university of Connecticut ibraries BOOK 230. OM 1 c. 1 OMAN # PROBLEM OF FAITH AND FREEDOM IN LAST TWO CENTURIES 3 T1S3 ODObbllS b The Problejn of Faith and Freedom in the Last Two Centuries Vision and Authority Or, the Throne of St. Peter A Study of the Nature and Object of the Church's Authority By the same Author Crown 8vo, cloth, ys. 6d. "It is not often one comes across a style so pregnant and sug- gestive, and as seldom one finds so much solid and fearless thought packed into a single book." — Rev. John Watson, D.D., in The Alnwick Guardian. " It is perhaps only a select class of minds to which the book will appeal, but it is minds of the finest texture that will do it most justice." — Rev. Prof. James Orr in The British IVeekly. " It is seldom indeed the reviewer has the good fortune to come upon a book like this, by which a comparatively unknown author passes at a bound into the front rank of serious religious thinkers. . . . Many, we believe, will read it with delight, and find that it cuts a path for them through a jungle ol perplexities."— Glasgou/ Herald. London : Hodder & Stoughton Translation and Introduction On Religion : Speeches to its Cultured Despisers By Friederich Schleiermacher 2>vo, 7s. 6rf. " This is a remarkable book because it had a remarkable influence upon a nation which for several centuries has guided the religious thought of all Protestant countries. . . . And yet it cannot have been an easy book to translate. . . . We give one extract to show the style of the author and the perfect rendering of the translator." — The Spectator. " In Mr. Oman's admirable introduction will be found an excellent estimate of their actual worth, and a lucid explanation of the place they hold in relation to Schleiermacher's spiritual development, as well as to all the various intellectual and political movements of that very yeasty and often stirring time, no single phase of which is unrepresented in the thoughts of the great preacher, patriot and theologian." — Glasgow Herald. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner and Co., Ltd. ^^^mi^v^-. r>-'iSi»£i&M»«kfite£ii£firii^i^^y'.£:;«-.«i««^^ The problem of y^ Faith and Freedom in the hast Typo Centuries . By John .Oman, M.A., B.D., D.Phil. Author of " Vision and Authority " New York A. C. Armstrong and Son 3 & S West Eighteenth St 1906 \<{l?>5 82 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY exclusive possession of truth as to commit their opponents to eternal damnation that drove him, he says, first to prayer, then to study, and finally to the task of thinking out the problem for himself. Even in his History/ of Henry VIII. there is a marked bias against all who, by standing upon theological punctilios, had hindered the work of peace, and practically nothing is said of the root upon which all the strife grew and which was planted in Henry's time — the difference between the king's and the people's Reformation. But his views are most fully set forth in two Latin works, De Veritate, published in 1624, and De Religione Gentilium, published after his death in 1663. There are according to Herbert five notitlw communes, common characters inscribed by the hand of God on man's heart, which form the essence of all religion. (1) There is a God ; (2) He should be worshipped ; (3) virtue and piety are the chief parts of Divine worship ; (4) sins are to be re- pented of and turned from ; (5) the Divine good- ness rewards and punishes in this life and after it. With this religion men began. Priests first cor- rupted it. The task of Christianity was to restore it ; but priests continued their jDernicious work and corrupted Christianity. Here we have the family characteristics of Deism. The significance of Positive religion is found in general principles believed to be common to the race, while all the rest is ascribed to priestcraft. Rarely did a word afford more mental satisfaction than priestcraft. Vafrities et Vecordia Sacerdotum amply accounted ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 83 for every conceivable error and superstition, so that the world was comfortably divided into two hemispheres — one containing a man's own views and the other the slimy progeny of priestcraft. To associate this ideal of freedom, with its air of a man of the world, with George Fox may seem the height of absurdity. Yet the doctrine of the inward light is only a more religious phase of the same desire to find one's own authority within. Fanaticism is still a word like priestcraft, saving much inquiry and allowing j^eople like Quakers and Levellers to be ignored as mere historical vermin. To suggest gratitude towards men who dared the singularity necessary for being pioneers in the great warfare for the right of each man to call his soul his own, would still require some courage. Nevertheless, this is how their work impresses a learned and judicious outsider like Lechler. " The movements of sects and parties in England, in the middle of the sixteenth century, form a regular series, linked together by the common endeavour after religious independence and freedom. There appears in these parties an ever bolder, more self- conscious, more concentrated independence of spirit, which, indeed, passed through an extravagant, a partially fanatic phase, but not without indication of outgrowing it." ^ The great struggle of the Civil War profoundly influenced men, and not all in one direction. It forced them back upon first principles, and it ^ Geschichte des englischen Deisnms, p. 66. 84 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY created a wider horizon. The humblest felt that the eyes of Europe were upon them. For some there was the education of large policies and unwonted power ; for others the education of wandering as exiles in foreign lands. In con- sequence, it was nearly as great an intellectual as a political crisis. The ultimate effect was to increase greatly the influence of France. This becomes apparent even before the Restoration in Hobbes, who, after Lord Herbert, was the most cosmopolitan of English- men. For years he lived in France amid the same circle of friends as Descartes, and it was to his judgment that Descartes submitted his Meditations. Mersenne the Jesuit introduced them, and this association with Mersenne cannot be too carefully remembered, for Hobbes's system is simply secular Jesuitism. It preaches the same individualism, and with the same object of showing that, as the organised society is the only bond, it must be absolute. He also preaches the Jesuit morals, dividing life by a broad line between obligation and the liberty to please ourselves, and developing a markedly materialistic casuistry of his own. Leviathan : or the Matte?', Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecdesiastical and Civil, published in 1651, deserves the attention which every clear, full and consequent statement of a false principle deserves. It is a whole-hearted assertion that civil order requires the abdication of the right ever to judge in our own case against the ruler. Only by absolutism can the safety of society be ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 85 secured, so that the notion of a man's duty to follow his own faith and assert his own freedom is the only really ruinous folly that can take possession of mankind. As this is the exact opposite of what seems to me to be the purport of these centuries of struggle and inquiry, it is well to hear the other side, especially as there is often no argument so convincing against a position as the arguments for it. Not in rather befogged Latin like Lord Herbert, but in the pithiest, clearest, most forcible English, Hobbes expresses himself. He brings forth a claim which long im- posed by wearing a paraphernalia of words as well as of attire, and presents it dressed only in the working-clothes of a plain, vigorous English. His scorn of the phraseology of the Schools and his style of the plain daylight should not be forgotten among his services to mankind, for when a man attempts to prove the ideas of an Oriental potentate by the Baconian method in plain English, his real influence is not likely to be what he intends. Hobbes's ideal of reasoning is as mathematical as Descartes'. Reasoning is simply a matter of adding and subtracting, which being done with well-defined terms must give a precise result. " Geometry is the only science which God has been pleased hitherto to bestow upon mankind," and knowledge of the mathematical type is what is required of a philosopher, " that is to say, of him that pretends to reasoning ". Geometry is the exact antithesis to the philosophy of the Schools, being " subservient to nothing but rigid truth ". 86 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY His conception of man's actions also is based purely on the conception of force. What man will do is a pure question of dynamics. Freedom is merely a convenient word, for the whole series is a chain, the first link of which is in the hand of God. Man's actions are simply the resultant of the forces that bear upon him, his course being taken purely by what he conceives to be his own selfish interest at the time. In every case to gain some good for himself is "of every man's will the proper object". There is no decent veiling of unblushing Utili- tarianism. " Honour consisteth in the opinion of power." Hobbes's idea is that man wears honour somewhat as a beast carries horns, to create in others a dread of his resources of self-defence. Yet, useful as the weapon is, men will, at a pinch, "rather hazard their honour which may be salved with an excuse, than their lives for which no salve is sufficient " ; and his whole argument assumes that to be the act of a reasonable man. To act reasonably means to act on a right understanding of our own interests, and that not, as in modern Utilitarianism, refined away into higher joys, but with the one clear standard of saving our skin. A man is benevolent "to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion," a feeling which arises from imagining ourselves in the like case. Justice is to perform covenants undertaken, but it would mean nothing without " some power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect from the breach of their coven- ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 87 ant ". Not to do to others what we would not have them do to us, is laid down as the fundamental law of nature ; but the sanction is that, if we do not, we may expect to be repaid in kind, and the real fundamental law of nature is to look after our- selves. One of Hobbes's chief arguments against rebellion is that life is too short for the insurgent himself to reap the benefit of his risk ; while the great argument for a social order is that it is the only way of keeping anything where every one else is wanting everything. The struggle for existence is as fundamental to Hobbes as to Darwin. The natural state of man is to fight for his own hand, to strike before he is struck, and to keep his teeth in evidence. Out of this helium omnimn contra omnes man is glad to be delivered at the expense of giving up his own rights on condition that others do the same. This com- pact or covenant is the basis of all civil government. Considering, if I might so express it, out of what a nest of jackals he escapes, man should never look back upon his bargain, but do everything to make the only authority which can keep the peace abso- lute and unquestioned. Whether this sovereignty is democracy, aristocracy or monarchy matters little, so long as it is strong enough. "For forms of government " Hobbes also would " let fools con- test," but he holds the form that is most submitted to, not that is best administered, the best. Absolute it must be in every sphere. No man can regulate action who does not regulate opinion, ''for it is evident to the meanest capacity that men's actions 88 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY are derived from the opinions they have of the good or evil which from those actions redound mito themselves ". This regulation is particularly neces- sary for religious opinion, for how could the calam- ities " of confusion and civil war " be avoided, if higher awards than life and death were in the hands of any other than the ruler ? Besides, religion rests upon the ruler. God Himself is simply the big Potentate, and is honoured on that account alone ; and the sovereign is His representative, and in His representative God is honoured. "Seeing the commonwealth is one person, it ought to exhibit to God but one worship," and that only the sovereign can regulate. Moreover, without the sovereign, the Scripture is merely a book of good advice, for he only can publish it in a way to make it a com- pulsory law. Just two forces oppose this absolute rule — those who fall back on conscience, and those who fall back on the Pope. The case of the former, on the whole, causes Hobbes more trouble. It is inconvenient that some have suffered even martyrdom rather than obey the civil ruler. But that is only admirable in the apostles who had a special commission. For the rest of us, if the sovereign makes us do wrong, it is his look-out, not ours. Christ also inconveniently said, " if any man deny Me ". But that also was for special people at special times. Even to worship an idol at the command of the ruler would not be wrong, for it would be the prince not the subject who made the graven image. Of course opinion cannot ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 89 be bound, but the subject's highest duty is to bow in the house of Rimmon. Only two things are necessary for salvation — faith and obedience. That Jesus is the Christ, the King who is to reign, is the only necessary article of faith, and, as that con- cerns the future, it need not bring us into conflict with anything in the present. As for obedience, the whole decalogue can be applied to God's earthly representative. The claim of the Papacy to interfere with the civil sovereign rests on one fundamental error, the confusion of the present Church with the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is a real, a material kingdom to be established here upon earth, with rule by covenant between ruler and subject, like any other kingdom ; but Christ did not come to establish it, else He would have given the necessary power, but only to prepare for it, which is to be done by persuasion. " Our Saviour and His Apostles left us not new laws to oblige us in this world, but new doctrines to prepare us for the next." Only in the hands of the legislator can they become obligatory canons, which apparently, like Erasmus's satire on Pojoe Julius, is a mighty improvement. The true significance of the book is in the vigour with which it raises the great question whether the last word belongs to an order within or to the order without, and in the relentless logic with which it accepts the position that man has no freedom within and none without except for self-destruc- tion. Henceforward the business of theologians 90 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY and moralists was either to build on Hobbes or to answer him. The positive elements in him — his care not to throw "atoms of Scripture as sand in })eople's eyes," his attempt to read in Scripture one unceasing Divine purpose, his distinction be- tween a Kingdom of Persuasion and a Kingdom of Compulsion, his reduction of the essentials of faith to the one belief in Jesus as the Messiah — were original and important. Nor has his doctrine of government by covenant had justice done to it, for it marks the transition from a merely traditional acceptance to a historical investigation of institu- tions, a necessary presupposition to this day for estimating their present use, as distinct from their origin. Nevertheless, Hobbes's supreme value is still negative, showing to what a dead world of Oriental despotism we should s})eedily return, if the ultimate basis of freedom should ever cease to be the high Christian demand by which alone it can be maintained either for a man's own soul or for his country — let a man deny himself. With the Restoration French infinence became entirely dominant, and, at the same time, the ec- clesiastical situation resembled the situation in France. The Church of England, amid a society growing in contempt for all aspects of religion, and with the heavy task on her hands of approving of the monarch whom she acknowledged as her head, engaged herself in the enterprise of making every one conform to her ordinances. Naturally the *' legitimate criticism which in the organised Church was suppressed, broke out as the disease of seep- ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 91 ticism ". Except in the writings of Charles Blount it was not publicly expressed, and even there it was only by way of sneer and suggestion. By hints in a translation of the Life of ApoUonlm 0/ Tyana Blount indicated so plainly that the Christian miracles were on a level with that worthy's impostures that his book was suppressed. But the scoffing attribution of all religion to man's baseness and folly in his other writings was less easy to extinguish and equally dangerous. This was the first definite attack on revelation, and it derived its force, not from itself, but from being an indication of the far more dangerous attack which was expressed in life, not in writing. To the danger of this practical infidelity which lived as if God were dead, the Church, however, remained blind, for that only questioned religion, whereas the expression of doubt questioned the position of the Church. Her position could only be justified by a quite unquestioned basis of fact. Men have, indeed, died for moral certainties who would have sacrificed nothing for logical demon- strations ; but on a moral certainty it cannot be taken for granted that the majority are right, and that the few who oppose the current convictions are candidates either for Bridewell or Bedlam, for in moral certainties there are all degrees, and the few may be precisely those who see deepest. On a moral certainty, however strong, you cannot proceed with such material arguments as Test Acts and Five Mile Acts. The rationale of such doings ought to be a foundation of demonstrated fact so 92 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY clear and solid that nothing but wilful folly could remain unconvinced. It must be of the kind that puts freedom in the same relation to the accepted faith, as to the fact, say, that fire burns. The kind of faith on which the Church pro- ceeded is set forth by the High Churchman who almost alone had courage both to rebuke James II. when he was in power, and to follow him when he went into exile. Charles Leslie's Short and Easy Methixl with the Deists was called forth by Blount's attack. In Leslie's view nothing but the worst motives and the most sophistical reasoning could lead any one to breathe a doubt of the absolutely sure grounds of the Church's faith. For such ma- levolent persons he argues the worst consequences both in this world and the next. The shortness and ease of his method is no idle boast. By four marks the religions of Moses and of Christ are demonstrated to be true. Is it not wholly irra- tional to question actions (1) which could be seen and heard, (2) which were done publicly in the face of the world, (3) which were commemorated by public monuments and observances, (4) which had observances and monuments instituted regarding them at the very time ? Take the twelve stones which commemorated the crossing of Jordan. It is easy to see how, if they were set up at the time, the story connected with them could be handed on from father to son. But who can imagine any one setting up these stones at a later date and getting people to credit this tale about them, or even inventing and circulating such a story about stones ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 93 already in existence ? Could any one persuade us that Stonehenge was set up by Hercules ? Then, could he have a law-book written and the people persuaded to accept it as ancient, and the Parlia- ment made to enjoin that it be taught to the children ? Let any Deist reply whether that could come to pass, or " whether, if I or any other should insist upon it, we should not, instead of being believed, be sent to Bedlam " ? That, of course, is the point where force has a right to interfere, where it is a clear choice between belief and the lunatic asylum. What is written from the mouth of God, Leslie continues, cannot, as in common histories, be in part accepted and in part rejected. It must be accepted as one infallible revelation upon one absolute proof. This proof is afforded us in the unbroken succession of the Christian priesthood and the Christian sacraments. " The devil has been most busy and bent his greatest force in all ages against the priesthood, knowing that, if that goes down, all goes with it."^ "And let us con- sider and honour the priesthood, sacraments and other public institutions of Christ, not only as a means of grace and helps to devotion, but as the great evidence of the Christian religion."^ Persons vaguely described as " certain Dis- senters," dimly suspecting the method, urged that too little stress was laid on the witness borne to Scripture by its own merits. To this objection Leslie replies that the Deist would not acknowledge 1 Works, vol. i., p. 48. ^ p_ 49 94 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY and perhaps could not understand that method. Here, Sir Leslie Stephen thinks, Leslie accepts the right conditions of the controversy with a courage worthy of his career/ But, in arguing with a blind man about sight, it is an excessive concession to agree to omit all references to the main fact — sight itself ; and it is an equally excessive conces- sion to agree to omit from a discussion of religion all reference to the experience of religion itself. What Leslie has the courage of is not so much his Christianity as his High Churchism. A religion which works with sacramental tests and like material persuasives, must not fall back on such an argument for Scripture as its own merits, but must abide by arguments which leave the man who rejects them the delicate option between being knave or fool. In judging the Church at this time, her deadness on the one hand and her persecuting spirit on the other, it must not be forgotten that she thought she possessed this kind of foundation for her belief. She thought she had the right to expect the agree- ment all sensible people have in the things they cannot avoid seeing, and, naturally, if one could walk so surely by sight, faith was apt to appear superfluous. But, while this explains how men of sense and honour could act as they did, it also shows that absolute certainty could be entrusted only to absolute wisdom and goodness, and that it was necessary these external securities should be rudely shaken. That troublesome questions were 1 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, p. 197. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 95 being raised, Leslie himself is proof, for an argu- ment of the kind he set forth is mightiest when it can be quietly taken for granted. To defend the undeniable is a grave admission that denial has touched us. Nor are these views of " certain Dissenters " unimportant, for, while the Dissenter laid almost as much stress on the external evidence as the Churchman, he was made to realise daily that a religious certainty which has no necessary dependence on personal faith, but is exactly like any other certainty of fact, puts the minority in the difficult position of claiming to judge on a type of evidence regarding which the majority, rightly or wrongly, have decided, even to the extent of putting the minority in strait-jackets, that they are the only valid court of appeal. The dissatisfaction with this comfortable type of argument first appears in a new desire to learn the extent of human knowledge. The account Locke gives of the origin of his Essay on the Human Under- standing is characteristic of the time. A dozen years had passed from the Restoration. Five or six friends were met in his chamber. A discussion arose on the principles of morality and revealed religion. '' After we had a while puzzled our- selves, without coming any nearer a resolution of the doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course ; and that, before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abili- ties and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with. This I proposed 96 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY to the company, who all readily assented." The Essay, Locke adds, thus begun by chance, was continued by entreaty.^ The historian of philosophy is often puzzled to understand the influence of the Essay, because he forgets this relation to the vital religious interests of the time. It dealt with no merely academic problem, and it spoke in a way suited to the temper of the age. Its broad conclusion that the material of all thought is provided by the five senses, that thought itself is a process of argumentation, that there are no innate ideas, but that God, the world and the soul are inferences from observed facts, and that this process should be conducted in a detached frame of mind, to which enthusiasm is the deadly sin, seemed to promise a sure protec- tion against the prejudices which, men had suddenly become intensely aware, determined a large part of their convictions. To start with self-evident facts and self-evident postulates and proceed by mathe- matically correct deductions, moreover, seemed to promise the same results in religion as it had ac- complished in physical science. The ideal of all reasoned conclusions was the Law of Gravitation. As every thinker in the nineteenth century had the Law of Development looming somewhere on the horizon of his thought, the eighteenth century thinker had the Law of Gravitation. Greater even than the influence of Darwin's Origin of Species was the influence of Newton's Principia. After two centuries of familiarity the stupendous dis- '^lAfe oj Locke,, by J, R. Foxe Bourne, 1876, vol. ii., p. 87. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 97 covery still staggers our imagination and dwarfs our individuality. But within a century from the time men first realised that this earth is a mere whirling sand-grain in space, the whole scheme of the vast worlds was displayed, governed to its re- motest boundaries by one simple mathematical order. Is it strange, then, that the discovery determined the method in all departments of thought, and that the mathematical standard, already so much exalted, seemed the only key to the universe ? In religion, above all, this self-acting Law of Gravitation was sought. Books like Clarke's Boi/le Lecture, which demonstrated the Being and Attri- butes of God and linked the Unchangeable Obligations oj Natural Religion with the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Religion, pursued the Newtonian ideal in Locke's temper. Less was attempted to be proved, but it was hoped to prove it with even more than the old absoluteness and on grounds still purely intellectual. Though it was intellectual, not merely moral, cer- tainty men sought, the new type of argument turned largely on morals. Hence came the second intellectual interest of the time — the eager and extended inquiry into the basis of morals. The old Scholastic question. Whether a thing is right because God appoints it, or He appoints it because it is right, returned, but, now that there was no absolute external authority to make the decision a matter of indifference, with more vital issues. Some things, it was clear, no power on 7 98 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY earth could make us believe were from God, while, on the other hand, some things were easily accepted as Divine. How was this determined ? Was the criterion what is useful or what is reasonable ; or had right some special standard of its own ? To show the wrong issues to which the defenders of Christianity were committing themselves, they proceeded to link Orthodoxy with Utilitarianism. To base conscience on reason seemed to them to supplant the sanctions of religion ; whereas, if the requirement were universal benevolence, and its only sanction personal well-being, a God with heaven and hell at His disposal was clearly the only link between the two with the power to impose the infinite obligation duty requires. Paley, who was no original thinker but an admirable expounder of his predecessors, sums up this type of reasoning with his usual compact lucidity, when he defines morality as " doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness ". In this scheme revelation had room made for it, its concern being that immortality which is the sole infinite enforcement of our present obligations. Shaftesbury complains that so much was made of the reward of virtue as to leave no virtue to be rewarded ; and even before him it was plain that to do a deed purely for our own happiness is pre- cisely the thing which would prevent the most heroic act from being virtuous. Moreover, though there might be reasonable confidence that men would be happy if they did God's will, they could ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 99 not discover God's will merely by wishing to be happy. God's will, therefore, must be determined in some other way. Guided by Grotius, who was a great influence in English thought at this time, thinkers turned to the idea of a law of nature. Cudworth sought to find it in reason, seeking there an " Eternal and Inmmtable Morality,'' independent of all wills human and Divine. Locke, though he falls back on the will and power of the Lawgiver for the sanction, thinks morality could be deduced with mathematical certainty from the relation of independent but associated beings to a supreme Being, infinite in power, benevolence and wisdom.^ Clarke would establish moral truth so as to make it as irrational to reject right in acting as truth in reasoning, but he also sees that to limit the argu- ment to time is to shirk the problem. Yet he knows not how to bring these two sides together, which is better, however, than purchasing consist- ency at the expense of seeing only one. But the writer who chiefly concerns us is Shaftesbury. Morality and religion, he affirms, have spheres of their own, and the sense of right and wrong is " a first principle in our constitution and make ". The right ground of virtue is "the generous admiration and love of it". It is an artistic joy, ** a natural joy in the contemplation of these numbers, that harmony, proportion and con- cord which supports the universal nature ". In this proportion of sentiment the true joy in life consists, and it would be the state of nature were men un- 1 Essay on the Human Understanding, ch. ii., sec. 18. 100 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY prejudiced by vicious education. "Therefore, if you dislike the word innate, let us change it, if you will, for instinct, and call instinct that which nature teaches, exclusive of art, culture and dis- cipline." What makes us happy is not to follow any selfish interest, but " to act according to nature and the economy of the species ". Such an attitude, it was said, made a future life less than necessary. Yet why, he replies, for exalting virtue merely, should I be deemed an enemy of a future state ? ''By building a future on the ruins of virtue, religion in general and the cause of the Deity is betrayed, and, by making rewards and punishments the principal motives to duty, the greatest Christian principle, that of love, is rejected and exposed." Yet it would not be a support to "the generous admiration and love of virtue " to suppose that " there is neither goodness nor beauty in the whole itself " — one of many hints that remind us of Spinoza — and there is abundant proof for believing in a " coherent system of things ". The proof, however, is not miracle but " that admirable simplicity of order from whence the one infinite and perfect principle is known ". Foolish people think the " world an accident if it proceeds in course, but an effect of wisdom if it run mad ". Here we have the forerunner both of Rousseau and Kant, of the State of Nature and the A ntonomy of Conscience, with something less Rationalistic and more Romantic than anything else to be found in the age. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 101 Yet Shaftesbury only succeeded by carrying the temper of his age a little farther than other people. Even the weary trick of triple synonym, which makes the Characteristics such dull reading, suited a taste trained by the periods of the Coffee-house oracle. It even helped to set the standard of literary taste which regarded poetry as epigram quotable with effect in that intellectual inner sanctuary. To Shaftesbury's shallow, pseudo-clas- sical creed to perpetrate ten monosyllables in succession was a high offence. His appeal to nature turns out to be an appeal to the gentlemen of fashion, whom he defines as "those to whom a natural good genius or the force of good education has given a sense of what is naturally graceful and becoming ". "I am writing to you," he says in his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, " only in defence of the liberty of the club." It is a blessed age in which imposture can be sharply inspected and wittily ridiculed. Every one has learned the force of ridicule, even the theologian, though he has the bad taste to bring the executioner on the stage with the Merry Andrew. But for these "gladiatorial penmen" it would be easier to keep in the good-humour necessary for right apprehensions of the Supreme Being. There are so many arguments to persuade a man in good- humour that, in the main, all things are kindly and well disposed, that only ill-humour seems to account for atheism, and certainly nothing else could "persuade us of sullenness or sourness in the Supreme Manager". Indeed humour is the 102 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY test of all truth, for the irrational alone is the ridiculous. In all this we have the Coffee-house standard of freedom and the faith it rests on, which is briefly comprehended in this confession, " Be a gentleman and believe that God's a gentle- man ". To this easy optimism, which thinks the world is a very good place if one will only develop a taste for things moral as well as things material, such a matter as a scheme of reconciliation with God is a mere example of bad taste. Like every good ruler, God likes His subjects to recognise His efforts for their benefit, but, like any large- minded person, it does not annoy Him very much even if they do not. This ease in Zion, along with the hints he occasionally drops that some things in Christianity are far from suiting his taste, was not counterbalanced by his assurance that he sub- mitted " most willingly and with full trust to the opinions by law estabUshed," ^ and he is always recognised by his age as one of the chief pillars of Deism. Deism started with the great advantage that it seemed to stand for liberty while the defenders of Christianity had suffered themselves to be driven into the position in which they are its worst enemies, the position of arguing that the rejection of the wrong kind of freedom involves hostility to all freedom whatsoever. Shaftesbury, whose love of freedom never wavered, complains that they at- tempt to bring the thought of liberty into disgrace 1 Characteristics, ed. by J. M. Robertson, 1900, vol. ii., p. 352. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 103 by ''confounding licentiousness in morals with liberty in thought and action". "They refine on selfishness and explode generosity," and, as people born in slavery, they admire their condition and begin "to think short". Hence Deism was from the first closely as- sociated with the Kevolution. As early as 1696 a pamphlet entitled An Account of the Growth of Deism in England, draws attention to this associa- tion. From the days of Archbishop Laud, it says, the travelled person could see that, at home as well as abroad, the question at stake was not religion but power, and proceeded to argue that, if the ancient clergy were equally possessed by the spirit of pride, corruption may have prevailed from the beginning. This prejudice, it continues, was in- creased by the Kevolution, for, though a form of toleration was admitted, no man was allowed to occupy a position of trust unless he had a " con- science by Law Established ". And at the same time that men were qualifying at their altars to be " bumbails, keep gaming-houses and sell ale," the clergy, who had preached, as the very mark of the apostolicity of their church, the divine right of kings, were diligently trimming their sails between " the divinely rightful King James " and the " de facto King William and Queen Mary ". Nor does the reply ^ attempt to rebut the facts, but only says it is very wrong that Christianity should suff'er for its defenders, and that the writer has a wicked bias ^ Beflexions wpon a PamjMet mtituled An Account of the Groivth of Deism in England, 1696. 104 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY against the clergy, and that there were other reasons for Deism, especially the corruption of manners and the reading of Hobbes and Spinoza. That also was true. The fire had been long hidden and the Revolution only gave it the wind of free speech. Nay there was more than free speech. The society of the Coffee-houses ruled public opinion, and its sceptical wit tended to make speech freer than thought. If the Deist was usually too poor and despised himself to belong to it, yet, like the other writers of the time, he aspired to address it. The society which set the intellectual fashion of the time, may not have been either very large or very learned, but every man in it considered himself a judge of all ideas and expected to have them set before him in the speech of every day. The paraphernalia of classical learning and Scho- lastic distinctions had to be abandoned, and the speaker on religion, as on other topics, had to follow the example of Tillotson who, as Sir Leslie Stephen says, assumed his hearers to be " not ' pas- sive buckets to be pumped into,' but reasonable men who had a right to be critics as well as dis- ciples".^ "Notional divinity," even among the most orthodox, came into disrepute, and to the disaffected any mysterious doctrine seemed "a, trick in all churches to take away the use of men's reasons and so to enslave them ". Though Locke repudiated the connection, the Deists all built on his foundation. 1 English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 60. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 105 In his Essai/ on Toleration, written in Holland the year before the Eevolution, Locke completed the work of Milton and Jeremy Taylor. The very doctrine which Bossuet had said no one could be- lieve or think with good faith, that sincerity, where ignorance made right doctrine impossible, might merit the Divine approval, he openly maintained. Toleration he esteems " the chief characteristical mark of the true Church". Persecution is a bid for power, for, if it were sincere, it would correct its friends rather than assail its foes. That is to say, it would have dealt with Charles XL, not with the Dissenter. Still more perfectly he illustrates the temper of the time in his Essay on the Reasonableness of Christiamty, God is there shown to have acted in a sensible, business-like manner, and Christ to be the incarnation of the Divine commonsense. Though Christ does in the end suffer death, He keeps discreetly out of trouble as long as He can. In everything He acts on prudential principles. For example. He chooses poor, uneducated men for disciples, not because of any undeveloped spirit- ual greatness in them, but for the politic reason that more learned, professional people would have been less docile, more inquisitive, apter to precipi- tate events. The age to which Locke thus spoke was no age of the prophets. A writer like Pascal would have spoken to it in an unknown tongue. What could not be tabulated and argued upon was disregarded. But this very isolation of the purely rational aspect 106 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY of religion helped to deliver it from debasing allian- ces. " If," says Locke, " upon a fair and unpreju- diced examination, thou findest I have mistaken the sense and tenour of the Gospel, I beseech thee, as a true Christian, in the Spirit of the Gospel (which is that of charity) and in the words of sobriety, set me right in the doctrine of salvation." There is a time to speak in the words of sobriety, as well as a time to speak with warmth and zeal. Religion is a fact of experience, not a deduction from abstract prin- ciples. And experience is always individual, char- acteristic, varied, while reason clips into uniformity and mediocrity. But the more vivid the experience, the greater the danger that it will extend itself by alien associations. Of all emotions the religious emotions are most in danger, just because they are most intense and touch life at most points. And in life, as in law, divorce can only be effected by a formal and hard inquiry, not always sparing of the sanctities and always chilling to the affections. " The writers and wranglers in religion," Locke sums up in his Essaij cm the Reasonahleness ofChris- tianity, " fill it with niceties and dress it up with notions which they make necessary and fundamental parts of it ; as if there were no way into the Church except through the academy or lyceum." In this they differ from the all-merciful God, '* who seems herein to have consulted the poor of this world and the bulk of mankind ". But the all-merciful God has His own way of doing things, and He used " the writers and wranglers in religion " in that age at least to undo a great part of their own work. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 107 Deism, being of all aspects of thought most entirely committed to the spirit of the age, de- manded a simple and lucid scheme of things on the model of the Law of Gravitation, a sort of straight corridor through life, expressed in straightforward English and defended by arguments acknowledged by sensible but not very religious people. Histori- cal investigation, moreover, had begun, but there was no sense of any progress in history, and the Deists were in the most pronounced degree histo- rians without historical outlook. The Scriptures, though contained in ancient documents, were con- sidered simply as a Divine deliverance which might equally well have been the product of any age. This want of historical perspective was a great limitation, but it is a limitation worth studying in an age like ours, when the question of origin has overshadowed every other intellectual interest, and when we can find so many reasons in history for everything, that we can hardly call any extreme definitely good or bad, but maintain a kind of intel- lectual caravanserai where everything finds entrance and nothing entertainment. The determination to be satisfied with nothing short of a perfectly comprehensible scheme of things is first fully expressed by Toland. Junius Janus or, as he is usually called, John Toland was a professed follower of Locke. Locke's Rea- sonable7iess of Christianity ajipeared in 1695 and Toland's Christianity not Mysterious in 1696. There is a dash of Celtic fire in the book very grateful to the reader of that vigorous but not inspiriting litera- 108 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY ture. An undignified, besmirched figure, walking the miry way of begging-letter mendicancy, and diving occasionally into the still slimier underground workings of the political spy, poor Toland yet has something of the quality of the publican and the harlot which is akin to the Kingdom of God. But this only renders more marked his severe limitation of experience to what could be learned by the five senses, stated in general propositions, brought together in comparison, and finally comprehended in one definite proposition. He will hold nothing as an article of his religion but what the highest evidence has forced upon him, and he sees no difference between Popish infallibility and being obliged to acquiesce in the decisions of fallible Protestants. Nor does he find any authority in the Ancient Fathers "who thought as little of becoming a rule of faith to their posterity as we to ours ". Reason is the only foundation, so there can be no doctrine either contrary to reason or above it. Only by some extraordinary way could anything above reason be learned, and it would be incommunicable to others. This might, of course, be precisely what religion is — a peculiar experience incommunicable except to a like experience — but, as it was univers- ally granted that the existence and nature of God were demonstrable by reason, and that all reli- gious beliefs were deductions of reason, Toland does not contemplate such a contingency. That being- admitted, he is manifestly right, for a doctrine reason can demonstrate and state in abstract ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 109 propositions, but cannot understand, is a manifest absurdity. In view of this position, there was just one great question. How was revelation related to this religion of reason ? To Toland revelation is simply " a mean of information ". Its worth therefore consists in the plainness with which this information is given. That it was meant to be given plainly is manifest, he says, from the abundant appeals to reason in Scripture, and because the language of Scripture was evidently meant to be understood by the common people. God might, of course, have re- quired the consent of His creatures to what they did not understand, but ''to act so tyrannically only becomes the devil ". The real source of religious mysteries has not been Christianity. They were introduced from Judaism and Pagan- ism. "There is nothing so naturally opposite as ceremony and Christianity, and the large share of the establishment of mysteries is due to ceremonies." " I acknowledge no orthodoxy but the truth, and I am sure wherever the truth is, there must be also the Church." " I am therefore for giving no quarter to error under any pretence." And does not all profit of deeper inquiry lie beyond that resolve ? His conception of revelation is practically the same as Locke's. Revelation, Locke argues, was added to the light of reason, because without it, though " the rational and thinking part of mankind " might have managed fairly well, ordinary mortals 110 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY were in need of the miracles of Christ to be a help- ful working evidence of the " one, supreme, invisible God ". As well expect to have all the day lab- ourers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids perfect mathematicians as to have them perfect in ethics by way of a code reasoned and demon- strated. A code embodied in a Person, however, is plain to all. To this must be added the help revelation gives to a pure and spiritual worship, a clearer belief in the resurrection and the assurance of Divine help — for a revelation has to aid in prac- tice as well as instruct in knowledge.^ That may be taken not only as a statement of Locke's own view, but as the generally accepted view of the people who wrote on religious subjects on both sides of the controversy. If, then, revelation is simply a mean of informa- tion on the one hand, and some help to right prac- tice on the other, there is nothing to hinder us thinking freely about it and every other subject. This was the drift of A Discourse of Free-think- ing by Anthony Collins which appeared in 1713. He opposes vigorously the idea of salvation by right doctrine. The whole crime of man with regard to opinion is in not thinking freely. As well have a confession of faith for sight as for belief. Seeing our carnal eyesight might deceive, should we not trust the authority of "those men who have pensions and salaries on purpose to study these things " ? " Let any man lay down a rule to prevent diversity of opinions which will not be as 1 Beasonableness of Christianity. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 111 fertile of diversity of opinions as Free-thinking ; or, if it prevent Free-thinking, will not be a remedy worse than the disease, and I will yield up the question," ^ All the people with whom it is any credit to be associated — Solomon and the prophets along with the rest — were great Free-thinkers, and, if they had a bad time in their own day, CoUins thinks they would have had a worse in his. The prophets were Free-thinkers while Judaism was simply a religion of priests and institutions. The Christian priests like their Jewish predecessors are in league against Free-thought and for the same selfish reasons. Wherefore, the untrustworthiness of the priestly class, as well as differences of doc- trine, canon and text, requires free inquiry. The clergy do not, he complains, study divinity properly so called, but only how to maintain a certain system of divinity— a reproach perhaps not yet wholly taken away. Toland, in discussing the Eikon Basilike, had said that, if in that late and learned age it could be palmed off successfully as a work of Charles I. , it was easy to see how in less critical times pieces could be issued, if there were any end to be served, " under the names of Christ and His Apostles and other great persons".^ He afterwards explained'^ that he only meant pieces outside of Scripture, but any one could extend the application. Collins drops hints that it is hard to tell, at this date, what was written, and in his Scheme of Literal Prophecy 1 P. 101. 2 j^ifQ qJ Milton, 1761, p. 77. ^Amyntor, p. 161 f. 112 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY he went farther. The evidence of prophecy, he thought, might not be very convincing even if we did know the text. In order to get a prophecy to fit the event it is supposed to predict, it must, he says, be allegorised, and he leaves it to be inferred that what requires such treatment means nothing. To this book, published in 1727, replies rapidly mul- tiplied. Mostly, they took it for granted that the orthodox position could be maintained by answering a few manifest objections. But Sherlock's Use and Intent of Prophecy recognises the large question at issue and deals with it from a new point of view, showing more historical perspective than almost anything else in the age. The primary task of the proj)hets was, he argued, to keep alive the spiritual hopes of their own age, not to furnish arguments to ours. Religion has always subsisted upon the same principles of faith, but what at first were obscure and general hopes were gradually unfolded, till the days came when God called men into the full light of the Gospel. The Law of Moses is to be looked upon simply as a method whereby God works to- ward the general restoration of mankind, and pro- phecy is part of that scheme. To this end temporal and spiritual deliverances had to be mingled, that the more exalted hopes might be sustained by nearer blessings. Under such a scheme it is not to be expected that every word should bear its ultimate meaning on its face, and it is enough if, when the fulfilment comes, we see that the claim that the Scriptures testify of Christ is true. No Deist has anything of this historical per- ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 113 spective, and the nerve and sinew of all Tindal's argument is in the utter absence of it. Christianity as old as Creation, m^ the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature appeared in 1730, when Tin- dal had arrived at the age when, as Johnson thought, it was time to give up religious discussion and be in earnest, having passed the allotted span. Tindal's book also is largely negative, but, more than any other book of the time, it attempts a constructive Deism. He lays it down as a self-evident proposition that, as God is perfect. He must have given all men the perfect means of pleasing Him. Locke only argued that God will be pleased with the ser- vice which He has put men in a position to render ; but Tindal holds that nothing else will accord with God's perfection than to have put every man in the position of rendering the perfect service. God must from the beginning have made the perfect religion perfectly known to every person. It must, therefore, be wholly discoverable by reason, for " the use of the reason is the only thing for which all men are responsible ". As God requires nothing except what makes for the happiness of His crea- tures, there is no difficulty, for man cannot mistake what is good for himself and what a benevolent Father would wish him to do to others. *' The prin- ciple from which all human happiness flows, is the desire of happiness " — apparently our own. It is the only innate principle. Yet religion is everywhere and always " a constant disposition of mind to do all the good we can," the Deity having implanted in our 114 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY mind " a tendency to be kind and beneficent to one another ". Apparently the link of union is that to follow the tendency makes us happy, it being no drawback if these " seeds of benevolence " are supported by prudence and love of approbation/ With such a regular and easy Deity, a revelation can have nothing to do either with reconciliation or with special commands. As God cannot be injured. He cannot want rej)aration. He "is the best natured mind in the world". And if there were new truths without foundation in reason, and men were to be "damned for mistaken opinions" on such matters, they would merely be worse off for a revelation than they were before. Against such a revelation of special commands Tindal urges that we could not be sure of even the letter of it, seeing it comes through a dead language and with a vast variety of readings ; that, if we had not already a perfect revelation of reason with which to com- pare it, there is no absurdity we could not take out of the letter ; that the language of Scripture is totally lacking in legal precision ; and that, in any case, it is pernicious where the infinite sanction is set on anything that is not of eternal significance, such as ceremonies or merely formal opinions. Kevelation at best could only come under the head of probability, a probability which weakens with each remove, and which time alone would suffice to wear out ; while seeing they are in the hands of an interested caste, "pious fraud leaves every document of the Church doubtful". Not because 1 P. 16. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY U5 it is miraculous, but because it is rational, are we to receive the Gospel, for nothing but reasoning can improve the reason, and even the Holy Ghost can do no more than propose arguments to con- vince the understanding. Wherefore, the only way to reach pure Christianity is '*not to admit any- thing but what our reasons tell us is worthy to have God for its author". The only alternative to that method is for the religion of the laity to consist in believing their priests, a class of persons who "are bound to maintain the religion that maintains them ". Christianity is simply a re- publication of the law of nature which all know, but to which all do not pay heed. Christ carefully distinguished this purpose by proclaiming that He came not for the righteous, thereby asserting that there were righteous who had no need of Him, and by selecting His disciples from the ranks of the wickedest persons. For respectable English people, however, Christianity is apparently quite useless, their sound common sense being rather disturbed by the " elevated romantic " Eastern style, while the general principle that " actions that tend to promote happiness are always good," is guidance sufficient.^ The misunderstanding of Christianity is gross even for the age, and the general scheme is, in Butler's words, " a futile, imaginary model of a world". Tindal's argument against Leslie's posi- tion, that it would make the introduction of error at any time an impossibility, could be turned 1 Pp. 311-12. 116 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY against his own with even greater force, for, if it is impossible that God should ever deal with anything less than perfection, no defect should ever have appeared in the world at all. Yet, if God cannot speak otherwise than infal- libly, and if He must provide a religion which here and now determines each man's destiny for heaven or hell, every man ought to possess it. It is much more convincing to argue with Tindal that every man must be infallibly instructed, than to argue with Newman that one person, whom millions never heard of, must be. Hence no reply of any ability attempted any more to defend Leslie's position that the Scriptures are God's infallible law-book, guaranteed by the outward institution and the priesthood, but all recognised that it is more reverent, as well as more historical, first to ascertain the facts and then to build on them. In this inquiry the whole temper of the age brought the question of miracle into prominence. This temper made the question of miracle both difficult and important. It would have nothing but miraculous proof of a miraculous revelation ; yet it was little sensitive to the unusual. With its unhistorical outlook upon the past it saw no other means of securing its treasure but miracle, no other means by which its beliefs could be imposed upon the most enlightened age of the world ; yet to admit any Divine preference for the first century over the eighteenth, and for a miserable little country like Judea over England, the home of enlightenment and liberty, seemed an absurdity. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 117 Then, behind all men's sense of God's ways, lay the idea of the vast machine governed by the Law of Gravitation. None escaped it, orthodox or heterodox. The world was thought of as a great watch. Herbert uses the illustration and so does Butler, while Paley's use of it afterwards only shows how fully it expressed men's thoughts. The one question remaining was whether, in this great watch of the universe, God had reserved to Himself the right to touch the regulator. In that possibility, both God's providence and man's free- dom seemed to be involved. Miracle was the one proclamation that God actively and immediately concerned Himself with man's affairs, the one loop- hole for prayer or any spontaneous utterance of piety, the one sky-light out of the mechanical prison-house. The issue was definitely raised by Thomas Woolston in A Discourse on the Miracles of Our Saviour, which appeared as pamphlets between 1727 and 1730. He treated all the miraculous narratives as allegorical. Every one was aware, however, that the whole controversy from the beginning had more or less to do with this ques- tion of miracle. Granted, as the age generally granted, that reason was the sole guide to truth, and that the sole method of reason was argument, three lines of reply were possible. The first was to take the strongest and most important instance of miracle, and decide the issues upon it. The best known and ablest reply of this nature was Sherlock's Trial 118 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY of the Witnesses of the Reswrection of Christ, which Sir Leslie Stephen describes as the concentrated essence of eighteenth century theology/ The sec- ond method was to discuss the general reliability of the whole record. This Lardner did in his long and learned treatise on The Credibility of the Gospels, a work which may be said to have laid the foundation of all critical study of the New Testament. The third method was to view the whole broad scheme, not only of revelation, but of nature. That was the task Butler set himself in the Analogy, published in 1736. In his treatment of details of the argument Butler is by no means pre-eminent. His view of prophecy is not as historical as Sherlock's, nor is his defence of miracle as well concentrated on the main issue. He is also farthest away from what the age thought was obligatory — such an apologetic as would put Christianity on the lowest possible intellectual franchise. Quite frankly Butler set up a defence which required all a man's heart and soul and mind, and did not guarantee him finality even then. But herein the significance of Butler appears, for, in the last resort, it is not upon intel- lectual, but upon spiritual issues that he depends. What he offers is what the Germans call a Welt- anschanung, a presentation of Christianity as a View of the World, to which we attain by making conscience the measure of our good. At bottom he does not think that any man can be argued into religion ; and his true purpose is not to convince ^English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i., p. 243. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 119 but to convert his opponent. Argument is only to remove the obstacles which hinder this conversion. This attitude, which is Butler's lasting claim to esteem, also assured his neglect in his own age. Sir James Mackintosh wonders at the smallness of his immediate influence and ascribes it to his style, saying, " No thinker so great was ever so bad a writer ". Apparently the critic had not read Kant, and, comparisons apart, while Butler cannot be read without unwavering attention, the difficulty is not caused by any confusion of ex- pression, but only by weight of thought and excessive anxiety to attain precision. The style is characteristic both of the man and of his mission. On such a high theme he felt that every writer and every reader should be prepared to weigh the truth with diligence and care. Wherefore, the only eloquence he permits himself is when he appeals for this high seriousness of attention. To set one- self to convince the Coffee-house oracle, to provide a reply clear and swiftly conclusive, a reply capable of being stated in debate and bandied in argument, was in his eyes the way not to arrive at truth. Religion has to do with conduct, and regarding conduct there is nothing reason requires more than a sense of its importance. No one ought to determine his conduct except upon the whole consideration of the case, which is what those who treat things in a short and lively manner, parti- cularly in conversation, are sure to miss. Hence the significance of Butler's constant repetition of the phrase, tqmn tlie ivhole. It is a standing pro- 120 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY test against the finality of the judgment of the town wit, whom he describes as judging without thinking and censuring without judging, and then confirming himself in error by dealing in ridicule. ^' Weak men are often deceived by others, and ludicrous men by themselves." Even demonstra- tion would not alter the behaviour of those whose answer is "Ridicule, unanswerable ridicule". And behaviour is the great matter. The important matter for us is not what light we have, but how we use it. The very reason why God appears not to have given us more light is that the task of acquitting ourselves in the great duty of walking with little light and seeking more is one of the chief parts of our present discipline. For such light as we have or may have we are responsible, and not for more. We cannot, with Tindal, main- tain that God is bound to give man anything ; all we can maintain is that He is bound to be fair according to what He has given. Hence, if the study of any evidence, historical or other, is within our reach, we may not settle the matter by indo- lently saying, " There are so many principles from whence men are liable to be deceived themselves and disposed to deceive others," which is at once an admirable summary of Hume's argument against the possibility of proving a miracle, and a reply to it by anticipation. If we acknowledge the credulity of mankind, Butler adds, we should also acknow- ledge their suspicion, especially regarding things that put them to trouble and disturb their temporal interests. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 121 Into this state of probation regarding truth every degree of probability at once puts us. Every degree of probability, being joined with a con- sideration of the importance of the subject, requires a dutiful regard to religion in all our behaviour. Yet this regard is not to restrict, but to urge inquiry. To be biassed in our inquiries by a sense of the greatness of the issue " is a prejudice as much as anything else ". But a religious attitude of reverence, attention, moral uprightness is the ne- cessary condition for understanding the importance of the subject and for appreciating its evidence. This being granted, it will not be astonishing that God should put it upon us to consider the whole outlook upon life, and to regard the Scriptures as a whole as a view of the world as God's world, and not merely to understand one or two pointed and pithy arguments. Though there is here a great change of attitude towards reason, Butler insists on reason not less than others. " The proper motives to religion are the proper proofs of it from our moral nature and from the confirmation of the dictates of reason by revelation." *'I express myself," he further says, "with caution, lest I should be mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning anything, even revelation itself." We are to inquire into the evidences of religion after the manner they are put before us "in Christian countries of liberty ". The Church, though Butler assigns it a high place as the Christian society, is not an external authority, even 122 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY in Leslie's sense. "Of this Church all persons scattered all over the world, who live in accordance with Christ's laws, are members." The whole con- sequences of freedom, intellectual and practical, Butler accepts. "From our original constitution and that of the world we are plainly trusted with ourselves." The basis of all religion is individual responsibility. He does, indeed, profess to argue without assuming the freedom of the will, but he can do so because " the constitution of the present world and the condition in which we are actually placed, is as if we were free," because, whatever it be in speculation, as a practical doctrine, necessity is false. Indeed, the whole pith and marrow of Butler's argument depends on the conviction not only that we are free, but that God has put it upon us to exercise our freedom. We are an inferior part of creation apparently in a state of degradation. Man might have been free without sinning, but apparently, in Butler's view, he could not be free without the possibility of sin. Hence freedom is a genuine option be- tween good and evil, the great option by which the habits of the soul are built up. For both time and eternity God puts it upon us to attain victory over ourselves. The relation of our present discipline to our future security Butler speaks of as involving us in mere possibilities ; but this is evidently to be taken with his whole view that all our destiny is built upon freedom and responsibility. There may, he says, be no trial in a future life, but a disposi- tion won through trial may be essential to our ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 123 blessedness. Virtuous habits may be our needed security, not only in this world but the next. If affections remain in a future state, acquired habits of virtue and self-government may be necessary for the regulation of them. All finite beings may have their security, in part at least, from having had a sense of the evil of sin formed in a state of proba- tion. Now that suggestion is not only interest- ing in itself, it is not only what the Apostle may have meant by " attaining to the resurrection from the dead," but it is of the greatest importance for showing Butler's view. It shows how much man's freedom and responsibility were realities to him and how entirely in his view every high issue in time and eternity depends on them. Butler thus agreed with his age in regarding freedom as man's universal and supreme birthright, but he differed entirely in his conception of what freedom involved. Freedom, in his eyes, is no longer mere absence of restraint and the right to be indifferent to everything that does not absolutely knock us down with argument. It is a high and solemn and vast responsibility, the great task of governing our own nature as a constitution or state in the midst of the big world which is also a constitution or state. Man is a mariner upon a great and storm-swept sea, with the task on his hands not to jettison his cargo, but to bring it through rock and tempest safe to port. Freedom is a necessity for the task, but it is freedom to follow every ray of light that may guide him in so great a task upon so vast a scene. 124 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY The exceeding perplexity of our way and our great ignorance Butler often dwells on. Let us by all means follow reason, but " let not such poor creatures as we are go on objecting against an infinite scheme, that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and call this reasoning ". A man has little pretence to reason at all who is not aware that in matters of speculation we are all chil- dren. The unsatisfactory nature of the evidence with which we are obliged to take up, even in the daily course of life, is " scarce to be expressed ". Butler, too, was impressed by the great scientific idea of the age, not, however, by the mere wonder of the corridor shown straight and clear by Newton's discovery, but by the suggestion it gives of a house of endless possibilities, a house, moreover, of which our own little dwelling can only be understood as a part. When all else leaves him placid, Tindal's omniscience in this dog-hole of a world, which may yet be the ante- room of Eternity and Infinity, stirs his contempt. " To us probability is the very guide of life," and that not to satisfy our curiosity but only to afford us practical guidance. The most we can do is to " discern the tendencies of things upon the whole ". To attempt like Descartes to " build a world upon hypothesis " is quite beyond our faculties. Thus after many years Butler takes up Pascal's word against the hope of finding our way through this great world by mathematical demonstration as the only guide of life ; and he takes it up again in the same interest, the interest of a practical faith. