledge is self- 
 contradictory and self-destructive, certain knowledge can only 
 come from the examination and classification of details. But 
 these details formed the limit of Strauss's criticism." 
 
 In^ order to get beyond Strauss's negative results, the 
 criticism of the gospel history must become the criticism of 
 the documents which are the sources for this history. And 
 if this is not to continue to consist of mutually exclusive 
 hypotheses, but is to be placed upon a firm basis, the special 
 characteristics of each Gospel must be exactly ascertained, the 
 literary features and objects of its author must be investigated, 
 and its relation determined to the general circumstances of 
 
 G. T. Q 
 
2 26 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. IIL 
 
 the time out of which it arose. This had been attempted, 
 after a fashion, before F. Chr. Baur by Bruno Bauer, Weisse, 
 and Wilke, who put the evangelist Mark in the place of a 
 general indefinite tradition, as the original evangelist, and 
 derived the other Gospels from him. This view was carried 
 to the most extreme lengths by Bruno Bauer, who regarded 
 Mark not only as the first narrator, but even as the creator 
 of the gospel history, thus making the latter a fiction and 
 Christianity the invention of a single original evangelist. In 
 spite of the evident absurdity of this " phantasmagorical view 
 of history," we must recognise a grain of truth in Bruno 
 Bauer's opposition to Strauss, when he asked whether the 
 mysterious myth-creating consciousness of the community 
 could produce its Gospels without having hands wherewith to 
 write, or taste to compose, or judgment to connect related 
 and exclude alien matter ? This touched, in fact, a weak place 
 in Strauss's method, viz. his ignoring the subjectivity of the 
 authors of the Gospels. But it was precisely this subjectivity, 
 as F. Chr. Baur remarks, which deserved the primary atten- 
 tion of historical criticism. " Since all history, before it 
 reaches us, passes through the medium of a narrator, in our 
 criticism of the gospel history, the first question is not. 
 What objective reality is possessed by this or that narrative 
 per se ? but rather, What is the relation of the narrative to 
 the mind of the narrator, through the medium of whom it 
 becomes for us an object of historical knowledge ? " We 
 must, therefore, in the first place know the aim and purpose 
 of the writer, his motive in writing as he does, and the 
 influence of this motive on his account ; and this question can 
 only be answered by as exact an investigation as possible of 
 the historical conditions under the influence of which the 
 author wrote. Every author belongs to the time in which he 
 lives, and the greater the importance of his subject for the 
 struggles, parties, and interests of the time, the safer the 
 assumption that he must bear the impress of his age, and that 
 the motives determining the form of his narrative must be 
 sought in the circumstances of the time. This holds also of 
 the Gospels ; hence the first question in the criticism of them 
 will be, What was the aim and purpose of each of their 
 authors 1 Thus only can we gain the firm ground of con- 
 crete historical truth. Since a special motive {Tendenz) is 
 most apparent in the fourth Gospel, Baur took this Gospel, 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTA5IENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 2'J< 
 
 which had hitherto offered the stoutest resistance to all 
 the attacks of criticism, as the point of departure for his 
 inquiry. 
 
 But before we trace this inquiry further, we must glance at 
 his previous critical works. I have begun with the above 
 discussion in the introduction to his book on the canonical 
 Gospels simply in order to make clear his relation to Strauss. 
 Baur himself, which is characteristic of his method, started 
 not from the Gospels, the most complicated problem of New 
 Testament criticism, but from the Pauline Epistles, where 
 the questions are comparatively simpler. As the fruit of his 
 exegetical lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, he 
 published in 1831 the essay, Die Christuspartei in der 
 korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des paidinischen 7md 
 petrinischen Christenthtnns in der dltesten Kirche, der Apostel 
 Petrus in Rom. He had here proved that Paul had to con- 
 tend in Corinth with a Jewish Christian party, which disputed 
 his apostolical authority and wished, to set up a particularistic 
 Jewish Christianity, in opposition to his universal Christianity. 
 He had then pursued the traces of the same division of parties 
 in the post-apostolic age, down to the Clementine Homilies, 
 and attempted to explain by its means the legends of Simon 
 Magus and of the episcopate of Peter in Rome. In these in- 
 genious, if at times rash, theories lay the germs of his later 
 view of primitive Christianity, but his literary criticism had 
 not yet reached an independent position. The full and unique 
 importance of this was first seen in the work, tjber die 
 sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, which appeared in the same year 
 as Strauss's Leben Jesu (1835). His researches into the 
 Christian Gnosis, published in the same year, had led Baur 
 to look for traces of this phenomenon in the New Testament 
 also, and he then discerned that the false teachers opposed in 
 the Epistles to Timothy and Titus could be no other than the 
 Gnostics of the second century, in particular the Marcionites. 
 This gave a firm footing of objective historical value for the 
 criticism of these epistles in place of the previous vague sub- 
 jective hypotheses. Other peculiarities of these epistles, in 
 particular those respecting ecclesiastical offices and arrange- 
 ments, were set in a clearer light by the circumstances of the 
 second century, and this at the same time served to support 
 the hypothesis based on his characterisation of the false 
 teachers. Individual critics, such as Eichhorn and De Wette, 
 
228 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. IIL 
 
 and also Schleiermacher, had previously doubted the authen- 
 ticity, at any rate of i Timothy, and not only were these doubts 
 now fully justified by Baur, but, what was the main thing, the 
 positive result was reached that these Episdes originated in 
 the opposition of the Catholic Church to Gnosticism in the 
 middle of the second century, and were intended to establish 
 the Church's tradition and hierarchy against heretics. The 
 importance of this work of Baur's went far beyond the 
 question directly treated of, inasmuch as it substituted for 
 the first time objective criticism, based on a wide general 
 conception of the conditions of primitive Christianity, for the 
 subjective criticism hitherto adopted — a new method, of the 
 great importance of which Baur in his preface shows himself 
 well aware. This critical method he applied during the 
 following years to the Pauline epistles and to the Acts of the 
 Apostles, and collected the results of these researches in the 
 work, Paulus, der Jl.postel Jesu Christi, seiii Lebeit tind 
 ]Virken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre (ist ed., 1845 ; 2nd 
 ed., 1866). In the first part of this work, Baur describes the 
 life and work of Paul, as the apostle who first gave Christi- 
 anity its universal historical importance, and freed it from 
 Judaism, which was not accomplished — as was hitherto held in 
 conformity with the Church's tradition — with the concurrence 
 of the elder apostles and the primitive Church, but in op- 
 position to and in conflict with them. He here subjects the 
 account given in the Acts to a thorough critical investigation, 
 which leads to the result that this book differs from the 
 authentic testimony of the Pauline epistles in so many and im- 
 portant points that it can be regarded as of only quite second- 
 ary historical value ; the author's aim was not to write 
 history, but to give " a defence of the Apostle of the Gentiles 
 against the attacks and accusations of the Judaisers." With 
 this view he represented Paul as quite a different man from 
 the actual Paul of the genuine Pauline Epistles ; he minimised 
 his divergence from the Jewish Christians in the same way as 
 he made Peter more Pauline than was really the case. The 
 writer's motives for doing this must be looked for in the cir- 
 cumstances of the time, in which " Paulinism had been so put 
 in the background by Jewish Christian efforts as only to be 
 able to maintain itself by entering into a compromise with 
 the powerful Jewish Christian party, and by an attitude of 
 conciliation softening down all the harshness and directness 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 29 
 
 of its Opposition to Judaism."-' The second part of the work 
 gives an analysis and criticism of the Pauline Epistles, of 
 which only those to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, 
 are accepted as genuine. The third part gives an account 
 of the Pauline theology from the point of view that it repre- 
 sents Christianity as the absolute spiritual religion in opposi- 
 tion to Heathenism and Judaism. There is no doubt much 
 in these two latter parts, as in the former one, capable of 
 being disputed and needing amendment, but the great merit 
 of the book remains, of having clearly set forth with an 
 emphasis, never approached before, the epoch-making im- 
 portance of the Apostle Paul in the history of Christianity, 
 the originality of his conception of Christianity, and the 
 magnitude of the struggle by which he carried out his ideas 
 in spite of the Jewish prejudices of the primitive Church. 
 
 Equally important, for a right understanding of primitive 
 Christianity, with Baur's work on Paul was further his Criticism 
 of John's Gospel, first given as an essay (1844), which he 
 afterwards incorporated in his book on Die kanoniscken Evan- 
 gelien (1847), as its first and most important part. He does 
 not start in the customary way with the question as to the 
 author, which only concludes the investigation. The question 
 he starts with is, on the contrary, that of the idea and purpose 
 guiding the author in his peculiar presentation of the gospel 
 history. Baur finds this in the idea of the Logos presented 
 in the prologue ; since the Logos, as the divine principle of 
 light and life, appears bodily in the phenomenal world in the 
 person of Jesus, and enters into conflict with the darkness of 
 the world, the whole history of Jesus turns on the development 
 and solution of this antithesis of metaphysical and ethical 
 
 1 This view of the Acts of the Apostles was further developed and put into 
 a more extreme form by Zeller. It regards the Acts as an " offer of peace " 
 made by a Paulinist to the Judaisers with a view to the union of the two 
 parties: but it cannot be maintained: for (i) the supposed extremity of 
 Paulinism in presence of an all-powerful Jewish Christianity is unhistorical ; 
 (2) the Acts, on the contrary, exhibits a Gentile Christianity energetically 
 asserting itself against Judaism; (3) the inexact account of Paulinism given 
 in this book cannot be the result of intentional misrepresentation, since it 
 was not pecuUar to the author but common to Gentile Christians of the 
 second century ; (4) finally, the theory altogether overlooks the real and 
 undoubted object of the writer, viz. to defend Christianity in view of the 
 Roman power as a religion not violating the laws of the State, and with a 
 claim to the same toleration as Judaism. 
 
230 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 principles, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, belief 
 and disbelief children of God and children of the devil, 
 life and death. Thus John's Gospel contains a Christian 
 gnosis akin to though not identical with the heretical gnosis, 
 clothed in the form of an historical account of the life of 
 Jesus. That such an account, completely dominated by ideal 
 motives of a doctrinal nature, does not possess historical 
 truth, and cannot mtd does not really lay claim to it, is self- 
 evident, and is then further proved by Baur by a critical 
 comparison of the Johannine and synoptic Gospels, the 
 superior historical probability being always found on the 
 side of the latter. In particular it is shown, in opposition to 
 the attempts to divide the Gospel, that precisely the Johannine 
 speeches serve the dogmatic purpose of the author and stand 
 in the closest connection with the narratives, and in general 
 that the whole Gospel shows a systematic unity of composition 
 which excludes all possibility of distinguishing between genuine 
 and not genuine— or better, between historical and purely ficti- 
 tious elements. At last the question as to the author of the 
 Gospel is investigated and his identity with the Apostle dis- 
 proved, partly by the unhistorical character of so many of the 
 narratives, in which the Gospel is inferior even to the writings 
 of Mark and Luke, who were not eye-witnesses, and in par- 
 ticular by the ignorance shown of places and conditions in 
 Palestine {e.g., i. 28 ; v. 2 ; ix. 7 ; xi. 51 ; xviii. 13); partly 
 by the attitude of the author to the question of the Passover, 
 which is the exact opposite of the view which the Church in 
 Asia Minor claimed to derive from the Apostle John ; partly 
 also by the contrast between the entire dogmatic character 
 of the Gospel and that of the Apocalypse, which exhibits, in 
 accordance with Galatians ii., the Apostle John as still quite 
 enthralled in Jewish Christian conceptions, which the author 
 of the gospel has left far behind. But if it be asked how It 
 was possible for a non-apostolic gospel to be regarded by the 
 Church, as a work of the apostle, Baur finds the explanation 
 In the peculiar spirit and character of the Gospel. By its 
 spiritual nature, that pneumatic character attributed to it 
 even by the ancients. It exercised a peculiar charm on men's 
 minds; and since, in virtue of its later origin, It represented a 
 more developed form of Christian consciousness and life, it 
 offered all the more points of contact with the time of its 
 origination and diffusion. It contains references to all the 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM: AND EXEGESIS. 23 I 
 
 conflicts of the time, and yet nowhere bears the definite mark 
 of a temporal or local opposition. The most important of 
 these elements of its time are the Gnosis, the doctrine of the 
 Logos, Montanism, and the question of the Passover. To 
 all these movements and questions of the age the Gospel stands 
 in a special relation ; we cannot say that they presuppose the 
 Gospel, and yet neither is it conditioned by them ; it comes 
 into contact with them, and yet remains in this respect free 
 and independent. It is the peculiar characteristic of this 
 Gospel to be connected with all shapes of the consciousness 
 of the age, and yet only in so far as at the same time to main- 
 tain an independent attitude towards all, harmonising the 
 antitheses into a higher unity." 
 
 While particular points in Baur's argument may be im- 
 pugned, his view of the Fourth Gospel has as a whole not been 
 refuted by later researches, but always confirmed anew. And 
 when we consider how this very Gospel had previously stoutly 
 withstood all criticism, and how difficult this non liquet had 
 made a scientific investigation of the gospels, and so of the 
 origin of Christianity generally, we must admit that Baur's 
 discovery deserves to be called the beginning of a new era 
 and a fundamental achievement for all future investigation of 
 primitive Christianity. The same cannot be said of his 
 criticism of the three synoptic Gospels. However natural it 
 was for him to think that he ought to apply to the other 
 gospels the key which had proved so useful in the case of 
 John's Gospel, viz. the discovery of a dogmatic purpose, it 
 was this very fact that prevented him from seeing their 
 literary relation to each other. Only thus can we explain 
 Baur's resting content with Griesbach's altogether mistaken 
 hypothesis that Mark's Gospel consists of extracts from 
 Matthew and Luke, when Wilke and Weisse had already 
 clearly and irrefragably proved the priority of Mark as the 
 source of both the others. It is the common fate of scientific 
 discoverers to be led into fresh extremes and errors by the 
 exaggerated application of their newly found principles. Baur 
 did not escape this fatality ; that his keen critical eye failed 
 him in the case pf the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and of 
 the Apocalypse is only to be explained by the apparent agree- 
 ment in these cases of the traditional view with his theory, 
 derived from Paulus, of the perpetuation of the opposition be 
 tween the Judaic and Pauline parties in the post- Pauline age 
 
232 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 A more exact appreciation and a less prejudiced critical analysis 
 of these three books might have led to a limitation of the 
 scope of this theory. Baur's further labours in the history of 
 the Church and of dogma will be described in a later chapter. 
 
 Baur was as great a teacher as he was an author. He pro- 
 secuted scientific research as a sacred service in the temple of 
 truth ; he combined the lofty comprehensive glance of genius 
 with the laborious industry and careful accuracy of the scholar, 
 and imparted the truth he discovered with the straightforward 
 openness of a conscience freed from selfishness and party 
 spirit ; he thus exerted an influence over intelligent and re- 
 ceptive young men of the depth and intensity of which the 
 present generation can form no idea. No wonder that Baur 
 from the first decade of his academical activity continued to 
 gather round him a band of disciples who followed intelli- 
 gently in the footsteps of their master, and soon became his 
 co-workers by their independent prosecution of his researches. 
 
 The first of these was Strauss, who had shot ahead of his 
 teacher by his Lebeii Jesu, considered above, and who had 
 supplied if not the impulse yet the proximate occasion of the 
 epoch-making critical investigation of the Gospels. He was 
 followed by Eduard Zeller, Albert Schwegler, Karl Planck, 
 Karl Kostlin, and others. The common organ of this 
 "Tubingen School " was the Theologische Jahrbilcher, edited 
 by Zeller, still of special interest as the monument of one of 
 the most active and fruitful periods of modern theology. A 
 o-lance at the essays and studies therein collected suffices to 
 show how entirely Baur's disciples and friends were free from 
 the slavish dependence, narrow-mindedness, and dull uni- 
 formity which are wont to form the unpleasing darker side 
 of " schools." Essentially agreed in their critical method, 
 Baur's disciples differed from the first not a little in their 
 critical results. 
 
 Zeller, in his critical essays on the Acts of the Apostles, 
 which first appeared in the Theologische Jahrbilcher, and were 
 afterwards collected in a volume, made some valuable con- 
 tributions to the exegetical interpretation and historical criticism 
 of the Acts ; even those who, like myself,' hold that he carried 
 out Baur's theory of an intended reconciliation of Paulinism 
 and Jewish Christianity in a one-sided and much exaggerated 
 
 ^ Comp. ante, p. 229 note. 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 233 
 
 manner, to the neglect of other essential points, will not deny 
 to Zeller's book the merit of having by its incisive criticism 
 brought out the problem of early Christian history into the 
 full light of day, and of having thus contributed to its solution, 
 even though this does not accord with his own. 
 
 Even more than of Zeller's Apostelgeschichte, we must say 
 of A. Schwegler's book, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter tn 
 den Hauptpunkten seiner Entwickeliing (2 vols., 1846), that, in 
 spite of all the ingenuity often shown in the just appreciation 
 of details, it must be regarded as on the whole a failure. 
 Baur's view of the original opposition and gradual reconcilia- 
 tion of the primitive Christian parties is here exaggerated 
 into a caricature. Christianity before Paul, Schwegler con- 
 sidered to have had no lofty ideas at all, but to have been a nar- 
 row, rigidly ascetic and legal form of Judaism, closely related 
 to Essenism, which, as " Ebionitism," maintained the upper 
 hand even against Paul's universalistic teaching, so that the 
 principles of the latter could scarcely anywhere prevail ; until 
 the age of Irenaeus ecclesiastical Christianity remained more 
 or less an Ebionitic Jewish Christianity, which by degrees de- 
 veloped into Catholicism. This point of view guides Schwegler 
 in his estimate of the whole of early Christian literature ; 
 everything in it really, or presumedly, un-Pauline is at once 
 taken as a proof of the Jewish Christian character of the book 
 in question ; the possibility is never considered of the existence 
 of Gentile Christians with un-Pauline and even anti-Pauline 
 views, not from Judaising tendencies, but because they found 
 much in Paul's theology which was unsuited to the compre- 
 hension and needs of the Gentile Christian Churches. It 
 seems as if Schwegler, hypnotised as it were with the one idea 
 of early Christian " Ebionitism," was completely blind to all 
 the varied thoughts and interests which moved that age and 
 also influenced the life and belief of the Christian Churches. 
 The dangerous tendency, to be seen, it must be confessed, in 
 Baur, of insisting too exclusively on a new point of view as 
 the only true one, was carried in Schwegler to the most 
 extreme lengths. 
 
 It is, however, of importance to note that a protest was 
 immediately raised against this one-sidedness from within 
 the Tubingen School itself Planck and Kostlin, in several 
 excellent essays, still worth reading, in the Theologisclte Jahr- 
 biicher (1847 and 1850) endeavoured to correct Schwegler's 
 
234 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. IIL 
 
 theory. Its principal error, Planck holds to be, that it made 
 Paul the real author of the new principle, and therefore the 
 founder of Christianity, leaving unexplained how he ^was 
 enabled to arrive at this new knowledge and to connect it 
 with the person of Jesus. We must rather start from the 
 position that the new principle was actually conceived, if not 
 fully developed, by Jesus, being contained in his idea of the 
 true righteousness as perfect self-renunciation and the surrender 
 of the human will to the divine will, thus combining the 
 perfect fulfilment of the law with its translation into the spirit, 
 and the cancelling of its purely external character. Paulinism 
 therefore only developed into full consciousness the principle 
 implicitly contained in primitive Christianity. The true right- 
 eousness of self-surrender to God, which Jesus spontaneously 
 exemplified and so experienced as an immediate fact of his 
 own consciousness, became in Paul the quickening " grace," 
 or power of the " Holy Spirit," coming to us from without, 
 from Christ. In this appears the difference between the 
 dependent and the creative mind, between the systematising 
 theologian and the original religious genius. Since the older 
 apostles did not, like Paul, prosecute dogmatic reflections, they 
 failed indeed to see so clearly the difference between the new 
 Christian principle and Judaism, but they still possessed this 
 principle in the form, directly derived from Jesus, of deepened 
 righteousness and practical piety. This Christianity, Judaic 
 only in form, was not opposed in principle to Paul's anti- 
 Judaic Christianity ; and hence a reconciliation of the two was 
 possible, without external concessions, by means of an inward 
 approximation of each to the other. It should be mentioned 
 that Planck held with Schwegler, that the development was 
 wholly on the Jewish Christian side, while Paulinism stood apart 
 as a stimulating principle but one incapable of growth. 
 
 KoSTLiN likewise censures Schwegler for not distinguishing 
 between the later extreme Ebionitism and the original apos- 
 tolic Jewish Christianity. The latter was from the first, in 
 point of fact, though without being clearly aware of it, in 
 advance of Judaism, and was then stimulated by Paul to a 
 development in two directions ; on the one hand, it advanced 
 to ecclesiastical unity, and, on the other, retrograded to here- 
 tical Ebionitism. To Kostlin also belongs in particular the 
 credit of first seeing that Paulinism and Gentile Christianity 
 must not be forthwith identified. The failure of the Pauline 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 235 
 
 doctrines of righteousness by faith and of the annulling of the 
 law to find permanent acceptance, is to be explained not, as 
 Schwegler thought, by the preponderance of Jewish Chris- 
 tianity, but by the fact that the Gentile Christians themselves 
 were without the speculative conditions and practical needs 
 necessary for the comprehension and adoption of these doc- 
 trines. They did not need, like Paul, the disciple of the 
 Pharisees, deliverance from the law, but the discipline of 
 the law ; the law did not seem to them, as it did to Paul, a 
 negative stage of development of transitory validity, but the 
 permanent standard of a pure and thoroughly ethical life for 
 the community. The natural desire to form fixed Christian 
 fnorals was what made the acceptance of Paul's doctrines of 
 the law and of justification a practical impossibility to the 
 Gentile Christian Churches, even if they had been understood. 
 Even Paul had recognised this desire of his Churches so far 
 as to speak of a " law of the Spirit," according to which 
 Christians ought to live. Nevertheless his teaching lacked 
 the legal precision desiderated by the Church ; it was too 
 ideal to be directly made use of by it. The need was felt of 
 supplementing this ideal PauHnism on the side of the actual 
 morality of works, and this found expression in the combina- 
 tion of Peter with Paul, or in the appeal against the one-sided 
 party watchwords of the heretics to the authority of all the 
 apostles — i.e. of Christ himself 
 
 The lines of Planck and Kostlin were further pursued by 
 Albrecht Ritschl, until from being an adherent he became 
 an opponent of the Tubingen school. In the first edition of 
 his book. Die Entstehu7ig der altkatholischen Kirche (1850), his 
 disagreement with the theories of Baur and Schwegler was 
 only partial, but in the second edition (1857) he declared his 
 total antagonism to their fundamental principles. Like Planck 
 and Kosdin, Ritschl holds that in the person of Jesus and the 
 belief of the first apostles we have the common neutral start- 
 ing-point of the various later parties. The attitude of Jesus 
 towards the law, he maintains, was an essentially independent 
 one — superiority to the externality of the ceremonial law in 
 the ethical principle of love to God and man, while observing 
 a conservative attitude in outward religious life. Accordingly 
 Ritschl considers that the first apostles no longer regarded 
 the law as religiously binding, but only continued its ob- 
 servance as a national custom, a view for which he appeals 
 
236 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 to the Epistles of Peter and James, the genuineness of which 
 he ventures to maintain against the doubts of criticism. 
 Though we must admit this to be too great a concession to 
 conservative apologetics, we recognise a valuable advance on 
 the older Tubingen theologians in Ritschl's tracing the de- 
 velopment of Catholic Christianity, not like them from Jewish, 
 but from Gentile Christianity, which he distinguishes from 
 Paulinism. He rightly points out that Paulinism had a 
 neutral basis in common with Jewish Christianity in the 
 doctrines of God, angels and demons, the present and future 
 world, Christ's second coming, the resurrection and judgment ; 
 to which we must add that the specifically Pauline doctrines 
 of reconciliation and justification have their roots in Jewish 
 (Pharisaic) theology. The earlier Tubingen theologians were 
 distinctly in the wrong in almost completely overlooking Paul's 
 Jewish side in exclusive attention to his anti- Jewish tendencies, 
 and thereupon explaining every departure from, his teaching by 
 a reference to Judaistic motives, while, reversely, it must be 
 explained for the most part from the anti- Judaistic habit of 
 thought of the Gentile Christians. Ritschl is right in main- 
 taining that " Catholic Christianity is a distinct stage of re- 
 ligious thought within the sphere of Gentile Christianity ; it 
 is independent of the conditions of Jewish Christian life, and 
 opposed to the fundamental principle of Jewish Christianity ; 
 it does not, however, depend merely upon the authority of 
 Paul, but rests both upon the Old Testament and the sayings 
 of Christ, and also upon the authority of all the apostles, 
 represented by Peter and Paul." But when Ritschl goes on 
 to explain the conversion of Paul's teaching into the Catholic 
 Christianity of the early Church by the failure of the latter to 
 understand the Old Testament, and condemns it as a " de- 
 generation," the objection presents itself that Paul's doctrine 
 of justification is not found in the Old Testament, which, as 
 the Epistle of James shows, offers rather the means of its 
 refutation than of its proof Ritschl was unacquainted with 
 the sources of the Pauline theology, and hence cannot satis- 
 factorily explain its post-apostolic development. A second 
 serious defect is his total neglect of the other chief factor in the 
 evolution of the theology of the Church, and even of that of the 
 New Testament — viz. Hellenism. This explains his strange 
 inability to deal with such an important phenomenon of early 
 Christianity as the Gospel of John, and his omission of all 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 237 
 
 reference to it in his book, with the exception of a brief 
 and meaningless note. Beyond question this gospel can be 
 explained neither by means of Jewish Christianity nor of 
 Paulinism, least of all by a superficial Gentile " degeneration" 
 of the latter, since it is purely a product of Christian Hellen- 
 ism. The very existence of this single book (irrespective of 
 others, e.g. the Epistle to the Hebrews) is a proof that no 
 history of early Christianity can be regarded as complete 
 which does not take account of the important factor of 
 Hellenism, which Ritschl, in a much more striking degree even 
 than the other Tubingen critics, has failed to do. 
 
 With Ritschl are connected several other opponents of the 
 Tubingen school, of whom we may here mention the more 
 important: Meyer {Commentar zum neuen Testament), Bleek 
 iyEinleitiing in das N. Test, and Commetttar zu den synop- 
 tischen Evangelien), Lechler {das apostolische imd nachaposto- 
 lische Zeitalter niit Rilcksicht auf Unterschied imd Einheit in 
 Lehre imd Leben, 2nd ed., 1857), Weiss {der petrinische 
 Lehrbegriff ; der johanneische Lehrbegriff ; Biblische Theolo- 
 gie des Neuen Testamettts ; Einleitung in das Neue Testa- 
 ment), Reuss {die Geschichte der heiligen Schriften Neuen 
 Testaments, and Histoire de la Thdologie chretiejme au siecle 
 apostolique), Ewald {Geschichte Israels, vols. v. and vi. ; 
 Geschichte Ckristus, and Gesch. des apostol. Zeitalters), Hase 
 {die Tilbinger Schule. Ein Sendschreiben an Dr. Baur). It 
 would lead us far beyond our limits to give the views of all 
 these theologians in detail, and we shall therefore be content 
 to mention summarily their objections to the Tubingen theory. 
 They first dispute the sharp antithesis affirmed by this theory 
 between Paul and the original apostles. A certain difference 
 in tendency is indeed admitted ; but this is not such that the 
 two parties were mutually exclusive, but rather such that they 
 supplemented each other. "We find variety coupled with 
 agreement, and unity with difference, between Paul and the 
 earlier apostles ; we recognise the one spirit in the many 
 gifts " {Lechler). The Judaistic antagonists against whom 
 Paul had to contend were an extreme party with which the 
 apostles themselves must not be identified. Further, the 
 view is controverted that the struggle and the attempts at 
 mediation and reconciliation were continued until the middle 
 of the second century ; on the contrary, it is contended that 
 the destruction of Jerusalem severed the bond which had 
 
2^8 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 hitherto connected the converted Jews with their nation and 
 its worship. With this ceased also the influence of Judaistic 
 agitation upon the Gentile Christian Churches ; and hence- 
 forth, in place of the Pauline- Judaistic controversies, we have 
 the new struggle with the heathen political power and heathen 
 heresy (Gnosticism), to which the Johannine Apocalypse 
 already bears witness. Further, an attack is made on Baur's 
 method of tracing in the New Testament writings products 
 of a definite party movement, and of determining their place 
 in the history of primitive Christianity by means of their 
 supposed dogmatic or ecclesiastical " Tendenz!' These ob- 
 jections are generally urged, moreover (irrespective of just 
 objections to exaggerations on the part of the Tubingen 
 School), from an apologetic desire to save the traditional 
 authorship of the Biblical writings, the most serious critical 
 arguments being too little regarded. The Epistles of James 
 and I Peter are asserted to be not only genuine, but pre- 
 Paullne, and (by Rltschl and Weiss) to be nowise connected ^ 
 with Paul. Of the deutero- Pauline Episdes, all — even those 
 to the Epheslans, Timothy, and Titus, regarded as spurious 
 even by Credner and De Wette— are reclaimed as Pauline. 
 Special ardour Is shown in the contention for the genuineness 
 of John's Gospel ; the dilemma, admitted by Lucke, that 
 either the Apocalypse or the Gospel, but not both, is genuine, 
 is given up, and the development of the author of the Apoca- 
 lypse Into the evangelist Is considered probable. But the more 
 hotly the contention raged at first around this question, the 
 greater is the significance of the fact that the former champions 
 of the genuineness of John's Gospel could not altogether resist 
 the adverse arguments, but were compelled to make greater 
 or less concessions to criticism. Plase, Weizsacker, and 
 Reuss have recently attributed the Gospel not to the apostle 
 himself, but to one of his disciples ; and even Weiss limits 
 the historical value of the speeches to a minimum of reminis- 
 cences, which have become confused In the mind of the author 
 with his own reflections, and thereby transformed. With re- 
 gard to other books also — e.g. the Pastoral Epistles or the 
 Acts — we have to note concessions made by the above-named 
 theologians to Tubingen criticism, so that a gradual agree- 
 ment as to the main questions need not be regarded as im- 
 possible. It is a specially happy omen that. In the province 
 of exegesis, a uniform method of philological objectivity and 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 239 
 
 exactness has been more and more developed on all hands ; 
 the services of Meyer and Weiss to exegesis are everywhere 
 acknowledged. A tribute should also be paid to Weiss's 
 Biblische Theologie des Ncucn Testavients, as a work of 
 pre-eminent scientific soundness, containing copious matter 
 arranged with exemplary clearness, and surpassing all others 
 in practical utility as a textbook for students. 
 
 The Tubingen school was not behindhand in replying to 
 these numerous and serious attacks. Besides Baur and Zeller, 
 HiLGENFELD, in numcrous books and essays (in the Zeitschrift 
 filr wissenschaftliche Theologie), distinguished himself as the 
 ready champion of the right of scientific criticism. Fond of 
 emphasising his independence of Baur, he still, in all impor- 
 tant points, followed in the footsteps of the master ; his 
 method, which he is wont to contrast as Literarkritik with 
 Baur's Tendenzkritik, is nevertheless essentially the same as 
 Baur's. In his view of the fourth Gospel, Hilgenfeld goes 
 even further than Baur, making it altogether dependent upon 
 Gnosticism. In the Synoptic question he leaves Baur's view 
 essentially unchanged, only placing Mark between Matthew 
 and Luke. He modifies somewhat the criticism of Paul's 
 epistles, restoring Philippians and i Thessalonians to Paul. 
 VoLKMAR differs decidedly from the other Tubingen critics 
 only on the question of the Synoptists ; he follows Wilke and 
 Weisse in regarding Mark as the earliest Gospel, which was 
 followed by Luke immediately, and only subsequently by 
 Matthew, the last being dependent upon both the others, and 
 a gospel harmony from the point of view of the Catholic 
 Church, with its reconciliation of differences. This un- 
 doubtedly correct view Volkmar has exaggerated, after the 
 fashion of Bruno Bauer, by making Mark the author of a 
 " didactic epic," intended to illustrate the Pauline gospel. 
 Though this seemed to do away with all historical foundations, 
 Volkmar, in his Religion Jesu, and still more in his Jesus 
 Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit (1882), tries to 
 separate and establish a kernel of historical facts as the basis 
 of the gospels. In his interpretation of the Apocalypse, he 
 follows Tubingen principles, and refers the Apocalyptic 
 imagery in the boldest manner to the party struggles of 
 primitive Christianity. The book is now somewhat out of 
 date, since Volter has shown that the Apocalypse is composed 
 of elements belonging to different authors and times, and 
 
240 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 Vischer has made a Jewish basis with Christian revisions very 
 probable. With Hilgenfeld and Volkmar, we must mention 
 HoLSTEN as a strict adherent of Baur in his Hne of criticism. In 
 his commentary on Galatians, and in several works on Paul, 
 he has discussed the Apostle's peculiar teaching with great 
 acumen, though often with too great subtlety and exaggerated 
 dialectic ; his long-promised review of the entire Pauline theo- 
 logy has not yet appeared. The question of the Synop- 
 tists has also latterly engaged Holsten's attention : he tries 
 very hard, but with doubtful success, to defend Hilgenfeld's 
 view (Matthew-Mark-Luke). On this question, Holtzmann 
 is the exponent of the view now most generally accepted. In 
 his book on die synoptischen Evangelien, he maintains the 
 priority of Mark ; our Matthew he derives from Mark and 
 Matthew's original " collection of sayings " (the Xo'^ia of 
 Papias), and finally Luke from our Matthew and Mark. 
 Besides numerous essays, Holtzmann has furnished valuable 
 contributions to New Testament exegesis and criticism in his 
 works on the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians and 
 the Pastoral Epistles ; and his Einleitung in das Nene Testa- 
 ment gives an excellent summary of the present position of 
 all the questions concerned. Whilst most critics were thus 
 working at questions of detail, Hausrath was led by his 
 natural love of artistic form, and his position as ecclesiastical 
 historian, to combine details into a vivid account of the time 
 as a whole. In particular his neutestainentliche Zeitgeschichte 
 has the merit of showing the place of the development of 
 primitive Christianity in the history of the world, and of 
 describing the connexion, too much neglected, between 
 the evolution of the Christian Church and the condition 
 of the Graeco- Roman world. As this work is further 
 distinguished by a beauty of style rare in German theolo- 
 gians, it has attracted attention even among the laity, and 
 contributed much to the diffusion of the results of modern 
 research. 
 
 At the commencement of the sixth decade of the century, 
 after Baur's death, the labours of Bible critics were so much 
 confined to literary questions of detail that these purely learned 
 controversies seemed to have put an end to the interest in the 
 great fundamental questions. This interest was, however, 
 revived in the same field in which a generation before the 
 whole movement had originated. The appearance in quick 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 24 1 
 
 succession of the works of Renan ^ and Strauss on the Hfe 
 of Jesus, which were followed by several other books on the 
 same subject, brought this question afresh to the front. The 
 difference between Strauss's new book, Lebeti Jesu fiir das 
 deutsclie Volk (1864), and his earlier one, was that he intended 
 it, not for theologians only, but for the nation at large, es- 
 pecially for the educated men of Germany. Accordingly, 
 it is thrown into a different form ; in the place of learned 
 discussions of details we have a summary of the results of 
 criticism with regard to the gospel history, popular in the best 
 sense of the word. In this new work Strauss seeks to obviate 
 the objections often brought against his earlier work, that it 
 gave a critique of the gospel history without a critique of the 
 authorities, and led merely to the negative result of the 
 unhistorical character of what was previously regarded as 
 historical, not to the ascertainment of a positive historical 
 kernel. He now prefixes a tolerably thorough criticism of 
 the authorities, though adhering too strictly to Baur's views 
 on all questions, even with regard to Matthew and Mark, 
 
 1 Kenan's Vie de Jesus (1863) belongs, neither in its origin nor in its effects, 
 to the history of German theology, but its international importance demands 
 the following remarks. It is evident that a book which in a short time 
 attained a world-wide celebrity must have had some special excellence. Not 
 to do injustice to it, we must be careful not to judge it by a wrong standard. 
 Such would be, in this instance, the standard of strictly scientific historical 
 inquiry. If Kenan's object had been to ascertain the actual ultimate founda- 
 tion of the gospel narratives, he would, of course, have had to begin with a 
 careful investigation of the sources — their composition, date, trustworthiness, 
 and mutual relations, which would doubtless have led him to conclusions in 
 particular with regard to the Fourth Gospel wliich would have made it impos- 
 sible for him to make use of the contents of this Gospel unconditionally, and 
 to co-ordinate it with the others. I doubt not that Kenan's subtle historical 
 insight would have enabled him without difficulty to arrive, by means of this 
 criticism of the authorities, a calm comparison of the texts, and a careful 
 weighing of the various probabilities, at a collection of data giving the most 
 probable view we can form on these matters. A book of this kind would 
 have possessed greater value as an historical treatise, but would have lacked 
 all the merits and charm which make Kenan's Vie de Jesus so unusually 
 attractive. These merits are, in a word, not scientific, but poetical. With a 
 faculty of poetical imagination, which paints characters, states of mind and 
 feeling, and scenery with equal vividness, Kenan has composed from the 
 gospel stories a religious epic, which brings forth the Saviour from the unap- 
 proachable darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people, first as 
 the idyllic national leader, then as the contending and erring hero, always 
 aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure from the resistance offered 
 by the reality to his ideal. Even those who may disapprove of such a 
 
 G. T. R 
 
242 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 without doing justice to the grounds of the opposite views. 
 Strauss, as he himself remarks in the preface, is not interested 
 in these questions. "What we really want to know is whether 
 the gospel history is true as a whole and in its details or not, 
 and such preliminary questions can only excite general interest 
 in proportion as they are connected with this fundamental 
 problem. In this respect the criticism of the Gospels has 
 undeniably in the last twenty years somewhat run to seed. 
 New hypotheses, particularly with regard to the first three 
 Gospels, their sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations, 
 crop up in such numbers, and are both maintained and at- 
 tacked with as much zeal as if these were the only questions, 
 while the resulting controversy is of such proportions that we 
 have almost to despair of ever settling the principal question, 
 if its solution has to wait for the conclusion of this contro- 
 versy." We must indeed, Strauss says, have made up our 
 minds as to the Fourth Gospel before we can enter into the 
 discussion of these matters ; but the mutual relation of the 
 Synoptic Gospels is not of the same importance. Moreover, 
 
 poetical treatment of a subject sacred to Christendom, must admit that it has 
 brought the human figure of Jesus nearer to countless men who had long lost 
 all appreciative feeling and care for the Christ of dogma, and has made him 
 the object of their sympathetic appreciation and reverent admiration. And 
 if offence was given by Renan's bringing out shadows and weaknesses in his 
 picture of Jesus, we might in general, without wishing at all to defend him in 
 detail, reply by way of excuse, ihat shadows in a bright picture might appear 
 expedient to make the human figure more life-like and his story more dramatic. 
 Finally, it must be said for this religious epic, as for other historical romances, 
 that, without teaching us history in detail, it enables us to realise an historical 
 event or period as a whole by means of riie poet's comprehensive and divin- 
 ing intuition better than the scanty accounts of the strict historian can ever 
 do. The further volumes of Renan's great work on the genesis of Chris- 
 tianity, the scientific value of which cannot be denied, still leave something 
 to be desired as regards critical rigour in the investigation and use of authori- 
 ties. But this defect is counterbalanced by the merits of vivid description of 
 the local and social environment of events and fine delineation of character. 
 Renan always places before his readers real human beings of flesh and blood, 
 with noble and base passions and motives, not mere ideal pictures upon a 
 golden background. Of special interest is his description of the Apostle 
 Paul. But he has too little sympathy with this Apostle of faith to be alto- 
 gether just to him ; he places him with Luther, as one of the historical men 
 of power, but fails in the case of both men to appreciate the depth of their 
 religious feeling and far-seeing speculation. The theological side of religion 
 is indeed always neglected by Renan, while he has a true eye for its practical 
 social side. He thus serves to supplement the German historians. 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 243 
 
 without deciding all those endless critical questions, we can 
 at least arrive at the negative result, that in the person and 
 work of Jesus there is nothing supernatural, nothing that need 
 oppress mankind with the leaden weight of an infallible 
 authority demanding blind belief. " And this negative result 
 is for our purpose, which is not solely historical, but looks 
 rather towards the future than the past, an important, if not 
 the most important, point." Of the positive correlative to this 
 negative result we can say nothing for certain ; but a summing 
 up of what in the present position of research must be con- 
 sidered probable is both permissible and desirable. " All 
 those engaged in these researches are thus reminded of the 
 real point at issue, and such reminding, such recall from the 
 circumference to the centre, has always been profitable to 
 science." It is in fact by such a balancing of the accounts that 
 Strauss now, as in his former works, gave a useful impulse to 
 the advance of science. The first of the two books into which 
 this Life is divided gives the outline of the historical life of 
 Jesus. This account has been called dry and meagre, and 
 indeed is so in comparison with Renan's richly coloured 
 poetry ; but who can blame the historian, if his authorities are 
 of such a nature that, on a critical examination, they fail to 
 furnish him with sufficient material ? Besides, it must be 
 admitted that on the main questions as to the religious and 
 Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and his relation to the Law, 
 Strauss carefully weighs the various indications, and with 
 subtle insight determines the most probable account. Like 
 Schleiermacher and Renan, Strauss assumes that the religious 
 consciousness of Jesus was the source of his consciousness of 
 himself as the Messiah ; but he expressly declines to accept 
 the idea (with Renan) that in the latter Jesus made use of 
 "accommodation" or "played a part"; since in the case 
 of a personality of such immeasurable historical influence 
 every inch must have been conviction ; this conviction was 
 the more natural in the case of Jesus, as the Messianic expec- 
 tation had a religious and ethical as well as a political side, 
 and the former side would appear to him of prime importance 
 in proportion as the latter had always hitherto proved itself 
 disastrous. The fundamental characteristic of the piety of 
 Jesus, Strauss holds to be his transference of the indiscrimi- 
 nate kindness towards good and evil alike, which was the 
 fundamental principle of his own nature, to God as the deter- 
 
^44 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 mining principle of his nature also. " By fully developing in 
 himself this glad spirit, which was at one with God and 
 embraced all men as brothers, Jesus had realised the pro- 
 phetic ideal of a new covenant, with the law written in the 
 heart; he had, to use Schiller's language, ''Die Gottheit in 
 semen Willcn aufgenommen" identified his will with God's, 
 and hence for him God, in Schiller's words, ' had descended 
 from the throne of the universe, the abyss had been filled up, 
 and the terror had fled,' in him man had passed from slavery 
 to freedom. This gladness and integrity ( Ungebrochcne), this 
 action from the delight and joy of a beautiful soul, we may 
 call the Hellenic element in Jesus. But the fact that this 
 impulse of his heart, and, in harmony therewith, his conception 
 of God, were purely spiritual and ethical — this attainment, 
 which the Greek could only attain to by philosophy, was in 
 his case the dowry granted to him by his education according 
 to the Mosaic law, and his instruction in the writings of the 
 prophets." Jesus had not, like Paul, to pass through an 
 agitating conflict and conversion, but was from the first a beau- 
 tiful nature, his development went on in general uniformly, if 
 not without great effort yet without violent crises ; " this is the 
 only living sense of the dogma of the sinlessness of Jesus, of 
 which, in its rigid ecclesiastical form, as a purely negative idea, 
 we can make absolutely nothing." After the first book has 
 given a description of the conjectural historical kernel of the 
 history of Jesus, the second book treats of his mythical history, 
 which had formed the sole subject of the earlier work. But 
 while it had there been treated analytically, it is here treated 
 genetically. It is assumed as the result of the former work 
 that the supernatural element in the gospel narratives is 
 mythical ; but the question now arises as to how we are to 
 conceive the origin and development of this mythical history. 
 As the first effect of the life and character of Jesus, we find 
 the belief of his disciples In his resurrection ; and thus we find 
 their ideas of him transplanted into a temperature in which a 
 luxuriant growth of unhistorical seedlings was bound to spring 
 up, each more miraculous than the other. The inspired Son 
 of David comes to be the Son of God without human father ; 
 the Son of God grows into the incarnate creative Word ; 
 the humane, thaumaturgic physician becomes the resuscitator 
 from the dead, the absolute lord of nature and Its laws ; 
 the wise popular teacher, the prophet reading the hearts 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 245 
 
 of men, becomes omniscient, God's alter ego, his life on 
 earth an episode in his eternal existence with God. This 
 process, by which the various strata in the development 
 of the conceptions of Christ were formed one after the 
 other, as the expression of the Christian feeling prevalent 
 in a given circle at a given time, is worked out in the 
 second book. It thus both supplements and confirms the 
 results of the previous work. For "if any one denies the 
 historical validity of a story universally believed, we have a 
 right to demand from him not only the grounds of his opinion, 
 but also an explanation of the process by which the unhistori- 
 cal narrative has come into existence." This explanation is 
 here given with such thoroughness and perspicuity that the 
 scientific value of the new work, in spite of its popular form, 
 is decidedly superior to that of the earlier one. The fact that 
 it, nevertheless, did not produce anything like the same sensa- 
 tion only proves that in the intervening generation the world 
 had become accustomed to receive the results of scientific re- 
 search even in religious matters much more calmly than had 
 previously been the case. 
 
 The two works of Renan and Strauss were followed by a 
 vast stream of literature on the life of Jesus, which, however, 
 grew shallower as it increased in breadth. Most of the works 
 of this class produced in the last twenty years have paid less 
 and less serious attention to both literary and material criti- 
 cism, and have almost retrograded to the position of pre-critical 
 apologies and harmonies. Inasmuch as this branch of theology 
 has thus completed its revolution, theologians ought without 
 doubt to deduce the conclusion that a scientifically certain life 
 of Jesus is impossible with the existing authorities. However 
 painful it may be thus to resign ourselves, this might still be \ 
 attended by the advantage of leading theology away from 1 
 devotion to small details and the attempt to trace the steps of \ 
 Jesus in Galilee and Judea, and to combine the mosaic of 
 evangelical tradition, now in one way, now in another, to the 
 study once more of history on a large scale, which would look 
 for the sources of Christianity in the life of expiring antiquity 
 as a whole, and see in the triumphant progress of Christ's 
 spirit through the earth the proof of his divine mission, proof 
 drawn from the wide history of the world, and independent 
 of the ever problematical results of the detailed investiga- 
 tion of his earthly life. From the mass of this literature 
 
246 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 I will call attention to three works as the most important, 
 Schenkel's Charakterbild Jesu, Keim's Geschichte Jesu von 
 Nazara, and Weizsacker's Evans^elische Untersticktmzen. 
 
