If, however, we have once arrived at a general conception of religion more or less distinct in outline, it serves, as do all general ideas, as a clue by which to determine the chief characteristics of the various species of religion. Now we have no difficulty in ascertaining by an examination of all other religions, that the secular knowledge which they involve is not disinterestedly theoretical, but guided by practical ends. This circumstance, therefore, when given a place provisionally in the general conception, suggests, first, that objection may justly be taken to the exactly contrary use of secular knowledge which has made its way into the Christian Church; and next, that the later should be expelled, as something accidental, from the idea of the Christian religion. In the investigation of Christianity the general conception of religion should be used regulatively. I desire to distinguish myself very precisely in this respect from those who, in interpreting Christianity, make a constitutive use of the general conception. For when this method is employed, no longer as Scholasticism employs it, but in such a way that the influence of the general conception of religion makes one even for a moment neutral towards the Christian religion itself, in order to be able to deduce its meaning from the conditions of the general conception, then the only effect of this is to undermine Christian conviction. Christian conviction, however, is necessarily left intact when, as a theologian, one forms a general conception of religion, whatever the nature of that conception may be, for regulative use. For the observation and comparison of the various historical religions from which the general conception is abstracted, likewise shows that they stand to one another not merely in the relation of species, but also in the relation of stages. They exhibit an ever more rich and determinate manifestation of the chief features of religion; their connection is always more close, their aims more worthy of man. Such a way of looking at them opens up more fruitful vistas than are offered by the abstraction of a general conception of religion, followed by the comparison of the historical religions as species of this genus. For in this case the various religions are treated merely as natural phenomena; in the other case they are viewed as elements in the spiritual history of humanity. To prove that religions are related to one another as stages, is a scientific problem which still awaits an impartial and unprejudiced solution. Consequently we have to consider that several religions, such as Christianity and Islam, claim to occupy the highest stage above all others; and that Buddhists and Hindus who have become acquainted with Christianity put forward reasons which are meant to demonstrate the superiority of their faiths over the Christian. When, therefore, as Christians, in reviewing the series of stages presented by the religions of the world, we judge them by the principle that Christianity transcends them all, and that in Christianity the tendency of all the others finds its perfect consummation, the claim of the science of religion to universal validity may seem to be sacrificed to the prejudice arising from our own personal convictions. But it is aimless and impracticable to attempt to prove the universal validity of the view that religions can be arranged in an ascending series. Do people expect to discover thus a way of demonstrating scientifically to a Mohammedan or a Buddhist that the Christian religion, and not theirs, occupies the highest rank? In carrying out the task we have indicated, we have no such aim. It were indeed a desirable result, in the case of people who have been born Christians, and now, e.g., declare the verdict of their scientific knowledge to be the inferiority of Christianity to Buddhism, if we could detach them from their error. But it is impossible for us, when arranging religions in a series of stages, to shut our eyes to the claim of Christianity to occupy the highest place. For those qualities in other religions by which they are religions are intelligible to us chiefly as measured by the perfection which they assume in Christianity, and by the clearness which distinguishes the perfect religion from the imperfect. The arrangement of religions in stages, consequently, amounts to no more than a scientific attempt to promote mutual understanding among Christians; and assent to the statement that Christianity is the highest and most perfect religion is therefore no obstacle to the scientific character of the theory.

Here, therefore, our task is not to elaborate the serial arrangement of religions, but to seek a solution of the question how Christianity, as a religion, is related to general philosophical knowledge. Consequently, it is desirable that the qualities by which Christianity reveals its religious character should be brought out with that distinctness which they claim to possess at the level of Christianity. If in doing so we glance at other religions, our business will just be to point out the modifications for the worse which they exhibit when compared with Christianity. The various historical religions are always of a social character, belonging to a multitude of persons. Thence it follows that to assign to religion a merely psychological complexion, in particular to refer it to feeling, is not a solution, but only an abridgement of the problem. In a community the influence of the individual is conditioned by two factors, inasmuch as he is both like and unlike the others, alternately dependent on them and affecting them actively. Consequently a psychological explanation of religion is inadequate, for it deals only with those phenomena of spirit in which all men are alike, and one is the type for all. The above-mentioned dissimilarity of men within the common life of a religion falls under the scope of ethics. Now the multiplicity pertaining to a religion is one of distribution, partly in space and partly in time. An illustration of the latter is presented by the successive stages of life. Thence it follows that every social religion implies a doctrinal tradition. The dispersion in space of the members of the same religion is a direct obstacle to their fellowship, but it is compensated for when the religion takes real shape in the gathering for worship. Feeling, as pleasure or pain, as blessedness or suffering, is the personal gain or the personal presupposition which impels individuals to participate in religious fellowship. Nor in all religions does this aspect stand out so clearly and distinctly from the other functions as it is customary to suppose. In orgiastic faiths, contending emotions of feeling are the very material of worship; in the Roman, religious feeling assumes the form of painful attention to the correctness of ceremonial actions; in the Greek, the same factor appears in the serenity and the seriousness which affect, and are affected by, the worship. Hence it follows that for different reasons the historical religions claim service from all the functions of spirit—knowledge, for the doctrinal tradition, i.e. for a particular view of the world; will, for the common worship; feeling, for the alternation of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, moods by which religious life is removed from the ordinary level of existence. No religion is correctly or completely conceived when one element of this succession is regarded as more important or more fundamental than the others. At the same time the question is reserved whether our scientific explanation of the total fact of religion shall give the preference to one or other of the functions of spirit.

In every religion what is sought, with the help of the superhuman spiritual power reverenced by man, is a solution of the contradiction in which man finds himself, as both a part of the world of nature and a spiritual personality claiming to dominate nature. For in the former rôle he is a part of nature, dependent upon her, subject to and confined by other things; but as spirit he is moved by the impulse to maintain his independence against them. In this juncture, religion springs up as faith in superhuman spiritual powers, by whose help the power which man possesses of himself is in some way supplemented, and elevated into a unity of its own kind which is a match for the pressure of the natural world. The idea of gods, or Divine powers, everywhere includes belief in their spiritual personality, for the support to be received from above can only be reckoned on in virtue of an affinity between God and men. Even where merely invisible natural powers are regarded as Divine, they are conceived in a way analogous to that in which man distinguishes himself from nature. For the rest, the ease with which definite stupendous natural phenomena, whether beneficent or destructive, are personified, proves that it is in the spiritual personality of the gods that man finds the foothold which he seeks for in every religion. The assertion that the religious view of the world is founded upon the idea of a whole¹ certainly holds true of Christianity: as regards the other religions it must be modified thus far, that in them what is sought is a supplementary addition to human self-feeling or to human independence over against and above the restrictions of the world. For in order to know the world as a totality, and in order himself to become a totality in or over it by the help of God, man needs the idea of the oneness of God, and of the consummation of the world in an end which is for man both knowable and realisable. But this condition is fulfilled in Christianity alone. For in the religion of the Old Testament the presuppositions, indeed, are given, but the world-end aimed at is merely the perfecting of the one chosen people in moral, political, and economical independence; the human perfecting of the individual Israelite, each in his own personal character, is not kept in view, as it is in the Christian conception of life and blessedness. Nevertheless, in heathen and even in polytheistic religions there is always a tendency at work towards belief in the unity of the Divine power, and in the measure in which this is the case the supplement to his own resources which man seeks in religion becomes more clear and more worthy. When, as in Brahminism, the world which has sprung from the original Being is so constituted that it returns to the distinctionless unity of real existence, what takes the place of the maintenance of selfhood is its absorption in the Divine Being. In its own way, this too is a kind of unity, for it is viewed as the consummation of asceticism and quietistic piety.

Christianity, by its completely rounded view of the world, guarantees to believers that they shall be preserved unto eternal life in the Kingdom of God, which is God’s revealed end in the world—and that, too, in the full sense that man is thus in the Kingdom of God set over the world as a whole in his own order. Not only the Christian’s tone of feeling, but also his estimate of self is determined by this highest and all-inclusive good. For this religion offers no passionate impulse, no vacillation between changing tones of feeling arising from confused ideas, no voluptuous alternation of aesthetic pleasure and pain; on the contrary, such emotions must be viewed in the light of the antitheses of sin and grace, of bondage as to what is good, and liberty to give God thanks and to act aright. The temper produced by these conclusions, therefore, normally issues in the reverence for God proper to the level reached by Christianity. This combination is the rule in other religions also. Those religious affections of feeling which are called forth by the effort to secure blessings obtainable from the gods, and which have a complexion of their own, universally manifest themselves solely in correlative acts of worship. At this point, however, in the sacrifice of acquired property, and in religious and moral self-abnegation, there comes into view a universal characteristic of all religions. In this way the domain of religious action is marked off from secular life as a sacred domain; at the same time, however, the value of the blessings bestowed by the gods is gauged by pleasurable feelings of another class than those which accrue to man naturally or as a result of work. Religious feeling, with or without the accompaniment of a clear estimate of self, will always be found to be the material of worship; but the form which such feeling assumes witnesses at the same time to a decision of the will, which gives reality to the acknowledgment of God and the personal satisfaction this entails. The idea of God is the ideal bond between a definite view of the world and the idea of man as constituted for the attainment of goods or the highest good. Worship is the realisation of the blessing sought by the practical acknowledgment of the power that bestows it. In Christianity, thanksgiving for God’s grace, prayer for its continuance, and service of God in His Kingdom, have attached to them eternal life and that blessedness which corresponds to the highest good, the Kingdom of God.

Common worship has a still closer relation to the revelation which forms the organic centre of every connected religious view of the world. This factor, too, appears with various modifications at the various stages of religion. In the religion of sorcery, acts of worship are employed to elicit revelations from mysterious superhuman powers. In Christianity, revelation through God’s Son is the punctum stans of all knowledge and religious conduct. In the developed natural religions, success in obtaining Divine revelations is bound up with their being regularly acknowledged in worship. No idea of a religion complete after its own order can be formed if the characteristic of revelation which belongs to it is either denied or even merely set aside as indifferent. True, this very method has long been customary. People think themselves justified in abstracting from the characteristic of revelation found in every religion, inasmuch as they regard the myths of natural religions, and the doctrines of the religions of the Bible, as veiled or undeveloped philosophy. But the original purpose of myths is to explain why particular acts of worship, intended to do honour to Divine self-manifestations, are performed at some definite spot and at regularly recurrent intervals. What we may regard as the doctrinal material of the religion of the Old Testament—the free creation of the world by God, and His intention that man, who, as spirit, is the image of God, should bear rule over it—denotes the presuppositions of the belief that the Israelites are called by God in an especial covenant, under which they have to achieve their historical destiny in the world under the government of their Divine King. The speciality of the spot at which a god has ordained that he shall be adored, the speciality of the times at which the gods move through the land and summon their worshippers to celebrate their festivals, the speciality of the choice of Israel by the Lord of all nations—in short, speciality is the element which impels men to grasp the different aspects of religion, and to combine them practically in worship. The significance which revelation thus has for common worship also indicates an indispensable precondition of our understanding Christianity. The Person of its Founder is not only the key to the Christian view of the world, and the standard of Christians’ self-judgment and moral effort, but also the standard which shows how prayer must be composed, for in prayer both individual and united adoration of God consists. At the same time the acknowledgment of the revelation of God in Christ yields this pre-eminent excellence of Christianity, namely, that its view of the world is a rounded whole, and that the goal it sets to life is this, that in Christianity man becomes a whole, a spiritual character supreme over the world. For speciality is ever the condition under which a universal end is realised through the combination of individual things and relations.

§ 28. How, then, is religious knowledge related to theoretical or philosophical knowledge? This question, indeed, has already been raised by the very fact of Greek Philosophy; still, much more tangible and comprehensive reasons for raising it are to be found in the mutual relations of Christianity and philosophy. Accordingly, it is best that we should limit the question to Christianity in so far as it is a religion, intelligible as such from the characteristics noted above. The possibility of both kinds of knowledge mingling, or, again, colliding, lies in this, that they deal with the same object, namely, the world. Now we cannot rest content with the amiable conclusion that Christian knowledge comprehends the world as a whole, while philosophy fixes the special and universal laws of nature and spirit. For with this task every philosophy likewise combines the ambition to comprehend the universe under one supreme law. And for Christian knowledge also one supreme law is the form under which the world is comprehensible as a whole under God. Even the thought of God, which belongs to religion, is employed in some shape or other by every non-materialistic philosophy. Thus no principle of discrimination between the two kinds of knowledge is, at least provisionally, to be found in the object with which they deal.

Now, in order to elicit the distinction between the two from the realm of the subject, I recall the twofold manner in which the mind (Geist) further appropriates the sensations aroused in it. They are determined, according to their value for the Ego, by the feeling of pleasure or pain. Feeling is the basal function of mind, inasmuch as in it the Ego is originally present to itself. In the feeling of pleasure or pain, the Ego decides whether a sensation, which touches the feeling of self, serves to heighten or depress it. On the other hand, through an idea the sensation is judged in respect of its cause, the nature of the latter, and its connection with other causes: and by means of observation, etc., the knowledge of things thus gained is extended until it becomes scientific. The two functions of spirit mentioned are always in operation simultaneously, and always also in some degree mutually related, even though it be in the inverse ratio of prominence. In particular, it must not be forgotten that all continuous cognition of the things which excite sensation is not only accompanied, but likewise guided, by feeling. For in so far as attention is necessary to attain the end of knowledge, will, as representing the desire for accurate cognition, comes in between; the proximate cause of will, however, is feeling as expressing the consciousness that a thing or an activity is worth desiring, or that something ought to be put away. Value-judgments therefore are determinative in the case of all connected knowledge of the world, even when carried out in the most objective fashion. Attention during scientific observation, and the impartial examination of the matter observed, always denote that such knowledge has a value for him who employs it. This fact makes its presence all the more distinctly felt when knowledge is guided through a richly diversified field by attention of a technical or practical kind.