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 125 There is even an advance upon Pascal, for this limita- tion of our knowledge is set forth not as mere restric- tion of our intelligence, but as also a necessary and important part of our moral discipline. So import- ant is this moral view of our ignorance that Butler's argument would have very little force without it. The full title of his book explains what this argument is. It is The Analog^/ of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature. One thing only is to be taken for granted — an intelligent Author of Nature and a natural Governor of the World. This Butler is supposed to assume, because the Deists conceded as much ; and he is supposed to be refuted by denying that we know anything about such a Being. But Butler only means to assume that experience is one rational scheme which may be argued upon, an assumption without which no discussion of the ultimate meaning of things can proceed. On this basis of the unity of experience he then proceeds to compare what '' religion teaches us to believe and expect " with the " known constitution and course of things," to see if both can be traced up " into the same general laws and resolved into the same principles of Divine conduct ". This purpose is totally misrepresented in saying that Butler seeks to show that religion is true because nature presents the same difficulties, so that, instead of lightening the task of accepting revelation, he merely burdens the task of believing in Providence. Besides it is said. What is the use of revelation at all if it does not clear up the difficulties of nature ? 126 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY To this Butler would reply that revelation is given to afford us light and succour, but certainly not to abolish the limits of our knowledge which are essential to our spiritual discipline and which the wisdom of God, having once set, will not re- move as long as the requirement is not altered. As these limitations are conditions of our proba- tion as much as, and to some men more than, our temptations, we should, if religion is a reality, ex- pect in life and in revelation the same discipline of probability at the same points, the roads showing at the same summits and dipping at the same valleys, the whole being one divinely appointed probation and discipline. Under the guidance of conscience we may know God's end, but we can be " no sort of judges what are the necessary means of accomplishing it ". God does not dispense His gifts according to our notion of the advantage and consequence they would be to us. The very things objected against may be the very best means for accomplishing the very best ends : and their appearing foolishness to us is no presumption against them. On the con- trary, if they mark the whole scheme both of nature and grace, we have a right to conclude that they are necessary, and that it is only our impatience and ignorance that find fault. For example, if every kind of progress starts in one place and pro- pagates itself from point to point, and always on the condition of one teaching another, it is plain that there must be some good reason for such a method, a reason requiring that it should also be ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 127 the method of God's revelation. Nothing, therefore, but omniscience could justify Tindal in maintaining that God must reveal Himself perfectly to every one in every place at all times. If a revelation is not evident to every one without trouble or difficulty, that is only in accordance with the general conduct of nature which is "not to save us trouble or danger, but to make us capable of going through them and to put it upon us to do so ". This being so, there is "an absolute and formal obligation in point of prudence and interest to act even upon a low degree of probability, and most of all in questions of great importance ". To misunder- standing of this position Butler constantly exposes himself by his cold and guarded expression and his negative way of arguing. His doctrine of proba- bility seems then only to mean that religion and everything else are very doubtful, but that, as Eter- nity is a high venture, a prudent man would stake on it. But prudence and interest in Butler's eyes include high issues of spiritual wisdom and profit ; while the first purpose of the uncertainty of our own foresight is to drive us back upon the only thing that is certain, the guidance of conscience. Amid all the doubt, there is "an absolute and formal obligation ". It is to look after one's own interest. It is an absolute and formal obligation to prudence. But a prudence which has such an authority to go upon is not mere expediency. It is a prudence which interprets itself by conscience. That is the foundation-stone of Butler's system. Self-love is to be interpreted hy conscience, not conscience by self-love. 128 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY The soul is a constitution or state. All im- pulses in human nature are right and useful in their due subjection. There are, however, only two re- gulative principles, both principles of reflection.^ They are self-love and conscience. Self-love, as a principle of reflection, is so far from being identical with the passions, that the passions unregulated are at least as antagonistic to the individual's true interest as to the well-being of others. Self-love, thus understood, is not inferior even to conscience. Not even conscience could reasonably command us to do what was plainly and ultimately contrary to self-love. But no foresight can tell us certainly what will be for our good upon the whole. On the other hand conscience speaks with absolute author- ity. Not to approve of virtue is impossible, while no one could be sure even for this life, much less for that which is to come, that vice could ever conduce to his good. The supremacy of conscience is here- in apparent that we can determine by reference to it alone what the economy of man's nature requires. " Had it strength as it has right ; had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world." ^ It is not resolvable either into self- love or benevolence, as it determines both true self- love and true benevolence, and " everything is what it is and not another thing," ^ which is a very im- portant principle. This moral certainty, then, is the basis upon which all the probabilities which guide us should ^ Preface to Sermons. ^ Sermon II. ^ Preface to Sermons. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 129 be built. But this probability with its basis of moral certainty is, for all practical purposes, what we call faith. The Apostle no doubt expresses himself better when he prays that our love may increase in wisdom and practical discrimination, that we may discern the things that excel. Yet there is some advantage also in having the same thing said in Butler's dry way, in having it urged that in matters of the greatest importance we must act on the lowest degree of probability. Life, to our author, is a great and dark affair, with little guidance in it but the call of duty, wherein a great charge which is to prove us has been com- mitted to our care, involving the necessity of fol- lowing aims the ultimate goal of which we cannot see, and of facing duties the full reason for which lies in other spheres. Hence it is necessary to follow every ray of light, discern things even dimly excelling, choose the path even slightly tending upwards. If this solemn task of governing our own nature as a constitution or state in the midst of the big world which is also a constitution or state involves infinite and eternal relations, then instead of being ready to reject everything that does not absolutely overwhelm us with demonstra- tion, we should be glad to get light enough in any way for the practical business of life ; while to forsake for our own foresight the only sure guid- ance we have, which is conscience, is sheer madness. This guidance of conscience is the real key to the meaning of life. What shows us that we are in a state of probation is our moral task. What 9 130 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY proves that virtue must be the. happiness and vice the misery of every creature, is that our whole nature leads us to ascribe all moral perfection to God. That is the real basis of religion, and the argument from analogy is not another proof, but only a way of removing certain intellectual difficulties which hinder the natural development of the moral con- victions. Our sole guide in interpreting the Divine meaning of life is the moral tendencies of things, less what actually happens than what conscience requires to happen. We thereby arrive at natural religion, the essence of which is that we are now in a state of probation, so that the full issues of our present life are explicable only by another and a greater. Had there never been any deviation from the path of right, this religion might have sufficed ; but to say that revelation is now a thing superfluous is "to talk quite wildly and at random". Possibly even natural religion is revealed religion, whether it could have been thought out being very doubt- ful ; and, in any case, considering the corruption amid which we live, to have it republished and con- firmed, and to have some " external institution of it " to carry forward its work in the world is a very practical and urgent necessity. A miraculous con- firmation of natural religion, whatever speculative difficulties may be raised against it, is of undeniable practical value, while the Christian society inter- preted, as every Divine work should be, by what it would accomplish if man did his part, is a very urgent practical requirement. ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 131 Besides thus enforcing natural religion, revela- tion makes known relations which involve special injunctions. But here Butler of all men seems to lay himself open to an objection. If another au- thority besides conscience is set up which can give commands of God, conscience is no longer the one absolute authority in the soul. To this Butler would reply that neither revelation nor anything else could reveal a duty that was not enforced by conscience. If anything were revealed merely as a command of God, had it no other reason either for or against it, we should make conscience of obeying it because of God's goodness and wisdom and our relation to them. But such commands God does not seem to require, as " the reasons of the practical precepts of Christianity are all manifest ". Revela- tion involves new duties only as all widening of our horizon does. The revelation of the Son as our Mediator and the Spirit as our Sanctifier in- volves our duty to them as naturally as good- will is involved in our knowledge of our fellowman. In explaining the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, Butler is careful to guard this central au- thority of conscience and the responsibilities of our own individuality. It is because our freedom makes sin such a terrible reality that such a work is required. " Consider what it is for us creatures, moral agents, presumptuously to introduce that confusion and misery into the Kingdom of God, which mankind have in fact introduced." Again, the help that is given us is of the same kind of in- terposition and assistance as is given by our fellows. 132 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY the same kind of self-sacrifice from others which is of such manifest vahie in doing away with the effects of evil in life, and which does not interfere with, but rather enforce, our personal responsibility. To Butler's whole scheme of thousrht two ob- jections are usually taken, Jlrst, that he deifies conscience and, second, that he ends in pessimism, not in faith. His doctrine of the absolute authority of con- science is supposed to be answered by the Theory of Evolution. But Butler would probably have made no difficulty about acknowledging the evolu- tion of conscience. No one in the century came nearer the idea. He acknowledges that there are perhaps creatures, not yet arrived at the moral stage, that may be on the way to it ; that in in- fancy we ourselves were not consciously moral beings ; and that even now our moral understand- ings may be impaired and perverted. Conscience he defines as a moral approving and disapproving faculty, and all he needs to maintain is that, so far as it is discerned, the distinction between right and wrong is absolute, not being dependent upon man's convenience but upon the ultimate meaning of the world. Butler started out to prove that the easy optim- ism of the Deist was absolutely apart from the realities of life. We know God's end, but the thing we are perfect children in estimating is God's way. The foolishness of blaming God's ways came, Butler says, from the foolish ease with which men thought to praise them. To have shown this ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY 133 was no unimportant service, for nothing is farther from true faith than easy-going confidence. Faith surmounts difficulties ; it does not ignore them. Being occupied in this task, Butler is not always careful to shun the appearance of pessimism, and he never blinks the sternest facts of life. And religion cannot be a necessity till we cease to be satisfied with things as they are. If we got a quite adequate belief in providence from life, we should never need faith. Butler, of course, can be answered by the scepticism which says, unless I can see, I will not believe, the scepticism which doubts the ultimate rationality of things and denies the possibility of freedom. But granting that life has a meaning and freedom a reality, he does not merely load the belief in God with The heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, but he loads it with the weight of a great concep- tion of a spiritual discipline, designed not for the ease, but for the victory of God's children — a view the final test of which cannot be argument, but life. Yet Butler's is not altogether the faith that sets us free. The easy optimistic view of providence as a truth of natural religion which so largely satis- fied his age, is, he argued, totally inadequate in view of the stern realities of life and the awful possibilities of moral failure. To walk in freedom meant for him to walk a dim and perilous way, where the mists gather and the precipices yawn. And if man walks alone, how else can he walk except with guarded and hesitating steps ? What 134 ENGLISH DEISM AND BUTLER'S ANALOGY can freedom mean to weak and erring man except an overwhelming responsibility and terrible pos- sibilities of failure ? Hence there is in Butler something akin to what we saw in Pascal. To Pascal God remained less than a Father, being only a Father Confessor. To Butler God also remained somewhat less than a Father, having in Him always something of the household disciplina- rian. In this Butler comes short of the glorious liberty of the children of God, very much short of the joyous confidence and security of the Ai)ostles. He never turns his eyes from the hope of the glory of God, but he cannot be said to rejoice in it. He found out the error of his time, he saw that a joy- ous belief in providence could never be an easy optimistic truth of natural religion : but he did not see that, if there is any work of reconciliation, this joyous belief must be the essence of it, seeing that a reconciliation with God must be a reconciliation with all God's appointments for us. The belief that freedom could be perfect without such a work had been the chief reason why redemption had been deemed a superfluity by so many, and the theologians, who comfortably acquiesced, confirmed the error. Butler helped to destroy that delusion, but he was unable to restore the conception of reconciliation to its place, because he did not see its bearing upon the joy and peace so much needed when man is so small and the world so wide, when attainment is so far away and failure so near at hand. LECTURE IV RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE Oxford Methodism, 1729-35. Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques sur Us Anglais, 1733. Hume, Treatise on Hioman Nature, 1740. Hume, Essay on Miracles, 1748. Voltaire, Candide, 1759. Eousseau, Contrat Social, 1762. Eousseau, Emile, 1764. Encyclopedie, 1751-65. Semler, Abhandlung vonfreier Untersuchung des Kanon, 1771 ff. Wolfenbilttel Fragments, 1774-78. Lessing, Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, 1780. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781. Kant, Die Beligion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793. Paley, Evidences, 1794. Books of Reference Essays : Voltaire and Diderot, Thomas Carlyle, ed. 1857. Botis- seau, John Morley, 1876. Geschichte der yrotestantischen TJieologie, Gustav Frank, dritter Theil, 1875. Lessing wid Semler, Leopold Zscharnack, 1905. The Development from Kant to Hegel, loith Chapters on the Philosophy of Religion, A. Seth (A. Pringle-Pattison), 1882. Kant, Fr. Paulsen, 1898. Kant, Kuno Fischer, 4te Auf., 1898. Die Beligion unserer Klassiher, Sell, 1904. LECTURE IV EATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF BEASON ALONE Butler's influence is very difficult to trace in tlie succeeding age. As has been shown, the explana- tion is not his style. Pascal's influence is equally difficult to trace, yet no man's style was ever more pellucid. The reason in both cases was the same. Men sought an easier way. When life is regarded as the supreme experiment in faith, as both required, the millennium will be arriving. The accepted defender of Christianity in Eng- land came to be Paley, not Butler. Paley's merit lay in using the work of his predecessors, and so using it that with unparalleled success he accom- plished their endeavour to put Christianity on a low intellectual franchise, to make its credentials plain to the meanest capacities. He was the embodiment of the century's lucid common sense ; and he shows very clearly what the long debate had accomplished. The stress of the argument for miracle had come to be laid on the Resurrection of Christ, on the uniqueness of the Subject of it and the uniqueness of the witnesses to it. The attack on priestcraft had so far succeeded that the very force of the defence depended on the difference between the (137) 138 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION position of the Apostles and that of any modern representative of Christianity, while the canon of Scripture was found valid just because it was not collected by ecclesiastical decree but by the Christian people for their use to edification. The appeal was no more to the institution, but to the individual, above all to that sense of sincerity upon which the ordinary reader of the Gospels had been accustomed to proceed before inquiry. And this triumph at least must be conceded to Paley. Up to his day, deliberate fraud was the common, as it is certainly the complete, explanation of every- thing exceptional. Since his time no one has seriously doubted the good faith of the Apostles. Yet Paley still uses, as has been said, every argument for religion except religion itself, seeking to prove and impose a religion, otherwise external and alien, as the will of a God who, as Locke says, " sees men in the dark, has in His hands rewards and punishments and power enough to call to account the proudest offender ". But though he is still under the Catholic idea of faith as the acceptance of revealed propositions on an external voucher only, and though he believes in God as the Supreme Mechanician, and in virtue as '' doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness," and though he would perhaps have agreed with Warburton that the necessity of miracles was past because " now the profession of the Christian faith is attended with ease and honour," Paley shows a tolerance of difference. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 139 a power of distinguishing between the essential and non-essential, and a recognition that the true effects of Christianity are to be looked for in humble lives, which are no unworthy fruits of a long discussion. In short the distinction set up at the Reformation between religion and the Church is by Paley wholly justified. The two men, however, who pointed to a new era were Hume and Wesley. What even Paley's argument could not do, the Evangelical Movement did ; it made Christianity level with man as man. And what no theology could do, it did ; it created a relation to God which actually did set men free in the midst of this big world, men, moreover, upon whom the battle of life pressed most heavily. The belief in Providence, which had been merely the comfortable assumption of persons in health and prosperity who had no intention of taking life otherwise than easily, became the triumphant assurance that could be victorious over all external conditions. Though, in Wesley's own day, the thinkers lived immune from its contagion, they could not for ever ignore a faith which had such vital consequences for practical freedom. Hume would only have been tolerable to Wes- ley because the great Evangelical leader never despaired of a convert ; and the thing which per- haps not merely Hume himself but his philosophy most needed was some kind of conversion. Berke- ley, following Locke's limitation of knowledge to ideas of sensation and reflection, had denied the 140 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION existence of matter. Not because of any doubt of the external order, but the more reasonably to ex- plain it, Berkeley replaced inert matter by active mind — our only experience of ultimate reality be- ing our own self-consciousness. Hume accepted Berkeley's rejection of matter as a hypothesis which explained nothing, but he also proceeded to reject mind as equally superfluous. That we cannot help having an idea of self as an indivisible and iden- tical principle, he does not deny ; but it is a fiction of the imagination, and all we really know is an ever-changing series of sensations and less vivid copies of them called ideas. In this experience the only order is customary succession. Even the law of cause and effect is merely the belief, due to repeated succession in the same order, that it will so happen again. This philosophy awoke a great many people besides Kant from their dogmatic slumber. Many answers were given to it, mostly of the nature of an appeal to common sense. Plainly it left no reality either in freedom or faith. Gradually, how- ever, it became apparent that this result was arrived at by putting the cart before the horse, by thinking we reached practice from theory, not theory from practice. What this philosophy wanted was not a new intellectual but a new ethical import. If the feeling of identity and causality is transferred from man himself into experience, manifestly the amount of reality in the transference depends on whether man has any task to perform in the world which proves that he is the same man and that the WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 141 world is a sphere for carrying out the same task. If freedom and man's moral tasks are realities, the things above all else that we cannot question are identity and causality, and the thing that most mani- festly appears in this flow of experience, giving it unity, is that moral purpose which men know as the Kingdom of God. But the things that cannot be shaken did not at first appear ; and men who had laboriously tried to put faith first and hang freedom on it, only saw in Hume the most trenchant sceptic the world had produced. Thus he remained the rock of offence for the rest of the century, and as such was one of the mightiest powers in it not only for destruction but for a new creation. The influence of English Deism passed into France chiefly through Voltaire. An exile from his native land, he found a home in England. There he learned to admire Newton, Locke, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke and Pope— a noteworthy list. The supreme treasures with which he returned were the P^'incipia and the Characteristics. " It is known, for instance," says Carlyle, " that he under- stood Newton when no other man in France under- stood him ; indeed, his countrymen may call Voltaire the discoverer of intellectual England." ^ This man, whom Carlyle calls the Grand Persifleur, partly created and wholly embodied the spirit of the age. He was the Apostle of Reason — all things not forthwith arguable being folly, the Father of Sound Philosophy — of the cheerfully utilitarian and merely ^ Essays, vol. ii., p. 39. 142 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION earthly kind, the Universal Genius — the forerunner of all them who make encyclopaedias. Mockery was his charter of freedom in this great and per- plexing world — a freedom in its way of conse- quence, for to sit in the chair of the scorner is an assured way of being at ease in Zion— and an im- portant change of outlook followed when that per- siflage grew manifestly inadequate to life and the needs of man. Besides interest in English thinkers, two things recur with amazing regularity in the French writers of the Deistic and Atheistic class. They have passed through the Jesuit Schools ; and they are mathematicians and adorers of the law of gravita- tion. By these two influences their thought was largely determined. What Carlyle says of Voltaire might be said of them all. History is but '*a poor wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries between the Encyclopedle and the Sorbonne. Wisdom or folly, nobleness or baseness, are merely superstitious or unbelieving ; God's Universe is merely a larger patrimony of St. Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt out the Pope." ^ But the influence of their Jesuit training did not end in mere antagonism to the Church. It was with the Jesuit externality that these men judged morals, and above all with the Jesuit leniency and readiness to grant absolution. Then, a philosopher, like a king, being due the compensation of con- siderable licence, it was easy to talk of the loftiest virtues without practising even the lowliest. From ^ Essays, vol. ii., p. 15. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 143 the Jesuit Schools also they brought the idea that man is a creature of outward influences, plastic as clay in the hand of the educator. Perhaps, too, they were confirmed in their idolatry of the argu- mentative faculty, for where religious instruction is merely scholastic and morals merely didactic, with- out any reaching of faith and aspiration back towards ultimate grounds of truth and conscience, argument has everything at its mercy. This same lack of ultimate grounds in faith and conscience, moreover, left them utterly the slaves of a great mathematical formula, there being no basis for a higher and more spiritual science which might set them free. Mr. Morley notes a difference between Kousseau and the leaders of thought who had been trained in the Jesuit Schools. The deeper element in Rousseau sprang from being a " citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration and austerity strong and vigorous within him ".^ Hence there was in him a passion for freedom of a wider reach, an enthusiasm only the disintegrating ele- ments of which could be assimilated by a Catholic country like France. *' In no country has the power of collective organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France, and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count for so little." ^ Man was to the Encyclopsedists infinitely per- fectible only because he was absolutely plastic, because they took care not to set infinite perfection 1 Bousseau, vol. i., p. 191. ^ p_ 223. 144 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION too high, and because they believed their own enlightenment to be the dawn of a golden age of dictionaries, in which no superstition could live and no foolish idealism distract men from the main business of being happy and learning from the Enlightened. This philosophy of life, this faith by which men thought they could attain the golden age of free- dom, in comparison with which all unhappy earlier epochs had been in bondage to foolish reverences, flourished and only could flourish in a false atmos- phere of social and literary clubs, with a suggestion of courtiers and even of royalties in the back- ground. To have touched mother earth would not have been life but death to it. This touching of earth did befall it, after a fashion, by the Atheism in which it landed. Though the poorest of mechanical conceptions of things, it proved a way of issuing out of that society candle-light in which alone such easy optimism re- garding human nature and human knowledge and possession can satisfy a mortal travelling betwixt life and death. It was perhaps the only way, in this direct line of descent from Descartes, in which the understanding was the sole court of appeal, and clearness of order and rapid precision of view the ultimate test of reaching reality. Even for the grand Persifleur himself it was surely a gain in serious- ness that the old Hebrew problem came upon him in the end, that the tabernacles of robbers prosper and the blood of the saints is shed like water round about Jerusalem, the problem which took the new WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 145 form, " People are engulfed at Lisbon, while they dance at Paris". With gratuitous grossness, but with abundant point and vigour, his novel, Candide, raised the same question. The book is of some im- portance, because in Voltaire's sense of goodness, as cheap kindness, there is most certainly not a good God on the throne of the universe, and only when such a belief was radically doubted, only when the God of modern comfort and respectability was fundamentally denied, was the easy, carpet slippers and dressing-gown idea of freedom found inade- quate to the needs of life. Nevertheless, it shows something less than dis- ciimination on Mr. Morley's part when he contrasts this recognition by Voltaire of defects in his Deity with Rousseau's defence of his, when he contrasts Candide with the Confession of a Savoyard Vicar, as showing more openness of mind.^ Rousseau, though somewhat of a Magdalene with the seven devils not very well cast out of him, presupposed very different conditions for understanding the ways of God from Voltaire. His exaltation of the state of nature is not history but dogma. It is his own mythology of the Fall. Its point is not that the past was ever perfect, but that the present is abundantly remote from perfection ; that some kind of reconciliation and amending and healing is much needed before any kind of right understand- ing of God's ways can be looked for. That involved a very different way of looking for deliverance from Voltaire's, and pointed clearly to a new age. ^ Rousseau, vol. i., p. 309 ff. 10 146 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION Moreover, Rousseau, though he never learned that the foundation of all is ''Let a man deny himself," had a heart for nature and for human nature. It was after all only the conventions and trappings of human nature that were thought so perfectible, and Kousseau, the prodigal too fre- quently among the swine, had a heart for others as well as himself who had not bread enough and to spare, and for the things of the heart, in spite of sentiment, and of the home, in spite of criminal abandonment of his children. These French influences, owing to the political situation of the time, passed at once into Germany undiluted. The Thirty Years' War left Germany broken up into small principalities, much subject to foreign interference, and scarcely even in name bound together by the tie of the Empire. The material resources had been so wasted that the country was left miserably poor, and the mere task of recuperation exhausted all energies, without leaving any to spare for things so disturbing as in- tellectual and religious discussion. For a hundred years from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, this slow process of recovery went on. Owing to the political situation, a patriotic German feeling was impossible, and French influence became dominant in what society and literature were able to exist. In literature the great ambition was to be classical, the model being the French drama. That belonged also to the desire for order and regularity. But, most of all, this tendency appears in the prevailing theological temper. Nowhere had the theology of WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 147 the Reformation become more scholastic than in Germany. The tendency, which had begun with Melanchthon, to turn the whole task of theology into accurate formulation of accepted positions, naturally grew strong in such an age. Bahrdt describes himself as becoming a pillar of orthodoxy merely by getting up his father's lectures ; while Goethe speaks of the national religion in which he was trained as only a kind of dry morals, a stirring exposition of which was not thought of. The first result of a new intellectual movement was naturally in the circumstances a mere unquali- fied claim for a liberty, upon which neither social nor religious ties put much restraint. What Collins had called Free-thinking, the Ger- mans called Aufkldrung. So great did its power become that the latter half of the eighteenth century is known as the period of the Aufkldrung. The word is sometimes translated Illuminism. En- lightenment would be simpler and more suggestive. A still nearer equivalent, not for the word, but for what was intended by it, is Emanci'pation. Its ideal was an intellect emancipated from all traditional authority, able and willing to test all conclusions, but, like our own word Free-thought, it came in practice to indicate a spirit of negation and shallow confidence, rather than the spirit of true and serious liberty. At the same time no movement of the century shows more clearly how necessary a purely rational phase is for human progress. Kant, whose active life exactly covers the period, has a short paper entitled, An Ansiver to 148 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION the Qaestion : What is Aufkldrung. Anfkldrung lie defines as the advance of man from self-caused pupilage, its motto being sapere mide. Pupilage, he says, is the inability to use our own understand- ings without another person's guidance, and it is self-caused when it is due, not to want of under- standing, but to want of resolution and courage to use it. The comfort of having our thinking done for us is great, and few care to face the falls men must encounter if they would walk alone. In the emancipation of a people the great difficulty is to avoid revolution, which usually accomplishes only a change of yoke, without reforming men's ways of thinking. The great object is to attain a slow and steady advance ; and, for that, nothing is needed except freedom to use the reason in every direction. There, however, is the difficulty. The military officer says, " Reason not, but drill " ; the revenue officer, *' Reason not, but pay " ; the parson, " Reason not, but believe ". Only one master says, "Reason as much as you will and on what you will, only obey". By this master Kant meant the Great Frederick, and no more characteristic product of the age of emancipated intellect could have been found, had he not on one point departed from the type. He refused to accept the prevailing enthusiasm for the goodness of the human heart, knowing, as he de- clared, " the cursed breed too well ". As it was Frederick's firm determination to allow every one to save his soul after his own fashion, and with a gay, if not a godly, gladness to suffer fools, every WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 149 type of thinking enjoyed under his rule the utmost liberty of expression. In accordance with Frederick's motto, " Reason but obey," Kant argues that the public use of the reason must be left entirely free, while the private use of it may have to be subjected to restrictions/ That is to say, a man should be allowed to publish any opinion whatsoever, though in the discharge of his civic duty he must speak and act according to his undertaking. An officer writing on military affairs should criticise everything that is wrong ; an officer under command should hold his tongue and obey. So also with the cleric. As a good citizen he catechises and preaches according to the standards, as he undertook to do ; as a scholar he is free, nay bound, to discuss defects and errors in the Creed, and to suggest improvements. A creed is to Kant merely a kind of government protection to the public. As with all other public legislation, the person appointed to carry it out should act in accordance with it so long as it is in force, but, just because he is most familiar with it, he is best able to criticise and correct it. So important is this aspect of freedom for Kant that, though his political theory was democratic and republican, he argues elsewhere that, under the despotism of Frederick, greater practical liberty was enjoyed than under an English parliament, which the King could purchase with money — an estimate which Lessing, who had a nearer view of the Prussian rule, is far from endorsing. 1 Kant's Werke, 1838, p. 113. 150 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION This interest in merely intellectual freedom was characteristic of the whole age. The middle class, who provided the thinkers, had no place in the public life. The crown lands provided the public revenues ; the crown officials ruled all the depart- ments of state ; the army drew its officers from the aristocracy and its privates from the peasantry. Public duty was a mere commission from the prince and public spirit could scarcely exist. The upper classes would rather have been citizens of France than of Germany, and the educated middle class were content with nothing short of being citizens of the world. The result was an amazing intel- lectual activity which was ready to embark with theory on any voyage of discovery, unhampered by questions regarding the practical consequences. This indifference to the consequences was further encouraged by the moral corruj^tion which spread from the Frenchified courts. It was the same kind of influence as entered England at an earlier period with the Restoration ; but, the courts being many in Germany and the territories small, the evil was planted more in the heart of the people, and went, therefore, deeper into society, affecting not only the aristocracy but the middle class. In these small courts where what Carlyle calls a "strum- petocracy " lived on the hire of the peasant sold to be a mercenary to the alien, the shallowest and most mocking Deism and Atheism found a congenial soil. There it existed very much as in France, except that the taste it appealed to was ruder than under the immediate shadow of the Bourbons. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 151 But the German cannot long continue without reflecting on his ways. His native constitution and Protestant training drive him back ultimately upon first principles. He began, therefore, to fashion more compactly a natural religion, begin- ning with Tindal's conception of a religion always and everywhere revealed directly in human nature. It was a time of cosmopolitan abstractions, so that natural religion was at once a man's charter as a citizen of the world and as judge of all things in it. Unqualified independence of judgment summed up the conception of enlightened freedom, and the faith on which the scheme rested was, in the main, the good-nature of the Deity. Among writers a most characteristic representa- tive of this phase was Nicolai, but, as a publisher and editor of journals, his chief interest is his con- nection with other people. Bahrdt, in his Auto- biography,^ has left the liveliest picture of what he took to be himself, but he is rather a caricature than a portrait of the movement. Yet the exag- gerations of a caricature also have their uses, if studied with discrimination. Aufkldrung is for Bahrdt almost the only sacred word in the language. He takes a giant stride in it when he is stirred " to believe absolutely nothing more than what he could readily prove from reason and Scripture and force upon the subtlest doubter,"^ and he attains per- fection when he reaches the point of omitting ^Dr. Carl Frederick Bahrdt's Geschichte Seines Lebens, Seiner Mehiungen und SchicJcsale. Berlin, 1791. 2 Theil 2, 210. 152 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION Scripture. For a theological professor, preacher and church superintendent, that must be considered fair progress, and the wonderful thing is not his persecutions of which he boasts, but the tolerance of him for which he is by no means grateful. Had he only exercised the sole virtue he really believed in, which was prudence, it would almost seem as if neither negation nor bad behaviour would have driven him from office. So much was decency the main consideration that a charge of fatalism and blank atheism against Schulz, who first opened Bahrdt's eyes, was regarded as gravely intensified in that the preaching of them was done without a wig.^ After his reason had happily expelled for Bahrdt the doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, Supernatural Grace, Original Sin, Eternal Punish- ment, he betook himself to morality and sound philosophy. A morality solely designed to make men happy became his chief theme. He could make a whole series of sermons on the influence of one moral requirement on all parts of human duty. He sought to heal men's sins by what he calls the natural way, apparently the way of prov- ing honesty the best policy. The essence of his teaching was "a quite special providence". We are so built that we cannot help being happy when we see others happy, and so is God. Jesus he finds the pattern of sound thinking and goodness of heart. He founded not a church but a secret society to hand on the truths oppressed by priests 1 G. Frank, Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, iii., p. 149. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 153 and temple clerics. "From true prudence and pastoral wisdom," He did not attack but under- mined popular errors. Thus He never denied the silly doctrine of Original Sin, but He showed the capacity of human nature for moral excellence. In theory Bahrdt follows this excellent example, but his experience of the individual specimens of man- kind, he thinks, might have turned him into a devil. This optimism in general and pessimism in particular is a feature of the movement. A higher type was Basedow, the founder of the Philanthropin schools. Father Basedow Goethe describes as a man of restless energy both in thought and action, with a mind turned in upon itself ; and Bahrdt describes him as pacing up and down the room saying, '* Dear Bahrdt, if you are the man who genuinely seeks the good, I will en- tirely pour my spirit into you, for I have ideas which hitherto no man has ever had ".^ Even Goethe was offended by the virulence with which he would in any society attack the doctrine of the Trinity — that doctrine containing for Goethe some right understanding of the Divine mysteries. All the conventions of the past were to be pulled down and a new building erected from the foundation. Education after the type of Rousseau's Emile was to make a new race. Human nature, uncorrupted by bad education, was unspeakably good and, built up by good education, was infinitely perfectible. This new school which was to fashion the new humanity, was called the Philanthropirmm. 1 Leben, Theil 4, p. 34. 154 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION In it the children were above everything else to have a good time, that human nature might blossom in the sunshine. Only with knowledge profitable for this life were they to be troubled, and even that mild pill was to be well sugared. The practical result was such that Herder said he would not send a calf to be educated on this sublime system. Yet, however much of a travesty it may have been, there was behind the attempt a right idea of education which has not been unfruitful. The same thing perhaps could be said of the whole age. It ex- aggerated, and yet it claimed for all humanity a freedom which was its due. But the only faith upon which this idea of freedom rested, was that man is bound to receive as true everything essential to human felicity. This covers, as Basedow argued, a belief in God, providence and immortality, since without them felicity there could be none.^ To follow nature did not mean to follow what is living, varied and concrete, but, as history was only a long record of the perversion of simple truth, and as dependence on it was only prejudice and bigotry, true human nature had to be evolved out of the inner consciousness. Nature to them was precisely what Butler had called *'a futile imaginary model of a world," which in practice means a world into which we can read our own dulness. Commonplace was glorified, and the high court of appeal was found in what was adoringly called •* the sound understanding ". By a more sentimental way, the English temper of the age was reached — unimagina- ^ G. Frank, Geschichte, iii., 15. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 155 tive, utilitarian, argumentative. Paley's definition of morals as " doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness," summed up the whole ethic of the Popular Philosophy as much in Germany as in Eng- land. Kindly good sense is the sum of private duty. The justice which regulates our duty to others is defined as " wisdom united to goodness ". Church and State were erected as useful institutions, as sensible arrangements in the circumstances. Mendelssohn, the most popular of the Popular Philosophers, argues that when man realises that he can as little perform his duty towards himself and towards his Creator, as towards his neighbour, in solitude, he can no longer remain alone without a sense of misery. " He must, therefore, leave solitude and unite with his fellows in society, in order, by mutual help, to satisfy their needs and, through common intercourse, to further their com- mon good. This common good includes the pre- sent as well as the future, the spiritual as well as the earthly — one inseparable from the other. With- out fulfilling our obhgations, neither here nor there, neither on earth nor in heaven, is felicity to be ex- pected." ^ In a sensible, reflective way society erects institutions to govern the actions and educate the thinking. And, seeing that man's duties refer to his Creator as well as to his neighbour, he needs a Church as well as a State. By the same method as the Popular Philos- ophy explained life, morals, government, religion, ^ Jerusalem, p. 17. 156 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION it proved the sole objects of its faith — God, Providence, ImmortaHty. In his Morgenstunden Mendelssohn sets up against Kant the familiar arguments for a Necessary Being who from the nature of the case must exist, and an All-perfect Being who must include reality among His other perfections, with an easy confidence in their utter sufficiency which goes far to justify Kant's sum- mary dismissal of them as sophisms of the reason. Upon similar comprehensive grounds, the Popular Philosophy defended the hope of Immortality. It had one real basis of all its convictions — precisely that easy belief in providence which Butler had exposed. Ritschl finds in this central position assigned to the belief in providence the essential truth of the movement, but in the basis sought for it its proton pseudos. " When the theology of the Auf- klilnmg renounced dogma in order to set the moral character of Christianity in a clear light, it kept its foot on faith in providence as the distinctive religious function." That is right, he holds, but the belief that providence is a truth of natural religion he thinks a fundamental error, no less calamitous because it had already found footing in the Orthodox Creed. " Let the error once enter that the love of God is a truth of natural religion, and that it no longer needs to be put in connection with reconciliation, and there immediately follows a difference in the feeling of self-surrender to God's will. It is no longer the energetic and brave feeling that neither life nor death, neither WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 157 things present nor things to come, can shake the believer, but it is small, soft, sentimental. It is then landed in the Old Testament difficulty about the difference between worth and happiness, and can only solve it by the postulate of compensation in another world, whereas the Christian conscious- ness of reconciliation overcomes it in every moment of the present." ^ It is easy to be unjust to the movement and to regard its glaring idiosyncrasies as its sole characteristics. As Gustav Frank puts it, it was " the enthronement of subjectivity "." That could not fail to be one-sided and extreme, yet it is always a necessary stage on the way to true free- dom. Its goal, perhaps its natural goal, was the Revolution ; but there also lay its justification, for, if man fell back upon himself, it was because there was so much authority which denied him his birthright. Christianity, no doubt, was travestied. Jesus, it was said, preached only this moral reli- gion. Did He or His disciples seem to favour a more positive tyj^e of religion, they were accommo- dating their teaching to their time. By this prin- ciple of Accommodation everything inconvenient was explained away, and the principle was exten- sively used even in the most serious exposition of Scripture. Nevertheless, something was accom- plished for that freedom of faith which is essential to a true understanding of Christianity. The great '^Die Chris tliche Lehre von der Bechtfertigung und Versoh- nung, vol. iii., p. 179. 2 Geschichte, vol. iii., p. 3. 158 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION truth that religion, and especially the religion of Jesus Christ, rejects compulsion and requires a faith and a life was accentuated. " Religion knows no doing without intention, no work without spirit, no conformity of action without conformity of mind. Religious doing without religious thinking is empty puppet show, not Divine service. That must come by itself from the spirit and not be bought by reward or compelled by penalty."^ These things were seen before by men of reli- gious genius like Pascal, but now they were forced upon the general mind. Beside this popular Rationalism, and running as a separate stream, was an ecclesiastical and theolo- gical Rationalism. Indeed the strict application of the word is not to the Aufkldrung of society and periodical literature, but to the more earnest phase of it in the university and the pulpit. This type of religious thought was dominant all over Germany at the close of the eighteenth century and the begin- ning of the nineteenth. Its effective creed was simply the old Deist Trinity — God, Virtue, Immortality. Its distinguishing characteristic, however, was its rela- tion to the faith and the doctrines of the Church. Instead of opposing the doctrines and scriptures of the Church, it set to work to distil out of them its own faith, and only its own faith. This quint- essence alone was thought worth keeping. With the spread of this Rationalism a kind of spiritual blight passed over Germany. It was found in pulpits all over the land uttering cold 1 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 27. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 159 moral platitudes and indulging in exegetical feats which first aroused wonder, then ridicule. The method afforded a vast field for ingenious dulness. To prophesy (weissar/en) was to say something wise. To walk on the sea was a colloquial way of saying Christ walked on the shore. The five thousand were fed by the contagion of a good example induc- ing people to pass round their luncheon baskets. And the homily was worthy of the exegesis, as when the early walk of the women to the tomb was used to point the moral of early rising. Common Rationalism, ratiojiaiiwius vulgaris, thus grew to be a term of reproach and ridicule. Yet it must not be forgotten that these absurdities accompanied a great phase of thought which was not gone back from, but gone through with. It was the work of Kationalism that made Rationalism in the end seem so poor and mean ; for Rationalism had a van as well as camp followers, and it is by its van that an army should be judged. The chief seat of this serious and learned Ra- tionalism was the universities, where it was not in- fluenced by French but by English Deism. '* The French Deist," says a writer of the time, ''gives a swift outline of his principles, skips over the ques- tion at issue and makes mockery of the whole business, as if he had demonstrated his assertions to the bottom." Voltaire, he adds, " wrote not for the learned. He wrote for the unlearned — for women-folk, for princes and shop-assistants — hence he won so many proselytes of unbelief."^ With ^ Zschamack, Lessing und Semler, 1905, p. 43. 160 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION this type German professors had nothing in com- mon. Most of them had travelled towards their position by way of Pietism and Wolffs philoso- phy. Pietism, while cultivating a disregard for the accepted doctrinal system, had impressed them, in a way not to be shaken off, with the power and importance of religion. The Wolffian philosophy had reduced everything to logical deductions, and left no basis for anything deeper except an alien Divine word, but it insisted that men should be serious and argue from a system of things. Light, therefore, was chiefly sought in the Eng- lish thinkers. Baumgarten in Halle was at once Wolff's most famous disciple among the theologians and the first authority on English religious con- troversy. English theology was in Germany in those days what German theology is in England to-day. Baumgarten alone seems to have reviewed almost every Deist and Apologetic work in our lano-uao^e. The translation of Sherlock's Trial of Witnesses reached thirteen editions. The many volumes of works like Lardner's Credihility of the Gospels did not prevent them being translated and widely read. The name that is most singularly absent is Butler's. Because he is little mentioned, it is taken for granted that he had little influence. But the deepest influences often travel by the most circuitous channels. Schleiermacher's chief work, for example, is not translated into English to this day, and references to him in earlier decades are few, but there has been no more potent influence in English religious thought for nearly a century. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 161 In the same way Butler's name is difficult to find in any German account of the period, but his in- fluence is by no means difficult to trace. Does any one suppose, for example, that Baumgarten is independent of Butler when he announces the following view of revelation : " All that God makes known to us through the natural revelation. He must also acknowledge and confirm in a nearer, an immediate revelation, though in the nearer re- velation more is contained than in the other " ? ^ This again became the basis of the Rationalist conception of revelation accepted by Semler, Lessing and Kant — that it is simply an earlier and easier way of learning the truths of reason. This connection between Butler and Kant confirms the view which on general grounds it would be difficult to escape, that the true forerunner of the Categorical Impera- tive is, by however indirect a way, Butler's doctrine of conscience. Hume and Shaftesbury and Hutche- son and many other English writers Kant read. Butler he may not have read. But it is one of the lessons of our study that the influence of a great thought, once it is put forth in the world, is not confined to its direct channels. That Butler's doc- trine of ProhahUity had anything to do with Kant's assertion of the Practical Reason as the faculty of ultimate reality, admits of more doubt, but at least we can say that it was nearer akin to Kant's thought than anything else then existing in the world. The predominating interest of the time, however, was directed toward the English External Argu- 1 Zscharnack, p. 228. 11 162 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION ment and the questions regarding Scripture which it had raised. On it Semler, the pupil of Baum- garten, fed his critical spirit. And Semler we may take as the most influential representative of serious and learned Eationalism. His piety was sincere, if vague ; and his learning vast, if chaotic. The ruins of an enthusiastic Pietism and the substructures of a dry and negative Rationalism abutted on one another, by which combination in him Semler did much to give its character to the later Rationalism. The English writers, he saw, did not go to the root of the matter. They discussed what they took the state of things in ancient times to have been, but neither orthodox nor heterodox investigated what they actually were. It is easy to argue, he says, what codex and canon must have been, "but out of our thoughts that history comes not". Thereupon he laid down the distinction which has been fundamental in Criticism ever since, that the Bible is not to be taken as a whole, but that each document is to be judged by itself both in respect of worth and of authenticity. The sole test of in- spiration, for him, was worth for religious instruc- tion. This is not decided by the canon, which is merely a collection for the use of the public insti- tution of the Church. For private use the worth of the books is vastly different. "I have not straightway held all books of the Old and New Testament equally indispensable for collecting rightly and completely the fundamental truths of our Christian personal religion. They may all be useful for many Christians, but there is no Chris- WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 163 tian doctrine which all Christians must deduce from all books of the Old and New Testaments."^ This is but a narrow Rationalist view of the Bible as a primer of certain moral and religious truths, but it also ends that kind of attack on Christianity which Carlyle describes as Voltaire's whole stock- in-trade. "That the Sacred Books could be aught else but a Bank-of-Faith Bill for such and such quantity of enjoyment, payable at sight in the other world, value received ; which bill became waste paper, the stamp being questioned — that the Christian religion could have any deeper founda- tion than Books, and all Revelations and authentic traditions were but a subsidiary matter, were but as the light whereby that Divine writing was to be read ; nothing of this seems to have, even in the faintest manner, occurred to him."^ History, nevertheless, remained for Semler, not an inquiry into the sources of things whereby we might penetrate a little deeper into their meaning, but a kind of pruning-shears for cutting away pre- judices and superfluities from the abstract truth. His penetration was in no way equal to his erudi- tion. In the back of his mind he still thought religion should have been written on the skies, so that he ever returned to Cosmopolitanism as the ultimate test of truth. Hence he could see nothing in the Old Testament but a national book of the Jews which had become connected with Christi- anity through Christ and the Apostles using it in 1 Semler's Lehensheschreihung , ii., 135. ? Carlyle, Essays, ii., 47. 164 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION making converts from Judaism. This was merely an accommodation to the time on their part. Nor is this accommodation absent from the New Testa- ment itself. It also " Judaises," as, for example, in its recognition of the taste for miracle. Paul's letters, not being abstract expositions, from the nature of the case state truth accommodated to the readers. Much of this accommodation involved a necessary consideration which still requires to be practised ; but Church History is full of a worse kind, designed to "■ keep the great mass in ignor- ance and make it easy for Church leaders to choose for their business quite other matters than faithful persistent instruction for ever greater welfare".^ Yet we are to do a little accommodation also to- wards this same public institution of the Church, for, while every man's private religion is to be absolutely free, the regulations which, though it should have been the people, the princes have laid down for the Church, are to be carefully regarded. There you have the typical mental and moral attitude of Rationalism. It does not break with Scripture, but reads its own abstract beliefs into it. Everything local and particular, which means every- thing living and concrete, it puts aside ; yet the Church as a useful educational institution is not to be disturbed any more than necessary. Its idea of freedom is the ordinary idea of the Aujkldrung as absence of constraint, and its chief abhorrence is the obligation of creeds, what it calls Zwangs- theologie. Nevertheless, it begins to be hampered ^ Zscharnack, p. 183, from Kirchengeschichte, vol. i., p. 10. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 165 by problems of life and action, and is being made to realise that it needs a deeper idea of freedom and something more to base it on than an easy belief in providence. A still more interesting figure is Lessing. Being a man of the world and a man of learning, both streams of Rationalism are united in him along with waters from a higher source than either. In no man are all the varied influences of that transitional time in more active fermentation. To his M'mna von Barnhelm Goethe ascribes the first clear vision of a higher, more significant world in literature — a world of living men.^ Hence the Rationalist in Lessing which reduced everything to abstractions of the understanding, and the poet which found all reality in the living and the con- crete, are in perpetual warfare. The one fire which burned in him with unquenchable flame was the search after truth. It afforded him a joy for which, he thought, not even the secure posses- sion of truth would compensate him. To this eager- ness to give truth a free field and no favour is to be ascribed his publication of what is known as the Wolfenbilttel Fragments. To others his action seemed a case of setting the house on fire to keep the fire brigade alert, but to that charge he replied that doubts are always most dangerous in the dark, and that it is a praiseworthy endeavour to try to bring every birth of the human spirit into the foundling hospital of the printing-house. The Fragments which Lessing professed to have ^ Au& Meinem Lebeji, Th. ii., Bk. 7. 166 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION found among the manuscripts of the Wolfenbuttel Library, of which he was librarian, were in reality extracts from a work by Reimarus, a teacher in Hamburg, who had died a few years before in the odour of sanctity. The whole work Reimarus had entitled Apology or Defence for the Rational Wor- shippers of God. It maintained an ordinary but extremely outspoken form of Deism with the usual objections to a revelation at any particular time and in any particular place, the usual bias against Judaism and the Old Testament, and more than the usual amount of fraud attributed to Christ and His Apostles. All the real truths of religion were said to spring from the ideas of God and Divine things, inborn in the soul, and a Revelation was thought impossible, untrue, useless, immoral. Worldly dominion is apparently the only origin of the positive religions — even Christ's main object having been the establishment of an earthly king- dom. Wherefore, in the name of religion itself, the fall of Christianity is to be predicted and pursued. The sensation caused by the appearance of this work was due as much to the editor as to the work itself. Yet Lessing would only have endorsed his author's views in a very small degree. He looked, indeed, for a third dispensation as much greater than Christianity as Christianity had been greater than Judaism, and he held the Bible a primer of religion, possibly as useful because of what was read into it as because of what was found in it. But Christianity had struck its roots too deep in his life to be eradicated after the absolute fashion WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 167 of the Fragments. Partly the learned piety of his father's home was still the deepest influence in his life ; partly he felt that Christianity was the greatest of historical growths and that history alone was the source of living reality. The idea of history as the development, not only of man's outward life, but of his inward nature and deepest sym- pathies, was growing clear to him. Religion was to him the education through which the human race was passing, an education in which particular and local beginnings are necessary. Of all poor ways of understanding a thing so great, mockery, he felt, was the worst. " God has His hand in the game, all except our errors," and the error of the scorner is the worst. Sometimes he speaks out of the bosom of the abstractest Rationalism, and sometimes as an en- lightened Christian. ''The theologians," Nicolai tells him, " believe that you have become a free- thinker and the free-thinkers that you have become a theologian." *' The restless zeal," says Herrmann, " which makes the appearance of this man so worthy of regard, and which at the same time stirs such painful sympathy, springs from unsolved re- ligious problems. He suffers heavily under the historical burden of the positive religions, yet can- not escape the feeling that in this historical growth, in Christianity, the life-nerve of humanity lies hidden." ^ The Christianity of the Gospels, Les- sing feels, has blood in its veins which never throbs ^ W. Herrmann, Warum hedarf unser Glauhe geschichtlicher Thatsachen, p. 13. 168 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION in the pale ghost of Rational Religion, though, in the last issue, he himself seems to have no better belief. " The more convincingly," he writes a friend, *' one party would convince me of Chris- tianity, the more I doubt ; the more wantonly and triumphantly the other would trample it to the ground, the more I feel inclined to uphold it, at least in my heart." In the Christian doctrines, too, he finds profound meanings, whereas in the system of the Rational Theologians he finds neither Christianity nor reason. Yet the authority of a historical religion can in no way be made to agree with his just and necessary freedom. His first difficulty is with the Scriptures. Though the New Testament has enlightened the human understanding more than all other books, Christianity existed before the New Testament was written, and is still independent of it. Religion is not true because the Apostles taught it, but they taught it because it is true. Now as then, it lives in the community and is discernible by its inner truth. A revealed religion cannot be so devoid of inward marks as to be dependent upon a book. It is not a medicine to be swallowed, package and all. Far more than belongs to religion is found in the Bible, and it is pure hypothesis that it is all infallible. " Thou, Luther ! Great misunderstood man ! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of Tradi- tion ; who will free us from the yoke of the Letter ? " Yet Lessing's only way of escape seems to be to look upon the Bible as a sort of handbook for teaching man to find certain abstract truths WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 169 which only his reason can prove. History, he feels, is the account of the education of the human race, and the religious development is the centre of the process, yet he knows not what to do with a his- torical religion. " Contingent truths of history can never prove eternal truths of reason. That is the ugly, wide ditch over which I cannot get, oft and earnestly as I spring." Wherefore, he is forced to fall back upon the position that revelation is just, like other education, a way of teaching us more easily and effectively what in time we might have learned ourselves. The same difficulty presents itself with equal force to Kant. " If religion is in the position that critical knowledge of the ancient tongues — philo- logical and antiquarian learning — is the bed-rock of it, the Oriental scholar can drag the Orthodox whither he will ; they dare not cheep, for in what, according to their own confession, is the proof, they cannot measure themselves with him, and shiver- ingly behold a Michaelis smelt their ancient treasure and stamp it with another form." In Kant also the spirits of two ages were in conflict, and the eighteenth century summed up its highest results in him as in no other man. As a consequence the new generation of thinkers found in him their necessary starting-point. Of him Les- sing's favourite saying from Leibnitz is pre-eminently true, that the philosophical sects are nearly all right in what they affirm but not in what they deny. No man is greater within his own limits than Kant, but the limits of few great men have been so 170 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION severely set. Yet that also belonged to his equip- ment, for in that wide-spreading, encyclopaedic age, such limitation made for power. Education and nature combined to fashion him a man sternly self-controlled, able and willing to regulate according to rule every detail of life. No man had more of the spirit of the age, but, hav- ing come from a lower stratum in society than most of the other thinkers of the century, and hav- ing lived in closer contact with the stern realities, he had less of its fashion. That blessed deliverance he owed largely to the home of the harness-maker where the struggle with a hard world did not admit of the consolations upon which a more leisured class rested its easy optimism. There religion was the sole presupposition of dignity and freedom, Pietism being delivered from its painful inward groping by the high task of owning nothing and owing nothing. That task of mastering life as it were with the bare hands, which is the natural human condition, the man of the world is apt to forget. Paulsen draws attention to the influence upon German thought of the many leaders it has drawn from the class of the handworkers, from Melanchthon — he might have said from Luther — down. They may have been limited ; they were perhaps dully professorial ; they could not express themselves as men of the world like Hume and Voltaire, but they had the supreme advantage of having mixed with people " to whom religion was personally the greatest question of life "} 1 Fr. Paulsen, Kant, 1898, p. 26, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 171 That was the blood in Kant which responded so warmly to Rousseau. *'By disposition," he says of himself, '' I am an inquirer. I feel all the thirst for knowledge and eager unrest to advance it, and contentment at progress in it. There was a time when I believed that that could make up the honour of mankind, and I despised the multitude who knew nothing. Rousseau corrected me. This dazzling predominance disajopeared and I learned to honour man : and I should find myself more use- less than the common toiler, did I not believe that this study could impart worth to others and restore the rights of humanity." ^ In this interest in man as man Kant was not altogether different from his age, for perhaps no century has done more than the eighteenth for the emancipation of the individual as such. But its faith was in knowledge and its hope in simplifying and popularising it, whereas Kant learned to look for the freedom and dignity of man in deeper matters than intellectual attainments or any kind of outward situation. Nor was any one more under the influence of the great intellectual idea of the century than Kant — but again with a difference. Newton and Rousseau he names together in a way which shows that he himself was quite aware out of what strands his philosophy was woven. The passage is of the utmost significance for understanding Kant's rela- tion to his age. " Newton saw order and regularity combined with greater simplicity, where before him disorder and ill-assorted multifariousness were IK. Fischer, Kant, 4 Auf., 1898, i., 254. 172 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION found. Since then the comets run in geometric courses. Rousseau first discovered under the multifariousness of accepted human fashions the deep hidden nature of man and the veiled law by the observance of which Providence will be justified." ' To combine Newton and Rousseau was Kant's problem. On the one hand he sought a world in which the law of gravitation would run absolutely, and on the other a world in which the moral law would run equally absolutely. The Law of Gravita- tion in particular is at the heart of his whole theory. He seeks, as it were, so to extend the mechanical idea into the realm of spirit as to prove that the mind is also a planet moving in its own orbit, under its own and not under alien law. Kant was a great astronomer as well as a great philosopher, and two objects alone, he says, awoke his supreme reverence — the starry heavens above and the moral law within. One of his earliest at- tempts at authorship was an explanation of the origin of the planets by the laws of motion, by what is now known as the Nebular Theory, and his theory of perception is simply a Nebular Theory of Know- ledge. First of all, in order to explain how mathe- matical formulae, which are only of the mind, should not only be emiMrically applicable but be neces- sarily valid in experience, he regarded space and time, to which they apply, as not external realities but forms of the mind, as the mind's necessary ways of arranging its perceptions. Instead of the 1 Kuno Fischer, p. 248. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 173 old explanation that " God geometrises," he argued that the perceiving mind geometrises. The mate- rials of knowledge are mere multifarious sense impressions, the manifold of sense, which Kant conceives as a mere haze of nebulous atoms which, as they float into the circle of attraction, are, by the mere force of the laws of reason, rotated, as it were, into an ordered knowledge. Nothing could be more in the spirit of the eighteenth century, yet nothing could be more fatal to its reliance upon the definite unit known as the sound understanding. Mathematical law, moreover, which had so long seemed to imprison the human spirit, is now used to emancipate it. No man was more under the power of the mathematical method than Kant. In his two great Critiques he forced his thought into a kind of quasi-mathematical form in which it fits like fingers in thumb-screws. But in thus following the spirit of the eighteenth century, he passes into another world. He fixes upon the necessary nature of mathematical knowledge. Only what the mind itself determines can, he argues, be thus certain before all experience of its application. Wherefore, the rules of mathematics are forms of our experi- ence, i.e., ways in which we must receive it. Time and space to which they apply are not forms of reality but only forms of perception, forms in which we must arrange our sense impressions. But in that case mathematical law does not lead us out to overwhelming vastness so much as it leads us back to the overwhelming significance of the thinking mind. Thus the mechanical idea which had so 174 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION long imprisoned the spirit, becomes itself a spiritual phenomenon. Mechanical law, moreover, being only a way of ordering our experience, is not valid beyond pheno- mena. It can have no validity for the Noumenal World, the Thing-in-Itself, the ultimate reality. The very necessity which makes such a law as causality apply to all phenomena, to all things as we know them, proves that it depends on our way of receiving knowledge, and, for that very reason, proves that it is not applicable beyond. Its abso- luteness within its limits and its severe restriction to these limits go together. Beyond these limits no thinking can advance, for the simple reason that the minute we begin to use the understanding the forms of the understanding are imposed upon us, but when we find in practice that the moral law is a law of freedom, we have no right to reject free- dom because of forms which have no application in that deeper region. Here, then, we have two worlds, one a pheno- menal world, a world as we know it, the other a noumenal world, a world we only touch by the exercise of our moral freedom. In working out this idea of freedom, Kant is also under the influ- ence of Newton, even while he struggles to get beyond him. The moral law he conceives also as a sort of law of gravitation. The moral law is the law of reason, and reason is for Kant the abstract, uniform element in life. So much is this the case that he makes the sole test of a moral law its fit- ness to be universally applicable, To every man it WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 175 is the same categorical imperative. Under it, dif- ferences of character can only mean imperfections of obedience. It is a moral law of gravitation, the sole difference being that the planet has the know- ledge of its course and the choice of moving in it. It is the Newtonian law of the Intelligible World. All this is essentially of the eighteenth century. The same is true of the idea of freedom that went with it. The essence of it was absence of interfer- ence from without — heteronomy, the acceptance of any other controlling force but the moral reason, being the source oi^ all evil. But herein lies the merit of the whole system. Kant did not retreat ; he went forward. He did not reject the great scientific idea of the century ; he advanced through it into another realm. For this realm he has several names, none of them perfect. His favourite phrase is the Intelligible World as opposed to the Phenomenal. That is less misleading than the Thing-in-Itself. The Thing-in-Itself is too readily taken to be a mere physical something unknown lying behind experi- ence. What Kant meant was a world of spiritual realities, a Divine End of the world, a Moral Governor, a free and responsible immortal spirit. Such a world is needed by reason, for we must proceed on the supposition of a thinking subject and an ordered world ; but, so far as mere thinking is concerned, we cannot get outside of our thought to prove that these ideas of reason are more than forms of thought like space or time, more than ways of imposing unity upon experience. Our 176 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION ultimate ground is not any argument reason can compass, nor any insight it can soar to above argu- ment, but a necessity of the practical reason, some- thing we must live and act by. Yet this practical necessity gives reality to all our thinking as well as all our acting, and freedom is the ground of reality even for the speculative reason. Without it ex- perience would be a mere variety show. Freedom is the essence of our personality. To act freely, not as the plaything of impulses, but according to an idea of law which our own reason has laid down for us, is to be a person, not a thing, is to rise into the realm of absolute pur- poses. It involves that a man should be treated as an end in himself, that the world should be a sphere fitted for him as a moral agent, that there should be a moral government and therefore a moral Governor, and that there should be scope for moral action, and therefore immortality. All this, Kant argues, follows from the demand that man should act solely from reverence for the moral law. That is the sole ground of faith ; and it is faith, not knowledge, that deals with ultimate reality. Here, then, we have two realms, each governed by a law capable of being reduced to Newtonian simplicity and completeness. The moral Law, the Newtonian Law of the Intelligible World, has just two marks, universality and necessity. It must be capable of being a universal law, and it has the binding force of a law of nature for the moral will. The planet in this higher world announces its course and has the choice of obedience, but the WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 177 moral law as absolutely prescribes its course. This legislative power, which Kant calls the autonomy of the will, is fundamental. Independence is an essential of morality. " A man's conduct is moral, only if he does what he sets before himself as being unconditionally necessary." ^ This position follows from Butler's maxim that, " if conscience had might as it has right, it would absolutely govern the world," for, in that case, conscience must stand wholly upon its right. But then independence becomes the highest obligation. Freedom is not the superficial idea of doing what we like, but the power of an- nouncing the highest law for our own guidance. Nor is the sphere of freedom the play-room allowed to us after God is satisfied, but it is the whole circle of life in which the voice of reason in our hearts ought to be the voice of God. Freedom becomes the basis of all worth in human nature, the sole way of lifting ourselves into the region of things eternal, and even of using this visible world for its final end. Not knowledge which is only acquisi- tion, but wisdom which is ourselves, is the final security of life. This exclusive place of conscience or the Prac- tical Reason is emphasised in the title of Kant's work on religion — Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. In the earlier days of the Auf kid- rung that would have meant within the limits of argument alone, but Kant means within the limits of conscience alone. The issue of the book drew down, if ever an ^ W. Herrmann, Faith and Morals, Eng. trans., p. 364. 12 178 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION event did, the irony of the gods. The great Fre- derick was dead, and his nephew, Frederick William III., reigned in his stead. Open profligacy did not hinder him from regarding himself as a pillar of orthodoxy, nor the maddest fanning of the flame from thinking himself called to quench the fires of the French Revolution. By this paragon the aged sage and, in his own dry way, the saint of Konigs- berg was treated to a severe spiritual admonition for his dangerous tendencies ; the man who spent a laborious life teaching the age the eternal order of personal duty was rebuked by the crude youth whose ill-considered fits of repression were as oil poured upon the furnace of revolt. The absurdity of making visible authority the pillar of the world could go no farther. But the orthodoxy of word has ever esteemed itself a greater security than the orthodoxy of spirit and action. The book was partly issued in 1792. After being suppressed by the censorship in Berlin, it was issued complete with the imprimatur of the Uni- versity of Konigsberg in 1793. Kant then received his sovereign's rebuke, and, as " your Majesty's most loyal subject," promised to hold his peace on the subject of religion. Had it not been thought that Kant's style was a sufficient guarantee against corrupting an ignorant public, the book might, in that age of violent reaction, have met even a worse fate. The confidence was reasonable. Though it is not stretched upon the quasi-mathematical rack upon which Kant usually tortured his thought, it wanders somewhat like a river in the fens, now WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 179 deep with profound thinking, now merely muddy with confused expression. The basis of everything is the autonomy of the Practical Reason. There is, therefore, no room for any authority but conscience. As a result, Kant concludes that the sum and substance of religion is morality. The starting-point is the freedom of the will. The will is free because it acts at all times on what Kant calls a maxim, that is, a deliberate principle of action. His commentator Kirchmann takes this to mean that a man cannot be bad without deliberately resolving to be bad, which he justly considers nonsense.^ But natural impulses do not directly override the will. When a man commits adultery, it is not a case of the impulses of the flesh proving stronger than the restraining impulses of decency, self-respect and fear of consequences. But the moral law says : Reverence your own person and treat other persons as moral beings and not as mere instruments of your pleasure. Before a man can sin in face of that command, he must in some way accept self-love as a rule of action. The final decision lies between that maxim and the maxim of duty resting exclusively on reverence for the moral law. Thus, to disobey is, in a sense, as much an act of reason as to obey. Wherefore, the springs of moral and immoral action alike lie not in the impulses, but in the mysterious sources of the will. Freedom, then, is the power to make the ^ H. V. Kirchmann, Erlduterungen zu Kant's Beligion, etc., 2 Auf., 1900, p. 15 f. 180 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION moral law our law, to follow reverence whatever attraction there may be of pleasure or whatever re- pulsion of fear. A man, in short, is free, because he can do what he ought. There is, thus, in every action the difference between walking by the maxim of self-love and walking by the maxim of reverence for the moral law, so that good and evil are not divided as heaven and earth merely, but, as Christianity rightly divides them, as heaven and hell. To regard man as half good and half bad destroys the security and definite- ness of all moral principle. In the judgment of reason the moral law stands entirely by itself, and to oppose any other maxim to it shows a corruption deep in the sources of the personality. Evil thus lies in something which is before any action ; yet, as it cannot operate without our choice, as, in the last resort, it must be a free choice for which we are responsible, it is obligatory to alter it ; and what is obligatory must be possible. The real hindrance is the deceitfulness of the heart, and neither force of impulse nor defect of conscience. The heart is satisfied with action and heedless of the disposition which alone gives it worth, and ascribes to itself the merit due only to fortune. This self-deceit is the foul blot on our race, disturb- ing the moral judgment and confusing the sense of merit and demerit. Wherefore, the Scriptures rightly ascribe the origin of evil to sin, to trans- gression of the moral law as a commandment of God; and rightly describe the process by calling the originator of it a liar from the beginning. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 181 Man is not created good, but to be good ; and this end is to be sought by what Kant calls " the moral ascetic," by which he means the discipline of the free, though corrupt will. As man's whole worth rests on his power to obey the moral law, his highest means of grace is to contemplate with admiration this moral endow- ment which makes us, who are so dependent upon nature, disregard nature and life itself, and which allows reason mightily to command without pro- mise and without threat. To awake enthusiasm by this contemplation is the truly moral means of confirming men in good. In this scheme the supernatural, in the ordinary sense, has no place. Every wise man, Kant thinks, admits the possibility of miracle, but proceeds in action as if everything depended on himself. Prayer should do no more than ask conformity to God's will ; and even such prayer a good man might not practise. The whole religion of ritual and outward worship is an attempt to gain God's favour as if He were a mere human superior suscep- tible of being influenced by praise or persuasion ; whereas God is only pleased when men are morally good. God's succour, no doubt, is a reality, but it is outside of our experience ; and to be always ex- pecting a work of grace to do what we must do ourselves, if it is to have any merit, is a hurtful moral attitude. Our sole task is to make ourselves worthy of the Divine succour by following after goodness. Yet the difficulties which grace has been wanted 182 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION to meet are boldly faced. Kant has a deep sense of the failure of man to rise at any time to the just demand, to be holy as our Father in Heaven is holy, of the need of a blessed assurance of perse- verance in good, and, above all, of the difficulty of being delivered from a guilt once incurred, seeing that no future obedience can ever do more than satisfy its own obligation. How a man, he says, can make himself good is beyond our knowing. As, however, the command to make ourselves better men continues, the task must be possible, even though it be only by way of making ourselves re- ceptive for higher succour. Gradual reformation cannot work the renewal. A revolution is re- quired, a complete change of mind, a kind of new birth, a new creation, a complete transition from the maxim of self-love to the maxim of holiness. That being accomplished, a man is — so far at least as his principle is concerned — a subject susceptible of good ; and though attainment still needs long progress in the narrow way, in the eyes of God who sees the endless progress as a unity, he may even now be pleasing as, in a sense, a good man. The only religion of any significance for this task is Christianity. All other religions are merely ritual : Christianity is the only moral religion. As the founder of the first true Church, Jesus is to be honoured as a teacher who taught publicly a pure, penetrating, simple religion in face of a burdensome ecclesiastical faith. The Gospels are the highest embodiment of this pure and simj^le religion. Yet, they and all positive religion are only useful be- WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 183 cause man's thought is sensuous and limited. If all men were philosophers, able to see that the essence of religion is to receive the moral law as the command of God — to see, that is, that the moral law is the law of the universe as well as our law, and that we are not asked to act justly except in a just world — the utility of outside aids would be past. Revelation is possible, but only of things which men are capable of knowing by their own reason, though not so early and not so well, and which, once known, must rest on their moral not their historical evidence. Otherwise we should, in Kant's view, have a competing authority with conscience. What the Scriptures should be used to teach is this religion of reason, the meaning of which ap- pears in the Idea of the Son of God and the Deduc- tion of the Idea of Justificatioyi. The Son of God is humanity in its moral per- fection, an ideal humanity, which is the only worthy Divine goal of creation, proceeds from God's nature, is in God from all eternity, the image of God's glory, a begotten son not a created thing. In such an ideal God has loved the world, and only by acceptance of it can we be children of God. Not having ourselves created it, and not knowing how human nature could be capable of it, we say that this pattern descended from heaven ; and, if we represent such a divinely disposed man as holy and not deserving of the suffering which, never- theless, he accepts for the world's good, we can speak of his life as a state of humiliation of the Son 184 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION of God. Though the ultimate quality of any good act is what is unseen and impossible to exemplify, a truly good man who had descended, as it were, from heaven to earth, and through teaching, conduct and endurance, gave the example of a man well-pleasing to God, would accomplish an incalculably great good in the world, effecting, so far as outward experience can go, a revolution in the human race. Next, we have the deduction of the Idea of the Church. In the very idea of reason, every race of rational beings is designed for the common aim of forwarding the highest as a common good. The basis of an ethical commonwealth cannot be an outward bond, or it would cease to be ethical. The ultimate basis is the moral order. Religion is obedience to the moral law as a command of God. As God's command it has unity of purpose, a goal we can call the Kingdom of God. Through man's shortcoming, however, visible churches become ne- cessary, and we should work continually for their improvement. Though the claim of any visible organisation to be divinely constituted is baseless and oppressive, a church agreeing with moral re- ligion and in advance of public progress may well be a Divine institution. Solemnities and observ- ances, though no service of God, may, in their place, be a temporary education for the true re- ligion. The Kingdom of God, nevertheless, only arrives when the faith of the churches is changed into the pure religious faith which rests neither on fear nor on favour, but simply on the assur- ance of good to all who do good. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 185 The history of the church is the history of the conflict between ritual and moral religion. The triumph of the ritual idea, of the belief that God is pleased with pious trifling, is the moral death of reason. The cleric is thereby exalted to an au- thority which needs not to convince but only to command. He becomes so strong that the State is tempted to accept his assistance. Then, from this dominion over men's minds, the Church comes to rule the State. The result is a habituation to hypocrisy which undermines the fidelity and up- rightness of the subject. As with all wrong prin- ciples, the opposite is accomplished from what was intended. Unless duty is first and religion built upon it, unless we trust in God's grace because we obey God's command, we worship not a God but an idol. Two apparently opposite criticisms are usually urged against this position. First, that to act morally is to do what we do not like. That is per- haps less destructive criticism than it seems, for to act morally is certainly to have strong distrust of acting according to our liking. The other is that Kant also arrives finally at happiness as the end of morals, seeing his belief in God rests simply on the need to make the moral man blessed. But it is one thing to base our belief in blessedness on morals and another thing to base our belief in morals on blessedness ; one thing to believe that the world is in the last issue just, and another thing to believe that justice is simply a weighing up of happiness. 186 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION The real failure is Kant's wholly negative atti- tude. He has only one rule for all and can only hold differences of character to be defects in obed- ience. Even that rule operates in the void. Wis- dom begins and also ends with the fear of the Lord, and has no way of going on to the love which casts out fear. There is a failure to realise how much freedom in this big world needs a free relation to God as well as to one's own soul. Hence the par- simonious conception of worship and grace. Kant is like an Egyptian fellah with a vast ditch before him, objecting to the rising of the Nile because it would deprive him of the credit of filling it with his shadoof. He will have no gospel, and no scheme of morals ever stood in more need of one. His yoke is not easy and his burden is not light. Though he shared with his age the con- ception of Judaism as a religion of mere ceremonies and rewards, there is nothing he stood nearer than the religion of the great prophets. Wherefore, in spite of the emphasis he laid on freedom, he cannot make man free, but rather discloses the need of a religion above this morality to raise men to the glorious liberty of the children of God. Kant's failure is at least partly accounted for by his attitude towards historical religion. It is in his eyes a useful kind of nursery governess for the true moral religion, but to rest upon it is " the superstition of mixing matters of ancient fact which the most frivolous may know, with the true rational moral faith which only the good can cherish". History may, however, have a different significance, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 187 even on Kant's own view that faith is simply faith in goodness, faith that the world is directed by a good holy will, faith that all things thereby serve the ends of goodness, so that the acts which to us are separate acts of obedience to the moral law are all directed to the one end of the Kingdom of God. On that view it must be of supreme import- ance to work in the light of faith, for we thereby find unity and freedom in our relation to the moral law. For that faith history must be of supreme signifi- cance, seeing the Kingdom of God is the final goal of history. If the good will is distinct from all other things in the world in being absolutely good, none of its acts can grow old. If we have in free- dom an absolute of action, we must have in the work of freedom an absolute of history — something of the eternal foundation not of an earthly but of a heavenly kingdom. Thus we are delivered from Lessing's difficulty that we cannot build eternal truths of reason upon contingent truths of history, for what we build upon history is a fact, the great fact which sums up all history. Moreover, we have a history which the frivolous cannot know, a history which has no meaning except for those who are seeking to accomplish the victory of freedom in the earth. But if Kant did not see this himself, he taught others. Nothing did more to restore historical religion to its true place than the prominence which Kant gave to the idea of the Kingdom of God, and the security with which he based it on the eternal element in human nature. This work he still 188 RATIONALISM AND KANT'S RELIGION further advanced by his profound interpretation of Scripture doctrines. He was a Nationalist, the prophet indeed of the later Rationalism, and his creed still ended in the Deist Trinity — God, virtue, immortality ; but it vt^as a Rationalism earnest and profound, a Rationalism which had dug its trenches deep and wide and only needed the rain from heaven to fill them. Most of all, this task was achieved by his austere and lofty scheme of morals. The effect of it was the greater for the contrast with the shal- low utilitarian views of human duty and the shallow optimistic views of human nature resulting from them which prevailed in the age. If all profounder views of human nature rest upon profounder views of human duty, Kant, were that his whole contri- bution, would have to be reckoned among the greatest of religious forces. The new and Divine order which men had so long been struggling to understand, the order of men self-ruled, the order in which Education, Church and State are mere revolutionary forces unless they acknowledge man's free activity and treat him not as a mere means in the hand of the ruler but as an end in himself, found in him large and noble exposition. That view of man which regards the wise poor man and not the rich instructed man as the bed-rock of a stable society, found in him a defence which the next century only poorly maintained. The absolute distinction upon which Kant based all his teaching has been blurred and toned down by misapplication of the doctrine of Development. WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE 189 But, as Kant himself argued, an absolute distinc- tion is not affected by the fact that it comes slowly to recognition. It is not by a Physics of Ethics but by a Metaphysics, not by an account of how morals come to realisation in the world, but by an account of what they ought to be though no mortal had attained, that we must rule our action. Kant was ready to admit the possibility of evolution, and to him it did not seem to affect in any way the absolute claims of the moral reason, a truth which, if we could recover it, would be iron in the blood of our age. LECTURE V EOMANTICISM AND SCHLEIEEMACHER'S SPEECHES ON RELIGION Lessiug, Minna von Barnhelm, 1767. Herder, Vom Geist Hebrdischer Poesie, 1782-83. Goethe, Goetz von Berlichingen, 1773. Goethe, Faust, First Part, 1769-1808. Fichte, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung, 1791. ScheUing, Vom Icli als Princip der Philosophie, 1795. Schleiermacher, Beden fiber die Beligion, 1799. Schleiermacher, Monologen, 1800. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812-16. Books of Refeeekce Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, Dritter Theil, Gustav Frank, 1875. Geschichte und Kritik der neueren Theologie, Fr. H. E. von Frank, 1898. History of Gerynan Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Fr, Lichtenberger, trans, and ed. by W. Hastie, 1889. The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and in England since 1826, 0. Pfleid- erer, 1890. ChristentMim ^md moderne Weltanschauung, Fr. Ehrenfeuchter, 1876. Beden uber die Beligion, ed. G. Ch. Bernard Piinjer, 1879. Schleiermacher, On Beligion : Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. 1893. Von Schleiermacher zu Bitschl, Kattenbusch. Leben Schleier- macher's, Dilthey, 1870. Discussions of the Beden by A. Eitschl, Otto Ritschl, Lipsius, Lemme. The Logic of Hegel, W. Wallace, 2nd ed., 1892-94. LECTURE V KOMANTICISM AND SCHLEIEEMACHER'S SPEECHES ON RELIGION The distinction between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth has been drawn in many ways, but nothing shows it more clearly than the differ- ence in their ideals of freedom. The eighteenth century was occupied with the problem of the indi- vidual ; the nineteenth with the problem of indi- viduality. It was man as man that concerned the eighteenth century thinker. He sought a religious truth that should have one appeal and a moral duty that should have one command, his sole problem being to find the law of man's orbit. In one sense the question of the eighteenth century was greater and more fundamental than the question of the nineteenth. To be able to re- gard all individuals alike and to find man's dignity not in his opulence of nature but in his common humanity, is a fundamental moral and religious requirement. The foundation of all liberty is re- gard for the individual conscience and for the faith which is truly an expression of the personal need. Moreover, this regard for the individual is the only secure foundation for a human society that is to be based on a more stable condition than outward (193) 13 194 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S compulsion. The ultimate test of a social order is its regard for the rights and duties of the individual as such. The century, therefore, wrought an im- mense work for human freedom and ultimately for social security — a work which has been persistently undervalued. That this appreciation should have been lacking in the nineteenth century was natural. During the legitimate reaction from the dry Rationalism of the previous age, men undervalued all that was associ- ated with it. The problem of the individual is apt to be dry and abstract, whereas the problem of in- dividuality is varied and more easily takes to itself a poetic and exalted expression. It is less critical, less negative, more appreciative, more creative. To an age that made its great aim a large, varied, abundant, glowing life, the dry temper of the pre- ceding century, especially its habit of measuring the whole world by its little footrule of the human understanding, was bitterly antagonistic. It is time now, however, that we began to see that this glory in individuality, when unbalanced by the question of the individual as such, is full both of moral and spiritual danger. Regarding this danger Kant himself lived long enough to utter a warning. Against Herder's conception of nature as a series of progressive kingdoms, each growing more abundantly varied and leading up to man as its crown, and against the confusion of moral issues implied in his making man's upright j^osition the cause of his reason, and in his comparison of im- SPEECHES ON RELIGION 195 mortality to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar, Kant showed that this confusion of the physical and the moral left no room for freedom without which there could be no ethics ; that it made virtue and vice mere varying degrees of self-love ; and that in the vast labyrinth we can have no clue unless we make morals the measure of progress, and re- gard the goal of history as man's moral freedom. In Jacobi's doctrine that we have a poetical intuition of all higher beliefs Kant finds it im possible to take his intellectual bearings, and he sees nothing but a wide door for the return of every foolish enthusiasm and vain superstition. By setting up this exalted intuition which cannot be tested, and by rejecting the prosaic appeal which every man ought to have to the common under- standing, it destroys every guarantee for freedom of thought.^ The superior tone also of these artistic philosophers who soar so easily into the empyrean and look down upon the laborious people plodding along the highway of inquiry, seems to Kant to sin against the toiler. Philosophy is in his eyes laboriously prosaic, and these philosophers of vision are merely hazarding its hard-won gains. ^ Though Kant's fears were amply realised, the Romantic movement, nevertheless, enriched both life and thought. Kant had no hope from any- thing except fighting in the valley : Romanticism would conquer its land from the top of Pisgah. * Was heisst : Sich im Denken Orientiren ? Werke I., 121 ff. 2 Von eineni neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in clef Philosophic, Werke I., 175 ff. 196 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S Kant's is the only secure way in the end. With- out it nothing is proved, nothing won, nothing guaranteed. But, without some Pisgah vision of the heart, fighting is a poor, dull, ineffective trade. Without vision, in point of fact, few do great things in life. It may only be the dimmest intuition, a vague anticipation, the sense of some great thing undefined ; but to him who is willing in the sweat of his brow to define it by the great experiment of life, it is neither hazardous nor useless. Few influences, too, did more to create the Romantic movement than Kant's own. No man stood more between the two ages, with his hand on both. His moral temperament and religious attitude were even exaggerations of the limitation of the eighteenth century. The moral law was the law of reason. Reason was the abstract and uni- form element in life. It enjoined man to be moral, but did not show what he was to be moral about ; it asserted the dignity of the individual, but did not show in what form of individuality this dignity was to display itself ; it asserted freedom, but it was freedom in a vacuum not a world. Yet an ethic like Kant's, which went deeper into the foun- dations, could not help showing them to be broader as well as deeper, and could not but demand the larger fulfilment which not resolution but only love is great enough to afford. Thus Kant himself made it plain that the moral reason must be more than a faculty of abstract injunctions, and that it must show God's infinite variety as well as the absence in Him of variableness or shadow of turning. Then SPEECHES ON RELIGION 197 the clanger was no more the austere dominance of an inflexible uniformity of rule, but such generous recognition of every manifestation of life, and such neglect of Kant's half of the truth as made it easy to regard sin itself as little more than the necessary shadow where there is so much sunlight. In Kant's doctrine of religion the feelings have no place. " Such a system," as Schleiermacher says, " can only logically say of them all what has been said of friendship, that man ought to have no time to begin it or to cherish it." Yet what religious scheme had ever more need of being floated by a rising tide of feeling ? Kant's doctrine also made little of history, yet it placed the whole emphasis on the realisation of the Kingdom of God. But if the Kingdom of God within must be completed by a Kingdom of God without, the history of that Kingdom must deal with facts of supreme import for the conduct of life — the more so if it is the history of human freedom, which, as Kant teaches, alone touches the absolute and eternal things. When this became clear, the danger of the nine- teenth century was no longer in the direction of separating man from history, but — Kant's half of the truth being again forgotten — in vague tolerance of everything that ever had historical justification. Still more marked was the eS'ect of Kant's theory of knowledge. Implicit in it, the new age found its two great conceptions — Idealism and Evolution. Where knowledge was so much a creation of the mind, it seemed superfluous to draw any of it from another source, especially as 198 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S the manifold of sense could not possibly be the atomic haze Kant assumed. The world we know is an ordered world, a world we receive and do not create, or if we do create it, the process must be in accordance with the Creative Mind and not merely with our own. Fichte cut the knot, making reason itself produce the manifold of sense as well as fashion it into experience ; but, through Schelling, it came home to the age, with the thrill of a new spiritual discovery, that the contact between man and the universe must be an intercourse of reason, not the creation of a world out of mist, but the thinking again of God's thought, because man was made in God's image. In all its wealth of suggestion the conception is wrought out in Hegel, but, in a slightly different, less Idealistic form, it is also the root of Schleiermacher's thinking. With this conception, freedom could no longer be regarded as mere autonomy, mere self-government, or the task of maintaining it as a mere riding of the marches between God and man and between man and man. God ceased to be thought of as a great planet moving in His great orbit, and man as a little planet moving in his little orbit. Then each seemed so intimately linked to all that the danger was no longer of a hard and barren Deism, but — Kant's half of the truth being again neglected — of a gorgeous pantheism with its confusion of all vital distinctions and its idea of liberty as mere luxuri- ance. The other idea, which was Evolution, tended in the same direction. Of the presence of this concep- SPEECHES ON RELIGION 199 tion in his scheme Kant was more conscious. In- stead of being content to accept knowledge as it is, he asks the great question of how it came to be. While the basis of his explanation is the mechani- cal law of gravitation, it is not a mechanical law but an organic that he seeks to establish, a law whereby it appears that the whole is in all the parts. This at once became the predominating scientific idea of the century. As the mechanical idea governed the thinking of the eighteenth cen- tury, the organic idea governed the thinking of the nineteenth. What the Law of Gravitation was to the eighteenth century the Theory of Evolution was to the nineteenth. Hegelianism is a theory of Evolution, of the self-unfolding of the Universal Reason. Schleiermacher even comes within sight of the Darwinian idea and, in one important re- spect, goes beyond it. All that is in man, he says, is a strife which avails for progress, because he has his place in an ordered whole — the significance of an ordered whole for the struggle of evolution being apt to be ignored. This conception of a restless struggle and a growing individuality in the bosom of a universe that rejoices in the unfolding of all its variety, is the keynote of the new age. Evolution in its Darwinian form — the only form ever heard of by many — has been used as the foundation of a materialism which does not, like the old Law of Gravitation, require even the Great Mechanician. It manages everything by the in- genious process of spreading sufficiently small changes over sufficiently long time. This way of 200 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S begging the cause piecemeal of so vast and won- derful a phenomenon as the world grows less and less convincing, especially as it cannot move a step without admitting a goal and regarding every de- tail as directed towards it. Supposing such a thing as spiritual experience, it is manifestly much easier to find room for it in this idea of organic evolution than in the idea of a world governed by a mechanical law of changeless operation. So far, therefore, the last century wrought with a freer conception of the world than its predecessor. With this conception of the world as a great growing organism, or, as it appeared to others, a great work of art in process of creation, the past became of overwhelming interest, and every form of research tended to become historical. History was no longer a mere record of kings, but had all the past for its province. Dead languages were interpreted, buried libraries were dug up, remote centuries at least dimly illuminated. Science began where his- tory ended, and sought to carry back our knowledge of society and man and living creatures and even the inorganic world to the very beginning of things. Philosophy also became historical, giving its energy to the task of understanding all that is implied in the process of evolution and staking its conclusions on the result. Above all, the study of religion, and many of its practical interests besides, have been historical — the investigation of the Sacred Writings and the history of the Church being the centre of the whole inquiry. The temper of this new age first came to self- SPEECHES ON RELIGION 201 consciousness in literature, and it was profoundly influenced by the artistic idea throughout its whole course. Through a variety of influences the dry moral temper of the eighteenth century reached its cul- mination in Germany. After the long chaos of the Thirty Years' War rule and order seemed the one object of desire ; men had been so long mere pawns in the game of war that it was enough to assert the worth and independence of the indivi- dual ; the poverty of the country, the simplicity of life and the absence of patriotic interest made men indifferent to the want of intellectual scope. And naturally the reaction was strongest where this temper was least qualified. In rapid and glowing contrast to the dry and inexpansive spirit of Ra- tionalism the Komantic movement developed in Germany. This movement which, above all else, gave its character to the nineteenth century, was concerned, not with man's rights as man, but with the development of all that was in man. It de- manded, first of all, a climate in which the soul should expand and put forth its whole glory. A new age seemed to have dawned upon the world, an age of higher interests and fresh creative power. In Goethe's Autobiography ^ we have the very feeling of the time. It was this faithful reproduc- tion of the spirit of the age that made Jacobi say that the truth of this poetry was often truer than truth itself. Goethe's youth lived long in him and its glow was not extinct when he wrote, yet, at the ^ Aus meinem Leben : Dichtung tmd Wahrheit. 202 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S same time, the calm of age makes the reflection lie like the skies in the mirror of a lake. Naturally, artistic interest predominates, for it was the first interest not only of Goethe himself but of the time. Yet he is just even to interests that did not very deeply concern himself. The artistic movement, he saw, had a political and still more a religious source. The victories of Frederick the Great awoke a new sense of self-respect and even a new intel- lectual confidence in the German race. Frederick himself might despise his blood and his native tongue, and give himself to writing bad poetry and using bad language in French, but he could not make Rosbach anything but a German triumph, nor hinder the revival of the despised German tongue which followed the revival of national power. At the same time Pietism, having broken up the icy Orthodoxy as well as the dry Rationalism, awoke to life the religious feelings, and made the Bible a book of life and not a mere text-book of abstract moral principles. To students of Scrip- ture like Bengel, Goethe ascribes a large share in the revival of historical interest. Bengel, he says, being known as a sensible, upright, pious, blame- less man, his book on the Revelation constrained many deep spirits to live both in the past and in the future. The revival of religion brought many sects into being, such as the Moravians and the Quiet in the Land, but they all, Goethe says, sought one object — a more direct access to God than was afforded by the dry morality of the established religion. SPEECHES ON RELIGION 203 The influence of the Pietistic or Evangelical Revival in winning its place for feeling and giving such prominence to the artistic judgment of men and things can hardly be exaggerated. Few pro- minent leaders of the Romantic movement were quite untouched by it. Kant, the forerunner, grew up in the atmosphere of it. Schleiermacher was trained by the Moravians and continued, according to his own acknowledgment, to the end a Moravian of a higher order. Newman's religious life also owed its birth to Evangelicalism. Even Goethe in his early manhood was touched by it, especially as he saw it in the elder women of his acquaintance. But the literary and artistic revival itself drew the young spirits like a religion. A new sense of freedom glowed in them, freedom of individuality, freedom of luxuriant growth asserted against the gardener's shears. One of those straws which show how the wind blows, was the extraordinary prominence given to Lavater with his doctrine of the significance of the human physiognomy. In any other age it would have been an interesting diver- sion ; in that age it was a serious demonstration that man, as it has been expressed, is each one a separate thought of God. The adorable thing in the new writers was that every one stood for some- thing in particular. Klopstock stood for the right of immediate feeling, Winkelmann for beauty of form, Lessing for pursuit of the whole truth, Herder for interest in all human affairs. The Jupiter of the whole Pantheon was Shakespeare, whose name was as a battle-cry against the 204 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S mechanical rules and intellectual frostiness which the eighteenth century honoured as classical, and the model of which was the French drama. To this whole movement the name Romanticism is frequently applied. It then stands for the great poetic movement of the century, the movement of which Wordsworth and Coleridge were priests as well as Goethe and Schiller. But the word is also used with a narrower meaning, being applied speci- ally to a particular school of literature which, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, had its centre in Berlin, and which may be described as the extreme left wing of the wider movement. The School bore all the marks of an extreme reaction. Individuality was often driven to whim and self-pleasing, and the sacred riohts of feelins^ were too often con- f erred uj^on the shallow claims of sentimentality. Its special appeal was to the artistic intuition, and its special task was to expound that great work of art, the Universe, with its boundless variety in closest unity of design. The man after the heart of this School was Goethe. Carlyle's reverence for that vaguely moral personality has puzzled many readers of the great moral dogmatist. But Carlyle had a sure eye for a great force, and he was not mistaken about the preponderating influence of Goethe in that age, and in the main for good. Goethe's resolve to build as high as he could the pyramid of his nature sounds pagan. Understood in one way, such a task is for mortal man the erection of a SPEECHES ON RELIGION 205 molehill. As it wrought on his admirers, however, it was an assertion of the right to walk against foot-binding, of nature against rules, of the beauty, variety and splendour of what God had made against the platitude, sameness, barrenness of what man had determined. His aim is summed up in one word — Culture. If not a religion, it was, at least, a worship. Culture purifies the heart and stirs the sense for the true and good. " In the cul- tured society the world is harmonised. Possession and community of goods do not exclude but include each other. The old world is done away, a new order of things is created, a free race blooms on a free earth. The ideal and the real are reconciled ; nature and art united. That is the fair humanity, of peaceful nature, of free heart, lively and serene ; that is the fair world given to man to replenish, to till and to preserve. The aesthetic state is a peace- ful content in which the soul of man at once suffices for itself and breathes a diviner air."^ That is the new ideal of freedom, the new Kingdom of God. Under Goethe's influence the world came to be looked upon as a great work of art, of which artistic insight was the only Divine interpreter. He even gave birth to the new faith by which this freedom was to live. The influences at work in creating it appear in the enthusiasm for Spinoza. Goethe, no lover of abstract philosophy, read him and found peace in his doctrines as in a religion ; Schleiermacher invokes his holy shade ; nearly 1 Ehrenfeuchter, Christenthum unci moderne Weltanschauung, p. 40. 206 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S every great thinker of the age came, in one way or another, under his influence. In Goethe's mind this pantheism took the artistic form which con- ceived of the world-spirit unfolding itself into all the variety of life and being, for its own artistic satisfaction. This conception, begun by Goethe, and wrought out by philosophy into many forms, had, as its " sentiment of the rational," no longer the undeniable but the harmonious. The first to give scientific expression to this faith was Schelling with his philosophy of Identity, and nothing shows better the gain and the loss of the age than the contrast between him and Fichte. Every man's philosophy, said Fichte, depends on the kind of man he is ; and in Fichte moral strenuousness was the note both of the man and of the philosophy. This sensuous world was a kind of gymnasium built by the soul itself for the exercise of its moral energy. It was essentially a place to play the man in, with diffi- culties and drawbacks expressly for that purpose. What man ought to do, he can do ; and to keep one's loins girt is to be free against the universe. But in Schelling the Rationalist conception of man as master in his own world has vanished, and the new conception of man as at once the creature and the interpreter of the world has come. Then Fichte's limitations passed away, but also his strenuousness. Renunciation also vanishes and artistic expansiveness takes its place. The world is one great organic, artistic whole, thought and substance being only two sides of the same thing, the Absolute being the identity of both. SPEECHES ON RELIGION 207 Then, as utterly as the eighteenth century started with ignoring Pascal's religious appeal, the nine- teenth started with ignoring Kant's moral appeal. Both centuries set off in pursuit of the same thing — an easier and completer solution. What has come in our day to be the common Hegelian ob- jection to Kant, starts by a radical denial of the dualism upon which Kant based his whole hope. Kant, it is said, starts with a foreign element in the object opposed to the subject, *' which can never be exorcised even though in knowledge and action it may practically be overcome "} This, of course, Kant not merely acknowledges, but tries deliber- ately to demonstrate, and even bases upon it his whole belief in a higher world. It is precisely be- cause there is this antagonism between the world and us which no thinking can exorcise, that our practical moral victory over it is so profoundly significant. As this opposition is one of the first certainties in life, the boasted artistic conclusion that all things, man and nature, are gloriously one, is not a solution but an attempt to ignore the diffi- culty to be solved. It is upon this dualism in life that our whole spiritual conflict must bear, and to start with the assurance that we have abolished it, is only to do away with the resistance by which we must climb. By starting without this dualism, we must end with a denial of all fundamental dis- tinctions, with the repetition of the mystic phrase " all in one," with the great cloud-land of pan- theism where the mere shadows of giants carry on 1 Edward Caird, Hegel, p. 121 ff. 208 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S a phantom battle of the gods ; whereas, by starting with this duahsm and bearing the burden of it in life, we may end with the high solution of wisdom and love, which after all is the only unity worth finding in the world. With such a conflict on hand, however, it is necessary to acknowledge that the way of freedom and duty often refuses to be artistic. The world in which they act has a way of being unsatisfactory. Nothing but a world ordered evenly from the centre out to the circumference can wholly satisfy the sense of the harmonious. This defect in moral strenuousness being ac- knowledged, the gain of Romanticism, however, ought also to be acknowledged — its recognition of elements in human nature and in life which had been ignored, its attempt to live in a world and not in a vacuum, its thought of the universe no longer as a great machine of which the main prob- lem was to find the driving wheel, but as a great work of art, the more glorious that it is still in process of creation, its idea of man's mind no more as a mere calculating machine, a lathe for turning out logical conclusions, but as a mirror of the uni- verse, a copy in finite form of the Eternal Reason, not a mere faculty of abstractions, but a treasure- house of all the variety and individuality of the world. Of this Romanticist conception Hegel is the great philosopher and Schleiermacher the great theologian. To Hegel the human reason is a mirror of the Divine, the Eternal Reason ; the process of thought SPEECHES ON RELIGION 209 by which we interpret the world is the same pro- cess by which the world came to pass. And thought is essentially creative. It is not, as the old logic held, a mere process of discriminating. We do not merely affirm and deny, and remain where we were. The process of thought consists in making an affir- mation, then in seeing a distinction in it which leads us to deny, and then, in discovering the wider conception which includes both. That being so, thought is not the mere abstract element in life. Eeason is not the mere universal law, but is a pro- cess by which we are always passing to more de- tailed knowledge, to more concrete conceptions, a process which is always widening to embrace the whole fulness of the truth. Under the same influences, but quite indepen- dently, it came upon Schleiermacher like a revela- tion that reason might be the source of individuality, that, like the Absolute Reason, it might reveal identity in variety, unity in multiplicity, and that the individual might be one distinct, necessary, glorious presentation of the Infinite variety, each person a sort of quintessence of the Universe, but with a character all his own. The idea of the world as a great picture where all the details have been developed out of the main conception, is the essence of all the Romanticist thinking. Its great task was to find a place in reason for individuality. Individuality is its domi- nant thought, and it is because of the place assigned to individuality that Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion have been called the religious programme 14 210 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S of Komanticism. The book was written in the midst of the extreme Romanticist movement, and no writing is more characteristic of this phase of thought. It had the deep and lasting influence which a book can only have when it is borne on the crest of a great movement. As Ritschl says, it represents a movement which would have had a large influence without it, but the soil would not have been so fruitful, either of good or of evil, had not Schleiermacher tilled it. The full title of the book is On Religion : Speeches to its Cultured Bespisers, and it was pub- lished in 1799. As it now stands, it is a very valuable record both of Schleiermacher's own de- velopment and of the changes which took place in his time, but it is not the book that made the first deep impression. Large alterations were intro- duced into the text of the second edition in 1806, and extensive explanations were added to each Speech in the third edition in 1821. When the book first appeared, the author was living in the closest intimacy with the writers of the Berlin Romantic School, face to face with an easy worldly culture which had decided that religion was only for the vulgar. Just as little, he knows, do his friends worship the Deity in sacred retirement as they visit the forsaken temples. But seven years afterwards, the Cultured had become enthusiastic for religion. Yet it was only as aesthetic feeling. Doctrine they would have none, and to buffet their body they had no intention. Twice seven years after that again, and it would have been fitter, SPEECHES ON RELIGION 211 Schleiermacher says, to write Speeches for the Pietistic slaves of the letter. Thus the book in its present form stands as an evidence of the growing seriousness of the age. In the first edition Schleiermacher bent his whole energy to the task of showing those literary friends of his that, to despise so fundamental and formative an element in man as religion, was a defect in their culture. He asserted that religion was not a mere com- pendium of doctrines about God of a kind to influence morals, but that it was something funda- mental and original, a vital element both in human nature and in history. Merely to have affirmed that truth in that age was a work of great merit. Yet, so eager was he in showing that religion is not mere doctrines and moralities, that he scarcely stopped to inquire whether it had any relation either to right thinking or right acting. Everything seemed to end in mere mystical feeling. Hence it became an urgent duty in the second edition to show that an element so fundamental as religion must be intimately related both to thinking and to acting. In accordance with this purpose, the changes in the text are all in the direction of seeking a more steadfast basis for re- ligion than mere mystical feeling. In the third edition the text is very little altered, but extensive explanations set forth the author's later views, especially in the direction of assigning a higher practical value to the visible Church, and of show- ing more interest in the practical bearings of re- ligion. All these changes mark the influence of 212 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S the book and add to its value as a biographical and historical monument. We are, however, mainly concerned only with the first form of it, for only the first edition can be properly described as the religious programme of Romanticism. The main contention of the book is expressed in the title, a contention which the usual translation Addresses or Discourses entirely obscures. The religious man does not discourse. He speaks as man to man. Being in touch with the Infinite, he feels deeply the need of confirming and completing himself by fellowship with others. Man is not free merely as he is self-contained. He reaches the freedom of a large individuality only in relation to humanity and the Infinite. This relation being fundamental to his freedom, to give utterance to his deepest feelings is, for the religious man, always an inward and often an overwhelming necessity. But then comes the task of finding adequate ex- pression for so high a theme. On the highest sub- ject with which language has to deal, we may not fall into the light tone of common conversation. We require all the fulness and splendour of human speech. Where poetical skill is wanting, '* religion can only be expressed and communicated rhetori- cally, in all power and skill of speech". In ac- cordance with this idea, the style of the book is throughout the style of the platform — enthusiastic, flowing, intense, rhetorical, in deliberate and glar- ing contrast to the dull level of expository prose, the cherished medium of Rationalism. Rationalism SPEECHES ON RELIGION 213 had plentifully discoursed on a religion " the hinges of which were providence and immortality," and the sole result had been " the ill-put- together frag- ments of metaphysics and ethics now called Purified Christianity . . . that perfect plaything with which our century has presented history". The whole affair is the handiwork of the calculating under- standing, and the discussion, which ever runs into cold argumentation, treats the highest themes in the tone of a common School controversy. In opposition to all this, the very thing to be asserted is just that religion is not this cold argumentative thing, but that it can only be seen in the pious exaltations of mind from which all activities are excluded, until the whole soul is dissolved in the immediate feeling of the Infinite and the Eternal. This is the original, personal experience by which alone religion can be understood. Only when we have this clue to it, may we hope to discover it in the outer world. A man must first fall back on himself and there find the plan and key to the Whole, if he would hope to find any religious meaning anywhere else. As one who has had such an experience, Schleiermacher comes forward. He comes, not as one who hopes to argue others into agreeing with him, but as one who hopes to awake in others an experience akin to his own. To ac- complish that object he will speak as man to man, without any prepossession of orthodoxy or pulpit conventionality between him and his audience. Of all ways of communicating religion, he says at the close, he has not shunned the loudest. This 214 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S direct, personal, rhetorical, unconventional deliver- ance, even though it may never have been actually spoken before an audience, is rightly enough called Sjyeeches. Fundamental to the whole contention is the Romanticist idea of freedom, as freedom of in- dividuality, with its conscious opposition to the previous idea of duty as the same obedience ren- dered by all to the same legal injunction. That doctrine is thus set forth by Fichte. " What is pure in a rational being and individuality are to be sharply distinguished. The expression and presentation of what is pure in reason is the moral law : the individual is that whereby each one is distinguished from others. A rational being must be an individual absolutely, not this or that definitely, not this or that distinct individual which is a mere thing that comes to pass. . . . Individu- ality depends merely on the relation to a particular body and on the plurality of mankind." All indivi- duality, in that case, is apt to appear mere aberra- tion, and the suppression, not the development of it, the moral task. His escape from this conception of freedom seemed to Schleiermacher nothing less than an emancipation. It delivered him from the sceptre of necessity and the curse of all-devouring time. Formerly, he says in the Monologues, he had hon- oured what was the same in all existences. He regarded that as the highest, the only thing to be considered. He looked for only one rule for all circumstances, and distinguished men only by SPEECHES ON RELIGION 215 situation and locality. Mankind were a uniform mass, outwardly divided but inwardly the same. Even special mental characteristics were only the fleeting results of social attrition. But a new con- ception of freedom dawned upon him, when he saw that " every man represents mankind in his own way, that he feels himself a distinct creation, a chosen work of the Godhead, and that he ought to rejoice in a distinct form and development ". This discovery of one's destiny to be singular only comes hard and late, but, when it does come, it creates tranquillity and serenity of heart. It lifts above the common life and commotion of the world ; it affords glimpses of promise into the future ; it beautifies youth and age. The point of this contention is not that there are diiferences among men. That is always ad- mitted. The point is that the variety is regarded as a necessary presentation of the Universal. Each individual is one aspect of the same infinite image of God. The duty of the individual is to be him- self, to realise the special thought of God which he embodies. As a moral being, it is the highest act of a man's freedom to follow his own bent, limit himself to his own task, be himself. This is Schleiermacher's ethical view, the stand- point of the Monologues. His religious conception, as set forth in the Speeches, is in accord. The moral duty to be oneself rests on the religious view that every man is a distinct manifestation of the Infinite, that " in him a portion of the Infinite consciousness divides itself off and, as a finite being, links itself 216 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S to one definite movement in the series of organic evolutions ". That is the point of view of the Speeches. The Infinite is endlessly at work ex- pressing itself in the most multifarious forms, and each individual rejoices in being one such expres- sion of the infinite variety. It would almost appear as if, to Schleiermacher's mind, infinity in God de- rived meaning and significance mainly from indivi- duality in man. This view of man's freedom, as the right and duty to be himself, went with a different concep- tion of the source of freedom. The creative power in man is not ratiocination, but feeling or intui- tion. By feeling we have intercourse with reality. Where Kant sees only the chaotic manifold of sense, Schleiermacher sees an intercourse with the Eternal Reason. Behind the distinct conscious- ness, before the object perceived comes to stand over against the subject perceiving, we have that undivided feeling in which the soul and the Uni- verse mingle and are one. This moment in our perception is the intercommunion, not of opposite elements — mere spirit and alien matter, but of the Universe with the soul formed by it to correspond with it. It is described as fleeting and transparent as the dew on a blossom, bashful and tender as a maiden's kiss, holy and fruitful as a bridal embrace. It fills no time and fashions nothing palpable, yet is the holy wedlock of the universe with reason in- carnated in man. Being immediate, it is above error ; and, by laying man directly on the bosom of the Infinite World, it communicates every living. SPEECHES ON RELIGION 217 every original movement in his life. It is the original primal experience in which lies the root at once of every impulse of freedom and of every religious emotion. Wherefore, freedom is a dis- tinctive, practical expression of the Infinite, and religion is feeling or intuition of the Infinite. Feel- ing being understood in this sense of direct contact with reality, the religion which springs from it can- not shut up a man in himself or make his freedom consist in mere absence of outside interference. Man truly finds himself only when he goes out into the world and contemplates the visible crea- tion and studies men and history, and then returns with his treasure back into himself, there to find both himself and the title to the possession of all else as truly his own. In this way, the more a man derives from the world both of men and of things, the more he will be himself, and the more all he has will be his own characteristic possession. Here we have the truth which appears most plainly in the poetry of the age — as much in Words- worth as in Goethe — and it is a truth essential for giving meaning to life and scope to duty. To dis- charge his task, man must follow more than a rule, and he may not follow the multitude even to do good ; for, except it is his own task which is in- cumbent upon him in particular without any refer- ence to how far it may apply to others, something is wanting to the right idea of duty. At the same time it. is not difficult to see that this idea of free- dom, as liberty of individuality, can be easily per- verted, even to the destruction of moral equality 218 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S on the one hand, and moral strenuousness on the other. This danger already appears in the very- fact of an appeal to the Cultured. Partly the appeal to this special class was due to the author's situation, but it also shows the influence of the Romanticist ideal of liberty as luxuriance of indi- viduality, the cultured being those in whom indi- vidual distinctiveness is most developed. They are appealed to in contrast with those who are enslaved to mechanical tasks, a slave being defined as ''one who must toil at what should only be done by dead forces". We hope, Schleiermacher says, that the perfecting of the sciences and arts will make these dead forces available for us. That is the same thing as Aristotle's idea of a great mechanical slave. Like him, apparently, Schleiermacher can think of no other foundation of society but slavery or a substitute. Indeed the whole conception is more akin to Aristotle's ideal of the large-souled man than to any Christian ideal of meekness and lowliness. It has no real hope of being able to call the slave God's freedman, and is in this re- spect far behind the eighteenth century. Only this hope of rescuing mankind from these slavish tasks saves the enthusiasm for culture from being a mere selfish caste interest. But this hope rests on a material not a moral basis, and so long as the idea of freedom is merely that of a spacious individu- ality, it is impossible to have any other than a material basis, or to sec how even from it the great bulk of mankind would not for ever be excluded. At all events, Schleiermacher finds that at present SPEECHES ON RELIGION 219 "the pressure of mechanical and unworthy tasks, under which millions of both sexes and all ranks sigh, makes them incapable of the free glance with which the Universe can be found". They have glimmerings of religion which ought to be encour- aged, but they have not the free individuality, such as is possessed by the Cultured, which would enable them to reach the deepest things. Manifestly, there is some mistake. The glorious liberty of the children of God can glorify the basest tasks, and our spiritual heritage should not be at the mercy of any outward condition, even the means of culture. Man in that case is not free in any right sense of the word. Unless life's final goal is something more independent of circum- stances than culture, there can never be any true inward freedom. Even such an outward good as entire social justice would wholly overturn at least the present basis of culture. That problem all Romanticism left unsolved. A condescending at- titude towards the uncultured characterised the whole movement. It failed to make prominent the glory of man which comes from possessing in his own bosom that high authority which ought to govern the world, that sovereign which is ever called upon to lay down a law universal. The uncultured ever remained persons in whom the true glory of mankind, their individuality, had been suppressed, persons, therefore, who must always be expected to be in pupilage. Such an attitude is so far from being confined to Schleiermacher that there are very few of the Romantic writers 220 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S in whom it is less apparent. In Newman, for ex- ample, it is far more prominent. What is the argument by which he defends the authority of the Church, when stripped of its trappings, if not that it is absurd to supjDOse that the ruck of man- kind can ever be in any position but pupilage ? This failure to assert the significance of the in- dividual as such, with his own responsibility, his own guilt, his own weakness, his own need of victory, has throughout its whole course been as- sociated with the idea of development. That doc- trine has ample room for individuality in all shades and phases, but the abiding problem for it is to find a rock in the stream on which to set the in- dividual, so as to secure his unchanging identity and personal responsibility, and so as to find in him a worth which is not dependent on any acci- dental gain, even culture. Ultimately all man's greatness must depend on his individuality, on what he can attain of victory and character that is his own. Even humility, rightly interpreted, is such a trust in God as en- courages us in the face of society and the world to be ourselves. But there is a common character of reason and conscience which belongs to man as man, upon which, and not upon culture, his true individuality is to be built. Only the individuality that is built on this enduring element in man as man can be described as giving freedom. In the whole conception of development this great truth has not yet found its due place, and least of all was it found in Romanticism. With its conception SPEECHES ON RELIGION 221 of freedom as luxuriance of nature, it had no right esteem for man as man, and no right way of testing its convictions by the great experiment of the com- mon life. A fluid artistic idea is at the heart of the whole movement, and this it is that appears in Schleier- macher's conception of religion. Religion he de- fines as feeling or intuition for the Infinite. The favourite words in the Speeches are Universe, hijin- ite, the Whole, All. They indicate the same thing — the unity of the great work of art we call the world. Frank, however, denies that Schleiermacher regards religion as a kind of art, and says that what he does is to regard art as a kind of religion.' In either case his conception is illustrated by art, the prime condition of which is that all the variety of detail be subordinated to one conception. The distinction of every true work of art is to have abundance, variety, beauty and interest of detail all wrought into the unity of one design. Artistic sense is a sure feeling for every way in which the detail illustrates the unity and the unity governs the detail. The sense of the highest unity is re- ligion, and art could not stop short of it, Schleier- macher maintains, were it not for the rest and satisfaction which every completed work of art offers to the mind. Without that it would be necessary to go on to see that the greatest work of art has for its material humanity itself, and that the Supreme Artist is the Deity who fashions it. 1 Fr. H. E. von Frank, Geschichte und Eritik der neueren Theologie, 3rd ed., p. 76. 