 Schenkel's Charakterbild Jesti, which appeared almost 
 simultaneously with Strauss's " Life of Jesus for the German 
 People," provoked an outburst of opposition among German 
 theologians, the reason of which it is hard to discover in the 
 book assailed. This is so far from having an irreligious 
 tendency, or being a frivolous treatment of sacred history, 
 that on the contrary it is full of a passionate enthusiasm for 
 the character of Jesus, such as satisfies the demands of the 
 heart much more than those of strict scientific research. In 
 its estimate of the value of the sources, Schenkel's book, it is 
 true, excels all other works here mentioned ; the priority of 
 Mark is maintained with great decision, and all connection of 
 the Fourth Gospel with the Apostle John, who did not live in 
 Ephesus, denied with equal emphasis (so at least in the 4th 
 ed., 1873). But in his use of the authorities, the author is far 
 from deducing the necessary consequences from this correct 
 conclusion. Instead of attending to the peculiarities of each 
 Gospel, and seeing in them the influence of a later time and 
 development of doctrine, all the Gospels are really used as if 
 of equal value, and from their narratives and speeches (even 
 the Johannine), by means of artificial harmonising and arbitrary 
 interpretation, a life of Christ is constructed, which, with all its 
 ideality, produces rather the impression of a modern reformer 
 and champion of liberty and truth than of the real historical 
 founder of the Church. Even those who are far from over- 
 estimating the historical value of Renan's life of Jesus, can 
 scarcely avoid ranking it higher than Schenkel's representa- 
 tion of Jesus. Compare, for instance, Renan's keen insight 
 into the social side of the work of Jesus with Schenkel's 
 recasting of all the language of the passages of the Gospels in 
 question, to bring them into conformity with modern ethics. 
 Or let us hear Schenkel's description of the significance of the 
 death of Jesus. " In order to kill the bondage to the letter 
 of religion, Jesus, the inspired representative of the spirit of 
 religion, had to die. The sanguinary law condemning free- 
 dom of belief was sentenced by his death ; by his sacrificial 
 blood he bought freedom of belief and through it liberation 
 from the bondage of the letter and of sin. Thus his death 
 became a victory of freedom and love, and thereby the source 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 247 
 
 of a new religion, which overcame evil in the inmost core of 
 personality, a ransom for the captives in Israel and the 
 heathen world." Schenkel did not consider that "personal 
 freedom of faith and of conscience " are ideals of very recent 
 growth, which cannot without a serious anachronism be 
 carried back to the rise of Christianity, and actually made the 
 pivot of the whole work of Jesus. Indeed, Schenkel's own 
 character was of such vigorous and yet one-sided subjec- 
 tivity that he altogether lacked the impartiality of objective 
 historical insight. 
 
 Theodor Keim became known about the year i860 by his 
 lectures on the human development and historical rank of 
 Jesus (in the 2nd edition, together published under the title 
 Der gesckichtliche Chrishis, 1865) as an able writer on the life 
 of Jesus, distinguished alike by his insight and religious feel- 
 ing. When his extensive work Geschichte Jesu von Nazara 
 (3 vols., 1 867-1 8 72) appeared, it was recognised even by 
 antagonists as of first-rate scientific importance. In it there is 
 collected and skilfully digested such a mass of learned mate- 
 rial, that this alone suffices to render it a lasting storehouse of 
 information for all students of the subject. The investigation 
 of the authorities, too, is more thorough than in similar works 
 (with the possible exception of Weizsacker's). And yet it is 
 here that the great error of the book lies. The discussion of 
 the Fourth Gospel is indeed excellent, and Keim is as decided 
 as Strauss with regard to its unhistorical character. But on the 
 question of the Synoptists Keim has not got beyond the view 
 of Griesbach and Baur, that Matthew is the original Gospel, 
 and Mark a compilation from it and Luke. His advocacy of 
 this totally erroneous view is feeble ; the evident signs of the 
 derivative character of Matthew are overlooked or attributed 
 to later revision ; his account of Mark is full of the strongest 
 prejudices. This erroneous estimate of the authorities places 
 the whole work from the beginning upon a false and unstable 
 basis, the effects of which naturally disturb all that follows. 
 The strangest thing is that Keim himself, in the course of his 
 history, often deserts his critical canon and finds himself 
 obliged to give Mark or Luke the preference over Matthew. 
 To this uncertainty as to the relation of the Gospels to each 
 other must be added Keim's failure sufficiently to appreciate 
 the influence of apostolic and post-apostolic teaching on the 
 gospel accounts, as well as of the personal influence of the 
 
24^ BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 writers themselves. When we further consider that Keim 
 regards the Easter stories in the Gospels as historical accounts 
 of actual Christophanies, and thus at the close of his book 
 quits strictly historical ground altogether, we shall be justified 
 in saying that his work, in spite of its great learning, fails 
 to satisfy the rigorous demands of critical historical inquiry. 
 Keim's style, too, lacks, according to my taste, the simplicity 
 and sobriety appropriate to historical investigations. It is 
 quite true that the lofty subject of this history demands a 
 corresponding dignity of tone and language. I3ut this does 
 not cancel the difference between an historical inquiry and a 
 sermon. When the emotional style of the pulpit is employed, 
 as it is by Keim, in historical narrative, it is almost inevitable 
 that emotion should substitute its language for that of the sober 
 understanding, and the weight of high-sounding phrases take 
 the place of material facts and arguments. Keim in this 
 respect closely resembles Ewald. 
 
 Of all the writers on the life of Jesus, Carl Weizsacker has 
 most carefully discussed the question of the authorities ; this 
 forms the first half of his book, Uniersuckzmgen iiber die 
 evangelische Gesc/nchie, ihre Quellen unci den Gang iJirer 
 Entwickehing [\^(>a^. He comes to the conclusion that the 
 three Synoptic gospels are based upon a common original, 
 the synoptiscke Grundschrift, most closely followed by our 
 Gospel of Mark, and that the speeches contained in the two 
 other Gospels, and not in Mark, are derived from a second 
 source, the " collection of sayings," incorporated in different 
 ways by Matthew and Luke with the Grimdschrift, Matthew 
 giving the purer form of it. The Fourth Gospel he holds 
 has a two-fold aspect, it has an ideal and also an historical 
 side ; it is not indeed composed of different elements capable 
 of being externally distinguished, but its two-fold character 
 pervades the whole work, which is on the one hand based 
 upon great theological ideas, and on the other guided by quite 
 definite historical motives. For the latter Weizsacker appeals 
 in particular to the small incidental remarks, such as definite 
 notes of time or place, which in his opinion bear traces of 
 personal recollection. Such traces he thinks he finds even in 
 the Johannine speeches, his strongest argument, besides the 
 hostility to the Jews, being the circumstance that the evan- 
 gelist does not introduce his personal doctrinal view into the 
 speeches of Jesus (an opinion which necessitates a very forced 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 249 
 
 interpretation of many unambiguous utterances in the speeches 
 of the Johannine Christ). Weizsacker's explanation of this 
 two-fold character of the Gospel is that it was founded upon 
 personal recollections and communications of the aged 
 Apostle John, and composed by one of his disciples towards 
 the close of the first century. This intermediate position on 
 the Johannine question, which Weizsacker shares with Renan, 
 Hase, and many more, is after all a great concession to 
 Tubingen criticism ; but it is allowable to ask whether this 
 position is tenable, and not a halting-place merely on the 
 retreat which must end in the complete surrender of all 
 apostolic connexion with the Fourth Gospel. I hold Keim's 
 view is the more correct one, and that these scholars have 
 been influenced to some extent, if not by ordinary apolo- 
 getical motives, yet by their dogmatic predilection for an ideal 
 of Christ, which may be gathered from the Fourth Gospel, 
 though only by a free interpretation of the speeches, and with 
 which moderns have a good deal of emotional sympathy. 
 
 A valuable continuation of his book on the Gospels has 
 lately been given by Weizsacker in his work. Das apostolische 
 Zeitalter der christlichen Kiirhe i^i%?>6). He first describes 
 the formation of the primitive community by the appearances 
 of Christ (which, like all critical theologians, he conceives as 
 subjective experiences, or visions, of the Apostles), and its 
 original condition before the activity of Paul, who forms the 
 subject of the remainder of the first half of the book. Paul's 
 conversion is first related and explained by its psychological 
 conditions ; then his first missionary journey, the form of his 
 doctrine and theology are described ; this is followed by the 
 detailed consideration of the relations of the Apostle of the 
 Gentiles to the Churches in Jerusalem and Antioch, and a 
 comparison of the accounts of Galatians ii. and Acts xv. And it 
 is most noteworthy that in all the chief questions here involved, 
 in particular in his unfavourable view of the historical charac- 
 ter of the Acts, Weizsacker is in surprising agreement with 
 the theory of Baur. Subsequently the Apostle Paul's mis- 
 sionary journeys, and the condition of the Churches founded 
 by him, are described, under the guidance of the genuine 
 Epistles, in a very thorough and instructive manner. A 
 second part describes the further development of affairs from 
 Paul's imprisonment down to the end of the first or begin- 
 ning of the second century : (i) in Jerusalem, with an account 
 
250 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [V>k 111. 
 
 of the Epistle of James and the origin of the Synoptic 
 Gospels ; (2) in Rome, with the discussion of the Epistles to 
 the Romans and Philippians, the legend of Peter, and the 
 Epistles of Clement and the Hebrews ; (3) in Ephesus, with 
 the consideration of the Johannine literature and the Epistles 
 to the Ephesians and Colossians. The two questions as to 
 the presence of Peter in Rome and John in Ephesus are both 
 answered by Weizsacker, like Renan, in the affirmative, the 
 first with more assurance than the second ; the chief evidence 
 in the latter case being the Apocalypse, which he holds to 
 have been composed not by the Apostle John himself, but by 
 one of his disciples, who appealed to his authority. Weiz- 
 sacker's analysis of the Apocalypse is subtle and ingenious, 
 but not sufficiently thorough ; it is superseded by the 
 researches of Volter and Vischer, who have shown the 
 probability of a plurality of authors and a Jewish work as 
 the basis of the Apocalypse. The final portion of the book 
 treats of the Church of the first century, its assemblies and 
 worship, its constitution and its life. The historian's skill is 
 everywhere shown in discovering the most important and 
 characteristic facts, and in producing, from minute and 
 apparently unimportant indications, by skilful grouping and 
 Ingenious inferences, a vivid picture of the earliest state of 
 the Christian Church and its natural evolution from small 
 beginnings. Much is, of course, only conjecture of which the 
 truth may be disputed ; but even when it fails to produce 
 complete conviction, Weizsacker's account Is so clearly con- 
 ceived, and the reasons for it so carefully given, that it is 
 in the highest degree attractive and suggestive. Since Baur's 
 Christenthii'in der drei ersten Jakrkunderte, nothing has 
 appeared on the earliest times of the Christian Church 
 superior to the "Apostolic Age" by Weizsacker, the worthy 
 occupant of Baur's chair. 
 
 In conclusion, I may here refer to my own book, Das 
 Urckrisientktt-m, seine Schriften und Leliren, in geschicht- 
 lichem Ziisammenhang beschrieben (1887). It Is based on the 
 Hibbert Lectures, delivered In England in 1885, on "The 
 Influence of the Apostle Paul on the Development of Christi- 
 anity," and forms an extension and continuation of my earlier 
 work on Paulinismus (1873). In It I have tried to show 
 that the development of primitive Christianity Into the 
 Catholic Church must not be conceived as a continued 
 
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 25 I 
 
 Struggle and gradual reconciliation between Paulinism and Jew- 
 ish Christianity, as Baur had thought ; nor (with Ritschl) as 
 a falling away from the apostolical religion and a degeneration 
 of Paulinism ; but as the natural evolution of the Christian 
 Hellenism introduced by Paul, which soon cast off the 
 Pharisaic elements in Paul's doctrines, and developed, on 
 the one hand, in a speculative direction, into the Johannine 
 theology of Asia Minor ; on the other, in a practical direc- 
 tion, into the Church life of Rome (Epistle of James). But 
 notwithstanding my difference from Baur, both in my general 
 view and in my estimate of individual books (especially the 
 Apocalypse, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the Acts and 
 others), I shall never forget how much I, with all our genera- 
 tion, owe to the epoch-making achievements of the great 
 Tubingen Master. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 
 
 In the same year. with Strauss s Lt/e of yesus, which intro- 
 duced the new era of New Testament research, appeared 
 Vatke's book, Dze Religion des Alien Testaments nach den 
 kanonischen Biichern entwickelt, which contained the be- 
 ginning of a not less important revolution in the views held 
 regarding the Old Testament. The book met with a strange 
 fate. The able and original theories it contained were re- 
 ceived with such universal disapprobation that it was scarcely 
 considered worth while even to consider them with any 
 thoroughness ; for a generation they remained practically 
 unnoticed, and it was only between 1865 and 1870 that the 
 same critical views were again advanced in a different form, 
 and evoked ever growing interest. To Vatke's book itself 
 its unfortunate history was partly due. As a disciple of Hegel, 
 Vatke had a keen eye for the laws of the mental development 
 and religious consciousness of nations ; approaching Old 
 Testament research with his insight thus quickened by phi- 
 losophy, he saw the impossibility of resting content with the 
 traditional or even with the semi-critical views of the history of 
 the religion of the Old Testament then in vogue. But this 
 very philosophical training, which was Vatke's strength, con- 
 stituted the weakness of his book in the eyes of the public. 
 After the then prevailing fashion of his school, Vatke had 
 prefaced his historical inquiry by philosophical prolegomena, 
 enunciating in the most abstract form propositions concerning 
 the idea and phenomenon of religion, which could only be 
 understood by those initiated into the mysteries of Hegelian 
 terminology ; and even in the course of his history he em- 
 ployed this terminology much too freely. No wonder that 
 this unfortunate form of the book had on many the deterrent 
 effect described by Reuss^ in his own case. "On the ap- 
 
 ' Gesc/i. der h. Schrijten Allen Testaments. Preface, p. ix. 
 
 252 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 253 
 
 pearance of the book, the table of contents, with its Hegelian 
 formulse, of itself terrified me to such an extent that I re- 
 mained at the time unacquainted with it. A speculative 
 treatment of history I trust no further than I can see. Since 
 then indeed I have seen that theory and formula in this book 
 were really only an addition which might be dispensed with, 
 and that my inquiries might have been materially assisted if 
 I had not let myself be deterred by them." Since it is one 
 of the pleasantest duties of the historian to place misjudged 
 merit in its proper light, I will here give a short account 
 of Vatke's little known book, not of its philosophical super- 
 fluities, but of its valuable, historical, and critical essence. 
 
 Vatke starts from the indisputable fact that the sources for 
 the earlier history of the Old Testament religion are derived 
 from later legends, and are therefore incomplete and un- 
 certain. Accordingly he not only passes over the whole 
 history of the patriarchs as prehistoric legend, as others had 
 done before him, but he also subjects the traditional account 
 of Moses to a more searching criticism than any one had pre- 
 viously ventured to do. He finds that the notion of Moses 
 having given the people its civil law and a pure belief in 
 God is irreconcilable with later history. For he holds it to 
 be impossible that a whole nation should suddenly sink from. 
 a high stage of religious development to a lower one, as is 
 asserted to have been so often the case in the times of the 
 judges and kings ; and equally impossible for an individual 
 to rise all at once from a lower to a higher stage, and raise a 
 whole nation with him with the same rapidity. We must not 
 separate individuals from the general life around them, and 
 must therefore often supply connecting links omitted in the 
 legend, or reduce our conception of the individuals in question 
 to the standard of their age. " This is particularly the case 
 with Moses, since on the assumption of the truth even of only 
 the greater part of this tradition as to his work, both his own 
 person and the whole course of Hebrew history become 
 inexplicable ; he would have come when the time was not 
 fulfilled, and would thus be far more miraculous than Christ 
 himself. The profound idea of the New Testament, that the 
 law was introduced between the promises and their fulfil- 
 ment, may after all be justified, since the Pentateuch in its 
 completed form is in truth later than the promises of most 
 of. the prophets." From indications in later history, and 
 
!54 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 from isolated statements of the prophets (Amos v. 25 sq.), 
 Vatke infers that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared 
 the universal worship of the stars. With regard to the work 
 of Moses, a critical examination of the tradition, in conjunction 
 with the condition of the country under the judges, makes it 
 certain in the first place that Moses did not found a state, 
 since the main condition of this was wanting, viz. the estab- 
 lishment of a legislative and executive authority, which did 
 not exist in Israel until the times of the kings. With the 
 conception of actual sovereignty the Mosaic state lacked also 
 all higher unity and all that belongs to the sphere of public 
 justice. The legislation of the Pentateuch did not found a 
 political constitution, and was not intended to do so ; its 
 object was the partial development of certain relations of the 
 community, and it must therefore have originated within a 
 state already constituted, and may be compared to canon law. 
 With regard to the sacrificial and sacerdotal ordinances of 
 
 I the Pentateuch, the history of the times of the judges and 
 
 I earlier kings proves that the simple patriarchal method of 
 worship was then in force, — a plurality of sacred places, the 
 priesthood not confined to a single tribe, the forms of worship 
 still very simple. Only in the later kingdom of Judah did the 
 system of the Pentateuch become possible ; it was then by 
 degrees actually realised, and became the fixed ritual after 
 
 ' the Babylonian exile. Composite ceremonies, such as those 
 of the " Mosaic " ritual, are in general only comprehensible 
 as the products of a lengthy development, and become, in 
 their stereotyped permanence, the dead shells of a previous 
 or a parallel spiritual growth ; the rigid mechanism of form 
 is never the original and direct product. That the laws con- 
 
 1 cerning ritual in the Pentateuch are not derived from Moses, 
 and do not belong to the early pre-prophetic period at all, 
 is confirmed by the protests of the prophets against the 
 ceremonial worship, which they regard as not a revelation 
 from God, but an invention of godless and deceitful men ; 
 which would have been quite impossible if the Pentateuch 
 had existed. But if Moses was thus neither a political nor 
 ecclesiastical legislator, nor a sage speculating on the nature 
 of God, he was still a true prophet, who came forward in 
 consequence of direct inspiration as an ambassador from God, 
 and hallowed the judicial and moral life of the nation by 
 bringing it into relation with the divine will ; he concluded 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 255 
 
 a "covenant" between the people and Jehovah, and thus 
 maintained the dependence of the historical and natural ex- 
 istence of the nation upon the sphere of justice and morality ; 
 this indicates that he beheld in Jehovah a holy power, and that 
 he deduced the other attributes of the divine nature from this 
 central idea. We must not however attribute to Moses all 
 the consequences involved in this principle ; for like the con- 
 ception of the ideal unity of God, the attributes of his nature 
 were realised in their fulness only in the course of time. The 
 divine holiness was regarded partly as an exclusive principle 
 on the side of natural existence and the service of nature, 
 partly as the standard of a legal and moral life ; in order 
 therefore to separate the elements of the sensible and the 
 higher order of things, and to arouse the moral sentiment 
 from the dream of nature-life, this Power had to appear to 
 men as severity, as a consuming fire and a jealous power ; its 
 instruments had to be full of a like holy zeal, while the abstract 
 nature of their message only increased the necessity for stern- 
 ness. For the question at issue was still the recognition of the 
 Lord, of a holy Will, of law and morality in general ; the first 
 abstract stages of a great process of purification were still 
 being passed through, which afterwards the earlier prophets, 
 especially Elijah, similarly fought their way through. The 
 principle of mercy and grace could scarcely be represented 
 even in an infinitesimal degree in such a development. 
 Although Moses received the idea of the holy national God, 
 whose will was to guide the whole political and moral life of 
 his people as an original intuition, i.e. as a revelation, we 
 still must not disconnect his appearance and work from its 
 historical conditions. For since natural religion produces 
 some legal and moral institutions, we must not draw a hard 
 and fast line between the two forms of religion ; it only 
 needed a distinguished personality, in whom were focussed 
 the various rays of a better spirit, to find and announce the 
 solution of the problem of the national mind, and thus give 
 its development a new direction. But although part of the 
 nation sided with the prophet of the higher spirit and carried 
 on his work, still he was far from being able to lift the whole 
 people up to his higher point of view. The mass of the 
 nation still clung to the old Semitic worship of nature. Later 
 tradition was therefore wrong in representing the people 
 under and after Moses as repeatedly sinking to a lower stage 
 
256 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 from a higher one already attained ; on the contrary, the 
 development was a gradual one in an upward direction amid 
 a constant struggle between the two parties. " Hence the 
 later religion of the Hebrew nation had the Sabaic religion 
 of nature, and particularly the worship of Saturn, as its 
 empirical starting-point, and the revelation of the divine 
 ideality and holiness as its higher principle." 
 
 This description of its Mosaic beginnings gives the key to 
 Vatke's whole view of the history of the Hebrew religion. 
 This view, as may be seen, is the outcome of an acute com- 
 parative examination of the traditions, and of general ideas 
 on the philosophy of history. The latter indeed will not be 
 a recommendation in the eyes of the public of to-day ; but 
 to me this appears an instructive example of the intuition of 
 a philosophically trained mind showing empirical research 
 the road to its most fruitful discoveries. 
 
 A curious contrast to Vatke's book is presented by Ewald's 
 great work on the History of Israel (ist ed. 1843-52, 3 vols. ; 
 3rd ed. 1864-68, 7 vols.). In the former the decisive points 
 are noted with the penetrative glance of genius, and the out- 
 lines of an actual historical development are brought clearly 
 before us, with the omission of unimportant particulars ; while 
 in the latter the reader's mind is confused amid an endless mass 
 of details which prevent his ever arriving at a distinct idea of 
 the history as a whole. His criticism of authorities exhibits 
 Ewald's critical sagacity in its strength and weakness — keen- 
 sighted in little things, shortsighted in great. Ewald distin- 
 guishes as the main sources of the Pentateuch, the Book of 
 Covenants, the Book of Origins, three Prophetical Narrators, 
 and lastly the Deuteronomist. But though he has much to 
 say about the character of these sources and the determin- 
 ation of their date, he pays no attention to those serious 
 objections which Vatke had already urged against the early 
 pre-prophetic origin of the ritualistic and priestly legislation of 
 Leviticus and Numbers ; Ewald does not attribute this legis- 
 lation to Moses himself, but he has no difficulty whatever in 
 dating it (as the Book of Origins) from the time of Solomon. 
 Ewald, moreover, has scarcely the faintest idea of the 
 development of the religious consciousness, of which Vatke 
 with so much insight gives a probably true description. He 
 considers the revelation of the purely spiritual God, in whom 
 love is superior to punitive justice, had been so completely 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 257 
 
 given in Moses, that we can understand neither how such a 
 phenomenon was possible at the time, nor what fresh and 
 higher truth the subsequent prophetical, or even Christian, 
 revelation could add. This is connected with one of Ewald's 
 characteristic peculiarities. He lacked the primary qualifica- 
 tion of an historian, the ability to sink his own personality 
 and mode of thought and identify himself with other and alien 
 modes of thought and feeling. When any historical figure 
 impresses him (and all impress him which tradition in any 
 respect represents as heroes), he is immediately carried away 
 by his feelings, and ascribes to his heroes, forgetting the re- 
 quirements of sober criticism, all the noble moral thoughts 
 and feelings which he, the historian, entertains at the mo- 
 ment. We might call his history a didactic romance. His 
 method of treating the Hebrew legends of miracles is more 
 suitable to the edifying romance than to an historical inquiry. 
 He does not actually believe the miracles, but does not openly 
 deny them and explain the origin of the legends ; he mani- 
 pulates the individual traits of these Biblical narratives in so 
 artificial a manner, and casts over the whole such a cloud of 
 edifying phrases, that each reader may make what he likes out 
 of them, — one a real miracle, another a natural and insignificant 
 event, a third a moral allegory. But this was just what the 
 public wanted in the middle of the century ; the bright light 
 of Tubingen criticism had given pain to weak eyes only just I 
 waking from the dreams of centuries ; so it was comforting 
 to have the Biblical history of the Old and New Testaments 
 interpreted by so great a scholar and set in a dim, soft twilight, 
 such as could not hurt the weakest eyes, while at the same 
 time it flattered the cultivated mind with a considerable 
 degree of Aitfklarung. Thus this excellent philologian, but 
 bad historian and worse theologian, was able to retard by his 
 authority the healthy advance of Biblical criticism for a whole 
 generation. The light of the two stars, Hengstenberg and, 
 Ewald, quite eclipsed that of Vatke ; but at last Vatke's bril 1 
 liant theory has been brought to the front by the labours of' 
 more recent inquirers, and made the centre of the Old Testa- 
 ment researches of the present day. Not for men only, but 
 also for books, die Weltgeschickte ist das Weltgericht ! 
 
 During the decades of Ewald's supremacy, when Vatke 
 appeared to be forgotten, Reuss in his lecture room at Strass- 
 burg had given his auditors an account of the Old Testament 
 
 G.T. s 
 
258 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 literature and religion different from the prevalent one and 
 very similar to that of Vatke. Two of his hearers, while the 
 master himself cautiously deferred the publication of his views, 
 made the theory, by their independent researches, the subject 
 of a controversy which since then has never ceased. H. Graf, 
 in his book. Die geschichtlicken Biicher des A. Testaments 
 (1866), by an investigation of the history of the Israelite 
 ritual, as given in the more ancient sources (not in Chronicles, 
 which is much later and is coloured by a marked Tendenz), 
 arrived at the result that the priestly legislation in the middle 
 books of the Pentateuch was later than Deuteronomy, and only 
 after the Babylonian exile incorporated as a great interpola- 
 tion with the earlier work of the Deuteronomist. He still, how- 
 ever, kept to the then usual view, that the Elohistic narratives, 
 in spite of their close connection with the priestly legislation, 
 were part of the " Grundsckrift" and regarded them ac- 
 cordingly as the oldest part of the Pentateuch. He had thus 
 divided this Grundschrift into two parts, which, although 
 perfectly similar in language and thought, were supposed 
 to differ in date by more than 500 years, the one being the 
 oldest and the other the most recent portion of the whole 
 Pentateuch. It was of course not a difficult task for criticism 
 to prove the impossibility of such an hypothesis. But while 
 the representatives of the older point of view believed them- 
 selves to have thus refuted the whole theory, and to have 
 vindicated the antiquity of the whole Grundschrift, including 
 the priestly code, keener critics considered Graf's error to 
 consist in want of thoroughness in working out his own 
 theory, and not extending it also to the narrative portions 
 of the Grundschrift. Graf himself recognised this error, and 
 in an essay published shortly before his death on "die soge- 
 nannte Grundschrift des Pentateuchs" drew the necessary in- 
 ferences. Still, in spite of the great impression produced by 
 his arguments, German theologians continued to reject the 
 " Graf'sche Hypothese" through inability to get rid of the 
 prejudice, supported by the authority of Ewald, that his 
 theory was contradicted by the ascertained history of the 
 literature of the Old Testament. In these circumstances it was 
 again a former pupil and later colleague of Reuss, Professor 
 Kayser, of Strassburg, who by his book. Das vorexilische 
 Buch der Urgeschichte Israels und seine Erweiterungen (i 874), 
 gave the death blow to this prejudice by proving, by an in- 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 59' 
 
 vestigation of the literary interdependence of the books, that 
 the Jahvistic book of history, with its naive epic style, is the 
 oldest, that then follows the Deuteronomist, and that lastly 
 the Elohistic legislation was added^ with its appropriate 
 framework of narrative ; the order of sequence inferred from 
 the history of the ritual being thus confirmed by the literary 
 evidence. Two years after Kayser's book, appeared Well- 
 hausen's essays on the composition of the H'exateuch (Joshua 
 being taken with the Pentateuch), and then his Geschichte 
 Israels (1878), in which the arguments for the new hypothe- 
 sis, derived from the parallel development of law, ritual, and 
 literature, were exhibited with such cogency that the impres- 
 sion produced on German theologians (especially of the 
 younger generation) was almost irresistible ; thenceforward 
 " Graf's hypothesis," the resuscitation of the long-ignored 
 theory of Vatke, was universally regarded as a question de- 
 serving most serious consideration, and by many as an ascer- 
 tained fact. It was a special merit in Wellhausen's book to 
 have excited interest in these questions outside the narrow 
 circle of specialists by its skilful handling of the materials and 
 its almost perfect combination of wide historical considerations 
 with the careful investigation of details, and to have thus re- 
 moved Old Testament criticism from the rank of a subordinate 
 question to the centre of theological discussion. Personally 
 I welcomed this book of Wellhausen's more than almost any 
 other, for the pressing problem of the history of the religion of | 
 the Old Testament appeared to me to have been at last solved I 
 in a manner consonant with the principle of human evolution, , 
 which I am compelled to apply to the history of all religion. It 
 is true, I was better prepared than the majority of German 
 theologians to appreciate Wellhausen's book by my acquaint- 
 ance with Kuenen's-work, Godsdienst van Israel. 
 
 The Dutch scholar Abraham Kuenen had even before 
 Graf come to doubt the early date of the priestly Grundschrift, 
 from observing- diat the impossibilities which Colenso had 
 proved in his criticism of Old Testament history occurred 
 with the greatest frequency in it. When Graf's book ap- 
 peared, Kuenen- saw at once that its separation of the Grund- 
 schrift into law and history was untenable ; but in consider- 
 ing the further question, whether the historical portions should 
 follow after the laws, or vice versa, he decided unhesitatingly 
 for the former alternative, perceiving that Graf's, arguments 
 
260 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 for the post-deuteronomic origin of the priestly laws were 
 valid, while his supposition of the early date of the correspond- 
 ing historical narrative was neither proved nor to be proved. 
 Hence he arrived at the conviction that " not only is the 
 priestly legislation chronologically later than the preaching of 
 the prophets, but the priestly historiography is later than the 
 prophetic (Jahvistic)." From this point of view he composed 
 his great work, masterly alike in form and matter, Godsdienst 
 van Israel (1869-70), which in Holland met with deserved 
 appreciation, but in Germany, on account of its foreign lan- 
 guage, was less known beyond the narrowest circle of special- 
 ists than it deserved ; it is all the more a matter for congratu- 
 lation that an English translation has facilitated its circulation 
 beyond the narrow limits of the Dutch tongue. The ability 
 and originality of this history strike one at the outset. It 
 had always hitherto been supposed that the history of a na- 
 tion or a religion must follow the chronological sequence of 
 events, and therefore begin with the earliest time ; it was not 
 remembered that the earliest history, since there exist no 
 'contemporary authorities for it, is the most uncertain and 
 deast adapted to form the secure starting-point of historical 
 inquiry, constituting as it does at first only an obscure prob- 
 lem, the solution of which, so far as any solution is possible, 
 can only be approached from other ascertained facts. If our 
 conception of the earliest times is to be more than an arbi- 
 trary hypothesis, if it is to produce the impression of a well- 
 considered conviction, we must first lay its grounds before 
 the reader ; but since from the nature of the case these can 
 only consist of inferences from later well-attested facts, we 
 must begin with an account of the latter. Hence it follows 
 ' that the proper method is to start from some period that is 
 historically clearly known (with the 8th century in Hebrew 
 history, the time of the first prophets that left written records). 
 The prophetic authorities for the history of this period directly 
 supply only the conception of Israel's prehistoric life which 
 was entertained in prophetic circles, they contain the national 
 heroic legends as interpreted by the prophetic consciousness 
 of the 8th century. Only by taking account of the alter- 
 ations in the form of the legend made by this later time, either 
 by addition or subtraction, can the historical kernel be ap- 
 proximately extracted from the legendary husk, its probability 
 being greater in proportion to the extent to which it serves 
 
Cli. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 26 1 
 
 to explain the later development. This method combines 
 the most careful analysis and criticism of the sources with a 
 secure synthesis of the results, thus analytically obtained, in the 
 positive construction of the historical process of evolution. 
 This splendid method of historical research was, so far as I 
 am aware, first applied to the religion of Israel by Kuenen ; 
 it is, however, exactly parallel to Baur's method of investigat- 
 ing the history of primitive Christianity. Baur started with the 
 Apostle Paul, and used the indications as to the conditions of 
 the apostolic age, as supplied by Paul, to explain the historical 
 books produced in those conditions, and then only argued back 
 to the state of Christianity before Paul ; and in exactly the same 
 way Kuenen starts with the first literary prophets, seeks from 
 the conditions of their time to explain and estimate the his- 
 torical books belonging to it, and thence draws inferences with 
 regard to the previous period, which must be conceived in 
 such a way as to account for the state of things in the pro- 
 phetic age as the natural development from it. This exact 
 similarity of method in different departments is the more 
 interesting, as there is no doubt that Kuenen was uninflu- 
 enced by Baur's precedent, but worked out his method quite 
 independently, led by his own sound historical instinct. Of 
 the rareness of this fine historical instinct, and of the difficulty 
 most people find in even following an inquiry into intricate 
 questions in this way, we have evidence every day ; I have 
 myself been censured on all hands for beginning my account 
 of Primitive Christianity with Paul and not with Jesus, who, 
 everybody knows, preceded him ! But Abraham and Moses 
 preceded Amos and Isaiah, and yet Kuenen had good reason 
 to begin with the latter instead of the former. Real historical 
 insight seems as rare as philosophical, and perhaps they are 
 one and the same — an eye for the reality behind phenomena. 
 It was not until after Kuenen and Wellhausen that the 
 early teacher of Biblical criticism and originator of this new 
 movement, Eduarr Reuss, gave publicity to the results of 
 half a century's labours in two extensive works, the one in 
 French (being the third part of his great undertaking. La 
 Bible), Lhistoire sainte et la loi, and the other in German, 
 his Geschichte der keiligen Schrif ten Alien Testaments {\%'&\). 
 .In the preface to the latter he states that the idea and plan of 
 the work were determined on at the time of his first course 
 of lectures on the subject in 1834, but only in the shape of an 
 
262 EIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 intuition, for which he could not at the time produce sufficient 
 arguments. " Those who remember the literature of that 
 period, not the conservative .merely, but particularly the criti- 
 cal, will be able to understand my unwillingness at once to 
 challenge -the learned world to look upon the Prophets as 
 older than the Law, and the Psalms as later than both. For 
 these propositions, which were the main pillars of my concep- 
 tion of Hebrew history, were as yet rather a distant vision 
 than a solid fabric." He tells us he hit upon this idea in his 
 study of the legislation of Israel in hope of finding the thread 
 of Ariadne, which might guide him out of the labyrinth of 
 the current hypotheses into the daylight of a psychologically 
 possible process of development of the people of Israel. 
 While in his youth much effort was wasted in explaining 
 miracles as natural occurrences, the most unnatural miracles 
 were left unexplained, viz. the commencement of Israel's reli- 
 gious education with the developed Levitical ritual ; the 
 unacquaintance with it displayed by the greatest prophets, 
 such as Samuel and Elijah ; the censure pronounced by the 
 Books of Kings on what those prophets approved by their 
 example, and so on. Such difficulties as these, felt by Reuss 
 when quite a young man, but which were overlooked by 
 others, or explained away, led him to the bold solution which 
 overthrew the whole mass of current hypotheses, and opened 
 fresh channels for Old Testament criticism. On the other 
 hand, he himself confesses that he was at first guilty of the 
 same want of thoroughness as Graf (see above, p. 258), and 
 that it was the works of others, especially of Kayser and 
 Kuenen, which helped him logically to work out his present 
 theory. The grounds of this theory are most fully given in 
 the introduction to his book, L! hist aire sainte et la loi (1879). 
 He shows first negatively, by a thorough literary and historical 
 examination, the impossibility of regarding the Mosaic tradi- 
 tions as historical truth ; he then tries to find a secure 
 starting-point for positive criticism, and discovers it in Deuter- 
 onomy. This book, discovered under Josiah, and no doubt 
 composed not long before, is unacquainted with the most 
 important regulations of the priestly (Sinaitic) legislation, and 
 must therefore be earlier in date ; on the other hand, it shows 
 an acquaintance with the Decalogue and the Book of Cove- 
 nants (Exod. xx.-xxiii.), as well as with the Jahvistic historical 
 narrative. This "national epic of Israel" is therefore the 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 263 
 
 earliest portion of the Pentateuch, dating from the ninth cen- 
 tury B.C. With this was united, shortly before the Exile, the 
 only book of laws then in existence, the so-called Deuter- 
 onomy, by the insertion of the introductory and closing chap- 
 ters. It was not till after the Exile that the priestly legislation 
 was produced, by following out the indications given by 
 Ezekiel ; it was codified by Ezra in Palestine, and at first 
 promulgated as an independent book of laws. Finally, in 
 Ezra's school, it was incorporated in the pre-exilic Jahvistic- 
 Deuteronomic work, and now forms the larger portion of the 
 middle books of the Pentateuch. On the basis of this criti- 
 cism of the literature, Reuss has, in his Geschichte des Alten 
 Testaments, described the evolution of the religious and 
 political life of the people of Israel, from its historical com- 
 mencement to the destruction of Jerusalem, in four sections, 
 viz. the ages of the Heroes, the Prophets, the Priests, and 
 the Scribes. 
 
 In order to give the reader a general idea of the history of 
 Israel as it takes shape under these critical principles, it seems 
 most suitable to take as my basis Wellhausen's short sketch, 
 first contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then 
 published by him in a somewhat enlarged German edition 
 (1884) in the first number of his Skizzen utid Vorarbeiten. 
 It seems to me to contain a good summary of the conclusions 
 as to which critics of the school of Reuss and Graf are agreed, 
 and which may now perhaps be regarded as the certain result 
 of the most recent critical labours ; this of course does not 
 exclude uncertainty on many questions of detail, and difference 
 of opinion among critics even of this same school. This, 
 however, rather affects unimportant questions, the solution 
 of which may be interesting to specialists, but does not deeply 
 concern the history of theology. 
 
 Long before the Hebrew tribes were united into one politi- 
 cal community, Wellhausen tells us, they had a certain internal 
 unity, going back to the time of Moses, and apparently due 
 to Moses himself. The basis on which Israel's sense of 
 national unity at all times rested was the belief that Jahve was 
 the God of Israel, and Israel the people of Jahve. Moses did 
 not invent this belief, but he succeeded in making it the foun- 
 dation of the nation and its history. Necessity compelled a 
 number of related families to quit their ordinary mode of life, 
 and this gave him his opportunity. He undertook to lead 
 
264 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 them ; he had faith in the result, and the result justified him. 
 But the success of the undertaking, of which he was the 
 moving spirit, was no merit of his. A tremendous occurrence, 
 independent of him, and not even capable of being foreseen 
 in the darkness of the future, concurred in a startling manner 
 with his purpose ; One whom wind and sea obey placed His 
 power at his command. Behind him there stood a higher 
 Power, whose spirit worked in him, and whose arm acted for 
 him — not for his own good, but for that of the people. It 
 was Jahve. Jahve was the moving, provident force in the 
 history which the elements of the nation, collected by neces- 
 sity, passed through together, and in which they gained the 
 beginning of a real national consciousness. Moses was instru- 
 mental in producing this consciousness ; he also succeeded 
 further in keeping it alive and developing it. The extra- 
 ordinary circumstances which had given the first impulse to 
 the formation of the new nation still continued, and under 
 their pressure the creation of Israel went on. The authority 
 Moses had gained by his deeds naturally gave him the posi- 
 tion of the judge of the people. By giving his judicial sentences 
 in the name of Jahve, and connecting this function with his 
 sanctuary, he established a fixed centre for traditions of justice, 
 and began a thora in Israel, which imparted to the sense of 
 nationality and to the idea of God a positive ideal content. 
 Jahve was now not simply the God of Israel, but as such also 
 the God of law and righteousness, the basis, motive, and 
 unexpressed content of the national conscience. From that 
 time forth Jahve continued to raise up men who were moved 
 by the spirit to place themselves at the people's head ; in 
 them his own leadership took bodily shape. He marched 
 among the warriors of the levy, and their enthusiasm marked 
 his presence. Finally Jahve decided from heaven the strug- 
 gle carried on on earth. He was always on the side of Israel ; 
 his interest was limited to Israel, although his power — being 
 God — extended far beyond its borders. Thus Jahve was in 
 truth a living God, but the tokens of his activity in the great 
 crises of the history were separated by long pauses. His 
 mode of working bore some resemblance to thunder ; it was 
 more suitable for extraordinary occasions than for daily 
 domestic use. Still even in the intervals of quiet it did not 
 altogether cease. As human leaders do not altogether lose 
 in peace the influence gained in war, so was it with Jahve. 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 265 
 
 The ark of the covenant, an idol intended primarily for the 
 life of soldiers in camps and on marches, continued also in 
 peace, as the sign of Jahve's presence, to be the centre of his 
 worship. And with the ritual was closely connected, both in 
 the time of Moses and later, the sacred administration of 
 justice, the thora. In all difficult cases inquiry was made of 
 the mouth of Jahve, counsel being sought of the priests, who 
 gave sentence in the name of Jahve, — either according to their 
 own knowledge of his will, or according to a decision of the 
 lot, — and possessed simply moral authority. The priestly 
 thora was an institution wholly unconnected with and prior to 
 political arrangements ; it existed before the State, and con- 
 stituted one of its invisible fundamental pillars. War and law 
 were religion before they were changed into compulsion and 
 civil order; this is the real meaning of the so-called theocracy. 
 A regular state, with specific sanctity, was by no means built 
 up by Moses on the principle, "Jahve the God of Israel;" 
 and after him the old patriarchal constitution of families and 
 clans, the elders of which were leaders in war and judges in 
 peace, continued to exist. Only when the whole nation had 
 some great special work to perform was an appeal made to 
 Jahve as the last and extraordinary resource. The theocracy 
 may be said to have arisen to supply the defects of anarchy. 
 Out of the religious consciousness of nationality grew the 
 State, the sanctity of which depended precisely on the fact 
 that it arose as an ideal of religion, to be realized in conflict 
 with indolence and selfishness. " Jahve the God of Israel " 
 accordingly meant that national duties, both internal and 
 external, were conceived as sacred. It did not mean at all 
 that the almighty Creator of heaven and earth had first made 
 a covenant only with this single people, that they might know 
 and worship him. Jahve was not at first the God of the 
 whole world, who then became the God of Israel ; but he was 
 originally simply the God of Israel, and then became much 
 later the God of the world. In an enlightened idea of God, 
 Moses would have given the Israelites a stone instead of bread ; 
 most probably he left them to think as their fathers had 
 thought about the nature of Jahve in itself, irrespective of his 
 relation to men. With speculative truths, for which there 
 was then no demand whatever, he did not concern himself, 
 but only with practical questions, definitely and necessarily 
 brought before him by the time. The religious starting-point 
 
266 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 of the history of Israel is distinguished, not by its marked 
 novelty,~but by its normal character. In all ancient nations 
 we find the gods brought Into rdation with national officers, 
 and religion used as a motive_power of law and custom ; but 
 in none with such purity and force as in the case of the 
 Israelites. Whatever Jahve's real nature may have been — 
 the God of thunder, or whatever he was,- — it retreated more 
 and more into the background as something secret and tran- 
 scendent, and no questions were asked concerning it. The 
 whole emphasis was laid on his action in the world of men, 
 whose aims he made his own. Religion did not call men to 
 participate in the life of God, but, on the contrary, God in the 
 life of men ; but in this it did not really fetter but free human 
 life. The so-called particularism of the idea of God, the 
 limitation of Jahve's interest to the affairs of Israel, was the 
 real strength of this religion ; it liberated it from the fruitless 
 play of mythology, and facilitated its application to moral 
 duties, which are always first presented and fulfilled only in 
 definite circles. As the God of the nation, Jahve became the 
 God of law and righteousness, and as such grew to be the 
 highest, and finally the sole power in heaven and earth. — After 
 the settlement of the Hebrews in Canaan, the higher civiliza- 
 tion of settled life was accompanied by a gradual weakening 
 of their national and religious consciousness. In proportion 
 as Israel coalesced with the conquered country, the gods of 
 the two nations coalesced also, and then arose a syncretism of 
 Jahve with Baal, which lasted on into the time of the prophet 
 Hosea. But the course of national history fanned the smoul- 
 dering coals into a blaze. The Philistines aroused Israel and 
 Jahve from their slumber. In the struggle against them was 
 founded Saul's kingdom ; and his more fortunate successor, 
 David, became the founder of the united Israelite kingdom, 
 whose military power remained always the proudest memory 
 of the nation. Later Jewish tradition, however, was wrong 
 in making him a Levitical saint and pious psalmist. Under 
 Solomon the floodgates were opened to Oriental culture in 
 the wider and higher sense ; closer intercourse with foreign 
 lands widened the people's intellectual horizon, and at the 
 same time deepened the sense of its peculiarity. His intro- 
 duction of Phoenician and Egyptian institutions into the 
 worship of Jahve might offend the true old Israelites of his 
 time, but his temple became afterwards of great importance 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 267 
 
 to the religion. The division of the kingdom under Reho- 
 boam was caused both by the discontent at the innovations 
 and strict discipline of Solomon's government, and also by 
 the jealousy of the tribe of Joseph, which had always been 
 the natural rival of the tribe of Judah favoured by David. 
 Religion was at that time no obstacle to the separation, as the 
 temple services in Jerusalem had not yet become exclusive, 
 the worship instituted by Jeroboam at Bethel and Dan 
 being equally legitimate ; there were images in both places, 
 and indeed wherever there was a sanctuary. There was in 
 general no difference in the religious and spiritual life of the 
 two kingdoms, save that religious movements generally first 
 originated in Israel. A new stage in the history of religion 
 began with the appearance of the prophet Elijah, the most 
 striking heroic figure in the Bible, towering solitary above his 
 time, and whose memory was preserved by legend and not 
 by history. When Jahve had thus founded the nation and 
 kingdom, primarily by its struggle with external foes, he 
 commenced an attack, within the nation and in the spiritual 
 sphere, upon the foreign elements which had been hitherto 
 admitted without much opposition. Ahab's erection of a 
 temple for the Tyrian Baal in Samaria was the occasion of 
 Elijah's contention against the Baal cultus generally, and 
 against the syncretism between Baal and Jahve, from which 
 very few in Israel had kept free. For Elijah there were not 
 several Powers with equal claims and equally worthy of 
 worship, but everywhere only one holy and mighty Being, 
 revealed, not like Baal in the life of nature, but like Jahve in 
 the ethical demands of the spirit ; the idea of God began in 
 individual men to rise above national limitation. — In the flour- 
 ishing period of the Northern kingdom, under Jeroboam II., 
 Hebrew literature began. The religious lyrics, telling of the 
 mighty deeds of God through and for Israel, which were 
 originally handed down by word of mouth, were now com- 
 mitted to writing and collected ; thus arose the " Book of the 
 Wars of Jahve" and the "Book of the Upright," the oldest 
 Hebrew histories. The next step was to write history in 
 prose, making use of documents or family recollections. The 
 books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings contain a considerable 
 part of these ancient historical writings. At the same time 
 certain collections of judicial maxims and decisions of the 
 priests were written down, of which we have an example in 
 
