The doctrine of the scholastic theologians of the Reformation exhibits no inconsistencies so plain and open as these. To be sure, they start with the assumption of an antinomy in God. In His justice He must condemn the sinful race of man; in His goodness and grace He desires to bless them. But for God Himself these two attributes have not equal importance: in their simultaneous reference to one and the same object, therefore, they form no contradiction. Rather, from the very outset greater importance is ascribed to justice than to grace. The same may be said of their explanation of the mediatorial rôle in which Christ brings into operation for sinful man the order of grace instead of the order of law. The decree by which Christ is sent forth, it is true, springs from the Divine grace; but if that decree were conceived to include all the consequences of His mission, the result would be the outlining of a series of Divine operations which would come into collision with the necessary results of His justice. But the gracious purpose of Christ’s mission is limited to this, that He should satisfy Divine justice for sinners by enduring punishment and fulfilling the law, and thus realise the essential precondition of their pardon. This act of grace is made subordinate as means to the Divine justice in such a way that, even when it is no longer put in force against sinners directly, justice still obtains satisfaction for its claims in a roundabout way. Moreover, this implies that the dispensation of grace, which springs from Christ, does not run counter to the dispensation of justice. For the Mediator of grace, in achieving satisfaction, is subject throughout to the standard of Divine justice, and He opens the door of the realm of grace only through bearing testimony, by His twofold satisfaction, to the inviolability of the justice of God. While the dispensation of grace remains dependent on His person, it likewise remains permanently bound up with the validity of Divine justice in virtue of the aforementioned significance which belongs to what He suffered and did.

The twofold satisfaction rendered by Christ imports that the law makes no claim to punish such sinners as are believers, and does not demand from them obedience to it as a precondition of salvation. Thus the direct authority of the original Divine law over believers is put in abeyance. If, now, the mission of Christ, as an effect of grace, were given its properly unlimited significance, then, as the satisfaction rendered by Christ would have set aside for believers the dispensation of law, the impediment in the way of Divine grace would have ceased to exist, and Christ would have to be described as the Mediator of grace to believers, in consequence of God’s first decree. In the theory under discussion, however, this is not the case. God’s first gracious resolve to send Christ is not conceived as including its possible consequences. For the merit of Christ is the moving power which first puts in force for men the Divine dispensation of grace, which is dependent on Him. Through endurance of punishment and entire obedience to the law, He vicariously satisfies both of the legitimate demands made on sinners by Divine justice, and abrogates for believers the dispensation of law, to the end that they may attain blessedness. Thus, by the meritorious value of His whole righteousness, He determines the resolve of God to open through Him for believers the dispensation of grace.

But what means the employment of this notion of merit when we are comparing the Person of Christ with the dominant conception of God? Merit is the necessary correlate of equity (Billigkeit). This discovery of Duns Scotus meets us again in the less lucid theory of Thomas Aquinas. The Divine grace towards believers, which the merit of Christ puts in operation, is nothing else than arbitrary goodwill, which as such implies no inconsistency with the assumed justice of God. Here the scholastic theology of the Reformation appears to coincide with Socinianism, and it seems as though the circuitous paths which it follows to reach this goal might have been spared. Yet their agreement is very limited, and more theoretical than practical. To begin with, we ought to observe that grace in the sense of equity, as a concomitant of the dispensation of public law, wears another form when likened to the right of pardon which resides in the State, than when it is taken as supplementing a prior private relationship existing between God and man. The right of pardon as a correlative of the penal law, is certainly also a manifestation of equity arising out of consideration for the moral circumstances of the condemned criminal (p. 91); but the opposite standpoints occupied by public law and private right lead, in the two theories which we are comparing, to the drawing of different inferences from their common conception of grace as equity. On the basis of private right sins reckon as injuries, the equity of God is taken to be a matter of course, and the forgiveness of sins to be a private affair between God and the individual. When the form of public law is followed, sins reckon as crimes: the exercise, prompted by equity, of the right of pardon, must next be artificially secured as a concession from the inviolability of penal justice, which then forms the basis de novo of a general dispensation for the Christian community, in virtue of the merits of its Founder. The only question is, whether the conception of equity, as fixing the value of grace, is strong enough to justify its being applied in this way.

By employing the arguments I have described, this theory prevents any inconsistency between the grace and the justice of God from appearing at any point. By using the conception of equity to express the grace of God, the latter is made to appear as an accident of His justice which can be exercised without the essence of that justice being in any way altered. But this benefit is counterbalanced by a peculiar disadvantage. It has been remarked already that Divine justice, in the traditional sense, cannot be a positive presupposition serving to explain the Christian dispensation of grace (p. 263). As grace is now explained to be an accident of justice, it at once becomes clear that this accident is called into action in the will of God from without, by the merits of Christ. Now it comes to the same thing whether we trace the dispensation of grace to this cause, or maintain that it rests upon God’s arbitrary volition. A contradiction between the Divine attributes of justice and grace had been avoided earlier by saying that God has to act according to justice, but might act according to grace if He chose. With this the conclusion, that the dispensation of grace rests upon God’s arbitrary will, is in entire agreement. This is really as hostile to the true interests of Christian theology as the Socinian representation of grace as being arbitrary will unaccompanied by universal laws. We are brought here again merely to the same conclusion as before, that the conception of God which dominates the argument is not thought as a unity. Necessity and freedom are not comprised within the conception of the Divine will as elements which mutually condition one another; but necessity is maintained to be at work in His action as prompted by justice, freedom (arbitrary) in the method by which His grace is put in motion. Their correlates in the work of Christ, satisfaction and merit, are materially identical indeed, but formally they are as disparate as necessity and freedom in God. As rendering satisfaction, Christ is both subject to Divine justice and indebted for His mission to the grace of God; as possessing merit, the range of His influence is not determined beforehand by God’s action; in this rôle, rather, He is regarded as putting in motion the Divine grace. But this is to offend against a fundamental presupposition of theology. It was right, by denying merit to man, to ensure the recognition of the essential unity of the Divine world-order, but this principle is as fatally endangered by the apocryphal formula, ” the merits of Christ,” as by any belief in human merit which existed in the Middle Ages. For even though the merits of Christ are based materially on His Godhead, and thus made subordinate to the being of God, yet formally they are referred to His human freedom, and through their being recognised as merits a range of activity is ascribed to Him which is not a priori subjected to the government of God.

This criticism of the way in which Lutheran and Reformed theology has derived the Christian dispensation of grace, is not to be confounded with the objections which have been raised by Faustus Socinus. What I mean is that this theory, in spite of a tendency opposed to that of Socinus, is not sufficiently far removed from the Socinian view of the world, but has too much in common with it. I trust, therefore, that I shall not be misunderstood if I homologate particular objections which Socinus has raised (vol. i. p. 326). Duo si dicunt idem, non est idem. The world-order which lies at the foundation of the theory in question is the moral law under the form of public law. It has already been shown that this combination of ideas involves a contradiction (p. 250). This contradiction naturally influences those inferences which condition the view taken of reconciliation through Christ. That is, if the moral law as such constitutes the original dispensation under which God deals with man, then the necessity of punishing, which follows from the moral law, will be no hindrance to God’s resolving to forgive sins, and carrying out that resolution in a dispensation open to all. Sinners, upon whom educative penalties are laid, may without inconsistency be conceived as objects of pardon. But that the need for punishment is regarded as an obstacle in the way of pardon, and that in order to reconcile them the punishment of a substitute is accepted, is simply a consequence of the presupposed judicial character of the law. There is no immediate relation, however, between moral good and the moral act of pardon and legal punishment, whether it is borne by the guilty themselves or by their substitute. What legal punishment does is to expunge legal guilt, without anything remaining over which civil society can forgive; and therefore the moral judgment of pardon has nothing to do with it. For we can pardon criminals although we lay punishments on them, while we do not pardon every criminal because he has been punished. These conceptions and no other we must apply to God’s dealings with men, for we must keep moral law and civil law altogether distinct. Moreover, according to the moral law, it is conceivable that an innocent man should feel the legal punishment which falls upon a relative—a member of his family or a friend—to be a legal diminution of civil rights also for himself, since in consequence of the punishment of the other he has to suffer certain evils. But in civil society it would be a plain offence against judicial equity to inflict penalties upon an innocent man in order to spare the guilty. When punishment takes the form of fines, the innocent, it is true, can pay for the guilty; but that does not mean that the former is punished for the latter. For the pains and penalties intended by the judge fall, qua sentence, upon the guilty man; and when the innocent man discharges the fine, the action does not imply a compulsory deprivation of civil status, but only a voluntary surrender of property. But from this we can draw no valid inferences regarding punishments which concern liberty and life, in which deprivation must be executed on the person of the guilty. In holding it possible to draw such inferences (vol. i. p. 334), orthodox theologians have fallen into the Socinian error of supposing that sin possesses the character of an offence which can be wiped out by a fine. According to civil law, punishment which affects the liberty of the subject can fall on no one but the offender himself, and cannot justly be transferred by the judge to one who is innocent. Just as little possible is it, according to the moral law, to reckon the moral achievement of one man’s life to another as his own, in such a way as to dispense the latter in any respect from striving after it for himself. For moral action is not a thing which can even be conceived as detached from its author (p. 70). And it is impossible according to civil law likewise, for moral actions do not, as such, fall under civil law. For these reasons the theory of the twofold satisfaction of Christ, which characterises the scholastic theology of the Reformation, is a confused inference from contradictory presuppositions.

§ 34. The theories of the Socinians and of the scholastic theologians of the Reformation regarding the original dispensation of fellowship between God and man, from which they sought to derive the special dispensation of fellowship between them in Christianity, are intended by their authors to be understood as wholly based on reason, though points of support for both were found in the New Testament. We have seen that the Socinian theory was directly designed to express the character of Christianity as the religion of forgiveness. But the conception of the Divine equity which dominates it does not furnish a basis for a universal order of moral action, nor can it form the foundation of Christianity as a general dispensation taking its rise in forgiveness. It really leads to a splitting up of the moral and religious dispensation desiderated, into purely private relationships between God and individual men. The theory of Protestant scholasticism bases the general order of human action upon the conception of Divine justice as a presupposition of reason, while it bases forgiveness as a general dispensation on the Christian Revelation. But it does not find in Divine justice the positive ground of forgiveness; it rather sees in forgiveness merely an exception to Divine justice which, while certainly controlled or conditioned by the latter, is yet combined with it in the conception of God in a merely accidental way. Lastly, in the normative view of the law which answers to God’s justice, the properties of the moral law and of the civil law are conjoined in so absurd a way, that the presuppositions, thence resulting, of the significance of Christ as the organ of Divine grace issue in contradictory conceptions. The basis of this train of thought is to be found in the Hellenic idea of the twofold requital dispensed by God; it is intelligible, therefore, that Christianity should not be deduced from that idea, but proved to be an exception to the rule. This is a misfortune which can neither be concealed nor compensated for by using the conception of vicarious satisfaction to explain the position of Christ within this order. For that conception has no essential relation to the moral law, it contradicts the civil law and even the moral law at times, and least of all can it be proved sound by confusing these two standards together.