222 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S This conception of religion is connected with the theory of perception before explained. The source of the feeling in which it consists, is that primal moment of contact between the individual and the Universe, which is the creative origin of all experience. From that feeling religion also springs ; and when Schleiermacher speaks of re- ligion as feeling or intuition, it is in this sense of direct experience. As this transaction between man and the Uni- verse is a more personal transaction in Schleier- macher's view than in the other philosophies of the time, his religious conception is less pantheistic. Yet, even in his case, the tendency of a religion which consists in a sense of the unity of the Whole is strongly towards pantheism. The essential ele- ment in it is mysticism, an element vital to religion, but not one that can govern religion without tending to reduce it to a placid contemplation of an undis- turbed unity, without making it hazy in thought and ineffective in action. Schleiermacher's conception, nevertheless, is rather to be described as defective tha,n as erroneous ; and even the defectiveness is almost atoned for by the necessity there was at the time of affirming strongly the other side against the rage for calculating and explaining which, he says, allows nothing to be done in the true spirit of discovery, nothing in child-like intuition, nothing in a way to receive the impression of anything as a whole. The value of the book is the vigour with which it asserts that religion is an original and funda- SPEECHES ON RELIGION 223 mental element in human nature. " I maintain that, in all better souls, piety springs necessarily by itself ; that a province of its own belongs to it in which it has unlimited sway ; that it is worthy to animate most profoundly the noblest and the best, and to be fully accepted and known by them." That is the claim by which the Speeches on Religion marked an era in religious thought. More than any other influence, the book helped to overthrow the idea which nationalism had so long upheld, that religion consisted solely in uncertain doctrines about God, virtue and immortality, and in ques- tionable motives of reward in a life to come. Our nature is one, and all our activities are interdependent. Religion springs from the very roots of our nature. It is implicit in those first intuitions which are the beginning both of our knowledge and of our activity. Hence religion must have a very intimate relation both to truth and to morals. But religion, Schleiermacher main- tains, is not in itself either doctrine or morals. A system of doctrine is only an attempt to review the province of religion, while, in respect of morals, everything should be done ivlth religion but nothing for religion. The ideas, for example, of God and of immortality are not immediate religious impres- sions, but interpretations involving doctrinal and moral elements. The religious impressions may be direct and intuitive, while the ideas might contain irreligious elements, such as anthropomorphism in the conception of God and other worldliness in the conception of immortality. 224 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S Religion, thus conceived, cannot, in the strict sense, be taught, any more than the artistic sense can be taught. Yet it does not feed on itself, but, again like the artistic sense, goes out into the great world, where it can be forwarded or retarded by everything it encounters. Rationalism is here looked on as the main hindrance. Though the amount of religion may be as great as ever, it is broken up by this oppressive force and so is hindered of its due place and influence. Discreet and prac- tical men, under the delusion that their own activity exhausts the task of humanity, crush out aspira- tion, employing even such openings into Infinity as birth and death only to win young souls for economy and caution. The religious sense, no more than the artistic sense, can be forwarded by discussing and expounding. Religion is not know- ledge that can be taught in a formula, but is a fundamental relation of life, the key to its changes and opulent variety. The capacity for it is born with man, even as the capacity for morality or for government, and, like everything that ought to be ever present and ever active in the soul, it lies far beyond the domain of teaching and imparting. All that another person can do for us, is to help to quicken this innate power by uttering his own religion. This help, however, is of the utmost im- portance, and it succeeds best when it rouses in others a living force which shows that it is alive by going its own way. The persons who, through the expression and communication of their own religion, can thus rouse a life which will afterwards go its SPEECHES ON RELIGION 225 own way, perhaps to the extent of choosing a quite different master, occujDy the high position of media- tors. So far is true freedom from requiring us to be independent of these mediators that we need their help in all departments to mediate '' between limited man and infinite humanity ". Man, that is to say, only comes to his heritage by finding how much there is in him that responds to the highest mankind has thought and done ; and, for calling out this response, he is indebted to others. Most of all in religion, which is a response to the Infinite, we need such mediators, who, instead of interfering with our freedom, as Rationalism ever dreaded, are the chief means whereby we reach it. In life there are two opposite activities. The Deity by an immutable decree appears to have divided His great work to infinity. Thus we see in the human soul, on the one hand, the endeavour, by absorbing what is around it for its own susten- ance and increase, to establish itself as an indi- vidual ; and, on the other, the endeavour to avoid the dread fear of standing over against the Uni- verse, by surrendering oneself to be absorbed in a Greater, to be taken hold of and determined. Sometimes one tendency is extreme, sometimes the other. The commonest and lowest, however, is colourlessness and feebleness of both. The thing to be desired is that both activities, self-surrender and self-realisation, should be at once invigorated and reconciled. Towards that object we can only be forwarded by those prophetic souls who have found God without losing themselves. They are 15 226 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S also called the heroes of religion, and their task is to reconcile man to his place on earth by interpret- ing to him the misunderstood voice of God and by opposing to his restless self-love another self-love, whereby, in this earthly life and along with it, he can love the Highest and the Best. In this attitude towards life and towards other men the great significance of the Romantic move- ment appears. Romanticism saw that man must be free, not to be nothing, but to be something ; not in a vacuum, but in a world ; not in disregard for others, but in possession of the great heritage of the race. All this is summed up by Schleiermacher as freedom in God, and freedom in God may be said to have been the burden of his message. But another question still remains over from Rationalism. We have seen that strictly speaking there are no teachers but only mediators of religion, and that, therefore, seeing they only help us to our own heritage, no debt to them interferes with the freedom of the religious man. But it still remains to be shown how we can be free, if we owe any debt to the historical religions. The primary intuition which gives birth to re- ligion derives its significance from the very fact that, like the seed sown in the ground, it does not remain alone. Religion, even for Schleiermacher, is not mere mystical absorption in the Universe. That is the beginning, but religion continues as " the working of the hour of birth ". Or — to use another figure — in the harbour of his own soul man fits out his vessel, and, only when he returns thither SPEECHES ON RELIGION 227 again, can he discover what wealth he has brought back from foreign shores. Yet he must make his voyage and win his treasure abroad, if he would not abide in penury. Something he can get from nature and something more from nature's laws, but nothing in comparison with what he gains from humanity. The great task of the religious man is to love humanity, to regard even the worst indivi- dual as a revelation of endless, undivided humanity. That is the truth Romanticism needed and which even Schleiermacher so imperfectly attained, but it is to his credit that, in that age, he was not ig- norant of the necessity. This interest in humanity is not to be attributed to his Romanticism, but to his Moravianism ; not to his theory, but to the deeper religion which with him continually went beyond his theory. The Moravian element in him, however, should never be forgotten. He is always a religious man speaking of the things of religion, which, though it may not have added to his consistency, greatly added to his truth and power. But if our treasure is thus to be won abroad, and most of all from humanity, history must be for the religious man the greatest and most general revelation of the deepest and holiest. For religion history is prophecy, predicting that the rude, the barbarian, the formless will be recast, that nothing will remain dead mass, but that all shall be made individual, connected, complex, exalted life. Blind instinct, unthinking custom, dull obedience, every- thing inert and passive, all the sad symptoms of the death slumber of freedom and humanity are 228 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S to be obliterated. That is the goal of the minutes and the centuries, the great ever-advancing work of redemptive love. Here we have Kant's idea of the Kingdom of God, with the Romantic conception of individuality to give it meaning, and the doctrine of development to put it in motion. We must note, however, that it is not so much to history as to a philosophy of history that appeal is made. Now no philosophy of history can be so unhistorical as to neglect the religions. In many cases, Schleiermacher admits they are degenerate. But that does not prove them to be unimportant, for the same is true of everything in time. Religion is debased by being dragged from the depths of the heart into the civil world, but, even then, every positive religion has a marked physiognomy of its own, and the worst has a vigour and reality nowhere discoverable in the tags of metaphysics known as natural religion. And, further, even what is now dead dross was once molten outpourings of the inner fire. A man no more loses his individuality by be- longing to a positive religion, than by belonging to an actual society or an actual state. Only under such great common influences can individuality be created and displayed. The boasted freedom of natural religion is mere freedom to be nothing in particular. It has a providence in general, a right- eousness in general, a divine education in general. Why it exists the gods may know ! Perhaps to show that the indefinite also can have a kind of SPEECHES ON RELIGION 229 existence ! What existence it does have, however, is mainly in denial and in violent polemics. And its polemic is against life, like objecting to be born, because of the necessity of being a particular per- son and not a man in general. A historical religion is a repetition, on a great scale, of our own awakening to the sense of religion. To religious men the original fact upon which their own religion is founded, and the moment when they were filled with the consciousness which has become the centre of their religious life, are always sacred. And more sacred still is the moment when an intuition of the Infinite was set up in the world to be the foundation and the centre of a particular religion. What determines the character of a religion is this intuition and the way everything is grouped round it. Not by the mere quantity of truth it contains, greater or less, is a religion to be esti- mated, but by its special intuition of the Infinite. The original intuition of Judaism, for example, is the feeling of universal retribution, the opposition of God to all caprice. This appears in that marked feature of its literature, its parallelism, which ex- presses the continual colloquy in word and deed which goes on between man and God ; and, again, in that marked feature of its religious life, prophecy, which is the presentation of the part of the dialogue not yet overtaken. The intuition of every religion is to be esteemed. All religions have their significance as manifesta- tions of life and progress. Yet they have not all 230 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S equal value. Christianity is assigned a distinctive place, though there is difference of opinion as to whether in the Speeches this pre-eminence is re- garded as final or not. Strauss takes Christianity to have been regarded in the first edition as merely one of many religions, the highest, but not other- wise distinct, and looks on all the alterations of the later editions as a painful and not very honest schoolmastering of the younger Schleiermacher by the older. Albrecht Ritschl receives the same unsatisfactory impression from the book, as if it merely covered its abandonment of Christianity by using Christian phraseology. But Ritschl's son Otto has answered both.^ He draws a careful dis- tinction between what Schleiermacher considered profitable to bring before his audience of cultured despisers, and the hints he gives of his own fuller persuasion. He even maintains that the last word in the book is the recommendation of positive reli- gion, and of Christianity as its highest embodiment. In the situation, Schleiermacher's exposition was necessarily exoteric, determined, that is, by the dis- tance to which he could hope to carry his audience. He does not, however, fail to indicate his own position, for he speaks of Christianity as being to his readers foolishness, and as lying at an endless distance from them, plainly hinting that, to himself, it is otherwise. The original intuition of Christianity, Schleier- macher maintains, cannot be advanced on. It is not one among an endless number of intuitions of ^ Sohleiermacher's Beden iiber die Beligion. SPEECHES ON RELIGION 231 the Infinite, but it deals with the opposition of all finite things to God and with God's way of treat- ing this resistance. Corruption and redemption, hostility and mediation, give its whole form to Christianity. It looks upon the spiritual world as alienated, and upon all God's dealings as directed to the work of reconciliation. All God's works, in its eyes, are ever new devices for counteracting the innate irreligious principle. Christianity thus uses religion as matter for religion, so that it is not a re- ligion merely, but religion raised to a higher power. This finality of Christianity might seem to be called in question by the two assertions that, un- like other religions, it recognises its own transitori- ness, and that it is quite ready to tolerate other religions alongside of it, and even expects to see fairer forms of religion still arise. But it is only when all things are reconciled to God that it is to pass, only when its purpose is wholly fulfilled — a success hardly to be looked for on this side of time. Other religions it tolerates, not because they might be equally good, but because its first task is to maintain its own purity, to be intensive not exten- sive. As for the fairer forms, they are evidently fairer forms of Christianity itself, for, as there is no higher intuition of God than the Christian idea of reconciliation, there can be no advance upon it. Nor, with Schleiermacher's view of religion as an artistic sense of the unity of all things, could he assign any less significance to an idea so much needed if we are to find repose and order amid the very inartistic turmoil of life. 232 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S Of the founder of Christianity he says in one of the Explanations added to the third edition, '' I acknowledge a purely inward and mysterious re- lation of Christ to human nature generally which is absolutely unlimited". This, it has been main- tained, is an entire departure from the conception of Christ in the first edition, which is said to be purely that of a great hero of religion. But, while a doc- trine of Christ could not be expected in the cir- cumstances, hints of a higher conception are not altogether absent. Before we can see the Divine in humanity, he says, we must seek a " Divine sign ". Among all the holy men in whom humanity reveals itself, we must seek one who shall be a reli- gious mediator for the transfiguration of our intuition of humanity. And a higher character must be found in man to relate him to the universe. Every religion has sighed for something outside and above humanity to fashion and take possession of it. When within the limits of humanity *' Divine nature " is met, this aspiration is satisfied. So Christ remains of abiding value for mankind, both through the clear- ness with which the original intuition of alienation and reconciliation was realised in Him, and through the new impulse He implanted in the race. But the same relation to humanity which re- quires religion to be historical, requires it also to be social. This social quality is essential to it. So personal an experience needs a response from with- out to witness to its reality, and the Infinite is a subject which, of all subjects, we can least exhaust by ourselves, and in respect of which we have SPEECHES ON RELIGION 233 most need to share with others. Seeing, then, that we are seeking witnesses and partners, our profit lies in the largest mutual interchange, and we have nothing to tempt us to cry, " No salvation except with us ". Having made the distinction between the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant, we must not seek the former where hundreds are assembled in the great temples. The virtuosos in religion are always few. To that name it is necessary to draw attention, for it gives a hint of the whole concep- tion. The Church Triumphant is the ideal of a true religious association which the virtuoso, the artist in religion, carries about with him, in which he lives, and by which he estimates the actual Church at its proper value, which is not specially high. Of outward embodiment all he needs is a fluid society where he may easily come into contact with those who can most help him and those whom he can most help. The actual Church is, at best, an assembly of persons seeking religion. Too often it is still less, consisting of people who are rather trying to eke out the want of religion than to attain religion itself. They expect to be passive while one teaches ; they set limits on all sides to the ex- pression of that teacher's most individual feelings and intuitions, so prohibiting what, above all things, they ought to demand ; they receive notions, opin- ions, dogmas, in place of the genuine elements of religion ; finally they distract themselves from all religious concerns by absorption in practical 234 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHEK'S affairs. The result is a ruinous sectarian spirit. Religious opinions, being deemed the way of attain- ing relijrion. must be broucrht into a system to be received on the authority of him who propounds it. Then eyery one who thinks differently must be regarded as a disturber. All this strife, division, insistence on dogma and degeneration into mytho- lotfv is not, however, from religion. On the con- trary, it is quite irreligious. But here it may be objected that, even if this .state of things is not due to the \nrtuo.sos in holi- ness, it at least proves that they have not fulfilled their task, and that, if the Visible Church is not to be regarded as their work, it must, at least, be re- garded as their failure. But the true cau.se of a deficiency so grave in the Church is precisely that these, its true leaders, have been excluded from their task A religion arises with its first fre.sh enthusiasm. The fire catches all round. Presently it appears that the majority have only responded with a fleet- ing glow. Then the Church is tempted and comes down to their level. Time would soon put this right again, for the indifferent would fall awav. But the State st€;ps in, and then everything is fixed. The Church is turned into a corporation, and its work Is made secular and of no interest to the virtuoso in holiness. In return for this calami- tous favour, the State treats the Church as an institution of its own apjxjintment, and turns the priest from being a religious teacher into a moralist in the .senice of the State. Would that this fatal SPEECHES OX RELIGION 235 gift had been refused, for the Church never needs anything on earth but room and utterance, and this hurtful connection with the State cannot be too soon ended. Just as little should the Church be held to- gether by the imholy bond of creeii as by the se- cular bond of the State. Even to diWde the Church into many creeds is no giiin. Each part, like the divisions of a polypus, then becomes a whole, and •* many individuals are not better than fewer ". What is desired is a duid mass, whei'ein the sec- tarian and proselytising spirit has ceased, whei*e each expresses his full individuality and seeks what is in attinity with it. In the last issue the only necess;\ry visible chuivh may be the family. Mean- time our reliance must not be on any outward bond. The great bond is for each to approach the Uni- verse and commimicate with othei*s. The more that is accomplishod. the more perfectly all are one. Most of this is true at all times regaixiing the Church, and was specially true when it was written. Yet the very low estimate of the Visible Chuix^h and the very unsymj^\thetic estimate of its divi- sions are plainly inconsistent with the enthusiasm for individuality which characterises the rest of the book. If natural religion is a hollow abstrac- tion, what is to bo said of a natural church ? If a religion does not lose its signiticauce by falling into corruption, why should a church ? If it be the Divine way that a religion must operate on the world, not by remaining pure, but by entering into 236 ROMANTICISM AND SCHLEIERMACHER'S the world, and then striving to regain its purity, why should it not be the Divine way that the Church should operate, not by keeping apart from social organisations, but by struggling ever to rise above them, so as to be in the world yet not of it ? It cannot be consistent to maintain that a religion must work on the world, even though it stain its purity in doing so, and take no account of the good in the actual channels by which its influence has travelled. To have a Church in general must be as useless as to have a religion in general. But, however illogical the position may be, it accords entirely with the spirit of the system. Religion is a matter chiefly of large impressions. It has no special victory to accomplish in the world. All it needs, therefore, is the free intercourse of an artistic society, where each may find what will kindle his own enthusiasm. There is no common task for which a closer association might be neces- sary. The pantheistic idea of God, the merely contemplative idea of Christ, the merely philo- sophical treatment of history, the view of the Church as a fluid artistic association, all go back to one root and all indicate the same attitude. The interest is so concentrated on individuality, that the individual disappears behind it. Man does not stand, as he did to the writers of the eighteenth century, with the burden of his freedom on his own shoulders, distinct both from God and from other men, arraigning himself before the tribunal of his own conscience and laying upon himself the burden of his own duty. When that SPEECHES ON RELIGION 237 was all, freedom was apt to be an empty idea, and it is Schleiermacher's enduring merit that he in- sisted that man must be free to be something, and that there is no real freedom except in God. But, on the other hand, though Christianity is said to be wholly concerned with ruin and redemption, the ruin is not of sin, but is only the striving of the finite against the Infinite — rather an artistic than a spiritual failure. The individual with his own responsibility, his own guilt, his own weakness, his own need of victory is not asserted. This defect is not merely Schleiermacher's per- sonal failure. It belongs to the whole Romantic conception of development. The doctrine of de- velopment has ample room for individuality in all shades and phases. The very purpose of its opera- tion seems to be the creation of variety and com- plexity of life. But amid the continual flow of change, it finds no place for the permanence and worth of the individual as an individual. That has been its moral weakness throughout, and the great task, one that would be of incalculable gain for the strenuousness of life, is to find a rock in the stream on which to set the individual with his unchanging identity and his abiding responsibility. LECTURE VI THE EEVOLUTION AND NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Hegel, Encydopcidie der philosophischeii Wissenschaften, 1817. Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glauhe, 1821. Coleridge, Aids to Beflection, 1825. Hegel, Beligionsphilosophie, 1832. Tracts for the Times, 1833. Newman, Apologia pro Vita sua, 1864. Books of Reference Spinoza tmd Schleiermacher, Theodor Kamerer, 1903. Schleier- machers Glaubenslehre in ihrer Bedeutung fur Vergangen- heit und Zukunft, Carl Clemen, 1905. Hegel's Philosophy of Beligion, trans, by E. B. Spiers and J. B. Sanderson, 1895. Hegel's Philosophy of History, trans, by J. Sibree, 1857. The Logic of Hegel, W. Wallace. Hegelianism and Personality, 1887 ; Man's Place in the Cosmos, 1902 ; and The Development from Kant to Hegel, A. Seth Pringle- Pattison. Kahnis, hiternal History of German Protestant- ism, trans. T. Meyer, 1856. The Oxford Movement, E. W. Church, 1892. Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Neivman dimng his Life in the English Church, Anne Mozley, 1891. Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith, 1900, and Cardinal Newmati, 1891, R. H. Hutton. Cardinal Neivman, Wm. Barry, 1904. The his- torians of theology as above, especially Pfleiderer and von Frank on Schleiermacher. LECTURE VI THE EEVOLUTION AND NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA The Komanticism of the last lecture flourished in the dawn of the French Revolution, in the days when, Wordsworth says, it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven. Humanity, like Samson, was awaking and rending its withes ; and henceforth evolution would be what the Deity meant it to be, a fair and even progress. Only ten years later, and the temper of the nations had en- tirely changed. In the sacred name of freedom the Revolution had assailed rights for which men wish to be free, and the last rampart against the flood had vanished in one day at Jena. Then men's thoughts changed. So long as the great army of Frederick was believed to be an adamantine bul- wark of the existing social order, it was easy to believe that the Revolution was a cleansing flood ; when it swept unchecked over all shores, it was hard to think of it as anything but a devastation. Men began to discover that they might pursue the form of freedom and miss the substance ; and then a serious spirit fell upon the age. " Only in the days of calamity," says Schleiermacher, " which were the days of glory, did we again learn the power of common sentiments, and then the con- (241) 16 242 THE REVOLUTION AND sciousness and consolation of a common piety re- turned." The importance of the social state became apparent, and especially the need for some fellow- ship in pursuit of righteousness which could be called a church. The difference is nowhere more apparent than in Schleiermacher, who himself re- cognises that all the changes in his later thinking have their root in a higher estimate of the import- ance of the actual Christian society. This is manifest in his two characteristic concep- tions of the function of dogmatic theology and the nature of Christian piety, both fundamental ideas in the Glauhenslehre. Dogmatic theology he defines as " the science of the system of teaching obtaining in a Christian society at a given time," the purpose of which is to help forward a harmonious guidance of the Chris- tian Church.^ Hegel takes this to mean that theo- logy is to be an account of what other people think, and he assails it as an abandonment of the task of finding the truth. ^ Ritschl, on the other hand, praises this recognition of the Christian society as Schleiermacher's chief service. As Schleiermacher imposes upon theology the task of showing the harmony between speculation, which is the highest objective function of the human spirit, and the pious self-consciousness, which is the highest subjective, he cannot have meant, as Hegel sujjposes, to shirk the task of showing somehow that what he says is true. What he does contend for is that Christian- 1 Der Christliche Glaube, 1884, i., pp. 102 and 108. " Philosojjhy of Bel ig ion, Eng. trans., i., 40. NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 243 ity, in its essence, is a fellowship, that Christian piety of necessity leads to the Christian society, and that the Christian theologian, writing in the society and for it, must meet the test, not only of his own individual conviction, but of application in the society. Piety he defines as " the feeling of absolute dependence ". That conception governs his whole later system. The expression affords excuse for Hegel's criticism that it makes the dog a more pious animal than his master. But Schleiermacher did not mean absolute in the sense merely of unlimited. It is absolute because its object is the Absolute. Practically it means the same as the former defini- tion, " sense or intuition of the Infinite ". The essential thing in real religion is still the feeling of the Infinite as something we everywhere come upon, a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused. It is still the sense that life is an intercourse not of one person with a multitude of things, but of one person with one Infinite. But the new expression is chosen to avoid the appearance of making religion begin and end with mystical feeling. Feeling is not mere emotion, but an immediate consciousness, a direct contact with reality, a creative experience out of which all knowledge and all activity are engen- dered. Just because it is immediate contact with reality, it at once divides into thought on the one hand and action on the other, and proceeds to build up its system of things. That the pious feeling, the 244 THE REVOLUTION AND feeling of the Infinite, is capable of a like develop- ment, that it at once divides into doctrine on the one hand and morals on the other, and so builds up its system of faith and duty, Schleiermacher now labours more fully to express. In the old days he conceived the Universe as the great work of art wherein man found scope and variety. Now he thinks of it rather as the great system in which men may build their own systems of society securely and be assured of peace. Sense or intuition cor- responded with the conception of a work of art ; the feeling of absolute dependence is the same thing adapted to the conception of a system. This absolute dependence on the one Infinite carries with it an absolute relation to all rational creatures. The task of progress is to fashion a fellowship to be a joint recognition of the common order and a joint refuge from the common corrup- tion. That fellowship is the goal of history, and Christ derives His significance from being the Ideal which the society needs, but cannot itself be. The same determination to get beyond mere feeling is still more marked in Hegel. His i)hilo- sophy professes to unfold nothing less than the great system in which man's societies and systems of thought find their due place. The appearance of these two great system-builders together is more than an accident. A system of things was a re- ligious and not merely an intellectual requirement. It was the way of securing both the substance and the form of freedom which met the need of the time. The Revolution had taught that true freedom NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 245 could only exist in an ordered world. But, in the troubled days which followed, it was impossible to think any more of an ordered world as a work of art without any discords. Wherefore, men were forced to think of it as a system which could in- clude and harmonise discords. In accordance with this necessity both Hegel and Schleiermacher aim at a system wherein the natural shall be super- natural and the supernatural natural, wherein God shall not be interpreted by incidents but by the system as a whole. For both, history is the true revelation of God. As the revolutionary, negative, antagonistic element in history was then much in men's thoughts, the first part of the endeavour of both' was to find a place for it. Those who were born in the days of the Revolution could regard it as a mere eruption from the pit, but those who were old enough to have known all that preceded it always felt the obligation laid upon them to acknowledge something of a Divine purpose in it. Hence, indeed, the re- ligious necessity of a system. It was a method of explaining the negative, a method of justifying the seemingly chaotic ways of God to man. The essential thing in the explanation of both is the same. The antagonisms only exist in time. God is beyond the region of antithesis, beyond contrasts and oppositions, beyond the whole strife between good and evil in which we at present live. The bad, Schleiermacher argues, is a necessary part of the good. The good could only come into action " through the ability of man to come forward with 246 THE REVOLUTION AND what is in him," and that involves the possibility of evil. He even seems to argue for more than a possibility, as if evil were a necessity for finite creatures, an unavoidable stage in development. The bad, being in this way only a consequence of what is good, is, in a sense, not from God, and, as the good develops, it will disappear.^ To Hegel suffering and sin are necessary aspects of Spirit in its progress, valleys through the gloomy bottoms of which we pass on to the heights. This place of the negative in progress is the most characteristic feature of his whole scheme of thought. Development by suffering, struggle, sin, is the centre of both systems. Progress is no longer an even process of fruit ripening in the summer sun. Nevertheless, both were still seeking the old Romanticist idea of freedom as the luxuriant ex- pansion of individuality. Hence the reality of this struggle had somehow to be denied. Sin for Schleiermacher is restriction of the consciousness of God, and for Hegel it is in a similar way a matter of limitation not of transgression. The feeling of absolute dependence which is true piety, Schleiermacher says, involves a belief in the original perfection of the world. But that original perfection may only be an original possibility of being perfected. No actual good exists that has not come into being through struggle. In the course of development conflict must arise, because the spirit, being one, advances by moments of re- markable illumination and quickening ; whereas the '- On his view of sia see i., pp. 348-50. NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 247 lower powers of sense, being a multitude, require to be vanquished in detail. Hence the develop- ment becomes irregular, and sin, as the sense of the restriction of the consciousness of God, enters. The removal of this restriction is redemption, but that process also is so irregular that guilt and ill-desert must come in to prepare the way. Hence arises also a heritage of sinful impulse which we make our own by accepting and furthering, and we need not only individual succour, but the shelter of a divinely effected common life to counterwork sin and the unhappiness which follows it. The crea- tion of this Divine common life is for him the very goal of history. It is at once the greatest task and the crowning need of freedom. Hegel starts from the same point as Schleier- macher — from the moment of contact between the individual and the Universal Reason. The differ- ence is only in the more intellectual nature of Hegel's solution. For Schleiermacher the creative element is feeling ; for Hegel the only reality is thought. Perception, with Hegel, is a rethinking God's thought ; it is picture thought. His whole scheme rests on one great postulate. If the Uni- versal Mind can be thus interpreted by my mind, the process of thinking must be identical in both. There cannot be two kinds of thought, and hence, as God is not the highest feeling but the highest thought, the individual reason must be the key to the Universal Reason. As Spirit is the ultimate, in the end the only, reality, this movement of reason or spirit must be the key to everything. Truth and 248 THE REVOLUTION AND the free spirit are identical. Free means being delivered from what is individual and particular. Our minds, being free from such disturbance, being in their own unperturbed orbit, correspond with God's orbit, so that the whole process of the world is a sort of logic in action. To find the key to the Universe, then, we only- need to discover the true process of thought. Now the essence of thinking is, first, to distinguish, to make differences, and second, to surmount them, to find agreements. I cannot think in my own soul. An object I must have, and it must stand over against me, different from me, alien to me. Yet the task of coming to know it is a process of bring- ing it back into myself and of finding myself in it. This is the rhythm, the pure, eternal life of Spirit. In this process of setting something over against itself, and then of finding itself in it, this process of negation and reconciliation, the notion unfolds itself according to a necessity which is the process by which the Universal Spirit creates actuality, as well as that by which the individual spirit knows it. In this process negation is essential. The general impression with which we start contains everything, but, not until we discern differences in it, is anything clear in it, anything individual. And this progress by division, by opposition, is as true of the Universal Mind as of ours. The Christian truth that we must deny self to live to self is the method of Spirit in its whole advance from the lowest natural form to the highest self-conscious- ness. Wherefore, we can in one sense say that NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 249 everything was in God from the beginning, but only in the undefined sense that everything is contained in a general proposition. The individualising and realising is through this process of discriminating and reconciling, so that God only understands Him- self in His universe. Thus God for Hegel is not merely the great System-builder, He is the great System in which everything is right because every- thing is in its place. History, then, is this movement of Spirit on its way to self-consciousness, and the historical religions are important stages. All have their place and their importance, but Christianity is the absolute religion, because it has attained the absolute truth of the movement of Spirit in its doctrine of the Trinity and in its idea of reconciliation in the God- Man. God the Father is the unity out of which all comes, but in which nothing is defined. He repro- duces Himself out of Himself and distinguishes Himself from Himself in the form of the Son. Then the reconciliation takes place in the Holy Spirit. And, at the same time that God is justly conceived, the right relation between God and man is justly conceived. The hard division between man and God which Rationalism carried through so drastically is overcome. God is found in man and man in God, and so the finite and the Infinite are reconciled. Through this scheme we see Hegel's interpreta- tion of the lesson of his age. But he also definitely refers to it. The French Revolution, he says, was the result of two partial ideas coming together, not 250 THE REVOLUTION AND in union but in collision. Religion prescribed law for eternity and the State for time. Two things that should go together were thus separated, till in the Catholic States personal freedom came to be looked on as opposed to religion. It seemed to set up against religion subjective freedom as something true in and for itself. Conflict then ensued between the religious principle which requires the surrender of the will, and the worldly principle which makes the will the foundation of everything. Religion in this purely negative attitude is thus, in Hegel's eyes, the prime revolutionary force. That religion should maintain the substance of freedom is, in his view, not enough. The form is also essential. I must be free in the sense of being in accord with truth and reality, i.e., with God ; but I must also be free in the sense of ac- cepting myself my own beliefs and choosing myself my own actions. Except I am thus free both in my own soul and in God, I am not really free. Plato's Republic, for example, which considers only the arrangements of freedom, does not present freedom ; nor does Kant's Metaphysic of Ethics, which only asserts the categorical imperative, the form of freedom.^ Both elements are required in true freedom. With all this Schleiermacher was in essential agreement, the basis of all his theology being Freedom in God. As God is the goal of all de- velopment and the bond of all true fellowship, as immediate knowledge of Him is the higher life, ^ Philosophy of Beligion, i., 252 ff. NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 251 while distraction among the various calls of the senses is the lower, we cannot truly be free in God without being free in our own souls. Both to Schleiermacher and to Hegel freedom and truth are one, because God and man are, or may be, one. In finding the truth man finds himself, finds what reveals him to himself, while the presence of the Divine is its own witness to minds made in God's image, the appeal of the actual to the potential, of attainment to original disposition. All this is of the first importance for the con- viction that genuine faith and real freedom can never be in disagreement, but when we come to ask how this freedom is attained and what this freedom really is, the weakness of the whole Romantic Movement even in its highest and most serious mood becomes apparent. Freedom with Hegel and Schleiermacher alike is rather a result of progressive development than a work of purpose and endeavour. Man rather registers the barometer than does anything to improve the weather. As Ritschl says, Hegel made nothing of the individual will, but gave exclusive heed to the development of the good in the form of states ; while Schleier- macher, through his intentional indifference to the idea of will, built his comjDrehensive organisation of the ethical system in the air.^ But to give any other place to will was to abandon the whole artistic explanation, was to in- troduce disharmonies which could not be treated as mere discords to perfect the music. Will is a ^ Bitschls Leben, ii., 347. 252 THE REVOLUTION AND disturbing element to include in the perfection of a system. But while so much similarity in men so widely different shows that they reflect the spirit of the age, Schleiermacher and Hegel also represent the division that was appearing in the age. Though Hegel exalts religion as the necessary completion of the natural and the moral, in practice he differs very little from the old view that religion is a kind of popular philosophy. Historically indeed he assigns it a higher significance, for he sees that it embodies large human interests and that it is a great creative force. But in respect of its present value it contains the truth onl}^ in an instinctive, popular, pictorial way. Philosophy alone can state it ab- solutely. Worship is a practical reconciliation of the Divine and the human, but philosophy is a continuous worship. The reconciliations which religion only gropes after, philosophy, by showing how everything is right in its due place in the great scheme, wholly attains. In the last issue we come upon a great formula, and when that absolute truth is found, religion is not only satisfied but surpassed. Schleiermacher, on the contrary, maintains that we cannot know God in that absolute sense. We know Him only as He is reflected in ourselves. Theology is not a statement of absolute formulas, but only a description of the pious states of con- sciousness in which the Divine is mirrored, and religion is not theology, not any doctrine, but a feeling, a sense, a direct relation.^ 1 Der ChrisUiche Glaube, i,, pp. 6, 94, 158. NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 253 In opposition to this attitude Hegel argues that religion has always been first of all doctrine, and doctrine has always been accepted as a statement of absolute truth. ^ The difference is not intellectual merely. It is a difference in the conception of the faith by which men can be free. Whether Hegelianism is to be called pantheism or not is largely a matter of words, but it is pantheistic in the sense of seeking a free- dom which can sit at the centre and watch the planets roll, which can know the whole current and disregard the eddies, which can contemplate the Universe and disregard the incidents. At first sight such absolute knowledge seems alone to meet our need of reality, while the admission that re- ligious knowledge is relative to our needs seems to concede that it is not knowledge of reality at all. It also seems at first sight to make us masters of the whole situation and to give a marvellous sense of emancipation. But we soon find that it is no gain in knowledge to neglect the relation to us by which alone we can know it. So far as knowledge from experience goes, it is real knowledge, and its very inadequacy leaves us with a sense of freedom ; whereas a great formula which comprehends God reaches so far beyond man's grasp as to leave us sure of nothing but a great inexorable force. Nevertheless, the Hegelian idea of religion as essentially doctrine made a powerful appeal to an age that was above everything in search of rest. Men had been wearied by struggle into something ^ Philosophy of Beligion, i., 38 ff., and ii., 343. 254 THE REVOLUTION AND of an Oriental willingness to take rest for peace, and in Hegelianism there was something of the Oriental pantheistic answer to man's turmoil which met this weariness. It all ends in intellectual contemplation, in the vision of the panorama of progress, in making history a movement and Christ an idea, but it seemed to offer a way back to a well- founded orthodoxy and a stable order. Schleiermacher's conception of God is also tinged with pantheism to the extent of corrupting his whole view of Christianity, but the ditierence can be seen in his doctrine of Christ. With his view of history he must also give Christ an important place, but it is as a moral force, not as a mere logical idea. He is careful to make Christ part of the system, to make Him, like the rest, both natural and super- natural ; but religion is a prime reality with Schleier- macher and no mere rudiments of philosophy, and, in his doctrine of Christ, he cannot help caring for the religious interests of faith and hope and love. The perfect society, he argues, in which we ought to work out our salvation is at the present time an impossibility, but a perfect individual is possible. Wherefore, the perfection of the Church is not in its state at any time or in any communion, but in having, as a common possession, the sinless perfec- tion of Christ to which every one may turn as the ideal of the society. Such a manifestation, however, is not a purely supernatural and separate act. The appearance of Christ in our humanity is only a reve- lation of a capacity for the consciousness of God implanted from the beginning. Christ's work is NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 255 simply a completion of the creation of human nature. In this sense of expressing the perfect consciousness of God Jesus is Divine. He is arche- typal {^arbildlich), not merely exemplary {vorbild- lich)} He is the manifestation in a definite person of an eternal act, the highest development of an already existing power, the completion for which all that went before was preparation. Just because this conception is based on a true idea of freedom as a thing of character and purpose, it remains to this day an indication of the right solution. But for that very reason its efifect was less immediate. The Church thought it found a greater security in Hegelianism with its revival of old formulas, its justification of existing institu- tions, its insistence on doctrine. Hegel, too, re- garded himself as a good Protestant, but he did more than any other to provide intellectual shelter for the Catholic revival, and at the same time, it must be added, for the most negative movement. Nor will this combination seem strange, if we re- member that both the extreme right and the extreme left sought their freedom in completeness of system, and that both were determined to bring the struggle of contending interests to a final issue. The Kevolution formed for Romanticism an intellectual and spiritual watershed which made one stream travel, like the Danube, to the East, and the other, like the Khine, to the West. What determined the direction was the way in which quiet was to be sought. This depended on the 1 ii., 28 ff. 256 THE REVOLUTION AND interpretation of the Revolution. If it were mere anarchy nurtured by excess of Hberty, it was to be suppressed as a revolt against properly constituted authority and against the God who appointed that authority. If, however, it had been suckled at the breasts of oppression, then the body politic was only suffering from a raging but recuperative sick- ness which must be gone through with. In the latter case the remedy was plainly greater freedom ; in the former every buttress of authority in Church and State needed to be strengthened. Most of the men who lived through the Revolution maintained their faith in its Divine necessity, but many who were born under its shadow could only regard it and all its intellectual offspring as a brood of dark- ness. The first need manifestly was to revive the power of the Visible Church, the supreme bulwark against anarchy. That would guarantee the sub- stance whatever it might do for the form of free- dom. That this movement was due to general and not to local causes, appears from the fact that it sprang up even earlier in Germany than in England. Kahnis, for example, in his Internal History of Ger- man Protestantism, finds the revival of orthodox Lutheranism the adequate Divine purpose of the whole period, and he is quite conscious of the extent to which the movement was indebted to Hegel. As to a High Churchman among ourselves. Rationalism is to Kahnis only another name for Revolution, and Revolution, political or intellec- tual, merely anarchy. For him also the sacra- mentarian doctrine has derived new significance NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 257 from a philosophy which regards matter as the mere vehicle of spirit ; and, under the influence of a conception of religion which makes dogma its essence, he has the same tenderness towards every word of the Creed. In Germany, as in England, others travelled farther on the same road. The study of history, and especially the study of the Middle Ages which Romanticism had called forth, became of practical significance through the temper of the time. If the Revolution was a mere chaotic upheaval, why not the whole commotion since the Reformation ? Before that event divided the German people into two camps, the Church was the bond of society, and the Holy Roman Empire the pillar of unity and strength. Had not the substance of freedom been sacrificed all these centuries to the form of it ? Why not go back, by one bold leap, to those days of greatness ? This movement, though it began in Germany and though its reverence for the Middle Ages had its historical reasons in Germany and not in Eng- land, was far more effectively carried through in our own country. The idea of a freedom which should ignore the form for the substance appealed powerfully to a practical race habitually indifferent to logical consistencies and enamoured of working compromises ; favourable conditions fostered it ; the enterprising character of the people organised it ; a man of religious genius guided and inspired it. The German movement, moreover, never re- ceived such adequate literary expression as would 17 258 THE REVOLUTION AND bring the study of it within compass, whereas in Newman's Ajyologia we have a narrative written from within with full sympathy and unrivalled subtlety of presentation. For the stream of Ro- manticism, therefore, as it were on the Eastern slope, we shall limit ourselves to the Ajjologia. The book palpitates with horror of the Revolu- tion. The Tractarian Movement was begun in 1838 by men as old as, or a little older than, the century, by men, therefore, whose most sensitive years were spent under the shadow of the Revolution. They looked on it as a mere submerging flood, and their whole endeavour was to form an association able to build a dyke against its encroachments. To con- firm authority and beat down Liberalism in every form was their sole remedy. Liberalism was Rationalism, and Rationalism, as the universal sol- vent, was Revolution. Liberalism was Antichrist, because it exalted itself above the yoke of religion and law ; and this spirit of lawlessness, of which Liberalism is the offspring, came in with the Re- formation. That is to say, they repeated Bossuet's charge with less than Bossuet's justification. That Romanticism was the other impulse in the movement Newman himself is partially aware. The doctrines, he says, were in the air. To assert was to prove ; to explain was to persuade. He ascribes the change to a reaction from the dry and super- ficial character of the religious teaching and the literature of the last generation, or even century. It came from a need felt both by the hearts and intellects of the nation for a deeper philosophy. NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 259 He traces it to Scott, who turned men's minds to the Middle Ages, to Coleridge who, " while he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate," after all installed a higher philosophy into in(j[uiring minds, and to Southey and Words- worth, who " addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings and carried forward their readers in the same direction ". This recognition of Coleridge in particular is no more than the barest justice. Though he stood on the other side of the ecclesiastical watershed and was rather a forerunner of the Broad Church than of Tractarianism, like Schleiermacher, he has the merit as a religious thinker of having influenced his opponents almost as deeply as his followers. To Coleridge's doctrine of a higher, director, more in- tuitive religious faculty than the understanding, and to his widely tolerant historical outlook, the new spirit upon which Tractarianism grew strong is first of all to be ascribed. Had Coleridge been no more than the living and vivid translator of German ideas, he would, from the situation of the time, have been the prime religious force of his genera- tion in England. Of any obligation direct or indirect to the great movement of thought in Germany, Newman is unaware, and it has even been said in sorrow that his attitude would have been different and the religious life of England different, if he had had some acquaintance with it. Of the theology of Schleiermacher and the philosophy of Hegel he only knew enough to be in great fear. But he had 260 THE REVOLUTION AND larger obligations than he knew, for, though his power of ignoring even English books was amazing, he was a man peculiarly sensitive to the influences that were in the air. From what other source did he derive his mistrust of the reality of material phenomena ; his assurance of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, him- self and his Creator ; or the conception of nature upon which he based his whole sacramental system, the denial of space except as a subjective idea ? He was told that his notion of material things, as mere types and instruments of real things unseen, came from Berkeley, who, good man, thought he had dealt the death-blow to such notions. But that the true source was the Transcendental Philo- sophy appears in the way in which he makes the intellectual basis of the doctrine of the Real Presence, *' the denial of the existence of space except as a subjective idea of our own minds," it being hardly possible that, so many years after Kant, he arrived at this conception by his own un- aided speculative talent. Above all, he is indebted to a person whom he would have regarded as a cultured pagan, to Goethe. Even in his evangelical days, he says, he re- garded doctrine as vital to his religion. "■ At the age of fifteen I fell under the influences of a definite creed, and received into my intelligence impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured." ''From the age of fifteen dogma has been the fundamental element of my religion ; I know no other religion ; NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 261 I cannot enter into the idea of another religion ; relisrion as a mere sentiment is to me a mere dream and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being." The illustration is not happy for his purpose, as a fact might be too directly known to be formulated into propositions, and filial love would scarcely be fostered by an intellectual scheme of our father's nature. Yet it indicates the man that he should use it, for even such a scheme of an earthly parent one could con- ceive him finding a necessity. Dogma was thus of the very essence of his religion, and yet there never was a clearer case of a man's dogma growing out of his religion, not his religion out of his dogma. *' For myself," he truly says, "it was not logic that carried me on ; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather." He found no obligation to study the other side ; a hint was sufficient to lead him on, and he passed by everything else to find what completed his own view even in the most unlikely quarters. For example, he found nothing in Middleton on Miracles except a quotation from Laud about " the Thirty-nine Articles seeming patient, if not ambitious also, of some Catholic sense". He follows a kind of aesthetic intuition, and builds up a scheme which draws him by its completeness ; and he never seems to experience the need of falling back on the question whether it had actuality behind it or not. Everything con- genial to his views, everything that rendered his 262 THE REVOLUTION AND scheme more artistically complete, he readily assimilated, and the rest he could pass by as though it were not. He heard the proposition once stated that the sacred text was never in- tended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it — the source of doctrine being the formularies of the Church — and his attitude to Scripture was deter- mined. The doctrine of Apostolical Succession he learned in the course of a walk round Christ Church Meadow. At a hint from Whately he conceived the Church as called to be mighty in the State yet free from State interference. In Butler he found mainly a justification for his method of arguing, a method entirely different from But- ler's. Keble maintained that it is faith and love which raise probabilities in religion to certainties. Friends, Keble said, do not ask for literal commands, but from their knowledge of the speaker they understand his half words, and from love of him they anticipate his wishes. Thus we are treated as sons, not as servants ; addressed as those who love God and wish to please Him, not as those subjected to a code of formal commandments. This Newman finds beautiful and religious, but thinks it does not even profess to be logical. By that he means that it is an argument which does not travel by his road, that it led in a direction opposite to what he most wanted — the definite authority of a Visible Church. Perhaps the greatest influence in his life was Hurrell Froude, and it was of the same impressionist nature. As even his dearest friend admits that Froude's power NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 263 of entering into the minds of others did not equal his other gifts, it is not strange that an unsympa- thetic person like Pfleiderer sums him up as one '' who, from his limited aristocratic Anglican stand- point, passed sentence on everything beyond it with the greater arrogance in proportion to his ignorance". He openly admired the Church of Rome and hated the Reformers, was " powerfully drawn to the Mediaeval Church, but not to the Primitive . . . delighted in the notion of a hier- archical system, of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty . . . had also a firm faith in the Real Presence". In the same aesthetic way portions of the writings of the Fathers came like