268 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 the so-called " Book of the Covenants" (Exod. xxi., xxii.). A 
 little later, perhaps, were recorded the legends of the Patriarchs 
 and of the earliest times, which cannot have had a very early 
 origin. When in this way a literary age had arisen, the pro- 
 phets also began to write down their speeches. — -With the 
 growth of civilization and national prosperity, worship also 
 became more stately than in the simple times of antiquity. 
 This was also the channel by which heathenism could, and did 
 again and again, make its way into the worship of Jahve ; 
 especially was this the case with the private sanctuaries, so 
 that kings and prophets emphatically insisted on the publicity 
 of worship, which provided a corrective for the worst excesses. 
 The priests, moreover, did not merely offer sacrifices, but were 
 also the advisers and instructors of the people, although these 
 more important duties were neglected in comparison with the 
 more lucrative ones connected with the sacrifices. The belief 
 of the nation was the simplest possible : Jahve is the God of 
 Israel, Israel's helper in need, the judge to secure him justice 
 against his enemies. But Jahve's work was seen, not in the 
 fate of individuals, but in that of clans and nations. Rarely 
 has history so powerfully touched the chords of a nation's 
 heart ; rarely has it been to this extent regarded as the effect 
 of the divine action, to which human action can only inquir- 
 ingly adapt itself, or prayerfully submit. Events were mira- 
 cles and signs, chance the pointing finger of a higher hand. 
 This way of looking at history was preserved from triviality 
 because the history of a people, not of individuals, was the 
 object of attention. The faith of men thus gained an 
 emotional vividness, the conception of God a magnificent 
 reality. Seers and prophets saw by second sight what Jahve 
 did, but there was no theology which coolly speculated about 
 him. Men did not seek to know his principles of action, but 
 his immediate intention, in order to act accordingly. The 
 living proof of actual experience was compatible with great 
 freedom of expression ; the reality of experience did not fear 
 even contradictions. Jahve had incalculable moods ; he 
 caused his face to shine, and he was wroth, it was not known 
 why ; he created good and evil, punished sin and tempted to 
 sin. Satan had not then robbed him of some of his attributes. 
 In spite of all this, Israel did not doubt him. On the whole, 
 times had hitherto been prosperous ; the disharmony between 
 external experience and faith had not become so painful as to 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 269 
 
 demand a reconciliation. The case was different when the 
 great Assyrian power began to stretch out its arms towards 
 Israel. — In anticipation of the coming troubles, the prophet 
 Amos made his appearance, the first and purest representative 
 of a new phase of prophecy. While all the minor nations 
 trembled before the approach of the eastern conqueror, the 
 Israelite prophets alone were neither surprised nor dismayed, 
 but in advance solved the terrible problem history presented. 
 They enlarged religion so as to embrace the conception of the 
 world, which had proved fatal to other religions, before it had 
 really become part of the profane consciousness of the people. 
 Where others saw the ruin of what was most holy, they saw 
 the triumph of Jahve over appearances and vain beliefs. 
 Whatever might fall, what was valuable remained firm. The 
 very time they lived in became for them the unfolding story 
 of a divine drama, the course of which they watched with 
 prophetic foresight and intelligence. Everywhere the same 
 laws, everywhere the same goal of development. The nations 
 are the actors, Israel the hero, and Jahve the poet of the 
 tragedy. The prophets, of the line of whom Amos was the 
 first, did not proclaim a new God, but they preached that 
 the God of Israel was primarily and above all the God of 
 righteousness, and Israel's God only in so far as Israel 
 satisfied his righteous demands. They therefore reversed 
 the traditional order of the two fundamental articles of faith. 
 This delivered Jahve from the danger of coming into collision 
 with the world, and suffering shipwreck ; the sovereignty of 
 right extended further than the might of the Assyrians. 
 Thus an historical contingency enabled moral convictions to 
 break through the limitations of the narrow faith in which 
 they had grown to maturity, and so to bring about an 
 advance in the knowledge of God. This is the so-called 
 ethical monotheism of the prophets ; they believed in the 
 moral order of the world, in the unfailing validity of righteous- 
 ness as the supreme law for the whole world. From this 
 point of view Israel's prerogative seems to be annulled, and 
 Amos, who states the new doctrine with the greatest abrupt- 
 ness and regardlessness of consequences, sometimes verges 
 upon the denial of it ; he calls Jahve the God of hosts, i.e. of 
 the world, but not the God of Israel. Still, the special relation 
 of Jahve to Israel was not doubted by the prophets; they only 
 made its condition a moral instead of a physical one. They 
 
270 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. IIL 
 
 emphasised the idea — not as yet the name — of the Covenant 
 and the corresponding idea of the Law, and made these the 
 basis of religion. Nevertheless, their attention was directed, 
 not as yet to the righteousness of the individual and the heart, 
 but to national uprightness and social action. The negative 
 result of their ethical monotheism was their attack on ritual, 
 so far as it was regarded as a means of purchasing the favour 
 of God without moral worth. Above all, the prophets at- 
 tacked the sensuous rites connected with worship as a 
 heathenish service of Baal. The prophets were taught by 
 history to know the awful severity of the righteousness of 
 Jahve ; they are the founders of the religion of the Law. 
 This is what constitutes their importance, not their being the 
 forerunners of the gospel. Least of all are they the latter on 
 account of their Messianic prophecies. In them they really 
 fall back upon the patriotic but illusive hopes of the common 
 people, and the "false prophets," whom they on other grounds 
 assail. This was the proof of the insufficiency of their princi- 
 ple. In view of the facts and necessities of history, the posi- 
 tion of the prophets inevitably led them to transcend the limits 
 of their nation and the world. It was. due to the prophets 
 that the fall of Samaria did not injure but strengthened the 
 religion of Jahve ; they saved the faith by destroying the 
 illusion ; they also immortalised Israel by not involving Jahve 
 in the ruin of the nation. — After the fall of Samaria, the king- 
 dom of Judah, which had hitherto politically and religiously 
 followed in the wake of the northern kingdom, succeeded to 
 its position. The prophet Isaiah was the means of saving 
 it from immediately sharing the fate of the northern kingdom, 
 by being involved in the foreign politics of the time, and of 
 securing for it a century of quiet and prosperous development. 
 He despised politics, and yet understood them better than the 
 short-sighted, practical politicians of his day ; he took in at a 
 glance the confusion of the time, for he stood outside and 
 above it. A magnificent faith in the victorious, universal 
 sovereignty of Jahve gave him courage and discretion amid 
 the storms of the time. While the great military powers of 
 the world threatened to stamp out Jerusalem, he beheld in 
 spirit the time when the great nations should come to pay 
 homage in the city of Jahve, and truth go forth from Zion. 
 Truth never expressed its confidence in itself with greater 
 assurance of victory. But this joyful confidence was mingled 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 27I 
 
 with tragic resignation. Isaiah recognised the inevitableness 
 of heavy judgments, to which the greater part of the nation 
 would succumb, and only a small remnant be spared as a 
 sacred seed for the future. And to prepare this remnant to 
 realise the ideal of a people of God, first on a small scale, he 
 considered to be the most pressing duty of the age. The 
 prophets thus entered on the path of practical reform, begin- 
 ning with the purification of worship. Isaiah energetically 
 resumed the attack on the worship of images, which Hosea 
 had previously derided, and obtained its actual abolition under 
 King Hezekiah. But the popular religion offered so stout a 
 resistance to this reform that Hezekiah' s son Manasseh had to 
 comply with it in the restitution of ritualistic superstitions, and 
 even permit its increase by the adoption of all kinds of heathen 
 rites and forms. The counter-reformation aped in bloody 
 fanaticism the sacred zeal of the prophets, children were sacri- 
 ficed in honour of Jahve-Moloch in the valley of Gehenna. 
 This period, in which the antithesis between ritualistic bigotry 
 and pure morality reached its acutest form, witnessed the 
 origin of the powerful warnings of the prophet Micah, and 
 perhaps also the commands of the Decalogue, which con- 
 cerned ritual only negatively by the command to abstain from 
 idols, and constituted moral goodness the sole content of the 
 divine Will, quite on the lines of Micah vi. 6-8. — A short 
 but very fruitful triumph was obtained by the prophetic efforts 
 at reform under King Josiah. One of their results was the 
 Book of Deuteronomy, supplementing the Decalogue by an 
 actual national code of laws, based chiefly on a modification 
 of ancient legal maxims. It was the first book of Law and 
 Covenant, the comprehensive programme of a reorganisa- 
 tion of the theocracy according to the ideals of the prophets. 
 Here is shown more plainly than anywhere else that Prophets 
 and Law are not opposed to each other, but are identical and 
 related as cause and effect. Nowhere is the fundamental 
 thought of the prophets expressed more clearly than in 
 Deuteronomy, that Jahve demands nothing for himself, but 
 regards and demands justice between man and man as the 
 true religion, and that his Will is not hidden high above us or 
 far off from us, but is to be found in the sphere of moral con- 
 duct known and understood by all. The most important 
 regulation regarding ritual in this code was the centralisation 
 of the worship of Jahve in Jerusalem, and the abolition of all 
 
2/2 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. IIL 
 
 Other sanctuaries. The motive of this radical innovation was 
 the consistent carrying out of the pure monotheistic religion, 
 and opposition to the heathenish naturalism, which had taken 
 such firm root in the idolatry of the high-places that it could 
 only be exterminated by the abolition of the latter. The 
 limitation of the worship of Jahve to Jerusalem was the popu- 
 lar and practical form of the prophetic monotheism ; but the 
 subsidiary consequence of this measure, and one not intended 
 by the legislator, was to strengthen the hierarchy at Jeru- 
 salem. Thus the first practical consequence of the prophetic 
 efforts at reform contained the germ of the subsequent de- 
 generation of their work. — The theocratic zeal aroused in the 
 people for Law and temple appeared to all to be a pledge of 
 lasting prosperity. Only one man was not deceived by the 
 external appearance, the prophet Jeremiah. In warning 
 words he pointed those who thought themselves secure to the 
 fate of Shiloh and the Ephraimites ; he was rewarded with 
 scorn and persecution. The patriotic fanaticism, which would 
 not learn either from Jeremiah or the course of history itself, 
 led to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the carrying away of 
 the people into the Babylonian captivity. Jeremiah, who had 
 foreseen this, did not despair, but turned his eyes towards a 
 better future for religion and his people. In his hopeless 
 struggle with popular infatuation and obstinacy he had come 
 to see that the real want was a new heart, which could be 
 created by no teaching and no form of worship, but could 
 only be given by God to individual men. The endeavour to 
 make religion individual and inward was the new tendency 
 which sprang out of the decline of the nation, and was pre- 
 figured in the individualistic piety of the last and greatest of 
 the prophets, Jeremiah. In place of the nation he was him- 
 self the subject of religion ; he only, not Israel, had fellowship 
 with Jahve. He knew that the future and eternity depended 
 upon him, for the nation was not eternal, but the truth which 
 the nation despised, and of which he was certain. — The small 
 Jewish colony that returned from the exile was no longer a 
 State, but only a religious community. The means for its 
 organisation could only be supplied by the temple service and 
 the priesthood of Jerusalem. The hierocracy, for which even 
 at the beginning of the Exile Ezekiel had begun to prepare, 
 was now inevitably realised. The high-priest, with the 
 nobility of the priests, beside whom the common Levites sank 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 273 
 
 to mere temple servants, became the centre and rulers of 
 the community. But in the confusion of the next decades the 
 religious spirit threatened to die out, and the Jewish colony to 
 perish by its mixture with the semi-heathenism of the inhabi- 
 tants of the country. Then came, under Ezra, a new rein- 
 forcement of Jews from Babylon, who aroused afresh in the 
 colony in Palestine the spirit of strict loyalty and the exclusive- 
 ness of the Jewish nature towards everything not Jewish, 
 which had been more fully developed in a foreign land. The 
 introduction of Ezra's priestly code laid the foundation of the 
 Judaism of later times. This post-Deuteronomic legislation 
 deals, not with a nation, but with a community, and regulates 
 chiefly the worship. Political matters are left out, as they 
 concern the foreign government. The constitution of the 
 community is assumed to be the hierocracy. The head of 
 the worship is the head of the whole community ; the high- 
 priest takes the place also of the king. The other priests are 
 officially his subordinates, as the bishops are subordinate to 
 the pope. They are distinguished from the Levites, the 
 lowest rank of the clergy, not only by their office, but also by 
 their noble birth. In this clerical organisation the govern- 
 ment of holiness is outwardly realised. Inwardly the ideal of 
 holiness governs life by a net of ceremonies and observances 
 which separate the Jew from the man. The renovated ritual 
 of the Temple, augmented by fresh sacrificial rites, had essen- 
 tially the same object ; it provided a fixed and united centre 
 for the new theocracy, and formed a protecting shell around 
 the faith and customs of the Fathers for the preservation of 
 ethical monotheism until it could become the common pro- 
 perty of the world. — Underneath this husk of ceremonial 
 precepts the kernel of prophetic religion did not altogether 
 die. On the contrary, the individualisation of piety made 
 further progress. Men began to reflect upon religion. The 
 so-called " Wisdom" was evolved, of which we have literary 
 remains in the Book of Job, in the Proverbs of Solomon and 
 of the son of Sirach, and in Ecclesiastes. And that reflec- 
 tion was not injurious to depth of feeling, but that, on the 
 contrary, individualism tended to make religion a matter of 
 the heart, is shown by the Psalms, which all belong to this 
 period. It was an immense advance that the devout Hebrew 
 became assured of his communion with God, as he does in 
 many Psalms, by inward experience, and thus dared to trust 
 G.T. T 
 
2 74 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 to himself in his religious relations. This was a subsidiary 
 product of prophetism, but of equal importance with its chief 
 product, the Law ; it was the universalisation of the personal 
 experience which the prophets, while outwardly unsuccessful, 
 had had in themselves of the inward saving power of truth. 
 While Judaism in the following centuries was petrified under 
 the influence of the externality of ceremonial law, the germ of 
 a nobler future lived on in the depths of inward feeling such 
 as occasionally finds its expression in the " Wisdom " books 
 and the Psalms. The gospel developed these hidden im- 
 pulses of the Old Testament, while it protested against the 
 dominant tendency of Judaism. And the religious individual- 
 ism of the gospel remains the salt of the earth. 
 
 I hope I have not wearied the reader with this excerpt from 
 Wellhausen's sketch of the history of Israel. Its insertion 
 was necessary, inasmuch as it is possible to properly esti- 
 mate the great importance of the Old Testament criticism 
 of to-day only by a comparison of this new conception of 
 Israelite history with the earlier traditional one. There we 
 had from beginning to end a series of riddles, of psychological 
 and historical puzzles ; here everything is comprehensible, we 
 have a clear development, analogous to the rest of history, the 
 external history of the nation and the internal history of its 
 religious consciousness in constant accord and fruitful inter- 
 action ; and though not an unbroken advance in a straight 
 line of the whole people, still a laborious struggle of the repre- 
 sentatives of the higher truth with the stolid masses, a 
 struggle in which success and defeat succeed each other in 
 dramatic alternation, and even failure only serves to aid the 
 evolution of the idea itself in ever greater purity from its 
 original integuments. This is human history, full of marvels 
 and of Divine revelation, but jiowTie_re interrupted ty miracle 
 or by sudden, unaccountable transitions. ~ 
 
 So bold an innovation necessarily provoked considerable 
 opposition. This was often expressly, and perhaps still 
 oftener silently, directed against what seems to us precisely 
 the advantage of this new theory, viz. the substitution of a 
 humanly comprehensible development for mysterious miracles 
 and revelations. Since this opposition rests on dogmatic 
 assumptions lying outside history, it cannot determine the 
 course of the historian. Serious consideration, on the other 
 hand, is due to such objections as have been raised by learned, 
 
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 275 
 
 dogmatically unbiassed, Old Testament scholars, and are based 
 on scientific research. Specially important, in this connec- 
 tion, are Ewald's eminent scholars : Dillmann, Schrader, and 
 Noldeke ; further, Riehm, Delitzsch, Strack, Bredenkamp, 
 Ryssel, Curtiss, Finsler, Konig, Kittel, and others. I cannot 
 here enter on the various, often conflicting, views of these 
 scholars as to the composition of the Pentateuch. Their 
 chief objections to the theory of Reuss and Graf may be sum- 
 marised as follows : From the fact that in a given historical 
 period we find no traces of the observance of a law, we cannot 
 forthwith infer the non-existence of the law at that time, since 
 it is possible for laws to be in existence long before they come 
 to be observed in practice. Further, the difference between 
 the prophets and Deuteronomy on the one hand, and the 
 priestly code on the other, is exaggerated by the critics ; some 
 variations may be explained by the difference in the points of 
 view and objects aimed at. The view that the prophets and 
 the Deuteronomist had no acquaintance with the priestly 
 code must be qualified, for both the prophets and Deuter- 
 onomy presuppose the existence of a thora relating to the 
 ritual.^ The distinction between priests and Levites was not 
 first introduced by Ezekiel, but was presupposed by him as 
 already long in existence. Finally, the chief objection is, that 
 the priestly code itself contains several directions which cannot 
 be explained from the time of Ezra, but point to a very early, 
 certainly pre-Deuteronomic date. Also the linguistic peculiari- 
 ties of the priestly code present indications of an early period, 
 not that after the exile, and in part even point to the earliest 
 period of Hebrew literature. 
 
 The advocates of the Reuss-Graf theory have not been 
 slow to answer these objections. Kayser, in his essays on 
 the present position of the question of the Pentateuch,^ has 
 subjected them to an examination, the conclusion of which is 
 that the three lines of attack made by Old Testament scholars 
 on Graf's theory have been repelled. " The theory has 
 maintained all its positions without giving way an Inch. When 
 the history of ritual has shown that the laws of the Elohistic 
 book were first promulgated in the time of Ezra ; when the 
 history of literature makes it plain that the book was unknown 
 
 1 This is also maintained by Vatke in his posthumous Introduction to the 
 Old Testament (1887), though without renouncing the main principle of his 
 early book — The Prophets before the Law. 
 
 '^ Jahrb.fiir prot. Theol., vii. 2-4 Heft. 
 
276 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 to all previous writers, and can only be properly understood 
 by a reference to Ezekiel's mode of thought ; when, finally, the 
 history of language Is compelled against its will to show that 
 the book bears all the characteristics of this time, — then what 
 further proof can we possibly expect of its really belonging to 
 it ? Until further evidence is forthcoming, we shall be justi- 
 fied in regarding Grafs theory as the best substantiated and 
 alone satisfactory explanation of the Pentateuch." Still even 
 the adherents of this theory admit that various questions of 
 detail have still to be answered. It is acknowledged that the 
 pre-Deuteronomic historical book, even after the removal of 
 the priestly code, is derived from two sources, a Jahvistic 
 and an Elohistic one ; as to the mutual relation of which 
 opinions are still quite divided. In Deuteronomy it is doubt- 
 ful whether the introductory and concluding chapters come 
 from the author of the book himself, or whether they were 
 added by a later hand, for the purpose of connecting it with 
 the earlier historical work. Of still greater importance is the 
 question whether the law promulgated by Ezra was the whole 
 of the Pentateuch, or only the main contents of the priestly 
 code, which was afterwards incorporated by the disciples 
 of Ezra in the earlier work, perhaps enlarged by the legal 
 additions and historical narratives. 
 
 The most recent thorough investigation of all these ques- 
 tions, including a consideration of antagonistic views, is given 
 by Kuenen in his Historisch-kritische Einleitung in die 
 Bilcher des alten Testaments hmsichtlich Hirer Entstehung und 
 Sammlung (1885, German trans, by Weber, 1887; English 
 by Wicksteed, 1887). He comes to the conclusion that in 
 the year of the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah (444 B.C.), the 
 Deuteronomic-prophetic sacred history and the priestly legis- 
 lative historical book were still separate, and that the two 
 were first combined to form the Hexateuch in the course of 
 the fifth century'by the Sopherim of the school of Ezra ; that 
 the text of the Hexateuch even then underwent numerous 
 revisions during a considerable period, of which traces remain 
 in the discrepancies between the three recensions (textus re- 
 ceptus, Samaritan Pentateuch and the Alexandrine translation). 
 Of further advocates of this theory, we may here mention 
 Stade [Gcschichte Israels, incomplete), Budde (^Die biblische 
 Urgeschichte, 1883), Smend [Coininentar zit Ezechiel), Duhm 
 {Tkeologie der Propheten, 1875), Schultz [Alttcstamentlicke 
 Tkeologie, 2nd ed., 1878). 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF DOGMA. 
 
 The way in which ecclesiastical history is written is always 
 largely determined by dogmatic or philosophical theology. 
 The extent and character of his own comprehension of Christi- 
 anity guides the ecclesiastical historian in his view of the 
 Church's past and in his judgment of the action of the his- 
 torical personages and the growth of the institutions, customs, 
 and doctrines of the Church. Again, on the other hand, a 
 comprehension of the history of the Church is a factor in the 
 formation of a dogmatical view of the nature of Christianity, 
 and of the significance of its traditions in the doctrine and 
 customs of the Church. Hence an account of the develop- 
 ment of theology in our century is bound to include works on 
 ecclesiastical history, so far at least as the most important of 
 them are typical of a definite tendency or stage of theological 
 knowledge. 
 
 During the flourishing period of Rationalistic theology, at 
 the end of the last and beginning of this century, church 
 history was written on the pragmatic method, of which the 
 best known exponents were Spittler and Planck, both 
 Swabians by birth, and invited from Tubingen to Gottingen, 
 where they entered on long and successful careers both as 
 teachers and authors. Spittler's Grundriss der Geschichte 
 der ckrisil. Kirche (1782), is written from the point of view 
 of the Aufklarung, in order to show how the human mind 
 had risen through the revolutions of eighteen centuries to 
 its present freedom in religious matters. The book is mainly 
 descriptive of the secular-political side of the Church ; its 
 religious and theological side being cast into the background. 
 Like Gottfried Arnold, Spittler sympathised with the heretics 
 in their opposition to the orthodox Church ; but this sympathy 
 was not due in Spittler, as in Arnold, to religious mysticism, 
 but to the dogmatic indifferentism of the Aufklarung, to which 
 the nature of Christianity as religion had become problem- 
 
273 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 atic and incomprehensible. Since Christian history is thus 
 from the beginning deprived of any guiding principle, it is 
 impossible to discover any theological coherence in it, and it 
 comes to be " one long lamentation over the weakness and 
 corruption of the human mind," which, however, is still gradu- 
 ally improved by the happy dispensations of Providence, 
 which from time to time, by the sending of wise men, brings 
 about a change for the better. The persons and phenomena 
 of history are not explained and judged according to the 
 principles and motives of their own time, but all alike are 
 estimated by the standard of the modes of thought of the 
 Aufklarung, and anything not agreeing with it is forthwith 
 condemned as stupidity, phantasy, and error. 
 
 More moderate in tone, but written essentially on the same 
 pragmatic method, are Planck's works, Geschichte der Entstel- 
 lung, der Veranderungen luid der Bildtmg unseres protestant- 
 ischeii Lehrbegriffs von Anfang der Reformation bis zur 
 Einfilhrzmg der Concordienformel {6 vols., 1 781-1800), and 
 Geschichte der christlich-kirchlichen Gesellschaftsverfassung 
 (5 vols. 1 803-1 809). The excellence of these works consists 
 in the exactness of the examination of authorities, the careful 
 regard of the various concurring circumstances, external rela- 
 tions, and inward inclinations conditioning actions, and the 
 sagacity in the discovery and combination of motives, thus 
 producing a lifelike and vivid picture of historical events. 
 But the weak side of this "psychological pragmatism" is also 
 specially evident in Planck : he tries to explain everything 
 that happens by the accidental subjective motives of individual 
 persons, and fails to understand the deeper causes lying in the 
 general ideas and prevailing tendencies of an age. The sub- 
 jectivism of the Aufklarung, which isolates and lays stress on 
 the individual, with his peculiar nature and arbitrary will, is 
 reflected in this treatment of history, which substitutes for the 
 great objective forces of human society the trivial play ot 
 accident and the caprice of individuals. And since the psy- 
 chological motives of men, especially of those living in the 
 past, can never be known with certainty, but at most only 
 conjectured, this pragmatism, which aims at explaining all 
 events by men's subjective motives, leads unavoidably to the 
 ascription of motives really quite foreign to the actors. We 
 often get the impression that the astute aims and plans 
 described by the historian are rather an invention of his own 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY Ot DOGMA. 279 
 
 than a part of the history itself. With this principle of the 
 Aufklarung is further connected the incapacity to enter, impar- 
 tially and sympathetically, into the modes of thought and the 
 religious interests and wants of the past. Such phenomena 
 as the papacy, scholasticism, and mysticism, find as little 
 favour in the eyes of Planck as of Spittler. That these things 
 were in their time the necessary and therefore legitimate ex- 
 pressions of the spirit of religious society, is a fact the subjec- 
 tive understanding of the Aufklarung cannot comprehend, but 
 it regards them categorically as lamentable errors, fanaticisms, 
 or even frauds. From this point of view the historian fails to 
 perceive the objective rationality of history, the development 
 of mind through various stages, and the functions of indi- 
 viduals foreign to himself, in whom the common spirit of their 
 time found a peculiar and forcible expression. 
 
 Among Planck's auditors from 1808-10 was August 
 Neander, who had shortly before given up Judaism for Chris- 
 tianity, and under the influence of Schleiermacher's Reden 
 had resolved to study theology, in order, as he confessed to a 
 friend, to " make war for ever on the common understanding, 
 which gets further and further away from the eternal centre 
 of all being, the Divine." This confession sufficiently shows 
 how different was the spirit of the scholar from that of his 
 master ; nevertheless Neander was first led by Planck to study 
 the sources of ecclesiastical history, though with very different 
 results in his case. When, in 18 13, Neander was called to a 
 chair in the newly founded University of Berlin, he became, 
 after Schleiermacher, the most important representative of 
 the new theology, which by its profounder appreciation of the 
 religious life gave him new insight into early Church history. 
 In quick succession he published a series of monographs, on 
 Julian and his Age, on St. Bernhard, Chrysostom, Tertullian, 
 the Gnostic Systems, and Memorials from the history of 
 Christianity, and the Christian life ; then his Allgemeine Ge- 
 schichte der christ lie hen Religion u. Kirche {lo vols., 1826-45). 
 During its publication appeared, as an independent supple- 
 ment, Die Geschichte der Pfianztmg und Leititng der christ- 
 lichen Kirche durch die Apostel {2 vols., 1832), and Das Leben 
 fesu (1837). His departure from the earlier method of writ- 
 ing Church history was described by Neander himself in the 
 preface to the 2nd ed. of his St. Bernard as follows : " A new 
 life of faith had arisen, which began to revivify theological 
 
2 So BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. II L 
 
 science also. This gave us the impulse to trace the stream of 
 Christian life in former centuries, and lovingly to include every- 
 thing Christian. A shallow Aufklarung, without mind or heart, 
 had, in its conceit and boastful poverty, taught us to despise 
 what was greatest and noblest in former centuries ; but now 
 this had been condemned alike by life and science. An 
 unhistorical age had given way to new insight into history 
 and to a new desire sympathetically to understand it, and 
 thoroughly comprehend the characteristic individuality of 
 historical phenomena." Neander's chief aim was everywhere 
 to understand what was individual in history. In the princi- 
 pal figures of ecclesiastical history he tried to depict the repre- 
 sentative tendencies of each age, and also the types of the 
 essential tendencies of human nature generally. His guiding 
 principle in treating both of the history and of the present con- 
 dition of the Church was — that Christianity has room for the 
 various tendencies of human nature, and aims at permeating 
 and glorifying them all ; that according to the divine plan these 
 various tendencies are to occur successively and simultaneously 
 and to counterbalance each other, so that the freedom and 
 variety of the development of the spiritual life ought not to 
 be forced into a single dogmatic form. This was the source 
 of his sympathetic appreciation of the most different historical 
 characters, of gnostics and mystics, of saints and heretics, 
 not even excepting the apostate Julian, in whom he admired 
 the pathos of phantastic religious enthusiasm even in its hea- 
 then garb. Hence also his generous tolerance of tendencies 
 in his own time with which he could not sympathise {e.g. that 
 of his teacher Planck), his championship of the freedom of 
 scientific teaching, even on behalf of Rationalistic opponents, 
 such as the Halle professors, Gesenius and Wegscheider, 
 when denounced to the government by Hengstenberg. In 
 one direction only Neander failed to exercise his usual toler- 
 ance, viz. towards the Hegelian school and the Tubingen 
 criticism. This was so distasteful to him that in his judgment 
 of it he became unjust and bitter — a sign of the consciousness 
 of having before him a scientific movement, not only opposed, 
 but superior to his own. Doubtless that too was incomplete, 
 and needed to be supplemented by Neander ; but it is equally 
 certain that it was strong just where Neander was weak. 
 Neander divided history into a series of separate pictures, 
 drawn with the loving hand of a master as edifying and instruc- 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 28 I 
 
 tive examples ; but he failed to grasp the connection between 
 phenomena, or the general ideas which dominate each age and 
 give to it its special character, or the regularity of the general 
 development of the religious spirit in the Church. His was 
 too much an emotional nature, and his theology was too much 
 governed by the subjective point of view of Romanticism for 
 him to be able to do justice to the importance of ideas in 
 religion and to the mental conflict in the different movements of 
 thought in the Church. The great dramatic forces of history 
 were hidden from him by the lyrical emotions of single indi- 
 viduals. The same preponderance of emotion in his nature 
 prevented him from fully appreciating historic characters of 
 marked individuality. His own generous heart enabled him 
 indeed sympathetically to study the character of historical per- 
 sons, but he always saw in them mainly those features which 
 were in accordance with his own feelings ; the corners and 
 angularities, in which the peculiarities of character find their 
 most significant expression, he smoothed down, and idealised 
 his heroes into copies, more or less, of his own individuality. 
 This was the opposite error to that of the Rationalistic method ; 
 in the latter a want of sympathetic appreciation had led to the 
 misrepresentation and caricature of the figures of history, but 
 in Neander these figures become dim ideal forms, like stars 
 hard to distinguish in the surrounding mist. Finally, Nean- 
 der's pectoral theology involved a serious lack of historical 
 criticism. This failing was indeed shared by almost all 
 Romanticists ; as they had grown tired of the sole sovereignty 
 of the understanding, the understanding was henceforth to 
 have no authority at all, and clear rational investigation be 
 doomed to silence, even in its proper province — historical cri- 
 ticism. Too much influenced by the modern historical spirit 
 consistently to exclude criticism on principle, and yet too much 
 of an emotional theologian to make thorough-going use of it 
 where it assailed treasured and beautiful traditions, Neander 
 never freed himself from that hesitation and want of thorough- 
 ness which strikes us so painfully in his Life of Jestis} 
 Neander, moreover, regarded miracles, in the proper sense, 
 as possible, not only in Biblical times, but down to the third 
 century. If so late, why should they not be accepted much 
 later, or throughout all history .? Because on that supposition 
 
 Comp. ante, p. 219. 
 
282 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 the scientific weakness of a supernaturalistic treatment of 
 history of such a kind would be much more strange and in- 
 tolerable than it actually is in Neander. 
 
 Closely allied to Neander, but of a more independent and 
 versatile mind, is the ecclesiastical historian, Carl Hase. 
 His strength likewise lies mainly in the loving study and deli- 
 cate, subtle description of individual phenomena in history. 
 His pictures of mediaeval saints {Franz von Assist, Katerina 
 von Siena), and of neti-e Propheten [Die Jungfo-au von Orleans, 
 Savonarola, Thomas Miimer) are both in form and matter 
 model monographs, and evince a power of sympathetically 
 entering into peculiar phases of religious life such as was 
 possessed in an equal degree only by Neander. But Hase's 
 attitude towards the figures of history is more independent 
 than Neander's ; he does not emphasise merely those sides of a 
 character which appeal to himself, but contrives, in a few brief, 
 pregnant lines, to sketch a clear and complete objective 
 picture of it. He does not, like Neander, seek for what is 
 edifying in the religious life of men and nations, but for what 
 is characteristic ; so that some details may be far from edifying, 
 for the simple reason that the actors in history are men, and 
 often caricature what is sublime. In his Lehrbuch der Kirch- 
 engeschichte (i ed., 1834, now nth ed.), Hase has succeeded 
 in compressing an unusually large amount of material into the 
 smallest possible space without anywhere creating the impres- 
 sion of a dry skeleton, but he makes " the wealth of life meet- 
 ing us in the original monuments of each age reveal itself even 
 in the most compressed outline." This was possible only to 
 an historian who combined a mastery of style, formed on classic 
 models, such as is possessed by few scholars, with a happy 
 instinct in separating the essential from the unessential. " Only 
 what has at some time truly lived and thereby become im- 
 mortal, by representing a ray of the Christian spirit, forms 
 part of history, which is a history of the living and not of the 
 dead." This excellent principle, enunciated in his preface, is 
 adhered to by Hase throughout his work. By throwing over- 
 board much of the worthless cargo usually carried by the 
 pedantry of scholars, he found room, in the small compass of 
 a single volume, for matter hitherto omitted or insufficiently 
 treated in Church histories, such as the religions of the hea- 
 then nations with which Christianity came into contact, or the 
 history of ecclesiastical art. Although the strongest point of 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 283 
 
 Hase's Church History is its artistic presentation of a wealth 
 of material, he gives us also from the stores of his wide histori- 
 cal knowledge, general reflections, birds-eye views, and main 
 points of observation, as well as his personal verdicts on men 
 and things. With the kindly tolerance which can be just to 
 other points of view, he combines a courageous honesty which 
 shows the dark as well as the bright side of his own Church, 
 and even of the period of the Reformation, which to other Pro- 
 testant historians is generally too sacred to be freely criticised. 
 This incorruptible impartiality in judgment is a merit of 
 Hase's history all the more valuable from its rareness among 
 our theologians. In the year 1885, the aged historian pub- 
 lished the first volume of a Church History, to be completed 
 in three volumes, in which the brief outlines and indications 
 of his text-book are further expanded for educated readers 
 generally. A glance at this volume shows how thoroughly 
 Hase, usually regarded rather as the historian of the middle 
 ages and recent times, is acquainted also with ecclesiastical 
 antiquity. He has, he himself acknowledges, learnt much 
 from Tubingen criticism ; his refusal to follow it in every 
 thing, we can only regard with approval. For my own 
 part, at all events, I have, in following my own line of study, 
 become more and more convinced of the truth of the verdict 
 pronounced by Hase (p. 175): "The Tubingen school has 
 perceived a part of the truth, — the profound division in the 
 Apostolic Church (formerly lightly passed over), two forms 
 taken by primitive Christianity. But, as often happens, the 
 discoverer of a new truth overrates its importance. A definite 
 Jewish Christianity existed towards the close of the cen- 
 tury in Palestine only, although there may have been a few 
 individual Churches in Syria also. On the other hand, Paul's 
 victory must not be understood to mean that the converted 
 Gentiles at once grasped his profound ideas in opposition to 
 the necessity of the law ; they in their strict consistency are 
 not for the popular mind ; the Churches composed of Gentiles 
 would be likely to feel themselves morally strengthened and 
 quickened religiously by the spirit proceeding from Christ, 
 without troubling themselves about the Jewish law." If it is 
 granted to the venerable author to complete this admirable 
 work, it will remain a lasting and valuable monument of the 
 life-work of a German theologian and scholar.^ 
 
 ' Since the text was written the venerable historian has died. 
 
284 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 Gieseler's Church History (3 vols., down to the Peace of 
 Westphalia, published by himself, 1 824-1 853, the subsequent 
 vols., 4-6, edited by Redepenning from his remains), is an 
 excellent aid to the study of ecclesiastical history, giving as it 
 does more fully than any other handbook the original authori- 
 ties for the views taken. Gieseler wished that each age should 
 speak for itself, since only by this means can the peculiarity of 
 Its ideas be fully appreciated. The author's own account is so 
 completely subordinated to his quotations that the meagre text 
 is often little more than a heading to the notes. We get little 
 more than the bare materials of the history ; what he is to 
 think of them, is left by the learned historian to the reader him- 
 self. This objectivity is related to that of a Hase or a Baur 
 as a skilfully arranged photograph to the picture of an artist. 
 
 Niedner's Ecclesiastical History is praised for its indepen- 
 dence and individuality of thought, but is also censured for its 
 heaviness and obscurity. At any rate its success has not 
 been great. Hagenbach's work is distinguished by the quali- 
 ties of an agreeable and edifying narrative, and is popular in 
 lay circles. The Ecclesiastical History of Kurtz, written 
 from the point of view of the Lutheran orthodoxy, has ap- 
 peared in two 'or three editions of varying length ; it contains 
 a collection of materials conveniently arranged for the purposes 
 of students. 
 
 The most important work of this century on Church History 
 is that of C. F. Baur, his last great work, and the ripest fruit 
 of his far-reaching scientific researches, of which the works 
 on New Testament criticism above discussed ^ are only a frag- 
 ment, although the most important one. In order to review 
 his achievements in this department, we must first go back 
 to his earlier works on the history of religion and dogmas, 
 which preceded his epoch-making critical labours. The first 
 of these, Symbolik unci Mythologie oder die Naturreligion des 
 Alterthiims (1824), is written from the position of Schleier- 
 macher's theology, and also shows the influence of Schelling 
 and Creuzer. Religion is traced back to the spiritual nature 
 of man, and its realisation discovered in the history of religion 
 at large, which as a divine education of the human race is a 
 continual revelation of God ; mythology is also to be regarded 
 as a portion of this revelation, and hence the antithesis of 
 
 1 p. 227, sqq. 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 285 
 
 supernatural and natural revelation is reducible to a mere 
 difference in the degree of truth contained in each particular 
 religion. Even in this, Baur's earliest work, is noticeable his 
 effort to discover the rational content of the creations of the 
 religious imagination (Vorstellung), combined with the dispo- 
 sition to thrust into myths philosophical ideas foreign to them, 
 and to overlook their natural psychological sources. The first 
 literary fruits of his theological professorship in Tubingen 
 were the works lying on the borderland between mythology 
 and the history of dogma, Das manichaische Religionssystevi 
 (1831), Apollonius von Tyana (1832), Die christliche Gnosis 
 (1835), and Ueber das Christliche ini Platonismus oder Sc- 
 krates und Christus (1837). The choice not less than the 
 treatment of these subjects is indicative of the large breadth of 
 view and the insight of the historian into the comparative his- 
 tory of religions ; he seeks for the points where Christianity 
 came into contact — now as a friend, then as a foe — with other 
 religions, and in conflict with them proved itself the higher, 
 the "absolute religion." His investigation of Gnosticism has 
 admittedly thrown light upon this obscure subject, though we 
 must likewise acknowledge that he interpreted and idealised 
 this mixture of Oriental mythology and Greek philosophy too 
 much from the point of view of modern philosophy. 
 
 Baur first entered on theology in the stricter sense by his 
 book, Gegensatz des Katholicismus imd Protestantismus nach 
 den Prinzipien tend Hauptdogmen der beiden Lehrbegriffe 
 (1834, and 2nd ed. enlarged, 1836). This is a defence of Pro- 
 testantism, evoked by Mohler's Symbolik, not indeed of the 
 empirical Protestantism expounded in the confessions of the 
 Churches, but of an ideal Protestantism on the lines of Schleier- 
 macher's Glatibenslehre and Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, 
 with the speculative doctrines of which the dogmas of the Pro- 
 testant communions are identified with a certain naive ingenu- 
 ousness. This disregard of the profound difference between his 
 own views and those of the Churches is characteristic of Baur ; 
 it is partly the result of his conscientious conviction that he 
 was faithful to the Protestant principle and its normal doctrinal 
 development ; partly also of his tendency to convert dogmatic 
 conceptions {Vorstelhmgen) too directly into philosophical 
 ideas, overlooking their actual origin in the religious spirit. 
 This defect is most apparent in the larger histories of dogma 
 published next. Die christliche Lehre von der Versdhnims: iji 
 
286 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY, [Bk. III. 
 
 Hirer geschichtlichen Entwicklung bis auf die neueste Zeit 
 (1838), and Z?ze chj'istlicke Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und 
 Mcnschwcrdiing Gottes in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung 
 (3 vols. 1841-43), followed by the Lehrbuch der christlichen 
 Dogtnengeschichte (1847), which contains a concise survey of 
 the whole history of dogma. His method of treating these 
 subjects is characterised by Baur himself in his prefaces as 
 follows : The object of history is to give an account of the 
 nature of mind itself, its inner movement and development, 
 its consciousness of itself, advancing from point to point. 
 This can only be done by a speculative treatment of the 
 materials. For whenever there is inner connection there is 
 reason, and whatever is by means of reason must also be for 
 reason, for the contemplation of mind. Without speculation 
 historical research fails to get below the surface and outside 
 of the matter, and in proportion as the subject is comprehen- 
 sive and important, and belongs directly to the sphere of 
 thought, it is necessary not merely to reproduce in oneself 
 what individuals have thought and done, but also to follow in 
 thought the thoughts of the eternal Mind of which history is 
 the work. — This is indeed a magnificent conception of the 
 historian's task, to trace the divine thoughts in history and 
 comprehend the ideal or teleological necessity in the develop- 
 ment of mind. But when Baur thought with Hegel that the 
 development of the living religious spirit was identical with 
 the dialectical development of logical categories, and that the 
 rise and growth of dogmas in the Christian Church can be 
 adequately rendered in the formulae of Hegelian terminology, 
 this was a decided error by which the value of his learned 
 works was sensibly diminished. We are not told exactly 
 what the real meaning of the Fathers was— for their opinions 
 are always translated into the language of Hegel ; nor do we 
 get a clear account of the various factors, religious and secu- 
 lar, individual and social, universal and temporal, contributing 
 to the formation of dogma— for instead of all these real fac- 
 tors appears always the imaginary cause in the "self-move- 
 ment of the idea." We may in fact affirm that Baur's slavery 
 to the formulae of the Hegelian philosophy was a weak point 
 in his treatment of the history of dogma, which only served 
 to obscure the truth and profundity of his conception of his- 
 tory as a true development of the human mind, and to give 
 the opponents of his principles many apparent advantages. 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 2S7 
 
 It is all the more important to notice that Baur in his later 
 years freed himself to an observable degree from this defect, 
 (which is specially characteristic of the monographs written 
 when in middle life on the history of dogma), and advanced 
 to a more independent conception of religious and historical 
 life ; of religious life, by subsequently more definitely distin- 
 guishing between religion and philosophy, and making the 
 former primarily ethical instead of intellectual ; and of histori- 
 cal life, by recognising the importance of the personalities, 
 before almost concealed under the generality of the idea, as 
 representatives of the idea, and as the concrete motive-forces 
 of history. This advance is seen in his last work, his Kh^chen- 
 geschichte, which is therefore the maturest and most substan- 
 tial fruit of his labours, while its superiority to all his former 
 writings in point of clearness and ease of language is no doubt 
 connected with this improvement in matter. Baur had 
 thoroughly prepared himself for this work, in which he in- 
 tended to exhibit in connection the results of the labours of 
 his life, by a critical account of the Epochen der kirchlichen 
 Geschicktsschreibung (1852), in which he showed the deficien- 
 cies of previous methods, and demanded that ecclesiastical 
 history, like the secular history of our time (above all that of 
 Ranke), should abandon its trivial discussion of proximate and 
 accidental causes, and rather describe the great connexion 
 and general causes of the phenomena in the ruling ideas of 
 each age. This essay was followed by Das Christenthim 
 und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte 
 (1853); next came, in Baur's lifetime, Die christliche Kirche 
 von Anfang des vierten bis zum Ende des sechsten Jahrhim- 
 derts (1859). The three subsequent volumes, containing the 
 history of the mediaeval age, of the modern age, and of the 
 nineteenth century, were published from his remains in the 
 years immediately following his death (i860). In the preface 
 to the first volume, Baur announces his intention of giving a 
 more connected account of the early history of Christianity 
 than had previously been done ; in particular the basis pro- 
 vided in history itself for Christianity in the form of a Church 
 must be more accurately and thoroughly investigated, the 
 connexion and unity of the whole must be made plain, the 
 differences and mutual relations of the various co-operating 
 forces and principles explained ; in short, as harmonious a 
 picture as possible formed of all the individual traits which 
 
288 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. IIL 
 
 distinguish this rich period. This conception of the object 
 and method of Church history will remain a model for all time. 
 In the execution, advancing knowledge will, of course, discover 
 and correct errors in detail, but taken as a whole, it is the first 
 thorough and satisfactory attempt to explain the rise of Chris- 
 tianity and the Church on strictly historical lines, i.e. as a 
 natural development of the religious spirit of our race under 
 the combined operation of various human causes. This is 
 what makes Baur's Church History, and especially its first 
 volume, a classic for all time. It may perhaps be of some in- 
 terest to those who do not read German, and have not direct 
 access to this work, if I here give a short sketch of Baur's 
 account of primitive Christianity, thus carrying on the above 
 (p. 263 sqq.) outline of Wellhausen's history of Israel, which 
 will assist in the formation of an approximately true idea of 
 the results of modern criticism in respect to Biblical and early 
 ecclesiastical history. 
 