The formal error, from which this theory of the Divine world-order suffers, lies in its neglect of the question, what end God has, or can have, in common with the human race. For the nature of fellowship is determined by the end common to both parties; and the law of action emanates from the will of the lawgiver not arbitrarily, nor from any other necessity than that of the preconceived end of the fellowship which the law is meant to serve as a means. Theologians of the older school have set these considerations aside because, under the influence of the Areopagitic conception of God, they cannot bring themselves to assume a real fellowship between God and man. The God who is conceived only as not being the world, must always be negatively related to everything that is real. Thus, even when He is conceived as a spiritual Person Who thinks Himself and wills Himself, this idea—an idea which is superinduced upon the Areopagitic theory, and, so far from being specifically Christian, is Aristotelian—is really robbed of all its force by the remark of Thomas Aquinas that God’s personal end lies incomparably above and beyond the end or purpose of the world (vol. i. p. 62). Therefore the creation of the world, even when explained by Divine love, is yet derived from God’s arbitrary volition. The revelation of Him given in Christianity, moreover, appears equally arbitrary; and though it leads men to the vision of God, yet this end, transcending human nature as it does, has as little relation to man’s essential being as God’s end has to the world which He has created. The scholastic divines of the Reformation break through this rigid conception of mediaeval theology by contending that the purpose, embodied in Christianity, to realise the spiritual and blessed fellowship of man with God, is originally included in the notion of human nature. This truth had to be fought for and won, if monasticism was to be deprived of its claim to be the perfect Christianity, because it realised the supernatural life, the life of the angels, in fellowship with God. But these divines did not clearly understand how much this involved for their whole doctrine of God. If the proper destiny of the human race includes spiritual and blessed fellowship with God, this end cannot be unrelated to God’s personal end. Between the creation of man for this end and the creative will of God it is impossible to think the relation as accidental; it must be necessary. The conception of God, therefore, which consists simply in thinking Him as equivalent to what is not the world, is not exhaustive. Or rather, He is not thought at all, until we gain that positive conception which ensures His differentiation from the world. Instead of perceiving this, the leaders of the theology which is extolled as loyal to the Church never offer us anything more than the shadow-play of Areopagitic negations and affirmations, which explain absolutely nothing, which constitute neither scientific nor Christian knowledge, and which simply must be thrown aside if the Christian view of the world and the practical interests of Protestantism are to be exhibited as necessarily and universally valid.¹⁹

Theology, in delineating the moral order of the world, must take as its starting-point that conception of God in which the relation of God to His Son our Lord is expressed, a relation which, by Christ’s mediation, is extended likewise to His community. For when the Apostles, in the Epistles of the New Testament, describe God as our Father, that is an abbreviated expression for the Christian name for God, which when fully stated runs, “ the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ ” (2 Cor. i. 3, xi. 31; Rom. xv. 6; Col. i. 3; 1 Pet. i. 3; Eph. i. 3). As the name of God is always used in Scripture as a compendious description of His revelation, it is clear that, when God reveals Himself as Father through His Son Jesus Christ, the process is only completed when the community accepts the revelation by acknowledging the Mediator who brings it as its Lord. Any attempt, therefore, to construct a scientific doctrine of God must be wrong which fails to keep in view all the aspects of this name. The name God has the same sense when used of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. xxviii. 19). For the name denotes God in so far as He reveals Himself, while the Holy Spirit is the power of God which enables the community to appropriate His self-revelation as Father through His Son (1 Cor. ii. 12). That the revelation of God through His Son, however, embraces the community which acknowledges His Son as her Lord, and how it does so, is explained by saying that God manifests Himself to the Son and to the community as loving Will (vol. ii. p. 96 ff.). As this conception of God is recognised as coming from the source of knowledge which is authoritative for the Christian community, it likewise follows that the goodness of God to all men, in bestowing on them the good things of nature (Matt. v. 45; Acts xiv. 17), is an inference which Christ drew from the knowledge He possessed of the love of God to Him and to His community. Thus the goodness of God, as the general presupposition of everything, is embraced in the specific attribute of the Divine Fatherhood; or, in other words, the truth that He has revealed Himself to the Christian community as love. There is no other conception of equal worth beside this which need be taken into account. This is especially true of the conception of the Divine holiness, which, in its Old Testament sense, is for various reasons not valid in Christianity, while its use in the New Testament is obscure (vol. ii. pp. 89, 101). Even the recognition of the personality of God does not imply independent knowledge apart from our defining Him as loving Will. It only decides the form to be given to this content, for without this content of loving Will the conception of spiritual personality is not sufficient to explain the world as a connected whole. The step, therefore, which we take now in bringing forward the truly Christian view of God ought not to be understood as though in His contrast to the world God were conceived, first of all, in general, as personality, and secondly, in particular, as loving Will;—and this in such a way that while consistent knowledge of the world might be drawn from the first conception, the second would yield simply more knowledge of the same sort. What I mean is rather this, that the conception of love is the only adequate conception of God, for it enables us, both to understand the revelation which comes through Christ to His community, and at the same time to solve the problem of the world. For this purpose the merely formal conception of personality is insufficient: for it leaves us free to ascribe all possible kinds of content to the Divine Will. Now, if an entirely different sort of world were just as possible for God as the world which actually exists, there is no perceptible reason why the actual world was ever raised by God above the level of possibility. And therefore, either the formal conception of the Divine personality is as unserviceable as a pantheistic notion would be, or it can be successfully employed only as the form whose special content is love.

It cannot be doubted, as a historical fact, that individuality (Besonderheit) is everywhere a characteristic of the religious idea of God. But the Scotists on the one hand, and the Spinozists on the other, regard with distrust and aversion the suggestion that a conception of God marked by this characteristic is an appropriate expression of a scientific principle of knowledge. minatio est negatio, and negation seems altogether incompatible with the idea of God. Scotism, however, fails to explain the fact that there is a real world, while Spinozism fails to explain the world as it really is. But modern Pantheism is not at all averse to the view that the Absolute forms the reality of the world by the gradual particularisation of itself, so as to reach its full realisation through the special organ of the human spirit and its special functions of intuition and methodical knowledge. If we think God as the universal ground of all reality, we cannot avoid ascribing individuality to Him in some way or other. For even in logic the particular comes under the universal only because it comes under the individual. The will, too, becomes the universal ground of particular real acts only by keeping to a definite direction, and simultaneously refraining from other possible directions. On the other hand, the Spinozistic principle that every special determination implies negation, amounts to no more than the logical law that the conceptions of the individual and the differentia always hold good together, or that we distinguish things by their species. If, therefore, the conception of individuality is inapplicable to God, God cannot be distinguished from things, nor things from God. Either everything is God, or everything is world. Either the distinction of things from one another and from the universal substance is a delusion, or it is a self-deception to assume the existence of an intelligent Creator of the world which is distinct from Him, and differentiated within itself. But this latter assumption was found necessary to explain the world, differentiated as it is into nature and spiritual life, with this further circumstance, that men regard their common moral life as the final end of the world (§ 29). To eliminate individuality from the conception of God, therefore, is wrong, for it leads to absurd conclusions.

God’s personal will, like any other force, can be thought as the cause of effects only when acting in a definite direction. As Will, God can be thought only as in conscious relation to the end which He Himself is. Nevertheless, this formal truth is inadequate to explain anything which is not God; it is inadequate, therefore, to explain the world. Unless it can be shown that, and how, the world is embraced in the personal end which God sets before Himself, then even this analysis of the Divine Will leads to nothing. We shall find that the conception of love, which is the key to the revelation of God in Christianity, carries us past the difficulties which accompany that analysis. Still, the preliminary question arises, whether to determine the Divine Will in this specific way is not to menace the value of the conception of God. For if God, conceived under the special attribute of love, is subordinated to a generic conception of will, it might be argued that this generic idea, as the higher, might claim to be in value the equivalent of God. Here the difficulty solved above returns in another form. Nevertheless, the specific character assigned to God’s Will is not such that the affirmation of it is the negation of some other specific character which in itself might possibly belong to Him, nor is it such that some other being might have to be viewed, under some other category, as deserving comparison with God. The truth rather is, that only through the special attribute of love is it possible to derive the world from God; this quality of love, therefore, serves in general to discover to us in God the ground of the unity of nature and spirit, and the law of their co-existence. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as lessening the cosmic significance of God. The logical superiority of the genus to the species never implies that the genus has an existence apart from the species. The conception of God, therefore, when it is specifically determined as love, is not to be regarded as being subordinated to some hypothetical substance, called “Will in general” or “indeterminate Will,” and thus possessed of the absoluteness which does not belong to Will when defined as love. For we have seen that indeterminate Will is incapable of explaining anything.

The word “love” is frequently used to denote the feeling of the worth of an object for the Self. But as such feeling always sets the will in motion, either to appropriate the loved object or to enrich its existence, ordinary usage comprises these kinds of movement of the will also under the designation of love. Nor is common usage ambiguous in doing so, for the two aspects of the emotion are closely related to one another. Love, as feeling, fulfils its nature when it excites the will; and love, as will, includes the feeling of the same name. The conception of love, therefore, is completely expressed by combining both. Love is will aiming either at the appropriation of an object or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth. But this definition needs to be supplemented by special qualifications. First, it is necessary that the objects which are loved should be of like nature to the subject which loves, namely, persons. When we speak of love for things or animals, the conception is degraded beneath its proper meaning. Secondly, love implies a will which is constant in its aim. If the objects change, we may have fancies, but we cannot love. Thirdly, love aims at the promotion of the other’s personal end, whether known or conjectured. To render assistance in ordinary matters does not require love, but only good-feeling, a less definite thing. Love, however, is not merely interested in the loved one’s affairs, which may perhaps have simply an accidental connection with him. What love does is rather to estimate everything which concerns the other, by its bearing on the character in which the loved one is precious to the lover. Whatever valuable spiritual acquirements the other may possess, or whatever is still necessary for his perfection, becomes the content of the definite ideal which the lover sets before himself. Love desires either to promote, to maintain, and through sympathetic interest to enjoy the individuality of character acquired by the other, or to assist him in securing those blessings which are necessary to ensure the attainment of his personal ideal. Fourthly, if love is to be a constant attitude of the will, and if the appropriation and the promotion of the other’s personal end are not alternately to diverge, but to coincide in each act, then the will of the lover must take up the other’s personal end and make it part of his own. That is, love continually strives to develop and to appropriate the individual self-end of the other personality, regarding this as a task necessary to the very nature of its own personal end, its own conscious individuality. This characteristic implies that the will, as love, does not give itself up for the other’s sake. To take up this position is not, as some have objected, to introduce the element of egoism into the conception of love. For the will is egoistic when it sets itself in opposition to the common aims of others; but in the present case, the will is directed to the closest fellowship with another and to a common end. This conception of love may without difficulty be tested by being applied to all sub-species of love, such as friendship, conjugal affection, paternal affection, and love for one’s parents.

