An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

endencies which are still significant. These distinctions have been significant not for Europe alone. They have had influence also upon those continents which since the

ssical culture continued unquestioned. More than this, impulses in rational life and in the interpretation of religion, which showed themselves with clearness in one and another of the reformers themselves, were lost sight of, if not actually repudiated, by their successors. It is possible to vi

t after the Revolution, in the Protestant communities the intellectual element was thrust into the background. The practical and devotional prevailed. Humanism was for a time shut out. There was more room for it in the Roman Church than among Protestants. Again, the Renaissance itself had been not so much an era of discovery of a new intellectual and spiritual

of their agreement with the Fathers of the early Church. They did not perceive in how large degree they were at one with Christian thinkers of the Roman communion as well. Few seem to have realised how largely Catholic in principle Protestant thought has been. The fundamental principles at the basis of the reasoning have been the same. The notions of revelation and inspiration were identical. The idea of authority was comm

en that which has been happily called the religion of authority and the religion of the spirit does not run between Catholic and Protestant. It runs through the middle of many Protestant bodies, through the border only of some, and who will say that the Roman Church knows nothing of this contras

iples, as they have emerged, have been felt to be new and distinctive principles. They are essentially modern principles. They are the principles which, taken together, differentiate the thinker of the nineteenth century from all who have ever been before him. They are principles which unite all

o literature and history, other than those called sacred. The thorough going application of this scientific method to the literatures and history of the Old and New Testaments is almost wholly an achieve

gion, as in the case of Laplace. The review of the religious and Christian problem in the light of the ever increasing volume of scientific discoveries-this is the new thing in the period which we have undertaken to describe. A theory of nature as a totality, in which man, not merely as phy

answer of a profoundly religious nature to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing forever to much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, y

ey are characteristic of the nineteenth century. They would naturally issue in an interpretation of Christianity in the general context of the life and thought of that century. The philosophical revolution inaugurated by Kant, with the general drift toward monism in the interpretation of the universe, separates from their forebears men

. Our religion as affected in its interpretation by principles of thought which are already widespread, and bid fair to become universal among educated men-this it is which in this little volume we aim to discuss. The term religious thought has not always had this significance. Philosophy of religion has signified, often, a philosophising of which religion was, so to say, the atmosphere. We cannot wonder if, in these circumstances, to the minds of some, the atmospher

ith. To think profoundly concerning Christianity one needs to have had the Christian experience. But this is very different from saying that to speak worthily of the Christian religion, one must needs have made his own the statements of religion which men of a former generation may have found serviceable. The distinction between religion itself, on the one hand, and the expression of religion in doctrines and rites, or the application of religion through institutions, on the other hand, is in itself one of the great achievements of the ninet

s a mistake to which both they and their opponents in due proportion contributed. A still larger class of those with whom we have to do have indeed asserted for themselves a personal adherence to Christianity. But their identification with Christianity, or with a particular Christian Church, has been often bitterly denied by those who bore official responsibility in the Church. The heresy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next. There is something perverse in Gottfried Arnold's maxim, that the true Church, in any age, is to be found with those who have just been excommunicated

t analysis, differs with individual men. Dogma is that portion of doctrine which has been elevated by decree of ecclesiastical authority, or even only by common consent, into an absoluteness which is altogether foreign to its nature. It is that part of doctrine concerning which men have forgotten that it had a history, and have decided that it shall have no more. In its very notion dogma confounds a statement of truth, which must of necessity be human, with the truth itself, which is divine. In its identification of statement and truth it demands credence instead of faith. Men have confounded doctrine and dogma; they have been taught so to do. They have felt

America, many of them, took up a corresponding position as towards the life of reason, especially toward the use of reason in religion. The sinister cast which the word rationalism bears in much of the popular speech is evidence of this fact. To many minds it appeared as if one could not be an adherent both of reason and of faith. That was a contradiction which Kant, first of all in his own experience, and then through his system of thought, did much to transcend. The deliverance which he wrought has been compared to the deliverance which Luther in his time achieved for those who had been in bondage to scholasticism in the Roman Church. Although Kant has been dead a hundred years, both the defence of religion and the assertion of the right of reason are stil

dent personality, that of Jesus. It sprang out of another religion which had already emerged into the light of world-history. It has been associated for two thousand years with portions of the race which have made achievements in culture and left record of those achievements. It is the function of speculation to interpret this phenomenon. When speculation is tempted to spin by its own processes something which it would set beside this historic magnitude or put in place of it, and still call that Christianity, we must disallow the claim. It was the licence of its specu