 Baur begins with the preparation for Christianity in the 
 Gentile and Jewish world. This includes, besides the political 
 universalism of the Roman Empire, the Grseco- Roman 
 philosophy ; the Socratic and Platonic idealism and the Stoic 
 and Epicuraean search for the sumimim bonum contain the 
 closest parallels to the religious questions of Christianity, 
 and in the later eclecticism of a Cicero and Seneca we have 
 the outlines of a natural theology, which was subsequently 
 further developed on Christian soil. We may therefore say 
 that in Christianity the various movements of the time con- 
 verge towards the same goal, and find in it their ultimate idea 
 and most complete expression. Simultaneously, Judaism 
 had assumed in Alexandrine Hellenism a more subtle and 
 spiritual form, new ideas were borrowed from the Greeks, 
 and in particular the Old Testament conception of God was 
 lifted out of the narrow sphere of the Jewish theocracy. Even 
 the dread of contact with the world and the religious selt- 
 contemplation of the Essenes was one of the points of 
 spiritual affinity between Judaism and Christianity. _ Thus 
 the whole previous history of mankind was a preparation for 
 Christianity ; it contained nothing which had not already in 
 some form or other been recognised as a result of rational 
 thought, or as a want of the human heart, or as a demand 
 of the ' ethical consciousness. In order to ascertain the 
 original character of Christianity, Baur starts from the Sermon 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 289 
 
 on the Mount, Matthew v. In the Beatitudes we get a glance 
 into the centre of the principle of thought and feehng of 
 which it was the product, viz. "an infinitely sublime religious 
 consciousness, which, though pervaded by the deepest feeling 
 of the pressure of the finite and all the contradictions of the 
 present, rises far above everything finite and limited. It is 
 the pure feeling of the need of salvation, still undeveloped 
 but containing within it the antithesis of sin and grace, and 
 as such necessarily involving the reality of salvation." The 
 emphasis laid by Jesus on the heart and character, as that 
 in which alone man's absolute moral worth consists, is an 
 essentially new step, a departure in principle from Mosaism, 
 and is the fundamental principle of Christianity. And just as 
 the idea of righteousness is deepened into a perfect surrender 
 of man's own will to God's, so the Old Testament idea of 
 the theocracy is so much spiritualised that everything relating 
 to man's connexion with the kingdom of God is made 
 dependent solely upon ethical conditions. " Christianity, thus 
 viewed, is in its most essential and primitive elements a 
 purely ethical religion, and its highest and peculiar excellence 
 is its wholly ethical character as rooted in the ethical con- 
 sciousness of mankind." But this spiritual substance of 
 Christianity took concrete form in the Messianic idea, and by 
 its aid entered on its historical development, the conscious- 
 ness of Jesus widening to universality by means of the 
 national consciousness. By the name " Son of man " Jesus 
 expressed his truly universal Messianic vocation ; in Peter's 
 confession this became an acknowledged fact for himself and 
 for his disciples ; in Jerusalem he put the nation to the test, 
 whether they adhered to their traditional, material and par- 
 ticularist Messianic belief, or would recognise a Messiah such 
 as he was and had shown himself by his whole life and work. 
 The answer could only be the one of which he had long 
 himself been assured. But his apparent overthrow was really 
 the most decisive victory and entrance upon life. His death 
 was the complete rupture between him and Judaism. What 
 the Resurrection really was lies outside the province of his- 
 torical inquiry, which has only to maintain that in the belief 
 of the disciples the resurrection of Jesus was the most certain 
 and incontrovertible of facts. So far as history is concerned, 
 the necessary pre-supposition for everything that follows is 
 not so much the fact of the resurrection of Jesus itself as 
 G.T. rr 
 
290 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. II 
 
 the belief in it ; but no psychological analysis can penetrate 
 the inward spiritual process by which this belief was gene- 
 rated in the mind of the disciples. In their view the return 
 of Jesus at the end of the world was so closely connected 
 with his departure, that by this expectation the old Messianic 
 hopes might easily be renewed and strengthened in them, 
 whereby the difference between the disciples and the other 
 Jews would sink into insignificance. What was it that raised 
 the belief in the risen Jesus to a new principle of universal 
 importance ? It was, Baur answers, the work of the Apostle 
 Paul, prepared for by the Hellenist Stephen. His conversion, 
 even though we cannot get to the bottom of it by any psy- 
 chological analysis, may be conceived as brought about by 
 the help of the great impression made on him by the death 
 of Jesus, which from the very fact of its contradicting all 
 Jewish national assumptions, necessarily gained in Paul's view 
 an importance extending far beyond Jewish particularism, so 
 that he first fully grasped the universalism of Christianity. 
 The two points of view which had been united in the person 
 of Jesus — the universal or ethical and the national Jewish or 
 Messianic, — were respectively divided amongst his disciples, 
 the elder apostles, generally laying emphasis on the national 
 character of Jesus, while Paul gave energetic expression to 
 his ethical universality. He did not indeed appeal to the 
 details of the life or teaching of Jesus, since the whole of 
 Christianity was for his mind concentrated in the person of 
 Jesus and the great facts of his death and resurrection. After 
 Paul had for a considerable time been working among the 
 mixed Churches in Syria, he and the Jewish Christians, 
 including the Apostles, became involved in a dispute, which 
 ended with the resolution that each of the two parties should 
 pursue its own independent course separate from the other. 
 How deep the disunion really was, in spite of the brotherly 
 shake of the hand, was soon seen at Antioch, in the personal 
 quarrel between Paul and Peter, which left a lasting impres- 
 sion on both sides. In none of Paul's epistles have we the 
 slightest sign of the two apostles having afterwards been in 
 any way reconciled ; the Acts passes over the scene in 
 Antioch in such deliberate silence that we can plainly enough 
 infer how little the recollection of it accorded with the concili- 
 atory Tendenz of the writer ; and in the pseudo-Clementine 
 Homilies (of the latter half of the second century) we can still 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 29 I 
 
 see that even then the Jewish Christians could not forgive 
 Paul his harsh words about their chief apostle. Soon after 
 we meet with the systematic opposition of the Jewish Chris- 
 tians to the Apostle Paul in Galatia, where they wished to 
 convert the Pauline Church to Jewish legalism ; and then in 
 Corinth, where they tried to destroy Paul's authority by all 
 the resources of intrigue and under the pretext of the 
 authority of the original apostles. And even in Rome, Baur 
 holds, Paul had to contend with Jewish Christians ; in order 
 to defend his mission to the Gentiles against their prejudices 
 he wrote his Epistle to the Romans, the last, in Baur's view, 
 which v/e have of his. During the Apostle's last stay in 
 Jerusalem also, the Jewish Christians took part in the tumult 
 which led to his imprisonment, and thus proved the implaca- 
 bility of their hatred of the Apostle of the Gentiles, whom 
 they regarded as an apostate from the Law of their fathers, 
 by which they continued to feel themselves bound. — The 
 reconciliation, so far as possible, of these two parties, hitherto 
 sharply opposed to each other, by the adjustment of their 
 differences and the softening of their antagonism, was, accord- 
 ing to Baur, the chief object aimed at in the sub-apostolic age ; 
 the whole literature of this period appears from this point 
 of view as a series of monuments of this opposition, and its 
 gradual reduction by the advances of both sides. Of the Gos- 
 pels, Luke is the purest and most important record of Paulin- 
 ism, while Matthew represents Jewish Christianity. The 
 latter found its strongest anti-Pauline expression in the 
 Apocalypse, which Baur regarded as a work of the Apostle 
 John, and interpreted thoughout from the point of view of 
 the primitive Christian party struggle ; so that even in the 
 censure of the Balaamites and Nicolaitans [i.e. libertine 
 Gnostics), he only saw an attack on Paul. As further chief 
 witnesses for the continued power and even supremacy of 
 Jewish Christianity, Baur appeals to Hegesippus and the 
 pseudo-Clementine writings, from the middle of the second 
 century, but he is too hasty when he makes use of the 
 " Tendenzroman " of the latter as a sign of the Judaistic ten- 
 dencies of the Church at that time. But in spite of this 
 bitter enmity to Paul, he holds that Jewish Christianity had 
 an infinite capacity for development, and was so prudent in 
 everywhere meeting the needs of the Church by the sacrifice 
 of its former legalism, that it came to exercise an influence on 
 
292 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 the formation of the Christian Church which cannot be 
 exaggerated, as is specially proved by the development of 
 the hierarchy, altogether an outcome of Jewish Christianity. 
 At the head of the canonical writings, which were at once the 
 expression and the agents of this process of conciliation, he 
 places the Epistle to the Hebrews, which by the emphasis 
 it lays on the priesthood is shown to be a product of Jewish 
 Christianity, although of a higher and more spiritual form of 
 it, already influenced by Paulinism. (This opinion receives 
 a remarkable correction in a note which describes the charac- 
 teristics of the Epistle to the Hebrews as " Alexandrinism," 
 which is neither Judaism nor Paulinism, but intermediate 
 between them, and by its limitation of them superior to both 
 — an excellent remark, which only needs to be consistently 
 worked out to lead to a different conception of the develop- 
 ment of post- Pauline Christianity.) The same effort at recon- 
 ciliation, represented in the Epistle to the Hebrews on the 
 Jewish Christian side, is represented on the Pauline side by 
 the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians ; they em- 
 phatically insist on the unity of the Church, as the essential 
 result of Christ's death as healing all division, and of Christ's 
 central all-inclusive position in the universe. In the Pastoral 
 Epistles, and in those of the pseudo- Ignatius, the Pauline 
 party displays an eirenical readiness, for the sake of an effec- 
 tive opposition to the heretics, to meet the efforts of the 
 Jewish Christians in the direction of a hierarchical organisa- 
 tion of the Church. In return, the Jewish Christians, in the 
 Epistle of James, so far made concession to the followers of 
 Paul that in spite of its rejection of Paul's doctrine of justi- 
 fication, it still speaks of a "law of liberty" and a "royal 
 law of love," and by its practical morals makes a contribution 
 to the formation of Catholic Christianity. In particular the 
 First Epistle of Peter proves that the Jewish Christians were 
 even able to accommodate themselves to the dogmatic ideas 
 of Paulinism by direct quotation of Pauline Epistles ; and the 
 Second Epistle of Peter even gives " brother Paul " a certifi- 
 cate of orthodoxy, and only laments that some things in his 
 epistles are hard to be understood, and had been misinter- 
 preted. Finally, in order to remove all disturbing recollection 
 of the' Apostolic struggles out of the way of the union of 
 parties desired by both sides, the Acts of the Apostles gave 
 an ideal picture of the Apostolic age, in which the two party 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 293 
 
 leaders, Paul and Peter, were designedly made so much alike 
 that they really seem to have changed places. Since this 
 deviation from history must be intentional, the Acts must be 
 regarded as "an effort at conciliation and a proposal of terms 
 of peace on the part of a Paulinist, who wished to pro- 
 cure the recognition by the Jewish Christians of Gentile 
 Christianity, by concessions from his own party to Judaism, 
 and sought to influence both parties in this manner (on this 
 view, compare the remarks above, p. 229). A similar position 
 is taken by Baur with regard to the writings of the Apostolic 
 Fathers and of Justin Martyr, and he explains the legend of 
 the death of both Paul and Peter in Rome as the expression 
 of the finally consummated reconciliation of the primitive 
 Christian parties. The same process of development, of 
 which this was the practical side in the Roman Church, is 
 seen on its ideal side in the Gospel of John ; while in the 
 former case the object was the realisation of the idea of the 
 Church, it was here the evolution of an ideal theology. As 
 there Peter and Paul were fraternally united as patrons of 
 the Roman Church, so here in this Johannine theology faith 
 and works disappear in love as their higher unity. The 
 opposition through which Paulinism had been compelled to 
 fight its way, is in John removed into the far distance. The 
 particularism of Judaism, with all the contradictions it in- 
 cluded, is lost in the general contradiction of the two prin- 
 ciples of light and darkness, which forms the background of 
 John's theology and also dominates the sphere of ethics. This 
 is a point of affinity between the Johannine Gospel and 
 Gnosticism, that great movement of the second century, which 
 both directly and indirectly greatly contributed to the forma- 
 tion of catholic and ecclesiastical Christianity. Here fresh 
 questions present themselves, the horizon is widened, but new 
 dangers threaten. God and world, spirit and matter, origin, 
 development, and consummation of the world, are the concep- 
 tions here involved, and in their development the antitheses 
 of the religions take a share. The questions of salvation 
 and of the ethico-religious consciousness are generalised into 
 questions of metaphysical speculation. But the Catholic 
 Church, everywhere careful to preserve the proper mean, had 
 to avoid this extreme equally with that of Jewish particularism. 
 For it was here threatened by an equally serious peril from 
 ideas by which the Christian consciousness would altogether 
 
294 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 lose its historical character. The tendency of Gnosticism 
 is to regard Christianity not primarily as the principle of 
 salvation but as the principle of the development of the world 
 generally ; it does not rest so much on a religious as on a 
 philosophical basis, and conducts again to philosophy as the 
 highest product of the heathen world ; it is the extension and 
 development of the Alexandrine religious philosophy which 
 had sprung from the philosophy of Greece. But in so far 
 as it clothes philosophical ideas less in the form of abstract 
 conceptions than of myths and allegories, it is in this respect 
 more akin to religion than to philosophy ; it is therefore 
 neither pure philosophy nor pure religion, but both together, 
 a combination of the two elements which Baur (perhaps not 
 very happily) calls " Religionsphilosophie." He further dis- 
 tinguishes three main forms of Gnosis, in one of which 
 Christianity is mixed with heathenism, in another with Juda- 
 ism, and in the third is opposed to both. With Gnosticism 
 Baur contrasts Montanism as the opposite heresy. While in 
 the former the idea supplants the historical reality, the latter 
 is a reaction of the realism of the Jewish Christian hope of 
 the future against its idealistic evaporation and ecclesiastical 
 secularisation. In an age in which the belief in the nearness 
 of the parousia failed, prophetic ecstasy grew rare or ceased, 
 and when, with this enthusiasm of the early Churches, their 
 ascetic zeal and love of holiness grew faint, there sprang up 
 in the Montanists a new form of ecstatic prophecy, a burning 
 chiliastic belief and a rigorous penitential zeal. These move- 
 ments of the second century, so different in character, and 
 crossing each other in all directions, all led to the develop- 
 ment and consolidation of the Church's doctrine and constitu- 
 tion as the indispensable breakwater against the billows pf the 
 time. Not only had the practical religious side of Christian- 
 ity to be maintained against the transcendental speculations 
 of the Gnostics, but also the very ground to be conquered 
 against the chiliastic fanaticism of the Montanists, which cut 
 off all possibility of the historical development and progress of 
 Christianity in the world. It was therefore by means of its 
 antagonism to the Gnostics and Montanists that the definite 
 consciousness and growing solidity of the Catholic Church 
 were developed out of the reconciliation of Jewish and Gentile 
 Christians. In the struggle with the Gnostics was evolved 
 the principle of ecclesiastical tradition as the final court of 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 295 
 
 appeal in all disputes, the appeal to the Apostolic writings 
 having proved insufficient, owing to the possibility of various 
 and especially allegorical interpretations. That only on which 
 the Apostolic Churches agree can be received as true, for that 
 must have been taught by the Apostles ; what is inconsistent 
 with it is heresy, i.e. an arbitrary and new individual opinion. 
 But who was to decide what was Apostolical tradition and 
 the common faith of the Church .'' The bishops alone could 
 do this, it being assumed that they were appointed by the 
 Apostles as their successors. It is true this assumption did 
 not correspond to the fact, since all indications go to prove 
 that the Churches were originally autonomous and chose their 
 own presidents, who were bishops and presbyters in one, 
 while the function of teaching was not confined to this office. 
 It was not until the struggle with the heretics showed the 
 need of a stricter centralisation q{ the Churches, that there 
 was instituted, at first in the individual Churches, the 
 monarchical episcopate superior to the presbyters. This epis- 
 copate provided a fixed rallying point against the separatist 
 tendencies of the heretics, and applied the Christian conception 
 of a supernatural world to the practical needs of the present, 
 thus initiating the further historical development of Christianity 
 on the basis of a universal Church. But the same effort at unity 
 which had first raised the bishop of the individual Church 
 above the presbyters, went on to elevate the Bishop of Rome 
 above the others who were originally his equals. That 
 the Roman bishop was Peter's successor in Rome, is an his- 
 torical fiction, Peter never having been in Rome. The 
 unhistorical legend about Peter took its rise at first merely 
 in Rome's political importance, and since the papacy itself 
 depends on this legend, we must seek for the origin of the 
 papacy in the simple fact that the importance enjoyed by 
 Rome, as the capital of the world, was transferred to the 
 bishop of the Roman Church. The most striking feature of 
 the hierarchical system thus established is the simplicity of 
 the forms on which it depends. The fundamental form is 
 the relation of the bishop to the Church of which he is the 
 head. This form continues unchanged, however much the 
 system may be developed, enlarged, or modified. The bishop 
 of the smallest Church is essentially the same as the pope at 
 the summit of the papacy. At all stages of this hierarchical 
 system the same fundamental form repeats itself, its greatest 
 
29'5 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 peculiarity being its capacity of indefinite extension. And this 
 hierarchical system is at the same time essentially theocratic ; 
 everything rests on divine authority ; the relation of the bishop 
 to his community is a repetition of the relation of Christ to 
 the Church. " The whole system is conditioned by a stage 
 of religious development in which men require to see a 
 visible representation of the relation in which Christ as the 
 Lord of the Church stands to it." The form assumed by the 
 Church in its episcopal constitution demanded also a corre- 
 sponding fixed and systematic expression in dogma. The 
 close connexion between the evolution of the constitutional 
 form and of dogma as its expression, is made very manifest 
 at the close of the first period of ecclesiastical development : 
 the oecumenical synod at Niceea saw the completest repre- 
 sentation of the episcopate and also the enunciation of the 
 highest content of the Christian consciousness in the dogma 
 of the Homoousia. In this period the whole development of 
 dogma is concentrated in the doctrine of Christ's person. 
 This is the reflection and concrete expression of the current 
 view of Christian salvation as a whole. The Christ of the 
 Synoptists was still a human Messiah, miraculously born, it 
 is true, and anointed with the Spirit, and raised by his resur- 
 rection and ascension to divine honours, but still essentially 
 man. In Paul's view also Christ is man, not, however, an 
 earthly and phenomenal man, but a heavenly and spiritual 
 one, the eternal type of the spiritual sons of God, appearing 
 in time in the flesh, the second Adam. This higher phase 
 of Christology in Paul was connected with his higher view of 
 Christianity as the universal revelation of salvation for all 
 the world. The Christ of the Apocalypse also has divine 
 attributes predicated of him which seem to leave no essential 
 difference between him and God, but they are only externally 
 connected with the person of the Messiah, who is essentially 
 the instrument for the execution of the divine judgment. 
 The Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the 
 smaller Pauline Epistles, on the other hand, rises to a higher 
 stage of development, and marks the transition to the Johan- 
 nine Christology, in which the idea of the Logos, borrowed 
 from the Alexandrine religious philosophy, and widely current 
 in the philosophy of the time, is transferred to Christ, the 
 doctrine of the Church corresponding to the Gnostic doctrine 
 of the a^ons. As in philosophy, the Logos in the Fourth 
 
Ch, III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 297 
 
 Gospel is the intermediate being connecting the transcendental 
 God with the world. This being becomes by the incarnation 
 the person of Jesus, who is accordingly regarded by the 
 Fourth Gospel as the self-revelation of a divine principle, the 
 historical view of the Synoptists being thus left far behind. In 
 the latter half of the second century the Johannine concep- 
 tion of the Logos came to be the dominant one, superseding 
 the earlier less definite ideas. This imposed on the theo- 
 logical thought of the Church the duty to define the relation 
 of this divine Logos or Son to God the Father. This was 
 first done in the sense form of a gradual emanation, corre- 
 sponding to the materialistic realism of Tertullian's con- 
 ception of God ; while in the abstract, transcendental idea 
 of God of the Alexandrians (Clement), almost all personal dis- 
 tinction vanishes between the Father and the Son. This view 
 lived on in the " Monarchians" of the third century, of whom 
 Sabellius particularly is ably interpreted by Baur. In the 
 Christology of Origen the two views, hitherto running parallel, 
 the one emphasising the distinction between God and the 
 Son, and the other their unity, balance each other in such a 
 way that his Christology became the turning point in the 
 history of the dogma, and the point of separation of the two 
 views, which were henceforward opposed to each other as 
 Arianism and Athanasianism. At Niceea, with the victory 
 of the Athanasian formula of Christ's equality with God 
 {kojnoottsia), the hierarchical aristocracy of the episcopate also 
 triumphed over the democratic presbyters. When Christian- 
 ity had, under Constantine, overcome the Roman world, its 
 consciousness of being the sole true and valid, or the " abso- 
 lute," religion found expression in the dogmatic enunciation 
 of the orthodox doctrine of the absolute equality of its founder 
 with God. Thus the inner history of the consciousness 
 of the Church, simultaneously with the external history of 
 the relation of the Church to the world and State, came 
 under Constantine to a climax which marked the close of 
 an era. 
 
 Here I must end this extract from Baur's CliJ'istianity in 
 t^i£ First Three Centuries, space forbidding me to give more. 
 But I hope that enough has been given to show the mag- 
 nificently historical spirit of this work, and to prove that the 
 traditional accusations of an "i^rz'trz construction of history," 
 "twisting of facts," etc., are baseless conventional fables, by 
 
29S BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III. 
 
 which smaller men try to protect themselves in view of the 
 superiority of Baur. 
 
 Since Baur's, no important work has appeared embracing 
 the whole of Church history (of Hase's unfinished work we 
 have spoken above, p. 283). Much labour has, however, been 
 devoted to the more accurate investigation of particular 
 questions, both of the ancient Church, and especially of the 
 period of the Reformation, and valuable material for the 
 illumination of the past has been accumulated in monographs 
 and biographies. An enumeration of these works does not, 
 however, fall within the scope of this book. We can here 
 mention only the most recent work on the history of dogma, 
 as it represents, with pre-eminent ability as well as partiality, 
 a new school of historical theology ; it is Adolf Harnack's 
 LekrbiLch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. i., die Entstehung des 
 kirchlichen Dogmas {^i^%6), and vol. ii.,part i., die Entwickelung 
 des kirclil. Dogmas (1887). On the publication of the first 
 volume, the work at once attracted general attention, and 
 gained for its author the well-deserved reputation of an eminent 
 historian. It is based on a thorough independent investigation 
 of the authorities, and the vast mass of material is arranged 
 with rare skill and clearness ; the writer's style is lucid and 
 vigorous, and he is always pleasing and suggestive, even 
 when not convincing. But the book owes its special im- 
 portance to its fundamental view of the history of dogma, by 
 which it gives typical expression to a prevalent mode of 
 thought and feeling of our time. Perhaps we can most 
 simply describe its character by saying that to Baur's opti- 
 mistic evolutionary theory of history it opposes a pessimistic 
 view of Church history, which makes this history to consist, 
 not in a progressive teleological and rational development 
 and ever richer unfolding of the Christian spirit, but in a 
 progressive obscuration of the truth, in the progress of 
 disease in the Church, produced by the sudden irruption of 
 Hellenic philosophy and other secularising influences. We 
 can understand that such a view is acceptable to a realistic 
 and practical age which has long lost all touch with the 
 ancient dogmas ; we cannot deny that it contains relative 
 truth, and might, in fact, serve as a salutary complement 
 to Baur's optimism ; but is it adapted to form the supreme 
 guiding principle of ecclesiastical history, or can it justly 
 claim to be the only scientific view, or the right to condemn 
 
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 299 
 
 as unscientific scholasticism the teleological theory of evo- 
 lution, which, in the manifold play of individual causes, 
 recognises the governance of a higher Reason ? These are 
 questions to be seriously asked. Moreover, this pessimistic 
 verdict on Church history is by no means a new one ; it is 
 found, in a certain sense, in the Magdeburg Centuriators, in 
 a different form in the mystic Gottfried Arnold, and in yet 
 another in the Rationalists. All these historians, however, 
 in their condemnation of the development of the Church had 
 a definite standard in what they assumed to be the original 
 truth of Biblical Christianity. But if we ask wherein, ac- 
 cording to Harnack, uncorrupted Christianity consists, we 
 nowhere get a clear answer. He cannot regard it as con- 
 sisting in the whole teaching of the New Testament, or he 
 would not with such surprising indifference hurry over the 
 Pauline and Johannine- theology. Are we therefore to go 
 back to Jesus ? But Harnack leaves us in complete un- 
 certainty whether we are to take as the genuine, permanent 
 constituents of Christianity all that is reported in the Gospels 
 as the preaching of Jesus, including the declarations regarding 
 the permanent validity of the Jewish law, the limitation of 
 the preaching of the gospel to Israel, Christ's visible return 
 to establish an earthly kingdom, and similar matters. But 
 where a definite conception, based on history, of the nature 
 of Christianity is so wholly wanting, the question as to 
 whether individual phenomena are truly Christian or a de- 
 generation, corruption, and secularisation of true Christianity, 
 can only be answered according to personal taste. In so far 
 this method of writing Church history is at least as subjective 
 as the Rationalistic method of the last century. Harnack's 
 keen-sighted realism is undoubtedly of great value, but it 
 needs to be combined with the profound idealism of a Baur 
 to form the true combination which can yield a completely 
 satisfactory treatment of Church history. 
 
BOOK IV. 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 SINCE 1825. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY IN THEIR RELATION TO 
 
 THEOLOGY. 
 
 At the opening of the present century the state of religious 
 life in England was substantially the same as in Germany. 
 On the one hand, a rational supernaturalism prevailed, which 
 sought to combine faith in revealed religion with the empirical 
 philosophy of Locke. This was attempted by showing the 
 possibility on rational grounds of revelation, and by basing 
 the fact of revelation on the external evidence supplied in the 
 miracles and prophecies of the Bible. At the same time it 
 conceived the God of revelation under Deistical forms, and 
 repudiated all vivid religious feeling as mystical "enthusiasm." 
 Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical side of 
 the empirical philosophy of the period, also played a pro- 
 minent part in orthodox belief ; either on the ground of the 
 tangible use of the doctrines of the Church in promoting 
 social order, or with a view to the transcendental benefits 
 implied in the divine reward of virtue. In contrast with this 
 unemotional and rational faith of the upper classes, satis- 
 faction for the religious needs of the lower classes was sought 
 for in a quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after 
 the manner of Methodism. But in this " Evangelical party ". 
 quickened religious feeling and zealous philanthropic effort 
 were so much cut off from any living relation to the thought 
 of the age and to theological inquiry, that any influence from 
 this quarter upon the theology of the Church was not more, 
 in fact still less, possible than was the case with the older 
 German Pietism. To bring new life and movement into 
 theology, a complete revolution in the minds of men was 
 needed. This followed in England from causes similar to 
 those which had produced a like result in Germany ; and in 
 part the revolution was due to the direct influence of idealism 
 as it had sprung from German Romanticism. 
 
304 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 The ultimate and profoundest source of this mental revolu- 
 tion, which, at the beginning of the century, spread through 
 all cultured nations, must be sought in the nature of man. 
 After the cold understanding had in the eighteenth century- 
 exercised despotic sway, starving the emotions and fettering 
 the phantasy, these wronged sides of our nature once more 
 claimed their rights, and rebelled against the despotism of 
 the understanding with an imperious violence which was as 
 tyrannical and exclusive as that of the understanding had 
 been. " A return to nature and natural emotions," was 
 now everywhere the watchword, and Rousseau became the 
 prophet of the new age. The cry found its echo in the 
 " storm and stress" spirits of belles le tires: Herder and Goethe 
 w^ere its heralds in Germany, Wordsworth and Shelley in 
 English poetry. Emotion, entering into loving sympathy 
 with Nature, could no longer behold in her the dead mechan- 
 ism to which sensualistic philosophy had degraded her ; the 
 machine, which had been robbed of its divinity, was once 
 again transformed into the living garment of God. But 
 Nature owed her reanimation to the soul of man, which had 
 taken possession of her. It was therefore impossible that 
 men should go no further than external Nature : they turned 
 their gaze upon their own nature, and sought in the depths 
 of the feeling heart, in its unconscious surmisings and un- 
 utterable sighs, the presence of a divine spirit, the witness of 
 our kinship to God. Thus from the Gospel of Nature of 
 Rousseau sprang the philosophical idealism of Kant and of 
 Fichte, and the religious pantheism of Herder and Novalis. 
 In like manner, in the case of Wordsworth, the poetic love of 
 Nature became a devoted self-surrender to the God whose 
 rule we recognise within not less than arozmd us. If the 
 standpoint which was thus reached was still only the sub- 
 jectivism of the eighteenth century, the events o{ history w&rt, 
 at the same time, bringing about an important advance. 
 
 Rousseau's Gospel of Nature had been marked by an 
 anti-social and anti-historical tendency ; its aim had been the 
 emancipation of the self-sufficient individual from the limita- 
 tions of an outlived order of society. At first it was every- 
 where taken up in this sense. In Germany the " schone 
 Seelen " greeted with enthusiasm the French Revolution, 
 and in his Robbers, Schiller depicted the Titanic endeavour 
 of the individual, in the fresh consciousness of its strength, 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 305 
 
 to break up the old order of the world and to construct a 
 new one to its own mind. In the same spirit the youthful 
 Coleridge wrote poems breathing sympathy with revolutionary 
 democracy, and, with Southey, planned a " grand scheme 
 of Pantisocracy," a Utopian commonwealth of liberty and 
 equality, to be established in America. Out of this intoxica- 
 tion of individualism the idealists of Europe were rudely 
 awakened by the thunder of the cannon of Bonaparte. As 
 the social system of Europe collapsed like a house of cards 
 under the hand of the new Csesar, it was made clear whither 
 the principle of selfish individualism, which breaks up society 
 into helpless atoms, inevitably conducts. When it appeared 
 that the separate nations were to be broken up and converted 
 into the one empire of the Caesar, the national spirit every- 
 where rose up against the foreign tyranny, patriotic feeling, 
 which distinguishes in such a marked manner the nineteenth 
 from the eighteenth century, was aroused from its slumbers. 
 And as the nations became conscious of their own peculiar 
 characteristics and rights, they once more called to remem- 
 brance their own past history. With admiring love they 
 recurred to the period of their youth and early manhood, 
 and discovered, precisely In those epochs which Rationalism 
 in its ingratitude and want of insight had despised, stores of 
 national strength, virtue, and honour, forming a humiliating 
 contrast to the weakness and disgrace of their own time. 
 Thus the enthusiasts of individual freedom were transformed 
 into the patriotic champions of national liberty in the anti- 
 Napoleonic wars, and out of poetic Romanticism sprang the 
 Tugendbtmd of young Germany, based upon an earnest sense 
 of duty and patriotic devotion. The Kantian imperative of the 
 subjective reason was enlarged and deepened, in the philosophy 
 of Hegel, into the consciousness of the dependence of the 
 individual on the rationality of history as realised in the 
 State. The true freedom, which is alone worthy of man, was 
 now seen to consist, not in opposition to the commonwealth, 
 but in unselfish devotion to It ; not In defiance of the State, 
 but in subordination to It as loyal citizens, and in- securing 
 individual, by labouring for universal ends. Precisely the 
 same transformation was effected in England. Whilst young 
 men hailed enthusiastically the French Revolution, when it 
 seemed that " temple and tower were to fall to the ground" 
 before its trumpet-blast of " natural rights," Burke raised his 
 
 G.T. X 
 
306 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 voice, as " one crying in the wilderness," against the delusion 
 of the individualistic idea of freedom, and pointed out the 
 unreasonableness of the endeavour to separate the individual 
 from the nation, to which he owes his existence, or from society 
 and its historical arrangements, to which really all human 
 culture is due. What Burke's eloquence failed to effect, the 
 course of history brought about. Under the pressure of a 
 " Continental System " and the wars of Napoleon, English 
 national feeling was aroused, the poets of Nature and Free- 
 dom became the heralds of patriotic love, of an admiring piety 
 towards the history of the past, which Sir Walter Scott's 
 genius restored to new life in the hearts of his contemporaries 
 by poetic idealisation. 
 
 But in the history of Christian nations, the Church, with 
 her institutions, customs, and doctrines, plays such an 
 essential part, that their inner and outer life could not be at 
 all understood without the consideration of this factor. It 
 was natural, therefore, that the newly awakened interest in 
 the history of the past generally should quicken also the 
 appreciation of the history of the Church, and therewith of 
 the positive and traditional elements in the faith and customs 
 of the nations. In those things which had been an offence 
 to the critical understanding of the eighteenth century, there 
 was now discovered, by the new historical sense, suggestive 
 symbolism, fine human feeling, natural poetry, and prophetic 
 truth ; in short, so much nourishment for the famishing soul 
 and the thirsty fancy, that the sons began to revere deeply 
 what the fathers had thrown aside as worthless superstition. 
 Thus, from the same Romanticism which had begun with 
 Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, sprang at last the revival or 
 religious and ecclesiastical taste and feeling. Rousseau was 
 followed by Chateaubriand and the Italian Manzoni ; by 
 Schleiermacher and Neander, and the Catholic convert 
 Schlegel, in Germany; and by Coleridge, and John Henry 
 Newman and Pusey, in England. 
 
 In order to last, and to influence the life of a nation from 
 various sides, a new mode of feeling always requires a new 
 mode of thought as its accompaniment, with new ideas and 
 associations of ideas as its vehicle and support, In Germany 
 this want was met in the idealistic philosophy founded by 
 Kant, which in all its various developments had this m 
 common, that it connected man with the higher world of 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 30^ 
 
 Spirit, and set before him conscious devotion to it as the 
 object of his own perfection. In England, however, no such 
 philosophy as this existed. For the philosophy of Locke 
 was, in reality, in its popular form, the formal expression of 
 that barren view of things which binds man to the world of 
 the senses as the sole reality, makes the individual complete 
 in himself, and prescribes as his highest end the pursuit of his 
 own advantage ; which was therefore precisely that view of 
 things which the new and more profound poetry and religious 
 and historical Romanticism indignantly repudiated. Under 
 these circumstances it was very natural that the originators 
 of this new mode of feeling in England should seek their 
 weapons of defence and attack in German philosophy. We 
 shall see as we proceed in what various ways this philosophy 
 affected the most thoughtful minds in England. Yet it re- 
 mained, after all, but a foreign growth on English soil. So 
 true is it that a philosophy is able to exercise a determining 
 influence upon the ecclesiastical and theological thought of 
 a nation only when it has penetrated it so profoundly as to 
 determine the popular philosophy of the educated classes 
 concerned. As regards the idealistic philosophy of Germany, 
 no such reception of it was possible In England. On the 
 other hand, the English philosophy of the past could no longer 
 satisfy the requirements of the new poetic and religious 
 feeling. The revived religious consciousness accordingly 
 failed to find the Indispensable intellectual basis and regulative 
 principles, without which it could not develop into definite 
 theological teaching, or guide the development of the mind 
 of the Churches in harmony with the general thought of the 
 nation and the age. It seems to me that we have here the 
 explanation of the remarkable fact that the Church life of 
 England, until within the last decade, has remained almost 
 completely untouched by the vast progress of the scientific 
 thought of the educated classes, and that wherever the two 
 come into contact, such a violent collision is the consequence 
 that popular feeling is shocked, and not a few despair of the 
 possibility of any mutual understanding. It Is true that 
 latterly this tension has been somewhat relaxed, and just now 
 signs are not wanting of the rise of a new philosophical view 
 of the world suited to the British genius, under the auspices 
 of which a reconciliation of the Church and the world, of 
 theology and science, may be hoped for. 
 
308 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 I propose, in the first instance, to offer a review of the 
 various philosophical schools in their relation to religion and 
 theology. This review must commence with the idealism of 
 Coleridge and Carlyle, which was so greatly influenced by 
 German philosophy. This idealism is met by the reaction of 
 the empirical philosophy of Mill and the critical philosophy 
 of Hamilton, connected with which is an agnosticism in vari- 
 ous forms. There follows then an evolutionary philosophy, 
 with more of systematic completeness, and in two forms : first, 
 realistic, with an agnostic basis, represented by Herbert 
 Spencer ; second, idealistic, represented by the Neo-Hege- 
 lians, Caird and Green, with whom are connected, finally, the 
 living representatives of speculative theism. 
 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a true representative of 
 Romanticism with all its bright and dark sides. He was a 
 man of wide culture, of fine sensibility, of vivid imagination, of 
 ready intellect ; but as a thinker his efforts were spasmodic 
 and fragmentary, lacking steadiness, consistency, and thorough- 
 ness ; and he displayed a surprising want of moral strength. 
 As a young man he was an enthusiastic worshipper of Nature 
 and Freedom ; afterwards, when sobered down under the in- 
 fluence of personal and historical experiences, he sought in 
 German philosophy consolation for the shipwreck of the ideals 
 of his youth. He studied Lessing and Kant, Jacobi and 
 Schelling ; and by the aid of philosophical idealism he recon- 
 ciled himself to the faith of the Church, from which he had 
 been totally estranged. Yet the reconciliation was in such a 
 form that he no longer based his faith upon supernatural au- 
 thority, but upon the ideal constitution of the human mind 
 itself, regarding Christianity as the perfection of human rea- 
 son. With Herder and Schleiermacher, Coleridge maintained 
 that Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life and a 
 living process, that the proof of it therefore must consist in the 
 inner personal experience of that life. While he thus related 
 himself to the supernaturalism of the orthodox party of that 
 time by going over to the side of the Evangelicals (the Pietists 
 of England), on the other hand he departed from the latter 
 in that he regarded Christianity not as something absolutely 
 supernatural in antithesis to the human, as the germs of |t 
 lie in the nature of man himself and are brought to their 
 perfection by Christianity; for which reason the truth of Chris- 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 3O9 
 
 tianity can never contradict reason when properly understood. 
 Coleridge expounded these views in his Aids to Reflection 
 (1825), not, it is true, in a systematic form, but in suggestive 
 aphorisms and explanatory examples, which should serve to 
 arouse independent reflection in the direction indicated. 
 
 Coleridge attached the greatest importance to the distinc- 
 tion, taken from Kant's Critique, between the "understand- 
 ing," as " the faculty judging according to sense," and the 
 " reason," as the faculty of " universal and necessary truths." 
 He further distinguishes the speculative from the practical 
 reason, the former as applied to formal or abstract truth, the 
 latter as applied to actual or moral truth, as the fountain of 
 ideas and the light of the conscience. While he is thus far 
 apparently quite in agreement with Kant, Coleridge ascribes 
 nevertheless to the practical reason a meaning which passes 
 beyond the moral sphere : like Jacobi he describes it as the 
 feeling or instinct of supersensible truths, or, with Schelling, 
 as an intellectual intuition of spiritual objects. Whilst the 
 understanding is confined to the world of the senses, and can 
 accordingly pronounce only conditional judgments, the reason 
 is the source of unconditional and necessary judgments, the 
 intelligible spiritual nature of man, which is one with the 
 Divine Spirit. From overlooking this distinction and from 
 the illegitimate application of the understanding to supersen- 
 sible objects, arises "unbelief or misbelief" "Wherever the 
 forms of reasoning appropriate only to the natural world are 
 applied to spiritual realities, the more strictly logical the 
 reasoning is in all its parts, the more irrational it is as a 
 wholeT- — Propositions such as these, to which the parallels 
 may be found here and there in German Romanticism and 
 speculative philosophy, have a certain meaning as a protest 
 against a shallow and negative Rationalism, but they betray 
 none the less a questionable inclination to suppress intelligent 
 criticism in religious questions. Nor did Coleridge altogether 
 escape this danger, although he had the good sense to acknow- 
 ledge the logical understanding as a negative canon in re- 
 ligious questions, since absolutely inconceivable propositions 
 cannot be true. It is only the positive proof of the truths of 
 religious faith which must not be derived from theoretical 
 argumentation, but from the moral and spiritual nature of man. 
 It is, as Coleridge well observes, the peculiarity of Chris- 
 tianity that, unlike philosophy, it does not seek by workings 
 
310 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 upon the intellect to elevate the character, but its first step is to 
 cleanse the heart and afterwards to restore the intellect like- 
 wise to its natural clearness. If the effects were not propor- 
 tionate to the Divine wisdom of the method, it was because 
 " the doctors of the Church forgot that the heart, the moral na- 
 ture, was the beginning and the end." " This was the true and 
 first apostasy, when in council and synod the Divine Humani- 
 ties of the Gospel gave way to speculative systems, and religion 
 became a science of shadows under the name of theology, or 
 at best a bare skeleton of truth, without life or interest, alike 
 inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians." 
 
 Coleridge illustrated his view of Christianity in its applica- 
 tion to selected doctrines — original sin, redemption, baptism, 
 inspiration. In doing this he everywhere seeks so far to 
 rationalise the dogma as to surrender its scholastic husk while 
 preserving its religious and moral kernel. The affinity of his 
 theology with Schleiermacher's, especially as represented by 
 the conservative wing of Schleiermacher's school, strikes the 
 student at once. The dogma of " original sin " is made to 
 mean that sin as spiritual evil is a condition of the will, which 
 is the ground and cause of all sins, that it was not inherited 
 from without, but is the act of the will itself, and so " self- 
 originated." This is certainly much more a Kantian than 
 Biblical or ecclesiastical doctrine. In complete agreement with 
 Kant, Coleridge says " that in respect of original sin, every 
 man is the adequate representative of .all men," and that the 
 first man in time, the Adam of Genesis, is only the type of 
 the race. Hence all statements as to the perfection of man 
 in Paradise must be cast aside as phantastic and valueless. 
 With regard to the doctrine of redemption, according to 
 Coleridge, the cause of redemption is not so much the death 
 of Christ as the incarnation of the Creative Word in the per- 
 son of Christ. This manifestation of the Divine in the human 
 life, labours, and death of the Saviour produces, as its effect, 
 our transformation from fleshly to spiritual men, and, as further 
 consequences, our progressive sanctification by the Word and 
 the Spirit. But the various forms of expression which are 
 used by the aposdes to set forth the actual consequences of 
 the act of redemption show by their diversity that they ought 
 to be taken as metaphors only, borrowed in part from Jewish 
 theology and in part from the opinions prevalent amongst 
 the readers and opponents of the apostles. 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 3 1 I 
 
 Specially interesting and instructive is Coleridge's essay, 
 entitled, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, published after 
 his death (1840), in which he assails the dogmatic theory of 
 the inspiration of the Scriptures with very rational arguments, 
 while adhering tenaciously to his conviction of their incom- 
 parable religious and moral value. He shows admirably that 
 the Biblical writers themselves lay no claim to the verbal in- 
 spiration of their writings, and that this doctrine, really bor- 
 rowed from the Jewish Rabbis, must therefore be regarded 
 as an unscriptural superstition. He goes further, and asks, 
 " How can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective 
 and fallible expressions," such as all human words and sen- 
 tences must be ? Moreover, we should gain nothing by such 
 an unnatural supposition, but on the contrary be simply losers. 
 For if all the heart-awakening utterances of human hearts, 
 such as we find in the Bible, were nothing more than " a 
 Divina Commedia of a superhuman ventriloquist " ; if the 
 sweet Psalmist of Israel were himself as mere an instrument 
 of the inspiring Spirit as his harp, an automaton poet, all sym- 
 pathy and all example would be gone, and we could listen to 
 his words only in fear and perplexity. The Bible is undeni- 
 ably " the appointed conservatory, an indispensable criterion, 
 and a continual source and support of true belief; but we 
 must not confound this with the statements — that the Bible is 
 the sole source, and that it not only contains but constitutes 
 the Christian religion, that it is in short a creed consisting 
 wholly of articles of faith ; and that consequently we need no 
 rule, help, or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what 
 parts are and what are not articles of faith." As the Church 
 herself has admitted it as a canon — that each part of Scrip- 
 ture must be interpreted by the spirit of the whole, it has 
 thereby practically granted "that it is the spirit of the Bible, 
 and not the detached words and sentences, that is infallible 
 and absolute." We see that it is the view of the Bible — at 
 once free and reverent — of Lessing, Herder, and Schleier- 
 macher, which Coleridge commends to his countrymen. We 
 shall find in the next chapter, in the case of the representa- 
 tives of the Broad Church party, that though this view has met 
 with opposition in the English Church, it has gradually made 
 its way there to a considerable extent. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle spent his early youth in the midst of the 
 simplest conditions of country life, as the eldest son of a 
 
312 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 Scotch mason, in a family in which a plain and serious Puri- 
 tanical piety held sway. These impressions of his childhood 
 engraved themselves so deeply on his heart that they con- 
 tinued powerfully to influence him after he had given up the 
 dogmas of the Church. From the bright inquisitive intellect 
 of the youth, who sought for truth at any price, the defects of 
 the traditional arguments in support of orthodox dogmas 
 could not long remain concealed, and an eager study of the 
 works of Gibbon and Hume, to which he devoted himself 
 during his university course in Edinburgh, added all that was 
 needed to make him a decided sceptic. But he could not 
 rest satisfied in mere negation. He was profoundly unhappy 
 when, under the influence of Hume's philosophy, the God of 
 the orthodox faith could no longer be believed in, or had be- 
 come the unconcerned absentee spectator of a mechanically 
 rotating universe, and when the idea of duty had also seemed to 
 change from a Divine messenger and guide to a false earthly 
 phantasm, made up of desire and fear. But his profound love 
 of truth and sense of duty formed the rock on which the 
 waves of doubt broke. Whilst his intellect, beclouded with 
 sceptical and pessimistic horrors, pictured to him the world as 
 the sport of chance and the work of the devil, his moral con- 
 sciousness attained to the certainty of the indestructible 
 freedom of the soul as the lord of the world. With this the 
 " Everlasting Yea " obtained the conquest over the "Ever- 
 lasting No." It was the repetition in an individual of the 
 same process as had been passed through in German philo- 
 sophy a generation earlier ; when the world of orthodox be- 
 lief destroyed by the criticism of the understanding, was 
 reconstructed from the subjective resources of man as a moral 
 and rational being; when the moral self-consciousness ex- 
 panded into the ideal world of the great German thinkers and 
 poets. 
 
 And it was not in Carlyle's case merely a similar process 
 of development, but it took place in direct dependence on 
 German thought. In the critical period of his life he occu- 
 pied himself closely with the writings of Goethe and Schiller, 
 Jean Paul and Novalis ; translations from their works were 
 his earliest literary efforts. To Goethe especially he felt 
 himself under great obligations. From the many fine things 
 which he has written upon Goethe, the following passage, as 
 especially characteristic of Carlyle himself, may be quoted 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 313 
 
 here : " He who would learn to reconcile reverence with 
 clearness ; to deny and defy what is false, yet believe and 
 worship what is true ; amid raging factions, bent on what is 
 either altogether empty or has substance in it only for a day, 
 which stormfuUy convulse and tear hither and thither a dis- 
 tracted expiring system of society, to adjust himself aright ; 
 and working for the world and in the world, keep himself 
 unspotted from the world — let him look here. This man 
 (Goethe), we may say, became morally great, by being in his 
 own age, what in some other ages many might have been, a 
 genuine man." ^ 
 
 '• To reconcile reverence with clearness, to deny and defy 
 what is false, and yet to believe and worship what is true " 
 — this is in fact an admirable summary of Carlyle's own 
 character and labours. A beUever, in the sense of orthodox 
 theology, he never became, but always expressed most un- 
 reservedly his poor opinion of it, at times indeed with a vehe- 
 mence which might surprise one in the case of an historian 
 who showed on other occasions such loving sympathy with 
 antiquity, did we not remember that the orthodox system 
 does not yet belong to ancient history, but is still a power in 
 the world, often making itself felt as a retarding fetter to minds 
 that are strivine after truth and clearness for themselves and 
 others. It is not any want of religion, not frivolous scepti- 
 cism, but rather a good piece of old Scotch Puritanism, 
 combined with modern ethical idealism, which makes him 
 I'uthlessly indignant at every form of religious cant, at all 
 ecciesiasticism that has become external form and convention. 
 Yet what is almost more repulsive and hateful to him than 
 the latter are the empty and windy negations of frivolous 
 scepticism, atheism, and materialism. In one of his masterly 
 characterisations of the present age ^ (to be compared with 
 Fichte's discourses on the Grundzilge des gegenwartigen Zeit- 
 alters) he says : " The fever of scepticism must needs burn 
 itself out, and burn out thereby the impurities that caused it ; 
 then again will there be clearness, health. The principle of 
 life which now struggles painfully in the outer, thin and barren 
 domain of the Conscious or Mechanical, may then withdraw 
 into its inner sanctuaries, its abysses of mystery and miracle ; 
 
 1 Miscellanies, vol. iv. p. 49 (Popular Edition, 1872). 
 - Ibid., vol. iv. p. 35. 
 
3f4 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 82:;. [Bk. IV. 
 
 withdraw deeper than ever into that domain of the Uncon- 
 scious, by nature infinite and inexhaustible; and creatively 
 work there. From that mystic region, and from that alone, 
 all wonders, all poesies, and religions and social systems have 
 proceeded; the like wonders, and greater and higher, lie 
 slumbering there ; and, brooded on by the spirit of the waters, 
 will evolve themselves, and rise like exhalations from the 
 deep." 
 
 In his essay on Diderot,^ Carlyle shows that his mechanical 
 materialism was the natural outcome of his barren logical in- 
 tellect, but that two consequences of some value have followed 
 from it : First, that all speculations of the sort we call Natural 
 Theology are unproductive, since of final causes nothing 
 can be proved, they being known only by the higher light of 
 intuition ; secondly, that the hypothesis of the universe being 
 a machine, and of " an Architect who constructed it, sitting as 
 it were apart, and guiding it, and seeing it go, may turn out 
 an inanity and nonentity " ; that " that ' faint possible Theism,' 
 which now forms our common English creed," which seeks a 
 God here and there, and not there where alone He is to be 
 found — inwardly, in our own soul, — that this Theism cannot 
 be too soon swept' out of the world. To the individual who 
 with hysterical violence theoretically asserts a God who is a 
 mere distant simulacrum, Carlyle exclaims, " Fool ! God Is not 
 only the7^e, but here, or nowhere, in that life-breath of thine, 
 in that act and thought of thine, — and thou wert wise to look 
 to it."^ " Whosoever, in one way or another, recognises not 
 that ' Divine Idea of the World, which lies at the bottom of 
 appearances,' can rightly interpret no appearance ; and what- 
 soever spiritual thing he does, must do it partially, do it 
 falsely." ^ With the theoretical perversities of the mere logical 
 understanding, which makes of the universe a dead mechanism, 
 go hand in hand the moral and spiritual perversities of selfish 
 utilitarianism. This blind pursuit of pleasure, which will have 
 God's infinite Universe altogether to itself, and therefore 
 necessarily remains for ever deceived and dissatisfied, is the 
 root of all evil. For this reason sorrow is so good and needful 
 to man, that it teaches him that happiness is not his highest 
 end and good, but rather, as Goethe maintains, life really be- 
 gins with self-renunciation. " Love not pleasure, but love God! 
 