When, now, we apply this conception to God, it becomes clear that neither the indeterminate notion of a cosmos, nor the notion of the natural world, can be conceived as the correlate of this particular aspect of the Divine will; for in them there is nothing akin to God. The proposition, that God created the world out of love, is useless to begin with, so far as it can bear the meaning that God communicates Himself to mere creatures, and gives their existence realisation as though it were the ultimate aim of His personal end. We can find an object which corresponds to His nature as love only in one or many personal beings. We cannot, of course, decide from the conception of love itself whether the forth-bringing of one loved person, or the forth-bringing, education, and perfecting of a world of spirits, constitutes the end which, under the conception of love, must be thought as embraced within the personal end of God. But the world also is for us a given fact, and an examination of the various aspects of the conception of God cannot but have some bearing upon the existence of the world, in which a multiplicity of persons exist as members of a race. These come into existence as a multitude of individuals, participating, as they do, in material and organic nature. For matter is the original expression of the multiplex, and the precondition of all multiplicity; while organic matter is the expression of the differentiation of a living multiplicity conditioned by the nexus of species and genus. Consideration of the world, therefore, shows that a multiplicity of persons, together composing a race, may be the object of the Divine love; while, apart from this empirical observation, it is at least as conceivable that God’s personal end should be bound up with that of a single kindred spirit as with that of a multiplicity of spirits.

Now, if we follow out, in the first instance, the connection given in experience between the world of spirits and nature, we find that we may draw, from the relation between the world of spirits and God’s character as love, a necessary conclusion regarding the origin of the world of nature. If it be an essential part of God’s personal end that He should create a multitude of spirits, formed after their own kind, and that He should bring them to perfection in order to manifest Himself to them as love, then the world of nature, viewed in its separate formation as distinct from the world of men, cannot be viewed as a mere arbitrary appendix, but must rather be regarded as a means to the Divine end. The rest of nature might be an arbitrary appendix to the existence of the human race, were it not called into existence by a Divine Will whose character is love——were it, in other words, the creation of a purely indeterminate Divine Will. But absolutely nothing definite or real can be derived from such a ground as this. Nature, therefore, must likewise be explained from the Divine Will in its self-given character of love. But, owing to its lack of kinship with God, it cannot be the direct object and the last end of His loving will. And so nothing remains but to conclude, that nature is called into being to serve as a means to God’s essential purpose in creating the world of spirits. In this way the statement that God has created the world out of love receives its proper limitations, and the creation of nature by God is given the value of a relative necessity, the necessity, namely, of serving as a means to God’s previously chosen end of calling into being a multitude of spirits akin to Himself. Granted, therefore, that the world of nature in general cannot be known directly as the creation of God, and that, on the other hand, the moral development of men as individuals, and their union through progressive fellowship in good, demand for their explanation the idea of God, it must still be remembered that these results cannot be attained save through the means furnished by our natural endowment. For the apparatus by which the individual life and all commerce in things spiritual is carried on, presupposes for its permanent existence the whole immeasurable system of the world, mechanical, chemical, organic. Consequently, if we must conceive God as necessary to guarantee our personal morality and our moral fellowship, we must recognise that the entire universe is designed to serve this Divine end; for otherwise we could not view even our moral life as an object of Divine care. The whole universe, therefore, considered thus as the precondition of the moral kingdom of created spirits, is throughout God’s creation for this end.

We have now provisionally recognised a multitude of spirits, together forming a race, as a possible object of the Divine love. But the question may be asked whether, since multiplicity is a necessary characteristic of them, they can really be akin in nature to the one Divine Will. For the human race, in virtue of its attribute of multiplicity, is involved in the conditions under which the genera and species of all organic creatures exist. Quâ multiplicity, therefore, the human race is akin to nature and not akin to God. In order to prove its kinship with God, it would be necessary to conceive the human race as a unity in spite of its natural multiplicity, a unity which is other than its natural generic unity. The conception we are in search of is given in the idea of the Christian community, which makes the Kingdom of God its task. This idea of the moral unification of the human race, through action prompted by universal love to our neighbour, represents a unity of many which belongs to the realm of the thoroughly defined, in other words, the good will. The multitude of spirits who, for all their natural and generic affinity, may yet, in the practical expression they give to their will, be utterly at variance, attain a supernatural unity through mutual and social action prompted by love, action which is no longer limited by considerations of family, class, or nationality—and this without abrogating the multiplicity given in experience. It is an essential characteristic of the Kingdom of God that, as the final end which is being realised in the world and as the supreme good of created spirits, it transcends the world, just as God Himself is supramundane. The idea of the Kingdom of God, therefore, gives a supramundane character to humanity as bound to Him, i.e. it both transcends and completes all the natural and particular motives which unite men together. Consequently, the unity of the human race thus reached is so far akin to the unity of the Divine Will that in it may be seen the object of the Divine love. But the community, which is called on to form itself by union into the Kingdom of God, and whose activity consists in carrying out this assigned task, depends entirely for its origin on the fact that the Son of God is its Lord, to Whom it renders obedience. The community, as the object to which God’s love extends, cannot even be conceived apart from the presupposition that it is governed continually by its Founder as its Lord, and that its members go through the experience of being transformed into that peculiar character of which their Lord is the original, and which, through Him, is communicated to them (2 Cor. iii. 18; Rom. viii. 29). The community of Christ, therefore, is the correlative of the love of God, only because the love in which God embraces His Son and assures to Him His unique position (Mark i. 11, ix. 7; John xv. 9, xvii. 24; Col. i. 13; Eph. i. 6), comes through Him to act upon those likewise who belong to Him as His disciples or His community (vol. ii. p. 97). Every aspect of this relationship to Christ, however, is comprised under the principle, that the Son of God is acknowledged as the Lord of His community, and under this condition transfers to it His own relation to God. The perfect name of God, by which He reveals Himself to this community, owes its interpretation, accordingly, to these progressive manifestations of His love. God is love, inasmuch as He reveals Himself through His Son to the community, which He has founded, in order to form it into the Kingdom of God, so that in designing for men this supramundane destiny He realises His own glory, or the fulfilment of His personal end. Herein is the love of God perfected, that we love our brethren in the Kingdom of God (1 John iv. 12). But as, from our point of view, this consummation always appears as one yet to be attained, our progress towards it is guided by our perception of the truth that for us the love of God, in His relation to His Son our Lord, is an assured fact. Lastly, it becomes clear in this connection that the destination of man for the Kingdom of God, in the form of the community of God’s Son, is to be included in the Christian conception of man, and not to be distinguished from it as something lying above and beyond it.

If, now, the creation and government of the world are accordingly to be conceived as the means whereby created spiritual beings——men——are formed into the Kingdom of God in the community of Christ, then the view of the world given in Christianity is the key to solve the problem of the world in general. The fact that this religion, in its origin, wears a particular historical guise, is no hindrance to its being destined to become the universal faith of humanity. The conception of God, however, through which this result is reached, avoids the difficulties in which is entangled the conception of God held by the older school of theologians (§ 32), and rises above the dilemma in which the orthodox and the Scotist theories circle aimlessly round one another. When God is conceived as love, through the relation of His will to His Son and the community of the Kingdom of God, He is not conceived as being anything apart from and prior to His self-determination as love. He is either conceived as love, or simply not at all. If anyone thinks it necessary, after the analogy of human personality, to conceive God first as infinite Being, or as indeterminate Will, or as quiescent Character, which may advance within itself to self-determination as love, what he conceives under these prefatory ideas is simply not God. For they mean something that becomes. But God is conceived as loving Will, when we regard His Will as set upon the forth-bringing of His Son and the community of the Kingdom of God; and if we abstract from that, what we conceive is not God at all. At the same time, the eternity of God is guaranteed by the very fact that we are compelled to think God in that self-determination as love in which we actually do think Him; for the content of our thought would not be really God, if we still posited something as prior in order to deduce from it His character as love. Nor is the act of thought which I am describing at all difficult. It has its analogy in the feeling of self and the judgment upon self of which we are conscious in exalted moments of moral will, and in which we discover experimentally our power of self-determination towards good, and rise above all the obstacles which are present within us and without.

Lastly, these results decide the twofold question, whether God wills the good because it is the good a priori for Him also, or whether a thing is good merely because God wills it. Both suppositions are false. We cannot at all conceive a will which is not definitely directed to some end. The Scotists held that God could as easily command as forbid deceit; the will, however, which they thus ascribe to Him is a will without direction. And a will which should receive its direction from an a priori substantive righteousness is not the self-determination befitting God. Now the conception of good employed in the twofold question stated above ought to be deduced exclusively from the consistent aim of the highest human fellowship, i.e. from the law of the Kingdom of God. But if the Kingdom is the necessary correlate of God’s personal end, to which the Divine will is directed, then it is inconceivable that God could command deceit or theft, for they are contrary to the persoual end of God as expressed in His Kingdom. On the other hand, the thought of the Kingdom of God as the content of His personal end is a datum, it is true, for our knowledge, but not for God before He determines Himself in His own Will. The truth is rather that it is brought forth eternally in God’s self-determination as love; it holds good for God, therefore, not before, but in His self-determination, as expressing the direction His self-determination cannot but take in order to realise His purpose. And we simply cannot have a right conception of the good as defining the relations of the multitude of persons who compose the Kingdom of God, if we abstract from the form of the Divine Will, and from its content as love.

§ 35. The Christian idea of the Kingdom of God, which has been proved the correlate of the conception of God as love, denotes the association of mankind—an association both extensively and intensively the most comprehensive possible—through the reciprocal moral action of its members, action which transcends all merely natural and particular considerations. Now it has been shown (vol. ii. p. 295) that this, the ruling idea of Jesus, failed to maintain itself as central in the ‘practical interest of the apostles, and came to possess only the limited sense of the redemptive consummation expected in the future. Cares about the formation of congregations came so much to the front, that the entire moral interest was concentrated on their internal consolidation. In order to preserve the true articulation of the Christian view of the world, it is necessary clearly to distinguish between viewing the followers of Christ, first, under the conception of the Kingdom of God, and secondly, under the conception of the worshipping community, or the Church. This distinction depends on the difference which exists between moral and devotional action, despite the fact that in Christianity moral action likewise can claim the value of service to God. Now every devotional act, in the technical sense of the word, is an end in itself to this extent, that it never can be at the same time a means to an act of the same kind. One may intend sacrifice and prayer to be the means of winning Divine favour and Divine gifts; but, among all the various possible devotional rites, it is neither conceivable nor justifiable to subordinate any one of them to another as a means to an end. Each devotional act, rather, just like artistic action, possesses in itself its end and its power to satisfy the human heart. On the other hand, every moral act, whatever its range, has this peculiarity, that it must be conceived at once as an end and as a means to all other possible moral acts. This is true even when the agent’s original intention does not include the thought of morality as a means to itself, but the fact is brought out only subsequently that those moral goods, which are produced by action, always stimulate action afresh. Those who believe in Christ, therefore, constitute a Church in so far as they express in prayer their faith in God the Father, or present themselves to God as men who through Christ are well-pleasing to Him. The same believers in Christ constitute the Kingdom of God in so far as, forgetting distinctions of sex, rank, or nationality, they act reciprocally from love, and thus call into existence that fellowship of moral disposition and moral blessings which extends, through all possible gradations, to the limits of the human race.²⁰ The fellowship of Christians for the purpose of religious worship manifests itself in the sphere of sense, and therefore betrays its peculiar nature to every observer. On the other hand, the moral Kingdom of God, even while it manifests itself sensibly in action, as a whole reveals its peculiar nature to Christian faith alone. Moreover, the fellowship of Christians for worship gives rise to legal ordinances which it requires for its own sake; but the Kingdom of God, while not injuriously affected by the fact that moral action under certain circumstances assumes the garb of legal forms, does not in the least depend on them for its continued existence.