human consciousness, operating with and operated upon by the impulse of Christianity. It is the great human experience from which we single out for investigation that part which is concerned with religion, and call that the religious experience. It is essential, therefore, that those general investigations of human consciousness and experience, as such, which are being carried on all about us should be reckoned with, if our Christian life and thought are not altogether to fall out of touch with advancing knowledge. For this

in which every man has a philosophy, this is merely the deposit of the regnant notions of the time. It may be amended or superseded, and our theology with it. Yet while it lasts it is our one possible vehicle of expression. It is the interpreter and the critique of what we have experienced. It is not open to a man to retreat within himself and say, I am a Christian, I feel thus, I think so, these thoughts are the content of Christianity. The consequence of that position is that we make the religious experience to be no part of the normal human experience. If we contend that the be

conceptions. It will not be possible at any point to do more than to select typical examples. Perhaps the true method is that we should go back to the beginnings of each one of these movements. We should mark the emergence of a few great ideas. It is the emergence of an idea which is dram

and spiritually, the product of tendencies which had long been gathering strength. He was the exponent of ideas which in fragmentary way had been expressed by others, but he gathered into himself in amazing fashion the impulses of his age. Out from some portion of his works lead almost all the paths which philosophical thinkers since his time have trod. One cannot say even of his work, Der Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793, that it

ssed are given for the first time in the language in which they are

this movement upon cherished religious convictions, that of the publication of his Leben Jesu, 1835. This movement has supported with abundant evidence the insight of the philosophers as to the nature of revelation. It has shown that that which we actually have in the Scriptures is just that which Kant, with his reverence for the freedom of the human mind, had indicated that

e to underlie in a great measure all the reflection of cultivated men in our time. In amazing degree they have percolated, through elementary instruction, through popular literature, and through the newspapers, to the masses of mankind. They are recognised as the basis of a triumphant material civilisation, which has made everything pertaining to the inner and spiritual life seem remote. Through the social sc

odern teachings, which yet seem to be the very warp and woof of the intellectual life of the modern man, is repudiated and denounced. It is held to imperil the salvation of the soul. It is pronounced impossible of combination with belief in a divinely revealed truth concerning the universe and a saving faith for men. In

recent date. That a discovery should within a reasonable interval become the property of all educated men, that scholars of one nation should profit by that which the learned of another land have done, appears to us a thing to be assumed. It has not always been so, especially not in matters of religious faith. The Roman Church and the Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain international character. Again the

ually, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for years cried, 'écrasez l'infame,' and Rousseau preached that the youth would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism. Quite logically, therefore, afte

movement and shaped the spiritual revival in the beginning of the nineteenth century were men who had themselves been trained in the bosom of the rationalist movement. They had appropriated the benefits of it. They did not represent a violent reaction against it, but a natural and inevitable progress within and beyond it. This it was which gave to the Germans their leadership at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the sphere of the intellectual life. It is worthy of note that the great heroes of the in

ifferent kind of labour, and destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss' first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first radical and subversive in the extreme. They were fiercely repudiated in Strauss' own country. Yet in the ma

ich Comte had attempted. He had far greater advantages for the solution of the problem. Comte's foil in all of his discussions of religion was the Catholicism of the south of France. None the less, the religion which in his later years he created, bears striking resemblance to that which in his earlier years he had sought to destroy. Spencer's attitude toward religion was in his earlier work one of more pronounced antagonism or, at least, of more complete agnosticism than in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his scientific freedom and conscientiousness. B

country at the beginning of the nineteenth century was at a low ebb. Men like Belaham and Priestley were known as apostles of a freer spirit in the treatment of the problem of religion. Priestley came to Pennsylvania in his exile. In the large, however, one may say that the New England liberal movement, which came by and by to be called Unitarian, was as truly American as was the orthodoxy to which it was opposed. Channing reminds one often of Schleiermacher. There is no evidence that he had learned from Schleiermacher. The liberal movement by its very impetuosity gave a new lease of life to an orthodoxy which, without that antagonism, would sooner have waned. The great revivals, which were a benediction to the life of the country, were thought to have closer relation to the theology of those who participated in them than they had. The breach between the liberal and conservative tendencies of religious thought in this country came at a time when the philosophical reconstruction was already well under way

rly of religious thought, was, moreover, as marked as that in the world of deeds. The Roman Church profited by this swing of the pendulum in the minds of men as much as did the absolute State. Almost the first act of Pius VII. after his return to Rome in 1814, was the revival of the Society of Jesus, which had been after long agony in 1773 dissolved by the papacy itself. 'Altar and throne' became the watchword of an ardent attempt at restoration of all of that which millions had given their lives to do away. All too easily, one who wr