 ^ Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 49 sq. ^ Ibid., p. 51. ^ Ibid., p. 52. 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 3 I 5 
 
 This is the ' Everlasting Yea,' wherein all contradiction is 
 solved : wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him." ^ 
 
 This is in brief the Weltanschauung of Carlyle, an ethical 
 idealism after the manner of Fichte, Herder, and Goethe. It 
 is undoubtedly not " Theism " as commonly understood, but 
 it is as little an abstract and systematic " Pantheism." Carlyle 
 hated all such formulae, and the endless controversies about 
 them. With him the essential thing was to feel God in 
 one's own soul as a living reality, to behold reverently his 
 rule in the world of nature and history, and from this feeling 
 and vision to labour for the good and true in unselfish devo- 
 tion. For himself he did not require a more definite formu- 
 lation of his philosophic view of things, and declined it as an 
 impediment. But he was too good an historian not to know 
 that the clothing of tangible symbols is necessary to make 
 ideal truth the faith of an historical community. The forms of 
 ecclesiastical creeds and life are, like institutions of the State, 
 the "clothes" of the idea ; without such clothes and historical 
 vestures, Carlyle expressly maintains, society has never existed, 
 and never can exist.^ But, he forcibly remarks, that it is with 
 these spiritual as with our bodily clothes — we always need them, 
 but cannot always have the same. Time, which adds much 
 to the sacredness of symbols, at length desecrates them again. 
 Symbols also wax old, as everything in the world has its rise, 
 its culmination, and its decline. As in the past new prophets 
 have always arisen at the right moment, who as God-inspired 
 poets created new symbols, so will it be in the future also. 
 " Meanwhile, we account him Legislator and wise who can 
 so much as tell when a symbol has grown old, and gently 
 remove it."^ 
 
 Carlyle has nowhere expounded connectedly his view of the 
 nature and development of religion (and we must remember 
 that he was really not a philosopher, but an historian), but his 
 ideas thereon may be gathered from various passages of his 
 writings, forming an inwardly connected whole. Religion — 
 we may thus summarise his opinion — is to be found in every 
 man as part of his spiritual constitution, as a God-given faculty, 
 enabling him to apprehend intuitively the Divine in the world 
 and in human life, and to worship it in reverent obedience. 
 But the constitutional endowment becomes an actual living 
 
 ^ Sartor Eesartus, p. 133. - Ibid., p. 149. ^ Ibid., p. 155. 
 
3l6 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 power in historical society only ; and there only by the instru- 
 mentality of those leading minds which as seers and prophets 
 apprehend in clear thought, and reveal in intelligible speech 
 what slumbers unconsciously in the souls of all. Their word 
 brings to consciousness the truth which was previously unper- 
 ceived, although longed for and dimly surmised, which lay in 
 the depths of the soul, and which is then incorporated in the 
 symbols of religious societies. These symbols are the indis- 
 pensable means of presenting to men's minds in an intelligible 
 and realisable form the Divine and Eternal, which is itself a 
 nameless and unutterable mystery. For this reason they are 
 the sacred bond binding souls together, tokens, signs, stand- 
 ards, and garments of the Eternal and Divine, acknowledged 
 by multitudes in common. Yet they are not themselves the 
 Eternal and Divine, and, as having arisen in time, they have 
 only limited duration. Waxing old with the progress of time, 
 they lose the intelligible meaning which they had at the begin- 
 ning, and then become empty masks, delusive simulacra, and 
 hindrances of the truth and religion. It is then time to re- 
 move them cautiously, and to supply their place with new 
 symbols from the perennial source of truth — the depths of the 
 unconscious, intuitive spirit. But the time of transition, when 
 the old is no more understood and received, and the new has 
 not yet been generally recognised and acknowledged, is a 
 time of difficulty and trouble. Doubt and denial then prevail ; 
 the cold understanding thrusts its barren logic into the place 
 of creative genius ; science, history, the universe are made 
 mechanical ; and only a few profounder minds perceive be- 
 neath the surface of chaos the signs of a new world of order, 
 in which reverence shall be combined with clearness. Such 
 a prophet of a nobler future Carlyle saw in Goethe, in the 
 midst of this desert age of the barren understanding. And 
 we may add that Carlyle was himself such a seer, who beheld 
 prophetically, in the light of eternal ideas, not the past only, 
 but also the future courses and destinations of human history, 
 and illuminated them with his inspiration. 
 
 It Is well known and Intelligible enough that Carlyle stood 
 very much alone with such views amongst his fellow-country- 
 men, — the Conservatives regarding him as a dangerous Radical, 
 and the Liberals as a reactionary. It is, therefore, the more 
 noteworthy that In the middle of the century a few more men 
 are found, who, like Carlyle, and to some extent Influenced 
 
Ch. I.] PPIILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 317 
 
 by him, sought to combine the severest criticism of the tradi- 
 tional belief of the Churches with genuine and profound piety 
 and moral earnestness.^ Chief amongst these was Francis 
 William Newman, younger brother of John Henry Newman, 
 who will come under our notice in the next chapter, to whom 
 he was in no degree inferior in point of delicacy and religious 
 feeling, and far superior in depth and clearness of thought 
 and in moral courage, although English society has per- 
 sistently placed the daring heretic, whose free thought was 
 inconvenient, below the socially distinguished and dignified 
 ecclesiastic with his polished style. In the book, Phases of 
 Faith (1850), Francis Newman, following his own religious 
 development, — really a typical case for our age, — describes 
 the process by which a truth-loving mind is compelled by the 
 logic of facts to resign one position after another in the 
 authoritative creeds. It is not a pi'iori presuppositions, not 
 considerations of the undevout understanding, not speculative 
 theories, that shake the foundations of his inherited belief; it 
 is simply the application of the intellect to the examination of 
 the received authorities, resulting in the conviction of their 
 insufficiency, and human and historical conditionality, and 
 accordingly of their want of divine authority, and of their 
 unfitness to serve as the firm ultimate bases of belief. Thus, in 
 the first instance, the orthodox creed is examined by the test 
 to which it itself appeals — the Scriptures, and is found not to 
 accord with them, and to be therefore unsatisfactory. The 
 examination is then carried further ; the Bible itself is sub- 
 mitted to it ; the parallel narratives are compared (e.g. in the 
 Gospels and the historical books of the Old Testament), 
 and are found not to agree ; then one doctrine is compared 
 with another {e.g., predestination and eternal torments with 
 the goodness and mercy of God), and here, again, irreconcil- 
 able contradictions are presented ; finally, notions of the Bible 
 are compared with undoubted facts of science {e.g. of astro- 
 nomy, geology, human history), and once again the fallibility 
 of Scripture has to be acknowledged. If, with the Unitarians 
 of that generation, the attempt was made to fall back from the 
 teaching of the Bible as a whole upon the teaching of Jesus, 
 as the final and sure authority, it could not be made out his- 
 
 1 One of these was William Rathbone Greg, the author of The Creed of 
 Christendom, 185 1. 
 
3l8 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 torically, from the traditions, what the teaching of Jesus cer- 
 tainly was ; all such attempts show ever afresh that it is a 
 self-destructive contradiction to seek to base an authoritative 
 system upon free critical inquiry. When the great primary 
 questions of religion are proposed, there are only two solutions 
 possible : either we follow the inward law of the reason and 
 conscience and disregard the external law of authority, or vice 
 versa. The middle course of orthodox Protestantism, which 
 requires on the one hand the submission of the proud reason 
 to the infallible authority of the " Word of God," and on the 
 other hand appeals from the authority of the Church to the 
 right of the individual " conscience " (which must mean the 
 reason), is illogical and contradictory; and the sense of this 
 sends many to Rome. 
 
 This position of Newman's is undoubtedly logically impreg- 
 nable, but in his statement of it he has overlooked an essential 
 point. The education of reason and conscience, by which the 
 individual is fitted to form true judgments, is the result of 
 the historical development of humanity, and cannot therefore 
 be separated therefrom, but must always seek from thence 
 instruction and guidance. From this point of view the anti- 
 thesis of inward and outward authority becomes less absolute 
 than Newman makes it, being the constant interaction of his- 
 torical universality and individual spontaneity. — The closing 
 remarks of Newman's are excellent : Religion was created by 
 the inward instinct of the soul, its longing for the sympathy 
 of God with it and for fellowship with him. But it had after- 
 wards to be purified and chastened by the sceptical under- 
 standing ; the co-operation of these two powers is essential for 
 its perfection. While religious persons dread critical and 
 searching thought, and critics despise instinctive religion, each 
 side of man remains imperfect and curtailed. Surely the age is 
 ripe for a religion which shall combine the tenderness, humility, 
 and disinterestedness that are the glory of the purest Chris- 
 tianity, with that activity of intellect, untiring pursuit of truth, 
 and strict adherence to impartial principle which the schools 
 of modern science embody. 
 
 Newman has sketched an ideal picture of a Christianity thus 
 chastened and combined with the knowledge of the present 
 day, in the two short but valuable essays, The Soul, its Sorrows 
 and its Aspirations : an Essay towards the Natural History of 
 the Soul as the true Basis of Theology (1849, 3rd ed., 1852), 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 319 
 
 and Theism, Doclrinal and Practical [i?)^^). A profound and 
 genuine piety breathes tiirough both of these books, combined 
 with clear and sound thought, which places in a bright light 
 the fundamental religious problems, and seeks their solution 
 in the depths of personal consciousness, and also in the wider 
 region of the consciousness of humanity as reflected in history. 
 As confessions of a devout thinker (akin to St. Augustine's 
 Confessions), they form a true book of devotion for thoughtful 
 religious readers. The comparison with Schleiermacher's 
 Reden is also obvious; but it cannot be denied that Newman's 
 idea of the nature of religion has this superiority over that of 
 the Reden, that it is based upon a truer psychology, and the 
 mysticism involved in it is less aesthetical than ethical, and 
 consequently the conception of God in Newman's essays is 
 more Christian than Spinozistic. 
 
 The empirical philosophy of the i8th century was handed 
 on and attained to new significance in the two Mills, father 
 and son. Following Hume and Hartley, James Mill, in his 
 Analysis of the Phenomena of the Hiunan Mind {i%2<)), had 
 traced all our intellectual and moral judgments to the associa- 
 tion of ideas, which in consequence of frequent occurrence 
 together become constantly connected. This doctrine of the 
 association of ideas forms also the basis of the philosophy of 
 John Stuart Mill, though it does not there retain the logical 
 thoroughness which it has in the father's system. In re-edit- 
 ing his father's book, the son added notes in explanation and 
 correction which amount to an abandonment of the funda- 
 mental principle of this philosophy. But as he sought 
 nevertheless tenaciously to cling to it, remarkable inconsis- 
 tencies and uncertainties found their way into his doctrine, 
 both on its theoretical and its practical side. 
 
 According to J. S. Mill we have knowledge of our sensa- 
 tions and ideas only, but neither of an object external to us 
 nor of a subject as the basis of those feelings. Things are 
 only the permanent possibilities of sensation, and mind is only 
 a series of feelings with a background of the possibility ot 
 feeling. Having had his attention called by Hamilton to the 
 fact that an association of ideas is possible only by a comparison 
 of similar sensations, that comparison involves remembrance, 
 and remembrance is possible only by virtue of the identity of 
 the ego as existing throughout the series of different feelings, 
 Mill extended his definition of mind by the addition, that iii 
 
320 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 82 5. [Bk. IV. 
 
 is " a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and 
 future." That this is a paradox, an inexplicable puzzle, he 
 himself admitted, without on that account, however, amending 
 the erroneous idea of the mind with which he had set out, and 
 to which alone the puzzle is to be ascribed. He likewise 
 admitted that the phenomenon of memory is a puzzle which his 
 psychology is unable to solve, as no explanation of it can be 
 assigned which does not involve belief in the identity of the 
 ego, which is the thing to be accounted for. Under the pres- 
 sure of this difficulty he wavers between such indefinite 
 descriptions as an inexplicable "link of sensations" or "thread of 
 consciousness " and the supposition of a real permanent element 
 which Is different from everything else, and can only be spoken 
 of as the ego. But he is far from making any actual use of 
 this as an original active principle. — Nor do our sensations 
 reveal any more the reality of external objects than of the ego. 
 Things, bodies, are simply groups of sensations, which arise 
 according to the law of causality, which, however, is the law 
 of subjective association. The theory gives no explanation of 
 the source whence these groups come, or of how they can 
 affect each other, of how it comes about that we associate with 
 the perception of certain moving bodies the idea of persons 
 external to ourselves. — Cause is the name simply of the regu- 
 lar recurring connexion in experience of certain sensations ; 
 when we speak of the " law of causality," we mean only the 
 uniformity, observed in experience, of a series of occurrences 
 
 an abstraction which, according to Mill himself, is not 
 
 reached until an advanced stage of observation has been 
 attained, whilst really thought is subject to the category of 
 causality from the beginning. Of course, with this explana- 
 tion of causality from the association of ideas, the element of 
 necessity is put out of court, and Mill accordingly regards it as 
 by no means inconceivable, that in other worlds than this the 
 connexion between cause and effect may not exist. Mathema- 
 tical truths, in like manner, possess nothing beyond the prob- 
 ability of inferences from uniform experience, and by no means 
 unconditional certainty. The contrary opinion would lead to 
 the metaphysics of innate principles, with which the doors 
 would be opened to the unscientific method of intuition and all 
 kinds of mysticism. In order, therefore, to protect science, em- 
 piricism is carried through to its extreme sceptical consequencer, 
 by which the ground is cut from under the feet of all science ! 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 32! 
 
 The final outcome of the philosophy of Mill is no better 
 on its ethical side. From the school of his father and of 
 Bentham, he adopts the principle that happiness is the one 
 desirable object, though it is not merely one's own happiness, 
 but that also of others, yet the latter only for the sake of the 
 former. No other reason can be assigned why the general 
 happiness is desirable, except that each person desires his 
 own happiness. In his autobiography,^ Mill speaks, how- 
 ever, of an important crisis in his life, when he learnt that 
 " the end of happiness was only to be attained by not making 
 it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who 
 have their minds fixed on some object other than their own 
 happiness ; on the happiness of others, on the improvement 
 of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a 
 means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something 
 else, they find happiness by the way. Once make the 
 enjoyments of life a principal object, and they are immedi- 
 ately felt to be insufficient." Beyond doubt, noble utterances, 
 to which an almost verbal parallel is to be found in the 
 idealist Carlyle^; but Mill has not shown how we are to 
 harmonise with them the fundamental principle of his ethical 
 philosophy, according to which the idea of happiness, and in 
 the last instance one's own happiness, is the highest motive 
 of action. Here also, as in the theoretical section of his 
 philosophy, he has failed to carry through his psychological 
 analysis to the final decisive point ; he has not made it clear 
 to himself that the question why we feel ourselves under 
 moral obligation at all, is quite distinct from the question 
 as to the content, the what, of right moral conduct. It is 
 undoubtedly true that in relation to the latter question the con- 
 sequences of an action to society and to the individual must 
 be taken into consideration as an essential criterion. But if 
 this criterion of the specific action is confounded with the 
 motive of the moral will, if the desire for happiness is made 
 the chief motive, and put in the place of the sense of duty, 
 the actual facts of the true moral consciousness are rendered 
 as inexplicable as theoretical knowledge is when the associa- 
 tion of ideas, which is only a means of logical thought, is put 
 in its place. The utilitarian principle of the empirical philo- 
 sophy has its proper place as an heuristic principle in 
 
 1 Page 142. " See ante, p. 314. 
 
 G. T. Y 
 
322 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 practical sociology, when the existence of the sense of duty 
 is assumed as a matter of course ; but when it claims to be 
 an explanation of the moral consciousness generally, and 
 when the sense of duty is accordingly derived from calcula- 
 tions of utility, the true science of ethics is not served, but 
 rendered impossible.-' 
 
 It is intelligible that with such premises the religious views of 
 Mill could not rise far above sceptical negations. His father, 
 who had lost all belief in a good God in consequence of his 
 education in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism and of his 
 reflections on the evils of the world, brought up his son 
 without any religious belief As compared with the purely 
 negative position of his early days, it marks, therefore, a 
 certain advance when, in his essay on The Utility of Religion 
 (written between 1850 and 1858), he allows that in early 
 times religious belief in the Divine sanctions of moral laws 
 was an excellent means of introducing and establishing them, 
 and that even now religion, like poetry, answers to a craving 
 in men for higher and nobler ideas than actual life supplies. 
 But it is doubtful whether "the idealism of our earthly life, 
 the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made, 
 is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense 
 of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings and 
 still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief 
 respecting the unseen powers." "The essence of religion is 
 the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires 
 towards an ideal object, recognised as of the highest excel- 
 lence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of 
 desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of Human- 
 ity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as by the 
 supernatural religions even in their best manifestations, and 
 far more so than in any of the others," which, by their 
 threats and promises, strengthen the selfish element of our 
 nature instead of weakening it. Besides, these religions 
 suffer under so many contradictions and irrationalities that the 
 simple and innocent faith which their acceptance involves can 
 co-exist only with a torpid and inactive state of the speculative 
 faculties, whilst persons of exercised intellect are able to 
 
 1 The folly of such a mode of procedure in ethical science, Carlyle has 
 admirably satirised by setting the problem, " Given a world of knaves, to 
 produce an honesty from their united action ? " (^Misc, iv. p. 36.) 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 323 
 
 believe only by the sophistication and perversion either of the 
 understanding or of the conscience. Finally, the Religion of 
 Humanity leaves open an ample domain in the region of the 
 imagination, which may be planted with possibilities and 
 hypotheses, of which neither the falsehood nor the truth can 
 be ascertained. 
 
 In the later essay on Theism, written between 1868 and 
 1870 (which had not received the final revisions which it was 
 his habit to make), likewise published after the author's 
 death. Mill appears to have advanced beyond this purely 
 critical standpoint. The inquiry is not now merely with 
 regard to the utility of religion, but as to the truth of religious 
 ideas, and the result of it leads to the acceptance of the pre- 
 ponderating probability of certain suppositions, although un- 
 doubtedly they are still far enough removed from orthodox 
 belief From the adaptations in nature, Mill now considers, 
 there is evidence which points, not to the creation of the 
 universe, but of the present order of it by an Intelligent 
 Mind ; though the imperfections in nature necessitate the sup- 
 position that its Author has but limited power over it ; and that 
 he has some regard to the happiness of his creatures prob- 
 ably, though we are not justified in supposing this is his sole 
 or chief motive of action. It is also possible that a Being 
 thus limited in power may interfere occasionally in the im- 
 perfect machinery of the universe, though in none of the 
 cases in which such interposition is believed to have occurred 
 is the evidence such as could possibly prove it. In the same 
 way the possibility of life after death must be admitted, 
 though it cannot be converted into a certainty. " To me it 
 seems that human life, small and confined as it is, and as, 
 considered merely in the present, it is likely to remain, even 
 when the progress of material and moral improvement may 
 have freed it from the greater part of its present calamities, 
 stands greatly in need of any wider range and greater height 
 of aspiration, for itself and its destination, which the exercise 
 of imagination can yield to it without running counter to the 
 evidence of fact." . . . "The indulgence of hope with 
 regard to the government of the universe, and the destiny of 
 man after death, is legitimate, and philosophically defensible. 
 The beneficial effect of such hope is far from trifling. It 
 makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feel- 
 ings, and gives greater strength as well as solemnity to all 
 
324 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 the sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow- 
 creatures and mankind at large." Religious belief in the 
 reality of the divine ideal, notwithstanding all the perver- 
 sions and corruptions of it, has proved its force through past 
 ages, a force beyond what a merely ideal conception could 
 exert. And this belief can only increase in value when the 
 critical thinker resigns the idea of an omnipotent ruler of the 
 world, as then the evils of the world no longer cast a shadow 
 upon his moral perfection. The Divine ideal is still more 
 valuable as it is to be beheld incorporated in the human 
 personality of Jesus. However much of the accretions of 
 legend and speculation may be taken away from us by rational 
 criticism, Christ will remain a unique figure ; on his words and 
 deeds " there is a stamp of personal originality, combined 
 with profundity and insight, which must place the Prophet 
 of Nazareth in the very first rank of the men of sublime 
 genius of whom our species can boast. A better translation 
 of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete cannot 
 be found, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would 
 approve our life." In the continual battle between the 
 powers of good and of evil, it is to the good man an eleva- 
 ting feeling to know that he is helping God by a co-operation 
 of which God, not being omnipotent, really stands in need, 
 and by which a somewhat nearer approach may be made to 
 the fulfilment of his purposes. 
 
 The religious idealism which speaks through these words 
 of Mill's is the more gratifying that it could not be looked 
 for from the principles of his philosophy. After individual 
 happiness had been made in morals the main principle, it 
 is surprising to find unselfish devotion to the requirements of 
 goodness or the purposes of God constituted the ideal in 
 religion. These are, surely, two standpoints far removed 
 from each other, the reconciliation of which Mill has not 
 supplied. And after he had in logic referred causality to 
 the association of subjective ideas, and the objectivity of 
 knowledge had been denied, we are taken by surprise when 
 finally an intelligent Designer and Ruler of the world is 
 inferred by means of the law of causation. Evidently Mill's 
 personal feeling and thinking were better than his philosophical 
 prejudices strictly allowed. 
 
 The principal representative of the intuitive philosophy, 
 v/hich, Mill supposed, was inclined to consider cherished 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 325 
 
 dogmas as intuitive truths, and intuition as tlie voice of 
 God and Nature, having a higher authority than the voice of 
 reason, was the Scotch philosopher. Sir William Hamilton. 
 Against his system Mill wrote his book. Examination of Sir 
 William Hamiltoii s Philosophy, which he subjected to a 
 searching criticism from his own empirical standpoint. But 
 he seems to have ignored the fact that the " intuitive," or 
 critico-speculative philosophy has other and more important 
 representatives than Hamilton ; and his knowledge of the 
 history of philosophy, particularly of German philosophy, was 
 defective.^ 
 
 Hamilton was indebted to both Reid and Kant : he endea- 
 voured to combine the realism of the former with the sub- 
 jective criticism of the latter, but without any great success. 
 He himself published an edition of the works of Reid with 
 notes, and after his death his pupils, Mansel and Veitch, 
 edited his Lectures on Logic and Metaphysics (i860, 4 vols.). 
 But he had previously plainly indicated his philosophical 
 position in his Review of the Philosophy of Cousin, which 
 appeared first in the Edinbtirgh Review (1829), and finally 
 in the volume of Discussions 07i Philosophy and Literature, 
 in 1852. There are, he considers, four views with regard to 
 the Unconditioned : according to Cousin it is cognisable and 
 conceivable by means of reflection ; according to Schelling, 
 though it is not comprehensible by reflection, it is knowable 
 by intellectual intuition ; according to Kant, though not 
 theoretically knowable, it is knowable as a regulative prin- 
 ciple, and its notion is more than a mere negation of the 
 Conditioned ; finally, according to Hamilton himself, it is 
 neither conceivable nor in any way knowable, because 
 it is simply the negation of the Conditioned, which alone 
 can be positively conceived. With regard to Kant, 
 Hamilton admits that to him belongs the merit of having 
 first examined the extent of our knowledge, and of having 
 limited it to the conditional phenomena of our consciousness, 
 but maintains that Kant's deduction of the categories and 
 ideas was the result of great but perverse ingenuity, and 
 his distinction between the understanding and the reason 
 surreptitious. As Kant admits that the "ideas" involve 
 
 1 As critics of Mill, may be mentioned, McCosh, Green, Bradley {Prin- 
 ciples of Logic), Martineau. 
 
326 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 self-contradiction, and yet makes them legitimate products of 
 intelligence, the speculative reason becomes in his system an 
 organ of simple delusion, and this must lead to absolute 
 scepticism. For if our intellectual nature be perfidious in 
 one revelation, it must be regarded as misleading in all. 
 When the falseness of the speculative reason has been once 
 proved, it is impossible to establish the existence of God, 
 Freedom, and Immortality on the ground of the supposed 
 veracity of the practical reason. Because Kant did not 
 completely exorcise the spectre of the Absolute, it has ever 
 since continued to haunt the German school of philosophy. 
 Though Schelling perceived the impossibility of getting a 
 philosophy of the Unconditioned by means of conceptual 
 reflection, his " intellectual intuition " of the Absolute was the 
 product of arbitrary abstraction and a self-delusive imagina- 
 tion ; for when the antithesis of subject and object, which 
 constitute consciousness, has been annihilated, all that remains 
 is nothing, which is baptized with the name of " Absolute." 
 
 According to Hamilton, the Infinite and Absolute is simply 
 an abstraction of the conditions under which thought is 
 possible, and accordingly a negation of the conceivable. For 
 to think is to condition, and conditioned limitation is the 
 fundamental law of thought. Thought cannot get beyond con- 
 sciousness, and consciousness is possible only under the anti- 
 thesis of subject and object, which are conceivable only in 
 correlation and mutual limitation. Whence it follows that a 
 philosophy which claims to be more than a knowledge of the 
 conditional is impossible. Our knowledge of mind and matter 
 cannot be more than a knowledge of the relative manifestation 
 of an existence, the essence per se of which the highest 
 wisdom must acknowledge as unknowable, as Augustine had 
 confessed, ignorando cognosci. But as the power of our thought 
 cannot be made the measure of existence, so neither may we 
 limit the horizon of our faith to the realm of our knowledge. 
 By miraculous revelation we have received our faith in the 
 existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all 
 conceivable reality. The saying of Jacobi is therefore true : 
 an understood God would be no God at all, and to imagine 
 that God is what we think would be blasphemy. The 
 ultimate and highest consecration of all true religion must 
 be an altar to the unknown and unknowable God. In this 
 Nature and Revelation, Heathenism and Christianity agree. 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 327 
 
 These ideas of Sir W. Hamilton's were further expanded 
 and made the basis of a system of dogmatic supernaturalism by 
 his disciple Mansel, in his Bampton Lectures, The Limits of 
 Religious Thozig/ii (1852, 5th ed. 1870). The position taken 
 is, that if philosophy undertakes to subject the contents of 
 revealed religion to criticism, it must first show its right to 
 attempt this by the proof of its power to conceive the nature 
 of God. But this proof has hitherto never been forthcoming, 
 and from the very nature of the mind can never be given. 
 For the " Absolute," the " Infinite," the " First Cause " of 
 philosophy involve irreconcilable contradictions. The Abso- 
 lute is one and simple ; how then can we distinguish in it a 
 plurality of attributes .'' The Infinite is that which is free 
 from all possible limitation ; how then can it co-exist with its 
 contradictory — the Finite ? And how can the Infinite be at 
 the same time the First Cause, since there is involved in the 
 very idea of cause the antithesis of effect, and accordingly 
 limitation ? From the nature of human consciousness, too, 
 the proof is given that these ideas involve hopeless contra- 
 diction. Consciousness is the relation of an object to a 
 subject and to other objects, but the idea of the Absolute 
 precludes all such relation. Further, our consciousness is 
 subject to the laws of space and time, and cannot therefore 
 think the thought of a Being not likewise subject to them. 
 But, Mansel holds, we must not thence infer that the Infinite 
 cannot exist, but only that what the Infinite is and his rela- 
 tion to the Finite is for us incognisable. From this our duty 
 is plain — to accept without addition or subtraction whatever 
 revelation, that is, the Bible, teaches as to God, on its autho- 
 rity. This will be the more easy when we remember that 
 the greatest difficulties of belief have their parallels in philo- 
 sophy ; for instance, the doctrine of the Trinity, in the relation 
 of one Absolute to a plurality of attributes ; the Divine sonship 
 of Christ, in the relation of the eternal cause to effects in time ; 
 the two natures in Christ, In the relation between the Infinite 
 and the Finite ; miracles, in the conception of government by 
 law at all, and in the relation of the law of causaUty to freedom 
 generally. If the reason is incapable of solving these philo- 
 sophical problems, it is not justified in rejecting the doctrines 
 of revelation because they are also, but not more, inconceivable. 
 As little may the reason on moral grounds criticise revelation. 
 For neither are moral principles by any means the eternal truth 
 
THEOLOGY IN GRE\T BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 of reason, but are laws which God has revealed with reference 
 to our human nature, without being himself bound by them. 
 When therefore the inspired word of God records commands 
 of God which seem to involve apparent immorality, we may not 
 argue therefrom that God cannot have revealed such com- 
 mands, but only that God's nature is not less incomprehensible 
 to our moral than to our speculative reason. Such instances 
 must be treated as "moral miracles," which prove that God 
 has the right to occasionally suspend the moral laws not less 
 than natural laws, without cancelling their validity in ordinary 
 practical life. 
 
 To the obvious question, how with such incapacity of reason 
 we can be in a position to recognise a Divine revelation as 
 such, and to distinguish the revelation of the Bible as the 
 only true one from the alleged revelations of other religions, 
 Mansel replies at the end of his book only, and there but 
 briefly. He warns us not to lay the main stress of the proof 
 on the internal evidence, which would involve an appeal to 
 the incompetent reason. " The crying evil of the present 
 day in religious controversy is the neglect or contempt of the 
 external evidences of Christianity ; the first step towards the 
 establishment of a sound religious philosophy must consist In 
 the restoration of those evidences to their true place in the 
 theological system." Though unconditional certainty does 
 not belong to any one of them taken singly, in conjunction 
 they constitute a sure foundation of faith in the revelation of 
 the Bible, and the revelation thus established must be accepted 
 from beginning to end, without criticism on the part cif the In- 
 competent reason. If the teaching of Christ is in any one thing 
 not the teaching of God, it is in all things the teaching of 
 man, and Christ was an impostor or an enthusiast ; but if Christ 
 is in truth the Incarnate Son of God, every attempt to improve 
 his teaching is more impious than to reject it altogether, for 
 this is to acknowledge a doctrine as the revelation of God, 
 and at the same time to proclaim it Inferior to the wisdom of 
 man. 
 
 It is significant as to the condition of theology in England 
 at that time, that this unqualified dogmatism of Mansel's 
 should have met with a large amount of approbation, and that 
 the author was considered a true Defensor Fidei. It is all the 
 more to the honour of F. D. Maurice that he at once discerned 
 not merely the irrationality of Mansel's theory, but also the 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 329 
 
 danger to which it laid open Christian faith, and that he 
 boldly and energetically opposed it. He very properly con- 
 siders that the fundamental mistake of Mansel is, that he 
 starts from ideas which he has himself set up, and then argues 
 from the contradictions, which he has himself put into them, 
 that the ideas themselves involve contradictions. He falls at 
 once upon the question of the Infinite, and overwhelms his 
 readers with a discussion of metaphysical problems, without 
 so much as touching the fundamental problem of conscious- 
 ness, without having asked, " How does our consciousness get 
 at reality at all?" Mansel holds the question as to the nature 
 of reality, of personality, as insoluble, because we cannot know 
 anything beyond the phenomena of our own consciousness, 
 but does not consider that while phenomena constitute the 
 immediate content of our consciousness, it is the very function 
 of philosophical science to deal not with them, but with what 
 is, das Ding-an-dch. It is precisely this — to distinguish 
 what is from what merely appears to be, which is the province 
 of reason, without which man would sink to the level of the 
 animal. The same distinction which is necessary in daily life, 
 must also be applied in the highest relations of knowledge. 
 When Mansel denies this, he casts aside the Bible as well 
 as reason. If he pronounces Kant's Practical Reason, with its 
 faculty of ideas, as merely a faculty of lies, then conscience and 
 the faith of the simple Christian are faculties of lies without 
 any support in reality. In order to deliver English theology 
 from the influence of German philosophy, Mansel falls back 
 upon the scepticism of Hume, with whom he shares also the 
 indifference of Positivism, which in the absence of personal 
 conviction advocates the re-assurement of men's minds by 
 means of the established religion of the State. Mansel's 
 endeavour to base faith upon sceptical agnosticism can only 
 serve to strengthen thoughtless indifference and traditional- 
 ism, which is the greatest danger for England. 
 
 What a dangerous two-edged sword this agnosticism of the 
 apologists is was very soon made evident. In the course of 
 the next decade, upon this agnosticism Matthew Arnold based 
 his ethical idealism, Seeley his aesthetical idealism, and Herbert 
 Spencer his evolutionism, three theories which, with all their 
 dissimilarities, have this in common, that they all regard the 
 impossibility of a Divine revelation and revealed religion to 
 be the necessary consequence of the incognisability of God. 
 
330 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 In his works, Literature and Dogma (1873), and God and 
 the Bible (1875), Matthew Arnold has advocated, as a sub- 
 stitute for supernatural religion, an ethical idealism very much 
 of the same nature as that of Fichte. He had convincad 
 himself that in an age like this, which will take nothing for 
 granted, but must verify everything, Christianity in the old 
 form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and mira- 
 culous deeds, is no longer tenable, and that the only method 
 of defending the Faith which has any promise of success, is 
 that which confines itself to such ethical truths of Christianity 
 as can be verified by experience, and rejects everything 
 beyond them, or admits it only as their merely poetic garb. 
 According to Matthew Arnold, religion has no more to do 
 with supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy : 
 it is ethical, it has to do with " conduct," but as distinguished 
 from ethics, it is " ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by 
 feeling," in a word it "is morality touched by emotion." The 
 mistaken notion that religion is something more than and 
 different from this, and in some way supernatural, arose from 
 a misunderstanding of the poetic and rhetorical form of speak- 
 ing natural to it ; what was meant as a poetic and imaginative 
 representation of ethical experience and emotion, was taken 
 for strictly scientific truth. This holds very specially of belief 
 in God. It would be folly to make religion depend on the 
 conviction of the existence of "the moral and intelligent 
 Governor of the universe " of theology, — a belief which cannot 
 possibly be verified by experience. The God of religion is 
 a poetical personification of that which alone constitutes the 
 object of religious faith in its moral sense. For this object 
 Arnold has coined the phrase, " the Eternal, not ourselves, 
 which makes for righteousness." All that we can say of 
 this power, on the evidence of experience, is that it is not 
 ourselves, but is ever revealing itself in the universe as the 
 Power making everywhere and always for righteousness, in 
 consequence of which also all things have and tend to fulfil 
 the law of their being. That this Power should be converted 
 by the religious imagination into a personal God, who thinks 
 and loves and rules the world, does no harm so long as we 
 treat the personification simply as representing in a poetic 
 form the unknowable Not-ourselves, of which we can become 
 aware only as working for the production of righteousness. 
 But as soon as ever we try to treat the personal God of 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 331 
 
 religion as a really existing being and object of scientific 
 thought, we enter the region of fanciful anthropomorphism or 
 abstract metaphysics, where the possibility of verification by 
 experience, and therefore of sure conviction, ceases. The tra- 
 ditional philosophical arguments for the existence of an intelli- 
 gent First Cause are equally baseless with the popular proofs 
 from miracles, and have, indeed, less value, as the latter 
 belong to a great and splendid whole — a beautiful and power- 
 ful fairy tale, while the former are only the hollow talk of 
 philosophical sophism. Of a personal Governor of the world 
 we can form no clear conception, and can have no certain con- 
 viction based upon experience, but we can form an idea and 
 have experiential certainty of a Power making for righteous- 
 ness. That idea of a personal God had its origin in meta- 
 physics, and must be banished, with metaphysics, from religion, 
 that in the future religion may occupy the only solid ground 
 supplied by the moral experience of mankind. 
 
 It need create no surprise that this theory met with a 
 considerable amount of favour in England, for it falls in 
 with the agnostic tendencies of our age, and at the same time 
 endeavours to be just to the moral consciousness, and to 
 retain reverence for the Bible. In Holland, too, it is known 
 and extensively held under the name of " ethical idealism." 
 To us Germans it presents little that is new, but is simply 
 another form of the sittliche Weltordnung, which Fichte at 
 the end of the last century pronounced the essence of the idea 
 of God. Arnold also shares Fichte's moral earnestness, and his 
 enjoyment of an onslaught on other opinions, without always 
 observing due moderation in his attack. And as regards the 
 tenability of the theory, the development of Fichte's philosophy 
 seems to offer an instructive anticipation. It is at all events 
 certain that the idea of an " Eternal Power not ourselves, 
 which makes for righteousness," is far from being a clear idea 
 derived from experience, as Matthew Arnold maintains ; but 
 is, on the contrary, an abstract philosophical conception, 
 behind the vagueness of which the possibility of very 
 various interpretations is hidden. At one time this " Not- 
 ourselves " is described as a real, efficient power, to which we 
 feel we are subject, and for which we feel reverence. In that 
 case, the inference can scarcely be withheld, that the effects 
 which we experience presuppose an active, effective, and 
 therefore actual subject, who intends to produce these effects, 
 
THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Ek. IV. 
 
 and who must accordingly be conceived as a beingr capable 
 of having spiritual, moral purposes, which would bring us to 
 a position very much like theism. On the other hand, other 
 passages point to an entirely different interpretation. The 
 " Not-ourselves " is also spoken of as a law of nature after the 
 manner of the law of gravitation, or the law of spiritual 
 beauty; as the latter was personified by the Greeks in Apollo, 
 so the law of moral conduct was personified by the Hebrews 
 in Jehovah, which is not at all inconsistent with the sup- 
 position that they might have reached the law by the Dar- 
 winian method of adaptation and heredity. Now, since a 
 "law" is not itself an operative, effective force, but only the 
 manner of the operation of actual beings, the interpretation 
 of Arnold's theory just given conducts necessarily to the 
 Positivist view, according to which the divine consists simply 
 in the morally good feelings and actions of man himself, not 
 in any power outside and above man. But, in that case, 
 where is the A^c/- ourselves upon which Arnold lays so much 
 stress ? To a more thoroughly logical agnostic will it not 
 seem to be a remnant of mystical speculation, which is not 
 verifiable by experience, but must be got rid of, and the 
 Positivist idea of humanity put in its place ? But then we 
 get the atheistic religion of humanity of Feuerbach and 
 Comte. To bring that, however, into harmony with Biblical 
 theism would be more than Arnold could accomplish, even 
 with his very bold and free exegesis. 
 
 It must be doubted whether Arnold's idea of a " Power 
 not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," which admits 
 of such various and in fact contradictory interpretations, is 
 superior in point of clearness and credibility to the conception 
 of God which has hitherto been generally held. Arnold 
 would not have deceived himself so far as he did on this head 
 if he had tried more seriously to think out his ideas. But he 
 often declares, with characteristic mocking irony, that for 
 philosophical thinking he has no faculty. In this he was 
 undoubtedly perfectly right. For a fuller discussion of 
 Arnold's position, I refer the reader to Martineau's essay on 
 Ideal Substitutes for God (3rd ed., 1881), to his work, A 
 Study of Religion, its Sources and Contents (1888) ; further, to 
 Tulloch's essay on The Modern Religion of Experience. 
 Tulloch remarks that Arnold's " Power not ourselves, which 
 makes for righteousness," can as little be verified by expe- 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 333 
 
 rience in the sense of natural science as any ancient dogma. 
 All that can be proved by the method of this science is the 
 recurrence of certain external conditions, to which Arnold 
 gives the name of " righteousness," and behind which he 
 supposes a Power causing them. But this is beyond question 
 as much his belief as the creed of any one else is his. The 
 idea of righteousness is as certainly a product of the con- 
 science, or of what Arnold calls metaphysics, as the idea of 
 personality ; both arise from within, and are not brought from 
 without. In fact, the two are twin ideas, inseparably con- 
 nected in the Hebrew and the universal conscience — a law of 
 conduct and a lawgiver, or personal authority, from whom it 
 issues. This is undoubtedly the voice of experience, though 
 not in Arnold's, but in a higher and truer sense of the word. 
 Accordingly, Arnold's notion of dogma as an excrescence or 
 a disease of religion is superficial. Of course religion and 
 dogma are not identical. But the latter is the product of 
 religious thought, or of the thought of the Church upon the 
 facts of religious experience. The creeds of the Church are 
 the fruit of the best possible efforts of theological thinkers 
 of every age, accordingly living expressions of the Christian 
 consciousness, deserving as such more respect than they 
 meet with from the representatives of the modern spirit. 
 So far the judgment of Tulloch. His remarks in the same 
 essay on the personal and literary characteristics of Matthew 
 Arnold I will not repeat here, incontrovertible as they appear 
 to me to be. 
 
 The author of the anonymous book. Natural Religion 
 (1882), who is, we are told. Professor Seeley, of Cambridge, 
 is Arnold's equal in the lucidity and beauty of his style, and 
 superior to him in breadth of view and acuteness of thought. 
 He also proceeds from the conviction that the supernatural 
 elements of traditional religion are rapidly losing their hold 
 upon the mind of the men of this age, while religion itself is 
 to-day as needful and indispensable as ever it was. He, too, 
 seeks to ascertain how much of traditional religion will be 
 left when the supernatural has been abandoned. But the 
 answer returned by Arnold, that the essential element of 
 religion is morality, does not satisfy Seeley, inasmuch as re- 
 ligion makes itself felt in other and equally important depart- 
 ments of man's " Higher Life." It is not so much a manner 
 of acting as of feeling, namely, the habitual feeling of admira- 
 
334 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 tion and reverence, combined with love and devotion. It is 
 not merely the God of wonders who can be the object of such 
 a religious worship, but whatever is beautiful, good, and true 
 in nature and man. Seeley accordingly distinguishes three 
 kinds of religion, each of which has its own peculiar value, 
 and can be harmoniously combined with the others. First, 
 the religion of the beautiful in nature, the aesthetic religion 
 of the Greeks ; second, the worship of the morally good 
 in man, the religion of ideal humanity, the very essence 
 of Christianity, which though propagated at first under 
 the supernatural form of the Christology of the Church, 
 has since the middle of the last century, freed from that 
 husk, developed into the religion of Humanity. Third, 
 to these must be added now the worship of the Unity 
 and Eternity of the universe, which, under the name of 
 " God," is conceived as the Supreme Power, comprehending 
 nature and man ; a religion which will remain though all 
 belief in the supernatural is abandoned. Reverence for the 
 supreme unity and the law of all being is so natural to men, 
 that it will continue to be felt, however they conceive the 
 relation of the One to the various elements of the universe, 
 or of God to the world. We do not find the difference of 
 theories as to man and the relation of his physical and mental 
 powers to one another hinders the practical reverence we feel 
 for human nature ; and as litde is our practical worship of 
 the Unity and Regularity of the universe affected by the 
 theological question as to the relation of the one Principle to 
 the multiplicity of phenomena. The name " Nature" does not 
 adequately represent this Unity, inasmuch as often in the 
 usage of scientific men it leaves out of view the moral and 
 human side of the universe, which is to us the more 
 important side. But the word " God " combines the great- 
 ness and glory of nature with "whatever more awful forces 
 stir within the human heart, whatever binds men in families 
 and orders them in states." God "is the Inspirer of kings, 
 the Revealer of laws, the Reconciler of nations, the Re- 
 deemer of labour, the Queller of tyrants, the Reformer of 
 Churches, the Guide of the human race toward an unknown 
 o-oal." The worship of this God, who reveals himself in 
 Nature and in History, is not merely possible in an antisuper- 
 naturalistic age of art and science, but it is very necessary. 
 For nothing else than the worship of the Divine and Eternal 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THKOLOGY. 335 
 
 in phenomena is able to confer upon art and science the virtue 
 of ideaHty, and to raise them above commonplace and 
 triviality. The State and Society rest, too, upon the basis of 
 religion, reverence for the eternal laws of human life, free 
 from all the supernatural wrappings of the past, which 
 render religion stationary and cut it off from the living 
 stream of modern life. Natural religion, on the other hand, 
 occupies a place in the centre of the movements of the 
 present and is the uniting and elevating force of all mani- 
 festations of human life. It is the attainment of the ideal 
 which the Reformation proposed, which was, in fact, the 
 ideal of the Hebrew prophets, for their religion was social, 
 political, historical, and supernaturalism was not its main- 
 spring. But Seeley does not wish to exclude everything 
 supernatural from religion : he desires that faith may hold 
 that a higher world than that known to us exists, only this 
 transcendental world must not be made the chief thing. 
 
 Interesting as this aesthetic agnosticism beyond doubt is as 
 a transitional phase in an age of scepticism, it is not possible 
 to entirely withhold assent to the criticisms of those who 
 maintain that thus to widen religion till it becomes simply the 
 admiration of everything beautiful and great in Nature and 
 history, is to water it down and empty it of significance, till 
 the wants of the devout soul are not met. Religion, as 
 Tulloch urges, undoubtedly does not ignore Nature, but dis- 
 covers therein the rule of God ; but the distinctive mark of 
 religion is an ideal transcending both Nature and man. The 
 Holy One of the Prophets and the Heavenly Father of Christ 
 are not merely higher conceptions, but also truer ones, than 
 any ideas of Nature of previous religions. The real problem 
 is, Is there a spirit above nature and Man, a universal Con- 
 sciousness, with which our higher life can have communion ? 
 To make religion the admiration of the laws of Nature and 
 the ideals of art and science, is to introduce confusion into 
 language, and to throw back moral ideas, which Christianity 
 had grafted upon our thought, to the outlived stage of 
 heathen thinkers. Perhaps we may add that thought itself is 
 unable to rest finally in such a vague, problematic relation of 
 the world to the one principle as Seeley expounds ; and this 
 must be felt the more in proportion as the effort is made to 
 comprehend the totality of the universe in the unity of thought, 
 which is the tendency of evolutionism in its various forms. 
 
336 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 Herbert Spencer is regarded as at present the chief 
 representative of agnosticism. But the agnosticism which 
 Spencer adopted from Hamilton and Mansel forms but the 
 one aspect of his philosophy, to a certain extent the con^ 
 venient background into which all metaphysical problems 
 can be relegated, so as to construct with fewer hindrances 
 a system of natural evolution from the results of modern 
 science. The significance of his philosophy lies in the bold- 
 ness with which it makes the idea of evolution, which has 
 controlled natural science since Darwin, the dominant point 
 of view in the formation of a connected and systematic theory 
 of the world. In order to save his doctrine of natural de- 
 velopment from collision with the presuppositions of existing 
 belief, he has placed the doctrine of the incognisability of the 
 Absolute as a wall of separation between philosophy and 
 religion, that an eternal peace may be concluded between 
 them ; but, in reality, with the result that he has deprived 
 religion of its contents and his philosophical system of its 
 prime principles. But, as in Spencer's system the idea of a 
 harmonious and orderly world, or of a systematic unity among 
 phenomena is so prominent, and this idea requires, or pre- 
 supposes necessarily, a connecting principle, or a basis of 
 unity, he has not been able to consistently carry out his 
 agnostic theory, but has surreptitiously converted the bare 
 negative, which Hamilton's Absolute amounted to, into a 
 reality, which bears the relation of a positive cause to 
 phenomena, only that nothing definite can be known as to 
 Its nature and its further relation to phenomena. 
 
 In h.\s Firsi Principles (1862), the ultimate principles of liis 
 philosophy, Spencer starts from the position, that as religion 
 has always been of great importance in the history of mankind, 
 and has been able to hold its ground in defiance of the attacks 
 of science, it must contain an element of truth. But as there 
 are various religions which claim to be true, and as science 
 also can make the same claim, while yet truth is but one,t\i& 
 latter, Spencer holds, must be looked for in what the various 
 religions have in common with each other and with science. 
 This common element cannot be a definite conception of the 
 Absolute or the First Cause of the world, for it is precisely on 
 this point that opinions diverge, and in every one of the three 
 main theories — Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism — is shown 
 the impossibility of a satisfactory solution that is not self- 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 337 
 
 contradictory. It follows that God, the Absolute, the Uncon- 
 ditioned, is not for us cognisable, but a great mystery, as all 
 religions to some extent acknowledge, and the higher their 
 rank, so much the more fully, only that the philosopher 
 regards this mystery as not merely relative, as the religions 
 regard it, but as absolute. Science and religion agree in this, 
 for science knows nothing about the most universal ideas — 
 force and matter, space and time ; it can know things only by 
 comparing them with others that resemble them, and on that 
 very account is unable to know the Absolute, which cannot 
 be compared with anything. 
 
 But although it is involved in the very nature of our con- 
 sciousness that it can know only what is finite and limited, 
 Spencer declines to go with Hamilton in maintaining that the 
 Absolute is a purely negative concept. On the contrary, 
 he holds that the reality of the Absolute is the necessary 
 correlative of the Relative. This is both a necessity of 
 thought and of the analysis of things. For if every de- 
 finite state of consciousness has a limited content, the latter 
 presupposes an unlimited and general content as the raw 
 material of limiting thought. Our self-consciousness, as it is 
 the consciousness of the conditioned ego and non-ego, pre- 
 supposes an Unconditioned which is neither the ego nor 
 the non-ego : this is the Absolute, which is accordingly the 
 necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. And this a 
 priori proof from consciousness is confirmed by an a posteriori 
 proof from the analysis of external things. The results of 
 modern physics and chemistry reveal as the constant element 
 in all phenomena Force, which manifests itself in various 
 forms that change places with each other, while amid all their 
 changes it remains unaltered. If, accordingly, every specific 
 force is only a relative changeable phenomenal form of one 
 universal unchangeable force, this must be regarded as the 
 absolute reality which must necessarily be presupposed as 
 the background and basis of all that is relative and pheno- 
 menal. The entire universe is to be explained from the 
 movement of this absolute Force, which takes place rhyth- 
 mically as attraction and repulsion, integration and disinte- 
 gration, evolution and dissolution ; the phenomena of nature 
 and of mental life come under the same general laws of 
 matter, motion, and force, which are however only symbols of 
 the absolute Reality or Force which is in itself unknowable. 
 