The importance of this distinction, for theology as well as for practical life, will appear if we remember what confusion and obscurity have gathered round this point. The early Church, it is true, was saved from confounding the two conceptions by the fact that, following the example of the apostles, it regarded the Kingdom of God as denoting in general the object of the Christian hope, but the Church as a present institution, representing the task to be accomplished during the period of earthly life. Instead of this view, which is incomplete and yet not positively incorrect, Augustine introduced into the Western Church the fatally erroneous opinion, that the Kingdom of God, which stretches down the whole of human history parallel with the kingdom of sin, exists at present in the form of the Catholic Church, and that Christ’s reign of a thousand years, which occupies the last epoch of the world’s history, does not still lie in the future, but has begun with the founding of the Church. In the Kingdom of God, he teaches, true righteousness is realised; the State, on the other hand, as the kingdom of this world, has sin for its principle, and can be brought into harmony with the Divine order only by subordinating itself to the government of the Church. This theory has determined the policy of the Papacy in opposition to the State up to the present moment. History, however, has brought to light the fact that in this “Kingdom of God,” governed by His earthly vicegerent, righteousness consists in the most selfish quarrelsomeness, and in the employment of all means, whether of violence or of falsehood, which may be found of use for this purpose.

Nothing shows so clearly that the Reformers have broken with this theory, in which culminates Augustine’s view of the world, as their recognition of the State as a directly Divine institution, and of civil justice as a positive moral good. They offer no deliberate criticism upon the above-mentioned theory, especially as Augustine’s argument, as such, does not seem to have been known to them. The truth is, they wholly lose sight of the idea of the Kingdom of God so far as its eschatological sense was not forced upon them by the New Testament. But, on the other hand, they construct an idea analogous to it under the title of the “Kingdom of Christ.” From this idea sprang the theoretical opposition, and the more important practical alienation, which arose between Luther and Zwingli. Luther, as a theologian, had arrived at a clear-cut antithesis between religion and the State; and so by the Kingdom of Christ he understood the inward union between believers and the Mediator, which subsists exclusively through the Word of God and faith, and is bound by no law or legal government: regnum Christi est spirituale. Zwingli, on the other hand, was so far influenced by the theocratic aspirations of the later Middle Ages, in line with Wiclif, Huss, and Savonarola (vol. i. p. 134), that he directly assigned to the State the function of realising the true religion by means of its laws and government. Accordingly, in conscious opposition to Luther and his followers, he defended the principle: regnum Christi est externum. This is the standard by which his reforming and political activity must be gauged; this also explains the tragic close of his life.

The principle he asserted, however, has not remained determinative for the ecclesiastical constitution which owes its origin to him, nor for that which Calvin founded, but was brought into operation again only by the Puritans, and that under completely altered circumstances. Calvin, rather, holds to a theory in evident agreement with Luther’s. He regards the Kingdom of Christ as the inward spiritual union of believers with Christ, which means that Christ, through His Spirit, guarantees to them the certainty of eternal life, leads them to victory over all obstacles hostile to salvation, and ministers support to them for the patient endurance of all their cares and sufferings. But as Luther’s idea of the spiritual Kingdom of Christ did not suggest any legal constitution for the Church, and the State had to be called in to assume this latter responsibility, Melanchthon, Luther, and Calvin come back to this, that they admit the Zwinglian principle that the State has a religious function, and concede its validity as a practical measure, alongside of the theoretical distinction between the State on the one hand and religion and the Church on the other. This comes out in the theory put forward first of all by Melanchthon, that the State is called upon to protect both tables of the Divine law, and therefore has not only to prevent the false worship of God, but also to provide for the true. The only way in which it was possible to avoid the plain inconsistency between these two positions was by holding that the legal constitution of the Church, which it receives from the State, forms no part of the conception of the Kingdom of Christ, and that the only organs of Christ’s Kingdom are the religious factors, the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It was only from the point of view which affirms that discipline maxima ex parte a potestate clavium et spirituali iurisdictione pendet, that Calvin ventured to vindicate that also as an essential note of the Church; while he omitted to consider theoretically the important practical influence exercised upon discipline by the civil power.²¹

Luther’s conception of the Kingdom of Christ also coincides with the general Reformation conception of the Church as the fellowship of believers, in so far as the latter conception is taken in a purely religious sense, and defined exclusively with reference to the creative action of God upon believers, and not as relating to their corresponding activity, namely, the worship of God. But this conception of the Kingdom of Christ is very far indeed from expressing the fellowship of moral action prompted by love. This, the content of the original idea of the Kingdom of God, is simply not apprehended at all in this form by the Reformers and their orthodox successors, with the single exception of Luther’s Catechism and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (p. 11). This indicates an essential defect in the Reformers’ compass of thought and in the scholastic theology which is counted loyal to the Church, when we compare these with the authority of Christ Himself. Besides, there is a tenet, peculiar to Melanchthon, which might end in assigning to the Church or the Kingdom of Christ such a significance as to smuggle in Roman Catholic error regarding the legal authority of the Church in matters of faith. Melanchthon, that is to say, in his conception of the Kingdom of Christ, expressly accepts preaching as a means. Now preaching is a legal institution of the Church, incongruous therefore with the spiritual and inward nature of the union of the believers with Christ expressed in the notion of His Kingdom. But to assert this connection between preaching and the Church, as is further done by Gerhard and Quenstedt, and also by Reformed divines, is to maintain in principle the same idea as is implied in the claim made by the Catholic Church to be the fellowship of godly righteousness and blessedness, on the ground that she is constituted a unity through the hierarchy as a legal institution. If, following the Reformers, we regard the Kingdom of Christ or the Church, understood in a purely religious way, as the fellowship of believers brought into existence by God through the preaching of His Word, and essentially characterised by that fact, then, in harmony with Melanchthon’s Smalcald Confessional tract, de potestate et iurisdictione episcoporum (§ 68), we conceive the community of believers as the subject by which the Divine Word is proclaimed, without thinking of any special office for the discharge of this task. But when we think of this special office as a means essential to the Church, this is to conceive the Church as a society of a legal character. And so Melanchthon, in connecting the office of preaching as he did with the Kingdom of Christ, committed an indiscretion erroneous in theory, and in practice calculated to have serious consequences. A legally constituted Church, be it Catholic or Lutheran, is not the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Christ, for the simple reason that the Church is not the Kingdom of God. Activity of the most important kind for the service of the Church may be of no value whatever for the Kingdom of God. Nor is devotion to the Church a virtue which could in any way compensate for the absence of conscientiousness, justice, truthfulness, uprightness, tolerance. While we must at present put up with a great deal which contradicts this principle, I have always counted what Christ says in Matt. vii. 21–23 as part of the consolations of the Gospel.

According to the canons of the New Testament, then, we find that the self-same subject, namely, the community drawn together by Christ, constitutes the Church in so far as its members unite in the same religious worship, and, further, create for this purpose a legal constitution; while, on the other hand, it constitutes the Kingdom of God in so far as the members of the community give themselves to the interchange of action prompted by love. These two modes of activity, however, are not unrelated to one another. They rather condition one another reciprocally. For Christians must get to know one another as such in the exercises of Divine worship, if they are to make sure of occasions to combine together in mutual action from love. On the other hand, the whole range of this loving activity serves to support the maintenance and extension of fellowship in Divine worship. For there is nothing from which the latter suffers more than from slackness in discharging the tasks of the Kingdom of God, even though that Kingdom consists in righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost (Rom. xiv. 17, 18).

§ 36. The Kingdom of God, then, is the correlate of God’s love in so far as it is the association of men for reciprocal and common action from the motive of love—an association which is determined, no longer by the natural conditions of affinity in the narrower sense, but by the unity of man’s spiritual constitution. So far as this association comes to be a reality through the mediation of Christ in His community, it is always due to the operation of God, and only subject to this condition can it be completely conceived. And this does not mean merely that the individuals combined in the Kingdom of God are subject to Divine action as creatures and members of the natural world; it means, besides, that, as possessed of moral freedom and in accordance with their spiritual constitution and destiny, they stand in the line of that purpose which, from our interpretation of love, we have found to be the content of God’s personal end. Accordingly, the instances of human action from love which are comprehended under the Kingdom of God constitute, as the correlate of God’s personal end and as His specific operations, the perfect revelation of the truth that God is love. What is here stated by way of deduction is anticipated by John, when he says that if we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us (1 John ii. 5, iv. 22; cf. vol. ii. p. 376). The creation of this fellowship of love among men, accordingly, is not merely the end of the world, but at the same time the completed revelation of God Himself, beyond which none other and none higher can be conceived. This principle supplies a basis for that religious and theological way of looking at the world, which sets itself in opposition to those Areopagitic conclusions whose baneful after-effects are present in all forms of orthodoxy. Instead of holding with Thomas Aquinas that God’s personal end has no relation to the end of the world, we find not only that God’s personal end and the end of the world are one, but also that the knowledge of the end of the world attainable by us coincides with the Christian idea of the nature and the completed revelation of God.

On the basis of these results we may approach certain difficulties which spring, partly from a closer examination of the theory we have arrived at, partly from a comparison of it with our historical experience. The first question is, how dependence on God, as the form of human action from love, is compatible with freedom; for not only is it necessary to conceive such action as free, but freedom is attested by the immediate feeling of self (§ 6). I should not venture to touch upon this classical question of theology, were it not that by pursuing the path we have adopted it is possible so to limit it as to facilitate its solution. The controversy between Pelagius and Augustine has become the regular model for theological discussion of the problem, but on these lines, certainly, no solution of it is to be looked for. For the dilemma, between freedom of choice (Wahlfreiheit) and the Divinely-imposed necessitation by original sin and electing grace, involves merely a small section of the problem in its philosophical form; and the shifting opinions, which appear in ecclesiastical theology, regarding the relation between grace and freedom, have never been determined by the principles which suggest themselves most readily in theology. For within Christianity experience teaches that it is just in and through a special kind of dependence on God that we possess freedom to do good. Theology, therefore, is only concerned with the question whether the law of freedom cannot be found by an analysis of this special experience; whereas Pelagius, by his general conception of freedom of choice, excluded a priori every law of the kind, and Augustine merely maintained as against freedom a law of sin and predestination. Between these two positions there is no medium, and a theology shut up to this dilemma is condemned to help itself out by a circumvention of the difficulty, which certainly takes a different form with Thomists, Scotists, Lutherans, and Calvinists, but is always equally unsatisfactory.