music to Newman's inward ear, as if in response to ideas he had long cherished, especially those based on the mystical or sacramental principle, those which spoke of Nature as a parable, Scripture as an allegory, and pagan literature, philosophy and mythology as a preparation for the Gospel. In all this Newman is the Romanticist seeking first of all perfection for his work of art. The same artistic sense which was drawn by the conception of a great, rounded ecclesiastical system, was repelled by all the agitation in Church and State which he sums up as Liberalism. Liberalism dares to interfere with the Irish sees ; to tell, by the mouth of the Prime Minister, the English bishops to set their house in order ; to demand from the Church, as the price of liberty, emolument and dignity. Could it once gain a footing in the Church, it would be sure of victory in the end, and 264 THE REVOLUTION AND Reformation principles would be powerless to save her. Succour must be looked for from the one true Church, the guardian of dogma, the possessor of sacrament and rite, the visible channel of invisible grace, the possessor of continuity in the bishop who is the successor of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ. Thus Newman arrived at the famous Via Media, in which the Greek, Latin and Anglican Churches are all identical with the early undivided Church and only kept apart by later errors, such as the existence of the Pope who is Antichrist, which alone keeps Anglicanism apart from the larger Roman communion. The Tracts for the Times were begun in 1833 in defence of this Via Media. But the note of Catholicity in the Latin Church became more im- portant for Newman and his fellow-workers, and the error of the Papacy less. Then the difficulty of signing the Thirty-nine Articles troubled many. Tract 90, showing, in the words of Laud's bio- grapher, that they were " patient, if not ambitious, of some Catholic sense," or, as Ward more bluntly said, that they could be signed in '' a non-natural sense," indicated plainly in which direction the new way was turning, and lost the cause many sym- pathisers. The practical failure of an attempt too subtle for the straightforward English mind alienated Newman from the English Church and made him more intolerant of anything between what he calls Rationalism and Catholic Truth. The dislike to the Papacy, in which he had been NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 265 bred, and which he calls a stain on his imagination, slowly disappeared. The evils of the practical sys- tem of the Roman Church vanished for him in view of the scope which the Church of Rome alone seemed to give *'to the feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, devotedness and other feel- ings which may especially be called Catholic ". Gradually, what had seemed to him the perversion, became the development of doctrine, the uninter- rupted progress in the truth. The Roman system now appears for him a telescope or magnifier " for pale, faint, distant Apostolic Christianity ". It is one great, perfect, completed whole, wherein every- thing down to the late-determined immaculate con- ception of the Virgin is right in its context and requisite in its place. In this rounded work of art, this co-ordinated and compacted system, his soul is at peace, and he is as one coming into port after a rough sea. Here at last is the Church that has power to control and to counteract reason. Though God is sensible to his heart, Newman cannot trace Him in this world. The human race is utterly at variance with the purpose of its Creator, and shows every evidence of having been implicated in some great aboriginal calamity. In this anarchical condition of things we must expect God to interfere. The easiest way to do this, so far as we can see, is to set up a face-to-face antagonist to baffie the fierce energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dis- solving scepticism of the intellect in religious in- quiries, against which no truth, however sacred, 266 THE REVOLUTION AND can stand in the long run. This will naturally be a concrete, actual representative of things invisible, and the simple way is to introduce into the world an authority invested with the prerogative of in- fallibility in religious matters. Such a working instrument is happily adapted for smiting hard and throwing back the immense energy of the aggres- sive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect. This is the Church which alone can put down rebellion against our Maker and denounce rebellion of every kind as, of all possible evils, the greatest. Such is Newman's solution of the problem of Kevolution. All this might seem to be deliberately and consciously antagonistic to the great movement we are tracing, the attempt to reconcile faith and freedom. It is even possible to maintain that Newman seeks neither true freedom nor true faith. The only possible meeting-place of both is the truth in which God's will and ours agree, in which the truth makes us free, in which we are free be- cause there is no constraint but faith in the truth ; and the impossibility of such a result is Newman's fundamental contention. There is no haltinsj-OTound in philosophy, he affirms, between Atheism and the infallibility of a Visible Church. That position nothing can make consistent with his own spiritual experience. If he has a spiritual experience more certain than hands or feet, and if there are only two absolute and luminously self-evident beings in the world, himself and his Creator, a true philo- sophy does not need the infallibility of a \^isible NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 267 Church in order to take account of them. Through personal prejudice and panic he was unable to give this experience its place, or to see that it, and not a visible Infallibility, is the true oppo- site of Atheism. As a matter of fact, Athe- ism and Infallibility are not opposites at all, but both appeal to minds that find satisfaction in a completed scheme with a material demonstration, a swift passage from one to the other being not infrequent. Newman's resort to Infallibility only shows how near he must have stood to Atheism, for his whole argument is an appeal to panic, not to faith. With all his delicacy of thought and language he only holds up the hangman's scourge over cringing humanity. Nothing, after all, is so cruel or so unbelieving as panic. To deny the power of truth to fight its own battle, to expect no effect from God's Spirit striving with man's, to see nothing spiritual except what is brought in by force from the outside, is a melancholy absence of faith. Kingsley's blunt accusation of intellectual dis- honesty is capable of being misunderstood, as if it meant deliberate misrepresentation, from which no one was freer than Newman. Yet Newman's mental attitude makes something less than the impression of a whole-hearted regard for truth. Many, at least, feel the need of a less subtle, a simpler, a directer temperament, of broader principles, and of a deeper sympathy with the fundamental facts of human nature. Newman, I know, would have re- garded this cross-country steeple-chase after truth as a work of the pride of intellect. But that is 268 THE REVOLUTION AND where the issue joins. The blinding pride of intellect is indeed an ever-present and most dangerous temptation. To spread our peacock feathers over our eyes is the surest way of shutting out the heavens. But pride of intellect is only rightly escaped by the humility which is not the resolve to abandon the intellect God has given us, but the resolve to use it as He guides us. We are often tempted where we are strongest, misled where we are most nearly right, assailed by pride, when we are surest we have cast it out ; and Tractarianism largely cast out the logical pride of Eationalism by the artistic pride of Romanticism. Even Evangelical piety has not been free from the complacency of distinguishing the artist in religion from the unappreciative multitude ; and Tractarian- ism was still less conscious that this attitude is pride. Newman himself confesses to this temper with disarming frankness. At the people who were perplexed by the Tracts for the Times he was amused ; for the people who were in doubt he had contempt. Fools were answered according to their folly in an ironical spirit which held a good many people to be fools. He acknowledges that he des- pised every rival system of doctrine and its argu- ments as well, and that he was rather pleased by the anger of dull and self-conceited men at proposi- tions they did not understand. Indeed his intel- lectual temper caused one of his friends to say, " Such is the venomous character of orthodoxy. What mischief must it create in a bad and narrow mind, when it can work so effectively for evil in one NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 269 of the most benevolent of bosoms and one of the ablest of minds ! " And when, in vindication of his over-subtlety, Newman himself says, " I never used an argument which I saw clearly to be un- sound," he is surely as near trifling with God's truth as with God's creatures. The whole attitude is more that of the finished fencer than of the humble seeker after truth, or, as Lord Acton expresses it, of the " sophist, the manipulator, and not the servant, of the truth"/ Nor is the terror at Liberalism consistent with true humility. True humility could never assume such superiority to our fellow mortals as to believe that salvation is only to be found for them in abject submission of the intelligence to another person. That would be so, even if the interj^retation of the Revolution were right, even if it were not the worst kind of pride of intellect to be sure that we had so measured any movement as to know there was no Divine meaning in it, but that it was a pure erup- tion from the pit. To sum up all Liberalism and Democracy as Kevolution and ascribe it to the spirit of the age as manifest in Materialism, shows no great insight, for, as Laveleye says, " Material- ism is always unmasking itself as a powerless con- servatism". It is rather with Materialism, with the power of things seen — council and Pope and sacrament — that Newman opposes what after all may only be the birth pangs of a more spiritual humanity. In any case, true humility cannot be ^Letters of Lord Actofi to Mary Gladstone, 1904, p. Ix, 270 THE REVOLUTION AND dismayed by such alternatives as Infallibility and Revolution. It has too large a sense of God's wisdom, patience, power, goodness in all things, to assume the responsibility of walking except by the light immediately given to it. Though this false reading of humility would make even truth an untruth and faith an unfaith, there are few movements, nevertheless, which an inquiry into the problem of faith and freedom could less afford to neglect, if for no other reason than that nothing interprets a position so much as extreme opposition. To begin with, we see here the great temptation of the artistic temperament. It is to be impatient at the disorder of a half-done task. We see here the same spirit at work which made Hegel think he had summed up the Eternal in an intellectual formula. It is impatient at doubts and half-lights and incompleteness of system. Everything revolu- tionary, everything sceptical pains it. And when it finds a completed system, it meets another temp- tation. The immediate perfection satisfies it, and it does not go on to ask whether that is the final perfection. The Roman system, being the work of many centuries, has, in a high degree, the rounded completeness which satisfies this type of mind. Yet it is only a narrow interpretation of God's ways, for, if the whole world is a sacrament of things spiritual, the sacraments of the Church must be great symbols laden with a world of mean- ing, but to narrow the sacramental efficacy of all material creation down to the wonder-working of NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 271 a material substance debases and does not glorify the idea. Nor is the highest way to place the sacramental idea in the material world at all, for its ultimate symbol is man not nature, and the funda- mental error is the denial of that liberty upon which that sacramental importance of humanity depends. Moreover, what is the worth of God's long patience and all the infinite device of His providence, if infallibility goes by office, and the end of all our search is not the light of the souls that love truth and the liberty of the souls that obey it, but the reception at the hands of another of a body of doctrine, and the performance at the direction of another of a body of ritual ? History, on such a scheme, has no meaning, for God could have so dominated us from the beginning, with- out all this intervening misery and error. It is all chaos, if it does not mean that God is patient enough to let us work out our freedom, that, in the end. He may bind us by the only eternal bond of love. How much grander and truer to reality, how much more satisfying, in the last issue, to all our instincts of harmony and completeness, to conceive the Christian faith, not as an infallible body of doc- trine, guarded by an infallible body of men, but as a new power of vitality which enters the world, partakes of its evil, and again rejects it, at times by violent commotion. As the great triumph of faith in regard to the world to come is not to abolish death but to transfigure it, to turn it into a supreme ground of hope, so it must be a supreme triumph of faith for our present life to see that revolution 272 THE REVOLUTION AND may as gloriously reveal providence as death reveal immortality. Again, we are taught the necessity of retaining the form of freedom if we are truly to win the sub- stance. In a sense this is the same lesson, for one of our temptations is always to take short-cuts to freedom. Rationalism had insisted that the short way was to assert the right of individual judgment and resent all other bonds. Romanticism had tended to take the other short way, and had ex- horted man to seek the system in which he could be free and be content. Hegel, who had asserted the importance of both, nevertheless practically laid all stress on the institution, and made little of the individual. Newman only illustrates the same tendency after a more pronounced manner. He does not wish to lose his freedom, he does not even wish any man to have less freedom than he is fit for. But then, he says, this contention for indi- vidual freedom, for knowing the truth of our doctrine and deciding the direction of our duty, only leads us into trouble and makes us lose the peaceable fruits of freedom. Man is not able to win his emancipation in that way. He must find some one to lead him by the hand, and then he will be sure of the right road. It is the old argument of the slave being really more free who has a good master, than the freeman who lives a precarious life, having no one better to care for him than his own inadequate self. But when we take for granted that the authority of an outward organisa- tion is easier for the common man to accept than NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 273 the authority of a general truth, it is because we degrade the idea of acceptance. The authority of a truth can be rightly accepted by all in the measure in which they see it, and, if it is funda- mentally a moral truth, all can see it to the extent to which they are willing to practise it ; while rightly to accept an institution, to accept it on other grounds than custom, demands an inquiry possible for few, and on conditions which, being purely intellectual, are not necessarily incumbent upon any. Thus the work of renouncing intellect is itself a very difficult intellectual feat. But the idea that we can reach our goal by some kind of rapid intellectual gymnastic is the vice of the whole Romantic Movement. Further, we see the necessity of making a study of history precede a philosophy of history. His- torical inquiry was too slow, too irregular, too interrupted, too uncertain in its utterance for Romanticism. It, therefore, proceeded at once to a philosophy of history, the prime endeavour being to adjust the facts to the theory, not to found the theory on the facts. Of this tendency Newman is an even more pronounced example than Hegel. He is not at all concerned to look at things as mere facts. His sole interest is in what he calls the " various Economics or Dispensations of the Eter- nal ". He is in no sense a historian ; he is a philo- sopher of history ; he looks at facts purely to see if they will fit into his scheme as Hegel does with his categories. Here, again, we see the need of patience, the need of looking at history not as 18 274 THE REVOLUTION AND a large scheme, but as a record of the toils and struggles of men for faith and freedom, struggles depending upon will and character in the final issue. This being recognised, it becomes apparent that the movement has also a positive value for our inquiry. The apparent effect is not always the ultimate issue. Man advances, not so much by great visions of his journey from mountain peaks of thought, as by earnestly trying all ways and finding, by coming to the end of them, that he is away from the great highway of true progress. This attempt to ignore the centuries cannot be anything but such a blind alley. Men have seen the vision of a faith that shall be free as well as of a freedom that lives by faith, and they cannot now turn aside from pursuing it. But the High Church movement was too general, and sprang too directly out of the influences of the time not to represent in some way man's requirement and the age's need. Though it does not escape the difficulty of making faith depend on an intellectual feat, its attitude shows a deep dissatisfaction with this result, and an earnest resolve at all costs to avoid it. Like the other phases of Romanticism, it also seeks rest in a system, but it has made this advance, that it looks to a system which has grown out of life and action, which has grown out of reverence and devotion and self-sacrifice. Development is for it a religious and not merely an intellectual progress. In short, with all its seeming repudiation of the task of uniting freedom with faith in a bond of mutual NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA 275 interaction and common support, it recognises, as Kahnis says of it, that fruits which the tree of knowledge refuses to yield grow on the tree of life.^ 1 Kahnis, Internal History of Protestantism, Eng. trans., p. 306. LECTURE VII THE THEOKY OF DEVELOPMENT AND BAUK'S FIBST TEHEE CENTUBIES Eichhorn, Allgemeine Bibliothek der biblischen Literatur, 1787- 1801. Semler, Abhandhmg von der Untersuchung des Kanons, VJll-lb. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu JcritiscJi bearbeitet, 1835. Schwegler, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter, 1846. Baur, Kritische UntersuoJiungen ilber die hanonischenEvangelien, 1847. Baur, Kirchengeschichte der drei ersten JahrJmnderte, 1853. Eitschl, Die EntsteJmng der AltkatJiolischen Eirche, second edition, 1857. Books op Refeeence Founders of Old Testament Criticism, T, K. Cheyne, 1893. L'Evangile et L'Eglise, A. Loisy, 1904. Essence of Christi- anity, A. Harnack. Strauss's Life of Jesus, trans, by M. Evans (George Eliot). Pfleiderer's account of Baur and Strauss has the sympathy of a disciple. LECTURE VII THE THEOEY OF DEVELOPMENT AND BAUK'S FIBST THREE CENTURIES By what must seem, so long as we look only at the external aspects of things, a mere irony of fate. High Churchism and Higher Criticism reached maturity together. Few movements would seem to be farther apart, yet this correspondence is not mere coincidence. Both sprang from the Roman- tic, the historical interest of the century, and, in however opposite ways, both dealt with the same problems. From the first attack of Deism upon the un- questioned authority of Scrij^ture, a full inquiry into the nature of the documents that compose it was inevitable, even though the Deists themselves had too little interest in what they regarded as the outlived writings of a rude age and too little scholarship to make even a beginning at the task. Rationalism, being a system of free- thinking within the Church, and having an omnivorous, en- cyclopaedic appetite for facts, possessed both the interest and the learning necessary for the task. Yet the age of Rationalism did not carry the work much beyond the Lower or Textual Criticism. Ernesti concerned himself wholly with the minute (279) 280 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND grammatical interpretation of Scripture, and even maintained that religion stood or fell with it. Michaelis occupied himself with the text of the Old Testament as Ernesti had done with the text of the New. Semler, more than any other, embodied the encyclopsedic learning of Rationalism. He prepared the way for all later criticism by laying down the rule that the Bible is not a uniform whole, but that each book is to be interpreted according to the cir- cumstances of the writer and his purpose in writing. Yet his chief critical work was an endeavour to make a complete classification of the sources of the New Testament text, and the most valuable work of Griesbach was done in the same field. The arbitrary, negative, unliterary, confident spirit of its Rationalistic beginnings may to this day be too evident in the critical investigation of the Scriptures. Yet it was only under the influence of Romanticism that criticism began to see the scope of its labours, and, however blind it may have been at times to the real issues, its inspiration has continued to be, not the Rationalist interest in moral generalities, but the Romanticist interest in life. The Higher Criticism, both of the Old and the New Testament, began with Eichhorn, the friend of Herder. The name Higher Criticism he took from the classical scholars who first used it for the investigations which go beyond the Lower or Textual Criticism. Eichhorn distinguished the Jehovistic and Elohistic documents in Genesis, and propounded the theory of an original Aramaic gospel to explain the verbal similarity of the Syn- BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 281 optics. His great successors, whether theological Rationalists, like Gesenius, or more direct adherents of Romanticism, as De Wette and Ewald, were all under the influence of the Romantic movement, while the Tubingen school regarded themselves as sjiecially called to apply its principles. Tractarianism, springing from the same move- ment, consciously or unconsciously raises the same questions. It settles none of the problems criticism has raised, but rather accentuates the necessity of determining the relation of living Christianity to its whole past. This must include any authority to which it appeals, and the Scriptures not least. The Tractarians might utter warnings from university pulpits of "■ the perils to England which lay in the biblical and theological speculations of Germany," ^ but a movement which exalts the Catholic and Primitive above all other authorities can only ac- centuate the need of inquiring what, in point of fact, Catholicism and Primitive Christianity really are. Under the impulse of the Romantic Movement men began to subject the whole record of humanity to investigation, as if it were no longer possible to enjoy our heritage from the past, unless we could learn how it first came to be. Had it been possible for any movement to exclude from this inquiry the history of Christianity, the one history which creates supreme interest in the past, how should the greatest intellectual labour of the age be void of religious significance, and how should faith be 1 Newman, Apologia, p. 37- 282 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND shadowed by the slavish dread that the sanctuary it dare not open must be empty of its shrine ! We might rather conclude from the inevitableness of it that this inquiry was one of the chief providential tasks imposed upon the age. The only alternative is Newman's perverted conception of humility. True humility must surely be submission to God, and, therefore, acceptance of God's task ; submission to truth, and, therefore, diligence in investigation. But to Newman true humility might be mere intellectual surrender. " It may be fairly questioned," he says, " whether in an intellectual age, when freedom both of thought and of action are so dearly prized, a greater penance can be devised for the soldier of Christ, than the absolute surrender of judgment and will to the command of another. " ^ As in theology so in history, we are not to be freed from our chain, but it is to be made so much an ornament and we are to be taught so well how to wear it, that we shall feel it to be a decoration and not a fetter. There also we have to do with an artist. What he desires to find is an institution, so spacious, so proportionate and harmonious that it can be to us the goal and measure of history. As the most eloquent presentation of this alternative to freedom his Essay on the Develop- ment of Doctrine remains of permanent significance. It was written during the period when, as he de- scribes it, he was on his death-bed as regards his membership with the Anglican Church, and it has in it the moving eloquence of that period of inward ^ Essay on the Development of Doctrine, 2iid ed., p. 397. BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 283 struggle. He spent his last year as an Anglican upon it, and, before it was finished, he resolved to be received into the Church of Rome. In that unfinished state the book remained, and all the power and passion of a man in the crisis of his soul are found in it. Nevertheless, there are two things strangely absent from such a dialogue with one's heart. First, one would expect it to be simple and direct and free from all sophistry ; but apparently Newman kept up a logical court retinue even in the inner chambers of his spirit. Second, one would expect to find the problem considered in all its bearings and in the face of all other alternatives ; but instead, we find the most amazing absence of reference to any other aspect of the matter, even to what might seem to lie nearest. In extreme old age Newman wrote, ** I never read a word of Coleridge ". That sums up everything. Even the most learned person might not regard it as any duty to read Kant, but to go through such a crisis at that time and entirely ignore a writer whom he otherwise recognised as one of his spiritual ancestors, and who lay, as it were, to his hand, shows an amazing power of abstraction upon one aspect of a great question. By Coleridge the most spiritual and thoughtful minds in this country were prepared for the inevitable crisis, and, though his ideas are sometimes only half born or concealed in wrappings of strange words and expounded unsystematically in the course of several volumes, one would have imagined that his Letters of an Inquiring Spirit, which was still a new book when Newman wrote, 284 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND having been published some years after the author's death, could hardly have been overlooked. In it are many things which have never been better said from that day until now. Like the Tractarians, Coleridge approached the Scriptures through the Church, but it is the Church of the saints, not of the hierarchy. The old test of truth, quod semper, quod uhique, quod ah omnibus, was for him the truth which in every age and under every condition had appealed to the believing heart, and the true Apostolic Succession was the succession of the faithful. Like the Tractarians, also, he started with the unity of the faith, but it is not a unity built up of separate dogmas. It is a unity of conception, a unity arising from such a relation of the soul to its Maker as shall harmonise all our thinking and all our acting. He sees religion as a landscape which is none the less one for running far away into shadowy horizons, and not as a series of fields which can only be known by being accurately sur- veyed. " Revealed religion, and there is no other, is the unity of Subjective and Objective." The word of God without speaks to God's word within, in- terpreting us to ourselves and completing what is wanting to us. The soul that is emancipated by it recognises it. " Fact and Luminary without corre- spond to Life and Truth within." With this witness of the Church and this evi- dence of faith, why should we fear any investiga- tion into Scripture ? Why should any one fear for a book in which he finds words for his inmost BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 285 thoughts, songs for his joy, utterances for his hidden griefs, pleadings for his shame and feeble- ness ? By finding him, it bears witness to itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit, and it ought to be enough that there is more in it that finds one than in all other books put together. Why on behalf of such a book should it seem necessary to indulge in such harmonising feats as would make Falstaff' s account of the rogues in buckram into a coherent and consistent narrative ? Faith and Scripture are reciprocal, the Word feed- ing Faith and Faith witnessing to the Word. This proves that, for all who seek truth with humble spirits, it is an unquestioned guide, but it does not prove that it is a book to be in all points unques- tioned, or that God's Spirit everywhere speaks in it in the same way, using all the writers as one musician might play on a variety of instruments. Such a doctrine of plenary inspiration only serves to petrify the whole body of Holy Writ. And, if it be objected that, failing that guarantee, we have no infallible arbiter in questions of faith and duty, we ask in reply. What advantage have we derived from using the Bible as such an arbiter ? Has the result been unity and peace ? Has it not rather been such piecing together of texts as would justify anything, the Inquisition itself, and the slothful, indiscriminate acquiescence in detail that neglects the spirit which shines in the parts only as it per- vades and irradiates the whole ? In contrast to all this, Newman affirms that the essence of all religion is authority and obedience, 286 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND the distinction, for him, between natural and re- vealed religion lying in this, that the former has only a subjective authority, the latter has an objec- tive. Christianity comes as a Divine institution, whole, objective, infallible ; and, as preservation is involved in creation, only an infallible authority could preserve what an infallible authority has given. This position the Roman system claims, and it has no rival. ^ It is taken for granted that nothing can keep men to the truth except such an external standard. That truth is what a man troweth, is a position Newman always regards with horror. That to trow rightly may be the only means God has given us of knowing truth, he is unable to imagine. He can dream of no meeting- place for those who love truth anywhere between the anarchy of individual notions and the rigidity of dogmas received from without. Truth, for him, to be true, must have one form and one expression, absolutely right, and proving all else to be false. He does not even honour with a glance the view that Scripture reveals only what is necessary that we may know God's will with us, and not the secrets of His counsel, that we should not be wise above what is written, and that the absence of de- tails of duty is no imperfection but the necessary condition of our liberty to follow the guidance of the Spirit of Christ. On the contrary, this is what he finds : " Our Lord's style shows itself in solemn declarations, canons, sentences or sayings, such as 1 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, p. 86. BAUR^S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 287 legislators propound and scribes and lawyers com- ment on ".^ And we had begun to think again that it was the common people who heard Him gladly, and that the highest evidence of His spiritual power was the certainty with which He spoke to the divine in man without needing the intervention of such official people ! But this inability to see any spiritual truth except at his own ecclesiastical angle must be accepted in Newman once for all. To maintain that the Church of the Papacy was, still unchanged, the Church of the Apostles, had become too hard a task even for this exclusive treatment and for the greatest special pleader who ever used the English speech. But the Theory of Development had already risen upon the horizon of thought, offering itself as a solution of all the pro- blems of history. To live is to change, and, mani- festly, the changes which come by growth are inevitable and legitimate. As the man who builds towers and pinnacles in accordance with the idea of the man who laid the foundations is the true successor of the founder, even though the simple lower storey could only have suggested to the skilled and experienced eye the palace reared upon it by later generations, so the Church of Rome may be the legitimate successor of the Church of the Apostles. Like the biologist with life, Newman's chief difficulty is to find the first link in the series. In the amazing freedom of the New Testament, especi- ally of the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, the 1 P. 67. 288 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND germ of a church which should act as a dominating external authority can only be found by microscopic search. Wherefore, like the biologist, he throws the burden upon his opponents and requires them to prove that the germ could not be there. In the nature of the case he feels justified in assuming that the Catholicism of the sixteenth and of the second centuries are, in substance, the very religion which Christ and His Apostles taught in the first. ^ If what Protestantism maintains ever existed, it has been swept away by a deluge. "Whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says or unsays, at least the Christianity of His- tory is not Protestantism." ^ This, of course, could be said of every new aspect, even of the oldest truth. It is precisely the argument the Judaisers used against Paul when he maintained that the Promise had been before the Law. Whatever might be said or unsaid, legal, ceremonial Judaism had been the Judaism of history. In the same summary way Newman takes his second step. The first three centuries are treated as one period, as if it were not one of the greatest problems of history to explain how the end of the third could be so diff'erent from the beginning of the second. Nor can he proceed even then, except by canons which forestall inquiry. If we find Ter- tuUian explaining " This is My body " as " This is the figure of My body," yea, if we think that to be the most natural explanation of the Scripture, we 1 P. 5. - P. 7. BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 289 are not to conclude, as we should in an ordinary- case, that neither Tertullian nor Scripture held the sacramental doctrine, but we must carry the deeper sacramental meaning back both into the Father and into the Gospel/ Again, if, in an earlier age, we find no trace of the existence of later institutions, we may not conclude that they did not exist, for we can suppose that " an idolatrous Paganism tended to repress the externals of Christianity ".^ In arguing that, from the first age of Christ- ianity, its teaching looked toward a closely com- pacted dogmatic and hierarchical system,'^ he uses canons which, turned to the work of destruction, could dissolve any basis of fact. Their legitimate application ends in the Hegelian view of the im- portance of the idea and the insignificance of all else, and Strauss found them as useful for his contention as Newman for his. The thing of su- preme value to Newman is the ecclesiastical find- ing, and to discover the agreement of Scripture with this orthodoxy we require to interpret it mystically, all schools of literal interpretation hav- ing been mere seed-beds of heresy. Surely it is a perilous approach to an admission of Strauss's identification of the mystical and the mythical thus to propound the Church's method of interpreting her Scriptures as liberty to read her own ideas back into them. Nor is this method of reading history by a pre- determined scheme the only reminder of Hegel. The conception of development by struggle and 1 P. 26. 2 p. 28. 3 p. 122. 19 290 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND reconciliation has its ancestry, by however indirect a channel, in Hegel's scheme of thought. Dr. Barry sees in every page of the Development Darwin's ad- vancing shadow.^ A thing very much easier to see is the departing shadow of Hegel. Dr. Barry takes for granted that, if Newman has not read an author, he is not indebted to him, as if any man of cul- ture could shut his mind to the forces which in- fluence deeply his time. Newman himself knew better, for, though he had not read a word of Coleridge, he knew him to be one of the spiritual ancestors of Tractarianism, and, though he had not read a word of Kant, he considered himself in a position to judge his philosophy the legitimate fruit of Lutheranism. Of his indebtedness to Hegel, Newman, with his usual disregard to his contem- poraries, is not aware, yet, who that has once heard it, can fail to recognise the accent of that great thinker when Newman goes on to describe the development he believes in ? From the nature of the human mind, he says, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas. When an idea is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it becomes an active principle. First, there is a time of confusion when conception and misconception are in conflict. By this process one view is modified by another and then combined with a third, till it is to each mind what before it was only to all together.^ By this process an idea may be developed into an ethical code, a system of government, a theology, a ritual, while remaining 1 William Barry, Neiv7?ia?i, 1904, p. 278. ^ P. 29. BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 291 in substance what it was from the beginning. In- stead of the stream being clearest at the spring, it is more equable and purer and stronger when it has become deep and broad and full.^ Nor does Newman avoid the supreme danger of this intellectual conception of development, which is not the denial of any idea or of any body of ideas, but the dissolution of the whole reality of religion into ideas. Religion to the Hegelian also was essen- tially dogma. He also could say with Newman : " I know no other religion ". He also sought in- tellectual emancipation by tracing in the past a great, logical, harmonious growth of ideas, asking only concerning ideas. But it was this very dogma which Newman took to be the indissoluble ele- ment in religion, that the Hegelian evaporated into philosophical abstractions. Hegel allows a legitimacy to revolution which Newman denies, yet even Newman has to admit the services of heresies in bringing out what was implicit in the Church's faith. Further, Hegel might seem to be very different from Newman in making freedom the goal of history, seeing that to New- man emancipation is a synonym for anarchy. Yet, in this also, the difference is less than appears. To Hegel freedom is simply obedience to an in- ward law, to have the centre of motion within. And his interest also is not in the individual with his personal moral struggle, but in the institution in which the idea that has succeeded abides and acts. 1 P. 40. 292 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND This correspondence arises partly from the fact that both writers were the fruit of the same Ro- mantic Movement, partly from the wide-spread influence of Hegel's conception of history which probably reached Newman through the Catholic theologians, but which has, unknown to them, influenced many minds besides Newman's. His- tory to Hegel is the unfolding of the Reason, the bringing out and making explicit of what was from the first implicit. Great men are simply organs of the Universal Reason. Whatever may be thought of his great cryptogram written in history, made clear as soon as we have the key of the true movement of thought, by affirmation, denial and reconciliation, we can hardly exaggerate Hegel's influence on the study of history. What Mr. Bradley calls the " unearthly ballet of bloodless categories" may leave us only amazed, and with Professor Pringle-Pattison we may not be moved by the achievements of the World Spirit to unquali- fied admiration, or be able to accept the abstraction of the race in place of the living children of men ; but the idea that we see in history our life in the making, in the first fresh realisation of its contrasts, in the early intensity with which men looked at the opposite sides of it, ere they had been able to look all round it and fit it into its obscure place in the foundations of our civilisation, inspired all the historians of the last century, and brought to a definite conclusion the eighteenth century concep- tion of history as a sort of museum of old clothes, mainly interesting from the sense of superiority it BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 293 gave to those who had attained a better fashion. Again, nothing may seem to us more unsatisfactory than Hegel's idea of freedom. Every word of Pro- fessor Pringle-Pattison's criticism may seem to us justified. " Even if the enormous spiral of human history is destined to wind itself at last to a point which may be called achievement, what, I ask, of the multitudes which perished by the way ? 'These all died, not having received the promises.' What if there are no promises to them ? To me the old idea of the world as the training-ground of individual character seems to offer a much more human, and, I will add, a much more Divine, solu- tion than this philosophical procession of the car of progress." ^ Yet, however little this kind of free- dom seems to be free, the attempt to interpret history as the discipline of freedom has been abun- dantly fruitful. It has been realised in consequence that an event, to be properly understood, must be looked at in both directions, backwards towards its causes and forwards towards its results, and that it can only be rightly understood in its place in the whole scheme, and that the key to this scheme must be a spiritual end, not a material cause. . Most deeply Hegel has influenced the study of the origins of Christianity. His influence has not been confined to one school, and it continues to this day ; but the distinctively Hegelian school is the Tubingen, the writers of which only lived to apply his principles to history. To them, as to Hegel, the distinguishing characteristic of spirit is '^Mail's Place in the Cosmos, p. 62. 294 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND its power to reconcile opposites, and history they take to be simply the necessary stages in the evo- lution of spirit. They also found in history a fixed process of affirming a truth, then of opposing to it a seeming contradiction, and then of discovering the whole truth which can reconcile and embrace both. This scheme was apt to become a rack on which to torture the facts of history into the required shape, a serious disturbance to an impartial investigation. Moreover, it tended, in the hands of duller men, to work as mechanically as the old eighteenth century concejDtion, to create the same intolerance of the idea of new forces, and to make religion a mere phase of the race's childhood. Religion was philo- sophy in the making, its forms being a kind of picture language, to be interpreted and superseded by the ideas which afterwards came to clearness in the process. In distinction from the eighteenth century the spirit of religion was recognised as the prime driving force in the progress of thought, but it was the progress of thought which drew to itself the final interest. Now that the true philosophy had come to put everything in its place and to show that everything in its place is very good, not only was positive religion evaporated into ideas, but the primary moral condition of spiritual progress — a new heart — would seem to have become super- fluous. Under the influence of this conception. Criticism devoted itself to the task of explaining the histori- cal origins of Christianity. The heart of the prob- lem, it was felt, lay in the Gospels. Of the BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 295 methods employed in the task Baur gives an account in his Critical Investigations regarding the Canonical Gospels. The criticism of the whole New Testament, he says, centres in the Gospels, and theology and the whole Christian view of the world are deeply concerned in the issue. The real prob- lem of the Gospels, the existence in them of every shade of correspondence, from verbal agreement to manifest contradiction, appears as soon as they are compared, and must have been evident from the day they were placed together in the canon of Scripture. Four methods, Baur says, have been used to solve this problem, (1) the Dogmatic, (2) the Ab- stract Critical, (3) the Negative Critical or Dialectic, (4) the Historical. (1) According to the Dogmatic explanation, the Gospels are all alike primarily the work of one Divine Spirit. On a deeper consideration, their differences are found to be either insignificant or necessary and useful. To the Fathers there were not four Gospels, but only one Gospel in four forms, and the Protestant harmonies all went on the assumption that the differences arose from one evangelist giving more detail, another less. Yet the very attempts at harmonising made it evident that all four Gospels could not be biographies in chronological order. (2) By the Abstract- Critical method the Gos- pels are treated, not yet as historical, but purely as literary documents. By what process, it asked, could these narratives become so like and so un- like ? Eichhorn suggested as the basis an original 296 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND Aramaic Gospel, added to, altered, and variously translated. Hug assumed the dependence of Matthew on Mark, and of Luke on both. Gabler fell back on a stereotyped, though fluctuating, oral tradition. Schleiermacher postulated multi- tudes of detached narratives of single events. No finality was possible. (3) From this method of fluctuating hypotheses it was easy to pass to the Negative Critical or Dialec- tic. The most conspicuous example of this method is Strauss's Life of Jesus. In the strict sense it attempts no criticism of the Gospels, but denies their trustworthiness on the ground that what they relate is incredible. Like all other sacred books, they are not histories but mythical embodiments of spiritual truths. They are not written by eye- witnesses or persons well informed. As everything contrary to common experience is at once to be re- garded as unhistorical, and as all the narratives are woven throughout with what is contrary to experience, no confidence can be placed on any part of any of the Gospels. In Strauss, Baur says, the age saw itself — its contradictions, its incon- sequences, its assumptions — mercilessly exposed, and, as a consequence, it hated him.^ But the resentment had more justification than that. Ritschl's criticism is also just. Strauss, he says, "wrote on religion, as one might write on harmony to whom all music was a disagreeable noise ". ^ The highest he ever finds in any event ^ Die kanonischen Evangelien, p. 48. 2 Eechtfertigung und Versohnung, p. 390. BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 297 in history that rises an inch above the common level, is a mythical embodiment of a philosophical thought. All heroism vanished at a stroke from history, and the figure which above all others meant for so many that life could be nobly and freely lived against all oppositions, vanished into mis- understood Old Testament texts. No man was ever less troubled by any haunting sense that religion might be a feeling, a life, greater than we know how to measure and express, and that the highest embodiment of it bore witness of being a real Person to the hearts that knew the secret and were fighting for the same victory. To Strauss the Jesus of the Gospels is in no way the peasant of Galilee, but is built \i\) of what the early Christians, influenced mainly by Old Testament texts, thought the Messiah should have been. Once admit this, he maintains, and the dif- ficulties in the Gospels are all dissipated. All we have then to explain is how the narratives arose, and, in treating that question, we may exercise the largest freedom, for the Gospels neither originated in the Apostolic age nor among a people of histori- cal temper. Each evangelist shapes the narratives to his own notions. Matthew, for the most part, has the incident in its least decorated form ; Luke shows it at a more advanced stage ; Mark ever indulges his love of the picturesque ; and John is mainly concerned to overshoot all his predecessors. With a subtlety which could prove that no histor- ical incident ever did happen, Strauss finds con- tradictions in the most ordinary incidents, as if 298 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND nothing ever came to pass except in ways a man in his study would regard as consistent. Yet, in the most remarkable of all the narratives, the accounts of the Resurrection, some kind of reality he must acknowledge. He reduces it to subjective impres- sions, prepared for by misunderstanding our Lord's prediction of the revival of His cause, and produced in an atmosphere of fervid pious enthusiasm ; but, even so, it remains the unusual, while his general canon is that the unusual is the incredible. Strauss contends that he distils from the narra- tives all faith requires, while rendering to free- dom all her dues. On high philosophic grounds he holds that, from the nature of the case, all religious narratives must necessarily be unhis- torical. " If religion be defined as the perception of truth, not in the form of an idea, which is the philosophical perception, but invested with imagery, it is easy to see that the mythical element can be wanting only when religion either falls short of, or goes beyond, its particular province, and that, in the proper religions, it must necessarily exist." ^ This is Spinoza's doctrine of imaginatio and that in eoccelsis. Religion is only religion, because its ideas are still bathed in the mists of myth and legend. Directly the sun rises, it becomes philoso- phy. Here, then, is how we are, in freedom, to inherit the past. The shell of the narrative is to be stripped off, and the ideal truth which consti- tutes its value is to be held. Strauss quotes Hegel to the effect that faith, in its earlier stages, 1 Eng. trans., p. 80. BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 299 is governed by the senses, and therefore contem- plates a temporal history, which, once it has helped to bring into the mind the idea of humanity as one with God, is seen to be only the presentation of an idea. We arrive, then, not at a sensible, empirical fact, but at a spiritual. Divine idea, to be confirmed no longer by history but by philosophy.^ On this principle we reach two results of value — not a sin- less Christ, which would be a miracle, but the best ideal an age could draw, which is vague enough to be modified as increasing enlightenment may re- quire, and, not a God-man, but the idea of the race as a reconciliation of the earthly and the Divine.^ (4) In contrast to these three previous methods, Baur calls his own method the Historical. The chief difference consists in giving a wider scope to his inquiry. Baur is as much a Hegelian as Strauss, but he applies his Hegelianism more in the spirit and less in the letter. At the whole problem of the rise of the Christian Church he will look, and he will look at it both in its causes and in its results, seeing it in its whole place in history. Few of Baur's own results have stood, but, if they have been overturned, it has been by his own method. He begins by asking how each writer himself regarded his own work — what he aimed at, what interest he wished to serve, what purpose he followed, what character he has thereby given his writing. To these questions only a knowledge of 1 P. 780. 2 p_ 773_ 300 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND the whole historical circumstances amid which he wrote can afford the answer. Yet the characteristic feature of the Tubingen Criticism was not this method alone, but this method with a postulate. As soon as a book is shown to have been written with a purpose, it is to be discounted as an accurate historical report. This principle is not merely applied in particular instances in which a tendency to accommodate facts to general contentions can be traced, but is laid down as a broad proposition. Yet Macaulay's History is not a work of fiction, although it has been called a huge Whig pamphlet ; and it is surely possible to imagine a writer so honestly certain that facts square with his views, as to be in a very special degree delivered from the temptation to pervert them. With Baur, however, Tendenz or purpose is almost as fruitful a mother of invention as myth with Strauss, and it is certainly not more reassuring for being nearer deliberate creation. Apart, however, from this postulate, Baur's method remains what he called it, the Historical Method. As it arranges the documents from the history and the history from the documents, it may seem to reason in a circle. But it is rather like putting the pieces of a Chinese puzzle together. First, the whole must be made up out of the pieces, and then, that the pieces are in their right place, must be proved by reference to the whole. Where the dates of the writings are in question no other method can be employed, but, to be convincing, it must be done with completeness and on a large scale. BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 301 On this scale Strauss had not conducted his inquiry. His elimination of everything remarkable from the person of Jesus only made the rise of the Christian Church more inexplicable. In the third century the Church existed in a form not to be denied, and it was manifestly a duty to explain, on the accepted principles, how it came to be. To Protestant theologians the Catholic Church was a declension from Apostolic Christianity, but the Hegelian, as much as the Catholic, had to show that it was a development. The Hegelian key to the process was furnished by Baur. First, there was primitive Judaistic Christianity. Then, the Pauline universal antithesis to it arose. Finally, these antitheses were reconciled in the Catholic Church. This solution Schwegler in his Post- Apostolic Age endeavoured to carry out in detail. Judaistic Apostolic Christianity began as mere Ebionitism, as Jewish in everything but a belief that the Messiah had come. From it Paul took nothing but the idea of a Messiah who died and rose again. The rest followed as the reasoned transformation of the legal religion into a religion of freedom, of an enslaved and unhappy conscious- ness into the assurance of reconciliation. Only after a century of toning down their differences were both parties absorbed into the unity of the Catholic Church. But this scheme at once raises the question, how, if the Jewish Christians were a mere Jewish sect, and if Paul's teaching were merely accidentally connected with the same Person, to whom, how- 302 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND ever, he attached a quite different idea of his own, there could be common interests to keep these parties together under the Christian name, and com- mon grounds upon which they could seek recon- ciliation ? Schwegler only seems to succeed by refraining from giving any clear account of the parties. Nothing is left to work the reconciliation except a desire for external unity, and, even when the reconciliation is accomplished, Schwegler him- self cannot maintain that it is an advance upon Paul. After Schwegler's attempt had been subjected to much criticism, Baur set himself to the task of working out his own idea in detail. He was thus able to apply the learning of a long and laborious lifetime to the subject, in the light of a keen dis- cussion. Yet the interest of the work is in the mode of trying and not in the measure of success. From the first it was a forlorn hope. When Schweg- ler wrote in 1845 the Tubingen school was in its prime. When Baur's Chiwch History of the First Three Centuries appeared in 1853 the movement of thought, to use its own language, was passing over into its opposite. Baur had already quarrelled bitterly with Ritschl for declaring that the Tubingen school was dissolved and that its influence would only deserve recognition, in so far as it had con- ducted to an opposite conception of Primitive Christianity from that of Baur and Schwegler. Yet this was no mean desert which Ritschl indicates, for it is one of Baur's high merits that he so states the problem as to lead on from his own conclusion BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 303 to a truer. Naturally, however, that was not Baur's own view of his services. Though he felt himself alone in the world, his faith in his position was un- faded. He still claimed to have comj^rehended things as they are, and to have put the various writings in the place to which they belong, with a confidence which made Ritschl exclaim : " What a superstition of the objectivity of his own knowledge an old Hegelian can have ! " ^ The Hegelian formula is Baur's guide to his- torical truth. First there is unity, then enters difference, and then the advancement takes place by the reconciliation of the difference. Men are mere vehicles of the idea which is of itself strug- gling to light. It is all " an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories," and even Paul, who more than Jesus is taken to be the creator of Christianity, is a mere puppet pulled by a string. Christianity, Baur says, like every other great movement, is a synthesis of elements already existing in opposition, and it again advances by making a new synthesis of the contradictory elements first latent and then appar- ent in itself. Christianity is a great reconciliation of the bitter social contrasts and deep spiritual needs existing in the world in the time of Christ, and the Catholic Church is a great reconciliation of the opposing views and interests which existed in the Church at the close of the second century. Our human interest asks bread from this scheme and receives a stone. Instead of the " living^ chil- dren of men" we have a formula. Nevertheless, 1 Bitschls Leben, vol. i., p. 271. 304 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND the advance which the new philosophy brought into the study of history is at once apparent. The old Kationalist idea of Christianity as a sort of happy accident, brought about by a few well-meaning but ignorant men in an out-of-the-way corner of the world, gives place to a great historic move- ment which came forth at the call of man's deepest needs. We are made to see that no movement ever united so many interests, or made use of so many advantages, or satisfied so many aspirations. Alexander opened the portals of the East, not merely for Greek speech and culture to be a vehicle of the new faith, but also for the spirit which assailed the national and particular. In both ways he helped to make a universal religion a necessity. In a similar manner, the Empire of Rome conquered the world not merely to provide highways for the ambassadors of the Cross, but also to be the bond and protection of the universalism of Christianity. Heathenism was dying and Juda- ism dividing, but only because they had created a higher need than they were able to satisfy. The old religions were crumbling, because a new, which required a worship free from the sensuous and material, with its foundations deep in man's moral nature, was already come. After the Old Testament, the most spiritual link with the earlier religious development was the Greek philosophy. It created and did not merely criticise. Platonism recognised a certain unity of the consciousness of God and sought a higher BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 305 ground for the Divine life. Epicureanism was not mere Euclsemonism and Atheism, nor was Stoicism mere self-sufficiency. Epicureanism and Stoicism both alike, though in different ways, enforced the lesson of Socrates that a man should return into himself to find the essence of virtue there, that man's blessedness is to be found only in a satisfied and disciplined moral frame. Scepticism taught not to be proudly self-sufficient. Eclecticism cor- rected partial views and Neo-Platonism urged an immediate consciousness of the Divine. By all alike, this great necessary lesson preparatory for Christianity was taught — that man is a moral sub- ject with his own special life's task. Most important of all, so conspicuous as to require no exposition, we have the preparation of the Old Testament. All these elements were combined in Hellenistic Judaism, which, having been delivered from Jewish particularism by Greek culture, was ready to receive a more spiritual form of faith and to provide the ambassadors of the new religion. All these elements, however much separated, were the result of one and the same wide move- ment. Christianity is the natural unity of them all, and contains nothing which had not made itself felt as a result of rational thinking, or as a need of the human heart, or as a requirement of the moral consciousness. To pass from the natural Christianity of Deism and the respectable moral Christianity of Eational- ism to these high places of the human spirit, 20 S06 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND makes one say with Keats and for a far greater reason : — Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken. But the greatness of Baur's description only makes his easy solution the less convincing. Is it strange, he demands, that, when all this was urging itself in so many ways upon the developed con- sciousness of mankind, it should finally appear in the simplest, purest, naturalest expression in Christianity ? We can only reply, especially when we are driven back to what Baur sought so strenu- ously to avoid, to the certainty that all that met this vast need was embodied in one man, that it is the strangest of all conceivable things, strange as life, strange as love. The aim of Baur's theory is to pour the fulness of the perfected idea of Christianity into many vessels, and he seems to ascribe as much to Paul as to Jesus, but he is too great a historian to be able to conceal the unique greatness of Him who remains the Author of the Faith ; nor, although his task is to prove development, can he obscure the fact that nothing ever rises higher than the religion of Jesus. Jesus, he says, dealt with the social problem which ojDpressed His age, and found a solution whereby those who have nothing, yet have all things. To be poor in spirit, gladly ac- cepting one's lot, is to have the Kingdom of Heaven. In this solution, again, there lie the deeper contrast of sin and grace, and the higher reconciliation of them in redemption. Moreover, BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 307 man being thus viewed apart from his position, morals could be viewed apart from circumstances, and the disposition could be made the express principle of morality. This carries with it a rela- tion to men of equal rights and love to all, and a relation to God of moral disposition, not of cere- mony. Forgiveness plays a larger part than ever, but it is as the necessary condition for fulfilling God's will. Under the influence of this higher moral conception, the idea of the Old Testament Theocracy was spiritualised into the idea of the Kingdom of God, into the idea, that is, of an association for fulfilling the will of God, which rests entirely upon moral conditions, upon the man him- self, his will and moral receptivity, and only de- mands that, on entering it, he lay aside all external claims for himself. Thus Christianity in its most original elements is a purely moral religion, and to this, its most distinctive character, we must, after all the errors of an excessive dogmatism, ever return. The contrast between this lofty idea of the morality of the Gospel and the compound of pru- dential maxims and dubious accommodation which constituted the idea of a century earlier is a signi- ficant sign of progress, a valuable result of investi- gation, for the understanding of the Christian Ethic is the beginning of all understanding of Christianity. Yet, even with this high conception of Jesus, Baur cannot effect a convincing beginning. Why should the idea of the Jewish Messiah, though it were the most national of all Jewish ideas, be attached to 308 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND One who had indeed the greatest elements of the Old Testament conceptions, but none of the ele- ments which alone the popular mind regarded ? Still less do we see how Jesus should have cared to claim the title, when, in the minds of His con- temporaries, it in no way represented the type of salvation He sought to accomplish. And, if we admit with Baur that the incontrovertible cer- tainty the disciples entertained regarding the Kesurrection afiPorded a firm ground for the further development of Christianity, what right have we to regard the source of so great a historical force as outside the circle of historical inquiry ? The sole result of the discussion is to make us feel that Jesus impressed His contemporaries, and especially His friends, with a greatness which Baur is equally powerless to explain or to explain away. In carrying out his work of pouring the fulness of Christianity into many vessels, Baur claims the right to date any of the books of the New Testa- ment anywhere in the first two centuries. Mark is a mere compilation from Matthew and Luke. Luke is a Gospel with a purpose — the defence of the Pauline teaching — and dates from the end of the first century. John is another Gospel with a purpose — the exposition of the Catholic theology — and dates from the end of the second century. The only trustworthy document is the teaching of Jesus, the Logia in Matthew. The only authentic writings are the four great Epistles of Paul, and, interpreting the other writings by them, we find that, almost from the day of our BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 309 Lord's death, Christianity began to sj^lit into two camps. To one the risen Christ was to return in the clouds of heaven to restore a Jewish kingdom ; to the other He had died, at the hands of the Jews, to all Jewish distinctions. The freer development began with the Hellenistic party led by Stephen. This party was expelled by the first persecution. Their departure left Jerusalem henceforth the centre of Judaistic Christianity. Paul's persecu- tion of Stephen and his associates only shows how clearly he saw the issues ; so that, on his conversion, he at once accepted a universal Christianity, and regarded the death of Christ as the end of the Jewish idea. Thus Christ's death and resurrec- tion were his chief concern. Of the life of Christ, seeing he could have the word of the living and working Christ in himself, why should he inquire at the other Apostles ? Yet surely it is this belief in a living Christ that has nourished in all other men, besides this singularly constituted Apostle, the undying interest in the narratives of Christ's earthly life. Paul became the leader of the universal party, while the older Apostles headed the Jewish party. The Apostles conceded something to events and to Paul's arguments, and Paul sought to maintain a link with the Jerusalem Church by raising contri- butions for its poor ; but the rupture with Peter at Antioch was, in Baur's view, never healed, and left a deep, rankling feeling of resentment in the Petrine party. The purest source of information regarding 310 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND Paul's party after his death is Luke's Gospel, which sets forth Jesus as the Son of God in Paul's sense, and relates how the Gentiles received the Gospel when the Jews rejected it. The Apoca- lypse, which Baur is willing to ascribe to the Apostle John, represents the other side. John, he argues, settled in Ephesus for the express purpose of controverting the Pauline party, and it is Paul and his followers who are described as ** those who call themselves AjDOstles and are not ". The other writings of the New Testament are landmarks on the way towards the reconciliation which ended in the Early Catholic Church. On the one hand, Judaistic Christianity sank circumcision in baptism, claimed Paul's universalism for Peter, and ascribed all the better elements of heathenism to Peter's converts ; on the other hand, Gentile Christianity modified Paul's doctrine of faith, and gradually adopted the theocratic institutions and aristocratic forms of Judaism. The influence of Judaism in fashioning the Catholic Church cannot, Baur maintains, be exaggerated, and the bishop, who was the germ of the whole Papal hierarchy, was simply the creation of the inborn imjjulse of the Jew toward a theocratic world-emj)ire. Apart altogether from the question of whether the facts justify this scheme, Baur does not show that Catholicism is a wider and higher synthesis of thought than original Christianity, and he cannot obscure the fact that it is a great departure from the freedom of the Apostle of the Gentiles. If Baur failed to gain any wide acceptance for BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 