 G. T. z 
 
338 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 It Is obvious that Spencer has thus very seriously modified 
 the doctrine of Hamilton and Mansel as to the incognisability 
 of the Absolute. The Absolute of Spencer, of which substan- 
 tiality, causality, eternity and immutability are predicated, 
 is no longer the simple Unknown, which would be beyond all 
 our conceptions. The only question which arises is whether 
 Spencer's doctrine of the Absolute is adequate to account for 
 the world of mental life, and whether it is adapted to serve 
 as the basis of the reconciliation of science and religion. An 
 affirmative answer can hardly be given to this question. For 
 there is surely much force in the contention of Spencer's 
 opponents, that his agnostic evolutionism is really only a 
 disguised materialistic (hylozoistic) Pantheism ; for if the 
 supreme principle is nothing but force manifesting itself in 
 various motions, it does not land us beyond materialism. On 
 the other hand, it must be allowed that Spencer's real 
 intention is directed to something higher, the attainment of 
 which has been frustrated by his entanglement in the principle 
 of empiricism and the psychology of association, though in 
 many of his statements he approaches very nearly a higher 
 position. If the Absolute must be conceived as the neces- 
 sary correlative of our self-consciousness, can it be conceived 
 simply as physical force, and not rather as universal self- 
 consciousness, as a spiritual self? And if we get the idea of 
 force from the experience of our own power of volition, its 
 action and its resistance, is it not natural to think of mind- 
 force as prior to physical, and accordingly of the absolute 
 Force at the basis of all specific forces as Mind ? The 
 doctrine of evolution would harmonise perfectly well with 
 these inferences, only it would have to become idealistic 
 instead of materialistic, and only after this transformation had 
 been made would a practicable basis be supplied for the 
 reconciliation of religion and science which Spencer has done 
 well to attempt. 
 
 Spencer would probably himself have taken this further 
 step. If he had been able, on the decisive question as to the 
 fundamental act of knowledge, to set himself free from the 
 superficiality and confusions of the association-psychology. 
 This he has failed to do, and defines consciousness as a suc- 
 cession of sensations or changes, which implies a relation of 
 different states, and Is brought about by different Impressions 
 of force. The question here arises, as in Mill's system, Can 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 339 
 
 a succession of feelings or changes be consciously felt without 
 a subject to recognise the change, without an active synthetic 
 principle to combine the changing states of feeling into the 
 unity of consciousness ? But Spencer has no place in his 
 system for such a subject, as he holds that the ego consists 
 simply of a " faint " and the object of a " vivid " series of 
 sensations. He acknowledges therefore really nothing more 
 than passive sensations, or impressions of force, and supposes 
 he can explain consciousness from their changes alone, while 
 undoubtedly it is wholly inexplicable without the active 
 synthesis of the ego. Spencer can have ignored this prime 
 factor only because, like all empiricists, he "confuses the 
 succession of feelingfs with cogfnition of succession, changes 
 of consciousness with consciousness of change." When he 
 speaks of change of states of consciousness as the result of 
 changing impressions of force, he seeks to find the origin of 
 consciousness in effects produced from without, which cannot, 
 however, surely, be perceived as in succession and changed 
 save by reference to previously existing consciousness ; he 
 really, therefore, presupposes consciousness as already in- 
 wardly present, while he seeks to explain it from external 
 action. In fact, we must concur in the searching criticism of 
 Green,^ that Spencer has not grasped the fundamental pro- 
 blem of the source and nature of knowledge, as it was pro- 
 posed by Hume and solved by Kant in the synthetic function 
 of the ego. Spencer supposes that Kant has been refuted 
 by the new discovery of the doctrine of natural evolution, 
 namely, that the supposed a priori or innate ideas which are 
 considered to precede experience, are in reality only the result 
 of the experience of the race which • the individual inherits.^ 
 But Spencer here fails to perceive the real nature of the pro- 
 blem, which is. How is experience in any form possible.'' A 
 problem which remains unaltered whether the experience is 
 that of the individual or the race, and to the solution of 
 which no historical " psychogenesis " of nature can contribute 
 in the smallest degree. And while his evolutionary psycho- 
 logy contributes nothing-whatever towards a solution of the 
 problem as to the nature of knowledge, Spencer really m.akes 
 
 1 Works of Thofnas Hill Green, vol. i. pp. 383 sqq. 
 
 ^'' See Martineau's critique of this doctrine, Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii. 
 pp. 357 sqq. 
 
340 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 a solution of it impossible by degrading the relation of sub- 
 ject and object, the ego and the non-ego, to a mere difference 
 of degree in the strength or vividness of a series of sensa- 
 tions. An error so fundamental at the crucial point can do 
 no other than produce a fatal effect upon the whole system 
 built upon it. If a man fails to perceive in himself the active 
 subject, the self-conscious mind, it cannot be expected of him 
 that he should find it in the Absolute. 
 
 With reference to the religious import of the Spencerian 
 doctrine of the Unknowable, the forcible criticisms of Mar- 
 TINEAU and J. Caird may here find a place. The former' 
 says that " Spencer's testimony against the purely phenomenal 
 doctrineis of high value " ; for " it betrays his appreciation 
 of that outlook beyond the region of phenomena for the con- 
 ditions of religion which cannot eventually be content to gaze 
 into an abyss without reply." But his position, that we can 
 know only that the absolute power is, but not what it is, is 
 untenable, because it is self-contradictory. We can know the 
 first fact by thought only, and " how can there be a thought 
 with nothing thinkable ? " " By calling this existence a 
 ' Power,' Mr. Herbert Spencer surely removes it by one 
 mark from the unknown ; but, besides this, ' we are obliged,' 
 he says, ' to regard that Power as omniscient,' as eternal, as 
 one, as cause manifested in all phenomena ; a list of predi- 
 cates, scanty indeed when measured by the requisites of 
 religion, but too copious for the plea of Nescience." When 
 we distinguish this Absolute from all that is related to it, 
 we know it, for to distinguish is to know. " This negative 
 ontology which identifies ' the supreme reality ' with total 
 vacuity, and makes the infinite in Being the zero in thought, 
 cannot permanently poise itself in its precarious position; it 
 must either repent of its concessions to realism and lapse into 
 the scientific commonplace, ' all we know is phenomena ' ; or 
 else advance, with what caution and reserve it pleases, into 
 ulterior conceptions of the invisible cause, sufficient to soften 
 the total eclipse into the penumbra of a sacred mystery." 
 Martineau makes further the pertinent remark, that " it is 
 but natural that the pretensions of men to more knowledge 
 than they can substantiate should lead to this reaction into 
 
 » A Study of Religion, vol. i. pp. 131 sqq. 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 341 
 
 imaginary ignorance." " The Gnosticism of theologians is 
 responsible for much of the Agnosticism of this century." 
 
 John Caird, in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 
 (1880)/ has given a searching criticism of Spencer's agnos- 
 ticism, the chief points of which are as follows. The two 
 propositions that our intelligence is confined to the finite and 
 relative, and that we have cognisance of an existence beyond 
 the finite, are contradictory and cancel each other. Whoever 
 maintains that human knowledge is limited shows thereby 
 that it is not limited merely by the relative, because in that 
 case it could have no knowledge of its own limits. The true 
 conclusion from the principles of Spencer's theory of know- 
 ledge is not the incognisability of the Absolute, but its non- 
 existence ; his "unknowable Absolute" is simply the negation 
 of thought ; and therewith of being, in every sense in which 
 we can use the expression. In reality, the assertion of the 
 unknowableness of the Absolute is based upon an abstraction ; 
 a fictitious logical entity is first created, and then conscious- 
 ness is charged with imbecility because of its inability to think 
 that fiction. Nothing can possess any reality for us save as 
 it is capable of forming a part of our thought, or is in itself a 
 thinkable reality. All science proceeds on the tacit assump- 
 tion that nature and the world of man are intelligible, of the 
 presence of reason, thought in things, and of rational rela- 
 tions in the events of history. This general presupposition 
 cannot leave us when we rise beyond nature and humanity to 
 the ultimate basis of all phenomena. If reason is irresistibly 
 impelled (even according to Spencer) to seek, above and 
 beyond the manifold and changeful phenomena, a permanent 
 unity, an infinite and absolute reality, it can at this stage, as 
 little as at any previous one, fall into the suicidal contradic- 
 tion of seeking by thought an object which has no relation to 
 thought, and of seeking the ultimate explanation of all rational 
 relations in the irrational. The presupposition and the final 
 goal of thought cannot be an Absolute which is simply the 
 negation of thought, but rather that which comprehends all 
 finite things and thoughts only because it is itself the Unity 
 of Thought and Being, and in which therefore our human 
 thought finds its fullest revelation. Lastly, Caird observes, 
 
 ^ Pages 10-38. 
 
34^ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 82 5. [Bk. IV. 
 
 that spencer's demand of religious worship of the Unknow- 
 able is an impossible one for the human heart to meet. It is 
 true all religion contains an element of mystery, inasmuch as 
 finite intelligence cannot be the measure of the infinite ; but a 
 religion all mystery is an absurd and impossible notion, and 
 would be nothing else than the apotheosis of ignorance. The 
 homage which we render to the Being in whom are hid all 
 the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, all the inexhaustible 
 wealth of that boundless realm of truth in which thought finds 
 ever increasing stimulus to aspiration, to wonder and delight, 
 is totally different from the dumb wonder of ignorance or the 
 grovelling awe of the supernatural, as it is exhibited in the 
 fetish-worshipper, whose religion is the nearest approach to 
 the religion of the Unknowable. True religion is not the 
 blind fear of an unknown Being, but trust, sympathy, and 
 love toward the " God who is light, and in whom is no dark- 
 ness at all," and to know whom is eternal life for the human 
 spirit. 
 
 As is evident from this critique of Spencer's position, and 
 as, he himself intimates in his "prefatory note," John Caird 
 takes essentially the standpoint of Hegel's Philosophy of 
 Religion. He founds his proof of the existence of God on the 
 fundam.ental principle of Hegelian speculation, in which he 
 finds the essence of the ontological argument, namely, that 
 the correlation of thought and being in our consciousness 
 involves as its necessary presupposition the absolute unity of 
 both in the divine consciousness. After the example of 
 Hegel, he describes the forms of the religious consciousness 
 as the representative, figurative form of knowledge, as the 
 abstract, disintegrating logical understanding, and as synthe- 
 tic, reintegrating speculation, which discovers in the contradic- 
 tions, to the understanding insoluble, of finite and infinite, 
 freedom and necessity, etc., the inseparable moments or 
 members of a concrete unity. Caird's idea of religion is also 
 formed after Hegel's, though with a stronger accentuation of 
 the ethical side, and in that respect related to Fichte's ethical 
 mysticism. Religion is the realisation of the ideal, which 
 in morality is never more than approximately reached ; for 
 religion is the surrender of the finite to the infinite will, the 
 abnegation of all private individual volition, and complete 
 identification of the personal will with God's. Hence en- 
 trance upon the religious life is the termination of the struggle 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 343 
 
 between " the false self and that higher self which is at once 
 mine and infinitely more than mine," the realisation of the 
 divine self in the human. The last chapter in the book, 
 which deals with the relation of the philosophy to the history 
 of religion, offers excellent observations on false and correct 
 applications of the idea of development to the history of 
 religion. This idea is according to Caird in no way incon- 
 sistent with the claim of Christianity to a divine origin, if the 
 latter is not understood in such a sense as to sever Chris- 
 tianity from human history, which It is not the interest of the 
 apologist to do. There is reason to resist the application 
 of the idea of evolution to Christianity In a sense which would 
 assert that there was nothing new and original in It, but 
 only a combination In new forms of pre-existing elements. 
 The connection of Christianity with the past must be conceived 
 as the transmuting of the past by a new creative spiritual 
 force. Thus, based upon Hegel, we have here an idealistic 
 form of evolutionism In opposition to that of Herbert Spencer. 
 The Scottish philosophers, Edward Caird and Hutchison 
 Stirling, and the Oxford Professor, Thomas Hill Green, have 
 successfully endeavoured to introduce their countrymen to the 
 philosophy of Hegel ; the two former by excellent mono- 
 graphs on Kant and Hegel, in which, while differing on many 
 points, they concur In representing the Kantian philosophy 
 as the fundamental basis of the speculation which reaches its 
 climax in Hegel. This conception of the relation of the two 
 great German philosophers appears to prevail pretty generally 
 in England and Scotland, and it is without doubt much more 
 correct than the view which prevails in Germany, In conse- 
 quence of the interpretation of Kant brought into vogue by 
 the Neo-Kantians during the last decades. According to 
 this interpretation, in order to remove him as far as possible 
 from the tabooed Hegel, Kant is to be explained in the 
 sense of Hume and Locke, whereby the epoch-making 
 element of his philosophy is totally ignored. It is really a 
 remarkable phenomenon in national psychology, that in the 
 same years in which in Germany the younger generation dis- 
 covers the progress of philosophy in a backward movement 
 from Hegel to Kant, and from Kant to Hume and Locke, the 
 younger generation In Great Britain has gone in the exactly 
 opposite direction. In his elaborate Introductions to Hume's 
 works (1874), by which he first obtained a name as a philo- 
 
344 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 8 25. [Bk. IV. 
 
 sophical thinker, Thomas Hill Green sought to show that 
 the English philosophy of the last hundred years has remained 
 stationary, because it has continued to build upon the founda- 
 tion of the empiricism of Locke, although Hume had shown 
 its untenability, and that therefore the first condition of an 
 advance is a serious reconsideration of the problem proposed 
 by Hume, a problem the solution of which Green considers 
 possible only in the direction of the speculative philosophy 
 begun by Kant and carried further by Hegel. He had given 
 expression to this conviction a few years earlier (1868), in the 
 suggestive essay on Popular Philosophy in its Relation to 
 Life, at the close of which he says : ^ "A peculiar charac- 
 teristic of our times is the scepticism of the best men. Art, 
 religion, and political life have outgrown the nominalistic 
 logic and the psychology of individual introspection ; yet the 
 only recognised formulae by which the speculative man can 
 account for them to himself, are derived from that logic and 
 psychology. Thus the more fully he has appropriated the 
 results of the spiritual activity of his time, the more he is 
 baffled in his theory, and to him this means weakness, and 
 the misery of weakness. Meanwhile, pure motive and high 
 aspiration are going for nothing, or issuing only in those 
 wild and fruitless outbursts into action with which speculative 
 misery sometimes seeks to relieve itself. The prevalence of 
 such a state of mind might be expected at least to excite an 
 interest in a philosophy like that of Hegel, of which it was 
 the professed object to find formulae adequate to the action of 
 reason as exhibited in nature and human society, in art and 
 religion." 
 
 As a tutor in Oxford, Green exercised, by the force of his 
 strong and sterling personality, directed always, both specu- 
 latively and practically, to the highest ideals, a powerful 
 influence, which continues to work, upon the young minds 
 that gathered around him. His importance as a philosophical 
 thinker became known to wider circles only after his death 
 by his posthumous writings. For our purpose it is his Pro- 
 legomena to Ethics, and his theological essays and addresses 
 (in the third volume of his collected works), that are of 
 special importance. On these and the references of his 
 editor, in the memoir prefixed to the third volume of his 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 124. 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 345 
 
 works, the following sketch of his religious philosophy is 
 based. 
 
 In a review of J. Caird's Inirodiiction to the Philosophy of 
 Religion, Green complains that Caird does not "sit looser to 
 the dialectical method" of Hegel, and identifies thought and 
 reality without sufficient explanation ; that the vital truth which 
 Hegel had to teach must be presented in a form which will 
 be more acceptable to serious and scientific men generally. 
 Green thus summarises this " vital truth " of Hegelianism : 
 "that there is one spiritual self-conscious being, of which all 
 that is real is the activity or expression ; that we are related 
 to this spiritual being, not merely as parts of the world which 
 is its expression, but as partakers in some inchoate measure 
 of the self-consciousness through which it at once constitutes 
 and distinguishes itself from the world ; that this participation 
 is the source of morality and religion." The exposition of 
 these propositions constitutes the subject matter of Green's 
 philosophy of religion. He finds the foundation of faith in 
 God in the intellectual and moral nature of man. Our know- 
 ledge of the world, being the mind's active combination of 
 various appearances into the unity of consciousness, becomes 
 the ground of the knowledge of a self-conscious Mind in the 
 universe, which is the necessary condition of the existence of 
 a like activity in ourselves, and the source and bond of the 
 ever growing synthesis called knowledge. But as the source 
 of all knowledge God is not knowable by us in the same 
 sense as any other object, and can only be thought of under 
 metaphors and practically experienced as the power by which 
 our minds think and love. As our thought presupposes as 
 the ground of its possibility an eternal thinking Mind, so our 
 moral action presupposes an eternal Will employing man as 
 the instrument of the realisation of its ends. For all moral 
 action is self-realisation, the development of our true nature, 
 the endeavour to perfect our actual nature in the direction of 
 a highest ideal. This effort after self-improvement is the 
 practical proof of an absolute perfection. For the possibili- 
 ties of our nature which wait for realisation presuppose a 
 superhuman self from which, in which, and for which they are 
 actual ; there must be an eternal subject which is all that the 
 imperfect subject is destined to become by the unfolding of 
 its powers. It is in this sense that Green uses the somewhat 
 bold expression, " God is our possible or ideal self." But he 
 
346 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 does not mean by this that this self is an empty, merely 
 imaginary ideal ; on the contrary, it is the only realising- 
 principle, or cause, of our personal self, which is never more 
 than a relative reality. As little may this be understood in 
 the sense of a pantheistic identification of God with man, be- 
 cause our imperfect, perpetually developing being distinguishes 
 us essentially from the eternally perfect being of God. But 
 what the expression does mean is that the human mind is in 
 principle one with the Divine, relatively participates in God, 
 is a reproduction of the Divine under the conditions of the 
 finite. According to Green, the inner essence of Christianity 
 lies in its sense of this fact, that God is not an alien, far-off 
 outward Power, but the Father, whose " word is nigh unto 
 us," of whom we may say that we are reason of his reason, 
 whose spirit lives in us, and for whom we live in living for 
 the brethren ; and thereby we live freely, because in obedi- 
 ence to a spirit which is our self; and in communion with 
 whom we have assurance of eternal life. A self which can 
 think and will eternal ideas, can seek to realise eternal ends, 
 is itself above time, shares in the nature of the eternal ; the 
 perfect development of its capacities cannot be its annihila- 
 tion, although we can form no conception of the positive state 
 of the realised ideal, because it lies beyond our experience. 
 
 The philosopher is accordingly conscious of being in essen- 
 tial accord with Christian faith when this is conceived in its 
 religious sense, that is, as a disposition of mind or character, 
 consisting in the consciousness of potential unity with God, 
 and issuing in the effort to realise this unity in life, in self- 
 denial, and in confiding love. This faith is independent of 
 historical proofs in every form, and carries the evidence of its 
 own certainty along with it. As a religious faith it cannot 
 come into conflict with knowledge, as both alike have their 
 source in reason or self-consciousness, which is itself again a 
 revelation of the Divine reason. But religious faith in its 
 empirical ecclesiastical form has another side, by which it 
 necessarily comes into conflict with knowledge. The one 
 spiritual truth is clothed in the forms of the imagination, 
 which can never adequately represent the idea. The pro- 
 gressive revelation of God in the spirit of man and in the 
 whole course of human history is narrowed to an event of the 
 past, occurring but once or occasionally, and of an exceptiona 
 and absolutely miraculous nature. Events of this kind are 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 347 
 
 then made to constitute the immediate object of faith, and 
 this faith in miracle the indispensable condition of Christian 
 piety and morality. But in this view it is forgotten that as- 
 sent to historical traditions, be they well or ill attested, true 
 or untrue, can never be more than an act of the intellect, 
 which would make no difference to the moral value of a man, 
 to his religious and moral character. From this faith, still 
 required in the churches, in the miraculous as the specific 
 form of divine revelation, the moral feeling and the intellectual 
 culture of our day have revolted. For when once the idea of 
 " nature " is conceived as a continuous, uniform system of 
 laws, " a supernatural event " would be a breach of the con- 
 tinuity of the order of which it was supposed to be an ele- 
 ment, that is, it would contradict the conditions under which 
 alone a thing can be an event. " As long as the truth of 
 religion is supposed to depend on supernatural events, science 
 is right in pronouncing it a fiction and in identifying faith 
 with unreason." The business of apologetics can be no other 
 than to distinguish faith in its spiritual and religious essence 
 from the inadequate forms of the imagination, and to learn to 
 understand historically the rise and growth of the latter. 
 
 It was not within the scope of Green's vocation as a philo- 
 sopher to deal with the critical history of Christian faith, but 
 he everywhere shows a close acquaintance with the results of 
 recent historical criticism, as far as they could serve to confirm 
 his philosophical speculations. " The glory of Christianity," 
 he says,^ " is not that it excludes, but that it comprehends ; 
 not that it came of a sudden into the world, or that it is given 
 complete in a particular institution, or can be stated complete 
 in a particular form of words ; but that it is the expression of 
 a common spirit which is gathering together all things in one. 
 We cannot say of it, Lo, here it is, or Lo, there ; it is now, but 
 was not then. We go backward, but vve cannot reach its 
 source ; we look forward, but we cannot foresee its final 
 power. We do it wrong in making it depend on a past 
 event, and in identifying it with the creed of a certain age, or 
 with a visible society established at a particular time. What 
 we thus seem to gain in definiteness, we lose in permanence 
 of conviction ; for importunate inquiry will show us that the 
 event can only be approached through a series of fluctuating 
 
 1 The Witness of God, Works, iii. pp. 240 sqq. 
 
34S THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 interpretations of it, behind which its orig-inal nature cannot 
 be clearly ascertained ; that the ' visible Church ' of one age 
 is never essentially the same as that of the next ; that it is 
 only in word, or to the intellectually dead, that the creed of 
 the present is the same as the creed of the past." But if it 
 is doubtless true that the roots of the system of practical 
 ideas which we call Christianity are as old as mankind, the 
 ideas would never have been developed save through definite 
 historical events and personal influences, among which some 
 outweigh all others in importance. The Son of Man came, 
 who was conscious, in the meanness of human life and death, 
 of the communication of God to himself, and through him to 
 mankind. Then came Paul, who found his idea of the 
 "heavenly man," borrowed from the philosophy of his day, 
 realised in Jesus, and made the death and resurrection of 
 Jesus the symbol of the fundamental principle, that man 
 comes to his true self only by the passing out of his old nar- 
 row self into the true divine self But while Paul had placed 
 this moral and spiritual element above the miraculous, sub- 
 sequently the relation was reversed : the miraculous over- 
 powered the moral and the spiritual. Yet two generations 
 after Paul followed the author of the Fourth Gospel, " who 
 gave that final spiritual interpretation to the person of Christ 
 which has for ever taken it out of the region of history and of 
 the doubts that surround all past events, to fix it in the puri- 
 fied conscience as the immanent God." By combining in faith 
 the spiritual with the moral, God with man, "this Gospel 
 has filled the special function of presenting the highest 
 thought about God in language of the imagination, and has 
 thus become the source of the highest religion." ^ But while 
 according to Paul and John Christ dwells and works as spirit 
 in believers, in the Church he has been step by step " ex- 
 ternalised and mystified." Thus arose dogma with its mys- 
 teries, from which knowledge and the purest moral culture 
 are estranged. But trustful, child-like love, set before us by 
 the Biblical presentation of Christ, and made an inward part 
 of our life and character, is sufficient to meet and overcome 
 all the blows of criticism and the problems as to historical 
 events. And if, as must be allowed, it is no longer possible 
 for the modern thinking Christian to retain the communion 
 
 1 Works, iii. p. 219. 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 349 
 
 and fellowship of the confessions and creeds of the ancient 
 Church, he must, nevertheless, continue to feel bound to his 
 fellow-Christians by the ties of practical love. Green's own 
 life was an example of this, and he combined in an uncommon 
 degree practical social labours with philosophical pursuits. 
 
 There are not wanting various indications that, as in Ger- 
 many the original Hegelianism, so in England Neo-Hege- 
 lianism, is so far from being the final end of philosophy, that 
 even those thinkers who are intimately conversant with the 
 latter, and ungrudgingly acknowledge its noble and massive 
 idealism, have nevertheless not been able to convince them- 
 selves of the tenability of the system, and so find themselves 
 compelled to advance in the direction of speculative theism 
 (which also predominates in the post- Hegelian speculation of 
 Germany). We must mention, as written on these lines, the 
 able book of Andrew Seth, Hegelianism and Personality 
 (1887), which appears to have been occasioned by the writ- 
 ings of Green ; for it begins with critical observations on the 
 crucial doctrine of Green's system, that a universal or divine 
 self is present in every individual as the efficient principle of 
 its theoretical and practical knowledge. In order to under- 
 stand and fairly judge this doctrine, Seth holds it is necessary 
 to go back to its genesis in the philosophy of Kant and his 
 successors, especially of Hegel. An acute analysis and cri- 
 tique of these systems leads to the result that the fundamental 
 error of Hegelianism and the allied English doctrine is the 
 identification of the human and the divine self-consciousness, 
 and that this identification depends throughout on the ten- 
 dency to take a mere form of consciousness, which is the 
 same in all individuals, and so universal, as a real being, to 
 hypostatise and call it the self common to God and men. 
 This is contrary, Seth maintains, to the characteristic nature 
 of the self, which, although in knowledge a principle of unity, 
 is in existence, or metaphysically, a principle of isolation {.''). 
 For the most certain testimony of consciousness is, that I 
 have a centre of my own — a will of my own. Nor does the 
 religious consciousness lend any countenance to the represen- 
 tation of the human soul as a mere mode or efflux of the 
 divine. On the contrary, religious self-surrender of the will 
 to the divine will presupposes the active self of the man. 
 What Hegel calls "spirit," "absolute spirit," is at bottom 
 
350 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 nothing more than the abstract scheme of intelligence, which 
 Fichte constructs in his IVissenschaftslehre. But this ab- 
 stract form has neither reality nor real value. The attempt 
 of the Hegelian schools to unify the divine and the human 
 subject is ultimately destructive of both. We cannot rightly 
 conceive either the divine or the human self in this impossible 
 union ; nor is this wonderful, seeing they are merely two in- 
 separable aspects of our own conscious life isolated and hypo- 
 statised. If we are to ascribe real existence to God, Seth 
 declares with truth, there must be a divine centre of thought, 
 activity, and enjoyment, which can no more be lost in its 
 manifestations in the universe than human personality in its 
 life for others. The admission of a real self-consciousness in 
 God is, moreover, demanded by the fundamental principle of 
 the theory of knowledge — interpretation by means of the 
 highest category within our reach : if the self-conscious life is 
 the highest in us, we cannot deny it to God ; he may, indeed 
 must, be infinitely more than we know ourselves to be, but 
 he cannot be less. The Hegelian system, continues Seth, is as 
 ambiguous on the question of man's immortality as on that 
 of the personality of God, and for precisely the same reason — 
 that the self of which assertions are made is not a real but a 
 logical self. The two positions are two complementary sides 
 of the same view of existence. If we can believe, with the 
 Hegelians of the Left, that there is no permanent Intelligence 
 and Will at the heart of things, then the self-conscious life is 
 degraded from its central position, and becomes merely an 
 accident in the universe ; but, on the other hand, to a philo- 
 sophy founded upon self-consciousness, and especially upon 
 the moral consciousness, it must seem incredible that the suc- 
 cessive generations should be used up and cast aside — as if 
 character were not the only lasting product and the only valu- 
 able result of time. Seth summarises his critique of Hegel 
 and Neo-Hegelianism in the sentences, " Hegel is the pro- 
 tagonist of idealism, and champions the best interests of hu- 
 manity ; but in its execution the system breaks down, and 
 ultimately sacrifices these very interests to a logical abstrac- 
 tion styled the Idea, in which both God and man disappear." 
 The speculative theism towards which Seth seeks to bring 
 Hegelian speculation is represented also in the writings of 
 Robert Flint, Professor of Divinity in the University of 
 Edinburgh, Antitheistic Theories (1877) and Theism {i%^€), 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 35 I 
 
 and In his brief but very instructive article on Tlieism in the 
 ninth edition of the Encyclopixdia Britannica. In the first- 
 named book FHnt has passed under review the naturaHstic, 
 positivist, pessimistic, and pantheistic theories, and shown 
 their untenabihty ; he does not in this work deal with agnosti- 
 cism, but has reserved it for a separate work, which has not 
 yet appeared. This will be looked for with the greater in- 
 terest, as the article on Theism in the Encyclopaedia offers 
 some excellent observations upon the agnostic position. 
 Flint maintains that agnosticism Is so far from being the 
 necessary corollary of Kantian criticism, that, on the contrary, 
 It contradicts Its true principles. For If It Is the categories 
 which make experience possible, their validity cannot be re- 
 stricted to sense experience, but extends as truly to the realm 
 of moral and religious experience. And if the objective 
 validity of the categories, or the necessary forms of thought. Is 
 generally called In question, It Is not merely theology which 
 Is thereby deprived of all foundation, but equally all other 
 sciences, which are then all resolved Into castles In the air. 
 But against such scepticism human consciousness testifies, for 
 It cannot think the mere subjectivity of a true category. As 
 against Hamilton and Mansel, Flint observes that the idea of 
 the Absolute so far from being, as they alleged, an empty ne- 
 gation, abstraction, and fiction, because out of all relation to 
 the knowable, contains the foundation of all relations, the 
 basis not less of existence than of thought, and therefore 
 far from being unknowable, is the richest and highest Idea, 
 to which all other knowledge conducts as Its necessary com- 
 pletion. In It all the metaphysical categories are Included, 
 for God is the absolute Being ; all the physical categories, for 
 he is absolute Force and Life ; all the mental categories, for 
 he Is absolute Spirit ; all the moral categories, for he is the 
 absolutely Good. Thus the idea of God brings all ideas which 
 are the conditions of human reason and the basis of a know- 
 ledge of things Into an organic system ; the whole truth of 
 the world, unfolded in the various sciences, as well as the 
 truth of the mind. Is Included in the idea of God. A philo- 
 sophy of the Absolute, such as Hegel's, may in Its contro- 
 versy with Agnosticism fall Into some extravagances of Gnos- 
 ticism ; but a theist may nevertheless sympathise with its 
 general aim and appropriate many of its results. Undoubt- 
 edly this philosophy needs correction, so far as It fails to do 
 
THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 justice to the personality and transcendence of the Divine. 
 And this error is due to its having obtained the idea of God 
 too exclusively by the method of formal logical thought, and 
 to its neglect of the other sides of the mind, the moral and 
 religious experience particularly. The idea of God cannot 
 be laid hold of solely by the scientific organising intellect, 
 but only by the combined theoretical and practical powers of 
 the mind. It is a truth ever more clearly perceived, that the 
 divine glory has its centre in moral perfection, in holy love. 
 On the other hand, the general movement of theism tends to 
 a mediation between the extremes of pantheism and deism, 
 to a harmonious combination of the personal self-equality 
 and the universal agency of God. Positive science has 
 powerfully co-operated with speculative philosophy in pro- 
 moting this movement. The modern scientific view of the 
 world has not as its result pantheism, but it gives sanction to 
 the relative claims of pantheism, and demands a theism which 
 acknowledges God's immanence in the world while holding 
 fast to his personality. The theory of evolution as applied 
 to nature and history does not lead to Agnosticism, but to a 
 more vivid knowledge of God, from whom and through whom 
 and to whom are all things, who is the eternal source of all 
 forces in nature, and also the power in history working for 
 truth and righteousness. These excellent views of Professor 
 Flint seem to me to contain, in fact, the quintessence of the 
 best thoughts of modern speculative philosophy and the pro- 
 gramme of its further development. 
 
 Lastly, as tending in a similar direction, must be mentioned 
 the works on the philosophy of religion of James Martineau, 
 the revered and venerable theologian who has spent his life 
 outside the Established Church as a preacher and theological 
 tutor amongst the Unitarians. By his Essays Philosophical 
 and Theological (2 vols., 1869), which appeared originally 
 chiefly in the National Review, and his college addresses, he 
 was known as one of the ablest antagonists of agnostic and 
 materialistic philosophy; and his two larger works. Types 
 of Ethical Theoiy (2 vols., 1885), and A Study of Religion 
 (2 vols., 1888) have more than sustained his reputation. In 
 his " Introductory chapter on recent developments," prefixed 
 to the re-issue of the second edition of John James Tayler's 
 Retrospect of the Religious Life of England (1876), Martineau 
 could speak of the emendation of the idea of God which had 
 
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 353 
 
 been effected since the days of the older Natural Theology, 
 " an emendation which had taken place long ago among the 
 Unitarians," that " God is no longer conceived as the First 
 Cause prefixed to the scheme of things, but as the Indwelling 
 Cause pervading it : not excluded by Second Causes, but 
 coinciding with them while transcending them ; as the One 
 everliving Objective Agency, the modes of which must be 
 classified and interpreted by science in the outer field, by con- 
 science in the inner." And he considers that " this change 
 of conception is due to the lessened prominence of mechanical 
 ideas and the advance of physiology to a dominant position, 
 substituting the thought of life working from within for that 
 of transitive impulse starting from without." Modern science, 
 with its doctrine of evolution, leaves theism, he maintains, 
 undisturbed and unharmed, as no physical knowledge can 
 prevent it from conceiving the unity of the Causal Power, 
 which evolution presupposes, as mind, a thesis implied in the 
 very idea of causality. This thought Martineau has worked 
 out in his Study of Religion. After a valuable introductory 
 book on the limits of human intelligence, from which we 
 quoted above,^ the idea of causality is reduced to that of 
 operative power, and this again to that of voluntary activity ; 
 whence the conclusion is drawn, that all that takes place in 
 nature has one kind of cause, which we can only conceive as 
 a will analogous to our own ; that therefore the universe of 
 originated things is the product of a supreme Mind. To the 
 charge of anthropomorphism, Martineau replies, that what- 
 ever idea we form of the ultimate principle of the universe, 
 it must be taken from the analogies of human experience, and 
 the one thing that makes the difference is, whether it be drawn 
 from the lower or the higher aspects of our human nature. 
 The notion, too, that God as a designer must be separated 
 from the world and left outside of it, is unfounded, for " the- 
 ism is at liberty to regard all the cosmical forces as varieties 
 of method assumed by God's conscious causality, and the 
 whole of Nature as the evolution of his thought." Yet the 
 immanency of God must not be so conceived as to leave 
 no room for the personality of created minds, or to make the 
 actual cosmos the boundary of the possibilities of the divine 
 activity. To get the more definite contents of the idea of 
 
 1 Ante, p. 340. 
 G. T. A A 
 
354 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 8 25. [Bk. IV. 
 
 God, the inference from our own moral nature to God as the 
 perfect Ideal is made, since that Ideal cannot be merely sub- 
 jective fancy, but the objective authority, in whose legislation 
 our conscience finds its origin and its explanation. Martineau 
 had previously maintained in his essay on Ideal Sit.bstitutes 
 for God, in opposition to the ethical idealism without God, of 
 such writers as Matthew Arnold and F. A. Lange, that the 
 truth of our religious and moral consciousness stands or falls 
 with the reality of the divine ideal. 
 
 Martineau's Shidy of Religion is a most instructive and 
 suggestive work ; what it seems to lack is a closer analysis 
 of the psychological nature of religion, and particularly a 
 more thorough examination of the historical development of 
 the religious consciousness of mankind. But it is not only 
 this work, but the English philosophy of religion generally 
 which seems to me to require supplementing and developing 
 in this direction. It would thereby exert greater influence 
 upon the theology of the Church, which appears to have 
 remained hitherto too much out of touch with the progress 
 of philosophical thought.'' 
 
 1 During the translation of the manuscript of this book has appeared 
 Martineau's work, The Seat of Authority in Religion (London, 1890), which 
 supplements his Study of Religion in a desirable way. For it follows up 
 the philosophical examination of the ultimate ground of religious certainty, 
 and of the relation of the divine and the human factor in all revelation with 
 an historical analysis of the traditional authorities (the Church, the Bible), 
 and with a review of the historical process by which the religion of Jesus 
 was transformed into a rehgion about him, and the kernel of moral and 
 religious truth was covered by a husk of " Christian mythology." Even those 
 who may think Martineau's critique of the early Christian traditions here 
 and there too radical, must be compelled to admit that it is the result of a 
 thorough examination of the facts, and of a penetrating and discerning 
 judgment. And every unprejudiced reader can convince himself by a careful 
 study of the fine concluding chapter, that this bold critique is quite consistent 
 with a fervent reverence for the religious personality of Jesus, and accordingly 
 does not detract from the essence of Christian faith. The work with which 
 Dr. Martineau has crowned the labours of his long hfe will be a lasting 
 monument of a mind not less free than devout. May it find many grateful 
 readers at home and abroad ! — 0. P. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THE THEOLOGY OF GREAT 
 
 BRITAIN. 
 
 It was remarked at the beginning of the previous chapter 
 that that general revolution of thought and feehng, commonly 
 known as " Romanticism," which took place at the com- 
 mencement of this century, produced good fruit in the revival 
 and reanimation of the religion of the Church. The first 
 and most influential representative of this new tendency in 
 England was Coleridge, in whose Aids to Reflection (1825), 
 German idealistic philosophy was transplanted to English 
 soil, and employed in the revivification of theological thought. 
 We have seen that in Coleridge, as in Schleiermacher, his 
 German predecessor, intellect and feeling, faith and know- 
 ledge, entered into such a close alliance with each other, that 
 he appeared on the one hand as the apologist of the faith of 
 the Church, in opposition to anti-religious rationalism ; and, 
 on the other, as at the same time the champion of a more 
 liberal view of traditional doctrines, in opposition to a literal 
 orthodoxy. These two aspects of Coleridge's thought, while 
 combined in his own person, separated into two distinct 
 parties or tendencies in the Church, their common origin, in 
 the set of feeling in Romanticism, betraying itself outwardly 
 in the fact that both parties proceeded from the same circle 
 of Oxford students, and were represented by men who were 
 personal friends in their university days, far as their courses 
 subsequently diverged. In this also we meet with a striking 
 similarity to the early days of modern German theology. 
 The relation of J. H. Newman, the originator and early 
 leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement, to his liberal teacher 
 and mentor, Whately, may be compared with Neander's 
 relation to his teacher Planck ; and the parallel between the 
 friendship of Thomas Arnold with Keble, the friend of 
 Hurrell Froude and Newman, and the friendship of the 
 youthful Schleiermacher with Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, 
 
 355 
 
556 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 is still more obvious. We must begin with the movement 
 of the High Church, or Tractarian, or Puseyite party, and 
 then take up that of the Broad Church, led by Thomas 
 Arnold and F. D. Maurice, which, from the first, existed by 
 the side of the Tractarian movement, but did not obtain 
 general influence until the latter had passed the zenith of its 
 power. This movement of the Broad Church party has been 
 more recently followed by a liberalism of a more decided 
 type, which has been represented during this generation in 
 the rise of Biblica;i criticism in Great Britain. 
 
 The Tractarian movement dates from the summer of 1833, 
 though its roots extend a few years further back. In the 
 year 1827 appeared Keble's Christiun Year, a collection of 
 religious lyrics on the principal festivals of the ecclesiastical 
 year ; the poems clothe a tender and deep piety in the 
 symbolic garb suggested by the seasons of the natural and 
 Christian year, and are the production of a true poet. We 
 might call Keble the English Novalis, the poet of religious 
 idealism, to whose vision " two worlds " lie always open, the 
 visible being but a type of the invisible, which always lay 
 nearest his heart. Only Keble did not possess the philo- 
 sophical culture and learning of Novalis, and lacked con- 
 sequently his largeness of view : in Keble's mind, profound 
 personal piety was so exclusively associated with the forms 
 of Anglican doctrines and ceremonies, that he could not con- 
 ceive Christianity or religion at all, apart from the Anglican 
 system ; his religious intolerance went so far, that when the 
 Queen selected a Lutheran prince to be godfather to one of 
 her sons, he set on foot a protest against it from English 
 clergymen. The religious poems of the Christian Year 
 gave such perfect and admirable expression to a wide-spread 
 state of feeling amongst English people, that the little volume 
 found everywhere the warmest reception, and probably ob- 
 tained more friends than all the subsequent theological tracts 
 and learned books for the new movement in the Church. It 
 produced a stiill deeper effect on the convictions and the 
 subsequent life of John Henry Newman^ who had hitherto 
 passed amongst Oxford men as a disciple of Whately's, 
 though as early as 1826 his mind began to take another 
 turn, chiefly through intercourse with his friend Hurrell 
 Froude. This young man seems to have played a similar 
 part amongst the aUies of English Romanticism to that 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 357 
 
 played by F"riedrich Schlegel in the same movement in 
 Germany. From Fronde's Remains, which were published 
 (1836-9) after his death by Newman and Keble, one gets 
 the impression of a man not of great natural capacity, but 
 of loose and neglected mind, which was greatly lacking both 
 in moral strength and solid learning ; a man who loved to 
 indulge in paradoxes, which aimed at being clear and pro- 
 found, but were often meaningless, and who, from his limited 
 aristocratic Anglican standpoint, passed sentence upon every- 
 thing outside and beyond it with the greater arrogance in 
 proportion to his ignorance. He hated the Reformation and 
 the Reformers, especially " Luther, Melanchthon and Co.," 
 because they denied the jus divinum of the Catholic Church, 
 preferred preaching to the sacraments, and put an end to 
 ecclesiastical discipline. He demanded the restoration of 
 monasticism, celibacy, fasting, ancient ritual and art, but 
 especially the emancipation of the Church from the supre- 
 macy of the State. The fanatical thoroughness with which 
 Froude advocated his views made a deep impression on 
 John Henry Newman, to whose nature submission to a 
 stronger personal authority was a necessity, and who was 
 just then passing through a mental crisis. When then at 
 length, soon after the appearance of the Christian Year, a 
 friendship between Keble and Newman was brought about 
 by Froude, the triumvirate was constituted, the object of 
 which was nothing less than a second Reformation, or 
 counter-Reformation, of the English Church. 
 
 The movement thus prepared for in this circle of Oxford 
 friends was brought to a head through the political and 
 ecclesiastico-political agitations at the beginning of the 
 thirties. In order to allay the agitation in Ireland, Sir 
 Robert Peel had carried his Bill for Catholic Emancipation, to 
 the great alarm of the Oxford orthodox party. The French 
 Revolution of July, 1830, and the accession of William IV., 
 brought the Whigs into power, who, after a violent conflict 
 with the Tory lords and prelates of the Upper House, 
 passed in 1832 the Reform Bill, a measure which had been 
 long and loudly called for by the majority of the nation. 
 The next year followed a Bill to remedy abuses in the Irish 
 Church, by which the income of the Anglican Church in 
 Ireland was greatly reduced, and one-half of its (superfluous) 
 sees were abolished. The unyielding opposition on the part 
 
358 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV! 
 
 of the nobility and clergy to all these absolutely necessary 
 reforms had so much excited liberal feeling amongst the 
 people generally, that the bishops were on several occasions 
 insulted and attacked ; and the premier, Lord Grey, ad- 
 vised the bishops "to set their house in order." In High 
 Church circles the feeling prevailed, that the very existence 
 of the Church was imperilled, and that what was required 
 was to create a powerful counter-movement to the liberal 
 tendencies of the day. The Assize Sermon of Keble's in 
 the University pulpit at Oxford, on the " National Apostasy," 
 formed the signal for its friends ; and in July, 1833, at a 
 conference at Hadleigh, it was resolved to take immediate 
 action. Under the conviction that " living movements do 
 not come of committees," but depend on personal influence, 
 Newman placed himself at the head of this, and began in 
 1833 the issue of the Tracts for the Times, as their editor 
 and principal author ; this being the origin of the name 
 " Tractarian." In the space of eight years (1833-41), ninety 
 tracts were published, which are collected in six volumes. 
 Contemporaneously there appeared also, by various writers, 
 extracts from the Church Fathers, under the title of Records 
 of the Church. When in 1835, Pusey, Professor and Canon 
 of Christ Church, joined the movement, an English transla- 
 tion of the whole of the Fathers was projected, which began 
 to appear in 1838, under the title of .^ Library of the Fathers 
 of the Holy Catholic Church. 
 