If freedom signifies that in which personality is unlike nature, although in virtue of its bodily organisation personality is interwoven with nature and receives from it impulses of a coercive kind, yet freedom is not the indeterminate in general, or that which is incapable of determination. Freedom, rather, is something quite as determinate as the system of nature, for only so can it be conceived as decidedly distinct from or opposed to the latter. Freedom, to begin with, is the quality of self-determination by universal ideals. Conscious self-determination in general would not, by itself, be an adequate expression for freedom: for even the coercive operation of particular impulses assumes in the soul the form of conscious self-determination. Nothing short of self-determination by universal ideals constitutes that capacity of the spirit which sets a limit to the propensities and their compulsion, and thus makes itself known as a force opposed to them. If now the spirit determines itself uninterruptedly by a single end, then, as a power ruling over its individual impulses, it is free. For freedom from compulsion—the negative sense of the conception—is actually realised only when, in a positive sense, power is attained over such influences as can in themselves, or under certain conditions, exercise a compulsion which has its basis in nature. Freedom, as the power of self-determination supreme over our impulses, is not attained, however, when the end which dominates our self-determination is bad, or when it consists in the satisfaction of a single impulse. For in that case we have only a partial power over our impulses, while the pursuit of a bad end implies a defect of freedom as against the single dominant impulse. Even though the general ends of our family, or class, or nationality form our personal end, self-determination exclusively by regard for family feeling, the interest of a class, or patriotism, may be bad if it sets itself in opposition to common ends that are higher still. In such cases what binds the will is certainly not a form of personal selfishness; but yet the limitation of our moral interest to these ends of merely relative universality implies a refined or idealised selfishness, and therefore a defect of freedom as against the impulse arising from natural partiality for one’s relatives, for those who follow the same occupation, or for public law and the State. Freedom, therefore, consists in self-determination by that end which, by possessing the most universal content, makes it possible to subordinate to it all individual impulses and all moral aims which may be particular in their range. In other words, freedom is permanent self-determination by the good end, the standard of which is to be found in the law of universal love for man, or, in Christian terminology, permanent self-determination by the Kingdom of God as final end. The Kingdom of God, however, is at the same time the end of the world in general; accordingly, action which is guided by its aims proves itself free in the positive sense likewise, in so far as it is controlled by the consciousness that all interaction between surrounding nature and one’s own natural character is to be estimated solely as a means subservient to the agent. If, now, this action within the Kingdom of God be regarded in its completeness, viewed, i.e., according to its religious idea, then the man who perceives himself to be free in the relations alluded to, must at the same time conceive himself as dependent on God throughout the whole range of his activity. For the Kingdom of God, in which we come to know freedom experimentally, being as it is the highest universal end by which our self-determination can be guided, is included as the object of Divine love in God’s personal end; in other words, it is dependent upon God as a whole, and therefore also in all the particular relations which go to make up the whole. Thus there is no inner contradiction in this theory. And if, nevertheless, human knowledge in this field can conceive freedom of action and dependence on God only as alternatives, this is so because men cannot, like God, survey simultaneously the system of the whole in all its parts and connections. It is their part, therefore, to aim in their individual action at the final end of the whole, and thus become conscious of their freedom; and, while doing so, they may hope to come to possess the sense that, as members of the whole, they are dependent on God, and that in particular, as active members of the Kingdom of God, they form part of God’s highest revelation of Himself.

Hence arises a new reason why we should criticise both the Lutheran-Calvinistic and the Socinian theories of the moral order. Both are out of harmony with Christianity exactly in so far as they are not guided by the Kingdom of God as a positive end which, as common both to God and man, follows from the conception of Divine love. It is for this reason that both schools have failed to reconcile, at any single point, moral freedom and dependence upon God. In various forms they give fixity to the customary experience that freedom and dependence are mutually exclusive. The Socinians begin with the position that men are created by God like slaves without rights, and therefore, as mere chattels, are dependent on His pleasure. It is added that He has given them a claim upon His equity (Billigkeit), and the result is a dispensation in which God and men co-operate, alternately free and dependent on each other, just as in a private relationship one who has more power compounds with those who have less. The theory of the Lutherans and Calvinists begins with the position that men, created by God with an innate right to blessedness, have a range of action not embraced in any knowable Divine end, but only limited by the condition of good works imposed by God. True, one might say that this domain of human life, directed as it is to the goal of blessedness, is still subservient to the glory of God, and therefore to His personal end. But a consideration such as that is in its nature ineffectual; for this reason, that the punishment of Adam’s sin by the condemnation of his race, or at least the eternal rejection of the greater part of mankind, is declared to be as appropriate a means to God’s glory as the salvation of mankind, or of the eternally elect. In fact, we find here no concrete idea of the Divine end, in and through which a specific relationship between God and man is essentially involved, and a basis given for some necessary form of Revelation. And so, after man’s relative freedom and relative dependence on God had been affirmed as the original form of the world-order, the latter, in consequence of the treatment awarded to Adam’s sin, veers round into an assumption of human dependence on Divine arrangements, so complete that neither in the status of sin nor in the status of grace is freedom conceded, or, as in Lutheranism, conceded only by an inconsistency. However irrational these positions turn out in particular respects, yet the starting-points of both theories are rationalistic, in the same way as the opposed theories of Pelagius and Augustine are dominated by the common experience that freedom and dependence are mutually exclusive. But it is not for Christian theology to start from such commonplaces of superficial experience; otherwise it cannot interpret those special experiences, belonging to the Christian life, in which moral freedom and dependence on God coincide. But if we start, as we must, from the analysis of freedom as subservient to the final end of the Kingdom of God, then we are not only forced to regard this use of freedom as being eo ipso entire dependence on God, but there results this further rule, that we must employ these two ways of looking at things alternately, because we cannot, like God, include in one view the whole of the Kingdom of God and our incorporation in it. Simultaneously, however, this practical principle emerges, that, provided we continually guide our action, in all its special relations, by the highest and universal end, we thereby take our place in the system of the Kingdom of God, the object of Divine love.

§ 37. A peculiar difficulty arises, however, when we institute a comparison between this principle and the history of the human race. What we are in search of is a moral order for mankind in general; the order represented by the Kingdom of God, however, holds good merely for the Christian portion of mankind. Accordingly, the general truth that God is love seems to be imperilled if the correlate of the Divine love, the Kingdom of God and its law, is realised merely in a particular, temporally and spatially limited, domain of human history, and has not governed the development of humanity from the beginning. The theological schools, whose theories we have rejected, deserve to be pardoned, at least for this reason if for no other, that they have undertaken to exhibit a moral order which shall embrace all mankind as related to the one God. Without this, we are apt to repeat Marcion’s error and make the God Who is love, and has created His Kingdom through Christ, distinct from the God Who made the world, and rules over natural humanity, or at least over the Jewish people.

Now it is worthy of remark that Augustine escapes from this dilemma by assuming that the Kingdom of God, of which Christianity is the completion, has always existed ever since there were men, that it constituted the dispensation under which our first parents lived before the Fall, that after the Fall it resumed its course with Abel and then again with Seth, and that it has had a connected, though oftentimes a hidden, existence during the whole course of human history. Augustine vindicates this conception by pointing to the fact that righteous Israelites, in believing the promises of their religion, really exercised faith in Christ; and at the same time he infers, from the example of Job the Idumean, that even those belonging to other peoples could live according to God, could please God, and belong to His Kingdom (De civitate dei, xviii. 47). Now we cannot, it is true, follow him in this view of history; it does not solve the difficulty as to how the universal significance of the Kingdom of God for the relationship between the human race and God is to be reconciled with its temporal limitations, as commencing with Jesus. And this difficulty Augustine himself felt still more deeply; for he puts to himself the question how God can be thought as Lord under all conditions, if He did not always have creatures to serve Him. This question he answers by referring to the world of angels, which existed eternally, even though created in time and not equally eternal with God (xii. 15). But just in this theory we find a precise expression of the difference between time and eternity, which in part seems to admit merely of a casual relationship between God and creation, and in part throws upon God the semblance of temporal change. How to escape this difficulty is the peculiar problem which arises out of the course, as hitherto followed, of our investigation into the relation which exists between the conception of God as love and the Kingdom of God which has been called into life by Christ: Augustine thinks that the difficulty described above is due to an imprudent use of the analogy of human life. In this he is right; but the brilliant antitheses in which he describes the conditions of the Divine volition and action have no meaning save the negative one, that these conditions lie beyond our powers of thought.²²

If any further knowledge whatever on this point is possible, it can be attained only by distinguishing accurately those elements in the idea of the eternity of God which are treated by Augustine himself. For him, the eternity of God implies, first, the inward continuity and identity of God’s purpose; secondly, existence without beginning or end. These two ideas are heterogeneous, and have no necessary relation to one another. If by eternity we understand the unchanging continuity and identity of the Divine will in relation to its goal, then we cannot place existence without beginning or end on a par with the former element, for it does not necessarily exclude a change of will. Besides, this formula, for one thing, is not a positive conception; for another, it must in a certain sense be predicated of the world, just as we are accustomed to apply it to God (p. 234). For in every act of knowledge we presuppose that the world and its orderly system always exist, for if we were to suppose the world non-existent, our knowledge would cease. And this holds true not merely of our knowledge of parts of the world, but also of our knowledge of God. For there, too, we cannot abstract from the world. If, therefore, we are unable to place ourselves in thought before the beginning or after the end of the world, without being forced to think ourselves away and cease to think, we are shut up either to conceiving the world as without beginning or end, or to holding that it always exists. But such a conclusion has only the negative value of saying that we cannot represent to ourselves the characteristics which would actually belong to the beginning of the world, and that we cannot abstract from its existence. Now, the existence of God without beginning or end likewise signifies that, in comparing the world with God and explaining it as arising from His will, we cannot think God as non-existent. But just as the conception of endless existence, when applied to the world, merely expresses the limits of our faculties, and accordingly does not exclude the possibility that on other grounds the world has a beginning, so one might discover grounds showing that God, Who always exists, nevertheless has a beginning in Himself. This, at least, is what the theosophy of the school of Böhme comes to. No guarantee, therefore, which would ensure the essential distinction between God and the world is to be got by following this line of thought. Besides, if we express that distinction by applying the predicate “eternal” to God, then it is inadmissible to speak of the eternity of the world. For the world, besides existing, is always liable to change, and to say that the world always exists implies merely that we cannot conceive its beginning or its end. If, on the other hand, the idea of the eternity of God is taken as referring to the continual and immutable aim with which His will is directed towards His purpose, and towards the Kingdom of God as within that purpose, then the positive meaning of this conception of eternity is given when we compare it with the changing action of God in time, from which we can no more abstract in theology than in religion. If we tried to escape from this idea, we should have to deny the reality of all individual existence. On the other hand, it is impossible to explain the world successfully either from the conception of a universal substance, or from that of an indeterminate will. Any attempt at such explanation can succeed only if we conceive the Will of God, the presupposed ground of the whole, as set in a certain direction. God’s Will, permanent and certain of itself, directed towards the realisation of the Kingdom of God as the ethical and supramundane unity of a multitude of souls, forms, for the sake of this end, the ground of everything, whether multiplex or individual, which serves as a means to its accomplishment. We must therefore conclude that God creates in time the multiplicity of things, which, as superior or inferior to each other, become causes and effects.

