and in every event of life; but in our natural condition we do not find this to be so. In the natural man, the religious consciousness is fettered by sensual consciousness. But in the community which has proceeded from Jesus of Nazareth, we obtain an emancipation, a redemption of the consciousness of God. This cannot be the effect of the community as such, inasmuch as it consists of men in need of salvation, but of the divine life only which the founder of the Church left to His people. Jesus Christ was the man possessed of the absolute power and energy of the consciousness of God, the ideal man who has redeemed the world by the life which proceeds from Him. To represent in a scientific way the Christian consciousness, as it exists in the redeemed as a matter of fact, is the task of systematic theology. It does not prove, but it evolves the existing feeling in its connection. But that this consciousness, thus evolved, agrees with the Protestant consciousness, is proved by texts from the symbolical books of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches. And since systematic theology is not a proof and demonstration of any object of knowledge, but only the scientific description of a part of the mind, it has nothing at all to do with philosophy.

This assurance of Schleiermacher, as to his being independent of philosophy, was not readily believed by his contemporaries; they found in his "Glaubenslehre" the same philosophy which they had found in his "Discourses on Religion," viz., Spinozism, and the proofs which Strauss (see Characteristiken and Kritiken, S. 146, ff.) gave, have not yet been invalidated. But certainly, religion is a life independent of all philosophy; to have demonstrated this is the great merit of Schleiermacher. It is, however, a different question, whether the feeling of dependence be the vital foundation of all religion. What

this "feeling of dependence" really meant, the principal theologians did not exactly understand, even after the explanations which Schleiermacher gave in his two Sendschreiben an Lücke. But even supposing that the feeling of dependence had proved itself to be a fact of life, a fact of life is not yet a fact of truth. And a consciousness must certainly know of something; consciousness of God is a knowledge of God; Christian consciousness of God is a knowledge of God as He has revealed himself to us through Jesus Christ. Of God, however, philosophy, too, knows something, and so does history of Christ. Schleiermacher developes the philosophical idea of God in his Dialektik, and the facts of the life of Jesus, in lectures in which a very bold criticism is to be found. Of what use, then, was it to systematic theology to be told that it did not stand in need of philosophy, if it was unable to prove the matter of its faith in any other way than by pointing to the fact of its existence in the mind, and thus stood powerless by the side of philosophy which sought its

God in its own ways. When, after Schleiermacher's

death, his Dialektik brought out an idea of God which was thoroughly Pantheistic, but agreeing well with the statements of his Glaubenslehre, it could no more be doubted that theology had ploughed with the heifer of philosophy. But, if such be the case, the vital nerve of this Glaubenslehre is cut. After the impulses which have proceeded from it shall have been digested, it will be to posterity like the doctrinal monologue of a great theologian.

In Schleiermacher's school a development took place similar to that which had occurred in Hegel's. One part of it entered into a positive relation to the doctrine of the Church (Twesten, Nitzsch) while another (Jonas, Sydow) joined the dissolving tendencies of the time. In this respect, Twesten says of himself: "He who has paid some

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attention to my exposition in the first volume, must have perceived that I do not altogether follow Schleiermacher in his definition of the relation of Gnosis to the religious consciousness, but that I assign to it a more prominent position. A consequence of that is, that differences which, in the first instance, concern the element of cognition, must lead to differences in doctrinal views also; and this accounts for my thinking differently, partly in the relation of doctrinal theology to the declarations of Holy Scripture, and partly also on many philosophical notions and doctrines. To this I may add farther that Schleiermacher's relation to the doctrine of the Church is not the same as mine." 1 There was little consistency in this tempering of the theology of feeling with speculative elements; it was more natural to reduce both of the elements into a higher unity. Rothe, Ullmann, Dorner, Lange, and others, represent this stand-point. In a time when the great creations of German philosophy lay scattered and broken in pieces, a theology which, out of its ruins built speculative huts, in which the so-called Christian consciousness could take up its residence, seemed to have all the sound intellects of the time in its favour. It claimed the past, inasmuch as it pretended to stand on the ground of the Confessions of the Reformation, and at the same time called itself the Theology of the Future; it made considerable concessions to modern science, and yet it did not abandon the claim of being in harmony with the doctrine of the Church. In the consciousness of its scientific depth, it called itself the "German Theology," and yet it paid attention to the present practical interests of the Church also. Ullmann's Wesen des Christenthums (i. e. Essence of Christianity, 1845), may be considered as the

1 Dogmatik II., S. XIX.

average profession of this school. Christianity is not essentially doctrine, as Rationalists and Supernaturalists have one-sidedly said; nor a law of morality, as Kantianism has asserted; nor redemption, as Schleiermacher would have it; but it is union of man and God, effected by the person of its Founder, a person perfectly united with God, perfectly divine, and perfectly human. This definition, at first sight, seems to be quite sound, and in harmony with the doctrine of the Church. But its truth is not proved from the formal principle of Protestantism, but by means of a dialectic settlement with the various, and especially the recent views of Christianity which have appeared in the course of the history of the Church; and it proves its correctness, by showing that from this point of view all these views are organically comprehended in one; and hence the definition of the essence and nature of Christianity is a product of mediation. It is, then, not justification by faith, as the doctrine of the Church so emphatically declares,—it is not even redemption, in the sense of Schleiermacher, but the union of man with God through Jesus Christ, which is the central point of Christianity. This union is a vital union, an union of man with God in the Holy Spirit, as sometimes, also, it is expressed, which manifests itself in all the faculties. The ideal of such an union is Christ. With some unessential modifications, we have thus here the Christ of Schleiermacher. It is in their view of the person of Christ that the theological systems have always characterised themselves. Dorner, Rothe, Lange, and others, saw in Christ the ideal man, in whom the human species has been personified, the personal recapitulation of mankind," the man of the species" (Gattungsmensch).1 The

'A comprehensive representation of this view is given by Liebner: Christologie, S. 27, ff.

ideal man originated from Schleiermacher; the "man of the species" was a production of speculation. The idea which this school entertained of Christ is thus an expression of the combination between the theology of feeling and the speculative school. By means of the same agents, Rothe came to the result, that the State is the realisation of the Church,-a view by which almost all the theologians of the time were offended, although it had a support in the practice of the Erastian State Churches. Notwithstanding all objections, Rothe returned to this result in his Ethik (1845). The speculative element and the religious consciousness have here united into a theosophy, which feels itself to be independent of philosophy proper. "I declare expressly that this work does not contain anything of philosophy, but only theology and theosophy, although I wish it to be noticed. by philosophers also,—and that I make no claim whatsoever to understand anything of philosophy." But who was to receive and acknowledge these results? The convictions, confessions, symbolical books of both the ancient and the Protestant Churches know nothing of that Trinity, that Christ, that Church which this Ethik taught; while Dialectics, which had produced these views, fled from the court of speculation, under the assurance of not being philosophy. It was obviously a blending of the theology of feeling and of speculation, the centre of which was an ingenious individuality pervaded by Christian elements, and formed in the school of modern philosophy. If any one should yet doubt whether this combination of philosophy and Christian consciousness was deficient in the objective exponent, he must be freed from all hesitation by the dilettanteism of Lange assuming every hue.

The theology of mediation had vital power as long as it went along with the tendency to the positive which