But even if we have made up our mind that religious knowledge in general, and therefore Christian knowledge too, consists of value-judgments, such a definition is as lacking in precision as it would be to describe philosophical knowledge contrariwise as disinterested. For without interest we do not trouble ourselves about anything. We have therefore to distinguish between concomitant and independent value-judgments. The former are operative and necessary in all theoretical cognition, as in all technical observation and combination. But independent value-judgments are all perceptions of moral ends or moral hindrances, in so far as they excite moral pleasure or pain, or, it may be, set in motion the will to appropriate what is good or repel the opposite. If the other kinds of knowledge are called “disinterested,” this only means that they are without these moral effects. But even in them pleasure or pain must be present, according as they succeed or fail. Religious knowledge forms another class of independent value-judgments. That is, it cannot be traced back to the conditions which mark the knowledge belonging to moral will, for there exists religion which goes on without any relation whatever to the moral conduct of life. Besides, in many religions religious pleasure is of a purely natural kind, and is independent of those conditions which lift religious above natural pleasure (p. 16.5). For only at the higher stages do we find religion combined with the ethical conduct of life. Religious knowledge moves in independent value-judgments, which relate to man’s attitude to the world, and call forth feelings of pleasure or pain, in which man either enjoys the dominion over the world vouchsafed him by God, or feels grievously the lack of God’s help to that end. This theory is almost more easily intelligible if it be tested by religions which possess no moral character. Orgiastic worships represent contending natural feelings with extraordinary intensity and with abrupt changes, in virtue of their recognition of the value which the identity of the Godhead with the vegetation as it decays and again revives, has for the man who modifies his attitude towards the world of nature in sympathy with the Godhead which he adores. The peculiar nature of religious value-judgments is less clear in the case of religions of an explicitly ethical character. Nevertheless, in Christianity we can distinguish between the religious functions which relate to our attitude towards God and the world, and the moral functions which point directly to men, and only indirectly to God, Whose end in the world we fulfil by moral service in the Kingdom of God. In Christianity, the religious motive of ethical action lies here, that the Kingdom of God, which it is our task to realise, represents also the highest good which God destines for us as our supramundane goal. For here there emerges the value-judgment that our blessedness consists in that elevation above the world in the Kingdom of God which accords with our true destiny. This is a religious judgment, inasmuch as it indicates the value of this attitude taken up by believers towards the world, just as those judgments are religious in which we set our trust in God, even when He condemns us to suffering.

In its day the Hegelian philosophy represented theoretical knowledge as not merely the most valuable function of spirit, but likewise the function which has to take up the problem of religion and solve it. To this Feuerbach opposed the observation that in religion the chief stress falls upon the wishes and needs of the human heart. But as the latter philosopher also continued to regard professedly pure and disinterested knowledge as the highest achievement of man, religion, and especially the Christian religion—which he held to be the expression of a purely individual and therefore egoistic interest, and a self-delusion in respect of its object, God—was by him declared to be worthless, as compared not merely with the knowledge of philosophic truth, but also with purely moral conduct. But an interest in salvation in the Christian sense, when rightly understood, is incompatible with egoism. Egoism is a revolt against the common tasks of action. Now, people might say that faith in God for our salvation, and a dutiful public spirit towards our fellows, have nothing to do with one another, and that therefore there is no conceivable reason why religion, as a rule, should not be egoistic. But in Christianity precisely faith in God and moral duty within the Kingdom of God are related to one another. As a rule, therefore, it is impossible that Christian faith in God should be egoistic. On the other hand, theoretical knowledge in itself, as has been shown, is not disinterested; but moral conduct is still less so. For in the latter domain the vital point is that one realises as one’s own interest the interest of others to whom the service is rendered. The moral disposition can nowhere strike root save in such motives. It is true that, contrary to the rule, faith in God may be combined with egoistic arrogance towards others. But the same danger attaches to both of the other kinds of activity which have been compared. It is possible for one occupied with theoretical knowledge to be vain and haughty, and for one devoted to the moral service of others to be tyrannical or sycophantic.

Scientific knowledge is accompanied or guided by a judgment affirming the worth of impartial knowledge gained by observation. In Christianity, religious knowledge consists in independent value-judgments, inasmuch as it deals with the relation between the blessedness which is assured by God and sought by man, and the whole of the world which God has created and rules in harmony with His final end. Scientific knowledge seeks to discover the laws of nature and spirit through observation, and is based on the presupposition that both the observations and their arrangement are carried out in accordance with the ascertained laws of human cognition. Now the desire for scientific knowledge carries with it no guarantee that, through the medium of observation and the combination of observations according to known laws, it will discover the supreme universal law of the world, from which, as a starting-point, the differentiated orders of nature and spiritual life, each in its kind, might be explained, and understood as forming one whole. On the contrary, the intermingling and collision of religion and philosophy always arises from the fact that the latter claims to produce in its own fashion a unified view of the world. This, however, betrays rather an impulse religious in its nature, which philosophers ought to have distinguished from the cognitive methods they follow. For in all philosophical systems the affirmation of a supreme law of existence, from which they undertake to deduce the world as a whole, is a departure from the strict application of the philosophic method, and betrays itself as being quite as much an object of the intuitive imagination, as God and the world are for religious thought. This is the case at all stages and in all forms of Greek philosophy, especially in those forms in which the ultimate universal grounds of existence, through which the universe is interpreted, are identified with the idea of God. In these cases the combination of heterogeneous kinds of knowledge—the religious and the scientific—is beyond all doubt; and it is to be explained by the fact that philosophers who, through their scientific observation of nature, had destroyed the foundations of the popular faith, sought to obtain satisfaction for their religious instincts by another path. In a certain respect, too, they were able to follow this tendency with especial confidence, so far as they succeeded in making out the unity of the Divine Being to be the ground of the universe. But in another respect they failed to satisfy the essential conditions of the religious view of the world, partly in so far as they surrendered the personality of the Godhead thus identified with the ground of the world, partly because they had to give up the active influence of a personal God upon the world. Nor, under these circumstances, could any worship be deduced from the idea of God. Thus the collision of Greek philosophy with the popular faith was twofold, and in both respects inevitable. For one thing, the actual observation of nature and her laws is incompatible with the religious combination of popular views of nature and the idea of God. Further, the rigidly unified view of the world held by philosophers is incompatible with the religious view of the world which is only loosely developed in polytheism. But the real force of the latter incompatibility is to be found in the fact that, under the guise of philosophic knowledge, what was really only the religious imagination has been operative in designing the general philosophic view of the world, the supreme principle of which is never proved as such, but always merely anticipatively assumed.

The opposition to Christianity which has been raised by Pantheism in its various modifications and by materialism, arises likewise from the fact that the law of a particular realm of being is set up as the supreme law of all being, though the other forms of existence neither would nor could be explained by its means. It may be admitted that natural science is right and consistent in explaining the mechanical regularity of all sensible things by the manifold movement of simple limited forces or atoms. But within this whole realm of existence, which is interpretable by the category of causality, observation reveals to us the narrower realm of organisms, which cannot be exhaustively explained by the laws of mechanism, but demand, besides, the application of the idea of end. But among organic beings, again, one section, differentiated in manifold ways, is animate, that is, endowed with the capacity of free movement. Finally, a still smaller section of animate beings is so constituted as to act freely from the conception of ends, to discover the laws of things, to conceive things as a whole, and themselves as in ordered interaction with them, further to identify all these activities with their own Ego by means of the manifold affections of feeling, and to exchange their spiritual possessions with others through speech and action. Now the claim of materialism to invalidate the Christian view of the world rests on the belief that it must succeed in deducing the organic from what is mechanical, and similarly the more complex orders of being from those immediately below. The materialistic interpretation of the world busies itself with the pursuit of these empty possibilities. Its scientific character is limited, however, by the fact that it can only suggest chance as the moving force of the ultimate causes of the world, and of the evolution of special realms of being out of those which are more general; for this is really to confess that science cannot penetrate to the supreme law of things. In all the combinations exhibited by the materialistic theory of the genesis of the world, there is manifest an expenditure of the power of imagination which finds its closest parallel in the cosmogonies of heathenism—which is of itself a proof that what rules in this school is not scientific method, but an aberrant and confused religious impulse. Thus the opposition which professedly exists between natural science and Christianity, really exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the entire world of nature.

The same holds true of the various forms of Pantheism which have alternately assumed the guise of the Christian view of the world, and entered the lists against it. The deceptive power of the imagination has to be called in to deduce all the diversified orders of reality from the laws either of spatial construction, or of vegetable life, or of lyrico-musical sensation, or of logical thought. None of these laws is the key to an adequate view of the world as a whole; none has been elevated by the use of properly scientific method, i.e. by means of observation and orderly inferences, into the supreme principle of interpretation; but philosophers have been surprised into accepting one or other by the religious desire for a complete view of things which they did not distinguish from their scientific cognition. The claims, adverse to the Christian view of the world, which have been made as a consequence of this self-deception, are further supported by the assumption, by which philosophical idealism is dominated, that the laws of theoretical knowledge are the laws of the human spirit in all its functions. From the standpoint of such a principle many aspects of the Christian view of the world and of the Christian estimate of self appear contradictory, and consequently untrue. But as certainly as feeling and will cannot be reduced to ideational knowledge, the last-named is not justified in imposing its laws upon the former. Feeling is admittedly not susceptible to what are called the “reasons of the understanding,” and the verdict of logic upon a contradiction, that it denotes something which is impossible and therefore unreal, is incommensurate with the moral verdict we pass on a bad will. It is true, the responsibility for the pretensions addressed by philosophy to the Christian religion often lies in part with the champions of Christianity themselves. It is so when they represent as the Christian faith some imperfect form of theology, that is, some system of the ideas of God and humanity which is as far away as possible from expressing the whole view of the world implied by the religious estimate of self which Christians are known to exercise, and by the character of their worship of God. Under these circumstances, philosophy often enough regards it as sufficient to demonstrate that the law of faith outlined in theology collides with laws of experience, and then declares religion untenable as an illegitimate trespass of the fancy upon the field of rigorous science. But the fact is, Pantheism is very far from rising to that estimate of the destiny and worth of human personality which is determinative in Christianity. Whenever the boundary-line between the Divine nature and the world is erased, whenever the universe in any one of its aspects is defined as the Absolute, there is nothing for man but to regard himself as a transient emanation of the World-Soul, or as an element in the spiritual development of humanity, whose progress leaves him behind and degrades him to a position of dependence. Nor is this result of the pantheistic view of the world sufficiently compensated for by the permission it accords us to cherish aesthetic sympathy with the universe, or to exercise ethical resignation in presence of the ceaseless advance of intellectual culture. These sentiments have already appeared on the soil of heathenism, and they indicate no reason why we should interest ourselves in free-thought. He who thinks that this view of the world is to be preferred to the Christian, ignores the principle of the Christian estimate of self—that the individual is worth more than the whole world, and that each soul can test and prove this truth through faith in God as His Father, and by service to Him in His Kingdom. For the Christian view of the world, disclosing as it does the all-inclusive moral and spiritual end of the world, which is also the proper end of God Himself, evidences itself as the perfect religion.

§ 29. That religious knowledge consists of value-judgments is brought out in a felicitous way by Luther in his Larger Catechism, in the explanation of the First Commandment: “Deus est et vocatur, de cuius bonitate et potentia omnia bona certo tibi pollicearis, et ad quem quibuslibet adversis rebus ac periculis ingruentibus confugias, ut deum habere, nihil aliud sit, quam illi ex toto corde fidere et credere… . Haec duo, fides et deus, una copula coniungenda sunt.” In these sentences are expressed various truths of which the theology of the schools both earlier and later has taken no account, and which its modern successors combat even yet. Knowledge of God can be demonstrated as religious knowledge only when He is conceived as securing to the believer such a position in the world as more than counterbalances its restrictions. Apart from this value-judgment of faith, there exists no knowledge of God worthy of this content. So that we ought not to strive after a purely theoretical and “disinterested” knowledge of God, as an indispensable preliminary to the knowledge of faith. To be sure, people say that we must first know the nature of God and Christ ere we can ascertain their worth for us. But Luther’s insight perceived the incorrectness of such a view. The truth rather is that we know the nature of God and Christ only in their worth for us. For God and faith are inseparable conceptions; faith, however, confessedly does not consist in abstract knowledge, or knowledge which deals with merely historical facts. On the contrary, it cannot be conceived save as possessed of those qualities which Luther vindicates for it. But, finally, his explanation of the First Commandment is bound up with the revelation of God in Christ, and is unintelligible apart from it. For the “goodness and power” of God, on which faith casts itself, is in Luther’s view revealed in the work of Christ alone. Apart from Christ, apart from the reflection of God in Him, Luther finds the idea of God to be accompanied by terrors and annihilating effects. This dilemma (pp. 6, 7) absolutely excludes the possibility of “disinterested” knowledge of God, as in some way correlative to the idea of the world.