But now, is it a defect for God that the Kingdom of God is realised only at an enormous distance of time, not only from the beginning of the human race, but still further from the beginning of creation? For it was under this impression that Augustine felt himself compelled not merely to date the beginning of the Kingdom of God from the creation of the first man, but to carry back its existence to the original creation of the angels—both to the detriment of the religious value to be put upon the claims which Christ makes for His unique work. But the goal of human history and of creation, though, measured from the beginning of both, it is late in being reached, does not therefore stand in a more remote relation to the permanently identical will of God than do the acts by which His diverse creations are called into existence. On the contrary, the end, embraced as it is in the Divine self-end, stands nearer to His eternal will than the creatures, which are merely means to its realisation. Moreover, in every act of creation and of government performed by Him as a means to this end, God, as omnipotent will, is equally certain, not only of His end in an ideal sense, but also of its being realised by every means employed, however diversified and remote. This may be seen from the fact that we are conscious of the very opposite, as a defect arising from our creaturely position. When we are carrying out a plan piece by piece, we may have a sure and firm grasp of it in thought; and though it should be that each successive link in the chain is not yet thought out in advance with perfect clearness, even this may leave us still unconscious of our imperfection. But when we remember our manifold dependence on nature and society, or the weakness of our will, we see that the attainment of a preliminary aim by no means implies that thereby we enjoy already the realisation of the whole enterprise. On the contrary, partial satisfaction makes us, likewise, always the victims of unrest and fear for the completion of the intended whole. On the other hand, through the very arrangement of our conduct in accordance with a plan of life, we gain experimental knowledge of the fact that our spirit is destined for eternity: and just as certainly we come to know the eternity of God from this, that through the continuity of His will as directed to the end of the Kingdom of God, there is cancelled for Him the significance of time, in which, to serve that end, He calls the individual into existence or causes it to appear—in other words, that the temporal interval between His preparatory creations and the realisation of the goal of revelation, means nothing for Him. The realisation of each subordinate means by the Divine will is reflected in God’s self-feeling or blessedness as the realisation of the whole. For this reason, too, there lies no inconsistency for our knowledge in the fact that the Kingdom of God is contained in the eternal purpose of God as the correlate of His loving Will, while our historical experience tells us that it is realised only at the close of the first era of the world’s existence. The religious reflection—arising out of the Christian view of the world—which affirms that God “has chosen us,” the Christian community of the Kingdom of God, “in Jesus Christ our Lord before the foundation of the world” (Eph. i. 4; cf. 1 Pet. i. 20), no doubt merely asserts the truth that the final end of the world—which is contained within the purpose of the supramundane God as its essential object—is for God assured of fulfilment, quite apart from the creation of the whole system of things which stands to that end in the relation of means. At the same time the statement just cited from the New Testament, by also employing the temporal idea “before the foundation of the world,” indicates the interval of time which lies between the Divine decree and its accomplishment. Possibly this leaves the impression that the duration of the world forms an obstacle to the accomplishment of the Divine decree, and we seem to be asked to do what is impracticable, viz. to call up an idea of time existing before time, while as a matter of fact we never can think the world as non-existent. But all that the positive conception of the Divine eternity contains is the logical superordination of the election of the community over the creation of the world. Accordingly, the idea of the community’s eternal election denotes only the value which belongs to the community of the Kingdom of God, as the Divine final end, in contrast with the world, which is, in comparison, merely a means. We therefore reject the misuse which is made of this idea, as though the world formed an obstacle even for God, as so often it does for us; for we recognise that at every step of creation God not only remains sure and certain of His plan, but enjoys the consciousness of the realisation of the intended whole as such.

For though the idea of time must so far hold good for God also that He distinguishes the individual thing as such from its causes, its effects, and all similar existences (p. 122), yet we do not assert that our idea of time should, in all its aspects, be imputed to the Divine knowledge. For our idea of time is conditioned by the fact that we find ourselves occupying a place in the series of causes and effects which come and go in time.²³ So that, although the form of temporal succession is overcome and abrogated by our cognition in the unification of impressions, and by our will in the imposition of a plan upon a multitude of objects (p. 235), yet the self-consciousness of each individual as a whole remains chained to the form of time. This is manifest from the fact that we regard ourselves and surrounding things as real only in the present, while that which has been and that which will yet be are regarded as non-existent. No doubt reflection rises superior to this impression by recollecting that very much that has been, and no longer exists in exactly the same form, still survives as a cause in its recognisable effects. Still, we do not venture to apply a similar mode of looking at things to the future, in which things now present will continue to exist as causes even though their present form is altered. Thus it is only in our presentiment of the future, and when reviewing the past in a very fragmentary way, that we are able transiently to escape from the subjection of our self-consciousness to time, and to raise ourselves above those limitations of our knowledge which arise from the fact that, as individuals, we are only parts of the system of the world. But the very circumstance that, at least in this degree, we can understand the system of things, compels us to suppose that a similar abrogation of the idea of time is the rule for the Spirit to Whom, as the Creator of the system of individual things, that system is perfectly transparent. So far as the world is subject in all its individual facts to a process of becoming, it can be represented by God only under the form of time; and so far also the distinction of past and future necessarily holds good for God’s knowledge of things. But so far as individual things are, through God, parts of the world’s system and organically related to its purpose, their reality for God consists precisely in their being members of the whole, for through His prevision of individual things and His insight into them as persistent causes, He is conscious of the realisation of the whole. On the other hand, if the future formed a limit to the knowledge and self-feeling of God, they would not attain satisfaction and equipoise until the end of the ages. On this presupposition, we should be forbidden even to believe that satisfaction with the world, previously lacking, had arrived for God with the historical commencement of the Kingdom of God; for then God would be dependent on His Kingdom for the completion of the possible satisfaction still awaiting Him throughout all the future. But if this is an absurd supposition, then no limit of time can be affirmed to exist in the life of God, after which He should be more certain of His goal than before. Rather must we abide by the statement that God not only is certain of His self-end and His world-plan at every point in its realisation, but that, through the congruence of His knowledge, which penetrates the whole, with His will, which moves the whole, He is continuously conscious of the realisation of the whole at every single point.

§ 38. But what inferences, now, does the conception of God as love allow us to draw for the affirmation of a moral order? This conception of God has as its correlative the association of mankind in the Kingdom of God, while the latter, so far as our experience goes, forms a special section of universal human history, more limited in space and in time than that history as a whole. Consequently, from this idea of God we can directly derive such a conception of the relations which obtain between human life and the world as holds good for those who are members of the Kingdom of God. Within this special sphere the supreme principle of the Divine love is to be applied on the analogy of the paternal education of children. Thence it follows that all evils which fall upon members of the Kingdom of God have, as Divinely decreed, the significance of educative punishments, and therefore of relative benefits; while, on the other hand, we have the assurance that all things work together for good to them that love God (Rom. viii. 24). It cannot be doubted, however, that to this there contributes the influence of the reconciliation likewise proclaimed in Christianity. But we are not concerned just now to follow out this special dispensation of human life, for we are interested in the doctrine of God only in so far as it forms a general presupposition which makes reconciliation possible. The question just now is, whether the knowledge we have, that the Kingdom of God as grounded in the Divine love is the final end of the world, throws any light on the character of the existence which the nations led up to the entrance of Christianity into history, and which even Christian nations lead, so far as we can abstract from their belonging to the Kingdom of God. For if the moral association of nations in the Kingdom is the end which God is pursuing in the world, then the inference is unavoidable, that the previous history of the nations must have stood in some teleological relation to that higher stage of development, and in some positive degree prepared the way for its advent, and that a similar order of things must obtain also in every Christian nation as a precondition of its Christianity. Observation, therefore, would have to verify the indications of the connection thus suggested, by demonstrating with some measure of certainty that the human race is educatively prepared for the Kingdom of God. When that was done, perhaps principles might thence be drawn explaining God’s dealings with individual men.

The writers of the New Testament do not expend reflection upon this problem. The history of the Jewish people alone presented them with the spectacle of a government by God so extraordinary that it could be regarded as a positive preparation for the Christian Kingdom of God. Only two statements of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles (xiv. 15–17, xvii. 25–30) deal directly with the rest of the nations. They indicate a very remote relationship between the general history of the nations and the Divine government. God is represented as having worked upon the Gentiles only through the blessings of nature and through the temporal and spatial delimitation of their territories, in order to move them thereby to search after Him; in the activities of their moral history He left them to themselves without interference. The standard, measured by which the condition of the nations is made out to be corrupt, is not moral goodness, which is the real question, but their defective knowledge of God, while yet very meagre opportunities had been given them of acquiring it. The authentical statements of Paul in the Epistle to the Romans express a still more unfavourable judgment, for they depict the entire life of the Gentiles as given over to sin, nay, to unnatural vices. Nay more, Paul takes so dark a view of the character of the Jewish people, that he represents the law as given merely to enhance sin, not to afford moral guidance. But his judgment is imperfect; it is, especially when tested by the contents of the Mosaic law, historically incorrect, and it has never been seriously adhered to by theology. For what we have to concern ourselves with at this point is not Paul’s formulation of the contents of the Christian religion, but his reflections upon history in its contrast to Christianity, which had just embarked upon its course. These would have taken a different form if the apostle could have surveyed the history of the Christian Church as we can. But, finally, these positions affirmed by Paul are not decisive in the question at present before us — how the general history of the nations is related to the final end of the Kingdom of God — for this reason, that Paul, viewing mankind exclusively as the subject of sin, takes Christianity merely as a dispensation of reconciliation.