 The design of this movement was certainly not purely 
 religious by any means, but ecclesiastico- political, not to say 
 political ; it was a general war against the Liberal tendencies 
 of the age, and in defence of custom and tradition in the 
 Church and society. As a means to this end, the revival 
 and confirmation of the doctrines and usages of the Anglican 
 Church was to be taken in hand. But while to all appearance 
 the object was only to restore historical Anglicanism in its 
 original purity, in reality the tendency to Catholicism was so 
 decided that Anglicanism was from the very first left a long 
 way behind, and the end of the movement, it could be fore- 
 seen, must be Romanism. This could be perceived in the 
 first declarations of the Tractarians, the principal of which 
 were the following: that salvation is based upon the objective 
 efficacy of the sacraments, which again depends on their ad- 
 ministration by apostolically appointed priests, that is, on the 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOUf. 359 
 
 apostolic succession of the bishops, who, as successors of the 
 apostles, are the inheritors of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, 
 and are thereby the highest authority, in complete inde- 
 pendence of the State, in matters of life and doctrine. The 
 writings of the Tractarians were devoted to the exposition 
 and the dogmatico-historical (rather than the Biblical) proof 
 of these positions. A few special points may be here men- 
 tioned. A tract of Pusey's, which appeared in 1835, on 
 Baptism, attacked the evangelical doctrine of regeneration 
 through faith, and its separation of the baptism of the spirit 
 from the baptism of water ; Pusey taught that the real re- 
 generation is effected by the act of baptism, that the only 
 condition presupposed is that no bar be placed in the way by 
 unbelief; that since this cannot be the case with infants, the 
 baptized child is regenerated. The Catholic doctrine of optts 
 operatum is adopted as correct ; but as the grace of baptism 
 may be lost again, for sins committed after baptism satisfac- 
 tion must be made by earnest penance, which has to be shown 
 also in the old ecclesiastical form of ascetic observances. 
 Hence the necessity of Church discipline as a means of 
 grace. The mere preaching of the cross of Christ can lead 
 to carnal security. It is not preaching, but ecclesiastical 
 discipline that forms moral character. — In the sacrament of 
 the Lord's Supper, such is the doctrine, the body and blood 
 of Christ is present, without transubstantiation, in reality 
 in a mystical manner, and the sacrament is a sacrifice 
 i^sacrificium, not merely sacr amentum), that is, the mystical 
 application of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, in which 
 Christ and the Church are together the subject and the 
 object of the sacrifice. R. J. Wilberforce connected this 
 theory with the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, holding 
 that the Incarnation is perpetuated in the consecration and 
 the sacrifice of the eucharist in a spiritual but real manner. 
 To confession also, sacramental significance is ascribed ; fre- 
 quent private confession, in accordance with prescribed rules, 
 is advocated. But as the sacraments owe all their savinsf 
 efficacy to their administration at the hands of the Church, 
 the whole stress falls ultimately, as in the Catholic doctrine, 
 upon the true doctrine of the Church. It is the actual visible 
 saving institution founded by Christ through the agency of the 
 apostles ; by the bishops, as the successors of the apostles, 
 the Holy Spirit descends through it, the means of grace are 
 
360 THEOLOGY IN GREAT^ BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 efficaciously administered and the truth infallibly taught. 
 The invisible Church is composed solely of the living and 
 perfected members of the visible Church, so that to the latter 
 salvation is unconditionally confined. The " notes " of the 
 true Church are apostolicity, catholicity, and autonomy. The 
 most important condition is the apostolical succession of 
 the bishops, which includes the other essential signs. The 
 most perfect Church is the Anglican. The other episcopal 
 Churches are branches of the one Catholic Church, but dis- 
 eased branches (especially the Romish Church), on account 
 of their errors ; on the other hand, all communities of Dis- 
 senters, as well as the Protestant Churches of the Continent 
 that have no bishops, are severed branches, sects, which do 
 not possess the means of salvation. For it is only through 
 the apostolic succession of the bishops that the gift of the 
 Holy Spirit, and therewith the saving efficacy of the sacra- 
 ments, has been preserved to the Church. As Christ is the 
 supreme Mediator, the bishop is his representative on earth, 
 the mediator between the Church and Christ, the highest 
 authority for the laity. The Scriptures cannot be taken as 
 the final and sufficient nortna fidei on account of their 
 ambiguity ; they must be interpreted according to the rule 
 of tradition, especially of the earlier centuries. Thus we 
 have in the Nicene Creed the witness of the whole Church, 
 affirming that the doctrine of the Trinity is the teaching of 
 Scripture when properly understood. In the Preface to the 
 translation of the Fathers, it is maintained that the New 
 Testament is the source of doctrine, but that the Catholic 
 Fathers are the channels through which it comes down to us, 
 and that an earnest study of Catholic antiquity conducts those 
 who are tired of modern questionings into the haven of security. 
 This love of ecclesiastical antiquity sprang out of the his- 
 torical impulse of Romanticism as much as Sir Walter Scott's 
 poetical revival of Scottish and English antiquity, or again, 
 the sympathetic learned study of German antiquity by the 
 brothers Grimm and the poet Uhland. But the mystical 
 realism of the above doctrine of the sacraments sprang like- 
 wise from the inclination of Romanticism towards a certain 
 Helldunkel, something neither light nor darkness, neither 
 sensible nor supersensible, a love of mysteries behind experi- 
 ence ; Novalis, for instance, liked to call himself a magischer 
 Idealist. So, again, the emphasis laid on the supernatural 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 361 
 
 authority of the bishops by virtue of their supposed succession 
 from the apostles was equally acceptable to an age that had 
 grown tired of disputation ; and it was at the same time 
 adapted to confirm afresh the position of the bishops, which 
 had been shaken by political events. It is, therefore, not 
 surprising that Tractarian doctrines were received at first with 
 great favour in the English Church, especially amongst the 
 clergy. It is true that there was at the beginning no lack 
 of opposition, particularly on the part of the Evangelicals, 
 who at once perceived, and passed sentence on, the weak 
 place in the new movement — its drift towards Rome. New- 
 man, indeed, endeavoured to defend his Anglo-Catholic posi- 
 tion as the true " Via Media " between Romanism and Protes- 
 tantism. This he did by undertaking to show the complete 
 agreement of the doctrines of the Church of England with 
 apostolic, that is, ancient patristic teaching, making use of a 
 very free and sometimes sophistic method of interpreting the 
 language of the Thirty-Nine Articles (in Tract 90). But it 
 was precisely this daring attempt to set aside the distinctive 
 points of the Anglican creed in relation to Roman doctrine by 
 the aid of forced and spurious interpretation, which brought 
 about the revulsion of public opinion. Tract 90 was censured 
 by the University (1841) and the Bishop of Oxford, and New- 
 man felt called upon to discontinue the series. Newman 
 resigned the leadership of the movement, which passed into 
 the hands of the more learned and cautious Pusey, who had 
 previously cast round it an academical nimbus, and at length 
 gave to it his name also. Many who had been so far its 
 friends now withdrew, or went over to the opposite party. 
 But this, again, produced the effect on the more faithful ones 
 of causing them to abandon all reserve in following out their 
 principles in their full consequences. In the course of his 
 studies in Church History, which he carried on in the retire- 
 ment of his country parish, Newman himself arrived at the 
 conviction by degrees that his Via Media was untenable : 
 more and more the catholicity of the Romish Church out- 
 weighed in his estimation the apostolicity of the Anglican ; 
 and the more he felt the defects of the latter, the dark spots 
 in the disk of the former tended to vanish. When at last the 
 Church of England committed what was in the eyes of him- 
 self and his friends the unpardonable crime of associating 
 itself with the Lutheran and Calvinistic sects of the Union- 
 
362 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 Church of Prussia, with the view of founding a new bishopric 
 in Jerusalem, it appeared to Newman, as it had appeared still 
 earlier to some more zealous friends, that to continue in such 
 a Church was no longer possible. In October, 1845, he was 
 received into the communion of the Romish Church, and 
 in the course of a year he was followed by 150 clergymen and 
 laymen of position belonging to his party. The party itself 
 survived the heavy blow, but has subsequently shunned 
 cautiously the slippery region of dogmatics, and devoted itself 
 with the greater zeal to the elaboration of a ritual as nearly 
 like that of the Catholics as possible. This Ritualism, how- 
 ever, has very little in common with theology.-^ 
 
 After his conversion Newman published several books, 
 which are of interest as giving an insight into his own reli- 
 gious character, and as throwing indirectly light upon the 
 movement of which he was the author and at first the chief 
 leader. This is especially the case with his Apologia pro Vita 
 S2ta: being a History of his Religious Opinions (1865, ist ed.). 
 This autobiography owes its attractiveness, not only to the 
 universally acknowledged beauty of its style, but also to the 
 honest openness with which the author describes the various 
 phases of his religious opinions. A sincerely religious char- 
 acter is unveiled, as it struggles to reach the certainty of con- 
 viction with deepest earnestness ; and if the appearance of 
 ambiguity and want of sincerity sometimes arises, it is not 
 from the slightest wish to conceal anything from others from 
 external considerations, but because the writer is not clear in 
 his own mind, and because he is trying to hold perforce what 
 is untenable and to conceal from himself consequences that 
 are inevitable. But honourable as such a character may be, 
 its weak side cannot be overlooked. The weakness consists 
 rather in a moral than an intellectual inability to distinguish 
 between religion and a particular form of its transmission in 
 doctrine and ritual ; ^ because the firm centre of religious and 
 
 1 In one of his letters to Emerson, Carlyle criticises this ritualistic Pusey- 
 ism in his somewhat pessimistic strain, as a symbol of the speedy dissolution 
 of the superannuated English Church. In Past and Present, and elsewhere in 
 his writings, he gives vent to similar vaticinations. 
 
 ^ Comp. Apologia, p. 49. " From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the 
 fundamental principle of my religion : I know no other religion ; I cannot 
 enter into the idea of any other sort of religion ; religion as a mere sentiment, 
 is to me a dream and a mockery." 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 363 
 
 moral certainty cannot be found in the man himself, he ch'ngs 
 to external authorities, maintains vehemently their inviolability, 
 and all the time is driven further and further by the inevitable 
 feeling of their insufficiency, until, weary of searching and 
 inquiring, the secure haven of Romish infallibility is at last 
 resorted to. What a different picture is presented in the 
 religious history of Francis Newman, the younger brother of 
 John Henry, as it is described in his Phases of Faith ! ^ In 
 both brothers we have the same deep religious nature and 
 the same restless desire for real conviction ; but in the case of 
 the younger brother there is also the moral courage to aban- 
 don traditional opinions about the truth and to search for the 
 truth itself, to let the outward props of authority fall one after 
 the other, to gain in the soul itself true certainty of the reve- 
 lation of God. John Henry Newman has also formulated a 
 theory of religious certainty, with a view to justifying his dog- 
 matism, and has expounded it in the two books, A71 Essay on 
 the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), and An Essay 
 in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). In the latter he 
 works out a principle which he had learnt from Keble,^ 
 namely, that religious conviction does not rest on intellectual 
 but emotional grounds, which cannot be theoretically proved, 
 probability being converted into certainty by a voluntary 
 assent and believing reception. Although this principle is not 
 wholly devoid of truth, there is reason to object to it,' that a 
 rule of certainty which is based neither on the reason nor on 
 proofs from fact, but on the simple power of the will to hold 
 something to be true, possesses no value, and may easily be- 
 come as fruitful a source of superstition as of faith. In fact, 
 the subjective character of this purely emotional certainty 
 is acknowledged by Newman himself in the very remarkable 
 words : " The argument from probability, in the matter of 
 religion, became an argument from personality, which, in fact, 
 is one form of the argument from authority." It will be diffi- 
 cult to avoid this conclusion, if it is once granted that religious 
 certainty rests merely upon emotional motives without rational 
 grounds ; in that case it is, of course, only a subjective cer- 
 
 1 See ante, p. 317. 
 ^ Apologia, p. 19. 
 
 ^ See Tulloch, in the Edinburgh Review, Oct., 1870, and his Movements of 
 Religious Ihought, p. 103. 
 
364 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 8 25. [Bk. IV. 
 
 tainty that cannot rest upon itself, but to render it secure 
 stands in need of the support of the greatest possible number 
 of other subjects, that is, of external authority. 
 
 Newman's work on the Development of Christian Doctrine 
 takes as its starting-point the incontestable principle, that 
 Christianity, like every historical institution, has passed 
 through a process of development, of growth, in doctrine and 
 custom, and was not given to the world at the beginning in a 
 perfect form. He offers a number of instances going to show 
 that orthodox Protestantism is under a delusion, when it sup- 
 poses that all its doctrines and practices are taught in Scrip- 
 ture and are prescribed therein, or are to be directly deduced 
 therefrom. It is impossible to remain in the mere letter of 
 Scripture, because the necessities of interpretation, for in- 
 stance, of such a phrase as " the Word became flesh," lead at 
 once to a series of further questions. Other questions, such 
 as the Canon of Scripture, its inspiration and authority, can- 
 not be answered from Scripture itself because the Apostles 
 had not then given any decision on them. As within the 
 Biblical religion itself there is a development through the 
 Prophets to Jesus, so, again, in " the apostolic teaching no 
 historical point can be fixed at which the growth of doctrine 
 ceased, and the rule of faith was once for all settled." Finally, 
 in Scripture itself the necessity of such a progressive develop- 
 ment is distinctly indicated, for instance, in the parables of 
 the Leaven and the Mustard Seed. If in all this the author 
 displays undoubtedly a degree of sound historical sense, the 
 reader is immediately surprised by a very unhistorical and 
 genuinely dogmatic application of the true principle ! In 
 order to guide the process of the development of Christianity, 
 to distinguish correct developments from false, and to sanction 
 them, there is required an infallible authority outside the 
 development — namely, the Church. If Christianity is, as a 
 whole, a revelation, the results of its development must share 
 the guarantee of its credentials. Revealed religion is distin- 
 guished from Natural by the very fact that it substitutes the 
 voice of a Law-giver — an objective authority, Apostle, Pope, 
 or Church — for the voice of conscience. In Protestantism 
 this authority is the Bible ; but as it can be proved that this 
 authority is insufficient, we must conclude that this required 
 living and present source of revelation can only be the infal- 
 hble arbiter of all true doctrines — the Church. Nor is per- 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 365 
 
 sonal judgment precluded by this infallible authority, but is 
 only limited to its proper range and preserved from error. — We 
 must allow that this defence (following in the footsteps of the 
 German Catholic Theologian Mohler) of the principle of Catho- 
 lic tradition and authority is conducted very cleverly. It rests, 
 all the same, upon a great fallacy. The fact is overlooked 
 that the alleged infallible authority is itself a product of the 
 general development, and that it participates in its changes, 
 and is therefore subject, like every historical phenomenon, to 
 the law of relativity. Moreover, the false traditional idea of 
 development is throughout taken for granted — namely, that 
 development consists solely in positive growth, in an extension 
 and more complete definition of older truth ; we hear nothing 
 of the great fact, that development has also a negative aspect, 
 that new truth does not come merely as an addition to the old, 
 but often abrogates the old, so that in reality there is accom- 
 plished in it the continuous criticism of mind in the process of 
 its development. We readily grant that this process does not 
 go on without obedience to an inner law of rationality ; but 
 precisely because reason is realised in the process of historic 
 development, it does not require a special infallible institution 
 to guide it, which can only become an impediment to the 
 living spirit. 
 
 In the same year in which Newman set on foot the reac- 
 tionary High Church movement, Thomas Arnold, the Head 
 Master at Rugby, published his pamphlet on The Principles 
 of Chtirch Reform, which, though it provoked at first a storm 
 of indignation on all sides, presented in its fundamental 
 thoughts the ferment of a new progressive movement in the 
 English Church in the next decades. Arnold had, like New- 
 man, been a pupil of Whately's at Oxford, and a friend of 
 Keble's. But while in the case of Newman the influence of 
 the devout friend soon overcame the cool intellectual acute- 
 ness of the tutor, with Arnold it was the reverse. Through- 
 out his life Arnold continued to combine a profoundly earnest 
 piety with clearness of intellect, a manly love of truth, and a 
 restless desire for practical work ; indeed, it is not easy to say 
 which of these aspects of the noble man's character was most 
 marked. Arnold was at the beginning of the thirties not 
 less alarmed than Newman and his Oxford friends at the 
 political troubles and threatening tempest which appeared to 
 
365 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 be gathering thick over the Church ; but while they sought 
 salvation by the abandonment of the Reformation in a reform 
 of dogma and the constitution and ritual of the Church, by 
 which its boundaries would be narrowed and more sharply 
 separated from the pulsating life of the nation, he demanded 
 a reform in the opposite direction. In order to preserve to 
 the nation the blessings of the State Church, he advocated 
 the opening of its doors to the Dissenters, and the widening 
 of its boundaries, so that all Englishmen who were, and wished 
 to be Christians, should find a place in it. As the condition of 
 membership, nothing more than an acceptance of the essential 
 doctrines of the Christian faith, common to all parties both 
 within and outside the Established Church, was to be required, 
 differences in doctrine, constitution, and ritual being considered 
 minor matters and permissible. The essential thing in Chris- 
 tianity is practical godliness, based on the revelation of God 
 in Scripture, and especially in the person of Jesus, and mani- 
 festing itself in the moral purification and sanctification of 
 personal and social life. It is the function of Church and 
 State equally, though from a different point of view, to be in- 
 struments and organs of this ideal. There may not, therefore, 
 be any separation between them, or jealousy and quarrel ; the 
 State needs for its moral ends the religion of the Gospel, as 
 the Church can exercise its educating influence over the nation 
 only within the constituted forms and regulations of the Chris- 
 tian State. — These are the main principles of Arnold's pam- 
 phlet on Church Reform, principles which have as their basis, 
 not only an ideal view of the nature and ends of the State, 
 but also a broad view of the nature of Christianity ; a stand- 
 point exactly the same as that represented by Rothe in his 
 Anfangc der Kirche and his Ethik} But this combination 
 of Christian idealism and large-hearted humanity was then so 
 new in England, that Arnold's proposed reforms were obnoxi- 
 ous to all parties alike: to the High-churchmen they breathed 
 heresy and revolution, and the Liberals considered them too 
 conservative and narrow. 
 
 The storm of opposition from all sides did not shake 
 Arnold's conviction of the truth and wisdom of his ideas. 
 The force of his personal character ; the success of his work 
 
 1 Though Arnold differed from Rothe as to the source of the corruption of 
 the true idea of the Church. See Arnold's Letter to Bunsen, Jan. 27, 1838. 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 367 
 
 in the school at Rugby, by which he initiated a reformation 
 in the entire system of public schools in England ; his power- 
 ful sermons, in which he proclaimed the eternal truths of the 
 Gospel with profound earnestness in simple undogmatic lan- 
 guage, and with constant reference to the various depart- 
 ments of moral life ; lastly, his work as a scholar in the field of 
 classical literature and Roman history — all this combined in 
 compelling his opponents even to respect the assailed and 
 censured man, so that his sudden death (1842) was lamented 
 on all sides as a national calamity. 
 
 It is Thomas Arnold, if any one, who must be regarded 
 as the pioneer of free theology in England. It is true he 
 wrote no considerable theological work — his vocation led 
 him into the field of scholarship and history : and his views 
 with regard to the interpretation of the Bible were neither 
 quite new, nor do they meet completely the present require- 
 ments of historical criticism. But Arnold was the first to 
 show to his countrymen the possibility and to make the 
 demand, that the Bible should be read with honest human 
 eyes without the spectacles of orthodox dogmatic presupposi- 
 tions, and that it can at the same time be revered with 
 Christian piety and made truly productive in moral life. He 
 was the first who dared to leave on one side the traditional 
 phraseology of the High-Churchmen and the Evangelicals, 
 and to look upon Christianity, not as a sacred treasure of the 
 Churches and sects, but as a Divine beneficent power for 
 every believer ; not as a dead heritage from the past, but as 
 a living spiritual power for the moral advancement of indi- 
 viduals and nations in the present. If the universality of his 
 interests and occupations was a hindrance to strictly scientific 
 theological inquiry, it was really very favourable to his true 
 mission : he showed how classical and general historical 
 studies may be pursued in the light of the moral ideas of 
 Christianity, and how, on the other hand, a free and clear 
 way of looking at things may be obtained by means of wide 
 historical knowledge, and then applied to the interpretation 
 of the Bible and the solution of current ecclesiastical ques- 
 tions. Thus he began to pull down the wall of separation 
 which had cut off the religious life of his fellow-countrymen, 
 with their sects and churches and rigid theological formulas 
 and usages, from the general life and pursuits of the nation. 
 It is also clear as day, that if longer life had been granted 
 
368 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 8 25. [Bk. IV. 
 
 to him, the result of the further prosecution of his historical 
 studies, which had been made, in his last year, part of his 
 vocation by his appointment to the chair of Modern History 
 at Oxford, would have been further insight and courage to 
 apply his historical and critical principles to the Bible. At all 
 events, his work was subsequently further prosecuted in this 
 direction by his friends and pupils. 
 
 Arnold was pre-eminently an independent character, both 
 in his scientific and his political principles. For this reason 
 he was prepared to learn from men of different schools. 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge exercised great influence upon him, 
 and he confesses that he found in him what he had never 
 been able to find in any other English theologian : "His mind 
 is at once rich and vigorous, and comprehensive and critical ; 
 while the >]Qo<s is so pure and so lively all the while."^ From 
 Coleridge Arnold adopted the distinction between the 
 reason and the understanding, and the determination of the 
 relation of reason to faith as of two modes of perceiving 
 religious truth, which are not antagonistic but supplementary. 
 Of Coleridge's Letters on Inspiration^ which he saw in 
 manuscript, he expressed the opinion, " that they were " well 
 fitted to break ground in the approaches to that momentous 
 question which involves in it so great a shock to existing 
 notions, . . . but which will end, in spite of the fears and 
 clamours of the weak and bigoted, in the higher exalting 
 and more sure establishing of Christian truth." His friend- 
 ship with Bunsen, too, whose acquaintance he made in Rome 
 in 1827, had an important influence on Arnold's mind ; it was 
 throuo-h this scholar particularly that he kept himself in close 
 relations with German literature, though principally only with 
 its historical and Biblical exegetical works, but not with 
 German philosophy or systematic theology ; of Schleier- 
 macher he read only his critical essay on i Timothy, the 
 results of which appeared to him too bold. 
 
 The most direct and lasting influence on the mental 
 development of Arnold was that of Whately, who had been 
 in Oxford his tutor and adviser, and with whom, as Arch- 
 bishop of Dublin, he kept up a close friendship and constant 
 
 1 Letter No. 209, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Sept. 25, 1839. 
 
 2 See ante, p. 311. 
 
 3 Letter No. 94, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Jan. 24, 1835. 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 369 
 
 intercourse. Whately was a man of clear intellect, happy 
 humour, and benevolent heart, but not a learned theologian. 
 His best known book is his Logic, constructed upon Aris- 
 totelian principles, which was once largely used in English 
 colleges and universities. He carried his sound common 
 sense into theological questions also, and found that not a 
 few orthodox dogmas have no foundation in the Scriptures. 
 Thus the orthodox doctrine of election is not in harmony 
 with Paul's teaching, for in the latter what is dealt with is 
 not the unconditional predestination of individuals to salva- 
 tion or destruction, but only the appointment of the whole 
 Church to salvation in Christ, which is elected from the rest 
 of the Heathen, as previously the people of Israel had been 
 elected from the other nations. The final destiny of indi- 
 viduals depends solely on whether they personally do or do 
 not make use of the advantages offered to them, by partici- 
 pation in the revelation of the Church. The doctrine of 
 justification by faith, too, must not be understood of an 
 imputation of the merits of Christ, but of the forgiveness 
 of sins on the fulfilment of the moral conditions. The death 
 of Christ as a sacrifice must be received on the authority of 
 Scripture, but it cannot be shown to be necessary. It is the 
 same with the Deity of Christ : it must be believed on the 
 ground of Christ's own declarations in the Gospels, but 
 interpreted essentially in the sense of Christ being the 
 perfect moral example. The object of Christ's coming was 
 the foundation of the kingdom of God as a moral common- 
 wealth. The claim of an apostolical episcopal succession, with 
 power to impart the Holy Spirit, cannot be proved from 
 Scripture, and is wrecked on the historical improbability of a 
 chain of tradition being kept unbroken through eighteen cen- 
 turies; the true succession is holding fast to apostolic principles, 
 that is, the moral character of Christianity. This is violated 
 by the Tractarian doctrine of the sacraments, which substi- 
 tutes the opus operatum for the heart. The rigorous obser- 
 vance of the Sabbath, too, is not in harmony with the New 
 Testament, the law of the Sabbath having been abrogated 
 for Christians with the rest of the Mosaic legislation ; 
 Sunday is a voluntary institution of the Church for the good 
 of men. Generally, the Bible does not claim to be a law- 
 book for the regulation of faith and practice, but it contains a 
 system of practical truths, motives, and principles in a popular 
 
 G. T. B B 
 
370 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 form.^ The unwearied diligence with which Whately devoted 
 himself to his ecclesiastical duties, to promoting- the education 
 of the lower classes, and unostentatiously assisting the poor, 
 both Protestant and Catholic, of his diocese in Ireland, reflects 
 favourably on his practical and rational theology, which was 
 not either in philosophy or in history and criticism pro- 
 found. In the latter respect there is much affinity between 
 it and the Rationalistic (Kantian) supernaturalism, as it was 
 represented in Germany in the first decades of the century 
 by not a few theologians deserving of all respect. 
 
 As contemporaries and men of a kindred spirit with 
 Arnold and Whately, we may mention the Oxford theolo- 
 gians Hampden and Milman, and the Cambridge theologians 
 Thirlwall and Julius Hare. The name of Hampden is 
 associated with an episode of considerable moment in the 
 Tractarian movement. When he was nominated in 1836 to 
 the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford, the dominant 
 party there, with Newman and Pusey at its head, got up a 
 protest against his appointment, and charged the learned 
 theologian with heresy on the ground of his Bampton Lec- 
 tures of the year 1832, on The Scholastic Philosophy in its 
 relation to Christian Theology, which had till then remained 
 unimpugned. In his lectures he had shown how orthodox 
 theology, as having risen in its Patristic and Scholastic form 
 under the influence of the philosophy in vogue at the time, is 
 not identical with the doctrine of the Scriptures, but is in 
 many respects an adulterated reflex of the simple Christian 
 belief. This indisputably correct account of the origin of 
 orthodox dogmas gave naturally great offence to High- 
 churchmen, whose fundamental principle was the identifica- 
 tion of Christianity with Scholastic theology. Pusey ^ main- 
 tained that this distinction between uncertain Scholastic doc- 
 trines and certain facts of Scripture was but the beginning 
 of scepticism and rationalism, as the example of Semler had 
 shown. The defence of Christianity then in vogue, which 
 threw the stress entirely upon the practical side of our 
 religion, he declared tended directly to unbelief, since every- 
 
 1 These are the leading principles of Whately's theological works, Essays 
 on the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul (1828), Tlie Kingdom of Clirist 
 (1841). 
 
 ^ Hampden's Past and Present Statements. 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 37 1 
 
 thing that could not be brought under the rubric of practical 
 applicability, would be forgotten, and in the end denied. 
 Hampden himself, in his inaugural lecture, professed his full 
 belief in all the doctrines of the orthodox faith in a way not 
 easy, it must be confessed, to reconcile with the expositions 
 of his Barnpton Lectures. Consistency seems rather to have 
 been on the side of his assailants. But the manner of their 
 attack upon him, their denunciation of detached propositions 
 torn from their context, in order to convict him of heresy, 
 aroused the fierce indignation not only of Whately and 
 Arnold, but of wider circles, in which the reaction against 
 the principles of the Oxford party began from this time to 
 make itself felt. A pamphlet published at that time gives 
 the following not complimentary picture of higher education 
 at Oxford. In all higher branches of knowledge the aim is 
 to put down free opinions. The endeavour is to give a safe 
 direction to young minds, and to confine their movements 
 within the narrowest limits possible. No inquiry which 
 might possibly lead to other results than those of the estab- 
 lished formularies is permitted. It is not easy to form any 
 idea of the extent of moral terrorism with which this in- 
 tellectual tyranny is practised, with what jealousy the words, 
 behaviour, reading of those is watched, who are under the 
 suspicion of having diverged from the majority. This 
 system is commended in and outside of Oxford as a thoroughly 
 practical and wholesome method of training devoted servants 
 of the Church, who shall be free from all doubt. But the 
 evil fruits of it are a terrible distortion of sound intellect, 
 widespread ignorance and hypocrisy. The student who 
 comes at every step upon the warning, " Not too deep ! " is 
 discouraged and takes refuge in deliberate ignorance. He 
 persuades himself that knowledge at best is a dangerous 
 acquirement in his career. In the consciousness of his own 
 inability to defend rationally a position he has taken, he 
 regards all speculations that are foreign to his mode of 
 thought with vague fear. The consequence is that theology 
 is studied in Oxford to no purpose, however much is said 
 about it, because it is studied apart from the simple object 
 of discovering the truth, and merely with the object of finding 
 proofs in support of dogmas which dispense with all further 
 inquiry. Such was the view taken by an Englishman of 
 the Oxford of those years. The less reason we have to 
 
372 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 8 25. [Bk. IV. 
 
 doubt the truth of the picture, the more cheering is it to 
 observe how great progress has been made there in the 
 course of the last half century. 
 
 Even in those years bright exceptions were not wanting. 
 Milman was connected with Whately, Arnold, and Hampden, 
 belonging like them to the pre-Puseyite generation. His 
 History of the Jews, which appeared in 1829 (2nd ed. rewritten 
 1863), treated the narratives of the Old Testament in the 
 same way as the historical traditions of any other ancient 
 people, took up a critical attitude towards the chronological 
 data of the Bible, explained not a few narratives as oriental 
 poetry and allegory, and sought generally by its graphic 
 style, catching the national and antique character of early 
 Hebrew times, to deliver Biblical history from the bonds of 
 traditional sanctity, and bring it nearer to the mind and heart 
 of the present day. It is the same freer attitude towards the 
 Bible which is seen in Arnold's method of interpretation, 
 but Milman was as far as Arnold from holding the principles 
 of scientific criticism now followed by Wellhausen or Robertson 
 Smith. He was rather an imaginative narrator than an 
 acute investigator of history. Nevertheless, by his History 
 of the Jews, and his later History of Latin Christianity, 
 Milman contributed his share towards making in the bulwarks 
 of traditionalism breaches through which a freer spirit might 
 enter when the time arrived. 
 
 The same is true of the Cambridge theologians Thirlwall 
 and Julius Hare, who by their joint translation of Niebuhr's 
 History of Rome, and by theological works, did good service 
 in spreading the knowledge of German historical science 
 amongst their countrymen. Thirlwall published in 1825 a 
 translation of Schleiermacher's book on the Gospel of Luke, 
 with an introduction of some length, in which he accepted 
 and defended the principles of Schleiermacher's Biblical 
 criticism — a bold thing to do in those days, when the strict 
 doctrine of inspiration was still in full force, and German 
 theology was but little known in England, and on that very 
 account was the more summarily condemned as heretical ! 
 Next to Coleridge, whose way of thinking on philosophy he 
 adopted, Julius Hare was above all his English contempor- 
 aries the student best acquainted with German theological 
 science. As a youth he had felt on the Wartburg the breath 
 of Luther's spirit, and subsequently wrote a thoroughly learned 
 
CIi. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. ^y^ 
 
 Vindication of the German Reformer, in reply to the charges 
 of the historian Hallam and the Scottish philosopher Sir 
 Wilham Hamilton, and the Puseyites. Against the latter he 
 wrote the important polemical essay. The Contest with Ro7ne, 
 1842, which had the greater influence as Hare's Christian 
 devotedness had been placed beyond doubt by his earnest 
 and thoughtful sermons. Speaking generally, it appears that 
 Hare made a deeper impression on his contemporaries by 
 his noble and amiable character than by his writings, which 
 were comparatively few, and of which the best known is his 
 volume of sermons, The Mission of the Comforter, dedicated 
 to the memory of Coleridge, 1846, in which he maintained 
 the principle of development of Christian doctrine. Amongst 
 his closest friends were Thomas Arnold and Frederick 
 Maurice. Maurice was Hare's pupil at Cambridge, and later 
 his brother-in-law, and to this intimate relation owed the 
 most powerful stimulus in his mental development. 
 
 Frederick Denison Maurice was one of the most impor- 
 tant English theologians of this century, with great individu- 
 ality of mind. To describe his mode of thought in theology 
 in a brief sketch, such as this necessarily is, is not easy, for 
 his theology is more complicated than that of any other theo- 
 logian, and is on many points extremely vague. In his 
 biography, published by his son in two large volumes, there 
 is presented the picture of a man of deep religious feeling and 
 of decided speculative and dialectical power, but at the same 
 time of a man who failed to reduce his convictions into a 
 consistent logical whole such as could fully satisfy himself, or 
 make a dominating and prevailing impression upon his con- 
 temporaries, because his own thought lacked clearness and 
 steadiness, and his knowledge concentration and thoroughness. 
 In reading his biography, the comparison of F. D. Maurice 
 with the German theologian Dorner has again and again 
 forced itself upon me. In both the same high moral and re- 
 ligious character compelling profound respect, the same mul- 
 tiformity of learned and moral interests, the same combination 
 of speculative theological thought with a vivid concern for 
 practical Church life, the same restless endeavour to mediate 
 both practically and theoretically between opposing parties and 
 modes of thought ; but in both also the same incapacity for 
 taking a clear and logically consistent position on questions of 
 principle, the same indefiniteness in dogmatic speculation, the 
 
;74 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 same dislike of rational historical criticism, the same shrinking 
 from the consequences of their own ideal principles, the same 
 hesitancy in estimating the real factors of life ; finally, as a 
 result of all this, the same fatality of giving offence on all sides 
 and the same waste of power on the endless frictions of the 
 actual world. 
 
 Maurice's father was a Unitarian minister, but his mother 
 and three sisters abandoned the faith of the father and joined 
 various other religious communions. This division in the 
 household made a profound impression upon the loving heart 
 and thoughtful mind of the boy, and early led him to the 
 conviction that every one's faith is true in what is positively 
 asserted by it, and untrue in what it denies, in its negations, in 
 charges against the opinions of others when they are not 
 sufficiently understood. But this charitable view of religious 
 differences did not prevent his own secession to the Estab- 
 lished Church, nor even his re-baptism, by which he accord- 
 ingly declared the Unitarian faith of his father un-Christian. 
 At Oxford he became acquainted with the leaders of the 
 Tractarian movement, which had just commenced ; and ap- 
 peared as a zealous convert in his pamphlet, Stibsc7'7piion no 
 Bondage, in which he sought to prove that subscription to the 
 Thirty- Nine Articles (though a few years previously he had 
 left Cambridge without taking his degree rather than sign 
 them) is no infringement of liberty, but rather a help in the 
 pursuit of the studies of a University. The Tractarians 
 believed that they had found in him a hopeful ally for their 
 cause, but they were soon disappointed, for he quickly turned 
 his back upon them on account of Dr. Pusey's tract on 
 Baptism, which he considered most dangerous, although, as 
 he thought, it contained a very important doctrine which was 
 denied by the Dissenters, and was adapted to unite all 
 Churches. Soon after this he published his first book. The 
 Kingdom of Christ (1838), in which he seeks to show that 
 the English Church is the true incorporation of the spiritual 
 universal fellowship of the kingdom of Christ, because it 
 alone teaches the fuU truth as to baptism, the eucharist, 
 apostolical succession. Scripture and tradition, and establish- 
 ment, whilst Quakers, Lutherans, Calvinists, Philosophers, 
 and Roman Catholics respectively hold but a part of it. But 
 the optimistic champion of Anglicanism was later on com- 
 pelled to find by bitter experience that it is for the dogmatist 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 375 
 
 but a short step from the position of the defensor fidei to that 
 of the condemned heretic. When Maurice taught in his 
 Theological Essays {i^^T,) that the Bibhcal phrases "eternal 
 hfe " and " eternal death " do not signify states of time of 
 indefinitely long duration in the future, but spiritual states of 
 communion and oneness with or separation from God, that 
 divine punishments are instruments of God's love employed 
 for our salvation, and that the Gospel of God's love for all 
 men, and not the fear of eternal torments in hell, constitutes 
 the object of faith, — it was found that these doctrines are not 
 by any means in harmony with the Creeds of the Anglican 
 Church, and Maurice was removed from his theological pro- 
 fessorship at King's College, London. But though thus 
 deprived, he continued to assert his attachment to the Thirty- 
 Nine Articles, when properly understood, that is, according 
 to kis interpretation of them. And when Bishop Colenso, 
 who had been on terms of intimate friendship with Maurice, 
 and had defended him at the time of his removal from 
 King's College, gave offence to the orthodox by his critic- 
 ism of the Pentateuch, our unaccountable theologian put 
 himself on the side of the same denunciators against whom 
 Colenso had been his advocate a few years before ; in fact, 
 he declared to his former friend that he expected from him 
 the resignation of his bishopric, to which he had no claim 
 as an unbeliever, receiving from Colenso the cutting reply 
 that there were many who were similarly of opinion, that the 
 author of the "Theological Essays" had no right to retain 
 his chaplaincy at Lincoln's Inn. 
 
 It is plain from all Maurice's letters to his friends and con- 
 nexions that through all these paradoxes he was absolutely 
 sincere and in earnest ; that the various changes through which 
 he passed were not owing to outward considerations ; that 
 his want of consistency was due to the indefiniteness of the 
 fundamental principles of his thinking, to the disharmony 
 existing between his heart and his intellect, between the 
 need he felt of adhering to an authoritative ecclesiastical 
 communion and his strong theological individualism. To his 
 father (Feb. 12, 1832) he explains his secession to Anglicanism 
 from the necessity of his heart to have God, the Invisible and 
 Unsearchable, revealed in a human form as a man such as 
 can be understood, "a man conversing with us, living amongst 
 us," who, in order thus completely to reveal God, cannot be 
 
37^ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 less than God. The greater simplicity of the Unitarian 
 faith he considers is of no value if it does not satisfy wants 
 which we feel, if it does not account for facts which we 
 know. As regards the Athanasian Creed, his explanation to 
 a friend of the supposed difficulties in the way of its accep- 
 tation is simply this : To know God is eternal life ; God is 
 perfect Love, the Father dwelling with the Son in one Spirit 
 is this perfect and eternal Love, which is the basis of all 
 things, whereupon we base our hopes for ourselves and the 
 world. (Certainly a very wide and free interpretation of this 
 Creed, an interpretation which may be made to include both 
 Arianism and Sabellianism as well as Athanasianism.) Par- 
 ticularly characteristic of Maurice's theological thought is a 
 letter to his mother (Dec. 9, 1833), in which he endeavours to 
 comfort her in her doubts as to the evidences of her being in 
 Christ. The truth is that every man is in Christ, created in 
 him, who is the Head of every man ; the difference between 
 the believer and the unbeliever is that the latter does not 
 perceive or acknowledge the truth, that except he were joined 
 to Christ he could not think, breathe, live a single hour. It 
 is the devil's lie to imagine that we are something apart from 
 Christ, and have a separate, independent existence. To 
 believe that we are in Christ does not require any special re- 
 ligious experience. We have the warrant for this faith in that 
 we cannot do one living act, or obey one of God's command- 
 ments, or pray, or hope, or love, without him ; and yet God 
 bids us do all these things. The state of independence, the 
 fleshly Adam state, is no state at all, it is a life of our own 
 vain imagination. The one thing therefore is to believe in 
 the Lord Jesus Christ as the Lord of our own spirit, that our 
 spirit belongs to him and not to the flesh, that Christ is in us, 
 and that we must let him do his will in us and through us. 
 This is a Christology which is a long way removed from ortho- 
 doxy, and is to a certain extent speculative and philosophical ; 
 very much like Dorner's. Christ is the ideal man, or the 
 Divine idea of Humanity, which is as a principle in the whole 
 race, but exists also, realiter, in one eternal Person, who by the 
 Incarnation became the historical Saviour Jesus. If humanity 
 is thus from the first essentially associated with Christ, a 
 saving revelation pervades human history from the beginning ; 
 there is no need for the reconciliation of a world alienated 
 from God, but the work of the historical Saviour can be no 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 377 
 
 Other than by his word and example to reveal and bring home 
 to the consciousness of men what had always been the fact — 
 their being in the eternal Christ, and thereby in God. Con- 
 sequently Maurice reconstructed in this sense the orthodox 
 doctrine of the atonement. In his book, The Doctrine of 
 Sacrifice (1854), he teaches that Christ so far partook of sin as 
 to identify himself in sympathy with sinners. He did not 
 bear as a substitute the punishment of sin, but by his loving 
 participation in the miseries of sin he delivered men from 
 their sins, by teaching them to believe in the love of the 
 Father towards them, for with this faith in the loving God the 
 separation from God is ended, which constitutes the essence 
 of sin. It is a heathenish view of God to suppose that the 
 punishment of sin had to be removed by a sacrifice presented 
 to him. The Christian view is that God by the perfect self- 
 sacrifice of his Son, who was in his sympathy one with 
 sinners, made known his eternal love to the sinful world, and 
 that on that ground peace has been offered which men could 
 not of themselves have found. By this act of love on the 
 part of Christ the one possible method of peace and harmony 
 in the world generally is revealed. The principle of self- 
 sacrifice is revealed as the truth in which God displays his 
 inmost character and which all creatures must obey by appro- 
 priating the mind of the loving Christ. Thus Christ, the 
 eternal Head of mankind, becomes the Head of a new moral 
 world, in which no longer selfish discord reigns, but lasting 
 and self-sacrificing love. 
 
 These ideas tend obviously in the direction of that idealistic 
 philosophy of Christianity which is represented in the specu- 
 lative theology of Germany and in the writings of such men as 
 Caird and Green in Great Britain. But Maurice even more 
 than the kindred German theologian Dorner failed to work 
 them out consistently and thoroughly. The cardinal con- 
 tradiction of making the eternal idea of humanity at the same 
 time an historical individual of an absolutely supernatural nature 
 necessarily involved everywhere the diversion of all ideal 
 speculative effort of thought into traditional supernaturalism. 
 And in the case of Maurice this supernaturalism was the 
 more pronouncedly narrow, inasmuch as he found the spiritual 
 community of humanity, founded by the revelation of Christ, 
 embodied not in the universal kingdom of God, or the in- 
 visible community of the children of God, but in the Church 
 
378 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 of England.^ Accordingly, while he teaches on the one 
 hand that the entire human race is created and has its 
 essential nature in Christ as its ideal Head, he seems to 
 maintain on the other hand that it is only in the Church of 
 England that the Kingdom of Christ has attained actual 
 existence ! This is a contradiction that a German intellect 
 finds it hard to comprehend, or can only explain by supposing 
 that the strong national feeling of the Englishman had got 
 the better of the intellect of the theologian. 
 
 The sources of the characteristic points of Maurice's 
 teaching are to be found in the idealistic philosophy of 
 Coleridge (whose metaphysical ideas, however, acquire in 
 Maurice's system a Platonic modification), and in the doc- 
 trines of the Scottish theologians, Thomas Erskine, of 
 Linlathen, and John McLeod Campbell, at whom we must 
 take a brief glance. The first of these men, an advocate by 
 profession, had, by his own independent study of the Bible, 
 arrived at the conviction that the orthodox representation of 
 the Gospel did not properly represent its real and scriptural 
 nature.^ For the Gospel announces the forgiveness of sins not 
 as a reward of faith any more than as a reward of works, but 
 as the free unconditional gift of God, which was bestowed 
 on mankind once for all in their representative Head, Christ, 
 so that every man may appropriate it. Yet forgiveness is 
 not itself salvation, but only the means of it ; and salvation 
 itself is not a future good, but is spiritual fellowship with God 
 in the sanctification of the character by means of his holy love. 
 The very purpose for which God offers his free unmerited 
 love, as forgiving mercy to sinners, is that they may thereby 
 be encouraged and impelled to love him in return, and to 
 grow themselves into the image of his holy love. Glad 
 devotion to God, a loving dependence on the Creator, is the 
 perfect condition of the creature, in which all the faculties 
 
 1 This, the fundamental thought of his book, The Kingdom of Christ, is 
 stated in strong and emphatic language in a letter of July 12, 1834 {Life, i. 
 p. 166). 
 
 2 The most interesting of Erskine's writings, which has been followed in 
 the above account of his system, is The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel 
 (1828) ; to it must be added The Brazen Serpent, or Life coming through 
 Death (1831) ; Tlie Doctrine of Election, and its Connection with the General 
 Theory of Christianity (1837) ; his first work. Remarks on the Internal 
 Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (1820), is of less importance. 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 379 
 
 of the soul are kept in their proper order by that ruhng 
 principle. The Fall of man consisted in the rise of the spirit 
 of independence, in that " each man became an independent 
 individual, loving and desiring and approving things accord- 
 ing as they affected himself, without regard to the will of 
 God or the sympathies of the universal family." And this 
 sin of man was also his misery, his hell. The punishment 
 of sin did not consist in external evils, which might be re- 
 moved by arbitrary acts, but it consisted in the very fact that 
 the man himself had revolted from saving fellowship with 
 God, and had exchanged the love of him for the love of 
 self and the world. "Restoration to a condition of salvation 
 cannot therefore be effected otherwise than by the restoration 
 of the love of God to its place as the paramount principle in 
 the heart, resulting in the due subordination of self and the 
 creature under it. Any remedy which falls below this re- 
 storation falls below man's need. No pardon which leaves 
 this undone is of any value to him. He needs no infliction 
 from without to make him miserable ; and it is not the re- 
 moval of any outward infliction that can give him happiness. 
 He must know that God is better than happiness, and that 
 sin is worse than sorrow. The love of God, not the desire 
 of happiness, is the true keystone of the arch." The means 
 which God has provided for the attainment of this blessing 
 is the Gospel. It shows us, in the appearance of Christ, 
 the eracious character of God in relation to his rebellious 
 creatures, in order thereby to draw back our hearts to 
 him, which had been estranged through hatred, fear, or 
 indifference, and thus to restore love to God and to the whole 
 divine human family to its true place in the heart. It is 
 particularly the sufferings of Christ in which the holy love 
 of God has been revealed ; but not in the sense that God had 
 to be reconciled, that his love had to be purchased, by the 
 sacrifice of his Son ; on the contrary, his holy love itself 
 was the source of the mission and the self-sacrifice of Christ. 
 Christ, by his patient endurance of all the misery that had 
 sprung from the sin of the world, overcame sin itself by love 
 and glorified God by his obedience. His glorifying of the 
 Father, by obediently enduring suffering from love of his sinful 
 brethren, was both the expiation and the putting away of sin ; 
 and because it was the Head of mankind who accomplished 
 this as representing all men, the sin of the entire race is once 
 
jSo THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 for all forgiven in Christ ; the resurrection of Christ was the 
 seal of this forgiveness. The message of this forgiveness is 
 proclaimed to all the world as the free gift of God offered for 
 its acceptance, but only those who actually accept it are 
 really justified and made part of the Church of Christ. The 
 fear lest the Gospel of free, unconditional mercy should pro- 
 duce a false peace in a world dead in sins, and expose the 
 moral interests of Christianity to the dangers of antinomian- 
 ism, rests, as Erskine is continually reiterating, upon a mis- 
 conception. For the pardon, which is the free gift of God 
 in Christ, is of advantage to men only as they receive it, and 
 with it Christ himself the revelation of the holy, loving 
 character of God, into their hearts ; and thereby the principle 
 of holy, self-sacrificing love is made the dominant power 
 and the root of personal holiness and salvation. Pardon is, 
 therefore, really received only when it evinces itself as the 
 effective means of sanctification and accordingly of salvation. 
 It is not itself salvation, for salvation cannot be given to men 
 gratuitously without conditions ; it consists in the fellowship 
 of the Holy Spirit ; heaven is holiness, and the forgiveness 
 of sins is a blessing only in so far as it produces holiness. 
 Holiness is the ultimate object God has in view with us, and 
 the Gospel message serves only as a means to this end. 
 
 These ideas of Erskine's were further worked out and 
 established by his friend, the theologian, J. McLeod Camp- 
 bell, in his very suggestive book, The Nature of the Atone- 
 ment, audits Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life 
 (1856, 5th ed., 1878). As a believing Bibhcal theologian, 
 Campbell does not deny that Christ presented an expiatory 
 sacrifice for us, but he maintains that when this sacrifice is 
 not interpreted in accordance with preconceived opinions, 
 but is looked at as it is, and as it is represented in the 
 Scriptures, it cannot be regarded as the suffering of the 
 punishment due to man's sin in his stead, but a moral and 
 spiritual meaning must be put upon it. Christ effected our 
 salvation by becoming the mediator between God and man, 
 and representing both — God with man and man with God. 
 This twofold relation of the atonement is worked out with 
 reference to its retrospective and its prospective action. In 
 the first respect, Christ's work was to reveal the Father in 
 humanity and for humanity, to be the witness of God's holy 
 love, a love which hates sin and seeks to save the sinner by 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOCxY. 38 I 
 
 converting him. Christ felt the pain on account of sin that 
 filled the holy heart of God, and in a perfect, vicarious 
 contrition acknowledged the righteousness of the divine 
 condemnation of sin, as the representative of mankind before 
 God. When he identified himself with his brethren in the 
 flesh by his compassionate sympathy, he endured the deepest 
 pangs, such as only the Holy One could feel, on account of 
 the sins of men, both as guilt before God and as the source 
 of human misery. This pain on account of sin, and this 
 perfect repentance of it, offered to God in the name of man- 
 kind, constituted the true atonement for the sins of mankind, 
 a sacrifice well-pleasing to God, such as no execution of 
 punishment could have supplied. With this complete con- 
 demnation of the sinful past of mankind by its representative 
 Head, full satisfaction was offered to the holy will of God. 
 But this moral atonement of Christ had at the same time 
 prospective significance. It must be conceived as effecting 
 salvation, or eternal life, not merely as the indirect result of 
 Christ's work, but as inwardly connected with it, as, in fact, 
 already included in that work. This would not be the case 
 on the supposition of an imputation of vicarious punitive 
 suffering to sinners, which leaves their moral condition in 
 relation to God unchanged, and makes salvation only a future 
 state of happiness. The atonement must therefore be con- 
 ceived thus : Christ in his person represents humanity as 
 holy, well-pleasing to God, and animated solely by love to 
 Him, and by means of his identification with his brethren 
 Christ communicated his righteousness as a new life to them. 
 He thereby not only revealed the Divine Fatherhood to men, 
 but he also discovered the treasure of the Divine imasfe in 
 man, which had until then been veiled under their sin. The 
 righteousness of Christ was the revelation of the latent 
 capacity in man for righteousness, which he possessed by 
 virtue of the indwelling Son of God. Christ must not be 
 conceived as so standing apart from humanity that his 
 righteousness could not avail for it otherwise than by im- 
 putation. He is, as the second Adam, the Head of humanity, 
 so truly one with it that his righteousness counts in the sight 
 of God as the righteousness of mankind generally, and that 
 it can pass from Christ to all men. Christ himself had in 
 his human consciousness the witness to the ability of man- 
 kind to be filled with the love of God. In his love to his 
 
382 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 brethren lay the prophetic hope that they also would open 
 their hearts to the love of God, from which they had for a 
 time been estranged. Accordingly, the atoning work of 
 Christ did not consist in the deliverance of men from future 
 punishment and the obtaining of future happiness ; but in 
 communicating to them his knowledge and love of the 
 Father, and making them thereby children of God, in the 
 possession of eternal life and a righteousness well- pleasing 
 to God. Everything that the Son accomplished, and that 
 the Father accepted, had the prospective intention of being 
 reproduced in us ; both his pain on account of sin, and his 
 confiding and obedient love to the Father, were intended to 
 be appropriated by us. Nothing of a mere external nature 
 that God could do with us or could give to us, which is not 
 involved in the relation of our souls to God and in the re- 
 lation of our own hearts answering to his heart, can possibly 
 be our salvation. 
 