311 his scheme, it was due largely to a change that was taking place in what Professor James has called the " sentiment of rationality ". Men were no longer so much charmed by the idea of evolution by intellectual movement. That, too, they began to feel, was only a kind of machinery. Pessimism, among other things, was changing the temper of the age. To it the car of progress was only a Juggernaut car rolling on over the bodies of its worshippers. Life, the Pessimist affirmed, is not rational in the Hegelian sense. It is not a fine optimistic business of climbing a ladder, first with the right foot and then with the left, and then sett- ing both feet on the rung above. Just because the truth Pessimism affirms had been so utterly ig- nored, it could be spoken of as if there were nothing else in the world. Life, it was affirmed, is a mere blind groping in the darkness with the smell of the underground prison-house about us, and our heads of little use except to hit the rafters. Then this easy conquest of the promised land by spacious intellectual formulae became a mockery, and men had to make their choice between regarding life as a poor attempt for a little season at cheating the worms of their due or as the tribulation by which we must enter the kingdom, there being manifestly no easy middle way. In view of this stern neces- sity of choice the history of the Early Church assumed a different shape and the figure of Christ received a new value. In face of a life made real by temjitation and trial, it was inconceivable that such a Being was made up of shreds and patches, 312 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND of Old Testament texts and popular misconcep- tions. Apart from all else, how could any religious enthusiasm, working with the ignorant imagination, conceive that glorious liberty of a child of God, that attitude of a Son in His Father's house ? Who, in that age enslaved to the past, could imagine even the intellectual freedom ? How, above all, could such a picture of liberty come to pass, when, on the hypothesis, mental subjection was its presup- position ? Think only of how in Christ the problem of history and the individual is solved. In Him there is nothing of the painful conflict which dis- turbs other seekers after truth, that, without his- torical religion, they are barren, and that, with it, they are enslaved. For Him there is no " ugly, wide ditch " to get over in passing from " contingent truths of history to eternal truths of reason ". Like a Son in His Father's house He takes secure and easy possession of all the treasures of the past. They are always at His service and never in His way. With entire freedom He uses the Old Testa- ment, finding in it a continual provision for His thought, but ever using it in His own way and for His own ends, and ever accepting its teaching because it is true and never because it is authori- tative. Just because He never takes up a merely intellectual attitude towards the truth, just because He is ever practically fulfilling the Kingdom of God, for which those who had gone before Him lived and died. He is always in living succession to them, inheriting all their labours, yet needing to call no man master. BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 313 Still less could any one imagine the perfect moral freedom by which this intellectual freedom was fed. Pessimism has all its rights accorded to it. Poor humanity's sores are not covered over. The harlot and the publican prostitute womanhood and man- hood. The formalist and hypocrite holds religion like a corpse to his icy heart. Poverty, disease and death occupy the scene. Jesus is in the midst of it all, bearing the burden of it all, seeking no freedom by fleeing pam and evil, yet free ; poor, but with no burden and degradation of poverty ; know- ing all trial, yet having a peace the world could not take away ; finally meeting death, from which His flesh shrank with horror, but with the Father's name on His lips mingled with a prayer for His cruel brethren. The man who has struggled for freedom knows the reality of that portraiture, knows it is no painted image to deceive the senses. By faith and not by criticism he reaches out to- wards it, knowing its supreme significance for his own freedom in a world of suffering and sin. It is, then, easy to believe that men could come short of the freedom of Christ, because they were unable to rise above the old levels of their thought and action, that they might again turn Him into a formula and acknowledge Him as Master in a way to destroy the very liberty which was the founda- tion of His whole relation both to God and to man : but what is no longer possible to be believed, is that one who did know His freedom, like the Apostle Paul, and who ascribed all his emancipa- tion of spirit to Him, was satisfied with a mere lay 314 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND figure, a shadowy Messiah about whom he knew nothing and cared to know nothing, except that, on the very dubious ground of a subjective vision, he believed Him to have risen from the dead. The one thing that stands out with absolute plainness from the whole history, the one thing which clamantly demands some explanation, is the unique Personality by whom so many have pierced their way through a world of sin and suffering to a buoyant and glad hope, a radiant Kingdom of God ; and there the Tiibingen criticism utterly broke down. The weightiest criticism of the Tiibingen position came from E-itschl. Though his work has inspired the labours of at least one disciple whose know- ledge of the period is greater than his own, his study of the Early Church remains to this day, in many respects, a conclusive utterance. Ritschl himself once belonged to the School, and he always acknowledged what he had learned from Baur both in regard to matter and method. Only in the second edition of his Rise of the Old Catholic Church did he attain a quite independent position. His history is weighty just because he had learned from Baur the whole extent of the problem in- volved in the rise of the Christian Church, but it abides in value because it does not deal with blood- less categories but with living men, and because it sees that the supreme concern is the Person of Christ. The first question Ritschl asks is, What was Christ's own relation to the Mosaic Law ? The BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 315 answer must largely depend on the Gospel we start with. It is of importance for Kitschl's whole outlook that he starts with Mark, which he holds to be one of the sources both of Matthew and of Luke. When he reached that conclusion he knew he was setting up a different standard of reality — not the idea but the world of men. Now, in Mark, Christ is seen to grow in freedom in respect of the Law. At the beginning of His ministry He sent a man He had healed to show himself to the priest. From that point He advanced, till in the end He set up the law of love to God and our neighbour as the substance of all laws, as a law to which the Law of Sacrifice and Sabbath rest were indifferent, the Law of Ceremonial Purity useless, and the Law of Divorce a concession to sin. In Matthew some- thing of this is toned down, but something also is accentuated. The Law as expounded and de- veloped by the prophets is no longer a mere Law of Holiness in the Mosaic sense, but is a Law of Righteousness, a Law which love can fulfil, while abolishing, at the same time, all legal ordinances and precepts. Liberty, therefore, in respect of the Law began with Jesus Himself. This freedom, however. He did not use in a revolutionary way, not even in His own action, but He left it as a principle attached to His Person to be afterwards realised in the Kingdom of God. The disciples were not with- drawn from their ancestral worship, and their future action was left to be determined by their subsequent progress under the guidance of the Holy 316 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND Spirit. The question is to determine how, from this starting-point, we arrive at the Catholic Church of the fifth century with its rule of faith, its hier- archy and its sacramental system. In arranging his authorities Ritschl found no place for any of the New Testament writings in the second century. " I confess generally," he says, "that, if the statements of the New Testament writers and Patristic deliverances come into con- flict, I unhesitatingly question the latter. The Church Fathers knew amazingly little about the circumstances of the Apostolic time, and what they knew was mostly wrong." Ritschl's contention is that the Scriptures are right in representing the differences between the older Apostles and Paul as not doctrinal but only practical. For this view his arguments are (1) that only the practical difference arose out of the situation in which Christ left the Church, and (2) that only the practical difference is found in the later history. (1) In respect of the situation as Christ left it, both parties started with a large neutral basis of Jewish belief, and were agreed on the universality of Christianity, and on the necessity of belief in Christ as the sole condition of salvation and of entrance into the Kingdom of God. Both took love and patience to be the law of this kingdom. Neither party ever refers to Ceremonial Purity, Sabbath Law, or Sacrifice. Nor do Peter and John come behind Paul in their dogmatic conception of the Person of Christ, or in acknowledging that the BAUR'S FIRHT THREE CENTURIES 317 revelation in Him is absolute. Even when Paul differs from Jesus and His immediate followers in distinguishing definitely the righteousness given by God through faith in Jesus Christ from the righteousness which is the fulfilment of the law by love, he is not departing from Christ's meaning, but is only taking special care to avoid a Pharisaic misconstruction of it as though it were still a law of special precepts. To avoid the danger of con- ceiving the love by which the moral duties in detail are to be renovated as a legal task, Paul insists that love is the necessary religious outcome of faith. But this difference in expression and practical in- terest only shows more clearly the agreement of Paul and the other Apostles in the leading ideas of Christ. Even Paul's view of the Law, as a Divine stage of moral development, but one which, from its want of power to carry out its own demands, necessarily points beyond itself, was not repugnant to the older Apostles, who, while they themselves observed the Mosaic Law, quietly omitted all men- tion of it from their Christian teaching. The real difference was that, while Paul was face to face with the obstacle the Law opposed to the reception of Gentiles into the Church, the Apostles of the Circumcision were face to face with the obstacle which the rejection of the Law would oppose to the reception of the Jews. The Apostolic Decree was a natural attempt at a compromise, though it was perhaps as natural that James should understand it in one sense and Paul in another. (2) In the later history this account of the 318 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND situation is confirmed, first of all, by the attitude of the Nazarenes, the most direct descendants of the Church at eJerusalem. As they continued to hold Paul and his work among the Gentiles in unqualified respect, it would appear, not only that the division did not go farther than the New Tes- tament represents, but that some further reconcilia- tion must afterwards have been reached. The later Ebionites who decried Paul, of whom Baur made so much, were descendants not of the Apos- tolic Church, but of the Pharisaic Judaising party who only used Peter's name, and of Christianised Essenes, Even this practical difference, Eitschl argues, presently disappeared. With the prohibition of circumcision after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Apostolic Church lost its last sign of distinction. The Catholic Church, therefore, was essentially Gentile in origin, but it was not, for that reason, Pauline. Heathenism, not Judaism, stood between the Gentile Christians and their understanding of Paul. It left them incapable of feeling the per- sonal contrast between his doctrine of Justification by Faith and his earlier Pharisaism, of knowing perfectly his idea of the oneness of God, and of understanding the history of God's covenant rela- tion, of moral righteousness and judgment, of sin and redemption, of God's kingdom and God's Son. What we find in the Apostolic Fathers is not the freedom of Paul but a new Christian legalism. Instead of the idea of the new birth which, in its original meaning, was the expression of the most BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 319 vivid sense of religious freedom, we have Christ as a new Lawgiver, whose rule of faith is to be ac- cepted and whose commandments are to be ful- filled. The rule of faith was a sort of cross-section of the Apostolic teaching which so combined the Apostolic types of thought that the individual stamp of every one of them is lost ; while the com- mands were without the sense of a new relation to God and a new principle of life which gave in the eyes of the Apostles such supreme significance to the death and resurrection of Christ. This last failure seems most amazing till we remember how ignorant the Gentile converts were of the Old Testament foundations of the Apostolic teaching. So marked is this ignorance that Ritschl considers it the supreme distinction between the later writers and all the writers of the New Testament. This lapse from freedom into legalism is so far from being incredible, as Newman argued, that it is always taking place. Men continually fall away from the high demands of freedom to the common level of rule and compromise, and, considering the world into which Christianity entered, the wonder was that men understood as much of it as they did. Much of what was a departure from the high Apostolic ideal was, Kitschl argues, nevertheless, practically helpful to the Church. The sacramental idea, though contrary to the Apostolic teaching, helped in that age to keep alive the idea of grace as a Divine act. The triumph of the sacramental element was assured by the increasing worldliness of the Church and the need of a means for pardon- 320 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND ing even heinous sins, if the Church was still to increase. For the same reason a ritual and mediat- ing character in the clergy, though it had no place in the original conception of the Church, became necessary, and the same cause created the mon- archical bishop whose real authority was the power of discipline in an age when the world was rapidly being included in the Church. This reintroduction of the legal and sacramental must, therefore, be regarded as a discipline required by the Church in view of outward opposition and inward corruption. But that does not hinder the fact that the great question of freedom which is solved in the New Testament is unsolved in the Church. Elements which in the teaching of Christ and the Apostles were intimately blended, are in the Catholic Church merely set over against one another. No attempt is made to seek that organic relation between Divine grace and human morality which is perfect freedom. Life and dogma move between the legal and the sacramental, and the only question is which should predominate. This admission of the temporal advantage of the great change which the Catholic Church in- troduced into the Apostolic faith is seized upon by the Abb^ Loisy in order to set up a new doctrine of development. His view is a combination of Baur and Newman. Newman's contention that a religion infallibly given must be infallibly preserved is no longer credible to him, but the prestige criti- cism takes from the Scripture, Loisy argues, it adds to the Church. His chief difficulty is to make BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 321 anything out of Jesus without setting Him so high that He and not the Church must be the last ground of appeal, or without showing in Him such freedom that no system of ecclesiastical belief and order can be regarded as an advance upon His life and teach- ing. While Loisy speaks of the impossibility of understanding Christ except through the Church, the actual Jesus is not interpreted by the Church, but by the most ruthless critical canons. He is only a man with an apocalyptic, impossible idea of the Kingdom of God, an ordinary Jewish conception of the Deity, and an ethical belief that there will be good to him who does good. When the immediate, visible rule of God did not come at once, there was nothing for it but to take the Church in its place. Even the first society had this outward aim. It was a centralised, yea a hierarchical fraternity. True the hierarchy was only of devotion, but the Apostles received converts, excluded the unworthy, and maintained good order. That the whole differ- ence between freedom and subjection lies in the distinction between an authority that is merely of devotion and an authority that is merely official, Loisy does not condescend to consider. Then this Christ of criticism suddenly becomes the Christ of the Church, apparently on the old Hegelian ground that it is only the idea that matters. Thereafter the contention is practically the same as Newman's. At important moments the Church became what she had to become or perish. Whatever the Church has been, whether at the height of temporal power in the Middle Ages or deprived of it in order that 21 322 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND she may turn her more spiritual attention to the exigencies of this doubting age, it has all been good. This true Hegelian optimism ought to encourage a believer to go a little farther and include also her divisions among the good things that have come to the Church. From all this, one thing, and one thing only, is perfectly clear. The Person of Jesus loses all real significance as soon as we interpret Him mainly as the Founder of an outwardly authoritative institu- tion. The key is lost to all His unique greatness when the freedom of a Son in His Father's house is omitted, and the gift of this freedom to His fol- lowers is regarded as a Protestant prejudice. The determination of this question must ultimately depend on a religious, not a historical, judgment. If the sacramental meaning is deeper than the things of the heart, and the rounded perfection of an ecclesiastical system higher than the simplicity which affords scope for freedom, Loisy is right in what Jesus was, and Strauss not very far wrong. But in that case the New Testament is only a very rudimentary germ. If, however, the true Divine end is freedom, if that is the purpose both of God's unveiling of Himself in revelation and of His work- ing in providence, if the end of all regulation is to enable men to pass on to the inward regulation of souls at one with God, or, in Paul's language, to shut us up to disobedience in order to turn us to the spiritual sources of freedom, the New Testa- ment becomes of very different significance. It is then the record of a mornent of freedom before it BAUR'S FIRST THREE CENTURIES 323 was subjected again to the discipline of institutions, of the visibility of the promise before it was again subjected to the discipline of law. It is such a moment as when, in the morning on the hill-top, we catch a glimpse of our distant goal before we descend to the plain to struggle towards it through the dust and the heat. This does not mean that the subsequent discipline was unnecessary, any more than that the Jewish Law was unnecessary. If freedom is the final goal, the most difficult and distant of all human endeavours, if it cannot be compassed either by argument or by resolution, if it is only possible through what Paul means by being in Christ, in an atmosphere flooded by the presence of God, and if men, even in the Church, live much in an atmosphere flooded by the world, and are always coming short of the Divine goal and needing to be put in pupilage again, the vast labour for one visible organisation to embody the discip- line and for a great network of sacrament around life to embody the grace, was not in vain. But so long as we remember that the purpose of these things is to enable us to pass beyond them, the New Testament will ever continue to raise two questions with increasing emphasis — the signifi- cance of Christ for this freedom, on the one hand, and the necessity of striving after the life of freedom, if we would realise our relation to Him, on the other. If Christ has this practical value, the Scriptures derive their significance from Him, and not from any conclusions regarding their accuracy or authorship. Ritschl's test of the 324 THE THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT canon of the New Testament, that, out of all com- parison with contemporary and later writers, the New Testament authors show an understanding not only of Christ's teaching but of its Old Testa- ment foundations, at once recognises a unity in all revelation, and a wide distinction from other writings. All the Scriptures may be broadly described as the literature of our goal of freedom in God. The practical test of it is whether, against the world without and within, it can afford ground for maintaining the glorious liberty of the children of God. LECTURE YIII THE THEOLOGY OF EXPEKIENCE AND EITSCHL'S JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION Schleiermacher, Glaube7islehre, 1821. Erskine of Linlathen, The Unconditioned Freeness of the Gospel, 1828. Domer, Entwiokelungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi, 1839. Eothe, Theologische Ethik, 1845. Maurice, The Doctrine of Sacrifice, preached 1854, Dedicatory Letter, 2nd edition, 1878. Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1852-56. M'Leod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1855, Intro- duction, 2nd edition, 1867. Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, 1868. Von Frank, System der christlichen Gewissheit, 1870-73. Ritschl, Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versoh- nung, 1870-74. Mozley, University Sermons, sermon on the Atonement, 1873. Dale, The Atonement, Congregational Lecture, 1875. Lipsius, Dogmatik, 1876. Pfleiderer, Beligionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage, 1878. Books of Reference Histories of Theology as above, especially Pfleiderer and von Frank on Biedermann, Frank on Hofmann, and Ehrenfeuch- ter on Eothe. Geschichte der christlichen Beligionsphilo- sophie (Eng. trans.. History of the Philosophy of Religion), B. Piinjer. Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl, F. Kattenbusch, 1893. A full account of the Ritschlian Literature may be found in The Ritschlian Theology aiid the Evangelical Faith, James Orr, 1898, and in The Ritschlian TJteology, Critical and Constructive, Alfred E. Garvie, 2nd ed., 1902. The most important commentary on Ritschl is his life by his son, Albrecht Ritschls Leben, Otto Ritschl, 1892. A sym- pathetic short account of Ritschl's theology is to be found translated in Faith and Morals, W. Herrmann. Ritschl's The CJiristian Doctrine of Justification and Recojiciliation, trans, by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay, 2nd ed., 1902. LECTURE VIII THE THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND EITSGHL'S JUSTIFICATION AND BE CONCILIATION Through all this discussion one result has become clear. Christianity has no means left to it where- by to compel consent from the outside. There is no sound doctrine of Scripture which can overbear us ; and just as little is there any sound doctrine of the Church. What power the Scripture and the Church have a right to exercise presupposes faith. They cannot, therefore, be the foundation upon which faith is built. The Protestant cannot say : Here is the infallible Scripture, submit to it ; nor the Catholic : Here is the infallible Church, submit to it. Hence all theologies which go no deeper than Scripture texts or Church dogmas are insuffi- cient. As soon as they turn upon us and say : It does not matter what you think, this is the doctrine of Scripture, or this is the dogma of the Church, which it is your duty to accept, they are building on the past in a way which our whole inquiry shows to be not only intellectually but spiritually indefensible. The question now is whether the Christianity which cannot coerce may not all the better attract. (327) 328 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S Is it still capable of making the same impression as it did when the Apostles went, unsupported by anything but the Gospel itself, to men prepared for its reception by no kind of tradition ? Is it a Gospel, good news of God, and, like other good news, its own evidence ? Can it win the mind by its inner harmony, the conscience by giving peace, the will by the regeneration of love, the heart by the true fellowship ? In that case it should have its sufficient enforcement in the great experience and the great fellowship which, during the cen- turies, it has created, a fellowship to which we may ourselves belong and an experience we may our- selves verify. The first to recognise clearly the necessity and the fruitfulness of this method was Schleiermacher. As Dorner puts it, Schleiermacher made an epoch in thought by seeking to renovate theology and the Church by the ethical idea of personal freedom in God. To prosecute still farther that endeavour remains to this day the first duty of theology, and modern German theology derives its significance entirely from the fact that, largely owing to the influence of Schleiermacher, it has clearly under- stood the nature of its call. During the discussion the large issues of per- sonal freedom have become apparent. Personal freedom never can be a mere intellectual matter, mere width of outlook. Nor can it be a mere political matter, mere right of speech and vote and action in relation to others. Nor can it be a mere social matter, mere equality of position. In the JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 329 last issue, fi^eedom must be a religious question, a question not of the things we see, but of victory over them by the things unseen. It cannot be a matter of finding peace in the world, but requires peace in spite of the world. There can be no free- dom in the end without reaching God. In that case the fundamental question of religion must always be : How are we reconciled to God ? The test of every religion must be its ability to work this reconciliation. Regarding Christianity, the great question will not be its outward credentials, but whether it can place man in such a relation to God that his moral and religious needs shall both be satisfied, that he shall be right with himself and master of his life. In that case reconciliation would not follow merely when Christianity had been proved to be true, but its power to reconcile would be the highest evidence of its truth. Is not an authoritative doctrine of the Atonement even something of a contradiction ? An Atonement must be its own witness to the hearts that have been atoned, or it is nothing. Of course our own personal experience may be inadequate. The higher God's goodness, the less we may, in the hardness of our hearts, be able to respond to it. As M'Leod Campbell says, our true need should be measured, not by our sense of it, but by what God has done to meet it. And even in estimating what God has done to meet our need, we may require to enlarge our individual experience by the general Christian experience. Yet, in the final issue, such an appeal can only be to our own ex- 330 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S perience thus instructed and stimulated. It must be some kind of experience in which we have realised our freedom, an experience in which feel- ing should have its place, but which cannot end with mere feeling. It must concern itself with our whole experience of sin and of penitence, of inward peace and of victory over the world. But truth cannot be announced to us merely as God's good pleasure. Theology must not, on any pretext, fall back on the position of Duns Scotus, that merit is anything which God chooses to announce to us, on good authority, as what will satisfy Him. It must recognise that if we have not already in our hearts and consciences the authoritative announce- ment of what will satisfy Him, we are without any criterion of things Divine. Though the weakness of English theology of all schools has been in one way or another to fall back on the position that truth is what God has authori- tatively announced, its deep interest in the ques- tion of the Atonement and its earnest endeavour to make the doctrine convincing to the heart and conscience show that the greatness of the issue at stake has not been altogether unperceived. In every theory the attempt is more or less perfectly made to rest Christianity on its own foundations, to enforce it, not as an external dogma, but as a Gospel which is its own evidence. Among the many influences which directed general attention to this question of the Atone- ment, Tractarianism was one of the greatest. On the negative side it compelled the Evangelicals in JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 331 particular to revise their assumptions, and on the positive side it contributed the idea of a doctrine which would be impressive through its unity, and vital through embodying the large experience of the saints. The effect immediately became apparent. The list of books on the Atonement quoted by Campbell, which appeared within some twenty years after the Tracts, includes reprints from John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, half a dozen elabo- rate works modifying Calvinism, and one or two works from the Anglican standpoint ; and it does not include the works of his friend Erskine of Lin- lathen, to whom he himself is most akin, or of Coleridge, the forerunner of the whole discussion. To this day English theology has not fully realised that its task is to give a complete study of Christi- anity as a reconciliation of man to God, under the conditions imposed upon our thinking by the scien- tific account of the origin of man and of man's place in the world, by the Criticism of Scripture, and by the poverty-stricken results of all philoso- phical reconstructions of religion. The discussion, nevertheless, having dealt with a living religious experience, has contributed much that is perma- nently suggestive. The Nature of the Atonement and its Relations to Remission of Sins and Eternal TAfe, by John M'Leod Campbell, may not always satisfy the reader by its results, but it cannot fail to touch him by its spirit. If the Atonement is meant to reveal a God of love, Campbell argues, it cannot be either an arbitrary or an unintelligible act. In this age when the 332 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S reign of law has for so many minds taken the place of God, and the idea of development has led them to regard sin as only a form of ignorance, Christi- anity must have its highest and ultimate evidence in what it is, and the crown of its argument should be the doctrine of the Atonement. The Calvinistic doctrine of satisfaction for the sins of the elect did at least preserve the idea that guilt is the sense of sin and punishment the desert of it, but the modifi- cation of the doctrine which makes it merely a necessity of God's government, merely a means of deterring others, only confuses clear moral issues regarding sin and guilt and punishment. The difficulties, Campbell thinks, are avoided by re- cognising that the Incarnation was not for the sake of an atonement, but that the Atonement naturally followed from an incarnation among a sinful race. The Incarnation is the primary fact, the supreme witness to God's interest in man and His purpose with man ; and the Divine mind in Christ, which was perfect Sonship towards God and perfect Brotherhood towards man, necessarily undertook all the task required to show this interest and ac- complish this purpose. We have to show that the Atonement is the highest manifestation of the Fatherliness of God. That must be, in the last issue, an appeal to the hearts of His children. Yet in order to estimate it with fulness, we must attend to the universal witness of the Church, lest we omit any genuine experience of the saints, any- thing of their great and real burden of sin, or of their great and real deliverance. JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 333 The work of the Atonement is to bridge the gulf between what man is and what God wills him to be, and the essence of it is Christ's sympathy with God's judgment of sin. It deals with man on the part of God and with God on the part of man, and is both retrospective and prospective. It deals with man on God's behalf regarding the past, say- ing about God's will, against which we rebel, and about the Father's heart, in which we will not trust, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father ". Re- garding the past also it deals with God on man's behalf, being a perfect Amen in humanity to God's judgment of sin and, therefore, a fuller satisfaction to God's righteous heart of love than any punish- ment. In a similar way it deals with the future. First, it witnesses for the Father to men. By re- vealing His Fatherly mind towards us, it shows the inestimable preciousness which is hidden for God in humanity and which only needs the right rela- tion to Him to become manifest. It thus calls us into God's righteousness, which is not legal obliga- tion discharged, but the mind of Sonship towards God. Then it deals with the Father on man's be- half, making intercession for us, not as for some- thing the Father is unwilling to give, but, as all prayer should be, the expression of the Father's own highest purpose. Christ pleads His merit with the Father, in the sense that what He is we may be, and that His filial spirit contains the new mind in which His rebellious children should return to the Father. In comparison with Campbell's great book. 334 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S Frederick Denison Maurice's Doctrine of Sacrifice seems superficial, but it represented a wider school and appealed to a more distinguished audience. The second edition is prefaced by a long reply to a lecture by Dr. Candlish, the ruthlessness of whose attack upon him Maurice failed to under- stand, for the simple reason that he had no sus- picion that his own view of the older theology he attacked was a caricature. When a man's faith is represented as a mere superstitious at- tempt to appease an angry God, probably he does well, like Candlish, to be angry. For that agonis- ing sense of sin which in all ages has found expres- sion in sacrifice, Maurice has no better explanation than man's selfish desire for personal good. In his eyes it never rises higher than an attempt at bribery of the incorruptible gods. Though he may speak more of the unity of the truth and of the witness of the Church than Campbell, his conception is much more external and far less vital to his contention. He attaches the idea of unity of the truth to the doctrine of the Trinity. The source of all morality and religion, he says, is that at the foundation of all things there is an absolute root of Truth and Good ; that of this Truth and Good there is a per- fect Utterer and Revealer ; that to make them effective over rebellious wills, there is a Living Person carrying them out. In respect of the Church, his test is too apt to be agreement with his own views, not the enlargement of their pos- sible limitations. Everything is to be approved by the right doctrine of sacrifice as the sacrifice of sur- JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 335 render. That is the true root of all theology and morality, while the idea of sacrifice as offerings to appease the gods is the root of all superstition. The very purpose of the Old Testament is to combat the wrong idea of sacrifice and establish the right, its sacrifices being the symbol of man's surrender of himself. It thereby reveals what is highest both in God and man ; and this teaching is the link between the Old Testament and the New, for the essence of Christ's humiliation is that He sacrificed Himself. The Lamb slain from the founda- tion of the world is the perfect revelation of God. Blood is the symbol of entire dedication to God, and because that is the only way of return to Him, it is also the symbol of restoration. Christ bore sin in the sense of having perfect antipathy to sin and perfect sympathy with the sinner, which is the only appeal capable of raising a voluntary and spirit- ual creature out of voluntary and spiritual death to a right and true life. Christ sounds the abyss of human misery to disclose the abyss of the Divine love, thereby restoring men to the power of control which makes them kings, and to the power of sym- pathy which makes them priests, and this Atone- ment, like the love it proclaims, is unlimited. This system, if it can be called a system, suc- ceeds mainly by ignoring the difficulties. The glorious liberty of the children of God needs some better ground for self-sacrifice than the sense that it is a very fine thing, and some better ground for peace than that God is more easy-going than the things which happen in the world would show Him 336 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S to be. All the pressing questions begin where this system ends. In reply to the attack on Mediation as an im- moral doctrine, Mozley, in his University Sermons, urges that what has called forth the moral affection of man so strongly must be seriously misunderstood, if it is represented as mere injustice — a vice which in others at least none love. Its voluntariness, its quality of personal intercession, its relation to a whole system of society in which we all profit by what we have done nothing to bring about, are quite overlooked. Christ's sacrifice is the sacrifice of love, and, as such, it is a real fulfilment of justice. It appeases the appetite for punishment, which is the characteristic of justice in relation to evil ; and it is also the highest guarantee of that change of disposition in the criminal which justice naturally requires. That is the substitution inherent in all acts of love. The heart accepts it, and the heart is a true witness, not to be rejected because the idea may remain for the mind only a fragment. Al- though we cannot reconcile them, justice, mercy, mediation are great vistas and openings into an invisible world in which is the point of view which brings them all together. Dale, in his Lectures on the Atonement, seeks to establish a still more positive doctrine of Substitu- tion. If the Atonement is only a wonderful mani- festation of love, he thinks it fails even in displaying love, for only a sacrifice that is required can be such a manifestation. Christ's sacrifice only proves love because he bore for man a penalty which JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 337 otherwise man would have had to bear for himself. As only those who hold that Reconciliation is not the removal of our hostility to God, but of God's hostility to us, have the apostolic feeling about sin, it is reasonable to suppose that they hold the apos- tolic faith. The reason of this hostility on God's part is His unique relation to the moral law. He must maintain His will as a complete expression of the law, even as a parent must maintain the respect and obedience of his children ; and the assertion and expression of this identity between the will of God and the eternal law of righteous- ness require that sin must be punished, or, if it be remitted, another act must express with equal energy the ill-desert of sin. This latter alternative was accepted when Christ, instead of inflicting the penalty. Himself bore it. At the same time, as our Representative, He made for us perfect ac- knowledgment of sin, restored our original relation to God, and, through His mystical relation to us, became the death of our sin. Dale's argument would be more convincing had he more clearly defined his relation to the authority of Scripture. In all these writers we have some of the best characteristics of English thinking. They show a willingness to recognise the fragmentary nature of human knowledge and to allow a due place to all the fragments, they insist on the living issues of life's tasks, on the necessity of doing them with what light we have, and they do not soar into abstrac- tions either about man or about God. The Briton always retains a sense of what is needed by a man 22 338 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S who has a restless spirit within him ever disturbing him, and who lives in a world with good wages in its hand to bribe him, and he has a notion which never leaves him, that he would like to be making improvements both upon himself and the world. Mere contemplating and cataloguing improvements does not satisfy him. Hence, in spite of his limita- tions, he usually accomplishes something for the practical issues of freedom. But his practical ten- dency also leads him into compromises which regard human agreements, not ultimate truth. Instead of considering whether he must not seek new foundations, his tendency is to continue to build on the fragment of Scripture authority criticism has left, of ecclesiastical authority division has left, and of moral authority comfort and conventionality have left. To deal with fundamental principles he finds disturbing to the good terms on which he would like to be with his neighbour, and is with himself. The German discussion has too often lacked this moderation, this fidelity to life, this regard for the hints and half lights of experience, but it has, on the other hand, much more fully realised the actual conditions, and it has dealt much more thoroughly with the whole intellectual and even with the whole spiritual situation, for it has realised that the one thing worth dealing with is funda- mental principles. It has been the custom to divide German theo- logians into Liberal, Ortlwdox and Mediating Schools, and the division will sufficiently serve our purpose. JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 339 The school farthest away from the English type of thought is the Liberal. It continued the in- fluence of the Hegelian or at least of the Monistic philosophy. The world was regarded as an emana- tion in which God's qualities were all unfolded. Things hostile to Grod could not exist in it as in a creation, but evil was, as Schelling said, from the dark ground in God. Hence no other reconcilia- tion could be needed in it except the expansion of a partial into a complete view. Even the most orthodox Hegelians, such as Daub and Marheineke, could not make this view of God and the world and sin appear Christian. Yet it was painful when Strauss, who always used language with the cold clearness of a frosty day, explained the idea of the Incarnation as humanity, the child of the visible earthly mother and the invisible Spirit, and when he went on to say : " We who have critically dissolved the Evangelical history, who have thrown the Scripture doctrines of the Church into the lumber room of superstition, are no more Chris- tians ". Feuerbach would seem to go even farther when he regarded all religion as the dream of what man, in his weakness, would like to be true ; but this acknowledgment that religion has a right, in this troubled life, to be a dream of power, was an acknowledgment of other elements in it besides mere critical intellectualism which went far beyond Strauss. When he goes on to say that what men are now attempting to reinstate is a Christianity with the roses and myrtles of the heathen Venus interwoven with the crown of thorns of the 340 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RlTSCHL'S heavenly Bridegroom, a dissolute, characterless, comfortable, belleletterish, coquettish, epicurean Christianity, and when he quotes Luther with approval as saying that it is all or nothing, he shows where the real stress of accepting or reject- ing Christianity lies. The attempt to reconstruct Christianity on essentially Hegelian lines, however, still continued. A school which regarded themselves as, in a quite unique way, scientific theologians, expounded the Christian teaching as it has existed in history, in order, by a critical and philosophical process, to distil out of it the truth which lay hidden in the popular and pictorial representation. The best known representatives are Biedermann, Pfleiderer and Lipsius. All alike deny our right in reason to ascribe personality to God. To Biedermann the idea of a personal and an absolute God is a contra- diction ; to Pfleiderer God's self-consciousness can- not stand over against His world-consciousness ; to Lipsius the ascription of personality to God is a sensuous and pictorial way of speaking which we can never quite get beyond, but which we must think our way out of as much as possible. Pfleid- erer is most fully satisfied with the position. The Christian doctrine of Creation, he says, is right in regarding everything as from God, but wrong in re- garding the world as a free act in time. The world is simply the manifestation of God's infinite poten- cies. The Trinity he explains, after the most approved Hegelian fashion, as various aspects of these potencies. Biedermann, though he accepts JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 341 the logical consequences of his position to the ex- tent of making immortality an imagination which has its only meaning in a Kingdom of God, which again is only the goal of evolution, nevertheless maintains the right of personal feeling to cherish such a conception as a personal God and to be- lieve in the reality of the love of God. Lipsius maintains that the one thing we really know is " how we are related to God and God related to us, and how our world appears in the light of our pious self-consciousness, and how our pious self- consciousness is affected by our world". Kattenbusch complains of the unspeakable mon- otony of the long process of distilling the true idea which always turns out to be the same abstract formula, that the finite spirit stands in a peculiar relation to the Infinite Spirit, and that freedom and dependence are united in religion, because all impression of finite dependence is lost for the pious self-consciousness in the idea of infinite dependence. '* I recognise," he says, "no other ground for blessedness than the aesthetic, that the Infinite Spirit is a principle of harmony, of ordered method, of illumination, of exaltation, and that everything is in Him in transparent rationality." ^ That result is natural enough, for everything characteristic and individual and varied is connected with personality, and nothing but an abstraction can remain if we remove it. And the weakness of this theology lies here, for if personality is nothing, man's faith and 1 Vo7i Schleiennacher zu Bitschl, p. 35. 342 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S service are nothing. No system would more con- fidently claim to be a presentation of freedom. It offers the freedom of spacious and detached con- templation. But the one thing it cannot admit is any effective result freedom accomplishes. That would explode its whole notion of reason as the even, the undisturbed, the smooth flow of the present out of the past. It is an Oriental way of thinking, a way of sitting to watch the stream of life go by, and it can only regard the idea that the current can in any way be affected by the individual will as an illusion. Man has not yet won such freedom that he could not profit by what this professes to be — a large system of emancipation, but, so far at least, he has not won any freedom except with the sense upon him that the issues of will and purpose are of infinite consequence. Even the institutions of freedom, so highly esteemed by this type of thinker, could not be retained on such a quiescent acceptance of things as they are. As Laveleye has pointed out, there is no such thing even as political freedom outside of Chris- tianity ; while, with the possible exception of Russia, no Christian country altogether lacks it. And he is surely right in ascribing this result, not to natural progress, but to a religion which teaches men to deny themselves, and to consider liberty as above life. Only when men are convinced, to the extent of being willing to stake their lives upon it, that everything that is is not right, can freedom be won or retained, for otherwise parliamentary safe- guards would be waste-paper. Moreover, this in- JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 343 difference to the individual by whose sacrifices all progress is won, though it may seem at first to give us spacious horizons and great and enduring ele- ments to work with, lands us at last in a world of dreams. We hear much about the goal of all pro- gress being a Kingdom of God, the high end towards which the great spiral of progress is ever winding upwards. But what is a Kingdom of God if it is not a kingdom of immortal spirits, and what is perfection if no individual is finally perfected ? In view of eternity, a world process is nothing to speak of longer or greater than an individual life. A world process loses all its meaning if the material it works upon is so perishable as mortal man. It is maya, a moment's dream of the Eternal as He turns in His endless sleep. At the other extreme is the Orthodox or Con- fessional School. They all belonged to the strict Lutheran party, hated the Union with the Reformed, and regarded themselves as the true representatives of German piety. They stood for a High Church Lutheranism which derived new vitality from the revival of German patriotism that followed the struggle with Napoleon. They made their own use of Hegel's insistence on doctrine as the essence of religion, and of Schleiermacher's presentation of doctrine as the belief existing in the Christian association. In so far as this movement sprang merely from a revival of German feeling which required, among other German things, a German creed, it sought only what its opponents were in the habit of calling 344 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S 7'ep7nstination — the resurrection of ancient beliefs without any justification of them to the mind of the present. Of that attitude Hengstenberg, a virulent and even bitterly orthodox person, was the most vigorous exponent. As he seemed to many to represent the truly patriotic position, he was, in his day, a great power in the land. But if there had been no more in the movement, it would have passed as a fashion of a day. What gave it vitality was the revival of practical religion which passed, not over Germany alone, but over a good part of Western Europe. The Church thereby be- came a concern of vital interest, and the old con- fessions were found to have spiritual forces in them, of which no trace could be found in the recent intellectual constructions of Christianity. In those circumstances it was natural that some good men, like Philippi, should assume that the Lutheran confessions embodied all truth, that they had a kind of infallibility which entitled them to be reimposed upon the age without defence or discrimination. The Liberal theologians of Germany too fre- quently speak as if this unquestioning conservatism had been the attitude of all the theologians of this school, as if they deserved no reply except an affirmation of the claims of freedom. But a theo- logian like Hofmann had no intention of restoring the past undefended and unchanged. While ac- knowledging that his religious life was deeply rooted in the existing religious institutions, he maintained an attitude of freedom towards them JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 345 as much as any Liberal theologian. The only re- gard for the past he cared for was to maintain the growing life and thought of the Church that had nurtured him. Frank considers Hofmann the greatest theologian since Schleiermacher, and if intellectual resource and originality are the tests, his opinion is not indefensible. The basis of all scientific theology for Hofmann is the freedom which comes from a new relation to God. This new relation is brought about by a living faith ; and a living faith is made possible through Jesus Christ. The result is the spiritually renovated person who should be the object of all theological study. " I the Christian am for me the theologian the proper object of scientific, syste- matic exposition." All real conviction is in this way from within, yet it is no real conviction unless it rest on some- thing without. The true revelation of God is history ; and the same revelation is repeated in three forms. First, we have it in our own believ- ing experience ; second, in the progressive growth of the Christian commonwealth ; third, in its first beginning and manifestation as unfolded in the Scriptures. The Divine revelation in all three cor- responds. The agreement of our own experience with Scripture forms the strongest and purest method of proof. When our experience and re- velation agree, we are sure that we have reached what is not only of personal but of universal validity. All historical life is revelation, but, at the centre, revealing its law and its goal, stands 346 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S the temple of the sacred history. The present has always something of the future in it, something which points to the stage beyond. It is, therefore, always prophetic. Scripture is prophetic in the same way, but in a special degree, because it sees into the inner meaninors of events and finds the creative beginnings of the Kingdom of God. It is, therefore, not to be regarded as a rejDository of texts, but as an organism to be brought to bear as a whole upon the whole system of truth. Then it is found to be no mere external announce- ment. We find a wonderful unity of history and truth, so that the essential thing in history, which is the unfolding of sonship to God, repeats itself in the heart of man just as it was first wrought by God. But history is also fulfilment, and Christ stands at the centre as the goal of its prophecy and the beginning of its fulfilment. His obedience, which endured the assaults of evil, even to suffering the death of a criminal, exhausted sin's ungodly nature and action, and made a new order of things pos- sible ; and He founded the new society which is God's witness to the peoples, to carry out this new order. Even his doctrine of God Hofmann bases on this relationship of grace. This relation of man to God presupposes, he argues, a relation of God within Himself. It thus forms the basis of our knowledge of the Triune God, and thereby shows us how He could endure that His work should go forth from Him as a historical process. The systematic thinker of the school is Frank. JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 347 In the main he works with Hofmann's suggestions. The theologian takes his own spiritual nature to be a great reality, and he believes in the reality of the roots upon which that grows. This proves, first, the reality of the things rationalism ignored or per- verted — sin as moral bondage, deliverance from guilt as entrance into a new life, a new life of moral freedom, and the hope of eternity as the completion of that life. It involves, further, the assertion of the things pantheism denies or per- verts — the sense of absolute guilt and absolute pardon, which requires an absolute supramundane Personality to be so sinned against and so to par- don. It even presupposes a Divine and human Mediator to afford an atonement which God alone could work, yet which man alone can render. That, of course, again assumes that the personal relation is fundamental in God. Finally, it affirms all that a negative criticism denies or perverts. The experience of regeneration requires channels of communication — AVord, Church and Sacrament. Kegeneration, moreover, being the experience of a causality interposing in the natural order, makes credible the belief that, for the purpose of salvation in Christ, the natural order has been impregnated with new potencies ; and, as saving thoughts go with saving acts, inspiration goes with miracle. Whether all this can be established in this way may be open to question. But what cannot be questioned is the existence in this Lutheran theology of the vitality of a new religious life, making it dissatisfied with a merely contemplative 348 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S and artistically expansive type of freedom. It in- sists that to be in God we must be of God after the practical fashion of living above our world and above ourselves. It sees that a religion which merely interprets God by the world, is helpless in the day of our calamity, that unless we find a reli- gion which interprets the world by God, we have no power to bear us up, that unless we have faith and not merely induction, our hope will vanish in the day we most need it. This faith it seeks, not at the bottom of its experience, not in the generali- ties -after everything living and concrete has been withdrawn, but at the summit of experience, with all the soul has won from the past and all it ex- periences in the present and all it anticipates from the future. The Mediating School was so named by Heng- stenberg, who had a high orthodox contempt for a person who imagined a question might have two sides. The name was taken up by the Liberals who had a high intellectual contempt for those who were not satisfied with the faith that the widest formula covers most ground. But the title applied in contempt has come to be a quite serious designa- tion. The endeavoiu- to find a place for seemingly opposing elements in religion was too great a need of the age to be long contemptible. Their position naturally exposed the adherents of this school to taunts of temporising, but at the present day it is clear that they occupied a definite ecclesiastical position, and sought vigorously a clearly defined practical result. While the sympathies of the JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 349 Orthodox party were with High Lutheranism of a Catholic type, their sympathies were with the Union, and they had an advanced Protestant out- look. Two things in particular they inherited from Schleiermacher : (1) The desire to set the Church free from such statutory fetters as maintain out- ward divisions where no fundamental distinction really exists, (2) The conception of Christ as es- sentially a moral phenomenon, not explicable by doctrines of His person, but by His central place in man's need and God's Kingdom. They were deeply influenced by the Romantic Movement, but they were also deeply dissatisfied with its pantheis- tic view of sin as irregularity in development, of reconciliation as an advance to an artistic view of the whole, and of free-will as development to the stage of reason. Thinkers of all shades of opinion belonged to the school, but Dorner is usually taken as the typical example of its mediating nature. His main endeavour is to show how the Christianity which comes to us from history can, when we attain an independent position, shine for us in the light of its own truth. Christ was necessary to the world apart from sin. His appearance corresponds to the true idea of humanity. The historical manifestation is thus implicit in reason. In Christ is actualised the God-manhood which is at the heart of all religion and is the foundation of every ethical ideal. Christianity has two principles, an inward, which is justification — the realising of our freedom in being sons of God, and an outward, which is Scrip- 350 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S ture — the means whereby justification is presented for our acceptance. Dorner probably attempted to reconcile too many interests, and he is more es- teemed as a suggestive than as a consistent thinker. The most interesting representative of the school, and the only one on whom we need linger, is Rothe. In the days when the doctrine of de- velopment first flashed upon men's dazzled imagina- tion, they were so satisfied by the sense of glorious progress that the idea of any reality in man's inter- ference seemed a mere disturbance. But experience showed, as Carlyle expresses it, that pantheism, which seemed to be fine flour, was ground glass. E/Othe was among the first to feel this danger, and he felt it deeply, though he did not always escape it. His theology, therefore, has two great aims : (1) To find a place both for God's action and for man's ; (2) To interpret the world by God and not God by the world. In contrast to philosophy, Rothe calls his position theosophy. Philosophy interprets God from the development, whereas theosophy begins with our immediate knowledge of God, and, from it, interprets the development. That distinc- tion is vital, for a religion which is a mere deduc- tion from life can never give us victory over life. At the very point where it ought to deduce triumph, it would deduce failure. It is this bitter need of something to give us mastery over life which makes so many persons adhere with such tenacity to an external authority of some sort. Our own impressions are at the mercy of our moods, while forms of faith which are received from without JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 351 seem independent of our perplexities and struggles, so that the surrender of intellectual seems well re- paid in practical freedom. That is the difficulty of which Rothe is conscious, but he seeks deliverance in advance, not in retreat. He does not wish to surrender either intellectual or practical freedom. Instead of regarding freedom under any aspect as a disturbance, he takes it to be the first great turn- ing point in creation, the first clear manifestation of what God aims at, the first clear proof of the spiritual significance of the world. What went before was only the material matrix ; what followed is the transmutation of matter into spirit. History is a moral process of spiritualising our nature, which means also a religious process of becoming like God. From the point at which man was endowed with free-will, he became the organ of God in His work of creation. That involves for him the two tasks of knowing, i.e., of idealising the real, and of acting, i.e., of realising the ideal. Of this work the material basis is marriage and the Church. We shall, however, pass beyond both into an immor- tality which is not a natural possession, but a spiritual acquisition. Rothe also holds that in this development de- parture from the normal was inevitable, but the departure is due to human failure in man's struggle for freedom, not to the inevitableness of a process. Yet it was so inevitable, that a redemption was from the first a necessity. Hence the second Adam is the central individual of the new spiritual man- hood. By occupying that position He is able to 352 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S overcome sin and its consequences, and so to be- come King of this spiritual kingdom which through Him comes to pass. Nor is this heavenly kingdom altogether of the future. The process of absorbing the Church into the Kingdom of God, he believes, has already begun. The Kingdom of God is not a Church but a State, and the final religious organisation is to be sought in the development of the State. The Church is a redeeming institution, but the redeemed society at once takes the form of a religious and moral or- ganisation of the State, so that the absorption of the Church in the State is to be welcomed, not resisted. Herein he finds the distinction between Catholic and Protestant. The Catholic knows the Christian Society only as a Church — a position once necessary but now an anachronism, the Pi'otestant looks on it as a means for realising a kingdom. We need a larger Christianity, including morality as well as piety, including nature and history, art and science, personal and public life, all united to God as its eternal basis and directed towards Him as its eternal goal. On this theory he sought to interpret his age. In his heart of hearts he did not love it. Its dry and unadmiring spirit, he admits, was alien to a soul that rejoiced in God's miraculous world of wonders, that found no inconsistency between miracle and every truth of science. But he also recognised that the new wine could not be put into the old vessels and that it was necessary the old ecclesiastical dogmas should be broken up, as they JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 353 have been in this age. Wherefore, in spite of every- thing that repels him, he has faith in the age's Divine significance. But the Christian thinker ought to realise that his duty to-day is to reconcile Christianity and culture, to show Christianity that the modern idea of everything coming to pass by development is not opposed to its coming to pass by Divine omnipotence, and to show culture that the laws of the world are contained in Christianity and the complete history of the universe in its revelation. Ritschl is also to be assigned to the Mediating School. He was a child of the Union of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, a vigorous de- fender of the Protestantism that went with it, and a trenchant critic of the High Lutheran assumption of being the only true Church. The true Church exists, he held, wherever the Christian moral life is set up through faith in Christ. The present divisions of Protestantism, he says, are chiefly maintained by insistence on externals to the neglect of essentials, and the only division of im- portance is between Catholicism and Protestantism. He does not, however, accept the exposition of it in Schleiermacher's well-known saying, that Catho- licism reaches Christ through the Church, whereas Protestantism reaches the Church through Christ. Protestantism also reaches Christ through the Church, for the Protestant, as well as the Catholic, must depend on the community for his knowledge of Christ. The real diff'erence is in the idea of the Church. To Protestantism the Church is the reli- 23 354 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S gious community ; to Catholicism it is the legally privileged clergy who do not absolutely require to belong to the community of believers at all. Our first task is to rid ourselves of the idea that the Church is the organisation. "The very things in which many seek the proofs of the might of Christi- anity — j)olitical influence and statutory authority and ecclesiastical institutions — are exactly what come under strong suspicion of falsifying Christ's intent. It requires, on the contrary, a good stout faith in the invisible to trace amid the chaos, abominations and trivialities of Church history Christ's advancing might over the world." "The legally constituted Church, a prey to party spirit, is in no way the Kingdom of God ; nor is the statutory order of the Church the Christian reli- gion." Nothing were more to be desired than some recognition by the ecclesiastic that the legal institution of the Church can be perverted to serve ends directly opiDOsed to the Kingdom of God. To have a particular Church is a necessity, but let him that has it have it as though he had it not, for to cherish the true sense of union and to have pain at the ruinous dealings of party men is the mark of possessing the Holy Spirit. This conception of the Church is the foundation- stone of Ritschl's theology. His practical aim is to make this Church of the saints, though it never can have the visibility of an institution, as real, and in a sense as objective, a basis of faith as a visible church with organisation, creed and authori- tative Scripture. To this, the true Church, God JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 355 reveals Himself, and in it His revelation abides and works. Christ is the Head of it, and His Kingdom is built up in it. Reconciliation gives us the freedom which makes us members of it, and by service in it, and not by sentiment and feeling, we make God's purpose our own personal end. The neglect of this conception of the Christian community often leads to grave misunderstanding of Ritschl's views, and in particular of his assertion that an essential part of being justified is to reckon ourselves one of the community of faith. At this stage we come upon Ritschl with a certain inevitableness. Partly, no doubt, it is the inevitableness of reaction and not of the final and balanced truth. But few things are more signifi- cant than an inevitable reaction. In revolting from the Tubingen Criticism, he revolted from the whole Hegelian conception of life and history. He had gone into the spider's parlour of the Absolute Philo- sophy, the web of its dialectic had been woven round his limbs, a religion of mere ideas had threat- ened to suck the life-blood from a religion of active and burden-bearing faith. Life and history had been reduced for him to a moving picture, man's struggle to an illusion, the human personality to a fleeting embodiment of the World-Spirit. When he turned from it, it seemed to him like a bad dream, and pantheism in every form remained his night- mare. " If freedom of thought is appreciation of the freedom of the individual, pantheism is a poor perversion of Christianity, incapable of reaching a high conception of the destiny and worth of the 356 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S human person." Freedom, for him, was essentially personal. Being the basis of the worth and distinc- tiveness of the individual it required a distinction, not only between man and the world, but also be- tween man and God. Hence he labours so to con- ceive the operations of God's grace as to exalt and not to obliterate the human personality, and he con- tinually takes up his parable against that mysticism which teaches that " the life of God works in the believer at the cost of moral freedom," in the belief that no error has so widely, so continuously, so deeply corrupted Christianity. Ritschl's system is often criticised as if it were a mere torso of orthodox beliefs, a church system with the prime defect of not being a satisfactory foundation for any existing church. But, apart from the fact that Ritschl would not have regarded the endeavour to maintain any church as it now is as a great good, his theology receives a new interest when we remember the situation in which it was produced and the experiences through which Ritschl himself had passed. Would we justly esti- mate his value, we must remember how he had known the time when Criticism had not got beyond Strauss — the story of Jesus being a mixture of Old Testament passages, of popular expectations of a Jewish Messiah, and of crude religious ideas ; when Baur seemed to have said the last word in Church history — almost all the writings of the New Testa- ment being placed in the second century, and the rise of the Christian Church being accounted for by an intellectual antagonism and a political recon- JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 357 ciliation ; when life seemed a mental panorama, history an emanation, free-will an assertion that man is a clock moved by his own mainspring, and religion a thermometer to measure the rise in the intellectual temperature. Against all this the watchwords of Ritschlianism are battle cries. Man and his vocation are supreme realities ; victory over the world is at once our supreme need and the supreme evidence of God's help ; free-will is the basis of all rationality ; the judgment of worth is the fragmentary but moral comprehension of the universe. Like the rest of the Mediating School, Ritschl sought a reconciliation between historical Christi- anity and the modern mind, which should do justice to both and subordinate neither. Like the rest of the school, too, he followed in the main Schleier- macher's solution. Though he disliked and dis- trusted Schleiermacher, even his own followers do not deny his obligation to the earlier thinker. Schleiermacher, Kattenbusch says, introduced a new era ; Ritschl only a new phase of it. From Schleiermacher Ritschl learned that religion is a thing by itself, distinct from doctrine and morality, that it is positive and social, and that everything distinctive in it depends on the Person of Christ. Moreover, Ritschl himself acknowledges Schleier- macher's great merit in asserting the significance of the Christian community. Ritschl's debt to the whole Romantic Movement is apt to be forgotten amid his strong opposition to its pantheism. Though he returned to Kant, it was 858 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S through Komanticism. The world without was no longer for him, as it was for Kant, a mere manifold of sense, a mere haze of impressions, but was one great ordered reality to be tested at one point by a spirit which should also be an ordered reality. As Hegel took the point at which we test it to be reason, and Schleiermacher to be feeling, Ritschl took it to be will. The unity of experience Hegel sought to understand by the idea of process, Schleiermacher by the idea of plan, and Ritschl by the idea of purpose. All alike, therefore, re- garded the world as ordered on one principle. Nor would Hegel or Schleiermacher have objected to Ritschl's principle. The idea of development was fundamental to the whole Romantic conception, and the development must always be estimated by its goal, and this goal was always recognised as, in some form, a Kingdom of God. But if the general conception is the same, the emphasis is entirely altered. The order which is directed to purpose and appeals to the will, is neither an intellectual nor an artistic, but a moral unity. The way to reach it is to become complete moral personalities and thereby find the world in which we carry out our tasks capable of being treated as a moral whole. Neither by science nor by art do we reach the order and unity of the world, but by introducing moral order and unity into the life we live in it. Not by intellect and not by feeling, but in the last issue by will, do we come into contact with reality. The primacy in human nature, therefore, is to be as- signed to will. JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 359 Much criticism of Ritschl's theory of knowledge takes for granted that the denial of the primacy to reason is equivalent to the rejection of every objec- tive test of the truth. In the same way it was formerly said that Schleiermacher's assertion of the primacy of feeling left everything at the mercy of sentiment. As both Schleiermacher and Ritschl devoted their lives to systematic thinking, it can hardly be supposed that they undervalued know- ledge. But when they came to ask what is the ultimate basis upon which knowledge rests, Schleier- macher found it in that first moment when thought and action are undivided in feeling, and liitschl said it is just that movement of dividing and react- ing that is essential. Thus it is not a question of what is exclusive in our experience, but of what is fundamental. Though his theory of knowledge is not essential to his theology, though it was not laid as a founda- tion but was added afterwards as a buttress, Ritschl seemed to regard the fact that the world had finally arrived at it, as a providential demonstration of the true basis of Christianity, at a time when such new succour was much needed. His tangled exposition justifies any misunderstanding, but if we ignore details and regard only the general conception, it is not without glimmerings of reason. Would the world be anything more than a series of sensations of a more or less orderly kind to any creature, how- ever intellectually endowed, that merely obeyed its impulses and had no power of reacting on the world according to a deliberate purpose ? When we take 360 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S up our resolution at another point, ascribe responsi- bility to ourselves for things long past, modify out- ward forces and are modified by them, we find reality in ourselves, and learn, by carrying out our tasks among them, to ascribe the same kind of reality to the things about us. By transferring ourselves into the world, we find identity amid change, efifectiveness as the cause of change, power to treasure up the result of change. But nothing, Ritschl urges, is added to our knowledge by conceiving another reality at rest behind the plane of the reality we only know by its relation to our activities. The practical reality is not en- larged or confirmed by an intellectual abstrac- tion, a noumenon, or idea, or thing-in-itself. The thing is not behind the phenomena but in them, as their cause, the end they serve as means, the law of their constant modifications. Ritschl, of course, must also have a presupposition behind phenomena. But what would be the supposition behind a world which proved itself real by accepting such a trans- ference of ourselves into it and responding to our rational activities ? It would not be a thing-in- itself, but an active reasonable will such as ours ought to be. If life would be no more than a moving picture, supposing we could maintain towards it a purely contemplative attitude, very little more is needed to vindicate Ritschl 's position and make his theory of religion at least possible. All religions, he says, seek, by the aid of the exalted spiritual might they revere, the solution of the contradiction in which JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 361 man finds himself, as on the one hand an insignifi- cant part of the world of nature, and on the other a spiritual personality claiming to dominate nature. Hence the religious solution always looks in the direction of spiritual personalities, in the direction of a kinship between gods and men. Frank may be right in saying that this view of religion makes God a hypothesis.