If that is the point at issue, then, it is true, the universal sin which we find in pre-Christian history is only a negative presupposition of reconciliation. But the Kingdom of God, in the Christian sense, can be proved the final end of human history only if there existed even previously standards somehow analogous, which determined the worth of human life and prepared the way for the appearance of the perfect moral standard. The judgment pronounced by Paul upon universal sin is a reflection of the value he attached to the Christian reconciliation; but it is no less a reflection of the value we attach to the moral and religious content of Christianity when we speak of God’s education of the human race, guiding them to the Christian ideal of morality. For by this hypothesis the religious interpretation of the moral development of the individual which is involved in Christianity—an interpretation derived from the presupposition of Divine sonship—is further applied in a wider sense to God’s leading of the nations to the supreme good. I use the phrase—the education of the human race—in another sense, it is true, than Lessing has given it in his interpretation of the history of religion. For one thing, Lessing has in his eye merely the narrower domain of Israelitish and Christian religion; next, he limits the idea of education to instruction through the medium of revelation; finally, his idea of this medium is such that it cannot fail to lose its applicability when Christian culture has reached the stage of maturity. This is, no doubt, a quite consistent view to take, if the idea of education is limited to instruction given in school. Every man who reaches a mature age grows out of school; if revelation, therefore, is defined as a kind of school-teaching, it becomes superfluous for one of independent character. But in thus following the customary theological prejudice which looks on revelation as instruction, Lessing ignores the fact that the value which Christianity places upon human life, in virtue of the mutual relations between God as our Father and us as His children, bids us view education by God as the highest and the unsurpassable criterion. Moreover, it is certainly a part of education that at the proper time the pupil should have disclosed to him both the aims and the conditions of personal life; but education consists still more in the timely restraint and stimulus of his volitions by the authority of the teacher.

It is in a much more comprehensive sense that Lotze²⁴ discusses the applicability of the phrase “the education of humanity” to the course of history. Under that conception he comprises all the material of culture which is the product of man’s spiritual nature, and is handed down from generation to generation. But he expresses a doubt as to whether what these conditions produce is the education of mankind as a whole. It is always the individual, he contends, whom we must conceive as the subject of education; humanity, whose spiritual acquisitions we see augmenting with time, is divisible into a sum of individuals; but of that sum those who come earlier know nothing of the progress achieved by their successors; while the latter, it may be, receive the acquisitions of their predecessors in the form of prejudices, and thus are put in the possession of the very opposite of what is really imparted by education, and makes it valuable to the individual. Besides, progress in assimilating the materials of culture and advance in their formal elaboration are never observable save in the minority of men, while crudity and dulness remain the lot of the great mass in every generation. Finally, even though we take no account of the many interruptions and retrogressions exhibited by the history of culture, and allow the minority of really educated persons to count as humanity, yet even these are incapable of surveying the course of the education of the whole race with such certainty of vision as gives the individual assurance of the success of his own education. For that would demand an amount of knowledge such as is possible, indeed, for scholars, but is not, at every moment, at the command of those who in a particular age may rank as men of culture and education. There is an obvious objection that, if we suppose ourselves to have unravelled the meaning of history by styling it the education of the human race, the above observations might rather produce an impression of the unconnectedness of the individual’s existence with the life of humanity, and of the vanity of all things. It is true, he admits, that the sentiment of fidelity in work is directly opposed to this despair of comprehending the course of human vicissitude, and that it is closely accompanied by an estimate of the worth of individual activity for the whole, which is the basis of faith in the success of such activity in the present and the future. But that very fact makes it certain that the idea of “the education of humanity” does not guarantee our insight into the laws of historical life as a whole.

This self-feeling, which belongs to patient and public-spirited moral work, and which repudiates the idea of the vanity of all things, testifies to the validity of the fundamental truth that the fellowship which arises out of these individual contributions is the supreme good, the final end of the world. Moreover, the hope we base thereon, that the effect of one’s personal work for the whole will not be lost even in the future, always springs from a religious view of the whole as a purposive order. The attitude, therefore, which forms our substitute for insight into the course of history is, stated plainly, that of practical activity in the Kingdom of God. But in that case the question recurs whether the idea of an “education of humanity,” by being limited in another way, might not be found suitable for interpreting the historical preparation for the stage we have reached in our estimate of self and the direction of our will.

We must not, it is true, expect to be able to embrace every nation in the framework of a theory fitted to solve the problem before us. We can pass no judgment whatever on nations which have played no part in history. Since the question concerns the meaning of the history of the world, none but the nations which have participated in that history can be taken into account. But even when considering these, we do not find that though one or other of them may have taken a step in the direction of the goal, it must therefore of necessity have reached the goal of its development, and maintained itself at the height of that attainment. Finally, in the answer we seek, we shall not consider it an objection to the idea of “the education of humanity” that the acquisitions of the preparatory generation should actually assume, for the generation which follows, the form of prejudices; though in the case of the education of the individual that form might as easily be taken to imply a hindrance as a help. What I mean is that the idea of the Kingdom of God, as the moral fellowship of men proper to their nature, had its way to influence prepared by the fact that it was preceded by the moral fellowship of the Family, national fellowship in the State, and, lastly, the combination of several nations in the World-empire. The Christian conception of the Kingdom of God in part stands in the closest analogy with all these graduated forms, and in part it is genetically derived from them. So that it could not be understood had these forms not previously entered into human experience, and their peculiar value been recognised. In every case the family is the original form of human fellowship; but if the healthy conditions of independent moral conduct are to be realised, it requires to be supplemented by the civil fellowship of the State.²⁵ For nothing but intercourse with those whom one gets to know, not as members of the same family, but rather as strangers, affords that fulness of reciprocal social relationships by which our respect for others and for our own rights can be tested. The tendency towards equality of rights regularly manifests itself even in the relation between brothers and sisters; but it depends very much upon the form assumed by the father’s power over the children, whether it does not rather reduce them under itself in an equality destitute of all rights whatsoever. In the history of the world, at any rate, the task of supplementing family existence by the civil order of the State has not been of such easy accomplishment as seems necessary to us. Nomadic tribes exist only in an extended form of the family, without distinct ideas of law being developed, or fixed legal ordinances being extorted from the caprice of the chief of the tribe. Nomads, therefore, either remain outside history, or come into prominence only as destroyers of higher culture, while they maintain their existence in the form of the family only at the price of the corruption of marriage, polygamy. In order to rise above this level at all, and in any degree become a State, a nation must be numerous enough, and must settle down in a comparatively narrow territory. The importance for a purely nomadic people of this advance cannot be more clearly indicated than by the fact that the tribal legends of Israel make the acquisition of a fixed abode the proximate aim of the Divine revelation to Abraham. This people is distinguished from their Oriental neighbours by the energetic expression given in their law to the consciousness of right; and the theocratic principle confines even the rights of the monarchy over the people within very definite limits. For among the settled peoples of Asia which play a part in history, the conception of the public powers possessed by the king is modelled so predominantly on the patriarchal type of the nomadic chieftain, that among them the private rights of the subject, even in their reciprocal relations to one another, had no chance of developing. Within this circle only a loose and uncertain support is given to the idea of special rights by the fact that, under the régime of the Oriental world-empires, subject peoples were permitted to retain their customs and their social system. Now the Israelites did not exert an opposite influence of a different kind, for they never gained an extensive and permanent dominion over other nations; on the contrary, the monarchy in their case rather diverged from its prescribed path to follow the models of the surrounding nations. The Roman people was the first to establish the community of the State on a solid framework of ordinances securing private rights, and thus it also imparted to its world-empire a different character from that which previous enterprises of the kind had borne. For even the Hellenic world-empires relapsed into the Oriental type, the reason being that the Hellenic idea of the State maintained the entire dependence of the citizen on the State, and allowed no proper play within the State to the moral rights of individual families and individual persons. But the Romans, by elaborating a large number of institutions which reposed on private rights, succeeded in conferring on the individual citizens of the State the assurance of personal independence as against one another, and a higher proportion of rights even as against the State; by their strict and noble conception of marriage they infused a deeper content into the power of the father over the family; finally, by legally investing aliens with rights of their own, they diminished the prejudice of antiquity which held that the alien is a foe, and, as such, destitute of rights. The history of the world, all down the succession of world-empires until that of the Romans, is at bottom the outcome of self-seeking and violence; but the moral sense finds a compensation for this in the fact that the nations, even under these conditions, arrived at a consciousness of their affinity as integral parts of humanity. For the injustice of each conquest was certainly atoned for by the benefits of a higher culture conferred upon the subjugated peoples. The other nations which in antiquity dominated the world cannot, it may be, claim this merit; but it does belong to the Romans, in spite of all the oppression and extortion which their provincial populations had to endure. Their government called forth in the peoples that dwelt on the shores of the Mediterranean a common sentiment of their historical affinity, though in varying degree; and, by the extension of the sway of Roman law, confirmed by the progressive bestowal of Roman citizenship, they paved the way for the recognition of the individual as an independent personality. These results of Roman supremacy are important enough to be reckoned as a positive preparation for the ethical tendencies of Christianity, even though as victories of humane feeling they were lamentably counterbalanced by the prevalence of slavery, that fountain of every kind of immorality. A further fact is that educated society in the Roman Empire was still more directly influenced by the Stoic philosophy towards belief in the moral solidarity of the human race, and in the obligation to respect the individual, and that in these principles the Hellenic spirit made its contribution to the culture of the Roman Empire, while remaining inferior in political force to the spirit of the Roman people.

These results of classical culture, indeed, are not sources from which the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God is directly drawn. For it finds its presuppositions proper solely in the religion of the Old Testament; in the fact, that is, that the One God is, to begin with, the Ruler, as He is the Father, of the chosen people, and that He stands Surety for that personal, independent, religious morality which follows from His righteousness. Jesus elevated these features into validity for all nations. But the understanding and acceptance of them by the nations within the Roman Empire was conditioned by the fact that the claim to act independently and with personal responsibility presuppposes the legal recognition of the individual, that the idea of the moral government of God demands a measure of common moral sentiment between nations, and, finally, that the principle of brotherly equality in the Christian community could count on a responsive feeling of the same kind in the people of that time. The very presence of these favourable prejudices among the population of the Roman Empire—even when men were unaware of the special grounds of their influence and of their origin—must be viewed as the outcome of a very highly complex historical development, which, when looked at in the light of the goal revealed by the foundation of Christianity, may be regarded as “the education of humanity.”

These considerations might possibly find a place in the framework of traditional theology, as evidences of the Providence of God. But I think that for the purposes of a theological system they claim more serious attention, even though they cannot be proved to have come within the observation of any New Testament writer. The traditional form of theology only admits incidentally the hypothesis of a positive preparation for Christianity. The reason is that, following explicit trains of thought in Paul, it seizes only upon the factor of reconciliation in Christianity; and for reconciliation there is no precondition to be found in the prior history of mankind, save the negative one of universal sin. But Christianity in its last and loftiest aspect aims at the final end of the Kingdom of God; the authority of Jesus, which deserves to be set above that of Paul, makes this conception supreme. In the light of the significance which Christianity thus receives, the dominion over man gained by law must be recognised as a positive preparation. Law, as a system directed to the realisation of common ethical ends of a subordinate order, must be reckoned as a dispensation established by the purposive will of God, not as though legal conduct possessed equal worth with moral conduct prompted by religious motives, but in such wise that the former must be recognised as a precondition of the latter. And indeed this does not merely follow for the past from the view taken above of history in general; it holds good even in the present for the Christian conduct of every individual. For were this not so, then even the historical continuity of development which has been proved could only in a very problematical way be ascribed to the Providence of God.