While I am explaining that I maintain the religious conception of God as conditioned in the way Luther describes, I should also like to adduce these further remarks of his: “quem-admodum saepenumero a me dictum est, quod sola cordis fiducia deum pariter atque idolum faciat et constituat. Quodsi fides et fiducia recta et sincera est, deum rectum habebis, contra si falsa fuerit et mendax fiducia, etiam deum tuum falsum et mendacem esse necesse est… . Iam in quacunque re animi tui fiduciam et cor fixum habueris, haec haud dubie deus tuus est.” For here the religious character of the knowledge of God seems to be reduced to the arbitrary feeling of the subject, and we seem to be furnished with a corroboration of the maxim that a man’s God varies as his faith. But this interpretation of Luther’s words cannot be the true one, for this reason, that he distinguished between two kinds of faith, that which is sincere, and that which is infected with illusion. If he reduced everything to arbitrary caprice, he would not make this distinction, which depends on whether one takes or does not take the right way to knowledge of God, namely, through Christ. For faith which is genuine and sincere can be exercised only in response to the true revelation of God. This is as far as possible from the case referred to in Luther’s last sentence above, when it is said that everything on which a man sets his heart, be it sensual pleasure, or honour, or power, has the value of an idol. Between the two stands the case of trust infected with self-deception, with which an illusory idea of God is so combined as to show clearly that the person concerned will only consent to believe in a God Whose nature he can first determine in general by disinterested knowledge through analysis of his experience of the world. Not only is such an idea of God false, but it is contrary to truth to separate, in relation to Him, between knowledge and trust. Now theology is not devotion; as a science, rather, it is “disinterested” cognition. But as such it must be accompanied and guided by a sense of the worth of the Christian religion. The theologian, in his scientific work, must so far keep this degree of “interest” in sight as to conserve all those characteristics of the conception of God which render possible the trust described above. All other theological ideas—e.g. the idea we have to form of Christ and His Divinity—must be treated either in quite the same way, or with the most careful reference to the nature of these supreme ideas.

Thus we secure a criterion by which to judge the so-called proofs for the being of God. Since the Middle Ages these arguments have been intended to prove that the idea of God, presupposed as given in Christianity, is scientifically valid. When people set about proving the existence of God, they did not thereby assume that the reality of God for faith was not sufficiently certain, or that as a religious idea it excited doubts of its own truth which a different kind of knowledge was needed to allay. On the contrary, to the Scholastics who adduce these proofs, the correctness and truth of the judgment of faith, that God exists, are absolutely indubitable. But they wished to prove that the Christian idea of God is valid likewise within the realm of science. This enterprise, again, does not imply the intention to exhibit the specifically Christian idea of God as that of universal reason. This distinction, which might have given a useful sense to a scientific demonstration of the Christian idea of God at the beginning of theology, has not been drawn by the Scholastics up to the present time. Christian thought about God, and scientific thought about God, it is supposed, will coincide and harmonise. Only it becomes clear later, that besides the characteristics that are common to both, Christianity carries with it a further and special knowledge of God. The traditional proofs of the being of God are themselves the expression of this confusion. Here we have to deal with the cosmological, the teleological, and the ontological arguments. They are not co-ordinate, it is true, but, as Duns Scotus observes, are so related to one another that the first two must be supplemented by the third. But even when so arranged, it is not difficult to see that they fail to prove the objective existence of God as contrasted with His existence in thought, that they fail to prove the existence of God, and that they cannot be constructed save in dependence on the very presupposition which distinguishes the Christian view of the world.²

The import of the cosmological and teleological arguments is that, at the stage of the interpretation of the system of things given by metaphysics, when things are not yet differentiated as nature and spirit, disinterested science, if it is to comprehend the world as a whole, is led to conceptions of God which coincide with the Christian idea of Him. The wish to comprehend the whole is itself something additional to disinterested science, and betrays the interest religious faith has in conceiving the world as a rounded unity. This interest, it is true, already appears in Greek Philosophy, and thus is not exclusively Christian. But in Greek thought, it is an expression of that religious way of looking at the world which could no longer rest satisfied with the popular worship. Now it is customary to state the cosmological argument thus—that if we seek a conclusion for the series of causes and effects in which things are arranged, we must conceive the first cause as causa sui, which is not also a res causata, and which therefore is God. And the teleological argument runs as follows, that if we seek a conclusion for the series of means and ends in which things are arranged, we must think the final end, which is no longer itself a means, as God. Now it is true that the Christian idea of God, our Father in Christ, includes in itself the ideas of First Cause and Final End, as subordinate characteristics. But, posited as independent things, the conceptions of first cause and final end fail to transcend the conception of the world, and therefore fall short of the Christian idea of God. For, to begin with, the idea of causa sui is not at all a specific notion, capable of rounding off the world as a whole. Every single thing is causa sui as the unity of its qualities, and this notwithstanding the fact that at the same time everything must be conceived as the effect of other things. We can reach a conclusion of the series only by assuming or postulating a cause which is likewise causa omnium in the same respect as it is causa sui. For this alone excludes the possibility of this thing being the effect of other causes. But the thing thus fitted to be the cause of all other things is simply the world-substance, the multiplicity of things regarded as a unity. And this has no resemblance to the idea of God. For while we must conceive the world as a unity, in order to explain interaction between things, yet in this sense the world-substance becomes more intelligible when viewed as a universal law of the connection of its parts than when viewed as a cause. The teleological argument is surrounded by similar difficulties. If its construction is the outcome of a priori metaphysical reflection, there is in this implied a preconception which has still to stand the test of experience. Granted, now, that it stands this test better than we can assert it does, yet it is premature to make the conception of Final End equivalent to the Christian idea of God. For what Aristotle calls God not only falls far short of the Christian idea of God in definiteness and richness, but the metaphysical conception of the World-End (Weltzweck) to which the series of means leads up, altogether fails to transcend the idea of the world, the unity of which it expresses. But even if we could overlook the distance which separates the results of both arguments from their intended goal, they require to be supplemented before they conduct us to the objective existence of God. For they are merely the expression of the idea that, if we wish to cognise the world as a whole, we must of necessity think God in addition as its First Cause and Final End. This, however, gives us no guarantee that anything real corresponds to the thought in our minds, which is necessary on the condition stated.

According to Duns Scotus, the ontological argument is adapted to fill up this hiatus. Anselm constructed it, it is true, independently of any such motive, but it can be accommodated to the circumstances without trouble. For the conception of a Perfect Being—Anselm’s term for God—must include the results of the other arguments: if the form of proof, therefore, is at all correct, it covers also the validity of the two arguments discussed already. Anselm’s ontological argument runs thus: The conception of a Perfect Being, than which nothing greater can be thought, is impossible, unless Its existence is certain; the quality of existence, consequently, follows from our idea of a Perfect Being. But this inference is true only for our ideas, not for the reality which stands opposed to our thought: the argument therefore fails of its purpose. The attempt made in the same direction by Descartes is no more convincing. He holds that we could not have the idea of the positively Infinite unless it existed in reality. For, said he, as this idea includes no negation, we do not gain it by abstraction; it is therefore called forth in us by the Infinite itself; it is therefore in itself proof of the reality of the Infinite. But this train of thought is merely an analysis of the pretended innate knowledge of God asserted by the Scholastics. Such knowledge, however, is nothing but what is gained by abstraction from the world, and is therefore of a negative kind. The argument itself establishes nothing save the way in which every form of religious faith expresses the reality of its gods.

This mode of reflective thought, which can go on within the sphere of religious knowledge, is exceedingly often regarded as the product of general theoretical cognition. In this respect the example of Descartes has perpetuated confusion among philosophers and theologians.³ For the proposition, that we are compelled to posit the thought of God as real in order to explain our own belief, is merely an analytic judgment, which is deduced from religious belief because it is already contained there. But it is not the synthetic judgment of theoretical knowledge, which is what people undertake to make, or fancy they are making. In fact, that is unattainable by the method in question. But, on the other hand, no theoretical negation of God has the right to reject the reality of God or gods affirmed by religious cognition; for the relation between these entities, and the attitude to the world taken up by the believer in the feeling of blessedness produced by his trust in God, does not fall under the jurisdiction of theoretical cognition when conscious of its own limitations. For religious cognition the existence of God is beyond question, for the activity of God becomes to us a matter of conviction through the attitude we take up to the world as religious men. And while, from the standpoint of Christianity, we must maintain that the interpretations of this relation afforded by heathen religions do not correspond to the reality, yet at the same time they are to be regarded collectively as proofs of a striving after the true solution. Further, while theoretical cognition must for this reason take religion into account as a normal fact of the human spirit, it must regard these very circumstances as among its essential characteristics.

Since, whenever religion appears, it is subject to the presupposition that man opposes himself, as spirit, to surrounding nature, and to human society acting on him through the media of nature, it is a mistake to employ the idea of God as Author or Creator of the forces of nature in order to compel natural science, aware of its limits, to recognise God’s existence. Inferences drawn from the observation of nature lead us to consider the multiplicity and interaction of material forces as the causes of natural things; many therefore suppose that they are justified in concluding further that this multiplicity of forces—which must all be conceived as limited—is derived from one creating and limiting Will. But this special modification of the cosmological argument for God’s existence is just as incorrect as its metaphysical and academic form. Were the presupposition of the elements of nature, thus sought, really conceived as God, such a conclusion could not be justified by natural science. Besides, the affirmation of a creative Will, desiderated as the ground of the elements of nature, would not be a religious judgment, and to use the name God to designate the entity thus sought would be premature. For we never exercise religious cognition in merely explaining nature by a First Cause, but always and only in explaining the independence of the human spirit over against nature. The same confusion, therefore, as that of which Scholasticism is guilty when it treats the idea of of God as an element in metaphysical science, is to be detected in the combination we are now discussing of natural science with the idea of God.

In religious cognition the idea of God is dependent on the presupposition that man opposes himself to the world of nature, and secures his position, in or over it, by faith in God. Consequently no proof of God’s existence starts properly save that which accepts as given man’s self-distinction from nature, and his endeavours to maintain himself against it or over it. This condition is satisfied in the case of the so-called moral argument, stated by Kant in his Critique of Judgment. It is true that Kant directly attaches to this theistic argument the cautious limitation, that it is necessary to think God in order strictly to explain the existence in the world of rational beings under moral laws, who view their own action, when worthy of their nature, as the final end of the world. For this involves likewise, as its precondition, the hope of felicity: the supreme good, therefore, which shall express the final end of rational beings under moral laws, is the combination of virtue and felicity, of moral and physical good (vol. i. p. 439). Both orders of existence, which follow laws quite different in kind, are conceived as meeting in this goal. The supreme good, thus determined, depends neither on our use of freedom nor on natural causes; consequently, in order to set the final end before us as the moral law directs, we must assume a moral Creator of the world. That is, it is necessary to think God as vouching for the satisfaction of the moral necessity we are under of conceiving the supreme good as a combination of virtue and felicity or lordship over nature (Critique of Judgment, § 87). To begin with, there can be no doubt that Kant is in agreement with the Christian idea of God in his description of the Moral Creator and Ruler of the world. For everywhere in this connection God denotes the ethical Power Who assures to man the position above the world befitting his ethical worth, and this, too, as the final end of the world. Moreover, the argument is not merely the outcome of the reflection of religious knowledge upon the connection of its own elements. For its starting-point—the estimate of moral action as springing from freedom, and the hope of the union of felicity and virtue—is conceived independently of the authority of God. But, lastly, it appears from Kant’s further explanations that he himself puts considerable limitations upon the necessary validity of this conception of God as the explanatory ground of the supreme good above described. He insists that the necessity of the thought of God can be adequately demonstrated solely for the practical Reason, for the idea of final end itself is rooted solely in the use of freedom according to moral laws, and does not arise out of the investigation of nature, and thus possesses only subjectivo-practical reality. He asserts that the argument in question does not comply with any form of theoretical proof, not even with that of an hypothesis set up to explain the possibility of a given fact. For we lack the material for the idea of a supersensuous being; and therefore it is impossible to determine such an idea specifically, and employ it as a basis of explanation. He maintains, accordingly, that the idea of God is only a conviction of personal faith, i.e. necessarily to be conceived as standing in relation to the dutiful use of the practical Reason. So also the idea of the final end of the world, by which we judge the use of freedom, can claim reality for us solely in a practical sense, and is therefore a matter of faith (Critique of Judgment, § 88). These explanations of Kant are for one thing in accord with the dualism which in general he maintains between the theoretical and the practical Reason, and at the same time obey the principle that the reflective judgment attains merely to subjective truth.