^ But that does not necessarily prove it a descent from Schleier- macher's doctrine of an immediate intuition of God. If Schleiermacher's view is right, why is the situation so difficult, and why does the knowledge of God seem to depend so much on character and so little on knowledaj-e ? The essential element in the various religions does not seem to be the intui- tion of the One in the many ; the way of advance does not appear to be emotional education into this higher intuition ; the task of religion is not any contemplation of its unity which enables us to find ourselves at home in the world. We are required to find our way through the world at the cost, if need be, of being strangers and pilgrims in it. No religion offers itself as an insight into the world which would enable us to be at peace with it, but all require that we shall have victory over it for the sake of some purpose which lies beyond it. Schleiermacher's assertion of the immediate nature of our knowledge of God was a great advance on a knowledge demonstrated like a proposition in Euclid, but the advance was mainly because it brought the knowledge of God nearer to life. ^ Geschichte imd Kritik der neueren Tlieologie, p. 326. 362 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S But Kitschl makes it a still more direct outcome of life. Nor, if our knowledge of God depends on our practical attitude, can it be justly described as less certain than if it were an intuition. It is only more arduous, and that can hardly be an argu- ment against it, seeing that all religions take the arduous way. In seeking succour against the restrictions of the world, as Kitschl says, men show a determined will to give reality to the acknow- ledgment of God by sacrifice of their belongings and by self-denial. On this view the revelation of God is revelation of His will ; and our verification of it must be intimately connected with our willingness to do His will. God's revelation and our ideals can only be two sides of the same thing. All religious judgments are what Eitschl calls "independent judgments of worth ". That is to say, they depend primarily on the significance we assign to our spiritual nature over against the material world. Materialism is not science, but a low estimate of the worth of the spirit in contrast to nature. Christianity in the same way " displays itself as a judgment of the worth of the human spirit as greater than the world ". Both conclusions alike are reached, not by argument, but by a direct prac- tical estimate of the world's purpose, arising from our attitude towards it. The Christian estimate is reached by response to the revelation of God's will, by faith in God as our Father, and by service for the Kingdom of God ; and it is rejected only by the absence of such a response. JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 363 The basis of a judgment of worth is personal freedom. By staking our life on it we can prove what freedom needs. Laboratories and experi- ments for testing truth are various, but the greatest laboratory is the world and the greatest experiment is life. In them alone can we demon- strate Grod. The man who will live by faith in a God above the world who is his Father and by whom the most contrary things are made to work together for good, and who will live for that Father's goal beyond the world, even for the king- dom of souls set free and bound only by love, will be able to demonstrate his conviction by finding his emancipation in that life ; but he can demonstrate it on no easier terms. Wherefore, God and a living faith are inseparable conceptions, not that a man's God varies with his faith, but that a revela- tion of God can only reflect itself in a faith which lives by it. In that case personality must be fundamental to the idea of God. That conclusion is the reason of Ritschl's practical interest in the whole discus- sion. The method of first reaching the Absolute and then adding personality as one of its attributes ends, he maintains, in a metaphysical idol. "When a Christian enters upon metaphysical knowledge of God he leaves his Christian horizon." ^ Personality and absoluteness are so far from being contraries, as Strauss contends, that nothing but personality can be absolute in any right sense. The very mark of personality is to take up and apply its environ- 1 Theologieund Metaphysik, p. 11. 364 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S ment to its own uses, without being confused with it. Personality, therefore, is essential to any belief in God's succour, while absoluteness follows as the belief that His succour is limitless. We understand God's perfect personality through our very limita- tions, while we can only understand our independ- ence in spite of our limitations through God's absolute personality. Nor is God's personality less essential for understanding His relation to the world than for understanding His relation to us. Belief in a personal God saves us from setting Him outside the world and apart from it, like the deist, and from confusing Him with the world like the pantheist. We do not identify God with the world but with His purpose in it, with the realisa- tion of His Kingdom. And this purpose we are in a position to interpret as the will of love, a solution of the problem of the world far more satisfying to the mind than any process of reason. We then obtain a truly rational view of the world, as the means for producing the moral kingdom of created spirits. This rejection of metaphysics has seemed to many a denial of the objectivity of all religious knowledge. The objection that " value-judgments do not fulfil the conditions of the old canon of Catholicity, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ah omnibus"^ is not very weighty, for that was a practical, not a theoretical test — a test very much of the nature of a judgment of worth. It might 1 Galloway, Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, 1904, p. 315. JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 365 even be maintained that judgments of worth, judg- ments regarding God's Kingdom, and man's moral worth, and Christ's place as Revealer and Head, have alone been the Catholic elements in Christi- anity ; while, on the other hand, one would not look for them in any intellectual reconstruction of Christianity. But why, it is asked, if these judg- ments have to do with reality, does Ritschl object to calling them scientific, theoretical ? Because a theoretical truth is one that can be forced upon any intelligent person by argument, and religious truth never arrives at that stage. To the end we must do the deed if we would know the doctrine ; to the end we require, not merely intelligent con- sideration, but an attitude of the will. The validity of the judgment of worth depends entirely on whether or not it corresponds to God's judgment. It is only a way of knowing God's revelation, all religious truth being revelation on God's side and judgment of worth on man's. Lotze distinguished the judgment of worth from the theoretical judgment before Kitschl, and the distinction has been widely accepted since. Re- ligious, moral and sesthetic judgments are recog- nised as having a relation to our own personal significance, which, for example, a law of astronomy does not have. The important thing to seek in history is precisely the development of man's judg- ments of worth. There are some, like Troeltsch, who find this the only revelation of God, and who estimate the person of Christ purely by His place in the development of these ideals. But to Kitschl 366 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S the person of Christ is so pre-eminent a revelation of God as to make all else superfluous. Unfor- tunately it is precisely on this important point that his exposition is frequently elusive. He is accused of so emphasising the uniqueness of the revelation in Christ as to divide history hopelessly in twain, with the result, not of exalting Christ, but of depreciating God's general working. Christ is cer- tainly for him the essential revelation. " An au- thority which excludes or subordinates all other standards, and which at the same time exhaustively regulates all trust in God, has the worth of God- head." Yet he admits degrees as well as diff'er- ences in the various religions. They become richer, clearer, more connected, worthier of humanity. They all claim to be in possession of a revelation. To make that claim is the very mark of a religion. And apparently the claim is justified so far as it goes. Moreover, the development of the family, of society, and of the State prepares for, and so far reveals, the Kingdom of God, their high place in human life being due apparently to their Divine meaning. Nor does Ritschl cut off Christianity from the past as Schleiermacher does, for he makes an understanding of how it was rooted in the Old Testament the sole test of the canon of the New. Christ is, therefore, only an exclusive revelation by pre-eminence. The general position is allied to Rothe's view, that from the time freedom entered into the world man became a fellow labourer with God in the work of development. To Hegel and even to Schleier- JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 367 macher freedom was a stage of progress ; to Ritschl progress is a work of freedom. On the former supposition the potentiah'ties of Deity unfold into actualities, till man reaches the stage of reason, when, being moved from within by an ideal and not from without by an impulse, he may be called free. On such a scheme sin can only be a neces- sary illusion. But if progress is a work of freedom, the Kingdom of God is man's task as well as God's gift, and neglect of it is a genuine failure. Ritschl's work on the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation consists of three extensive volumes. The first, dealing with the history of the doctrine, proves abundantly his deep and exact theological learning. The important points, however, are repeated in the third volume in learned excursions which do not always help the progress of the argument. But the second volume, on the Biblical sources of the doctrine, should not be neglected. It shows, at all events, what in Ritschl's eyes a revelation is not. Every religion aiming at universality, he says, must display its characteristic quality in its founder ; and this general principle is specially true of Chris- tianity as a religion of reconciliation with God. This assertion is not so fully justified as the im- portance of it would seem to require. The only defence offered is that nothing else could distin- guish it from the surrounding forces. That is a vague statement, yet if we apply it to the concrete instance of Jesus Christ, we see how essential the person of Christ was to a religion which spoke of 368 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S God, and addressed itself to the soul of man as man, amid influences fitted to contaminate, but not to purify it. And besides this empirical ground, is not the individual the universal element in re- ligion, and is not the recognition of what is uni- versal essentially a task of freeing the individual from the yoke of the institution ? In any case Ritschl's whole view of the early history of Chris- tianity, his whole estimate of what is religious in it, and his whole personal relation to it, made him find all that is significant in it in Christ. The value of the Scriptures, he says, is not to be sought in any doctrine of inspiration but in the concrete fact that they are essential to our know- ledge of Christ's teaching, of its presuppositions and its first effect in the community, that indeed we have no other source of knowledge. All the necessary doctrines of salvation through Christ are, therefore, to be sought in Scripture, but all the forms of life and all the hopes connected with them in the early Church are not necessarily valid for us. The Scriptures are not infallible. The Apostles never speak as authorities above the community, but the worth of the epistles lies in the very fact that they are not theological science but religious utterances from the bosom of the community and under the consciousness of the Christian fellowship, so that they present the first impression of Christ on the community. Christ alone is an original source of revelation, embracing all He says " in the interrelation between His life's vocation and His peculiar relation to God ". That JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 369 not very lucid sentence indicates the sense in which Christ is a revelation. He maintains Himself in a perfect relation to God, the result of which appears in His whole life's vocation. This vocation was to found a community which should allow themselves to be governed by God, and He is to be interpreted by His significance for this community. When, therefore, we speak of Him as the Son of God and the Bearer of His sovereignty, we are not dealing with metaphysical unknown qualities, but with the religious recognition that the forgiveness and grace necessary for entering God's Kingdom are through Him. Belief in Christ, pardon of sin and entering the kingdom go together and derive their meaning from each other. Christ has authority to forgive sins for the sake of establishing the Kingdom of God. Christ is not, however, a revelation in the sense of not being Himself the subject of religion, but, on the contrary, He is a perfect revelation be- cause He is Himself perfectly the subject of reli- gion. His relation to the Father is the secret of His person not explicable in any formula, yet it is maintained only by His fulfilling the will of the Father. The unsurpassable perfection of the reve- lation of Christ is in making God known as love, in showing that His object, and therefore the ob- ject of the world, is the Kingdom of God, or, in other words, the organisation of love realised in the new religious community. The significance of Christ's death depends on this relation to the community of believers. It derives its meaning from His resurrection and pre- 24 370 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S sent sovereignty over His community. Yet to ask whether it is the individual or the community that is justified is to draw a wrong distinction. It is the individual who is justified, but his justification is in, not apart from, the community. Christ's death is always compared with such Old Testament sacri- fices as presuppose God's covenant mercy towards the people of His choice. It is the crowning act of Christ's obedience in the task of establishing this covenant relationship, and its significance depends on the moral perfection of His character, determin- ing Him to submit His life to the Father for the good of men. In short His death stands for obedi- ence in His vocation, which is of God's appoint- ment. The sin, however, with which it deals can only be ayvoia, hardening of the heart and dulling of the conscience, not dvo/xta or a-neiOeia, obdurate wickedness. That is to say it can only appeal, it cannot compel. The difference between Christ and the Phari- sees turned on the idea of righteousness. The Phari- sees laid stress on ceremonial, judged men legally, and set the righteous man and God over against one another with mutual rights. Christ took the idea of God's righteousness, found in the Psalpas and elsewhere in the Old Testament, as fidelity to His covenant relationship, while man's righteous- ness was steadfastness of mind towards this suc- couring God. All the New Testament writers represent Christ's idea of righteousness as active brotherly love cherished in the power of the Spirit and on the grounds of faith. Sanctification follows JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 371 and is essential, yet being attained in this way it is not in works, but in one life work. This is the righteousness by which the Kingdom of God is to be wrought ; and, though in the midst of earthly men it can have no visible sign, it is there for all those who act from love to God and their neigh- bour. Christ's leading thought, the Kingdom of God, does not dominate the epistles. It was obscured by the expectation of His immediate return and by the pressing claims of the society established for its realisation. Yet none of the Apostles fail to in- sist on that rule of love which is its practical reli- gious significance. As there is no church, so there is no Apostle great enough to reflect the whole Christian faith. All have limitations and may even take up erroneous positions. Paul's purely nega- tive view of the Law of Moses, for example, is controversial, not adequate. Nor is it Christ's. Yet the more deeply the epistles are studied, the more clearly Christ's impress upon the Apostles appears. Paul, for instance, removes the emphasis from the future to the past. Righteousness from faith is with him a relation of congruity with God resting on a judgment of God which precedes the righteous life and makes it possible. The emphasis is laid upon the fundamental relation in which sinners are placed to God in the Christian com- munity. But this emphasis on the past is only be- cause it assures the future accomplishment of the salvation which consists in the blessedness and the tasks of the Kingdom of God. Paul's idea of justi- 372 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S fication is the exact equivalent of John's idea of fellowship with the Father and the Son. It works peace, giving the assurance of perseverance, and of profit in all trial ; it is a relation to the world, giv- ing us an end beyond it which is yet the object of it ; and it is a relation to man, teaching us to hon- our his destiny and at the same time to see that no man is self-dependent enough to impose his judgment on us. In the third volume, wherein Ritschl sets forth his own system of belief, he expands, but does not always make plainer, this view of Christ in His vocation as the Founder of the Kingdom of God and as such the centre of all revelation of God, this insistence that the society of the Kingdom is an invisible community of the souls who obey the Father's rule of love, and this idea that to take our place in this moral kingdom is the sole way of receiving the revelation. Christ is Divine in two senses, as the Revealing Word, the perfect Revealer of God, and as Lord over the community through being Lord over the world, through having, that is, the secret of God's purpose in the world and, therefore, in men's lives. This divinity is not, however, to be interpreted by any doctrine of His person, such as that of the two natures, or from any unknown quality behind, of which He has emptied Himself, or which He keeps in abeyance. But He is Divine because He is the perfect embodiment of God's will of love. The criteria of His Godhead are grace and truth, not omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience. " In so JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 373 far as God is spirit, will and love, He can be efifec- . tive in a human life, but not in so far as He makes and rules the world." Christ is the personal will of God as essentially love. He incarnates the heart of God. The power He has is only what we all may have, in so far as we are one with God. He is Lord over the world solely because God knows Him and He knows God. And the statement that the world was created by Him, is to be similarly interpreted. It means that in the eternal idea of Him in God's mind the world's goal was set. His death, therefore, sums up the religious worth of His person, because it is the final proof of the obedience and patience which showed in face of all trial the oneness with God which overcomes the world. Knowledge and power still come to us from the Founder of the spiritual relationship into which through Him we have entered, but in what manner is left doubtful. Is it only through the influences of His historical life, or has He present relations with the believer? Every operation of Christ, Eitschl says, must have its standard in His historical life. Some consider that to be a denial of anything but a historical influence. But if present operations need a standard, they would seem to exist. Ritschl would seem only to be guarding against the very real danger of replacing the Christ who conquers by suffering by an exalted Christ the wielder of might, of an earthly Christ who is spiritual by a heavenly Christ who is very material. Further, he says Christ is still Head of the community. 374 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S That relation could hardly be maintained without present operations. The careful way in which he guards his statement is not to minimise this rela- tionship, but to guarantee that it is understood as a free, personal relationship, and not as an infusion of power we cannot reject. This leads him to in- sist upon the use of the means which allow room both for Christ's personality and for ours. The same interest, moreover, appears in his doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is boundlessly vague, but it insists on the one point of practical importance, that the Spirit's influence is free and personal, educative and helpful, through mind and heart, and no mere pouring in of love and power, or any other Divine gift. God's revelation, therefore, must in a sense be man's work as well as God's gift, not partly one and partly the other, but both at once. Christ's significance would seem to be that He meets this requirement, being at once a perfect revelation of God's will and of man's task. This will is the Kingdom of God which also is not less an achievement for being a gift. It is not partly one and partly the other, but both at the same time. As God's end is to make us free. He can only work through our freedom. And this freedom for Ritschl is essentially a matter of the will. It is a choice with real issues. This affects his whole view of truth. The choice of the will has a sacredness into which God Himself will not intrude. All opposition to good springing from ignorance God will patiently overcome, but even JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 375 He must accept an obdurate choice of evil. All history, he thinks, would be unreal, if there were election of individuals. History is not a settled process, but a great struggle in which actual and uncertain issues are decided. In respect of having things undetermined in it, time, he main- tains, must exist for God as for man. God's blessedness is not in having everything settled beforehand, but in the feeling of His eternity — apparently the final security of His purpose. Revelation would seem to be simply God's side of this task of freedom. In respect of freedom, Ritschl says, Christianity is not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two foci. They are the redemption of the indi- vidual and the Kingdom of God, and the one in- volves the other. We cannot have a kingdom of freedom unless it is fashioned out of souls made free ; we cannot have freedom in God unless we realise our liberty in a Kingdom of God. Christ's work is redemptive in both senses, bringing pardon and a sense of victory to individuals, and uniting them into a society to accomplish God's will of love. This accords with Schleiermacher's view that Christ is the completion of creation, that with Christianity the real task of working out God's purpose in the world begins. But instead of the easy explanation that it is by way of process, Ritschl finds the significance of Christ precisely in the fact that through Him we can see how it is by way of providence and freedom. To begin with, it is a work of reconciling, not 376 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S of any kind of constraining. Keconciliation is the fountain of the religious sense of freedom. It is accomplished through justification, which is de- scribed as a synthetic judgment of God, in con- trast to the Catholic view that it is God's estimate of what will happen through the grace poured into a man, and the Pietistic view that it is God's estimate of what faith will ultimately grow to. These are both described as analytic judgments, because if they add anything to our state it is through a mechanical operation. But justification is a real change of relation to God, so important for our religious sense of freedom that it alone would make Christianity a religion and not merely a morality. Justification is not to be understood as altering the consequences of sin, or as freeing us from the evil which accompanies it, or as taking our good intentions for performance, or as judging the promise of faith as though it were already realised, but as that pardon which recognises sin and, in spite of it, restores fellowship. Sin being a perverted relation to God, justification is a restora- tion of the right relation. Not by the removal of imperfection, but in spite of imperfection, the sinner enters into communion with God. In this sense it is a removal of guilt, which is not liability to punishment, but a real disturbance of the relation of the will to its moral destiny and to God who is the representative of that destiny in the world- order. Like pardon among men, it is a cancelling which at once maintains the honour of the person who has been offended and restores fellowship with JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 377 the offender. And reconciliation is only a more positive assertion than justification that a sinner is brought into harmony with God's cherished purpose. E-econciliation has its demonstration, not in a feeling, but in a practical attitude. It is reconcilia- tion, not with God in the heavens, but with God in our lives. The attempt to appropriate justifica- tion by isolated and changing feelings exposes us to miserable uncertainties and sorrowful reactions. The true demonstration is the possession of eternal life. The evidence of that again is victory over the world. In being reconciled to God we are recon- ciled to His purpose and find it to be the end which the whole world only serves as means. Wherefore, the world cannot but be our servant, and we can- not but be its master. Thus, apparently, we pos- sess our blessedness as God does, in the confidence that our end, being God's, is ultimately secure. The right assurance of salvation is faith in God's providence and patience under divinely appointed trials — the only secrets for victory over the world. This the true significance of justification, Eitschl maintains, has been obscured by the great error of regarding faith in God's providence as a truth of natural theology. It is never a real and energetic belief except through reconciliation to God and to God's purpose in the world, and, even the vague general acceptance only shows that for a great many people their science means less and their Christianity more than they suppose. Yet, in spite of this error, the Protestant assertion of 378 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S justification by faith has secured a practical indepen- dence which is in marked contrast to the dependence Catholicism imposes. By conceiving justification as the direct gift of ability, as something poured into us, we reach a mechanical, not a spiritual, relation to God. But if justification is the restora- tion of our religious relation to God, our religious dependence becomes the ground of our personal independence, for it is a relation which sets us free both from the self-seeking and world-loving im- pulses and from man and man's ordinances. How- ever much we may find it our duty to obey human regulations, whosoever is not in the personal sanc- tuary of his heart independent of man, has not known the joy of reconciliation to God. This focus of the ellipse requires the other to correspond to it. Personal freedom requires a kingdom of the free. " Justification belongs to individuals only as they attach themselves by faith in the Gospel to the community of faith, that terri- tory which is governed by the forgiveness of sins." As the practical way of assuring ourselves of God's grace is to have victory over the world, the prac- tical way of entering into communion with God is to belong to the society of those who seek to ac- complish His purpose. This relationship gives God's pardon its enduring efficacy, even as return- ing into the bosom of the family would give efficacy to a father's pardon. Thus the person who is re- conciled to God is reconciled to two things — to those among whom he is to seek God's purpose, and to the life wherein he is to seek it. Where- JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 379 fore he ranges himself in the community, and not above it ; and he exercises his freedom in life, and not apart from it. Here again we have a hint of how religious truth is made up of God's revelation on one side and man's judgment of worth on the other. The perfect realisation of the Kingdom of God would, Ritschl says, be the fall revelation of God. The essential thing in the revelation of God is not any unfolding of His secrets, but the manifestation of His will. As that will ought also to be our will, and as our emancipation is in doing it, we find the evidence of God's revelation in the exaltation of our true personal well-being. " All religion is an exposition of the course of the world in such a way that the exalted Person who rules in it or above it sustains or maintains for the personal spirit its worth against the constraints set by nature or by the natural operation of human society."^ No inference from the world can meet this need. Nothing can meet it but a revelation, an unfolding of the end for which God rules the world, and for which He will help us to rule it. Of that revela- tion nothing can be a satisfactory proof but the task of using it to accomplish this victory. Per- haps we should express Ritschl's opinion by saying we are sure we have found God's will, and there- fore this revelation, when our religious trust and our moral duty are wholly reconciled. Philosophy, which can only provide us with an inference from the world, is of no avail to help us ^ Theologie und Metaphysik, p. 9. 380 THEOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE AND RITSCHL'S to rule the world. But to help us to rule the world is religion's supreme concern. Wherefore we must not test religion by philosophy, but by adopting God's end and by showing that we are enabled to use the world for it. Thus we recognise Jesus Christ as Divine, not when we have given a meta- physical account of His nature, but when we know ourselves raised by Him to kingship — meaning lordship over the world, and to priesthood — mean- ing undisturbed communion with God. Seeing we are thus brought directly into con- tact with God's revelation and are enabled at all times to test its spiritual value, we are free, so that no human creed can be authoritative for us. We are not even dependent upon the Fathers. Herein the very significance of Christ's person and work appears. They enable us to go behind the Fathers and all other authorities. The Fathers also were influenced by the atmosphere in which they lived. In their day, as in ours, the Divine revelation pene- trated through a human medium. From Greek Philosophy and the organisation of the Ancient State they imported two ideas into Christianity, which no doubt were links with minds educated under those influences, but which are not organic parts of Christianity, which have led to much cor- ruption, and which to-day hinder us in reaching the minds of our contemporaries. The Atonement was interpreted, not through the idea of the family and so through the Fatherhood of God, as it is in the New Testament, but after the analogy of the Ancient State and through the idea of God as the JUSTIFICATION AND RECONCILIATION 381 Supreme Ruler. Thus the conception of a Father's pardon was changed into the idea of State condona- tion. Then the Divinity of Christ was interpreted, not through His religious worth as the Revelation of God, the Founder of His Kingdom and the Head of His community, but by a Neo-Platonic abstract idea of the Logos, a conception entirely different from the Logos in John, representing nothing but an abstract idea behind the plane of reality. In the same way God was conceived, not as a Person revealed in love, but as an abstraction from all existence, a qualityless something with which our souls can only come into contact by a mystical sub- limation beyond thought and action. Hence arose the error of salvation by mysterious dogmas and the mystical piety which regards God's operations as a kind of material force. LECTURE IX METHOD AND KESULTS Books op Eeferenoe Of adverse criticisms use has been made in this lecture of Die ritschl'sche Theologie, E. A. Lipsius, 1888, Die ritschl'sche Theologie kritisch beleuchtet, 0. Pfleiderer, 1891, Die kirchliche Bedeutung der Theologie A. Bitschls, Fr. H. E. Frank, 1888, Die Principien der ritschV schen Theologie und ihr Werth, L. Lemme, 1891. Of works on the philo- sophical aspects of Eitschl's teaching, Les Origines his- toriques de la ThMogie de Ritschl, Henri Schoen, 1893, and Ueber Werthurtheile, 1895, by Otto Eitschl, and of English works in addition to those mentioned above, The Christian View of God and the World, 1893, and Bitschlian- ism, Expository and Critical Essays, by Professor Orr. LECTURE IX METHOD AND RESULTS It is difficult to pass a calm judgment upon the theology of Ritschl, to acknowledge its contribution to the task of humanity while seeing even in its de- fects an indication of the task of the future, be- cause we have now reached the limit of what may be treated as history and are passing into the per- turbed territory of present theological controversy. An estimate of Ritschl in his due historical propor- tion may, therefore, be impossible. But just because he is the most important link between the past and the present, we must conclude by summing up the position as he left it, with as much fairness as is at our disposal. With the abundant inconsistency in detail of which many of his critics accuse him we are not concerned, not only because it is easy to find such inconsistency in any writer who departs from the beaten track, but because that is not an aspect of the matter with which we are called to deal. There is also a kind of criticism, as easy as it is futile, to which Ritschl has been frequently subjected, which we must try to avoid. A system is compared with an eclectic summary of all aspects of truth and the (385) 25 386 METHOD AND RESULTS author is chidden for the very concentration upon what has stirred his own soul which gives him sig- nificance. Such generalised criticism is specially unjust to E-itschl whose individuality, force and concentration upon one issue, whose limitations if you will, make him for so many a teacher and also somewhat of an apostle, so that he has founded a school in a sense that no other modern theologian, not even Schleiermacher, has done — a school, more- over, which has not restricted its interest to writing theological treatises. Nor is it necessary to find a great many things to praise and blame, for both the force and the weakness of the system spring from one root — its reaction from Romanticism. The defect of a reaction is usually sought merely in what is called the svv^ing of the pendulum, in an undue disregard for the aspect of truth which has been too much exalted and an undue insistence upon the aspect of it which has been ignored. There is, however, usually at the same time some inability to stand apart from the very movement against which it revolts. The man who is strong enough to create a reaction from the movement v/hich governs the fashion of his time, must not only himself have gone through it, but must have gone through it with enthusiasm and vigour. Conse- quently he is precisely the man who carries unex- pected and inconsistent marks of it, so that his system may harbour contradictions, as well as be inhospitable to certain aspects of the truth. This eff'ect, not of his own position but of the position he opposed, appears in liitschl chiefly in METHOD AND RESULTS 387 his attitude towards physical and moral law. Phy- sical law he conceives as the ordering of a world designed in God's ultimate purpose to be a material scaffolding for the spiritual Kingdom of God ; moral law he describes as the organisation of the ends of this kingdom, the organisation, there- fore, of the supreme law of love. What is love at the centre, he says, becomes law at the circum- ference. As the moral law is nearer God's final purpose, being the direct organisation of it, we should expect to find the moral system less tolerant of interference, because more profoundly rooted in the nature of God than the system of physical law, which on the hypothesis has its ground only in utility. Yet E-itschl's general attitude leaves ex- actly the opposite impression. Physical law seems to suggest rather the idea of fixed process than of the purposes of will, whereas moral law is so fluid as almost to suggest that God has no fixity of operation. Such an attitude can only be due to the subtle influences of the pantheism he so strongly opposed. The effect appears first of all in a wholly vague treatment of miracle. With the old significance of miracle as the seal of a word of God, alien to man and only to be confirmed by exceptional external proof, Ritschl of course is not concerned. His view of faith does not require miracle to lean upon, and it is his merit that he has tried to base it on personal and strictly religious grounds. But is his view of the freedom upon which he bases faith equally independent of miracle ? If he had really 388 METHOD AND RESULTS rid himself of the whole pantheistic feeling towards life, of the atmosphere as well as of the system, and if in feeling as much as in theory he had set free- dom at the heart of things, he could scarcely have avoided a frame of mind to which miracle would hardly seem strange. Like Rothe, along with a perfect readiness to discuss and reject any miracle, he would have cherished the buoyant faith that miracle is the likeliest of all things in a world so marvellous and with a God so near. True he never denies the possibility or even the reality of miracle, and he even speaks continually as if the resurrection of Christ were an essential of faith, or at all events that it was so to the Early Church. But the question is always remotely touched upon and the general impression left upon the mind is of a view of nature more akin to a fixed process than to means in the hands of a wise and loving Will. The doctrine of Christianity most affected is the estimate of Christ's worth. Christ has for us, Kitschl says, the worth of Godhead. But this worth, he proceeds to explain, only refers to God's attributes of love, and not to His attributes of power. In one way that is a just distinction, yet, in another, quite apparently, the system labours to recognise in Christ might as well as grace, or rather to find that in Him grace is might. His worth is found in manifesting the Kingdom of God as God's personal end, and in enabling us to conquer the world for it. The final issue, therefore, is victory over the world. The means for accomplishing this victory are said to be fidelity in our Divinely METHOD AND RESULTS 389 appointed tasks and patience under trial. Nor would any one wish to deny the importance for our victory of Christ's manifestation of this faithful- ness and patience in His life, and of His perfect display of them in His death. Yet, for the Apostles at all events, it was not the death of Christ but the transfiguring of it by the resurrection which created the joyous, triumphant belief in a providence of God which makes all the tasks and trials of life the tribulation whereby we enter the Kingdom. In raising Christ from the dead after He had perfectly fulfilled His vocation by His death God seemed to them to have made Christ a revelation of His power as well as of His love, a revelation that love is power, a revelation that it is meekness which in- herits the earth. We may not say either that Ritschl rejects the resurrection or that we could not de- rive much help from Christ's example of suffering patience without any belief in a resurrection except beyond the grave, but considering how the test of everything is found in victory over the world and how important this belief has been for that victory, we feel it should not have been dealt with soelusively. Either what it means for us, or how we can afford to do without it, should have been clearly shown, for manifestly the statement that Christ has for us the worth of Godhead depends, at all events for the feelings we attach to it, on whether He conquered death as well as sin. In contrast to this impression of fixity in the system of physical law is the impression of fluidity in the system of moral law. The influence of the 390 METHOD AND RESULTS Greek idea of the State no doubt was very power- ful ill the minds of the Gentile converts to Christ- ianity, and no doubt also converts from heathenism imported then, as they do now, many corruptions from the religions in which they had been brought up. There was an idea of God which made men think He required to be appeased, which was pagan not Christian, and a Father's pardon was too much obscured by the civic idea of State condonation. In the process true Christian freedom was under- mined and the true Christian faith perverted. But after Kitschl's desert in exposing the roots of these evils has been acknowledged and even warmly ap- preciated, something still remains which is not the result of a mistaken theology, but of man's deepest religious need. There is a sense in which men feel they need to be reconciled to the law of God which they have broken as well as to God Himself. If freedom involves the reality of choice which Ritschl maintains, it must involve an amaz- ing relation to the moral order in which alone it can find its sphere and which yet it is in a position to disturb. Reconciliation to God must in that case involve more than the recognition of His honour, and Ritschl's failure to recognise that more is involved in his premises only marks his inability to rid himself of the idea of sin as the mere neces- sary shadow of evolution, which he had inherited from Romanticism. Frank finds the error in regarding love as God's supreme attribute, and His Kingdom as His per- sonal end. Love, he maintains, is only one of METHOD AND RESULTS 391 many equal attributes and the Kingdom only one of many ends/ Justice, therefore, must be set by itself and not be subordinated to love, and justifica- tion must be considered by itself and not merely in reference to the Kingdom of God. But Frank can hardly be right in maintaining that the Scripture writers would say, God is justice, in the way in which they would say, God is love, and they surely regard His Kingdom as in a very special sense the end of all His operations. The belief that love is supreme in God is, moreover, necessary for our freedom on the one hand and for any sure estimate of what is Divine on the other, while the equality of justice with love is not necessary for maintaining that solemn sense of the majesty of the moral order which made it for Kant the su^^reme object of reverence. The conviction that God is supremely and wholly and exclusively love should not, if we think with Ritschl that it is a love which cherishes man's freedom, make us less able to consider with Butler, " what it is for us creatures, moral agents, presumptuously to introduce that confusion and misery into the Kingdom of God which mankind have in fact introduced ". Wherefore, however many difficulties may surround the conception, Christ, if He is to have for us the full worth of Godhead, must have something of cosmic as well as of individual significance, a relation to the resti- tution of the moral order as well as of the erring person. But the theology of Ritschl is also a reaction in ^ Geschichte und Kritik der neioeren Theologie, p. 310 ff. 392 METHOD AND RESULTS the sense of being an extreme revolt from a pre- vailing error. In his antagonism to the pantheism of Komanticism and the artistic intuition upon which it rested, he fails to recognise the necessary mystery in human life and to do justice to the intuitions by which we reach out towards it. The warmth of his righteous and necessary opposition also caused his chief limitation. Against every form of pan- theism, and especially against that mysticism which teaches that " the life of God works in the believer at the cost of moral freedom," E-itschl contended with all his vigour and almost with his last breath, bringing to bear against it not only general argu- ments but vast historical studies. He saw in it a pantheism which sapped the moral vigour and left men exposed to the fluctuations of feeling which cause a baseless and hurtful self-approbation when exalted, and an equally hurtful depression when the reaction inevitably follows. It seemed to him to rob Christianity generally of its right to be called a religion of the freedom of the children of God. Every form of mysticism, mediaeval and modern. Catholic and Protestant, treats men as mere re- ceptacles for God's grace, fails to recognise that God regards both our personality and His own, and finally introduces unspiritual elements into God's service and worship. Nor can it be seriously ques- tioned that both experience and history afiFord corroboration of Hitschl's contention. In view of dangers so great there is much to be said even for Kitschl's refusal to discuss certain mysteries which lead in the direction of this pernicious mysticism. METHOD AND RESULTS 393 He will not enter, for example, on such a question as how a man is laid hold of by the Holy Spirit, but insists that our task is to verify life in the Holy Spirit, by calling on God as our Father, by acting with love and joy, meekness and self-control, and by guarding against party spirit and cherishing a spirit of union. A certain type of faith needs nothing so much as this objective and practical attitude, and Kitschl's insistence on it is no small service. Nor is he wrong in maintaining that the revelation of God is mainly concerned with this practical relationship and has nothing to do with relations to God which have no meaning for our thought. Nevertheless, there is a mystical element in religion which has been too general and per- sistent, and is too vitally connected with the prac- tical religious life to be explained as due solely to an error of the early Christian teachers who had been nurtured on Neo-Platonism. Neo-Platonism no doubt was a vast influence, not always for good, but even that only shows that it appealed to some important element in human nature. In regard to the religious intuition by which this mysticism is nourished, Ritschl had all Kant's sense of its danger, and he had more than Kant's justification, for he had lived to see what Kant had only predicted. The pride of the re- ligious artist had disturbed and perverted Christian humility, while the easy confidence it gave of being able to soar to truth made men impatient of the travail and turmoil of seeking truth. Ritschl's in- sistence on the more arduous way seems to some 394 METHOD AND RESULTS of his followers akin to Bacon's insistence on the necessity of experiment for science. Nor is the claim without a measure of truth. Yet, just as Bacon spoke as if science needed nothing but ex- periment, as if theory and intuition and all the uses of the scientific imagination were mere obstacles to true science, forgetting that no experiment is ever more than a test of what has already been antici- pated, Ritschl speaks as if the religious intuition had never done anything but hinder the true re- ligious method of reaching faith, as if it had never contributed anything but a misleading standard of the harmonious, resulting in the errors of pan- theism and an empty mysticism. But though the vision of the truth which is content with its own artistic satisfaction is an excuse for not treading the arduous way, faith lives by intuitions, and there is nothing faith can verify unless it is prepared to follow them. The man who does great things in religion, as in life, is the man who has large visions and who is prepared to realise them in the sweat of his brow. Now the man who follows his intuitions and anticipations will never get rid of mystery, more particularly if religion is a matter primarily of the will and not of the intellect. A mystery, if it is only an intellectual mystery, must either be solved or ignored, but, if it besets the will, it must be endured. The mystery of the road we must travel over is not a mere sense of ignorance. It is an important element in our calculation. Take, for example, the mystery of the person of Christ. METHOD AND RESULTS 395 Ritschl says its origin is a mystery, and as a mys- tery he leaves it alone. Were we solely concerned with an intellectual problem, that would be the one reasonable course of action. But Christ's practical worth as a Revelation of God and as the Founder of His Kingdom involves that we must believe and obey under the sense of passing over the infinite, a sense which, however little it may be explicable to our thought, continues to be an essential part of our feeling and of our life. Though the doctrine of Christ's two natures may be no adequate expres- sion of the truth, and may add nothing to our thought and little to our faith, it at all events re- cognises a mystery of practical significance. Nor can we altogether ignore a mystical element in Christ's death. All freedom, if it is to face the universe, must somehow be baptised in blood. Every soul of man that stands for a spiritual issue, heedless of those who can destroy the body, stands in the shadow of a great, but vitally effective? mystery of which the death of Christ is the inner sanctuary. Ritschl, no more than any of his successors, has spoken the final word. His method, nevertheless, sums up the result of this long discussion in a way not to be ignored. First of all, we must accept the very thing which to so many has been the chief rock of offence. We must recognise not only the right but the duty of untrammelled investigation, under the sense of the obligation laid upon us by personal freedom in God. Ritschl is in no way singular in 396 METHOD AND RESULTS his recognition of it, only he applies it to the whole history of the Church in a way to show how far it might carry us. He criticises the whole theology of Protestantism, maintaining that, from Melanch- thon onwards, it failed to carry out its own con- ception of faith and fell back upon a Catholic conception of faith as acceptance of a body of correct doctrine. Nor does he stop there. He criticises the whole theology of the Early Church, maintaining that, almost from the beginning, the doctrines of the New Testament were imperfectly understood and that the Fathers were deeply in- fluenced by the practical exigencies of the time and the social and philosophic views amid which they lived. Such an attitude in one poor mortal seems mere overweening j^resumption. Mr. Hutton quotes a passage from Newman for the sake of the style, but also, it would appear, with approval of the sentiment,^ which deals with this attitude, and which might almost have been directed specially against Ritschl. *' For me, dear brethren, did I know myself well, I should doubt- less find I was open to the temptation as well as others to take a line of my own, or what is called, to set up for myself ; but whatever might be my real infirmity in this matter, I should, from mere common sense and common delicacy, hide it from myself, and give it some good name in order to make it palatable. I never could get myself to say, 'Listen to me for I have something great to tell 1 Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith, p. 58. METHOD AND RESULTS 397 you, which no one else knows, but of which there is no manner of doubt'. I should be kept from such extravagance from an intense sense of the intellectual absurdity which, in my feelings, such a claim would involve. . . . Not religious principle, but even worldly pride would keep me from so unworthy an exhibition." Then he associates the right of private judgment with taking up some fancy religion, retailing the Fathers and jobbing theology. This sounds very specious until we remember that no improvement has ever been effected in the world without some one placing himself in the po- sition of singularity which Newman considers so vulgar, and that there is nothing truth so much re- quires as solitary witnesses and martyrs. Stripped of its grace, is it not an exaltation of deference above conscientiousness as a matter of good taste ? Obscure the issue as we may, it comes in the end to a surrender to the brute force of numbers. Ritschl retorts with a like accusation of vulgarity. In the Catholic Church, he says, each bishop is liable to error, but all together are infallible : each Catholic is bound in timor fllialis to cherish doubts of his own salvation, but all together are the exclusive possessors of salvation. " The spokesmen who have to enforce this claim ever come forward with that kind of bravery which draws its power from crowds, and this form of infallible conviction has, in con- sequence, always a savour not met with in good society."^ That is not quite so subtle, yet when ^ Bechtfertigung und Versohnung, vii., p. 619. 398 METHOD AND RESULTS all is said, is anything really vulgar except a coward fear of being singular ? Such deference to numbers rests on a standard of greatness which, in our day, reduces all human affairs to insignificance. It is indeed too late in the day to ignore the importance of great institutions, whether of Church or State, but it is equally belated, with our sense of the vast- ness of the universe and of the wide reign of law, to set up any institution as the source of spiritual authority. The institution is a greater unit than the individual only on a standard of size which, measured even by what we know of the greatness of the universe, leaves neither of them anything. We may confer every sacred title of honour on the institution, it remains only an insignificant part of the visible universe, and man, regarded merely as the subject of its external discipline, is under the external rule of law in a way which leaves him too insignificant for consideration. But if God's law is directly announced to man, if the Almighty has condescended to ask from each child of His willing and conscious concurrence and to tolerate refusal, if man under the guidance of that law has a majesty which may defy both physical and social pressure, a new measure of greatness has appeared in the world. Then whole-hearted humility with God must be whole-hearted sincerity with ourselves ; and no place can be found for the fear of man under any aspect whatsoever. If freedom is not mere arbitrary action, but is a real possibility of choice between the Eternal Will and our present pleasure, conscience must be fundamental and cannot be METHOD AND RESULTS 399 combined with any equal authority. To acknow- ledge, as Newman does, Butler's doctrine of con- science as fundamental for faith, and then to rest faith on any external infallible authority are irre- concilable methods. If conscience has an absolute right to govern the world, it cannot divide its throne with another sovereign ; if the very mark of con- science is to announce right, free from all other considerations, all other considerations whatsoever must be subordinated. The tremendous thing about right, as distinct say from deference, is that it lays us directly on the bosom of reality. If right is right, and not a misleading synonym for conven- tion, it rests on the pillars of the world, and makes a man in all humility a king in Divine right. Our present chaotic and distressful state arises from our failure to realise this positive and en- nobling idea of freedom. We are found toiling hard to be allowed to halt between two opinions. An external authority is set up in such a way as to leave the impression that freedom consists in mere absence of restraints. As only enough of the authority remains to give people a coltish satis- faction in kicking over the traces, it is felt the old bonds must be strengthened. Then the sole result is to show how weak they are. Had the same diligence been applied to the task of calling men into the glorious liberty of the children of God, of teaching them all it means of personal re- sponsibility, of humble love of the truth, of the deej^est of all agreements with men through the very absence of temporal compromises and the pre- 400 METHOD AND RESULTS sence of one desire to walk in the light of God's truth, we should have been much farther on our way to the only enduring and perfect order. But it may be argued that we do not even seem to be making progress in that direction, and that if the struggle is not to be given up in fear of the results, it is time it was abandoned under the sense of its futility. What have the vast labours of the last two centuries been but sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind ? Yet even so, if ''it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honour of kings to search out a matter," the struggle itself is a high testimony to man's greatness, and to renounce our share in it for any cause is treason to the spiritual hopes of our race. To suffer the battle to go by default, and to lose faith in the future and a hopeful diligence in the present, is only a coward's act whether in things practical or intellectual. But, in view of the magnitude of the task, have we any right to be discouraged by the result ? We have not, it is true, wrung any absolute secret from the universe, we have not yet made a secure syn- thesis of all knowledge, we have not been able to finish off the lessons of history with the fine point of a formula, but we have attained a deeper sense of the meaning of freedom in so great a world and of its significance as a basis for our spiritual hopes. The great difficulty is to obtain the right point of view from which to consider the work of both centuries. For that task, Ritschl's reaction from the Romanticism of the nineteenth century is im- METHOD AND RESULTS 401 portant. It helps us to see that the Romanticism which has been so near us that we imagined it the sum of all truth, was also of the nature of a reaction, and that its weakness lay in ignoring the labours of the eighteenth century. Yet the task is not merely to return to Kant as the culmination of these labours. We must carry back with us the his- torical sense of the nineteenth century — the sense of process, of development, of infinitely varied in- dividuality, and then interpret everything by the authority of conscience and the significance of man as man. One result is already apparent. Freedom is not merely the fundamental, it is the exclusive basis of spiritual belief now left to us. We must now found faith upon the very thing we have so long feared would destroy it. In seeking to understand that assertion, we must not forget that there is no more question-begging adjective in the language than this word spiritual It is used everywhere to justify men's own judgments of things. Authorities well incarnated both in flesh and upholstery are called spiritual powers ; observances visible to the eyes of all and governed by rules known to all are called spiritual exercises ; activities directed with much use of material means towards objects to be established in calculable results are said to be spiritual service. What is spiritual may in some distant way be attained through these authorities and organisations, but so far is it from being identical with them, that we might even conceive it opposed by them. These are all visible things, incapable 26 402 METHOD AND RESULTS of rising out of the world of vastness measured by which man at his best estate is altogether vanity. His spiritual hopes must be built on a greatness which has no relation to size, a higher order which can only be the things of freedom. If man is not free, if he is a mere part of the great nexus of mechanical necessity, the only problem to explain is by what accidental combination of selfish motive the distinction between spiritual and material was ever coined, and how actions which are merely the resultant of all the forces at work could be accom- panied by things so irrational as struggle and pain, aspiration, endeavour and self-condemnation. But if the law of freedom makes right might, not merely might right ; if conscience ought to govern the world ; if it is corrupted when it listens to other voices than its own and weighs other con- siderations than its own word of duty, the last word was not spoken by the law of gravitation, or by any mechanical law of motion, though it may govern the vast worlds out to their remotest dis- tance and down to their minutest particle. If freedom is a reality, if man's destiny is not shaped for him but he does something to shape it himself, the vast process of evolution also is not to be measured solely by the countless ?eons which have been invoked to give scope to the operation of happy accident, and by the law of the survival of the fittest. Development without the idea of freedom is an utterly unspiritual process. If the only process is the struggle for existence, there is no higher order, there being no upwards and no METHOD AND RESULTS 403 downwards, but only fitness to persist in living, a battle manifestly not to the good and generous but to the morally cunning and the physically strong. And it helps little to exalt the process, if it remains all of process. If it is all merely a great network drawn across the face of the world, very little is effected by calling it reason, for if it is an involun- tary, it is an unspiritual force with no better cri- terion for what is higher than greater complexity. Spiritual worth we can only acknowledge when we have to do with a soul struggling upwards to free- dom, to a freedom which is lost in mean ends and found in high. If, however, there is such an issue as freedom, if any creature ever acted, not by the mere forces driving him on, but by a voluntary ac- ceptance of the eternal laws, process ceases to be mere process and bears in its bosom the beginning at least of a conscious work for a purpose. Then the world must be interpreted, not by what it is but by what it will become, and therefore by a spiritual standard of worth. Yet what, it may be asked, have the past two centuries contributed to such a conception of free- dom 1 The commonplaces of morality and freedom are not new. Was Butler a discoverer, when he set up the absolute right of conscience to rule, or Kant, when he insisted that it must utter its own verdict and listen to no alien voice ? As for Ritschl, what does he say about the significance of choice that every person not bamboozled by philosophy has not said from the beginning ? In the first place, it is much to know that the 404 METHOD AND RESULTS sensible person has a right to his opinion, and that in fundamental matters philosophy must conform to him, not he to philosophy. Then, even were it all commonplace, a revelation of the full mean- ing of a commonplace, a recognition that it is not commonplace but elemental, is scarcely equalled in importance by a new discovery. And there has been much more than a repetition of what has been from the beginning. The true significance of freedom, its overpowering importance for all our thinking and acting, only became fully manifest when it was seen setting up the rule of right amid a system of vast and ceaseless mechanical law, and asserting its power to accept or reject in face of the might of an endless process of development. It then manifested itself as a new order of greatness, carrying with it incalculable consequences, so that the very frequency with which the plain witness of freedom has been denied, is just the measure of its significance in view of our modern conception. If the issues of freedom are genuine, there are distinctions in life which are absolute. A view of life is involved which has God on one side and whatever we like to call the absence of good on the other. Evil can no more be the mere necessary shadow of good. Between the choice of agreement with eternal right and disagreement with it there must be something of the absolute distance of heaven and hell. Just this absoluteness of moral distinctions, however, has seemed to be destroyed by the doc- trine of evolution. It has seemed to do away with METHOD AND RESULTS 405 the significance of human choice and to swallow everything up in a great relentless process in which what is most permanent is continually changing and the individual is nothing. But in the first place, if we have moral assurance of the signifi- cance of the individual and of the eternal issues of every action which is based on living experience in the present, no theory of what has happened in the past can ever rise to that height of certainty which would justify us in modifying it ; and in the second, the theory rightly understood has no such effect, for the process of evolution is simply a re- duplication and increase of the significance of the individual. The Darwinian theory of it in par- ticular. Professor James points out, depends in no way on a necessary unfolding according to an even process.