 This is manifestly the same reconstruction of the Christian 
 doctrine of salvation which was effected by Kant and Schleier- 
 macher in Germany, whereby it is converted from forensic 
 externality into ethical inwardness and a truth of direct 
 religious experience. Erskine and Campbell appear, however, 
 to have reached their convictions in entire independence of 
 German theology, by their own absorbing study of the Bible ; 
 and I regard their ideas as the best contribution to dogmatics 
 which British theology has produced in the present century. 
 That the Scottish Church rejected and thrust out from its 
 midst, in the person of Campbell, this line of theological 
 thought, was the heaviest blow that it could inflict upon itself; 
 thereby it arrested its healthy development for more than 
 half a century. For it is only just now that Scotch theo- 
 logians begin to start once more from Campbell, though, it 
 must be confessed, with great timidity, as may be seen from 
 the book of the Glasgow theologian, Alexander Bruce, 
 The Hti^niliation of Christ in its Physical, Ethical, and 
 Soteriological Aspects (1876). It is here taught (following 
 rather Hofmann, of Erlangen, than Campbell) that the Son 
 of God entered into the condition of humanity, as it lay under 
 the wrath of God, in such a way that he felt in himself the 
 effects of that wrath, though he was not himself in his per- 
 sonal relation to God the object of it. The value of the 
 sacrifice of Christ, Bruce holds, was equal to his Divine 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 38;; 
 
 dignity multiplied by his perfect obedience, multiplied by his 
 boundless love, multiplied by his sufferings, which reached the 
 utmost limits of what a sinless body could endure. As God 
 took all this into account, and was thereby satisfied, we also 
 must take it all into consideration, in order to say " Amen " to 
 the Divine view of the sacrifice of Christ. This is an attempt 
 to mediate between the old and the new, which does not 
 approach in clearness of principle the thought of Erskine and 
 Campbell, although we must acknowledge that it is in the 
 same direction which they took. 
 
 Though condemned in the land of their birth, the ideas 
 of Erskine and Campbell were received in the soil of the 
 Liberal theology of England. The religious profundity of 
 the Scotchmen admirably supplemented the thought of the 
 Englishmen, which is characterised more by a practical 
 breadth than religious and speculative depth. It is to them 
 that Maurice's theology owes its best features. And from 
 Maurice again Charles Kingsley received the dominant 
 direction of his theology, which gave fitting expression to the 
 feelings of his heart in its warm sympathy for everything 
 truly human, and supplied the theoretical rallying-point for 
 his philanthropic aims. In the history of the Christian- 
 socialist movements of the century, the names of Maurice and 
 Kingsley occupy a foremost place. They showed by their 
 deeds what was the fundamental thought of their theology — 
 that Christianity is the leaven which Is destined to regenerate 
 and to hallow the life of human society. Side by side with 
 them stands the great preacher Frederick W. Robertson, 
 whom death too soon removed, who was equal to them in 
 nobility of character and their superior In the wealth and 
 depth of his mind. The biography of this man, so admirably 
 executed by Stopford A. Brooke, reads like the life of a 
 saint, but of a Protestant and modern saint, who does not 
 escape out of the world, but, as a soldier of God, fights the 
 great fight with all ungodliness, with the sins of the upper 
 and the lower classes, with the unreality and falsehood of 
 even religious parties, who at the same time keeps his own 
 soul unspotted from the world, and who is compelled often 
 and deeply to drain the bitter cup of suffering, which no 
 soldier of God can escape In this world of wickedness and 
 folly. There is little in homiletical literature to compare 
 with the four series of Robertson's sermons, in respect 
 
384 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 of wealth and depth of thought, strength of moral pathos, 
 warmth of religious emotion, clearness and vividness of style, 
 and elevation and beauty of language. As his biographer 
 says, Robertson " felt that Christianity was too much preached 
 as theology, too little as the religion of daily life ; too much 
 as a religion of feeling, too little as a religion of principles ; 
 too much as a religion only for individuals, too little as a 
 religion for nations and for the world. He determined to 
 make it bear upon the social state of all classes, upon the 
 questions which agitated society, upon the great movements 
 of the world." After painful inward conflicts, which arose 
 not merely out of theological difficulties, but from a percep- 
 tion of the falsehood and unrighteousness of the various 
 political and ecclesiastical parties, he found rest in the 
 Gospel of Christianity, the truths of which seemed to embrace 
 the truth of Conservatism and the progressive tendencies 
 of Liberalism, and to offer the solution of the questions of the 
 day, not by setting up laws or external limitations, but by the 
 spread of a spirit of love, of duty, and of mutual respect. 
 Those salutary truths he beheld embodied in Jesus, the per- 
 fect type of man as the child of God. He held that Christ 
 was humanity, and in Him alone is our humanity intelligible. 
 It is only in the feeling of fellowship and union with this life, 
 in the acknowledgment of like feelings and conflicts, in a 
 similar estimate of the world and its maxims, that our own 
 life becomes bearable and desirable. Judging humanity in 
 the light of this ideal, Robertson had, on the one hand, the 
 keenest eye for its sins and weaknesses in their endless forms 
 and disguises, and yet, on the other, he never lost sight of 
 the Divine heart and root of human nature. The greatest 
 truth which Christ revealed, as Robertson is always urging, 
 is that all men are as men children of God, and each other's 
 brothers ; they do not become children of God by baptism 
 or by faith and regeneration, but are already such by virtue 
 of the divine image in which they were created ; baptism is 
 the messenger to each one in particular, declaring that he is 
 a child of God de jure. But in order to be this de facto, it is 
 needful for him to receive this message in faith, and to 
 realise it in life, i.e. that he should be regenerated. Faith 
 does not create the fact of Divine sonship, but receives it 
 and converts it from an unconscious reality, which would avail 
 nothing, into a conscious and voluntary life after the likeness 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 385 
 
 of Christ. Christ is our Saviour not by the vicariious suffer- 
 ing of the penalty due to our sins, but by being actually the 
 typical realisation of that which every man is potentially, as 
 a child of God, and ought to be actually. The death of 
 Christ was an atoning sacrifice, in so far as, having been 
 endured in sympathy with human misery, it established the 
 eternal principle, that salvation for man must always come 
 from the sacrifice of self in ministering and patient love, a 
 principle that is so universally asserted in nature and history 
 that it must be regarded as a law of the universe. Faith is 
 the life of Christ begun in us, which God counts as righteous- 
 ness, because, as the Divine life in the soul, it is the root and 
 spring of righteousness. As the inward principle of a morally 
 good will, it sets us free from external laws, which can only 
 incite to transgression or produce conventional legality. This 
 thought Robertson applied energetically in relation to the 
 Sabbath question ; he openly declared the legal observance 
 of the Sabbath a relapse from the spirit of the Gospel into 
 Judaism and Pharisaism. On account of this genuinely 
 Lutheran view of the question, he claims almost more than 
 any other English theologian the sympathy of Germans ^ ; 
 and not less on account of his views as to the authority of 
 Scripture and the dogmas of the Church. Deeply as 
 Robertson revered the Bible as the inexhaustible spring 
 of profoundest truth, he pronounced " bibliolatry " as super- 
 stitious, as false, and almost as dangerous as Romanism. 
 The Bible is inspired, he says, but not dictated ; it is the 
 word of God, but in the words of man ; as the former, per- 
 fect ; as the latter, imperfect. Indeed, the Divine wisdom is 
 shown in the fact, that it has given a spiritual revelation, that 
 is, a revelation concerning the truths of the soul and its 
 relation to God, in popular and incorrect language ; for how 
 otherwise could it have been understood by unscientific men 
 and ages ? The highest truths, he maintained, rest ulti- 
 mately, not upon the authority of the Bible, or of the Church, 
 but upon the witness of the Spirit of God in the human heart, 
 
 1 He claims this sympathy also for the reason that he did not share the 
 national prejudices of his countrymen, but, on the contrary, spoke with 
 fitting contempt of their contempt for everything German (see his remarks on 
 " German Neology," in his letter of 1849, Life and Letters, p. 97 of People's 
 ed.). In this respect how far he stands above Maurice ! 
 
 G. T. C C 
 
o 
 
 86 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 a witness which is to be reached not by the cultivation of the 
 understanding, but by the loving obedience of the heart. 
 Accordingly, in interpreting the dogmas of the Church, he 
 never troubled himself about their intellectual husks, but only 
 about their kernel, the religious truths and moral principles 
 which are to be found under the various dogmatic opinions as 
 their real meaning. He was consequently, with all his strict- 
 ness in the condemnation of what is morally wrong, extremely 
 charitable and catholic in the views he took of dogmatic 
 differences of opinion. There was one principle which pro- 
 bably Maurice recognised in the dim distance, but which 
 in his case remained confused eclecticism, but Robertson's 
 deeper and clearer mind endeavoured to work out distinctly, 
 and applied with unerring tact in various regions of contro- 
 versy : it was the principle, that the one truth which under- 
 lies the various partial views of opposing parties, and by this 
 very partiality and onesidedness becomes falsehood, must be 
 brought out into clear light as the essential thing common to 
 both parties. An acute dialectical intellect and a rare power 
 of sympathy in entering into the thoughts and feehngs of 
 others qualified him to perform, as few men could, the work 
 of a peacemaker amid contending religious parties. If a 
 longer life had been granted him (he died 1853, at the age 
 of thirty-seven), and if he had had leisure to write the 
 theological works which he had proposed to himself (that on 
 Inspiration, e.g), what a beneficial influence he might have 
 exerted on the development of theological thought, both in 
 his own country and abroad! But as it is, his Sermons and 
 Letters are a rich source of truth and light, from which no 
 one can draw without feeling their purifying, strengthening, 
 and elevating power ; they are the monument of a genuine 
 religious genius, in whom for some time to come later 
 generations will reverently recognise a prophet of the higher 
 development of Christian thought and feeling. 
 
 We have still to take a glance at the course of Biblical 
 criticism in Great Britain, and the review may be the more 
 rapid as the labours in this department of theology practically 
 commenced but a generation ago, and have hitherto produced 
 little of independent value. The credit of having done the 
 work of pioneer in these studies in England must be accorded 
 to the learned classical scholar and theologian, Jowett, who 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 387 
 
 published in 1X55 his exegetical work The Epistles of St. Paul 
 to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans, with Critical 
 Notes and Dissertations (2 vols.), in which he introduced 
 to his countrymen the results of Baur's critical labours. His 
 own views hold a place midway between those of Baur and 
 the traditional ones as to the relation of Paul to the earlier 
 Apostles : there was not complete harmony, but neither was 
 there absolute antagonism ; the difference was not so much of 
 a dogmatic as of a practical nature, and on the part of the 
 Twelve was due more to want of consistency than to an- 
 tagonism of principles ; though in accord with Paul on funda- 
 mental principles, they were attracted to Jewish practices by 
 their national sympathies and habits. Some points of Pauline 
 theology are discussed in the appended Dissertations with 
 characteristic acumen and without dogmatic prejudice (e.g. 
 the doctrine of election). Of special value is the careful 
 criticism of the text, and the amended authorised English 
 version. The principles of interpretation which Jowett ap- 
 plied in his Epistles of Paul he has expounded in the ex- 
 tremely interesting essay, On the Interpretation of Scripture 
 (in the Essays and Reviews, i860), in which he demands, 
 quite in the spirit of Arnold, that the method of the classical 
 scholar shall be applied in Biblical exegesis, in short, that 
 "the Bible must be interpreted like any other book," and thus 
 the study of the Scriptures be raised to the rank of the most 
 valuable portion of the study of history and antiquity ; the 
 best book for the heart ought to be made the best for the in- 
 tellect, so that its moral judgment of history might seem to 
 complete and correct the aesthetic standard of the classics. 
 " Before we can make the Old and New Testaments a real 
 part of education, we must read them not by the help of 
 custom and tradition, in the spirit of apology or controversy, 
 but in accordance with the ordinary laws of human know- 
 ledge." 
 
 The year i860, in which the Essays and Reviews appeared, 
 may be regarded as an epoch in the history of English 
 theology, corresponding to the year 1835 in the history of 
 German theology. The storm which this collection of theo- 
 logical essays by various authors called up in England had 
 great similarity with the commotion produced in Germany by 
 Strauss's Leben Jesti. It is quite true that the causes of the 
 commotion in the two countries were by no means of equal 
 
388 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 importance. For the Essays and Reviews contain nothing 
 that had not already been thought and said from the days of 
 Whately and Arnold by not a few writers belonging even to 
 the Anglican Church. The first essay, by Temple, Arnold's 
 successor at Rugby, deals with the gradual and progressive 
 education of the world, a thought which had from the time 
 of Lessing formed part of the ordinary consciousness of the 
 educated world, and which is to be found indicated in the 
 Church Fathers, and in fact in the New Testament. The 
 second essay, by Rowland Williams, gave an account, ex- 
 pressing substantial agreement, of Bunsen's Biblical Re- 
 searches. This was one of the essays which the opponents, 
 High-churchmen and Evangelicals combined, selected as the 
 basis of a prosecution for heresy. The charge was laid, that 
 the general scope, tendency, or design of the essay as a whole 
 was to disseminate unbelief in the Divine inspiration and 
 authority of Holy Scripture, to degrade it to the level of 
 mere human writings, to deny prophetic predictions and 
 miracles, or to interpret them in an unorthodox way, and to 
 explain away articles of the creeds. The trial, which took 
 place in the Court of Arches, before Dr. Lushington, and in 
 which Mr. James Stephen defended the accused essayists in 
 a masterly manner, ended in a complete triumph for Liberal 
 theology. Mr. Stephen remarked in the course of his defence 
 that a poor compliment would be paid to the English people 
 if they were deemed incompetent to bring into open discussion 
 the views of Baron Bunsen. The design of the accusation was 
 really nothing else than to put asunder reason and faith, which 
 God had joined together. But the questions which learning 
 and criticism had raised would have to be settled ; the de- 
 cisive question was whether the clergy should be allowed to 
 . co-operate freely in the settlement. The authorities might 
 perhaps close the mouth of the clergyman, but not of the lay- 
 man, or of literature and history. Is it allowable to make a 
 compact between Christ and darkness ; reason and Satan ? 
 It is of greatest moment to Christianity itself that theo- 
 logians should be free to study the Bible. The decision of 
 the Court, which was in accordance with these principles, 
 sanctioned the rights of free theology in the English Church. 
 A leading representative of this new party, which may 
 be described as the left and progressive wing of the Broad 
 Church, was Arthur P. Stanley, the pupil and biographer 
 
Ch. I I.J PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 389 
 
 of Arnold. The fact that his high ecclesiastical position as 
 Dean of Westminster did not prevent his sustaining friendly 
 relations with Dissenters and heretics largely helped, no 
 doubt, to modify the dogmatic exclusiveness of the Estab- 
 lished Church. His theological writings were valuable con- 
 tributions in aid of a free and unfettered study of Biblical 
 and ecclesiastical history. Simultaneously with Jowett's com- 
 mentary on St. Paul, he published his kindred work, The 
 Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians, with Critical Notes 
 and Dissertations (1855), which had been preceded by his 
 Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age (1847), in which the 
 realistic historic method of Arnold was applied to the history 
 of the New Testament period in a way that departed far from 
 the lines of customary dogmatic exegesis. To the same 
 category belong his Lectures on the Jewish Church (1862), in 
 which the history of Israel is treated in a manner midway 
 between poetry and criticism, following very much the lines 
 of Ewald. In an essay on the Theology of the Nineteenth 
 Centicry, published in Eraser s Magazine, Feb., 1865, Stanley 
 characterised the method which he had followed. The theory 
 of development, he maintains, has taken the first place in every 
 field of religious and philosophical thought. It has had an 
 important effect on the proper understanding of the Bible 
 itself. The gradual growth, the imperfect forms, the varied 
 degrees of Revelation itself are now understood, and thus 
 the greatest difficulties in the way of understanding the Bible 
 are removed. We no longer expect to find in the Jews 
 of the Old Testament premature Christians, or premature 
 astronomers or geologists. Together with this historical 
 spirit, a characteristic of modern theology is the importance 
 it attaches to the moral and spiritual aspect of religion. The 
 value of internal evidence has now been recognised in theory 
 as well as in practice, in theology as well as in philosophy, and 
 its superiority to the proof from miracles. The spirit is placed 
 above the letter, and practice above dogma. The first and 
 clearest statement of this new principle is found in Arnold's 
 Essay on the Interpretation of Scripture, the man to whose 
 memory Stanley has dedicated such a noble monument in his 
 biography. 
 
 That the problems of Biblical criticism can no longer be 
 suppressed, that they are as it were in the air of our time, so 
 that theology could not escape them, even if it took the wings 
 
390 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 of the morning and dwelt in the uttermost parts of the sea, was 
 strikingly shown at the beginning of the sixties by the re- 
 markable case of Bishop Colenso. He had gone as Bishop 
 to Natal with the orthodox belief in the inspiration of the 
 Bible, with the object of converting the Zulus, and returned 
 home as a critic to call in question the integrity and historical 
 character of the Books of Moses. In the course of his in- 
 struction of the heathen, their doubts led him to make a more 
 careful examination of the Biblical text, and in the process it 
 grew arithmetically certain to the keen and mathematical 
 intellect of the Bishop, that it was impossible to maintain the 
 correctness of the Mosaic records. The historical inquiries 
 thus started led him step by step to further results; he per- 
 ceived the composite character of the Pentateuch as consist- 
 ing of component parts of various ages and sources (the 
 Elohistic and Jahvistic sections), he perceived the gradual 
 growth of the Levitical Law, of which some portions origin- 
 ated before Deuteronomy, that is, before the time of Jere- 
 miah, other portions not until after Ezra, being inserted into 
 the earlier portions of the Pentateuch. In a word, Colenso 
 arrived, by his originally quite independent path of inquiry, at 
 results which are in substantial agreement with the views 
 of the Biblical science of our day. But the Bishops of the 
 Anglican Church, instead of calmly examining the honest 
 studies of their brother, felt called upon to break a lance for 
 Moses and the infallibility of the letter of the Bible, and 
 demanded the deprivation of the Bishop of Natal. Once 
 more the Secular Court, the Queen's Privy Council, was 
 wiser than the Churchmen, and pronounced the Bishop the 
 legitimate occupant of his see (1865). 
 
 Amongst the opponents of Colenso was to be found not 
 only Maurice, who had himself suffered as a persecuted 
 heretic, but even Matthew Arnold, who substitutes the moral 
 order of the world for the God of the Bible, and with this 
 object in view takes great liberties in the interpretation of the 
 Bible. In an essay in Macmillan s Magazine (Jan. and Feb., 
 1863), he demanded that the Biblical historian should show 
 great consideration for the edification of his readers. In order 
 not to do violence to their devout feelings, and not to endanger 
 the interest of the practical religious life, he ought, Arnold 
 thinks, to attenuate the difficulties which might be a stumbling- 
 block to faith in the Bible, to go out of the way of what is 
 
Ch. 11.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 39 I 
 
 doubtful, such as the miraculous stories, by using nice gener- 
 alities, a method of which Stanley had given a perfect model 
 in his Jewish Church. Without doubt Matthew Arnold ex- 
 pressed the views of the great majority of Englishmen on 
 this matter, and perhaps the views of the men of his age. It 
 may also be granted that there are practical interests at the 
 bottom of such advice which have some justification. On the 
 other hand, it ought to be perceived, as Matthew Arnold 
 seems to have subsequently perceived, that the claims of the 
 purely scientific spirit to present the simple historical truth are 
 equally well founded, and that both those practical religious, 
 and these absolute scientific interests will be better promoted 
 by the separation of the two kinds of Biblical interpretation — 
 the practical and the learned, — than by a confused amalga- 
 mation of both. These hybrid forms, with their indefinite- 
 ness, half-truths and compromises, have little value in the pro- 
 motion of an exact knowledge of the historical facts ; the only 
 use they serve is to check, in a time of transition, such as 
 ours is, the too rapid advance of some and to prepare others 
 gradually to receive what is new ; in that way facilitating 
 and securing an orderly and steady development of general 
 opinion, and avoiding sudden leaps and catastrophes of a 
 dangerous kind. This is without doubt the duty which the 
 modified orthodoxy of the English Broad Church party has 
 to perform at present, and perhaps for some time to come. 
 The acknowledgment of the legitimacy of this purpose, and 
 respect for those men who endeavour to realise it, is quite 
 consistent with a decided assertion of the rights of strictly 
 scientific historical research in theology, uncontrolled by any 
 secondary considerations whatsoever. The representatives 
 of this purely scientific research are, however, so much in 
 the minority, not only in Great Britain, but everywhere, that 
 there is no reason to fear lest the development of the general 
 religious consciousness should go on at too rapid a rate. 
 
 Whilst the Colenso controversy was still engaging public 
 attention in England, R. W. Mackay, (who had previously 
 by his Progress of the Intellect, as exemplified in the Religious 
 Development of the Greeks and the Romans (1850), — a learned 
 work, but burdened with too great weight of material — made 
 himself known as a free inquirer in the department of religion) 
 published the very instructive book. The Tubingen School 
 and its Antecedents (1863). An introductory review of the 
 
392 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 relation of religion to theology, of the origin and development 
 of dogma, of the influence of modern philosophy on the 
 doctrine of the belief in miracles and inspiration, and of the 
 history of Biblical criticism from the Socinians to Strauss, is 
 followed by an excellent account of the critical labours of 
 F. C. Baur and his disciples, of their method and its new 
 results, the author professing himself an adherent of the school. 
 In an appendix polemical notes against the opponents of 
 the criticism of Baur, amongst others Ewald, Ritschl, and 
 Lechler, which show accurate knowledge, are added. To 
 this book the merit is to be ascribed of having promoted 
 an acquaintance with the stricter form of German criticism 
 in wider circles in England. Nor are there wanting- signs of 
 the ferment produced by this criticism. Oxford itself could 
 not escape its influence, where T. H. Green introduced, 
 together with German speculative philosophy, the critical 
 results of the Tubingen school to his circle of friends. 
 
 A pendant to the various Lives of Jesus which appeared 
 on the Continent during the sixth decade originated in 
 Cambridge, £cce Homo : A Survey of the Life and Work 
 of Jesus Christ (1866). This anonymous book (said to be 
 by Professor Seeley, the author of Natural Religion), pro- 
 duced a deep impression, and greatly promoted the cause of 
 more unfettered religious thought in Great Britain, although, 
 or perhaps because, it was not directly critical, but, upon the 
 basis of the narratives of the four Gospels, drew a picture of 
 the moral personality of Jesus with great delicacy of feeling 
 and a profound perception of his peculiar greatness and 
 originality. The nature of Christian morality, as distinguished 
 from Jewish and Heathen legality or philosophy, is derived 
 from the character of Jesus and the personal impression 
 he made upon his disciples. If, therefore, the personality 
 of Jesus as delineated by Seeley produces to some extent 
 rather the impression of an artificial composition than that 
 of real historical truth, this is the unavoidable consequence 
 of the author's neglect of any critical examination of the 
 sources ; the personal claims of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, 
 and the Synoptics' discourses of the Messianic Judge being 
 ascribed to Jesus himself straightway. By this means the 
 portrait of the ma?i, which is really the object aimed at, ac- 
 quires an unintelligible, problematic aspect. Still, Ecce Homo 
 takes a foremost place amongst the books of this class. 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 39 J 
 
 At this point the learned work of the late Dr. Edershei.m, 
 The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (2 vols., 1883), may 
 be mentioned. It is a harmonistic combination of the nar- 
 ratives of the Gospels, with a decided apologetic purpose, 
 and without any concession to the most important objections 
 of historical criticism. But the scientific value of the book 
 consists in its rich collection of materials as to the condition 
 of Jewish life and beliefs at the time of Jesus. It meets 
 thereby a real and urgent want of Biblical research in our 
 day. For it is very true, as the author observes in his 
 preface, that a light is cast by these contemporary circum- 
 stances and analogies upon many parts of the gospel history 
 itself, by which our knowledge of the origin of our religion 
 under the forms of Judaism, and yet in opposition to its spirit, 
 is essentially furthered. It is probable that strictly critical 
 research may make often another use than the author himself 
 would wish of the learned materials which his book supplies ; 
 where he finds confirmation of the historical character of a 
 narrative in the New Testament, or of a discourse in the 
 Fourth Gospel, others may discern rather the source of the 
 literary origin of the narrative or the discourse in question. 
 But in any case, the good service the author has rendered 
 should be thankfully acknowledged ; by laborious studies, 
 pursued through many years, in out-of-the-way Jewish lite- 
 rature, he has collected an extremely rich and useful mass of 
 materials bearing upon primitive Christian history. 
 
 Samuel Davidson's Introduction to the Study of the New 
 Testament (2 vols., 1868), presents noteworthy evidence of 
 the progress of historical criticism in England since the begin- 
 ning of the sixth decade. In the first edition (1848-51) the 
 author had maintained the genuineness of the whole of the 
 New Testament writings, not excepting even 2 Peter, against 
 all the objections of criticism. He then published an Intro- 
 dudion to the Old Testament (1862-3), in which the stand- 
 point of the apologist was abandoned, and the intermediate 
 position of Ewald was taken {e.g. the Pentateuch not by 
 Moses, but not completed until the reign of Josiah, the Priestly 
 Legislation preceding the Prophets). Six years later, the 
 author having in the meantime resigned his position as 
 theological professor in the Lancashire Independent College, 
 and acquired full freedom to prosecute his critical studies, 
 appeared the second edition of his Introduction to the New 
 
394 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 Testament, entirely rewritten, in which the standpoint of the 
 Tubingen school was taken with almost too little reservation. 
 The counterwork to it is the strictly apologetic Introduction 
 of Salmon, which appears to enjoy well-nigh the rank of an 
 authority in orthodox circles. 
 
 The latter is the case with the Introduction to the Study 
 of the Gospels, by Westcott, now Bishop of Durham, the 
 English Tischendorf. This work, which appeared in six 
 editions between 1851 and 1881, belongs to that class of 
 apologies which, by their learning, an air of superiority 
 towards the main arguments of the critics, and occasional 
 minor concessions on secondary points, are accustomed to 
 make a great impression, and really perform the service above 
 referred to, of retarding the progressive theological spirit 
 of an age. The best part of the book is the introductory 
 chapters on the Jewish religion, and particularly the Messianic 
 faith of the century immediately preceding our era. But with 
 regard to the Gospels, the author holds that their contents 
 are in complete harmony, or that only unessential differences 
 in the form of narrative are to be met with. These are to be 
 explained by the varied individuality of the writers, in whom 
 the Divine image of the Saviour was reflected in diverse 
 but mutually complementary forms. For the Gospels are all 
 Divine in the highest sense, because they are in the highest 
 sense human. The spirit in the Evangelists searched into 
 the deep things of God, and led them to realise the mysteries 
 of the Faith, as finite ideas, and not in their infinite essence. 
 This is such language as we have long been accustomed to 
 hear from Neander ; instead of getting intelligible answers to 
 definite questions, we have to listen to the mystical phrases 
 of devotional literature, which appeal to the emotions and 
 presentiment (Ahnung), where, from the nature of the case, 
 the intellect alone is qualified to speak. Westcott's lectures, 
 entitled The Historic Faith (1882), have the same apologetic 
 purpose, being an historical and dogmatic exposition of the 
 Apostles' Creed. 
 
 But influential as these and similar apologetic works (they 
 are essentially so much alike that it does not seem necessary 
 to give a list of their titles) may be for the present moment, 
 they cannot arrest the stream of time.^ This we may, finally, 
 
 1 The papers on the results of recent criticism of the Old Testament, read 
 
Ch. II] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 395 
 
 assure ourselves of by a glance at three important works of 
 the last three lustra, with which our survey of English theo- 
 logy may conclude. 
 
 The anonymous work, Supei^nahtral Religion. An In- 
 quiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation {3 vols., 1874- 
 1879, in seven editions) seeks, with the aid of an acute and 
 scientifically trained intellect and extensive historical learning, 
 to overthrow the popular view of Christianity as a religion 
 transcending the human reason and based upon supernatural 
 institutions and miracles. With a view to this, the belief in 
 miracles is first examined in general, its untenability being 
 shown less from metaphysical than epistemological considera- 
 tions and analogies from experience, and the origin of the 
 belief is explained from psychological and temporal conditions. 
 When the proof from miracles has been thus in general de- 
 prived of its force, positively by the immutability of the order 
 of nature, and negatively by the unreliability of human obser- 
 vation and testimony, the Christian legend of miracles is next 
 submitted to trial by a detailed examination of the evidential 
 value of the Biblical documents — -the Gospels and the Acts. 
 From an examination of the testimony of the Fathers the 
 author finds that not one of the canonical Gospels is connected 
 by direct testimony with the men to whom they are tradition- 
 ally ascribed, and that the later, in itself valueless, tradition is 
 divided by a long Interval of profound silence from the period 
 of its alleged authorship ; the canonical Gospels continue to 
 be anonymous documents until the end of the second century, 
 without evidential value with regard to the miracles which 
 they record. The internal evidence confirms this result of 
 the external ; to say nothing of minor discrepancies which 
 run through the first three Gospels, it is Impossible to bring 
 the accounts of the Synoptlsts Into harmony with the Fourth 
 Gospel ; they annul mutually the force of their testimony. 
 Like the Gospels, the Acts is a legendary composition of a 
 late date, and cannot be regarded as a sober historical narrative, 
 which renders the reality of the numerous miracles it reports 
 
 at the Church Congress, at Manchester, in 1888, by Dr. Perovvne, the Dean 
 of Peterborough, Professor Cheyne, of Oxford, and Mr. J. M. Wilson, the 
 Head-master of Clifton College, supply one of many proofs of this. Mrs. 
 Ward, the author of Robert Elsmere, very justly regards the debate on these 
 papers as " The glorification of criticism." See her striking article on " The 
 New Reformation " in the Nineteenth Century for March, 1889. 
 
59^ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 82 5. [Bk. IV. 
 
 incredible. The testimony of the Apostle Paul as to the 
 resurrection of Christ remains then to be considered. A 
 close examination of his evidence shows that, so far as it con- 
 cerns the earlier events, it rests upon indefinite hearsay and 
 does not agree with the accounts of the Gospels, whilst the 
 Apostle's own experience, in view of his peculiar and highly 
 nervous temperament, must be looked upon as a subjective 
 vision, as are also most probably the appearances to the 
 excited disciples of Jesus. Accordingly the proof of the re- 
 surrection and ascension must be pronounced as absolutely 
 and hopelessly insufficient. The examination of the historical 
 sources has therefore confirmed the view of the improbability 
 of miracles formed upon general grounds. 
 
 So far the author of this interesting book stands upon fiirm 
 historical ground, and it will be difficult to upset his main 
 position. But when he proceeds to draw the inference that 
 the claim of Christianity to Divine revelation has no better 
 foundation than the like claim made by other religions, he 
 is advancing no longer an historical but a philosophical opinion, 
 which is not by any means the necessary consequence of his 
 critical results, but is based upon an inadequate estimate of 
 the distinctive properties of Christianity as an ethical religion, 
 and upon a superficial, external, dualistic idea of revelation. 
 The defect of the work Stipernatural Religion, as of Strauss's 
 Leben Jestt, is that it employs destructive criticism ex- 
 clusively, and neglects to make clear, or even so much as to 
 indicate, what is the lasting moral and spiritual truth that lies 
 at the basis of the supernatural legends and dogmas. But 
 while this is beyond doubt a very serious defect, it is equally 
 certain, on the other hand, that the work of negative or 
 destructive criticism must everywhere be first done as the 
 conditio sine qua non of the positive or constructive task of a 
 better understanding of the historical religion. And as the 
 author himself describes his labours as but the negative pre- 
 paration for positive construction,^ we are not justified in 
 judging them by any other standard ; and within the limits 
 which he proposed to himself, the value of his contribution to 
 the end in view cannot be called in question. 
 
 Naturally, a work of this kind attracted great attention 
 
 1 Preface, p. Ixxvii, " Under such circumstances, destructive must precede 
 constructive criticism.'' 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 397 
 
 wherever the Enghsh language is spoken. Never before had 
 such a systematic attack, based upon sohd learning, been 
 made in English upon the external evidences of the Christian 
 religion, which still continue to hold a foremost place, not 
 merely in the popular, but also in the theological apologetics of 
 England (Mansel, Newman, Mozley). It may, undoubtedly, 
 be taken as a sign of the times that this book, in the first year 
 of its publication, passed through six editions, and that the 
 periodical press of all parties gave long extracts from it, and 
 reviews of it, which were for the most part, as appears from 
 Lightfoot's complaint, of a favourable and even laudatory 
 nature. The answer which Lightfoot, the late Bishop of 
 Durham, offered in the name of orthodoxy in a series of 
 articles in the Contemporary Review, subsequently published 
 as a book, is extraordinarily weak. Instead of calmly sur- 
 rendering the outworks and establishing the claim of the 
 Christian religion to be a revelation (which was called in 
 question) by an appeal to its spiritual nature and its position 
 in the whole course of history, by which means the solely 
 negative standpoint of the author of Supernatural Religion 
 would have been successfully impugned, the short-sighted 
 scholar found nothing better to do than to submit the author's 
 examination of references in the Fathers to the Gospels to petty 
 criticism ; while, even if all the Bishop's deductions were 
 correct, the general result of the author's inquiries would not 
 be in any way altered. It is not surprising that in his reply 
 to Bishop Lightfoot, which has recently appeared, the author 
 not only adheres to his historical positions as not upset, but 
 that he also repeats his general conclusions in a form of more 
 pronounced antagonism. For his refutation, it needed really 
 other means than Bishop Lightfoot had at his command ; it 
 required a free, profound, and far-seeing philosophical and 
 historical defence of Christianity, as the growingly perfect 
 stage of the religious development of humanity. 
 
 And to such a defence the last decade has made in the 
 highest degree valuable contributions in the works of Robert- 
 son Smith and Edwin Hatch, which, though they belong to 
 very different departments, are closely allied by a common, 
 genuinely scientific method, an unprejudiced and acute criticism 
 of authorities, and a fine insight into the conditions and causes 
 of historical development. In 1881 and 1882 Robertson 
 Smith published two series of lectures, the one on The Old 
 
398 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV. 
 
 Testament in the Jewish Church, and the other on The Pro- 
 phets of Israel and their Place in History, which, together with 
 the author's articles in the ninth edition of the EncyclopcBclia 
 Britannica, hold a place amongst the best things that have 
 been written on the religion of the Old Testament. He 
 considers that the historical documents of our religion must 
 be treated according to the same principles as are applied 
 with such valuable results to the other sources of ancient 
 history. " The timidity which shrinks from this frankness, 
 lest the untrained student may make a wrong use of the 
 knowledge put into his hands," is, as Robertson Smith truly 
 remarks, " wholly out of place in Protestant Churches," which 
 ought to regard it as " a religious as well as an historical gain 
 to learn to read every part of the Bible in its original and 
 natural sense. Much unnecessary exacerbation of dogmatic 
 controversy would be avoided if theologians were always 
 alive to the fact that the supreme truths of religion were first 
 promulgated and first became a living power in forms that 
 are far simpler than the simplest system of modern dogma." 
 The revelation recorded in the Bible had a history which was 
 " subject to the laws of human nature, and limited by the 
 universal rule that every permanent spiritual and moral re- 
 lation must grow up by slow degrees and obey a principle of 
 internal development." This application of the idea of de- 
 velopment to the history of the religion of the Bible is so far 
 from detracting from its character as a revelation that, as 
 Robertson Smith admirably shows, the best way of proving 
 it is to show historically the unity and the consistent progress 
 through centuries of the development of the religion of the 
 Bible. " If the religion of Israel and Christ answers these 
 tests, the miraculous circumstances of its promulgation need 
 not be used as the first proof of its truth, but must rather be 
 regarded as the inseparable accompaniments of a revelation 
 which bears the historical stamp of reality." Without en- 
 dangering, therefore, religious faith in the truth of the religion 
 of the Bible, free discussion of the details of historical criticism 
 may be fearlessly conceded. Of this freedom, Robertson 
 Smith himself makes use without any reservation. He 
 confesses in the preface to his lectures on the Prophets his 
 adoption of the main positions of the newer school of criticism, 
 represented by Wellhausen, that the priestly legislation did 
 not precede but follow the prophets, that the latter were 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 399 
 
 therefore not the interpreters of a relitjion which had been 
 previously fixed in the Law, but were the original representa- 
 tives of the ethical idea of God which was developed along 
 with and out of the national history of Israel. To show this 
 in detail, is the noble design of his excellent lectures on the 
 Prophets. 
 
 Simultaneously with Robertson Smith's lectures on the 
 history of the religion of the Old Testament appeared the 
 Bampton Lectures of the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, on The 
 Organisation of the Early Christian Churches (1881). In 
 the opening lecture the author gives a very instructive 
 account of the historical method which ought to be followed 
 in the inquiry before him. The first thing is, to test the docu- 
 ments as to their origin, their temporal and local surroundings, 
 and the value of what they say. When the facts have thus 
 been ascertained, the inquiry must proceed to the considera- 
 tion of the probable causes of the facts. Here careful 
 attention must be paid to the difficulty arising from the fact 
 that the same words do not always bear the same meaning, 
 but alter it with the development of the institution designated 
 {e.g. eTTia-KOTTOi). The history of the past can never be pro- 
 perly understood when a series of historical facts is interpreted 
 by its modern form and meaning ; we have to begin at the 
 beginning, and trace the new elements step by step through 
 succeeding centuries. To understand this process of develop- 
 ment, it is needful also to consider the resemblances which 
 exist between Christian and non-Christian institutions, in 
 order that similar phenomena may be referred to the same 
 causes. Nor may the historian be deterred from such an 
 inference by the supposition of the supernatural character 
 of the Church. For the formation of the Church has been 
 effected by God according to the same laws by which the 
 life of human society generally is produced. The divinity 
 which clings to the Holy Catholic Church is the divinity of 
 order. " It is not outside the universe of Law, but within it. 
 It is Divine as the solar system is Divine, because both the one 
 and the other are expressions and results of those vast laws 
 of the Divine economy by which the physical and the moral 
 world alike move their movement and live their life." It is 
 then shown in detail how the Christian communities were 
 organised at first after the analogy of the Jewish synedrion 
 and the Gentile associations, borrowing from them both the 
 
400 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 82 5. [Bk. IV". 
 
 presbytery, or council of " old men," and the executive organs 
 of self-government — the bishop and the deacons. The bishop, 
 at first only the president of the administrative body, gradually 
 became of greater importance, in proportion as the need of 
 an authoritative organ for preserving the unity of doctrine 
 and of discipline arose. But all the time the right to teach 
 and administer the sacraments still belonged to all members 
 of the Churches in common ; the right of the priority of the 
 clergy was as yet not exclusive. When the bishops laid 
 claim to the exclusive possession of this right, the claim was 
 energetically disputed by the Montanists, who maintained 
 the superiority of individual gifts of the Spirit to official rule. 
 Nor was ordination at first anything more than appointment 
 to an ecclesiastical office, of the same kind as any appointment 
 to a civil office, without implying the idea of the communica- 
 tion of exclusive spiritual powers. The clergy did not become 
 a separate class before the fourth century, and then partly in 
 consequence of the grant of special privileges from the State 
 to ecclesiastical dignitaries, partly also from the growth of 
 the influence of the analogy between the Christian and Mosaic 
 dispensations, whereby Christian ministers became priests. 
 The connexion between the individual Churches was also at 
 first loose and voluntary ; it was under the influence and after 
 the pattern of the State, again, that the organisation of the 
 confederation of the Churches was brought about. 
 
 Hatch then raises the question, whether the organisation, 
 thus effected, of the Christian communities into one general 
 Church can be justly identified with the ideal Church of the 
 New Testament, the "body of Christ." He denies this, and 
 establishes his position with great acuteness. The unity of the 
 Church, he shows, was in the earliest period only " a common 
 relation to a common ideal and a common hope." I n the second 
 period, the age of conflict with heretics, " the idea of definite 
 belief as a basis of union dominated over that of a holy life " ; 
 Christians were to be held together by their possession of the 
 only true tradition of Christian teaching. In the third period 
 was added insistence on Catholic order, without which dogma 
 seemed to have no guarantee of permanence. "It was held 
 not to be enough for a man to be living a good life, and to hold 
 the Catholic faith, and to belong to a Christian association ; 
 that association must be part of a larger confederation, and 
 the sum of such confederations constituted the Catholic Church." 
 
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 4OI 
 
 This is the permanent form of the idea of Cathohc unity since 
 the fourth century. It is true, it was not universally accepted; 
 the Donatists were not to be convinced of the value of an 
 outward unity which lacked inward purity and sanctity. They 
 were put down with the aid of the State ; but the question 
 they raised was not thereby solved, but still retains its full 
 significance : the question whether external organisation 
 constitutes the Church ? And Hatch answers the question 
 in a truly Protestant spirit : " Subtler, deeper, diviner, than 
 anything of which external things can be either the symbol or 
 the bond is that inner reality or essence of union — that inter- 
 penetrating community of thought and character — which St. 
 Paul speaks of as the ' unity of the Spirit' !" 
 
 Hatch's book belongs, as is widely acknowledged, to the 
 best that have been written on the origins of our Church. 
 If he had been spared to write the history of Church doctrine, 
 after the same method as he has followed in his account of 
 the organisation of the Church, what an instructive work that 
 would have been ! The unexpected and sudden death of this 
 fine scholar must be regarded as a heavy loss not to Oxford 
 only, but to Protestant theology generally ; yet we may hope 
 that the seed sown by him will bear fruit far and wide. The 
 place where Green and Hatch laboured and cast the light of 
 philosophical and historical knowledge cannot fall back again 
 into the night of the Middle Ages. The days of a Newman 
 and a Pusey are for ever past for Oxford and for England. 
 
 G.T. j3 p 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Ammon 8g. 
 
 Arnold, M., 330 sq., 390. 
 
 Arnold, T., 365 sq. 
 
 Bauer, Bruno, 226. 
 Baur, F. C, 224 sq., 284 sq. 
 Biedermann 137 sq. 
 Bleek 237. 
 Bredenkamp 275. 
 Bretschneider 89. 
 Bruce, Alexander, 382. 
 Budde 276. 
 
 Caird, John, 340 sq. 
 Campbell 380 sq. 
 Carlyle 311 sq. 
 Colenso 390. 
 Coleridge 308 sq., 355. 
 Curtiss 275.- 
 
 Daub 132. 
 Davidson, S., 393. 
 Delitzsch 275. 
 De Wette 97 sq., 227. 
 Dillmann 275. 
 Dorner 156, 373. 
 Duhm 276. 
 
 Edersheim, 393. 
 Eichhorn 209, 227. 
 Erskine (of Linlathen) 378 sq. 
 Ewald 237, 256. 
 
 Feuerbach 135. 
 Fichte, J. G., 57 sq. 
 Finsler 275. 
 Flint 350 sq. 
 Froude, Hurrell, 356. 
 
 Gieseler 209, 284, 
 Graf, H., 258. 
 Green, T. H.^ 344 sq. 
 
 Hagenbach 284. 
 Hamilton, Sir W., 325. 
 Hampden 370. 
 Hare, Julius, 370, 372. 
 Harnack 298. 
 Hase 205, 237, 282. 
 Hatch 399 sq. 
 Hausrath 240. 
 Hegel 68 sq. 
 Herder 21 sq., 210. 
 Hilgenfeld 239. 
 Hofmann, C. von, 173 sq 
 Holsten 240. 
 Holtzmann 240. 
 Hume 6 sq. 
 
 Jowett 386. 
 
 Kant 3 sq., 32 sq. 
 Kayser 258. 
 Keble 356. 
 Keim 247. 
 
 Kingsley, C, 383 sq. 
 Kittel 275. 
 Konig 275. 
 Kostlin 234. 
 Kuenen 259, 276. 
 Kurtz 284. 
 
 Lange, J. P., 170 sq. 
 Lechler 237. 
 Lightfoot (Bp.) 397. 
 Lipsius 195 sq. 
 
 Mackay 391. 
 Mansel 327. 
 Marheincke 131. 
 Martensen 164 sq. 
 Martineau 340, 352 sq. 
 Maurice, F. D., 328, 373 sq. 
 Meyer 237. 
 Mill, James, 319. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 40: 
 
 Mill, J. S., 319 sq. 
 Milman 370, 372. 
 Miiller, Julius, 124. 
 
 Neander 219, 279 sq. 
 Newman, F. W., 317 sq 
 Newman, J. H 
 Niedner 284. 
 Nitzsch 123. 
 Noldeke 275. 
 
 358, 361 sq. 
 
 Paulus 211. 
 Pfleiderer 250. 
 Planck 233, 277 sq. 
 Pusey 35 8. 
 
 Renan 241. 
 Reuss 237, 261. 
 Riehm 275. 
 
 Ritschl, Alb., 183 sq., : 
 Robertson, F. W., 383, 
 Rohr 89. 
 Rothe 148 sq. 
 Ryssel 275. 
 
 Schelling 62 sq. 
 Schenkel 177 sq., 246. 
 Schleiermacher 44 sq., 
 
 228. 
 Schrader 275. 
 Schultz 275. 
 Schwegler 233. 
 Schweizer 125 sq. 
 Seeley 333 sq., 392. 
 Seth 349. 
 
 ■35- 
 sq. 
 
 Sraend 276. 
 
 Smith, Robertson, 397. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 336 sq. 
 
 Spittler 277. 
 
 Stade 276. 
 
 Stanley, A. P., 389. 
 
 Stirner, Max, 136. 
 
 Storr 86. 
 
 Strack 275. 
 
 Strauss 132, 213 sq., 241 sq. 
 
 Supernatural Religw7i, 395 sq. 
 
 ; Temple 3S8. 
 
 f 'riiirlwall 370, 372. 
 
 Tieftrunk 87. 
 
 Tulloch 332. 
 
 Twesten 124. 
 
 ; UUmann 12^, 220. 
 
 I 
 
 A'atke 252 sq. 
 Volkmar 239. 
 
 Wegscheider 89. 
 Weiss 237. 
 
 Weisse, C. H., 145 sq., 222, 226. 
 ; AVeizsacker, 238, 248 sq. 
 103 sq., 209, \ Wellhausen 259, 263 sq. 
 Westcott 394. 
 Whately 36S sq. 
 Wilberforce, R. J., 359. 
 Wilke 222, 226. 
 Williams, Rowland, 388. 
 
 Zeller, Ed., 229 n., 2^2. 
 
^^^