Under these circumstances Kant’s line of thought implies that, as his philosophy is incapable of combining into one whole the two heterogeneous theories of practical reason and of nature, he hands over the task of solving the problem to the Christian religion. I have already remarked (p. 207) that philosophical systems secure the unity of their view of the world either directly by introducing a tentative idea of God or by employing conceptions of the world, which, being neither proved nor provable, belong to the imagination, and are therefore to be assigned to the sphere of religious knowledge rather than to that of theoretical cognition. It is instructive to observe how Kant’s procedure diverges from such methods. He does not start dogmatically from the idea of God, nor from a preconceived idea of the world; rather, he finds the final unity of his knowledge of the world in the Christian idea of God, and that, too, expressly in such a way as to limit that idea to the sphere of religious knowledge. Whether this procedure wins for him the suspicion of philosophers or the gratitude of apologists, at all events the moral Theistic argument, thus limited, adds nothing to the proof of the reality of God as distinct from the necessity of thinking Him in order to explain certain relations of man to the world—nothing, that is, to the proof of the reality of God as an object of theoretical cognition. The latter purpose Kant had not the least desire to accomplish. Even when he declares that he has proved the reality of a supreme Moral Legislator Who is also Creator of the world, yet the limitation of this proof “to the merely practical use of our reason” (Critique of Judgment, § 88) simply means that for religious knowledge the reality of God is self-evident. But this limitation hangs together with his separation of the spheres of the theoretical and practical Reason, in which Kant failed to estimate the practical Reason at its proper value. If the exertion of moral will is a reality, then the practical Reason is a branch of theoretical cognition. These two positions Kant never reached. The reason of this failure lies in the fact that with him sensibility is the characteristic mark of reality. Therefore, too, he declares the conception of God to be theoretically impossible, and abandons it to the practical Reason. For, says he (Critique of Judgment, § 90), we possess no material for determining the idea of the supersensuous, seeing we should have to derive it from the things of sense, and such material is absolutely incongruous with the object in question.

If it is possible at all to give a proof, first of all, of the scientific validity of the conception of God, which shall not merely be an utterance of the religious consciousness reflecting on its own contents, it can be done only by the proper delimitation of that sphere of experience which nothing save the religious conception of God can adequately explain. What I mean by this is that, besides the reality of nature, theoretical knowledge must recognise as given the reality of spiritual life, and the equal binding force of the special laws which obtain in each realm. With respect to this, theoretical cognition must simply accept the fact that while spiritual life is subject to the laws of mechanism so far as it is interwoven with nature, yet its special character as distinct from nature is signalised by practical laws which declare spirit to be an end in itself, which realises itself in this form. Kant wrongly let himself be persuaded, by this specific quality of spiritual life, to oppose practical Reason as one species of Reason to theoretical Reason as another. And yet knowledge of the laws of our action is also theoretical knowledge, for it is knowledge of the laws of spiritual life. Now the impulses of knowledge, of feeling, and of aesthetic intuition, of will in general and in its special application to society, and finally the impulse of religion in the general sense of the word, all concur to demonstrate that spiritual life is the end, while nature is the means. This is the general law of spiritual life, the validity of which science must maintain if the special character of the spiritual realm of existence is not to be ignored. In so far as we consider spiritual life in itself, this law holds good in a subjectivo-practical way, for spirit exists in the form of subjects alike in character. But since men, as spiritual beings who exercise through their natural organism particular effects on nature and on one another, constitute a special realm of reality in the world, and since the moral goods they call into existence are no less real than the natural world, therefore knowledge of the practical laws obtaining in this sphere falls under theoretical cognition no less than natural science does. But it is likewise the task of cognition to seek for a law explaining the coexistence of these two heterogeneous orders of reality. Kant, however, abandons the attempt to discover, by the methods of theoretical cognition, a principle which will unite spirit and nature in one, and bids us explain the combination of both in a single world through practical faith in God, conceived as endowed with the attributes which Christianity ascribes to Him. One circumstance which co-operated to produce this conclusion is doubtless the fact that all knowledge of nature, as subject to law, depends on the practical presupposition that nature exists for the human spirit. Now religion is the practical law of the spirit, in accordance with which it sustains its fundamental character as an end-in-itself against the restrictions it suffers from nature. This practical law attains its complete development in Christianity, for Christianity lays down the principle that personal life is to be prized above the whole world of nature, which is the realm of division (Mark viii. 36, 37); and consequently repudiates that intermixture of nature and spirit by maintaining which the heathen religions betray their comparative failure. For in the Christian religion the soul gains the assurance of its peculiar value as a totality through the consciousness of blessedness—a consciousness conditioned by the idea of the purely spiritual God, Who as Creator of the universe governs all things on the principle that mankind are ordained to be the final end of the world, through trust in God and as members of His spiritual kingdom. Now we must either resign the attempt to comprehend the ground and law of the coexistence of nature and spiritual life, or we must, to attain our end, acknowledge the Christian conception of God as the truth by which our knowledge of the universe is consummated. In the former case, science would disobey the impulse to complete itself which arises from the perception of the fact that nature is knowable and is known only because it exists for spirit. Such a renunciation of the systematic completion of theoretical knowledge would not impair the practical validity of religious faith in God in the Christian sense. But still, as all cognition of nature is subject to the precondition described above, knowledge has laid on it the task of comprehending the coexistence of nature and spiritual life. If so, however, nothing remains but to accept the Christian idea of God, and that, too, as an indispensable truth, in order that we may find both the ground and the law of the real world in that Creative Will which includes, as the final end of the world, the destination of mankind for the Kingdom of God.

While, then, by following this path we find that science is bound to accept the Christian idea of God, it is likewise true that this argument is directly based upon necessary data of the spiritual life of man which lie outside of the religious view of the world, and must be explained either by recognising the Christian idea of God or not at all. Now, when we mark the attitude taken up by the human spirit towards the world of nature, two analogous facts present themselves. In theoretical knowledge, spirit treats nature as something which exists for it; while in the practical sphere of the will, too, it treats nature as something which is directly a means to the realisation of the common ethical end which forms the final end of the world. The cognitive impulse and the will both take this course without regard to the fact that nature is subject to quite other laws than those which spirit obeys, that it is independent of spirit, and that it forms a restraint on spirit, and so far keeps it in a certain way in dependence on itself. Hence we must conclude either that the estimate which spirit, as a power superior to nature, forms of its own worth—in particular, the estimate which it forms of moral fellowship, which transcends nature—is a baseless fancy, or that the view taken by spirit is in accordance with truth and with the supreme law which is valid for nature as well. If that be so, then its ground must lie in a Divine Will, which creates the world with spiritual life as its final end. To accept the idea of God in this way is, as Kant observes, practical faith, and not an act of theoretical cognition. While, therefore, the Christian religion is thereby proved to be in harmony with reason, it is always with the reservation that knowledge of God embodies itself in judgments which differ in kind from those of theoretical science.

The meaning, therefore, of this moral argument for the necessity of the thought of God differs altogether from the aim of the other arguments; and for that reason the success it attains surpasses that of the others. The cosmological and teleological arguments are intended to show that the conception of God—necessary to complete the circle of knowledge—is similar in kind to the results of science. A truth which for religious faith is certain is thus proved, it is held, to be at the same time the result of scientific cognition as it advances from observation to observation and crystallises into conclusions, and should be set up as the criterion of theological science. But this method ends in failure, partly because neither argument takes us beyond the limits of the world, partly because their pretended results, even if they were correct, differ from the Christian conception of God in this, that they fail to express His worth for men, and in particular His worth for men as sinners. On the other hand, while Kant regards practical faith in God, conceived as endowed with the attributes which Christianity ascribes to Him, as necessary to complete our knowledge of the world, yet he does not posit this idea—which is an object merely of practical faith, and cannot be proved apart from such faith—as a conception which is theoretical or rational in the sense of general science. On the contrary, he maintains it in its original and specific character. Now it is the duty of theology to conserve the special characteristic of the conception of God, namely, that it can only be represented in value-judgments. Consequently it ought to base its claim to be a science, when looked at in itself, on the use of the method described above (p. 15), and, when looked at in its relation to other sciences, by urging that, as Kant was the first to show, the Christian view of God and the world enables us comprehensively to unify our knowledge of nature and the spiritual life of man in a way which otherwise is impossible. When we have once got a true conception of this point, a review of the moral constitution of man, based upon the principles of Kant, will serve as the ratio cognoscendi of the validity of the Christian idea of God when employed as the solution of the enigma of the world. Such an argument would form a close analogy to the declaration of Christ (John vii. 17), that whoso willeth to do the will of God, shall know whether His doctrine is of God or of merely human origin. Probably, too, this saying of Christ has quite as wide a range. For if, through actively fulfilling the will of God, one becomes convinced that Christ has really revealed God, that implies that it is by the same path that we come to perceive that the practical end set before men in Christianity is at the same time the final end for which the world is created and governed by God. This is the essential characteristic of the idea of God valid in this domain.⁴

§ 30. The conception of God with which Scholastic theology, whether mediaeval or Protestant, sets to work, is very different from that which we find in Luther’s Larger Catechism. To begin with, Scholastic theology posits as God the conception of limitless indeterminate being, a conception which is already current in the earliest Apologists. In its origin, this idea is simply the general conception of the world, the predicate which belongs to all things alike, and which, therefore, when abstracted from them, constitutes according to Platonic standards the idea of the world. But being in general is so different from the concrete fulness of the world, that it rather impresses the mind as not being the world. And this impression leads to indeterminate being in general being posited as God. Now this idea has to be verified as scientifically true in its relation to science in general. Accordingly, the cosmological and teleological arguments are employed to prove that the conception of First Cause and Final End is equivalent to the conception of indeterminate being. Nothing, indeed, was to be gained by keeping to the Platonic theory; for the abstraction from the world, of which it is the expression, of course serves any purpose rather than that of explaining the world. Accordingly, the conception of cause was foisted upon it, and this again, by a similar interpolation of the conception of final end, raised to the level of personality—since, according to Aristotle, the perfection of the Final End consists in His thinking of Himself. Lastly, there was ascribed to these conceptions, which have no affinity with one another, the whole content of the Christian idea of God, although no necessary connection could be shown to exist between them and the Divine attributes of self-revelation and love to man. This false conjunction of ideas, with its four different stages, does not give even a semblance of scientific necessity to the Christian idea of God. In reality, what a doctrine of God so constructed does is merely to introduce an explication of the content of the Christian view of the world which has no affinity with the scientific notions of limitless being, first cause, and self-conscious end. The theology of the Middle Ages and Protestant orthodoxy, therefore, can claim a positively Christian character only so far as they neglect the scientific presuppositions of their doctrine of God. But when these presuppositions are taken seriously, there arise out of this element in ” ecclesiastical ” theology the different species of Rationalism—Deism and Pantheism. We must not permit ourselves to be blinded to this fact by the circumstance that the champions of Positivism and Rationalism derive mutual hatred from a mutual comparison of their respective tendencies. For as these hostile brethren have a common origin, so they are also bound together by the value which each sets upon the other. Neither will admit the possibility of a third kind of theology, for each, besides believing in itself, believes only in the other, even though it be with trembling, as the demons believe in God. Circling round one another in endless controversy, they only further unintentionally each other’s interests; and the champions of both schools, as would appear, can as little dispense with mutual service as with mutual vituperation. A specially conspicuous place in this circle of speculators is occupied by those who follow Jacob Böhme in construing the nature of God apart from the world. Yet they ought to know, from the experience of Mysticism on which they plume themselves, that he who abstracts from the world so becomes one with God both in knowledge and in will, that even his personal individuality, his thinking and his speaking, cease to be. To describe the inward evolution of God outward into the world is therefore, to say the least, to use language without thought.

The explanation offered in § 29 has made it clear why theology takes as its fundamental truth the full conception of God as a Person, Who establishes the Kingdom of God as the final end of the world, and in it assures to every one who trusts in Him supremacy over the world. Such a conception may be differentiated without further remark from limitless being, regarded as the substance of the universe, from the idea of a First Cause which need not be personal, and from the self-conscious but self-enclosed Final End of the world. The conception of God thus set up is of such a nature that it simply cannot be distorted into Pantheism or Deism. A theology based upon it, therefore, is not rationalistic. On the contrary, it is positive, for it starts from the Christian idea of God; and it is scientific, for the Christian idea of God must be acknowledged to be the fundamental principle which explains the coexistence of nature and morality—morality being viewed as the final end of the world—if their coexistence admits of any explanation at all. We have yet, however, to justify the claim of theology to be a science, by proving that the conception of personality can, without contradiction, be applied to God.

The aversion felt to this truth is due to the change in aesthetic criteria which began about a hundred years ago. In the previous era the feeling of the beautiful was guided by stereotyped traditions of artistic form. In particular, the presuppositions which legitimately influence architecture dominated taste also in regard to the music of the fugue and dramatic poetry, bound as the latter was to the unities of time and place. To this preponderance of a priori theory, by which artistic taste has been shackled since the Renaissance, corresponds that physico-theological estimate of the relation of the world to God by which it was sought to test the conception of His personality. The rapid growth of this mode of thought as a consequence of the philosophy of Wolff is full of significance, in the first place, as indicating the lines which feeling and taste followed in that age, and, in the second, as throwing light on the conception of religion current at that time. The tendency just noted has, since Goethe, been superseded by an unfettered feeling for the naturally beautiful, and thus lyrical poetry and lyrical music have gained supreme influence over the regulation of aesthetic taste. Lyrical feeling, which adapts itself to the various aesthetic objects by which amid all the changes of impression its continuity is sustained, and which, by producing subjective harmony, balances the varying values of objective things, is a powerful impulse towards a pantheistic view of the world. Under the influence of this feeling people think they have discovered a sufficient explanation of the real world, when they find in the impersonal principle of development the force which produces equilibrium amid all the shifting phenomena of nature, and see the moral order of the world in the actual purposiveness of human society, which unconsciously brings all the aberrations of moral forces into accord with their substantially concurrent tendency. These presuppositions lead to the view that ” the universe ” is the highest conception of all.

