Everything, in such a task as this, depends on the material in hand to start with. Of matter properly speculative or dogmatic, as we have seen, Schleiermacher has almost nothing. To the last, he left it a matter of doubt whether any of the points of common Christian doctrine were matters of belief with him or not. He starts, however, as his postulate, with this plain matter of fact: 1 am a Christian. By introspection and analysis, he will see what that fact implies; and this shall be his Christian creed. Now, religion means, to him, "communion of life with the living God." This Deity may be Spinoza's, which in fact it seems greatly to resemble. But, at all events, God is no dead phrase, no empty name. He is the Universal Life; and dependence on that Source is necessarily an element in all our profounder consciousness. Now, it is in our dependence on the Universal Life that we first find ourselves emancipated from the world of sense, so that morality becomes possible; * and, in this feeling of our dependence, we have the first essential germ of that spiritual life, which in its unfolding is Religion.

Again, following the same method, we find our body of doctrine in the data of Christian consciousness. Here, Schleiermacher parts from what is absolute or universal. It is impossible, from his point of view, to find any dogmatic necessity in the Christian body of doctrine as such. Such a phrase as that belief in it is "necessary to salvation" has no longer any meaning,- unless it be that a realizing of what our best thought is, is necessary to our best intellectual life. If Schleiermacher had been a Mussulman or Buddhist, he must by his own method have analyzed the Mussulman or Buddhist consciousness, and not the Christian. There is, accordingly, a seeming sophism or else an illogical narrowing of the ground, when (as we presently find) he takes not the human, but the Christian consciousness-and not even broadly the Christian, but the German-Protestant-LutheranMoravian-Reformed-religious consciousness-as his basis of operations, and spends thick volumes in building upon it a structure as little differing from the old theology in shape

*Compare the experience of St. Augustine, Early Christianity, p. 138.

and proportion as the landscape reflected in a lake differs from the landscape seen beyond the shore.

Facts of the religious life lend themselves not easily, and only by a sophistry perhaps unconscious, to be shaped into a dogmatic system. The system at best can only co-ordinate, it cannot legitimate, the facts. We shall probably not be far wrong, if we consider that Schleiermacher's essential work, as a man of original religious genius, was done in the powerful impulse he gave at starting to the higher thought of Germany; and if we consider that which followed as the valuable but only incidental and subsidiary service of a long, devoted, and useful life.

Strictly speaking, it would appear that the value of his service consists more in what he has added to our knowledge of the facts of religious experience in themselves than in any system of philosophy built upon those facts. The experience itself is the most obscure and disputed ground in our study of human nature. It is also the highest ground.. When we find ourselves in the range of those thoughts and emotions expressed by such words as contrition, aspiration, reverence, reconciliation, religious peace, to say nothing of such more passionate emotions as moral heroism, poetic enthusiasm, spiritual ecstasy, then we know that we are dealing with the upper ranges of experience and character. We touch that which is most characteristically human, as distinct from the motives and limitations of animal life. And he helps us most, for what is best in life, who makes us feel, most distinctly and powerfully, that that range of it is both attainable and real.

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Now from that region of thought and emotion there emerge two or three strongly defined convictions, which appear to be taken for granted in that range of experience, just as the reality of the outward world is taken for granted in every act of perception. These convictions are what we call the fundamental data of religious consciousness; and they are commonly stated to be these three: the Being of God, Moral Freedom (or, better perhaps, in this connection, the Law of Holiness), and the Immortality of

the Soul.* In what sense are these convictions implied in our religious consciousness? and in what sense can they be said to be verified by the fact of that consciousness? These two questions state the fundamental problem of speculative theology, as distinct from mere psychology on one side, or mere dogmatism on the other.

In approaching this problem, we are met at the outset by two opposite schools, or tendencies of thought: the "positive," which limits us strictly to the facts themselves, with the laws of sequence and association to be traced among them; and the "transcendental," which holds that the object of belief is, as much as any external object of perception, a reality independent and (so to speak) outside of the mind which apprehends it. We have only to do at present with the latter.

We might put the question already stated in another form, namely: "Are the objects of religious conviction God, Freedom, Immortality — truths of reason? or are they only the moods, or the reflections, of our experience?" But this turn given to the question has the difficulty that it introduces us to the phrases and the distinctions of philosophical schools, which are apt to be misleading. In particular, it is in danger of hiding from us the point at issue. The question we have raised is not one of certitude, but of certainty; not one of "truth," but of "fact."