e as in the old days it would have done. The decree of infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is viewed in the light of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, and again of the Encyclical of 1

e year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom. But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively sustained, was almost doomed to further that alienation between the life of piety and

most significant ecclesiastical movement which the Church of England in the nineteenth century has seen, the Oxford or Tractarian movement, as it has been called. There was conscious recurrence of a mind like that of Newman to the Catholic position. He had never been able to conceive religion in any other terms than those of dogma, or the Christian assurance on any other basis than that of external authority. Nothing could be franker than the antagonism of the movement, from its inception, to the liberal spirit of the age. By inner logic Newman found himself at last in the Roman Church. Yet the Anglo-Catholic movement is to-day overwhelmingly in the ascendant

ious habit and practice. This truth is one which liberals, in their emphasis upon liberty and the individual, are always in danger of overlooking. The great revivals of religion in this century, like those of the century previous, have been connected with a form of religious thought pronouncedly pietistic. The building up of religious institutions in the new regions of the West, and the participation of the churches of the country in missions, wear predominantly this cast. Antecedently, one might have said that the lack of ecclesiastical cohesion among the Christians of the land, the ease with which a small group might split off for the furtherance of its own particular view, would tend to liberalisation. It is doubtful whether this is true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their permanence. The middle of the nineteenth c

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of the rising might of the rational spirit throughout the western world, men should have sought at once to utilise that force for the restatement of religion. Yet one may say quite simply that this undertaking of the deists was premature. The time was not ripe for the endeavour. The rationalist movement itself needed greater breadth and deeper understanding of itself. Above all, it needed the salutary correction of opposing principles before it could avail for this delicate and difficult task. Religion is the most conservative of human interests. Rationalism would be successful in establishing a new interpretation of religion only after it had been successful in many other fields. The arguments of the deists were never successfully refuted. On the contrary, the striking thing is that

y moved by some English writers who would be assigned to this class. In a sense Kant showed traces of the deistical view to the last. The centre of the rationalistic movement had, however, long since passed from England to the Contin

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r is, "No, but we live in an age of free thought." As things are at present, men in general are very far from possessing, or even from being able to acquire, the power of making a sure and right use of their own understanding without the guidance of others. On the other hand, we have clear indications that the field now lies, nevertheless, open before them, to which they can freely make their way and that the hindrances to general freedom of thought are gradually becoming less. And again

had been, had never touched. It was he, therefore, who could lay the foundations for a new and nobler philosophy for the future. The word Aufkl?rung, which the speech of the Fatherland furnished him, is a better word than ours. It is a better word than the French l'Illuminisme, the Enlightenment. Still we are apparently committed to the term Rationalism, although it is not an altogether fortunate designation which the English-speaking race has given to a tendency practically universal in the thinking of Europe, from about 1650 to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Historically, the rationalisti

p also by Pietism, the other great spiritual force of the age. This was in spite of the fact that the Pietists' view of religion was the opposite of the rationalist view. Rationalism was characterised by thorough-going antagonism to supernaturalism with all its consequences. This arose from its zeal for the natural and the human, in a day when all men, defenders and assailants of religion alike, accepted the dictum that what was human could not be divine, the divine must necessarily be the opposite of the human. In reality this general trait of opposition to reli

e was ready to proclaim the divine right of the State which was himself. Still, not until the period of his dotage did that claim bear any relation to what even he would have called religion. Publicists, both Catholic and Protestant, sought to recur to the lex natur? in contradistinction with the old lex divina. The natural rights of man, the rights of the people, the rationally conditioned rights of the State, a natural, prudential, utilitarian morality interested men. One of the consequences of this theory of the

'Aufkl?rung' in Herzog-Hauck, Realen

ion in public opinion upon all matters of morals. The ferocity of religious wars, the cruelty of religious controversies, the bigotry of the confessional, these all, which, only a generation earlier, had been taken by long-suffering humanity as if they had been matters of course, were now viewed with contrition by the more exalted spirits and with contempt and embitterment by the rest. Men said, if religion can give us not better morality than this, it is high time we looked to the natural basis of morality. Natural

enthusiasm to study facts, and to observe their laws. Modern optics, acoustics, chemistry, geology, zoology, psychology and medicine, took their rises within the period of which we speak. The influence was indescribable. Newton might maintain his own simple piety side by side, so to say, with his character, as a scientific man, though even he did not escape the accusation of being a Unitarian. In the resistance which official religion offered at every step to the advance of the sciences, it is small wonder if natures less placid found the maintenance of their ancestral faith too difficult. Natural science was d

ese maxims began to be applied, sometimes timidly and sometimes in scorn and shallowness, to the sacred history and literature as well. To claim, as the defenders of the faith were f

the friend, and even possibly the enemy, of theology. Before the end of the rationalist period it was the master of theology, though often wholly indifferent to theology, exactly because of its sense of mastery. The great philosophers of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, belong with a part only of their work and tendency to the rationalist movement. Still their work rested upon that which had already been done by Spinoza and Malebranche, by Hobbes and Leibnit

nt was it possible to utilise the results of the rationalist movement for the reconstruction of theology. If evidence for this statement were wanting, it could be abundantly given from the work of Herder. He was