There is hardly anything better fitted to throw light upon this conjunction of ideas than Strauss’⁵ unadorned statement of the notion of the Universe, on which he undertakes to found his new faith, his substitute for religion. He finds that the Universe, on which we are absolutely dependent, is constructed not by supreme reason, but for supreme reason. If, arguing that every effect must have a cause, we incline to the former belief, this, he maintains, is only to betray the limitations of our intellect, for the Universe is really at once cause and effect, inner and outer. In these disclosures the mask of science is finally laid aside, and the successor of Romanticism displays his true physiognomy. For his substitution of the conception of the Universe in place of the conception of a personal God is now no longer set up, as a pretended result of science, in opposition to the religious fancy: it is opposed as the content of one faith to the certainties of another. We are not permitted, however, to decide between the two on the principle of knowledge, that an effect must have a cause which corresponds to it. The new faith, it is true, repudiates the idea of the personality of God, on the assumed ground that the implications of the Absolute and of personality are contradictory. But we must regard this argument merely as the expression of a fixed aversion, for otherwise this creed finds no difficulty in maintaining contradictions. A universe which is at once cause and effect, inner and outer, is already by those descriptions withdrawn from the very conditions of scientific knowledge. It is an object of the imagination, a generalisation of aesthetic feeling, due in fact to the lyrical, especially the musical, balancing of feelings of pleasure and pain excited simultaneously—that is, without a clear interval of time between them—and by the influence of identical objects. Here cause and effect, inner and outer, vanish into one another! In particular, the position—inevitable once this line of thought has been entered on—that the laws of reality are at the same time the forces at work in reality (and this, looked at logically, is as much as to say that what is passive is ipso facto active), is only the reflex of an aesthetic emotion. For artistic enjoyment represents an impression of phenomena connected together in an orderly way, of a unified multiplicity which operates as such, i.e. on the feeling of the observer. But in this way of looking at things it is altogether forgotten that a law, as imposed, refers us back to a legislative and imposing Spirit and Will, and that the moral order of the world implies a Creator Who lays down laws and governs according to a fixed purpose. For such considerations would interrupt the feeling of artistic or natural beauty and of poetic justice. But it is only a leap of the imagination when the aesthetic effect upon our feeling of a law discerned in nature and history is thrown into objective form as the principle that every known law of reality is eo ipso the efficient force and sufficient ground of that which is real. Nor need we let ourselves be intimidated by the further assurance that it is a mark of limited intelligence to demand an ordaining Will as the prius of a law, and from that Will to deduce likewise the active force exhibited in the phenomena embraced by the law. Our thinking certainly has its limitations, but in the department of scientific thought we are called upon to set bounds to the aesthetic fancy, and to forbid it to intrude into a realm where it has no jurisdiction. The idea of a universe which should be at once cause and effect, inner and outer, which should be constructed for supreme reason, on which man should feel himself absolutely dependent and yet never be tempted to think that possibly it had its origin in an independent Mind—such an idea accords very well with one of Beethoven’s symphonies, by which one is wholly carried away without ever reflecting on the question by whom and how it was composed, or how many are performing it. But we cannot but have ideas, other than those which visit us when enjoying a romantic piece of music, about the universe in which we exercise moral freedom in the consciousness that each of us is a whole in his own order, and no mere part of the world. For the principle of lyrico-musical feeling is not the principle of the universe.

An objection to the personality of God, which Strauss is never weary of repeating, is that the predicates of the Absolute and of personality are mutually exclusive. “Personality is that selfhood which shuts itself up against everything else, which it thereby excludes from itself; the Absolute, on the other hand, is the comprehensive, the unlimited, which excludes nothing from itself but just the exclusivity which lies in the conception of personality.”⁶ This idea of the Absolute is simply that of space, and that one cannot combine the idea of space with the idea of personality is undeniable. On the other hand, we define personality incompletely when we limit it to the characteristic it possesses of distinguishing between everything else and itself; for this is merely the precondition which renders it possible for human personality to comprise its multitudinous contents. We find, too, that the personality of man is more developed the greater the compass of his knowledge, the more susceptible his feeling to diverse impressions, the stronger his will in the capacity to change the form of things and to rule other persons. Personality, as we have it in our experience of manhood, is conditioned, it is true, by the natural endowments of the individual. The development of personality from this foundation, in the directions mentioned above, always issues likewise in that peculiar cast of character which proves the original endowment of each to have been different from that of all others. A person’s peculiar cast of character, however, always indicates his acquired difference from all other persons. For that very reason it cannot coincide with that formal and original self-distinction of the individual from all others, to which Strauss limits his conception of personality. Every healthy human being, indeed, oversteps this function of personality perpetually, whenever he assimilates any material for his spiritual development. One who succeeded in living such a self-enclosed life as to shut himself off against everything that was not himself, would display none of the marks of spiritual life at all. Consequently, for the purposes of the present discussion he simply would not exist. Or if a man, in his spiritual appropriation of things, lived an exclusive life—even though only for the most part—lived, that is, indifferent to the problems of knowledge, insensible to the different values of things, irresponsive to stimuli of the will, regardless of the common interests of mankind, current terminology would not account him a personality at all. When his reason is not affected, these characteristics may, in a perceptible degree, be traced to a selfish opposition to the social conditions of moral action, and then we speak of bad individuality. Or they are accompanied by mental derangement; and no one professes to find the ideal of personality in the maniac or the imbecile. On the other hand, acquired individuality of character is the form assumed both by the highest possible degree of receptivity to the general relations of things and the common interests of mankind, and by the highest possible degree of spiritual influence over other men in any direction. Individuality, therefore, certainly denotes an impassable limit of human personality, for the single soul can be pervaded with the common elements of spiritual life, and the universal norms necessary for their appropriation, only when the form assumed is particular. But the fact of acquired individuality is, for that very reason, not inconsistent with the subjugation of the world by spirit, with the appropriating reception of very diverse contents into “the self-comprising Ego,” or with the latter’s operating efficaciously upon a certain portion of the world, and a more or less extensive section of human society. Thus Strauss’ criticism of the notion of personality is not in harmony with ordinary usage, and is as far as possible from being based on that complete and precise observation of phenomena which usage points to.

The conceivability of the personality of God is to be reached rather through the study of what is so worthy of esteem among men—independent personality.⁷ For those objections to the personality of God which rest upon the contention that we only know personality as a product of the interaction between our Ego and the given world, or as a self-evolution of the Ego which is essentially conditioned by the stimulus of the environment, point to the fact that we are created for personality, and that even under the category of “persons” we are limited, growing, mutable. But such considerations are more than balanced by the fact that an independent personality, when acquired, has open to it a range of activity beyond the sway of the above-mentioned conditions. What we have become during life, through the interaction of experience and native endowment, the Ego opposes through memory as a connected reality to all possible stimuli arising from the world. Further, the Ego draws a multitude of incentives from the reciprocal action of its own memories and from the principles it has acquired, and is thus able both to repel the synchronous stimuli it receives from surrounding persons and things, and to demonstrate its independence by influencing others. Developed personal individuality consists in the power to take up the inexorable stimuli of the environment into one’s plan of life, in such a way that they are incorporated in it as means under firm control, and no longer felt as obstacles to the free movement of the self. In such a case, the emotions can no longer be regarded as passive mental experiences, but come rather to involve principally an exercise of power which the independence of one’s character is felt to justify. The stage of spiritual and moral culture, to seek and to maintain which gives human life its true worth, likewise brings with it that specific experience of eternity for which our spiritual constitution in general is adapted. The idea of eternity would mean absolutely nothing for us, and even as an attribute of God would be for us an empty name, if the two current conceptions of it, as timelessness and as time without beginning or end, were correct. For neither can we abstract from time during waking consciousness, nor in the idea of time without beginning or end can we distinguish God from the world. Indeed, we can conceive neither the beginning nor the end of the world, since if we abstracted from the existence of the world we should also have to abstract from our thought, for as thinking spirits we are parts of the world. Time is our intuition and idea, in which we first distinguish our ideas from one another, then arrange our experiences according to the relations of cause and effect. But we abrogate it again in every act of knowledge, when we combine words heard consecutively in the unity of the judgment, qualities perceived consecutively in the unity of the conception, and experiences acquired consecutively in a view of the world. The positing and the abrogation of time in our simplest and most habitual acts of knowledge is itself an instance of the eternity of spirit. It manifests itself still more characteristically in the power of the will actively to pursue a single end throughout the ordered succession of intentions and resolves derived from it, and this even when some of the latter have to be modified or withdrawn. For eternity is in general the power of spirit over time. Nor is this general conception affected by the fact that this characteristic cannot be verified with equal facility in the realms of knowledge and of will, and that this difference is connected with the distinction in worth which exists for personality itself between theoretical knowledge and moral will.

These facts are enough to prove that the human spirit, designed as it is for personality, even though in its activity and development it is conditioned by stimuli received from things—that is, by the non-Ego—must still be supposed to exist anteriorly in its own peculiar character, if its evolution by means of these conditions is to be understood. It is true that the human spirit always remains conditioned by these external stimuli, even when it has reached the stage of independent personality, and thereafter, guided by its own principles and impulses, utilises things for its own ends, and exerts an influence upon the society of its compeers. For in both directions independent action must be guided by the laws which have been found to obtain in the natural and moral worlds. Moreover, the conscious connection between one’s acquired individuality and one’s fixed plan of life is limited at every moment by movements of feeling and vague ideas which form an accompaniment to the rest; and even though we know as a whole what we are and what we desire, yet the manner in which we have come to possess our nature is present to our memory only in a very defective form. From these characteristics we learn experimentally that, as persons, we are always in a state of becoming, and that this is what we are created for. But the personality of God is thinkable without contradiction just because it stands contrasted with the restraints which we find by experience imposed on our personality. As the cause of all that happens, God is affected only by such forces of influence as He has conferred upon His creatures, and as He sees transparently to be the effects of His own will. Nothing which affects the Divine Spirit is originally alien to Him; and there is nothing which, in order to be self-dependent, He must first appropriate. Everything, rather, that the world means for Him is at bottom an expression of His own self-activity; and whatever of the movement of things reacts upon Him He recognises as the recurrent sweep of that reality which is possible through Himself alone. As comprising all that happens in the unity of His judgment and the unity of His purpose, He is eternal; and no break in this being or this consciousness is conceivable, for no impression can arise either from things or from ideas which He has not taken up beforehand into the unity of His knowledge and His will. Our mind, it is true, can lend no colour or music to this conception, for sensuous vivacity belongs only to perceptions acquired within that limited circle to which our creaturely nature confines us. Yet neither the truth nor the validity of our ideas depends on whether they are reinforced by perceptions of a sensuous or an aesthetic kind. The truth of the idea of the personality of God rather is verified just by our finding in it the standard which determines whether, and in what degree, the same predicate is to be ascribed to us. For that we are independent personalities we judge by reference to the conception of that Personality which, inasmuch as it has the whole ground of its activity within itself, is normative. At that stage of human development, therefore, which we describe as independent personality, it becomes clear that the disputed idea, so far from being alien and remote, is vitally bound up with the specific worth which we ascribe to spiritual culture.

Personality is the form in which the idea of God is given through Revelation. As theology has to do with the God revealed in Christ, this is justified scientifically as the only practicable form of the conception of God. The content of the Divine will is to be deduced from the revealed reciprocal relations between Christ and God, and from no other principle. Thus a full elucidation is given of the starting-point of theology, as fixed by Luther. One would have thought that this method of procedure would have been safe from the objections of those who generally pique themselves on their loyalty to the symbolical books of the Lutheran Church. Yet Frank has contended against me that when stating the theological doctrine of God we ought to begin with the conception of the Absolute, in order to keep the attributes of love and personality in God distinct from their existence in man.⁸ This scholar understands by the Absolute, the qualities of existence in, through, and for self, in which, he maintains, God must be conceived before we can ascribe to Him the predicates of love and personality. This Absolute, however, may be described as God because, under the qualities named, we conceive Him in Whom we make our refuge. Now, when judged by the Larger Catechism, the trustful confidence thus attested by Frank is hardly right, for it sets up an idol instead of God. For his Absolute is nothing but an incomplete conception of a thing, in which abstraction has been made from its cognisable relations to other things. So little is this conception fitted to ensure the distinction between God and the world, that there is nothing to which one might not attribute the qualities which he enumerates, though in doing so one would be further off from real knowledge of it than ever. And even if in either case we fancy that by their means we have reached a complete conception of something in its true character, yet no attributes of relation such as personality, love, or righteousness can be combined with such a subject without the conception of it being abrogated. For the qualities of the Absolute which Frank gives include likewise the quality of lacking external relations. The whole conception, therefore, when relations such as love and righteousness are combined with it, is transformed into the conception of the Relative. But that Personality which is love is the conception which Luther describes as God. Personality, indeed, is likewise a predicate of man; but, as has just been proved, only in a derivative fashion. Again, men too exhibit love; but the fulness of the idea is applicable to God alone, for, according to Christian ideas, all man’s love springs from the revelation of God in Christ. And this every theologian ought to know; indeed, I have taken it for granted as a familiar truth (vol. ii. p. 99). Finally, the method which Frank adopts simply betrays a disinclination or an incapacity to think spirit as self-dependent. When, therefore, he wishes to comprehend God, Who is Spirit, he manufactures first of all an indeterminate Thing, a kind of frame or skeleton on which, if he is going to maintain their validity, he must then hang the attributes of spirit. But this framework, the Absolute, is an idol; and if Frank makes it his refuge, his trust is different from that of all the saints of the Old and New Testaments—a trust which Luther describes by saying that it builds upon the goodness of God. Now things are either spirit or matter. There exist no things-in-general, which are neither the one nor the other. When contrasted with the reality given in experience, “a thing” in the merely metaphysical sense is a conception indeterminate as to its kind. Now, if the Absolute is to be taken as real, and yet not to be taken as spirit, it must be a material thing. And this shows all the more clearly that the Absolute, which Frank posits as God, has the form and impress of an idol. I do not say that Frank has any inkling that this is implied in his position; but to my mind there is an element of materialism in his view.