^ It shows that the individual, as he ex- presses it, becomes a " ferment in the race ". The slightest improvement in the individual is of vital importance for the whole stock. These improve- ments, indeed, are looked upon as involuntary, but there is no reason why they should not also be volun- tary. Then man's will becomes the supreme force for a higher development. Above all there is no- thing in Darwinism to support indifference. The slightest variation from the law of life is visited with heavy penalty. There is no place of repent- ance even for a mistake, though it should be sought carefully with tears. If, however, man develops slowly into a moral creature, how can this absoluteness of the distinc- 1 The Will to Believe, p. 222 ff. 406 METHOD AND RESULTS tion between good and evil be maintained ? In reply, it may be asked, How does the slow recog- nition of the distinction affect its absoluteness ? Suppose an animal develops eyes, the light is not thereby developed ; and suppose it refuses to walk by the light it sees, the calamity that would over- take it would be absolute. Only one question very deeply affects the moral situation. In this process of development, is man being made free, and is his destiny in the midst of it determined in any way by the use of the freedom he has ? In that case, at whatsoever point man stood between right and wrong, free to choose between them, he never could be in doubt about the absoluteness of the distinc- tion, as soon as it appeared, however much he was confused in its application. History is a long record of the development of man's moral ideals, and we have proof every day of how much his moral nature needs development. But, however much preparation went before, the rise of the sense of right and wrong and the consciousness of ability to choose between them must have been a crisis. A distinction unlike all other distinctions had come upon him. Without it he had been a mere animal ; with it he was a man. Intellect may have been a slow growth, and feeling may have been a slow growth ; and moral discrimination depends on the former, and moral sensitiveness on the latter. Both intellect and feeling develop slowly in the child, yet the sense of right and wrong and the im- perative need of choosing between them come upon a child with a flash. And it is hard to METHOD AND RESULTS 407 see how it could have come otherwise upon man- kind. It has also been the custom, under the influence of the idea of slow development, to minimise too much the clearness and force of the earliest moral issues, and so to decide that any less sinful and tragic course of moral development was impossible. Though a child has a very limited moral horizon, just because he is so much freer from the great net- work of evil which has woven itself so closely round the grown man, confusing his judgment and per- verting his will, he may within his smaller horizon, have the clearest moral issue, and upon his obedi- ence to it the whole development of his life may depend. Similarly for the primitive man physical impulse may have been strong, seeing that hitherto it had entirely controlled his life, but moral evil had not yet drawn its black streak through it. Hence in the very limited issue that could arise, there may have been a quite clear vision of the amazing nature of the choice and a quite unper- verted attitude of the will towards it, upon which great matters for the method whereby the race was to arrive at its heritage of freedom had to depend. Wherefore the thing that is crucial in the doctrine of the Fall, the absolute significance of the choice of right and wrong, the significance of it as the supreme " ferment in the race," follows, in spite of every conceivable doctrine of evolution, from the introduction at any point of things so absolute as right and freedom. Our error lies in supposing that the choice had to be made on the plane of 408 METHOD AND RESULTS our present moral ideals, or even on the plane of the absolute moral ideal. We forget that there may be the same absoluteness of responsibility regarding the lowest ideal. The possession of freedom would thus draw an absolute distinction between man and the lower animals, relating him in a totally difterent way to the world, and, therefore, to God. So long as an animal is merely the creature of impulse, it is simply a phase of the universe, a vehicle for the forces of the world. The possibility of a choice between agreeing to work out the purpose of the world and disagreeing alters everything. It shows that the purpose of the world is of a nature which blind forces cannot work out, but involves a haz- ardous experiment in which God as well as man has high responsibilities. Force only involves a relation of power ; freedom involves a relation at least of righteousness. Further, if we believe in the genuine issues of freedom, we cannot avoid drawing absolute lines in history. History must always have an aspect of unreality so long as it is conceived as a process upon which man's actions depend, but which does not at all depend on man's actions. It is mere gossip about our insignificant family, unless its incidents were genuine decisions between good and evil with an important issue at stake. History interests itself in institutions, but is a long record of their insecurity, and if they were not for the Imilding up of something spiritual they were all passing vanities. History interests itself in culture, METHOD AND RESULTS 409 but if that only concerns the intellect it is writing upon sand. History interests itself in races, but if they are only the playthings of destiny they are as the swarm of summer files. To find the strings which work this puppet-show may add to the interest : it cannot add to the sense of reality. Astronomy with its 3eons in which the few thou- sand years of human history are nothing, and its spaces in which even the whole theatre of man's actions is a mere mote in the sun, may have some pretension to a knowledge of things in their due proportion, but history merely treats a small eddy as if it were the great stream. If, however, free- dom is a genuine act of choice, and if the sense of right is a guide to the eternal and the ultimate meaning of things, history becomes the record of man's advance towards God's purpose, and has a significance not measured by space and time. The ideals and purposes of individual men have an absolute worth which societies, institutions and cultures cannot in themselves provide. Scientific histories may be written which ignore men and deal with movements. Mankind continue to ig- nore them and to be interested precisely in those individual heroisms which are said to be only the gossip of history. The story they love is of the man who continues to be free in face of dire calamity, fierce opposition, death with all its ter- rors. They conclude rightly that the ideals and moral strength of the race have been won precisely by such heroisms, and that even the record of them continues to be a blessed heritage. 410 METHOD AND RESULTS Freedom embodied in an institution may be on its way to decay ; freedom embodied in a heroic soul is absolute in its worth and eternal in its in- fluence. Man's heroic decisions, the working out of his heroic ideals, the response to high Divine calls in word and act, build up all that is worthy of being remembered and justify our belief that human history has an infinite as well as a merely finite sig- nificance. Then ** the proper study of mankind is man," and his explorations into nature which have so long seemed to yield him the vastness otherwise denied him and the finality otherwise slow of arriv- ing, will also take their place simply among the great heroisms of labour and love of truth, to be valued mainly by what they add to our vision of good and our ideal of life. History, being in this way a continual dealing of man with God, is all of the nature of a revelation, and when we speak of the history of the religions, of the faiths by which man's freedom has sought to live, as being concerned with revelation, it is only to be understood by way of pre-eminence. Yet that history, so tangled and perplexing, has pre- eminent interest, for, if freedom is a reality, the history of man's religions is the history of his struggle for footing amid the shifting sands of time. If all issues are fixed in a system determined from the beginning, religion is a wholly inexplicable and superfluous disturbance of man's peace. The uni- verse produces us and does not consult us, and why it should have complicated life by making us sup- pose that there is some interchange of thought and METHOD AND RESULTS 411 purpose, is hard to understand. No conception of fixed process, however specious it may be made to appear, can find room for that interaction between obedience and succour which every religion has presupposed. But with real freedom of choice, there must be that interaction between ourselves and the world which requires faith both in a free agency in ourselves, and in a free agency behind the world. In that case religion must be as vital a concern as morality, and right morality and true religion must be in entire accord. Yet religion is not merely another name for morality. Not in that sense is the will fundamen- tal in religion. Keligious faith involves feeling. Unless it is an intuition of the heart, it is not faith. It also involves thought. We must know in what we believe. And these various elements must not only be present in faith, but be united into one vision. To reach this vision, however, we must do more than argue : we must judge ourselves and judge the world from the vantage-ground of spirit- ual beings engaged in winning our freedom in a world which in one aspect is our mightiest opponent and in another is wholly consecrated to our aid. Without that, emotion were an absurdity and insight an illusion. Faith has thus a prior conviction to its formulated conclusion, so that in a sense reason is merely servusjidei and credo ut intelligam a neces- sary form of procedure. Faith is not, however, on that account a flight of baseless confidence soaring out of sight of inquiry. Rather it is the one thing which insists on the whole experiment of life. At 412 METHOD AND RESULTS every step faith can only reach one arm's length in front of us. We can then take hold to gain another step, but we cannot reach another arm's length till we have taken that step. This way of advance is slow and perplexing, and the history of the religions is accordingly tedious and confused. But it is a high task and only life can forward us in it, and it is this groping of freedom which gives interest to all phases of man's religious struggle. At the same time this significance of freedom does something to answer the question whether there is any absolute distinction between Christian- ity and the other religions, or whether Christianity is merely the highest phase of a graduated series. As an institution embodying ecclesiastical authority, as a visible Church, Christianity is only one among many phases of temporal things, possibly the highest, but scarcely the ultimate. Suppose it were even the possessor of infallibility, would that be more than a temporal device ? Can a society with one infallible head and all other persons submissive members be the eternal order ? But if Christianity is rather obscured by those external buttresses which we have tried so hard to maintain ; if its real mean- ing lies in the absence of these external authorities, and if the process which to so many has seemed to be sapping its foundation has only been dis- playing its true proportions ; if it trusts to nothing in the last issue except reconciliation and grace ; if it will be satisfied with nothing less than a re- lation to God in which we shall be wholly free METHOD AND RESULTS 413 intellectually and morally, it must belong to the absolute, the eternal order. Whether Christianity is absolutely different from other religions must, however, in the last issue, depend on whether Christ is absolutely different from other men. As freedom must be an acquisi- tion as well as a gift, Christianity had to descend into the world and be mingled with its evil, so that, when we would understand it in its purity, we must ever go back to Christ. This does not mean, as some suppose, that Christ can be understood apart from the Church. But it does mean that there can be no kind of understanding of the Church apart from Christ. The nearest analogy to the position of Christ in the Christian religion is the idea of right in morals. In spite of all confusion and mis- understanding and misapplication, the idea of right remains for every moral being an absolute distinc- tion. Similarly, in spite of all uncertainty regarding His life, misapprehension of His significance, and misappropriation of His approval, He remains for every religious soul not of relative but of absolute significance. And the reason is that in Him we find the perfect freedom which could only be sus- tained by the perfect relation to God. According to notions too long inculcated upon us nothing is final, all is relative. The struggle never attains anything except the right to make a further attempt. Possibly it may be a higher at- tempt, but if there is no absolute good within our reach, it is hard to tell what is higher and what is lower. Yet even in history, when we meet with 414 METHOD AND RESULTS freedom, we meet with what is final. This is the conviction which is enshrined in the idea that the works of genius are imperishable. The man of genius may err and even sin. The thing he cannot do is to be conventional, a mere slave of the accepted order. After some fashion he must go up into the mount and meet with God. Then men accept his work neither as new nor as old, but as a permanent enrichment of the race. It is not a case of " accept- ing absolute truths of reason on contingent grounds of history ". Rather is it true, that only in this way has any absolute conviction come into human life. For right agreement in it argument should be absent and the compulsion of human opinion disregarded. Then only can it evoke the insight by which it is approved. All God's revelation to man is of this heroic nature. It speaks to man because by it " the heroic that is in all men finds a Divine awakening voice ". Herein we see the folly of the demand that a Divine revelation should be written on the skies. It is written on something far greater — on the souls it has made free. Who were the Prophet and the Apostle ? Men who through God feared neither men nor events, who were incapable of being dismayed by adversity or of being corrupted by fortune. And what did they record, except the liberty wherewith they had been made free. Among other things this conception of revela- tion might in time afford us some rudiments of the principles of criticism on the basis of our common human nature. These principles would not fix METHOD AND RESULTS 415 writings to any date, but they would refuse to tolerate the dulness which grows burdensome, of men who never wrote an inspired sentence in their lives and who do not know that an inspired sen- tence never was written except with an attitude of inward freedom towards living events. A vital writing can no more be made out of extracts in the study than a vital body out of specimens in the dissecting room. Wherefore a duty would be forced upon the critic of showing what heroic warmth of action ,and of feeling smelted all these elements into literature, and thus, whatsoever con- clusions of date or authorship were arrived at, the Scriptures would remain the heroic record of God's dealings with heroic man. But what bears more directly on our subject is that this conception of revelation, as God's response to man's aspirations after freedom, at once shows the necessary relation of all revelation to Christ and the necessary subordination of it to the re- velation in Him. Jesus speaks with a directness and simplicity to the hearts made in God's image, and meets them so entirely on the basis of their human needs, that He stands quite alone in His significance for our freedom as children of God. Ritschl speaks as if this were accomplished solely by revealing the moral qualities of God, in par- ticular His will of love. But that is not where he or any one who seriously rests his life on the faith of Christ comes to a halt. In order to gain victory, Christ must also in some way embody God's will of power. He must show that God's will of power is 416 METHOD AND RESULTS His will of love. Is He not the supreme source of the freedom of God's children, just because the glory of God in His face is a transformation of the idea of God's power ? Relentless force is too small a thing for the Infinite. All it could make would be a dead universe. No process can breathe into God's work the breath of life. Life refuses to look out of its vastness with the light of the soul in its eye. But when God undertakes to work with freedom, He undertakes to bear and forbear, and the method of Christ becomes the revelation of a higher Omnipotence. Power becomes love, and gains in power by being love. Power can only rule by iron law, love can rule with the freedom of God's children ; power can only create a vast play- thing, love can create a Kingdom of God. With this distinction clearly before us, we may hope in time to attain a patience in our thinking in some degree corresponding to God's patience in working. We shall see that a method which works by freedom must necessarily be slow and irregular, full of failure, apparently having more of man in it than of God, but we shall see that nothing else has in it any spiritual promise. One requirement it must wait for — the faith which works by love, for by it alone can God enter a life in freedom. But it makes no other demand, for it never is God's power or willingness that is in question, but only the difficulty Omnipotence has not to annihilate the finite will, the difficulty of so helping as to set free, and not to enslave, God's children. Then also it will appear that grace cannot be mere propulsion, METHOD AND RESULTS 417 or humility the abnegation of independence, or God's work the annihilation of man's. On the contrary, grace is the power to be truly ourselves and humility a sense of God that overshadows the sense of our fellowman. Finally, the institution will not be of less im- portance, but it will be strictly regarded as means not end. We shall thereby be always in a position to keep it in the sunlight of just criticism, and so preserve it from the decay which always overtakes Church or State, or any other institution, when it lives for itself and forgets to judge itself by what it ought to accomplish. If in some way it is not serving the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of souls organised only through love, it is an encumbrance and a positive evil. Every living institution ought to be attempting to abolish itself ; every statutory arrangement should be anticipating a higher than legal obedience ; every appointment for men by others should contemplate itself as a discipline for teaching men to recognise no appointment but their own. Human authority may have done much to secure the conditions of man's freedom, but, if it is to do still more, it must always stand farther and farther back from man and leave him to a higher rule than man's. Of the Church this must in a very special sense be true. No institution is more in need of being subjected to constant comparison of its present state with the purpose it should serve ; nor should any institution live so continually in the thought that compulsion is the worst of all disloyalty to the 27 418 METHOD AND RESULTS kingdom it is meant to accomplish. It should be her part to call men into the glorious liberty of God's children, always demanding of them a higher, more personal faith, and a more inward, more personal obedience, than she has any right to demand of them for herself. Perhaps we may find here, too, something re- sembling a philosophy of history. Freedom is a burdensome task and God does not impose the whole weight of it upon us at once. Wherefore He appoints the statutory element in life and in re- ligion to be a substitute for freedom when men are weary of it, and a disci23line when they misuse it. It is a legitimate though only a temporary resting- place. History thus consists of recurring periods of Law and Gospel. The Promise always was before the Law, but the Law always is a necessary preparation for the Promise. Yet such periods of external rule are always more or less marks of present failure, so that the duty of every man who can appropriate the promise of freedom is to live, not for the Law, but for the Gospel. When a great movement is waning there is a danger of an extreme repudiation of what has been extremely affirmed. This appears in the desire at present to reject altogether the conception that the world is an ordered whole on any plan we can guess at. We have been crushed into insignificance by a vast mechanical law, our doings have been made futile and meaningless by a relentless process of development. Now that the newness of the in- cubus has worn off we realise in spite of everything METHOD AND RESULTS 419 that the issues of life are of supreme importance, and that man should not be daunted. These vital issues we know are not touched by any scientific results. Wherefore, it is beginning to be main- tained, that we ought to take the liberty of ignoring these results. But I have entirely failed in my purpose if I have not shown you that it is just when set in the midst of this vastness that freedom and faith attain their high significance. Not till we have traversed immensity and eternity have we attached any ade- quate meaning to the assertion that the things of the spirit have greater issues depending on them than the mightiest law or the vastest process. In the present feeble beginnings of man's freedom, nour- ished tenderly by God's grace, we see the baby hand that holds the sceptre of this realm, and we should resent nothing that displays either its vastness or its permanence. Thus in a higher sense than his we realise the force of Hegel's great saying : *' The truth of necessity is freedom ". NOTES I.— PASCAL'S WAGEE AKGUMENT No reference has been made in the lecture on Pascal to the famous passage on the reasonableness of staking on the chance of the existence of God, yet it would seem to affect seriously our view of his attitude towards faith. What he says is to this effect : — God exists or He does not exist. Let us put it at an even chance, with no more reason on one side than on the other. It would then appear to be right not to stake at all. But you must stake, you must in some way say heads or tails in spite of you. You must therefore weigh truth and well-being, reason and will, knowledge and blessedness. Truth, reason, knowledge, however, being evenly balanced, do not influence the result. It is all then a question of well-being. By believing in God we lose nothing and stand a chance of an infinite gain. If there is an infinity of life, infinitely blessed, it would be rational to stake on it, not merely v^ith equal chances, but on an infinitely small chance. It is no answer to say that, though what we sacrifice is finite, it is certain, while what we should gain, though infinite, is uncertain. In life we consider it rational to stake a certainty against an uncer- tainty on an even chance. True, we cannot believe because we will. We can, however, seek to be cured of unbelief by diminishing the passions. To this end we must act altogether as those who do believe, taking holy water, saying masses, etc. " Naturally that will make you believe, (421) 422 NOTES will make you simple (abetira). ' But that is what I fear ! ' And why? What have you to lose?" Instead of losing there is everything to gain, all the Christian virtues and a growing assurance that what we lost was no real good at all, and that what we stand to gain is certain as well as infinite. Were that a deliberate and final utterance, we could only say with Sully Prudhomme that the dramatic form of it does not save it from being shockingly, cynically in- terested, and we should scarcely be inclined to accept the good he afterwards finds in it.^ Principal Tulloch says that it is no lofty mood and no higher in Pascal than in any other, yet it appeals to a man who in the grip of the wave of scepticism clings to the Divine with something of the gamester's thought that it is the winning side.^ Pro- fessor James regards it as a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the unbelieving heart. " We feel," he adds, " that faith in masses and holy water adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the inner soul of faith's reality ; and if we were our- selves in the place of the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward," The supposed way of winning might thus be precisely the way of losing. God might regard what is truthful in motive above what is merely true in point of fact, even though it concerned belief in His own existence. Intel- lectual sincerity might be the first requirement in His sight, and to seek to believe in His existence merely on interested grounds might earn the same kind of disapproval that speaking wickedly for Him earns in Job. To be biassed in our inquiries by a sense of the greatness of the issue is, as Butler says, " a prejudice as much as anything else ". And this applies, not merely to Pascal's argument, ^ La vraie Beligion scion Pascal, p. 267 tf. 2 Pascal, p. 193. NOTES 423 but to every attempt to urge truth either by fear or favour. If the word ahetira is rightly translated, as Professor James translates, " stupefy our scruples," if the effect of masses and holy v^^ater is expected purely from the might of custom, which Pascal elsewhere describes so graphically, the most difficult of all conditions of seeking truth, the deliverance of our souls from the fetters of custom, is not only ignored, but deliberately rejected. It would then appear that Pascal cared for nothing, if he could only en- tangle a man in the toils of the Church. A different impression is made on our minds, however, when we recognise, as M. Havet does, Paul's usage in such passages as " the wisdom of this world is folly before God ". This shows two things, first, that Pascal was only writing for himself and was careless of misunderstanding, and second, that he is not hoping for the effect of custom to stifle inquiry, but for the discipline of the passions, and especially of intellectual pride, to direct inquiry into its right course. To stake and be done with more thought about the matter is not Pascal's own way in the least degree. He is not recommending the highest and best, but is, as Professor James says, " playing his last trump ". Where so great an issue is at stake, he thinks no inquiry could be too arduous. "Negligence in a business which concerns themselves, their eternity, their all, stirs me to anger rather than to pity ; it astonishes and dismays me ; it is a monstrous thing to me." It is to this stupidity and extravagance that he directs his argument, not as a high appeal, but deliberately as the last and lowest. Perhaps no passage in the Fense'es requires to be read with a more careful recollection of Vinet's warning, that much of it is still in the form in which the author was only writing for himself, jottings of what were recognised as unqualified statements, which, had Pascal lived to com- plete his work, would have been balanced by the opposite 424 NOTES truth, modified, or at least differently expressed. Regarded in this way, something might even be said for the masses and holy water, especially seeing they are finished off with a vague, etc., on the ground that they stood to Pascal's mind as a sort of shorthand note of certain conditions of worship and fellowship, necessary for withdrawing the carnal man from the dominion of the world, and for open- ing his sympathies to the appeal of things spiritual. At all events that was their significance to Pascal's own soul. We can then recognise that there is something here new as well as true, something lying very close to Pascal's contention that the whole of man's activities are concerned in the issues of faith. An argument of this kind. Professor James says, would no more revive devotion to masses and holy water in most of us than an appeal from the Mahdi to weigh our infinite gain, if he is genuine, against our infinite sacrifice, if he is not.^ Yet with options which are still living issues, the willingness to go in for life has a great, and a legitimate, influence on our beliefs. " Pascal's argument instead of being powerless, then seems a clin- cher." " Our passional nature not only may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds." ^ We might even argue that all the merit of faith lies in this venture beyond the conclusions of the understanding. Should we admire the determination of Socrates to die rather than to do wrong, to choose the uncertain evil of death rather than the certain evil of disobeying the laws, if he had seen the country to which he was going ? Are not his most impressive words—" But now it is time for us to go, I to death and you to hfe ; and which of us goes to the better state is known only to God" — words not really of doubt but of a noble venture of the heart ? 1 The Will to Believe, p. 6. Ubid., p. 11. NOTES 425 A remarkable likeness exists between Pascal's Wager understood in this way, and Butler's doctrine of Probability. Butler insists on "an absolute and formal obligation in point of prudence and interest to act even upon a low degree of probability," and he is impressed by the amazing ignorance amid which every inan must conduct the busi- ness of life. Butler is more guarded in his expression, connects action upon probabilities more definitely with the need of constantly falling back upon the sure guidance of conscience, applies it more generally and therefore more justly, sets it in the midst not of one Church but of that Church which consists of all persons scattered all over the world who live in accordance with Christ's laws : but he has precisely the same overwhelming sense of the dimness of the light with which we are compelled to act and of the need of our whole nature, and not merely our faculty of argument, in searching for that faith which the conduct of life imposes on us. II.— GEEMAN THEOLOGIANS AND BUTLER In the great intellectual commonwealth which is re- gardless of political boundaries, the thought of the great thinkers permeates from one nation to another, and from one class of thinkers to another, and even to classes w^hich do not consciously recognise their obligations to the thinker at all, by channels of communication to which transla- tions form very httle guidance. The books which have been translated as soon as they appeared, and which have been much reviewed and talked about, were often mere echoes of the great books which remained in the back- ground scarcely referred to. Yet the smallness of the attention paid to Butler in Germany is almost a unique instance of neglect. So great a student of English theology as Lechler accords him just five not specially discrimin- ating lines in his History of English Deis7n. The explana- tion is due at least in part to the extraordinary absence of any reference to Butler in earlier German writers which could have afforded a hint of his significance. At a period when all kinds of EngHsh books, especially books of theo- logical controversy, were translated, the only writer who has shown enduring quality appears to have been almost, if not totally, neglected. As late as 1877, in an article on Apologetics in the second edition of Herzog's Beal-Encyclo- pddie, the only source of information to which Christlieb can refer his German readers, is a summary of the Analogy in Gass's History of Protestant Dogmatics. In the first edition of Herzog there is no article on Butler at all. In the first volume of the first edition under Apologia he is (426) NOTES 427 referred to as "Job. Buttler of Durham," and there is a brief notice of the Analogy in the Appendix under the heading Oxford Essayists. In the second edition the editor evidently wakened up at the end to recognise an omission, and an article on Butler, manifestly written to order, appears in the Appendix. In addition to the article, there are two references to him, both by Christlieb. In the reference already spoken of, Christlieb shows that he is fully aware of the important place assigned to Butler in England, but he also shows that he is merely repeating the common English view of what that reputation rests on. He represents the Analogy as of the same school as Paley's Evidences, being, he says, "a defence of Christ- ianity as a body of doctrine and not as a new Divine principle of life ". Under the article Predigt, he deals somewhat more adequately with the Sermons, though with a touch of rhetorical platitude which creates a suspicion of the sources of his knowledge, and a total neglect of the significance of Butler's doctrine of conscience which con- firms the suspicion. The explanation of this indifference is no doubt due to the fact that the estimate of Butler by his English readers almost always turned on elements in him which the Germans believed had been outlived, but why no one ever troubled himself to go behind that estimate is hard to say, unless there may be some truth after all in Sir James Mackintosh's theory about his style, the German being accustomed to the type only in his own language. III.— THE JUDGMENT OF WOETH The translation "judgment of worth" for Werthurtheil has been preferred to "value-judgment" for several reasons. First, judgment of worth seems to be uniformly used by English philosophers ; and as the term was originally borrowed from philosophy, there is no good reason at this date for attempting to establish a different terminology. Second, the expression "value-judgment" without explanation represents no conceivable meaning to the English reader, whereas " judgment of worth " at once suggests the double meaning of intrinsic worth and worth to me. Third, the German word has exactly this double significance, and it is begging a very important question to use an expression which apparently is meant to exclude the former. To deal adequately with all the controversies regarding the meaning and just application of the judgment of worth would require a treatise, not a note. Fortunately, such an aspect of the subject hes outside the scope of this work, yet a little fuller elucidation may not be unacceptable. Two streams which had previously flowed apart meet in the judgment of worth, and the point in dispute is the method and the legitimacy of their union. First, there is a philosophical stream, connected mainly with Kant's assertion of the significance of freedom as the basis of a worth in man which is above price. A good will alone, Kant taught, can give man's existence absolute worth ; and only in relation to this worth can the world be conceived as an absolute whole with a purpose. Here we have not (428) NOTES 429 only an idea of intrinsic worth, but a connection of it with our moral personality, which are the two elements in the idea. Otto Eitschl in his pamphlet Ueber Werthur- theile traces the development of the idea, through Herbart, Schleiermacher and De Wette, to Lotze. Lotze brought the question into its present form by definitely raising the question how worth for me and worth absolutely are related. Worth and unworth, he maintained, are purely forms of our feeling, while feeling is simply inclination or disinchnation, the sense that a thing forwards or hinders our personahty. The whole soul is in all its operations, and from the beginning we are not open to any impression that has not this feeling of worth or unworth for us. In this feeling for the worth of things " the reason has a genuine revelation, just as in the principles of rational inquiry it has a necessary instrument of experience ". The other current has always existed in religious thinking. It goes back to the Master's own words, "He that doeth the deed shall know of the doctrine ". Luther is rightly enough referred to as having brought the idea again to due recognition, by insisting on the significance of the believer's personality for his faith. But there has also been a growing sense that the idea is a guide through the perplexities of our modern time. , Pascal, Butler, Schleiermacher might be adduced. Butler is specially im- portant because of his connecting self-love with conscience as the two regulative principles of human nature. Butler's doctrine of probability guided by the absolute authority of conscience is very closely allied to Herrmann's doctrine of worth guided by the categorical imperative of the moral law. These two currents are united in the modern use of the expression "judgment of worth," so that it is not fully explained when it is described as merely a modern way of saying, " He who does the deed shall know of the doctrine," for a very important element is the modern way of saying 430 NOTES it. The justification for this practical faith is found in the relation of our personality to all ideas of worth. In short the characteristic element in the doctrine is the way in which the right to follow a practical judgment is related to the significance of personal freedom. The question is whether my rational purposes have the same relation to reahty as my rational perceptions. We know that the vagaries of both are astray, but can I understand the pur- pose of the world by my use of it, as I understand the connection of the world by my study of it, and has there been built up a practical realm of truth regarding the meaning and use of life by service and character, as there has been built up a theoretical realm of truth regarding its laws by study and research ? All the soul is in all its operations, and no kind of judgment can be utterly separ- ated from another, but there is this distinction between what the world is and what it is meant to be, and the ques- tion is whether the desire to know the purpose of life throws us back as essentially upon character as the desire to know the connected facts of life throws us back upon observa- tion. Worth must mean worth for the purposes of a spiritual being, and the only spiritual being by whose purposes I can test it is myself, and it is this vital rela- tion of my own self to the understanding of the Divine meaning of things that is meant to be indicated by the expression "judgment of worth". Worth does not mean, therefore, what I value accord- ing to my fancy, but what I value according to real spiritual significance for me, and therefore according to real spiritual significance for God, in whose image I am made. Thus it is a judgment of worth regarding the real meaning of things, and not merely for the vagaries of the individual. It is not, therefore, to be distinguished from a judgment of truth, or from a judgment of existence, for the highest truth is what ought to be, and it is the eternal in all existence. What we are to distinguish it NOTES 431 from is a theoretic judgment. Nor in considering this distinction should we speak of theoretic judgments as objective and judgments of worth as subjective, for both are subjective and objective at the same time. The differ- ence is that I can force a theoretic judgment upon any man who uses his eyes and his intelHgence aright, whereas I can only force a judgment of worth upon a man who uses his conscience and will aright. The place of the judgment of worth in life is not doubtful. The difficulty begins with its application to history. The question of how far it can measure, not merely the things now before us, but the past events upon which our present estimates so largely depend, has come to be of vital importance in these days when we seem so much at the mercy of the historical critic, and when the authority of Scripture can no more be asserted as literal and legal. The supreme interest of history, as has been said above, is the building up of the judgment of worth. The unique interest of history also is derived from the ap- pHcation to it of the judgment of worth. And that is more particularly true of the history of Jesus. No one can read it without relating it to his own personahty, and its in- fluence is embedded deeply in the whole estimate of hfe amid which we live. Now what sort of answer could the judgment of worth give, say, to Strauss' s Life of Jesus ? When George Eliot was translating it, she revolted at last at its negative character. " The soul," she says, " that has hopelessly followed Jesus — its impersonation of the highest and best — all in despondency : its thoughts all refuted, its dreams all dissipated ! Then comes another Jesus — another but the same, the same highest and best, only chastened, crucified instead of triumphant — and the soul learns that this is the true way to conquest and glory. And there is the burning of the heart which assures us that ' this is the Lord,' that this is the inspiration from 432 NOTES above, the true comforter that leads into truth." That, as far as it goes, is a judgment of worth. A judgment of worth of the same kind but more positive set Kitschl to the study of the early centuries, the result of which appeared in the second edition of his AUkatholische Kirche. In estimating the meaning of the judgment of worth for Eitschl that study must never be forgotten. A new judgment of worth set him to new research. Then he found the unreality of all the supposed impersonal forces. Above all he saw the unique signifi- cance of the person of Christ. He saw that the right way to study history was not to be without prepossession, but to have the true prepossession, that in particular the absence of all prepossession in studying our Lord's life is the absence of any key to its meaning. The immense force of the impression of Christ's personality, its immense significance for his own inner life which came upon him in these historical studies, was the determining force in his whole theology. But two questions still remain, How far can such a judgment of worth guarantee the accuracy of the docu- ments ? and. How much can it tell us of the Divine secret of Christ's nature ? Some way of dealing more directly with the veracity of Scripture, especially of reaching the conviction that the impression of Christ as we receive it is generally true to fact, other than the criticism of the Gospels, were greatly to be desired. Not only is that fluctuating and uncertain. It is not a religious require- ment at all. The ordinary man cannot engage in it and should not be dependent upon it. Are we then to say with Bender, Let us profit by the impression without troubling ourselves as to how it was put before us, or whether there ever was a man who corresponded with it, and let us take advantage of the influence of the Christian religion, however much or however little of it was connected with Jesus of Nazareth ? Be thankful for NOTES 433 historical ideals, in short, however they arise. But this view of the case Eitschl and all his followers have emphati- cally opposed. In Eitschl's view, so far as the realisation of our freedom reaches, reality reaches. While the judg- ment of the worth of Christ's life for our spiritual lives cannot silence historical criticism and cannot guarantee us against any special error in the narrative, it can legiti- mately assure us that the impression we receive is generally true, which is all we require for our religious life. The limitation which Eitschl sets upon the reach of the judg- ment of worth in regard to Christ's person has already been discussed. It is what Eeischle describes as a " judg- ment of trust directed towards a normative Divine revela- tion," and beyond that normative, regulative value Eitschl will not go. Eightly or wrongly one gains the impression in read- ing Eitschl that his general theory of religion also started from this impression made upon him by the personality of Jesus. God, he thought, forms the same kind of impression on us in life that Christ does in history. His reaHty also is involved in the reality of our freedom. That does not give us a natural religion, something that can be argued out as an inference from the world, but freedom is met by something we might describe as a natural revelation, a succour of God in events and in men. 28 IV.— FEEEDOM AND SOCIALISM. The position maintained in the last lecture that, as freedom advances, the institution will stand farther and farther back from the individual, may w^ell seem to be refuted by the movement at the present day in all countries of Western Europe towards State organisation of many matters formerly left to individual enterprise. In reply it might be said that the last thirty years do not sum up the history of the world, that, strange as it may appear to us whose own history they do sum up, they are probably not much more important in the whole scheme of things than any other thirty years. The present tendency, which some call Socialistic, might, therefore, only be one of those eddies which prove the strength of the current. It would then suffice to point out, as Herbert Spencer does, how the earlier civilisations subordinated man to the institution, regulating his dress and his opinions, and how the State has at least in some degree realised that there are matters outside its province, with a result that has tended to order as well as to freedom. But it would be said in reply, are we to content ourselves with a Philistine individuahsm, with a cruel and wasteful social basis of competition, which, considering how much success goes by men's wits and how little by real public service, is only a kind of legahsed robbery? Are we not to hail the present tendency to- wards corporate control, and regard it with hope as a beginning of the process which will end in nationalising all the means of production ? At all events we are sick of that individualism whose Kingdom of Heaven is in Park (434) NOTES 435 Lane with a Gehenna only a few streets away to give zest to the joy of being in the Abraham's bosom of opulence. Are we to sit down in the midst of this appalling state of society and simply wait for the millennium ? To this it may be conceded, that the one thing we may not do is to sit down and do nothing. The most necessary and difficult of tasks must be done. We must ourselves walk in freedom. We are not to be enslaved to riches, nor honour ourselves for the possession of them ; and we are not to be afraid of poverty, nor despise any man for being poor. Perhaps the latter task is the greater and more necessary. A movement among the rich not to trust to their uncertain riches and to honour men for what they are and not for what they have, would be a power. But a movement among the poor not to envy the rich and not to esteem man for his riches would promise a regenera- tion of society. The system which can make a man who never was a benefactor to society at all a millionaire, and the man who has done the hardest and most disagreeable and most necessary work a pauper, the system whereby the ready-witted win and the simple go to the wall, is only made tolerable at all to a sense of justice by the assurance that the first may yet be last and the last first. It has at least no other relation to any Christian ideal of the strong serving the weak. But the power which upholds the sys- tem is not a defective government. It is the commonness of the belief that a man's life consists in the abundance of the things he possesses. Nor will it ever be remedied merely by capturing the government. It is not remedi- able at all, perhaps it would be no gain to the world were it remedied, until man's true life, his worth as an indi- vidual and the sphere in which he finds scope for his individuality, is found in the things which the State must cease to regulate. Then it may be possible for men to enjoy the fruits of the earth as much in common as they now breathe the air of heaven. But not till meat and 436 NOTES drink are no more our Kingdom of Heaven, not till they occupy as small, if as necessary, a place in our conscious happiness as breathing, can any decree of parliaments ever bring such an issue to pass. In an optimistic mood one hopes that the increase of public management of matters for the general well-being indicates the growth of this moral basis ; in a pessimistic mood it suggests only weari- ness of the way of freedom. In any case Christ's method was to advance the moral basis, not to capture the ma- chinery. He set no special store by the machinery, but rested everything on men being free in their own souls ; and it is a grave question whether the churches have gained anything by departing from His method. Perhaps the crisis through which the Church is passing is not in the last issue intellectual at all. The thing that may prove whether Christ is a reality or not may be the attitude of His followers to the things of this world. At present we cannot say that it is manifestly and conspicu- ously Christ's own attitude. Moreover the issue will not be decided by movements but by men. Just this personal significance makes Tolstoi, like the prophet, a sign. His way may not be normal, it may be full of exaggerations, but in the midst of those who, sacrificing nothing person- ally, expect to work with spacious schemes in which force occupies a large and undisguised place, the nobleman seeking to solve the problem in his shirt sleeves is heroic, and it is heroisms alone that tell. Our state is less des- perate and may require less drastic remedies, but we also have come to a pass which requires us to show that the possession of money is not our heaven, nor the want of it our hell. INDEX Absoluteness of God, 363. Absolute philosophy, 355. Accommodation, 157, 164. Acton, Lord, 269. Alexander the Great, 304. Analogy, the, 118. Apocalypse, 310. Apologia, the, 258. Apostles, 316, 317, 321, 368, 371, 389. Apostolic Decree, 317. — Fathers, 318. Apostolical Succession, 262. Aristotle, 218. Art, 204, 221, 263, 270, 358. Athanasius, 69. Atheism, 144, 267, 305. Atonement, 329, 330-37, 380. Aufkldrung, 147, 151, 156, 158, 164, 177. Augustine, 16, 48, 49. Augustinus, 47-50. Authority within, 20 ; infallible, 23, 266. Bacon, 394. Bahrdt, 151-53. Barry, Dr., 290. Basedow, 153, 154. Baumgarten, 160, 162. Baur, 295-310, 320, 356. Bender, 432. Bengel, 202. Berkeley, 139, 140, 260. Bible, Rationalist view of, 163 ; Lessing's view of, 166. Biedermann, 340 if. Blount, 91. Bolingbroke, 141. Bossuet, 50-53, 58, 258. Bradley, Prof., 292. Butler, 118-34, 154, 391, 403, 422, 425, 429. (437) Butler and Paley, 117, 137 ; style, 119 ; influence, 137 ; in Ger- many, 160, 161, 177, 426 ; and Newman, 262, 399. Caird, Edward, 207 n. Calvin, 16, 47, 48. Calvinism, 14. Calvinistic doctrine of Atonement, 332 Campbell, M'Leod, 329, 331-33. CandUsh, 334. Carlyle, 141, 142, 150, 163, 204, 350. Catholic, 327, 352, 353. Catholicism, 281, 288, 378. Catholic revival, 255. — truth, 264. Charron, 45. Christ— in order of love, 58 ; Pas- cal's view of, 61, 70 ; miracles of, 110 ; and conscience, 131 ; Schleiermacher's view of, 232, 254 ; contemplative idea of, 236 ; significance of, 244, 311, 375 ; sinlessness of, 299 ; free- dom of, 312-15 ; and the Church, 321, 353, 413 ; merit of, 333 ; humiliation of, 335 ; our representative, 337 ; and a living faith, 345 ; a moral phenomenon, 349 ; the second Adam, 351 ; person of, 357, 365, 366, 394, 433 ; a revela- tion, 366, 367, 395, 415 ; death of, 369, 389 ; divinity of, 372, 381, 391 ; resurrection of, 137, 298, 308, 369, 389 ; historical life of, 373 ; religious worth of, 381, 388, 389 ; vocation of, 389 ; method of, 436. Christianity — original intuition of, 230 ; Apostolic, 265, 301 ; 438 INDEX early, 303 ; primitive, 381 ; universalism of, 304 ; Ration- alist idea of, 304 ; a recon- ciliation, 305 ; a moral religion, 182, 307 ; an Epicui-ean, 339 ; its two principles, 349; and culture, 353 ; historical, 357 ; early history of, 368 ; the religion of freedom, 327, 392, 412. Christiieb, 427. Church — a woi'ld-power, 8 ; true claim of, 9 ; and science, 11 ; and organised society, 16 ; material success of, 22 ; spirit- ual conception of, 24 ; one, 69, 70 ; its perfection, 254 ; witness of, 284, 334 ; author- ity of, 327 ; as an institution, 417. Butler's idea of, 121, 425. Catholic, 17, 46, 301, 303, 310, 316, 318, 320, 397. English, 90-93, 282. Frank's idea of, 347. History of, 164, 200, 302, 311. Invisible, 8. Kant's idea of, 184. Mediaeval, 263. Pascal's relation to, 68. Primitive, 263, 396. Protestant, 13. Ritsclil's idea of, 354. of Rome, 265, 287. Rothe's idea of, 351. Schleiermacher's idea of, 233 ff. and State, 17, 18, 234, 262, 352. Visible, 7, 211, 233, 234, 235, 262, 266. Western, 19. Church History of First Three Centuries, 302. Churches, State, 17. Civil War, 83. Clarke, 56, 97. Claude, 50. Coflfee-houses, 101, 104, 119. Coleridge, 204, 259, 283-85, 290, 331. Collins, no ff., 147. Commerce, 10. Confession, 42. Conscience, 126, 128, 130, 132, 177, 399. Cosmopolitanism, 163. Counter -reformation, 52. Cousin, 58. Critical Investigations regarding the Gospels, 295. Criticism, Higher, 279 ff., 331, 414. — Textual, 279. Crusades, 10. Cudworth, 49. Culture, 205, 219, 408. Cultured, appeal to, 216. Dale, 3, 336. Darwin, 87, 96. Darwinian evolution, 199. — theory, 405. Daub, 339. Deism, 102-18, 125, 159, 198, 279, 305. Deism in England, The Growth of, 103. Deistical Writers, Vieiv of, 81 n. Democracy, 269. Descartes, 50, 53-58, 59, 61, 62, 84, 85, 124, 144. Development, Romantic concep- tion of, 237. — theory of, 198, 274, 287, 402. Dogma, 260, 261, 291. Dogmatism, scientific and religious, 13. Dorner, 328, 349 ff. Draper, Prof., 12. Duns Scotus, 330. Ebionitism, 301. Ecclesiastic, 21. Edwards, Jonathan, 331. Egyptian fellah, 186. — temple, 11. Ehrenfeuchter, 205 n. Eichhorn, 280, 295. Eighteenth century, 193. — century in France, 65. Eliot, George, 431. Encyclopedie, 142. English influence in Germany, 160. — theology, 330 ft". — thinking, 337. Epicureanism, 305. J INDEX 439 Erasmus, 89. Ernesti, 279. Erskine of Linlathen, 331. Escobar, 40. Eudaemonism, 305. Evangelicals, 330. Evangelical Movement, 139. Evolution, 12, 76, 132, 198, 199. Ewald, 281. Faith and the old order, 5 ; abso- lute, 4 ; surmounts difficulties, 133 ; Catholic idea of, 138 ; and feeling, 411. Fall, doctrine of, 76, 407. Fathers, 26.3, 295, 380, 396. Father confessor, 49, 63. Feuerbach, 339. Fichte, 206, 214. Filliucius, 41. Fischer, Kuno, 39, 171. Fox, George, 83. France, 44, 47, 52, 53. Frank, Fr. H. R. von, 221 n., 345, 346 ff., 361, 390. — Gustav, 157. Frederick the Great, 148, 149, 202, 241. — William III., 178. Freedom — absolute, 4 ; a reality, 5 ; relation to God, 14 ; re- lation to the world, 17 ; and responsibility, 20 ; and faith, 24 ; and mechanical law, 25 ; and justification, 33 ; a genuine option, 122 ; a high responsi- bility, 123 ; essence of person- ality, 176 ; Romanticist idea of, 246; form of, 250; per- sonal, 263, 356, 378; Hegel's idea of, 291 ; two foci of, 375 ; and Greek ideas, 390 ; and mystery, 395 ; and the Eter- nal Will, 398 ; absence of re- straints, 399 ; basis of spiritual belief, 401-19 ; and belief in God, 433 ; and socialism, 434. French drama, 146. — influence in England, 81, 84, 90. — influences in Germany, 146, 159. — Revolution, 178, 241, 245, 249, 255, 257. Frenchified courts, 150. Froude, Hurrell, 262. Gabler, 296. Galloway, 364 n. German patriotism, 343. — theology, 328, 338. Gesenius, 281. Glaubenslehre, 242 ff". God, personality of, 363. — Pascal's conception of, 64. Goethe, 153, 201, 204, 206, 217, 260. Gospels, criticism of, 294 ff. — with a purpose, 308. — harmonies of the, 295. Gravitation, Law of, 12, 96, 97, 107, 142, 199. Greek philosophy, 304, 380. — State, 380, 390. Habits, 123. Heathenism, 304. Hegel,! 198, 199, 208, 242, 244-54, 259, 270, 273, 289-95, 298, 343, 358, 366, 419. Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, 242 253 ff". Hegelian, 303, 311, 321, 322, 339, 340, 355. Hengstenberg, 344, 348. Herbart, 429. Herbert, Lord, 81-83, 85, 117- Herder, 154, 194, 203, 280. Heresies, 291. Heroisms, 410. Herrmann, W., 167, 177. Herzog, 426. History — mistakes in, 4 ; Semler's idea of, 163 ; contingent truths of, 169 ; in nineteenth century, 200 ; the movement of spirit, 249 ; and infallibility, 271 ; and prophecy, 346 ; a moral process, 351 ; a struggle, 375 ; heroic, 408-11 ; and finality, 413 ; philosophy of, 228, 272, 292, 418. High Churchman, 256. High Church Lutheranism, 343, 349, 353. movement, 274, 279. Hobbes, 84-90, 104. 440 INDEX Hofmann, 344 ff., 347. Holy Spirit, 131, 374, 393. Hug, 296. Human nature, Pascal's estimate of, 73 ff. Hume, 120, 139-41, 161, 170. Humility, false reading of, 270, 282. Hutcheson, 161. Hutton, 396. Incarnation, 332, 339. Individuality, 203, 204, 209, 218, 220, 228. Individualism, 22, 57, 434. Individual, redemption of, 375. — significance of, 405. Infallibility, 267. Inquisition, 36, 37, 41, 285. Inspiration, 285. Institutions, 398, 412, 417 ; interest in, 291. Intellect, pride of, 268. Intuition of a religion, 229. — 393, 411. James I., 81. James II., 92. James, Prof., 311, 405, 422. Jansen, 47-50. Jansenists, 43, 47, 63, 67, 68. Jerusalem, 155. Jesuit Society, 34-58 ; formation of, 34-36 ; watchword obedi- ence, 34 ; immediate success of, 37 ; and the princes, 38 ; and probabilism, 39. Jesuit morals, 84 ; schools, 142, 143. Jesuitism — and Protestantism, 35, 39 ; and St. Thomas, 49 ; issue of, 50 ; and learning, 53 ; indi- vidualistic, 57. Jesus — AufkUirung view of, 157 ; Kant's view of, 182 ; and the social pi'oblem, 306 ; greatness of, 308 ; person of, 322. John the Apostle, 297, 308, 310, 316. Judaism, 228, 304, Judaistic Christianity, 310. Judgment of worth, 357, 362, 363, 365, 379, 428 ff. Jurieu, 50. Justification — and freedom, 33 ; Kant's deduction of, 183 ; Paul's idea of, 371 ; and recon- ciliation, 377 ; Ritschl's ex- position of, 376 ff. Justification and Reconciliation, 367. Kahnis, 256, 275. Kant, 169-199, 216, 228, 260, 283, 290, 357, 391, 393, 401 ; auto- nomy of conscience, 56, 100, 403 ; style, 119, 178 ; and Hume, 140 ; What is Auf kid- rung, 147 ft". ; arguments for God's existence, 156 ; and Butler, 161 ; and Pietism, 203; dualism of, 207; Meta- physic of Ethics, 250 ; and the judgment of worth, 428. Kattenbusch, 341, 357. Keats, 306. Keble, 262. Kingdom of God, 25, 141, 312, 341, 343, 362, 371, 391, 395, 416, 417 ; identified with the Church, 89, 354; Kant's de- duction of, 184, 187, 228 ; goal of development, 228, 358 ; God's goal, 364, 369, 388, 390 ; an achievement, 374 ; and freedom, 375 ; Ritschl's ex- position of, 378 ft'. Kingsley, 267. Kipling, 10. Kirchmann, 179. Klopstock, 203. Knowledge, Ritschl's theory of, 359. Lardner, 118. Laud, 261. Lavater, 203. Laveleye, 269, 342. Lechler, 83, 426. Lecky, 53 n. Leibnitz, 12, 169. Leo X., 31. Leslie, Charles, 92, 115, 122. Lessing, 149, 161, 165-69, 203. Leviathan, 84-90. Liberal School, 339 ft'. Liberalism, 258, 263, 269. INDEX 441 Lipsius, 340 ff. Locke, 95, 104-6, 113, 138, 139, 141. Logia, 308. Loisy, Abbe, 320. Lotze, 3(55, 429. Louis XIV., 61, 52. Loyola, Ignatius, 35. Luke, 296, 297, 308, 310, 315. Luther, 13, 14, 34, 35, 49, 168, 170, 340, 429. Lutheran theology, 347. — Church, 353. — confessions, 344. Lutheranism, 290. Macaulay's History, 300. Macchiavelli, 36. Mackintosh, Sir James, 119. Marheineke, 339. Mark, 296, 297, 308, 315. Marriage, 351. Materialism, 269. Mathematical law, 173. — method, 54, 59, 85. Matthew, 296, 297, 308, 315. Maurice, 334 ff. Mediating School, 348-57. Mediation, 336. Mediator, 347. Mediators, 225. Melanchthon, 147, 170, 396. Mendelssohn, 155. Messiah, 297, 301. Metaphysical knowledge of God, 363. Metaphysics, rejection of, 364. Michaelis, 169, 280. Middle Ages, 6, 25, 257, 259, 321. Middleton, 261. Milton, 105, 111. Miracle, 110, 117, 181, 352, 387. Mockery, 142. Modern Time, 6. Monistic philosophy, 339. Monologues, 214, 215. Montaigne, 43, 44, 47, 73 ; Essays, 45. Morality and religion, 99. Moral distinctions, 404. — law, 176, 389. Moravians, 202, 227. Morgenstunden, 156. Morley, Mr., 143, 145. Mozley, 336. Mystery, 395. Mysticism, 392. Nantes, Edict of, 51. Napoleon, 343. Nature, laws of, 74. — works of, 60. Nazarenes, 318. Nebular theory, 172. Neo-Platonism, 305, 393. Newman, 220, 258-75, 282-92, 319, 320 321 399. New Testament, 322, 324, 356, 370, 396 ; amazing freedom of, 287. Newton, 54, 96, 141, 171, 172, 176. Nicolai, 151, 167. Nineteenth century, question of, 193. Nominalism, 7. Northern nations, 19. Noumenal World, 174. Old Testament, 163, 304, 305, 307, 324, 335, 370. Optimism, 5, 22, 133, 134, 144, 322. Original Sin, 64. Orthodox School, 343 ft'. Owen, 331. Paley, 117, 137, 138, 427. Pantheism, 222, 236, 253, 254, 347, 350, 355, 387, 392.^ Papacy, 264. Papal hierarchy, 310. Pascal, 50, 58-77, 105, 134, 429 ; Provincial Letters, 40 ff., 63 ; Wager-argument, 421 ff. Paul, the Apostle, 123, 129, 301, 303, 306, 308, 313, 316, 317, 318, 322, 323, 371. Paulsen, 170. Pensees, 62. Personality, 430. Pessimism, 132, 311, 313. Peter, the Apostle, 309, 316. Pfleiderer, 263, 340 ff. Pharisees, 370. Philanthro'pinum, 153, 154. Philippi, 344. Philosophy, 73, 200, 252, 350, 379, 404. 28^ 442 INDEX Physical law, 387. Pietism, 160, 170. Pietistic Revival, 203. Piety, definition of, 243. Platonism, 304. Plato's Republic, 250. Pope, 141. Pope, the, 47, 68, 69, 88, 142, 269. Popular philosophers, 155. Port-Royal, 63. Prayer, 181. Priestcraft, 82, Jlo, 137. Primitive man, 407- Principia, 96, 141. Pringle-Pattison, Prof., 292, 293. Probability, Butler's doctrine of, 124, 129. Protestant, 322, 327, 349, 352. Protestantism, 18, 43, 288, 353, 396. Providence, 125, 156. Puritanism, 18. Quaker, 83. Quixote, Don, 36. Rainy, Principal, 23. Ranke, History of the Papacy, 35 n. Rationalism, 158-70, 194, 201, 202, 212, 223, 224, 225, 226, 258, 264, 268, 272, 279, 280, 281, 305, 347. Rational theologians, 168. Realism, 7. Real Presence, 263. Reason, Absolute, 209. — and the heart, 71. Reconciliation, 231, 329 ; and free- dom, 355, 376 fi"., 390. Reformation, 5, 6, 8, 11-23 ; re- ligious life of, 20 ; its schol- astic theology, 147. Reformed Church, 353. Reformers, 16, 263. Reimarus, 166. Religion — and the Church, 8 ; and science, 12 ; feeling, 222 ; not knowledge, 224 ; essentially doctrine, 253 ; philosophy, 294, 298 ; theory of, 360, 379 ; and morality, 411. Religion, natural, 130, 131. Religion within the Limits of Reason, 177. Religions, historical, 226-32, 410. Religious wars, 44, 81. Restoration, the English, 90. Revealed religion, 284. Revelation, 23, 109, 114, 125, 345, 365, 375, 379, 414. Revival of learning, 10. Revolution, English, 104. — French, 53, 178, 241, 257, 258. — problem of, 245, 266, 291. Ridicule, 120. Righteousness, 370. Ritschl, 24, 26, 156, 230, 242, 296, 302, 303, 323, 353-81, 403, 432 ; criticism of, 385 If. ; Die Altkatholische Kirche, 314-20. Ritschl, Otto, 230, 251, 429. Ritual and moral rehgion, 185. Ritualism, 19. Romanticism, 201-8, 210, 212, 218, 219, 220, 226, 227, 257, 258, 263, 268, 272, 274, 280, 292, 357, 386, 392, 400. Romantic Movement, vice of, 273. Roman Empire, Holy, 257. — system, 270. Rome, Church of, 41, 47. — Imperial, 8, 304. Rothe, 350 ff., 366, 388. Rousseau, 100, 143, 145, 146, 153, 171, 172. Rule of faith, 319. Saci, M. de, 46. Sacraments, 270, 347. Sacramental idea, 289, 319, 322. Saint-Cyran, 47, 48, 49. Sainte-Beuve, 41, 45, 47, 48. Schanz, 23. Schelling, 198, 206, 339. Schiller, 204. Schleiermacher, 160, 198, 199, 203, 205, 208-37, 259, 296, 328, 3A 345, 349, 353, 357, 358, 359, 361, 366, 375, 386, 429. — and Hegel, 241-55. Scholasticism, 44, 46, 48, 97. Scholastic distinctions, 104 ; spirit, 47. — basis of doctrine, 18. Schoolmen, 7, 36. Schulz, 152. Schwegler, 301, 302. INDEX 443 Science, 12, 352, 358. Scripture — misuuderstanding of, 13 ; a view of the world, 121 ; and origin of evil, 180 ; and doctrine, 262 ; and the Church, 284 ; interpretation of, 289 ; authority of, 327, 337, 338, 354 ; an external principle, 349 ; and the judgment of worth, 432. Secularisation, 20, 21. Self-love, 127. Semler, 161-65, 280. Seventeenth century, 43, 44. Shaftesbury, 98, 99-102, 161. Shakespeare, 203. Sherlock, 112, 117. Sin, 246, 247. Socrates, 305, 424. Son of God, 183. Sorbonne, 142. Southey, 259. Speeches on Religion, 209-36. Spencer, Herbert, 434. Spinoza, 100, 104, 205, 298. State organisation, 434. Stephen, Sir Leslie, 104, 118. Stoicism, 305. Strauss, 230, 289, 296-99, 301, 339, 356, 363, 431. Substitution, 336. Sully-Prudhomme, 67 n., 422. Taylor, Jeremy, 105. Tendenz, 300. Tertullian, 289. Theoretic judgment, 431. Theosophy, 350. Thinkers, limit to, 26. Thirty-nine Ai'ticles, 261. Thirty Years' War, 146, 201. Thomas Aquinas, 46, 48, 49, 59. Tillotson, 104. Timor fiUalis, 397. Tindal, 113, 116, 120, 127, 151. Toland, John, 109, 111. Toleration, 106. Tolstoi, 26, 436. Tractarianism, 258 ff. ; and artistic pride, 268 ; and criticism, 281 ; and Scriptui-e, 284 ; and Cole- ridge, 290 ; and Atonement, 330. Tracts for the Times, 264. Transcendental Philosophy, 260. Travel, 10. Trent, Council of, 34. Trinity, 153, 158, 188, 249, 334, 340, 346. Troeltsch, 365. Tubingen criticism, 355. — School, 281, 293-95, 302. TuUoch, Principal, 66, 422. Twelfth century, 9. Union, Lutheran and Reformed, 349, 353. Utilitarianism, 86. — and Orthodoxy, 98. Value- judgments, 364. Via Media, 264. Vinet, 61, 65, 77. Voltaire, 53, 141, 142, 145, 159, 170. Ward, 264. Wesley, 139. Wette, De, 281. Will, autonomy of the, 177. — primacy of, 358. Winkelmann, 203. Wit and humour, 101. Wolfenhilttel Fragments, 165 ff. Wolff, 160. Woolston, 117. Wordsworth, 204, 217, 241, 259. World-spirit, 292. Zscharnack, 159. THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS LIMITED THE KEEE LECTUEES THE CHEISTIAN VIEW OF GOD AND THE WOKLD AS CENTEING IN THE INCAENATION. By Pro- fessor Orr, D.D. Seventh edition, crown 8vo, 7s. 6d. (Edinburgh : Andrew Elliot.) Principal Fairbairn says : " I am greatly impressed with the largeness of its view, its learning, and its grasp. 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