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antagonism to the social distinctions which prevailed, its individualism, its emphasis upon the practical. It was part of a general religious reaction against ecclesiasticism, as were also Jansenism in France, and Methodism in England, and the Whitefieldian revival in America. But, through the character of Spener, and through the peculiarity of German social relations, it gained an influence over the educated classes, such as Methodism never

isolation of the conflict the movement lost its poise and intellectual quality. In Germany, even after the temporary alliance of pietism and rationalism against the Church had been transcended, and the length and breadth of their mutual antagonism had been revealed, there remained a deep mutual respect and salutary interaction. Obscurantists and sentimentalists might denounce rationalism. Vulgar ranters like Dippel and Barth might defame religion. That had little weight as compared with the fact that Klopstock, Hamann and Herder, Jacobi, Goethe and Jean Paul, had all passed at some time under the influence of pietism. Lessing learned from the Moravians the undogmatic essence of religion. Schleiermacher was bred among the devoted followers of Zinzendorf. Even the radicalism of Ka

y. He was to escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which his father had passed. Even there the spirit of the age pursued him. The precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race was wrestling with. He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the man he so revered. Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself upon his father's mercy, only to be abused and measurelessly condemned. He had his way. He resorted to Halle, turned his back on sacred things, worked in titanic fashion at everything but the problem of religion. At least he kept his life clean and his soul sensitive among the flagrantly immoral who were all about him, even in the pietists' own university. He laid the foundations for his future philosophical construction. He bathed in the sentiments and sympathies, poetic, artistic and humanitarian, of the romantic

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nd fanaticisms of middle-class pietism, they despised. Their war with rationalism was not because it had deprived man of religion. It had been equally destructive of another side of the life of feeling, the ?sthetic. Their war was not on behalf of the good, it was in the name of the beautiful. Rationalism had starved the soul, it had minimised and derided feeling. It had suppressed emotion. It had been fatal to art. It was barren of poetry. It had had no sympathy with history and no understanding of history. It had reduced everything to the process by which two and two make four. The pietists said that the frenzy for reason had made man oblivious of the element of the divine. The ?sth

, 'back to the State by divine right, back to the Church, back to the Middle Age, back to the beauty of classical antiquity.' The poetry, the romance, the artistic criticism of this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before. It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. I

the analysis of the ethical and religious feeling. All the knowledge and insight thus gained he gathers together into a history of the spiritual life of mankind. This life of the human spirit comes forth everywhere from nature, is bound to nature. It constitutes one whole with a nature which the devout soul calls God, and apprehends within itself as the secret of all that it is and does. Even in the period in which he had become passionately Christian, Herder never was able to attain to a scientific establishing of his Christianity, or to any sense of the specific aim of its development. He felt himself to be separated from Kant by an impass

to the last, his own manner of brooding and creating, within the limits of a poetic impressionableness which instinctively viewed the material world and the life of the soul in substantially similar fashion. There is something almost humorous in the way in which he eagerly appropriated the results of the philosophising of his time, in so far as he could use these to sustain his own positions, and caustically rejected those which he could not thus use. He soon got by heart the negative lessons of Voltaire and found, to use the words which he puts into the mouth of Faust, that while it freed him from his superstitions, at the same time it made the world empty and dismal beyond endurance. In the mechanical philosophy which presented itself in the Système de la Nature as a positive substitute for his lost faith, he found only that which filled his poet's soul with horror. 'It appeared to us,' he says, 'so grey, so cimmerian and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost. We thought it the very quintessence of old age. All was said to be necessary, and therefore there was no God. Why not a necessi

, custom, knowledge of the world, philosophy, religion, even many an accidental occurrence in our daily life, all tell us that we must renounce.' 'Renunciation, once for all, in view of the eternal,' that was the lesson which he said made him feel an atmosphere of peace breathed upon him. He perceiv

vine. In the second place, it was due to the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both of these respects he would have found himself much more