§ 31. The Christian conception of God, with which theology sets out, has combined with it an idea of the world, and of the destination of man—who is made in God’s image—in the world, or above it, which is at the same time God’s final end of the world. Without these implications, which the Larger Catechism also indicates, the Christian conception of God is quite incapable of being expressed. The assertions which are made regarding God, as He was before the world and before the moral order existed for man, are either purely formal determinations which have no force until the content of Revelation is taken into account—e.g. the conception of the personality of God—or they are words without meaning. Now, save where theology has taken on a pantheistic colour, the general relation of God to the world is conceived as that of creation and preservation, and His free omnipotent will is given as the sufficient ground for these operations. On the other hand, theology has in two ways made the attempt to supplement the idea of God by the idea of a moral world-order. The one theory depends on the position that God as the unrestricted Sovereign over all His creatures, out of His mere good pleasure treats mankind with equity (Billigkeit), though in themselves they have no rights against Him. The other theory defines the relation of God to humanity thus—that He regulates the inter-relations of the reciprocal rights subsisting between Himself and men by a law and dispensation of justice which is a necessary outcome of His own nature. The former theory is dominant in the theology of the Middle Ages, attains its classical expression in Duns Scotus, develops its consequences in Socinianism, and, with a diminished lucidity of inference, is adopted by Arminianism. The other theory appears in the orthodoxy of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, in the latter case assuming a form such that at the same time one position which follows from the first theory is affirmed in the Reformed doctrine of the twofold predestination.⁹ Both theories, though they build upon different elements in the Biblical mode of thought, yet betray the form and features of natural theology; and each of them likewise claims to expound what a rational criticism of the moral order takes to be self-evident. In both conceptions, the idea of God represents both the law of the moral world and the power which realises it. As the Christian doctrine of reconciliation is judged by these criteria, they also determine the decision of the question whether it and the mediatory processes involved in it—processes for which different kinds of proof are offered—are in harmony with reason.

The first theory, which represents baseless Will, caprice, dominium absolutum, as the supreme law of the world in general and the moral world in particular, has never received such consistent expression as the other. Its employment, on the one hand by the theologians of the Middle Ages, and on the other by the Socinians and Arminians, led to its being modified in various ways. The reason was that the latter sects had before them the Lutheran and Calvinistic theory of the a priori validity of law even for God, and only succeeded in carrying out their contrary view by making concessions to the correctness of the other. The average position taken by those who adopt the first theory may be summarised as follows. The relation of God to the world is based on His arbitrary will. That is, God could have made the world otherwise than He did, and no decisive ground can be discovered why He created it such as it is. Moreover, as against all His creatures, even man, He is unfettered Lord. They have no innate right against their Creator and Lord, but as contrasted with Him are as destitute of rights as slaves. If, nevertheless, they are not treated by God as chattels, this rests on a free resolve, a positive ordinance which He has made, and which imposes on His own action the principle of equity (Billigkeit) towards men.¹⁰ The Scotists and Nominalists even illustrated the unrestricted omnipotence of God by the hypothesis that He might have given the moral law a directly opposite content to that which it actually has. The Socinians and Arminians avoided this inference by conceding that the Divine omnipotence is limited beforehand by regard for public order, both as concerns the permissible and the obligatory. And although the attempt was made to maintain the guiding conception of the arbitrary will of God, by contending that “ the permissible,” as the more general conception, is superordinate to “ the commanded,” yet Socinianism could not altogether ignore the only true view, that “ the permissible ” denotes in extent those actions which, while not commanded, are yet not in contradiction to that which is commanded. Socinians decline, however, to draw from this the inference that the relations between God and man are determined by the a priori rules of universal justice incumbent on God, and thus by the necessity of the case. For this would be to corroborate the opposite theory and renounce controversy with it. To obviate this difficulty, recourse is had to the position that men, as slaves, have originally no rights in common with God. For thence it follows that God treats them in accordance with special justice—which holds good alongside of general justice—i.e. He deals with them in accordance with His special purpose of equity (Billigkeit). Thence follows, further, that God is under no necessity to punish human transgressions of His laws, but is free to forgive them as injuries or as infractions of His private rights. Thomas is guided by this principle when he remarks, à propos of the Christian doctrine that the forgiveness of sins depends on the satisfaction and merit of Christ, that God could have attained the same end in another way; similarly Duns considers it possible that a man might merit forgiveness for himself had God not determined otherwise; the Socinians, finally, declare that to render forgiveness possible the satisfaction of Christ is superfluous (vol. i. pp. 49, 69, 300). Moreover, Duns views the equity of God as the ground of His reckoning voluntary good actions as deserving of salvation; while on God’s treatment of men thus the Socinians base the principle that He regards the obedience of faith, imperfect though it be in each particular case, as sufficient to win eternal life.

The conception of the Divine equity, which links the Socinian view of the order of the world to the Scotist conception of merit, serves to impose restrictions on the attribute which has been premised—namely, the dominium absolutum. This denotes the exclusive right possessed by God as Creator, the consequence of which is that originally men have absolutely no rights. This legal conception is now modified and supplemented by the introduction of the moral conception of equity, which recognises men not only as the subjects of rights, but, still further, as possessed of moral worth. For usage generally connects “ right ” and “ equity ” (Recht und Billigkeit) with one another, and thereby indicates a varying line of conduct accompanied by the desire to supplement the one by the other. The right which equity comes in to supplement always signifies the right arising out of a compact, in which human action is regulated by the ascertained interdependence of two individual aims. Now, one who strictly adheres to the standard of right ignores the fact that the legally obligated subject, as a moral personality, is entitled to be viewed otherwise than merely in the light of the compact. The legal obligation to perform a service which has been contracted for, however, never denotes more than a small element in the man’s whole nature, considered as a person capable of action. When, therefore, the superior to the contract judges of the service contracted for in the light of the helpful or hindering influences which the inferior’s whole situation exerts upon his performance, and when the view thus taken by the superior is not subsumed under the principle that each is bound to do the other all the good he can, then we have an instance of equity. For equity expresses itself either in forbearance, when a man’s other obligations or his unfavourable circumstances impede the discharge of his legal obligation, or in the bestowal of a reward when, by the special promptitude with which he performs the service agreed upon, he shows that he is in earnest. In both cases the legal standard is supplemented by a moral standard, inasmuch as account is taken either of the man’s moral freedom, or of the probable obstacles which it encounters in his discharge of the contracted service. But the standard which equity applies is in its nature purely relative, and does not exhaust the possible methods of moral judgment. For it confines itself to the same field as is prescribed by the relations of private right, and abstracts from the highest criterion of morality, which is based on the principle that the society of moral agents ought properly to be as comprehensive and as open as possible. Indeed, we refrain from criticising self by the conception of moral duty, just when, by exercising equity, we express such a private and moral concern for a neighbour as dovetails into the presupposed relations of private right.

A moral order, then, which makes the equity of God its highest criterion, splits up necessary human action, as we actually find it, into simple cases of private relations between God and the individual, and can therefore be regarded as a moral order only in an erroneous sense. This result of the Socinian theory, even with the otherwise clear opposition between law and equity, accords in a singular way with the presupposed Divine dominium absolutum over man. For if, from this point of view, men are to be conceived as slaves, then God is represented as the owner of property. Such a relation, however, can only be estimated from the standpoint of private right (Privatrecht), and cannot of itself become the source of public law (öffentliches Recht). Now, if God bestows rights upon men out of equity, it is only in appearance that we can deduce from this the existence of public law. For the idea of public law always depends solely on the existence of common aims; but common public aims are precisely what is excluded by the supreme principle of God’s equity in dealing with individual men.

The development of this Socinian theory is occasioned, it is true, by certain similitudes used by Christ (Luke xvii. 10), and therefore stands in a certain analogy to the feeling of interest by which the Christian religion is sustained. The doctrine of man’s dependence on God, in fact, is strained to its utmost possible limit. Everything which raises man above the level of things, exactly so far as it is not ascribed to his original endowment, is traced back to the Divine bestowal. Even man’s destination to eternal life—a privilege transcending the nature he receives at birth—is granted him merely through God’s free resolve. In the most extreme contrast with this, however, stands the fact that this view regards human life, even though subject to universal moral law, as always dependent on the Divine equity alone—an equity which passes judgment on each individual as such, and that by a fortuitous and relative standard, which just for that very reason is neither necessary nor universally valid. But it is an absurdity that the definite principle of moral fellowship, when traced back to God, should be made subordinate to the incalculable private considerations of mere equity, while equity can be brought into play only by neglecting the strict obligations of the moral law. Equity, which is admissible only as an exception, under special circumstances, to the universal validity of duty, cannot, even as an attribute of God, form the basis of an obligation binding men to God and to one another. Consequently, this theory would justify men in taking a view of themselves which is utterly devoid of inward consistency. The very persons who have to regard themselves as originally destitute of rights against God, are then again to be convinced that they stand to God in a private relationship, such that they may count on His indulgence and His rewards. The sense of being as far from God as the utter difference between Creator and creature implies, is to give way to a feeling of co-ordinate equality, such as obtains between subjects capable of rights, and such as awakens the expectation that each will regard the other also as the subject of equal moral freedom. This theory, therefore, as combining the Divine attributes of dominium absolutum and aequitas, not only is composed of heterogeneous elements, but, so far as it represents a moral order, it is intrinsically absurd; for no adequate basis for a public and universal order can be found in the indeterminate private moral relationship of equity (Billigkeit). To be strongly convinced of this, one only needs to remember the factors which confessedly go to make up the argument. A slaveowner, who out of equity treats the men who are his chattels as persons capable of rights, who in this confidence imposes on them a law of reciprocal behaviour, but indulgently tolerates infractions of it except when they are characterised by obstinacy, and rewards the well-meant fulfilment of his law, however imperfect it be—here, in this domestic régime, we have the model of the Socinian moral order! But it is more than probable that a régime of this kind would simply break down when confronted with cases of obstinate transgression which must be punished.¹¹ There is only one argument which could make this moral order credible, the argument, namely, which the orthodox employ when they find themselves embarrassed in theology—that what is impossible for men is for that very reason befitting God! But in this way, as is well known, any absurdity can be proved.

§ 32. The other theory regards the destiny of eternal life as forming part of the inborn nature of man, and therefore puts man forward from the outset as the subject of personal rights even against God. But the right to eternal life has first to be realised, and that too under the condition that the moral law, in its relation to God’s authority and His fellowship with men, shall be fulfilled by action. Without this the right to eternal life, the basis of all personal rights, would be lost. In this scheme of the moral world-order, also, it would seem at first as though the form of private contract alone were employed. To counterbalance this impression, however, we have the fact that the law, the fulfilment of which is required, is not one of arbitrary content, but the expression of the Divine will—such, indeed, as is essential to God Himself, must of necessity be ascribed to Him, and is ordained to be in all its concreteness the indispensable and universal rule of the moral order. Not only is the moral law represented as the mirror of the Divine justice, to which men can become subject only through obedience, but its fulfilment or non-fulfilment is brought into close connection with the Divine justice, seeing that the rewarding of good works and the punishment of transgressions are unconditionally necessary for God. Thus the Divine law (Gesetz) is given the form and impress of public law (Recht). That this is implied is clear enough, though Cocceius traces it back to the foedus operum, a contract between God and man; for that is only an expression of the tendency displayed in the seventeenth century to derive the State from a private contract. In any case, this form of representation neither intentionally nor necessarily eliminates the distinction between public and private law. Now, public law is an expression of the fact that the rights which individuals have against society are inferior to the rights which society has against individuals, and that their permanence depends on the performance of social duties. But, under these conditions, individuals are recognised as the subjects, even as against the State, of rights which the State does not create, but can only acknowledge. The conception of the moral order now under discussion, accordingly, is modelled on the idea of the State. For God, as Maker and Executor of the law—though He creates man as the subject of rights against Himself—represents the State with its acknowledgment of the rights of its citizens; while men, in their capacity as members of the State, are so subordinated to the Divine law that it depends on their fulfilment or non-fulfilment of it whether they realise their personal right and claim to eternal life, or lose it altogether. The civil character of this conception of the moral world-order, further, appears clearly enough from the assertion that God must, out of His justice, both reward the fulfilment of His law and punish men for its transgression, and that of Himself it is simply incompetent for Him to display that indulgence and forgiveness which a private individual may exercise. For the legal community of the State can continue to exist only if it asserts itself against the law-breaker by the infliction of a judicial penalty.¹²

These criteria, derived from public law, are now applied to a system of things which transcends civil relationships. The question at issue, in the Divine ordering of human life which we are now discussing, is the realisation of eternal life, the realisation, that is, of a good very different from the ends which, in the State, are controlled by public law. But in order to produce the impression that the civil order, thus conceived, is likewise adequate to realise this supra-civil end, every infraction of the Divine law is represented as being visited, like treason, with the severest possible penalty, the penalty of death or everlasting damnation. Finally, the doctrine of original sin is called in, and the position taken up that all men whatsoever, who enter this world, are straightway subject to the sentence of death. Thus is conceived the order of human life, an order from which, it is true, reconciliation liberates us. But, on the foregoing presupposition, the fact of reconciliation is interpreted in such a way that the action of the Reconciler is regarded as illustrating the legal world-order, which therefore works on indirectly even in the Christian life. The conclusion drawn from this connected series of ideas is conditioned by the doctrine of original sin, accepted on scriptural authority but interpreted by reason; the earlier judgments composing the arguments, however, are affirmed in quite a rationalising way; and whenever any position of the Apostle Paul gives them support, his statement is credited with the value of a universal truth of reason (p. 4). Accordingly, we are called upon to investigate the rationality of this theory, i.e. its consistency with itself and with experience.