Again, in stating the question to ourselves, we find that we have to deal not merely with three objects of belief, but with three different orders of belief, and that each of them is to be met by a different process from the rest. The same criterion will not apply to them all. One is the object of intellectual contemplation or moral reverence; one, of the special emotion of loyalty and obedience; one, of that bold hope which will recognize no limit to the life that seems opening immeasurably before it.

What we can possibly call proof, or evidence, from a given

In the dialect of Kant, moral freedom belongs only to the homo noumenon as distinguished from the homo phenomenon. The "actual man," it would appear, cuts a pitiful figure in presence of the demand made upon him by the Kantian

ethics.

state of mind, will apply in very different measure to the three. Thus, we may speak, accurately enough, of a "consciousness of God." We do speak with the strictest conceivable accuracy of a "consciousness of moral freedom." We can speak only by a violent figure (as is often done) of a "consciousness of immortality," which means, if it means anything, consciousness now of endless future states of consciousness and of innumerable other persons' states of consciousness. Cicero's expression, "a fore-feeling" (præsensio), is a much better expression, and is perhaps the nearest approach we can make to a true account of that phase of experience. Strictly speaking, then, the conviction of immortality remains, as to its speculative ground, not a conscious knowledge, but at best a fore-feeling or apprehension, more probably a hope or dread as the case may be. What we can be really conscious of is not the duration, but the quality, of the life we call spiritual. And, the more intense our realizing of it, the more we shall find that the quality is a far more important matter than the duration.

Moreover, when we deal with that deepest of religious convictions, the Being of God, the answer we find will depend on the "attributes" or limitations we attach to that Name. If we mean by it- what many have found in itsimply an expression for the Universal Life, the consensus of all laws and forces, known or unknown,- then the existence of God is a self-evident truth. It is, in short, merely one term of an identical equation. It is a verbal definition which we are agreed beforehand to accept. Our intellectual assent may well enough be taken for granted. It only remains, by increase of knowledge or play of imagination, to comprehend as best we may the universe of fact which we have embraced in our definition.

But this "cosmic theism" (as it has been called) leaves. out of sight precisely the one thing which makes the name of God venerable and dear to the religious feeling. The attribute of Holiness can have no possible meaning to our mind, unless it is set over against that which is unholy, base, profane. In other words, it reflects one mood of that moral

conflict in which we find ourselves plunged as human beings. To such a mood, the thought of God as the Absolutewhich swallows up all distinctions, so that the hint of conflict is a contradiction in terms - brings no satisfaction: it is rather the keenest affront. To say that God is the sum of all life, all force, is perfectly satisfying as a postulate of speculative theology. That poetic pantheism, that fair unmoral paganism, fits well enough the wide and placid landscape of mental contemplation. But when it comes to mean — as it must mean not only that the germinating life and the law of social evolution are acts of God, but just as much the explosive force of dynamite, and the ferocity that would use it to wreck the social fabric; the hideous disease alike with the healing skill that fights it; the crime and the criminal on exactly equal terms with the heroism and the saint, — then we find how worthless for any religious uses is that fine-sounding definition, after all. The term "God" in this sense has only one advantage, that I can see, over "The Absolute" or "The Unknowable" or "Persistent Energy," that it is shorter, and easier to speak or spell.

In one sense, then,-and that sense the deepest and most practical, the interpretation given us in a cosmic theism. (which is the best that speculative theology alone can do) is not an interpretation that meets any religious need. It is seen to be not only independent, but even destructive, of that other co-ordinate term in the religious experience, the recognition of a Law of Holiness. The two are not only distinct, but hostile. The speculative Dualism which was once their way of reconciliation has always, since Augustine, been hateful to the Christian sense, and in the eye of any modern philosophy would be intolerable. To many of the best and most serious minds, it has therefore seemed unavoidable to throw up the speculative problem; at least, to leave it for the plaything of the understanding, not as hoping by its solution to cast light on the real business of life. Of the three elements, or data, of the religious consciousness, that central one, which declares the Law of Holiness, has appeared to such minds the only one that can have a perma