The first question is, whether the conception of God on which it is based accords with the presuppositions which must be fulfilled ere that conception can form the highest conceivable criterion of all reality. Now the Socinians have already raised the objection,¹³ that the justice of God which furnishes the immutable principles of the Divine legislation, and which imposes upon the Divine will the necessity of punishment, indicates a power superior to God, and that, as Will, He is subject to this justice as a natural necessity. Now we cannot escape this difficulty, even by making this very power a part of the Divine attribute of justice. For then the conception of God falls asunder into two strata, distinguished by the superordinate attribute of passivity and the subordinate attribute of active will. Such a diremption of the idea of God, however, is incompatible with the necessity we are under of thinking God as the unity posited by religious experience. Neither is the Lutheran and Reformed theory justified by the fact that the conception of God held by the Scotists and Socinians involves the opposite error, namely, that of supposing that the groundless will of God can will, create, or command either of two opposites, and that He deals with men, not on a fixed plan, but according to His arbitrary aequitas. Both of these positions, that a thing is good because God wills it, and that He wills a thing because it is good, are equally unsatisfactory. The rare attempts made by orthodox theologians to support their view by reasons¹⁴ only prove that, with the materials of thought at their command, it was impossible for them to reach that unity of the conception of God at which they aimed. For if it follows strictly from the assumed personality of God that He is real only in the form of will, then it is bad metaphysics to attribute righteousness to Him as a passive quality possessed by Him apart from His form as will. What means a passive quality at all, if the qualities of things must necessarily be conceived as their particular ways of acting, and especially of acting on our perception? The idea of a passive quality is due to the self-delusion which arises when our attention is uninterruptedly enchained by the way in which something acts on us continuously. For our idea of action and cause is always called forth originally by the changes of phenomena, and unless we give stricter attention to the ways in which we get our knowledge, it is only from intermittent similar perceptions that we receive the idea of the action of a thing. But though our vision cannot discern the changes of phenomena at a distance as it can those near at hand, it does not follow that the remoter objects are really at rest, as they seem to us to be. The error in the conception of God now under discussion is occasioned specially, it is true, by the imprudent use of the analogy of human personality. Our consciousness of personality teaches us that it depends upon natural endowment, and that it is further guided by acquired principles, of which we know that, even apart from our assent, they possess certainty for others. And therefore our inaccurate way of judging marks off character, as a self-enclosed entity, from every individual action which proceeds from it, in such a way that—to use the spatial terms “ near ” and “ remote”—we think that what is remote is in this case just as much at rest as to our limited vision it appears to be. Now our natural endowments determine beforehand the kind and range of our action, and we become conscious of our acquired character as a second nature, so that we thus know ourselves to be created personalities. But it is wrong to repeat these characteristics in our conception of God. For even our own character we do not really possess in passivity, but in its proper activity; and if it were not ever being reproduced anew by activity, it would not exist at all, or would be lost. To affirm a necessity for God, which cannot be intelligibly derived from His will but is deduced from some latent “natural” quality, is to describe Him as a finite and growing personality.¹⁵ The orthodox doctrine of God, therefore, is altogether impracticable.

The second question is, whether the form of public law harmonises with the assumed contents of the Divine law, and whether it is at the same time fitted to embrace within itself the necessary relations between man and God. In regard to the former point, it must be remembered that the principles of love to God and to our neighbour to which, as the supreme commandments of the Mosaic law, Jesus ascribed fundamental authority in His Church, are regarded by the older school as forming the content of the universal law which God not only implanted in human reason, but publicly proclaimed in the prohibition He addressed to our first parents, and then later through Moses and through Jesus. The righteousness in which man was created, it is held, satisfied this standard, the covenant of works was based upon obedience to these commandments, and the bestowal of eternal life would then have followed as a common right. Now law is the ordering of social action with a view to the realisation of those ends which combine a people into a State, and in order to ensure that freedom which each individual has to exercise in pursuing those aims which lie beyond the province of the State. Law is either private law or public law. Private law controls the mutual commerce of individuals, which is due to the fact that several individuals (or groups, which may be treated as individuals) may simultaneously make the same articles or the same particular work the object of their desires. Public law controls reciprocal or social action, which arises from the fact that, in the State, men are combined for universal ends. The ends controlled by public law, however, never possess more than relative universality. For the highest end which can be proposed to action forms the basis of the domain of morality. It proves itself the highest end conceivable, in that it prescribes rules not merely for action, but also directly for our purposes and intentions and disposition, and regulates action by regulating these determinants of the will. It proves itself the highest end conceivable, moreover, because it embraces all law and all action conformable to law. For thus law is seen to be a means to the end of moral action, or a precondition of the exercise, by each member of the community, of the freedom to pursue moral ends; while at the same time law is intelligible as a product of the principle of moral freedom. Lastly, it thus becomes possible to regard law, and the association of a people under law, as a relative moral good, and to found it upon such a degree of moral disposition as is necessary for the continued existence of any civil society. So far as it is possible to regard civil society as an end in itself, the validity and efficacy of law, it is true, is independent of the question whether its provisions are submitted to voluntarily, or are enforced by fear and compulsion. But the derivation of all law from moral freedom, and the, in general, moral character of civil society are proved by the fact that, if civil society is to be permanent, its foundations must be laid in the moral disposition of its members (p. 50). This disposition the law of the State can neither demand nor enforce; indeed, on the lines of State-law nothing more can be secured than legality of action. Only when law is regarded as a product of moral will can we perceive the possibility and the necessity of moral disposition for the existence of law.

Law, therefore, has to do with a material of narrower extent than morality. Nothing is subject to law but those conjoint or mutual actions which render possible the existence of the State. Morality, on the other hand, likewise embraces the inward tenor of the will as such, which may be discerned behind visible action; it embraces, besides, all actions which the standard of law leaves undetermined, or are merely permissible. To it belongs everything which concerns the intercourse of men as moral beings, as distinct from the fact that in the State they have to take each other into account as fellow-countrymen. When the State is described as the social form of morality as such, an utterly confused and incorrect conception of its nature is the result. For the production and the criticism of moral disposition lie just as much outside the competency of the State—i.e. the nation as a civil society—as the duty of universal love to man transcends the limits of nationality. Moral fellowship as such neutralises national distinctions, for it springs from the subjective motive of love, which differs from that natural hereditary friendliness of fellow-countrymen to one another which is, as a rule, an accompaniment of civil society. Moral fellowship, viewed in these two characteristics of possessing the widest possible extension and being animated by the most comprehensive motive, can only be conceived as the Kingdom of God. This idea Christ expresses in such a way that He transcends the view of the national State, and takes up an attitude essentially opposed to it. In harmony with this is the following distinction. Civil law is the system embracing those actions which necessarily follow from the ends for which a particular State exists. Moral law is the system which embraces those dispositions, intentions, and actions which necessarily follow from the all-comprehensive end of the Kingdom of God, and from the subjective motive of universal love. It is clear that these two conceptions are not co-extensive. Since the one has a narrower compass than the other, it must be confessed that we might have a kind of action which would satisfy the civil law, and yet, more or less, might be immoral. Not only is it the case that action in accordance with State law may be barely legal and destitute of moral consideration for civil society—and therefore, so far as disposition goes, egoistic—but it may happen that the whole disposition is preoccupied with ends of State, and accompanied by indifference to the more universal ends of humanity. Conversely, the general moral disposition will also embrace the disposition to obey the laws of the State. But even in this connection, we could conceive a case where we have a single infraction of the laws of the State, taking even the form of crime, while yet the general moral disposition of the offender is beyond all question. Those are the cases of tragic inward conflict, which in the highest degree engage the interest of those who combine the most educated moral disposition with insight into the difficulty of carrying it into practical effect.

Our discussion has shown that it is a self-contradiction to conceive the moral law under the form of public law. This error, however, is chargeable to that view of the world which forms, in the theology of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, the presupposition of the doctrine of reconciliation. To say that God rewards obedience to the law by promoting man’s personal end, i.e. by bestowing on him eternal life, is not a position in harmony with the law of love, the authority of which is based in the very nature of God. However, the connection of thought here is so obscure in the ordinary exposition of the theory under discussion, that a special analysis of its relevant aspects is still necessary to vindicate the judgment I have expressed.

When orthodox theology teaches that the law of love, by which the action of men to one another and to God is regulated, is a reflection of God’s essential righteousness, this is to give an extremely imperfect account of its origin. Any law of action can be explained solely from the final end of the society which the law is designed to serve. If that end is to render a nation capable of the social life through which a nation as such exists, and through which protection is secured for every citizen and for every society possessing conjoint interests to pursue their particular aims, limited as they are by the common interest of the nation, but otherwise legitimate, then the law in question is the civil law of the State. If the end is to unite men in the closest conceivable way by disposition and by action, then we come to the law of love as the law of morality. The moral law affords no basis for any expectation, such as follows from the civil law, that obedience to the universal law will be rewarded by the protection and furtherance of our individual rights; on the contrary, the moral law forbids us to reckon thus on a reciprocal relation between duties and rights. Even though such an expectation were accidentally bound up with the permanence of a moral community, yet it is not an essential condition of the individual’s performance of duty. He who acts dutifully, finds his enjoyment rather in the action itself: at all events, he does not count on being recompensed for his moral acts by others reciprocating what he has done. Now if, in the theory before us, God represents the society in relation to which men have to act as the law commands, it is impossible to combine in thought these two positions—that they are to discharge the obligations of love, and that they may expect a legal compensation for them in the satisfaction of their personal claim to eternal life. For of necessity it is only in civil society that men receive rights as a compensation for duties; in the moral fellowship, based on action prompted by love, such a compensation may occur accidentally, but it is not necessary as a precondition. In the theory before us, therefore, the fundamental principle of the moral world-order is composed of heterogeneous and incompatible elements.

Lastly, the following circumstance goes to prove the same thing. While, in this theory of the moral world-order, God represents the commonwealth, yet there must also be ascribed to Him His proper significance as the personal Power on whom man is religiously dependent. This requires that nothing by which the estimate of human nature is conditioned, shall be left outside the compass of man’s acknowledged dependence on God. Now the theory is so constructed that it assumes a graduated relationship of dependence upon God. That men have a right to eternal life is deduced from their creation by God: that this right can be made good only through fulfilment of the Divine law, depends on God as the Sustainer of the moral order. Thus it is solely in reference to creation that dependence on God is considered complete; as regards the moral order, it is limited by a relative co-ordination of men with God, corresponding to the reciprocity which holds within the State between duties and rights. This scarcely gives expression to the Christian view of the world; but, apart from that, we cannot admit without more ado the rationality and self-evidence of the theory. For the Socinian view makes exactly the same pretensions (p. 241). It derives every right possessed by man within the moral order not from his creation, but from the special grant made to him by God out of equity (Billigkeit), and this last it likewise regards as the basis of the moral order. This gives consistent expression, such as is wanting in the other theory, to the complete dependence of man upon God in moral respects. But we shall have to consider later the elucidation of this contradiction of the two theories—a contradiction which was never fought through to the end.

If we look, thirdly, at the conditions under which this moral order is applied to man, no point shows more clearly how inadequate for its expression is the analogy of civil law, than the assertion that God is compelled to punish infractions of His law. This necessity, which arises from the Divine justice, is equally pressing with the necessity He is under to recompense the obedience of man with eternal life. The co-ordination of these two exemplifications of the Divine justice corresponds to the two branches of public civil law, the so-called police force and the penal law, and their employment positively to further and defensively to protect the commonweal. But since Divine justice, in relation to human sin, operates merely in a one-sided way, namely in its character as penal power, the juridical complexion of this theory comes out still further in the notion that the primitive justice of God manifests itself in the same positive impartiality as befits a judge when hearing each particular case of accusation. Just as a judge, when forming his opinion of a punishable act, must disregard everything of the nature of moral disadvantage which the punishment of the criminal will entail upon his relatives and himself, so God, it is maintained, is bound so strictly by His punitive justice that He is entirely indifferent to the form which the fate of the human race may take as a result of punishment. The proverb which is used to illustrate the impartiality which ought to characterise any particular sentence—fiat iustitia, pereat mundus—is literally applied to the alleged Divine dispensation. It is impossible to prove that this theory, in and by itself, is in harmony with reason. For it is unintelligible how God could be compelled by His justice to punish our first parents with eternal death on account of their disobedience on a well-known occasion, and at the same time to consign the whole race for their ancestors’ transgression to a state of punishment directly contrary to His plan. Among the standards of civil society by which this theory is dominated, there is also to be found the principle of penal law, that punishment must be determined by the degree of crime. The basis of the whole argument is abandoned, consequently, when the transgression of our first parents, which was anything but wicked, is represented as being visited by the heaviest of all penalties, and that, too, embracing their whole posterity. There may be a religious necessity for such a position, but the structure of the theory before us supplies but poor reasons for it. But if that theory, thus constructed, constitutes the proper criterion of the moral order, it has no connection whatever with the view that the first transgression was punished by the condemnation of the whole race.

But this view reckons as punishment not merely the eternal condemnation which embraces the whole race for their ancestors’ sin, but also all evils which come upon individual men, including physical death. It is, however, very far from being proved that the conceptions of evil and punishment are equivalent. The slightest observation is enough to show that the former conception is used with a wider extension than the latter; but if we were to regard punishment, for that reason, as a species of evil, we should be at once confronted with the question, what the two conceptions really have in common. In general that which ministers to our end is good, and so that which impedes our end, by injuring our means, is evil. Natural evils are either such effects of mechanical natural causes as render our bodily organism wholly or partially useless for its purpose of executing our ends, or such as spoil or destroy the property which we have acquired as the regular means for accomplishing our ends. Social evils are such disturbances of our freedom to follow out our ends, or of the intended result of our activity, as arise from the actions or expressed opinions of our fellow-men. Now punishment, as a civil institution, is always a social evil, for it is inflicted by other men. As put in force by civil society against a criminal, however, it is a special kind of social evil, for it encroaches upon those blessings which in ordinary circumstances are protected by the State, namely, personal rights of property and liberty. Punishment is that social evil which consists in a diminution of rights, and that not merely in virtue of the execution of a sentence, i.e. the deprivation of property (money fine) or of freedom (imprisonment, exile), but in virtue of the very fact of condemnation, the ideal negation of rights which are ideal attributes of personality. Now this conception of civil punishment certainly admits of being applied to the relation of man to God. If man be conceived as entitled to eternal life in fellowship with God, then banishment from God and exclusion from our proper fellowship with Him—which we have found to be the all-inclusive conception of Divine punishment (p. 42)—may be subsumed under the general notion of “diminution of rights.” But just as the conception of civil punishment is not complete unless it be acknowledged by the criminal as a legitimate retaliation on the part of society, so there is nothing which can detect the presence of Divine penalties but the consciousness of guilt of the man who counts an evil a punishment sent by God, because he acknowledges the opposition of his will to God which broke forth in his transgression (p. 49). This introduces a complication with which the authors of the orthodox theology did not reckon, but which threatens to destroy our belief in its general truth.

It is certainly a fact that, in the circle of pre-Christian religions, it was common to combine the ideas of evil and Divine punishment. Through great calamities men were led to believe that some great enormity had been committed against the gods: and conversely, they expected or demanded that penal ills should light upon the foes of God or of human society. And so these currents of thought, appearing equally among the Israelites and the classical peoples, seem directly to favour the dogmatic theory. These considerations seem to prove it thoroughly in harmony with reason. However, another fact counteracts this impression. In the pre-Christian religions no application of the connection between the ideas of evil and Divine punishment is made, save to special and specially conspicuous cases of misfortune and of human wickedness. The insignificant sufferings of life, and death as a normal phenomenon, were not regarded as Divine punishment, but as something quite natural. This is true even of the religion of the Old Testament, where the record of the conjunction of death with sin is as far as possible from laying down a dogma. Though the fate of death is considered a special calamity by the psalmists, this does not imply a specific consciousness of guilt, but rather, on the contrary, a specific consciousness of innocence, accompanied by the feeling that, through their fellowship with the true God, they are raised above the ordinary level of mankind by nature. It is thus within that civilisation which is independent of Christianity and of Old Testament conceptions of a Divine revelation of grace, that we find the idea of evils, especially natural ills, combined with that of Divine punishment in connection with specially conspicuous degrees of wickedness and misfortune. But this “natural” view of the matter is not all equivalent to the principle, assumed as natural by Dogmatics, that the conceptions of evil and Divine punishment are coincident. Dogmatic theologians, it is true, treat the phenomena described above as though they could draw this general principle from them by a trustworthy induction. But this is an unjustifiable assumption. For while special cases of wickedness followed by striking misfortunes are interpreted by religious thought in the light of the conception of Divine punishment, slighter ills are in point of fact not viewed in the same way; for no attempt is made to reach a general rule. And this very combination of ideas betrays its religious character by the fact that it does not presuppose the theoretical principle of Dogmatics, that all evils are Divine punishments. We shall find (§ 42) that it is likewise impossible to represent this principle as an element in the view of the world which Christianity justifies us in holding. Nowhere, therefore, in the range that is claimed for it, does it possess practical validity. But it cannot claim theoretical truth, if it has no practical validity in the sense that any religion exists in which the consciousness of guilt is so comprehensive as to acknowledge all evils, felt as such, to be consequences of personal sin. Consequently, if anyone, relying on this theory, expects to succeed in convincing men of the truth of Christianity by the force of argument, he will find that the conception of the moral order now under review is accepted by no one.

For when, fourthly, we investigate the origin of this theory, we find that its dominant idea, that God must requite the diverse actions of men in one of two ways [i.e. by reward or punishment], is not the fundamental conception of Christianity. Even the writers of the New Testament, when dealing with the wider ramifications of the moral order, may show their belief in the Divine requital of human action, yet Christ fills out God’s attribute of perfection with an exactly opposite content. God, He says, causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust. This being the Divine perfection which Christ declared, He can prescribe love to one’s enemies as a Christian duty (Matt. v. 44–48). This truth is ignored by those who harp upon the fact that penal retribution is a general ethical idea which had been realised in history long before the institution of civil and legal society was ever thought of.¹⁶ This idea, it is asserted, theology found present to begin with as an element of conscience, and transferred it to God under the guise of the attribute of justice. But the question for Christian theology is not what idea of God can be shown to be the presumptive content of natural conviction, but what declarations of Christ we have. In the present case it is simply a falsification of Christianity to maintain that the attribute, from which the twofold co-ordinate requital is derived, is that fundamental element in the conception of God which should dominate all other aspects; and it proves but little acquaintance with the Bible to assert that such an idea is Scriptural without attempting to bring it into harmony with the sayings of Christ adduced above. Lastly, it would be worth while to prove that the idea of punishment had appeared before the existence of civil society! Theologians who are accustomed to copy second-rate models, might learn from Calvin (Inst. i. 2) that the natural religion of our first parents before the Fall did not rest at all upon the attribute of Divine retribution, for the latter has no meaning until God has given His law. But, according to Calvin, the recognition of God as Lawgiver is properly to be derived from the fact that God’s goodness and providence are reckoned the source of all blessings for men. Not till we come to the third rank of the Divine attributes do we meet with the attribute of retribution. Foremost of all stands, as Christ testified, the goodness of God. And that is as it should be: for the religion of our first parents is nothing but the prophetic shadow of Christianity. What Calvin says upon the subject, however, is based upon Luther’s discussions of Genesis (p. 171).

The tendency to fill up the idea of God with the attribute of a twofold co-ordinate requital, is not so innate or so universal as Kreibig imagines; for we can localise it historically in the religion of the Greeks. Here it fundamentally determines the relation between gods and men, who are not regarded as dependent on the gods through creation. That is, to punish and to reward, as co-ordinate acts, are the functions of the State as conceived by the Greeks; and they are ascribed to the gods, because in this religion the State constitutes the summum bonum. In these functions the Greeks discern the justice of the State, and the justice of the gods.¹⁷ It is characteristic of them that they viewed the punishment of crime and the rewarding of merit as the co-ordinate duties of civil justice.¹⁸ That is not a self-evident view, nor is it a view which obtains everywhere. For, according to our ideas, the single duty of the State is to maintain public law and order, and so assure everyone of protection in the pursuit of his legitimate ends, in order to promote which purposes the State likewise employs the forces of punishment against criminals. But the rewarding of individual merit is only an accidental addition to its functions; the fulfilment of their civil duties is, rather, the very condition of all enjoying the protection of the State. This more mature conception of the State betrays itself even in the idea of God’s justice which obtains in the Old Testament (vol. ii. pp. 107, 138); for here, too, the foundation is supplied by the civil order. But in the Old Testament the bestowal of rewards and the infliction of punishments are not co-ordinated under the Divine attribute of justice. Rather, the justice of God is regarded as assuring the righteous of their rights and of protection within normal civil society; the destruction of the godless, however, effected as it is by God’s wrath, is the means used to enforce law and order to the advantage of those, too, who hitherto have been deprived of their full rights. Thus to suppose that the conception of the twofold retribution of God, as an innate idea and as an element of natural religion, is likewise the fundamental conception of the moral order which must be presupposed in Christianity—to suppose this, is in reality to acknowledge the Greek idea of the relation between gods and men as the supreme criterion of every part of the Christian system. As has already been shown, therefore, the God who is conceived under this attribute is an idol, and so also the trust placed in Him by His theological devotees must be false and deceptive. But how comes it that every attempt to correct this falsification of the Christian idea of God is so obstinately resisted as we find to be the case? The primary cause is the slovenly and thoughtless use of the Bible which prevails in theology. If any statement whatever of God’s retributive justice can be pointed to in its pages, then that is taken as constituting the Divine attribute of justice which is fundamental in Christianity! Thus Kriebig says, in concluding the remarks to which I formerly adverted: “Even though the Biblical idea of God may differ in different passages, yet the idea of a God Who, as such, is a holy dispenser of justice, is incontestably Scriptural.” But the point at issue is whether this Scriptural idea is the fundamental element in the conception of God. In the second place, theologians of this school are influenced by the fact that the twofold co-ordinate retribution, in the eschatological form which Plato had already given it, was represented by Justin Martyr as a leading feature of Christianity, and a correlative of its legalistic character. This doctrine of the Apologists, which we can likewise perceive to have been the Christian conviction of the earliest community in Rome (vol. ii. p. 317), implies that the chief idea of Hellenic religion is being carried over into Christianity. Thus it is that theologians of orthodox repute, who at bottom are rationalistic, foster the prejudice that they must believe in God under this attribute first of all, before they can agree upon the further attributes which the revelation in Christ offers to their faith.

§ 33. Such a moral order, which is based upon the Hellenic juridical conception of Divine justice, and which, moreover, in virtue of our first parents’ sin issues in the condemnation of the whole human race, leaves no room for the possibility of the reconciliation of man with God. So far from being a positive presupposition of the governing idea of Christianity, it is an obstacle to our understanding the Christian faith. This conclusion is still further confirmed by the following considerations. Reconciliation with God may be taken as the basis of the perfect religion. But we are told that the original dispensation consisted in a reciprocal legal relationship between God and man. Now law and religion, at least in the experience of evangelical Christians, are conceptions quite opposed to one another in species. Species cannot be derived the one from the other; they are mutually exclusive. The species of fellowship with God which we know as reconciliation, therefore, cannot be derived from the presupposed reciprocity of rights between God and men. Accordingly, if the religion of reconciliation is derived from God, it must be based upon a different conception of God’s relation to man from that on which stress has been laid hitherto, namely, upon His grace. This thought, however, is treated by Protestant orthodoxy in such a way that, instead of repudiating altogether the ideas which follow from the idea of Divine retribution, it endeavours to preserve them in force alongside of the inferences from Divine grace. This is accomplished by means of a compromise, the artificiality and pretended profundity of which are no guarantee of its truth.

An artificial solution of the contradiction contained in the premises was already offered by the theory of Anselm, the result of which is to remove the contradiction to a different point from where it stood originally. For the presupposition of this theory is that the honour of God forms, with equal necessity, the ground both of His condemnation of the sinful human race and of His intention to bless them with salvation. In order to exhibit this intention as attainable and attained despite the sway of condemnation, he demonstrates that satisfaction to God for sin is necessary, and that, through the Person and the Death of Christ, it is possible and effectual. But he derives the necessity for satisfaction from a conception of the justice of God which implies an equality in private rights between God and man. It is impossible, however, to combine this relationship in thought with the truth that God is the absolute end of man; consequently, the first contradiction is solved only by the admission of a second (vol. i. p. 39 ff.). Moreover, a plain contradiction is involved in the way in which Luther derives reconciliation from the love of God, but at the same time derives from the wrath of God the satisfaction which Christ has to work out through the vicarious endurance of punishment (vol. i. p. 221). For it is impossible to conceive sinners, at the same time and in the same respect, as objects both of God’s love and God’s wrath.