The Evangelical system of doctrine includes the elements of this argument in two respects. I refer, first of all, to the view it takes of the possibility of iustitia civilis as contrasted with original sin, and the loss of freedom which that implies. Roman Catholic controversialists usually proceed as though they derived a great advantage from their assertion of the reality of freedom in the state of sin, as opposed to its denial in the Evangelical system. But when looked at more closely, this denial of freedom proves to be not absolute but relative, in so far, that is, as it refers to the discharge of duty from religious motives. On the other hand, a relative freedom is acknowledged to belong even to the state of sin, in regard to what is relatively good, i.e. the possibility of iustitia civilis is recognised. Whether, now, it is fitter to ascribe to the state of sin a relative freedom in regard to that which is completely good, or to limit the acknowledged relative capacity of sinners to that which is relatively good, is a question I shall not here discuss further.²⁶ The topic of iustitia civilis, however, is treated in a merely one-sided way by the Reformers and the theological tradition dependent upon them. They discuss the conception merely as correlative to the state of sin, and as in its nature contrary to iustitia spiritualis. We must, however, further view both kinds of iustitia in their analogy to one another and in respect of their difference of degree, apart from the conditions of their realisation. This they omitted to do, clearly for the reason that they looked at the relations between the two exclusively in the light of the current antithesis between law and the promise of grace. For, in accordance with the usual conception of law, they took iustitia civilis in the sense of legality, without combining with it the idea of a law-abiding disposition, though the latter is one stage of the moral disposition.

The reason why the theology which is loyal to the Reformation cannot but attribute to the conception of iustitia civilis a significance which involves more than merely the correct determination of the notion of freedom in the state of sin, lies in the consistent estimate of the State as a positively Divine institution. It was only because he recognised the independent significance of the State as a direct institution of God, that Luther was able to construct his conception of iustitia civilis at all, and to wrest a domain for its exercise from the Augustinian theory of original sin. The opposite theory taught by the Papacy is rooted in the view which Augustine held of the civitas terrena. This civitas he finds realised in the existence of the Roman Empire, which, as reposing upon violence and conquest, perpetuates the character of the fratricide and city-founder Cain, and which, through its dependence on heathen idol-worship, is marked with the stamp of unrighteousness. Augustine never perceived that to the Roman people was due the creation of private rights. And so it actually leaves quite a comical impression to find him demonstrating, at the very climax of his exposition (De civitate dei, xix. 21), that the Roman commonwealth, according to Cicero’s own definition of it as a society united by uniformity in law and by common interests, never really existed. For, he argues, law (Recht) implies righteousness (Gerechtigkeit); now, righteousness can be had only through faith in the true God; the Romans, consequently, could not claim to have a legal or civil commonwealth, for in particular they had violated the legal maxim suum cuique by making man, who belongs to God, the slave of impure demons. We may learn the real value of this verdict on the Roman State—a verdict which lies at the basis of the mediæval view of the State in general—from the fact that Augustine also defends the opposite opinion. For he is not so perverse as to represent the empire as simply a devilish counterpart of the Kingdom of God, and civil laws as expressions of established injustice, or the law of property, for example, as veiled robbery. Rather, he recognises peace, aimed at internally by the State, as a mark of that struggle after good which men cannot abandon even in sin. However strongly he may emphasise the truth that the attainment of this peace can be purchased only by much violence and oppression of the weak, yet he does not reckon these means as necessary elements in the conception of earthly peace. And so Augustine finds that there is an ascending succession from the peace of the home to the peace of the State and the peace of the heavenly Kingdom — a succession which expresses the generic unity subsisting among the aims of every human society, and therefore proves that each of the spheres thus compared is, in its own way, independent of the others. He therefore states it as his conclusion that God has ordained for men temporal peace and the means necessary thereto, and this as a stage preliminary to religious morality and a preparation for eternal life in loving fellowship with God and men. Whoever abuses the means of temporal peace, indeed, fails to attain the stage of peace with God, and misses the humbler goal as well.²⁷ Here we have the principle stated which, in my opinion, the meaning of Reformation theology requires us to add as a supplement to the conception of iustitia civilis. However defective the latter may prove in reality, yet it ought not to be regarded merely as a possible accident of the state of sin, but as a necessary and integral part of God’s moral order. Viewed in isolation, it wears a character opposed to religious morality. For the disposition which limits itself to the domain of law may for that reason come even to be in contradiction to the disposition which aims at the highest end of all. But of the successive kinds of human fellowship, that defined by law is of narrower limits than that of moral action, and is so constituted as to need the latter as its supplement; for law is intelligible only as a means to morality, and requires for its success a measure of moral feeling. It merely confirms this conclusion, and at the same time suggests the necessary limitation of the doctrine of universal sinfulness, which is usually determined exclusively by the idea of reconciliation, when we find Peter and Paul (1 Pet. ii. 13–16; Rom. xiii. 1–7) prescribing obedience to the State absolutely, and this too as expressive of religious conscientiousness.²⁸ Such teaching would be impossible unless the State and the law were magnitudes of permanent moral value when viewed from the standpoint of Christian reflection on the world, and unless the capacity to satisfy the demands of the State were still preserved even in the state of sin.

The question which has given rise to this discussion was whether, from the interrelations between the love of God and the Kingdom of God, there results such a moral order that it prepares the way for the Kingdom of God among men. Our conclusion, that law and the State in general are preconditions of the Kingdom of God, is of a form different from that of the sketches of a world-order which we owe to the orthodox and the Socinians. What they attempt is to furnish information in regard to the individual’s original relation to God, and the principles which God follows in His treatment of him. The theory put forward here to determine generally the relation between law and the Divine Kingdom has nothing to say to this interest in the fate of the individual. Yet it harmonises with the conception of an education which places men under special institutions, in order to render them capable of the free appropriation of the most universal principle of life. This is what is meant by saying that the reciprocity of private rights and the obligations which bind men to civil society have both to be impressed on the mind before we can order our behaviour to those farthest off, as well as to those who are nearest, by the motive of love. Now we find that if the only motive of an action be a legal one, it cannot be considered as coming under the head of our religious relation to God; but we also find that the motive of religious morality yields the principle of obedience to law, which raises an action done in the particular sphere of civil law into the domain of moral law and the Kingdom of God. Thus it becomes all the more clear that individual legal works as individual—and in this light the doctrine of the foedus operum views them—cannot, save incorrectly, be regarded as the material in which man’s religious relation to God takes shape, and by which it can be judged.

The only question which might still arise is whether the result we have reached is not invalidated by certain of Jesus sayings. For in Matt. v. 38–42, He pronounces against the legal principle of retaliation in the intercourse of men with one another, and demands from His disciples, as proof of their belonging to the Kingdom of God, that on all conceivable occasions they should surrender their private rights. This section of the Sermon on the Mount is lacking, indeed, in the lucidity of expression and connectedness to be desired; nevertheless, it is quite impossible to doubt that it does not intend the subversion of the institution of private rights altogether. What is forbidden, rather, is that in our intercourse with fellow-members of the Kingdom of God, we should insist on our private rights unconditionally, on the principle that services must be reciprocal; and the command is given to surrender one’s rights in particular cases for the sake of moral fellowship. That is to say, recourse to law between members of the Kingdom of God is thereby modified; but the validity of law for their life is not abrogated altogether. Its validity is of necessity presupposed; for the independence of moral action and of personal virtue in general is unthinkable apart from legal independence. The exhortation addressed to slaves, that they should patiently submit to being without rights (1 Pet. ii. 18–20; Col. iii. 22–25), is to be regarded as an exception dictated by circumstances, for the existence of slavery in the Christian world is a standing menace to public and personal morality.

§ 39. We have found that the institution of the State is a means to the Kingdom of God, and that it is not to be applied, contrariwise, as a standard of Divine authority by which to gauge the possibility of realising His Kingdom. In this consideration, therefore, there lies no obstacle to our deriving reconciliation from the love of God, as well as from His justice, when properly understood as denoting the method in which He carries out His loving Will for the salvation of all mankind, as well as of individuals (vol. ii. p. 113). If it is conceivable at all that God should bestow His love on sinful man, then the justice with which that love has to reconcile itself is not such as it would be if God originally stood to man in the relation of reciprocity characteristic of private right or civil law. Rather is it God’s perfection, according to Christian ideas, that He does good to men even when they are His enemies (Matt. v. 44, 48). In this respect He is set up as a model to men. Thus Christian love to one’s enemies, or forgiveness to one’s debtors, is not dependent on their rendering satisfaction. No more can Jesus have found any difficulty in the fact that God, intent on reconciliation, should love men even though they are His foes. Nevertheless, we have not yet completely solved the question (§ 17) how the principle of forgiveness, and the attribute which issues in moral legislation, can be combined in our conception of God. Tieftrunk’s contention that Divine pardon accords with the moral law, because irreconcilability, conceived as the law of a moral kingdom, would be self-contradictory, we found to be unconvincing. For reconciliability is a principle of moral duty which is binding only between equals, and even then not unconditionally, while, between one possessed of moral authority and a subordinate, it holds good only in a conditional way. If the moral law is the highest expression by which we can define the relation between God and man, then it is only in an accidental fashion that pardon or the forgiveness of sins can be conjoined with it. For that reason, however, the solution proposed by Kant (vol. i. p. 456), namely, that the forgiveness of sins is determined by the individual’s amount of moral performance, does not harmonise with the Christian view of the matter. On the other hand, the path which we must take is indicated by the other theory put forward by Tieftrunk, that pardon and law are not contradictory if pardon be bestowed for the sake of the law—if, that is, the realisation of the universal ethical end, especially love to the law, is impossible without previous forgiveness (vol. i. p. 463).

For if God is conceived in general as love, in order to explain the Kingdom of God as the final end of the world and therefore the world itself (§ 34), then, from the significance which the Kingdom has for God, there follows the content of the moral law and its absolute stringency for the members of the Kingdom. The practical union of a multitude of persons, so that as homogeneous with God they become the object of His will manifested as love, is effected by obedience to the law of love to God and our neighbour. The love of God is already intent upon men, in so far as His aim is to elevate them to the Kingdom of God, even though at the time their will may not actually be directed to the highest moral end. For love ever aims first of all at the possible ideal of another’s self-end, and its proper strength resides in the other’s improvement and education. If, therefore, God eternally loves the community of the Kingdom of God (Eph. i. 4, 6), He also loves already the individuals who are to be gathered into it, in so far as He purposes to bring them into the Kingdom. Now, if we must assume that they are sinners, then God loves even sinners in view of their ideal destiny, to realise which He chooses them. Why sin should make this relationship unthinkable it is impossible to see. For even though sin is active opposition to God’s final end, yet persistence in such a course would make the love of God to sinners impossible only if in all cases sin were definitive and conscious opposition to His final end. But if, on the other hand, the degree of sin in individual cases is less than this, and if it is therefore possible that the direction of the will in this respect may be altered, then the love of God may operate on sinners through His purpose to realise their ideal destiny. Now, if we may thus presuppose that sin involves different degrees, the founding and the existence of the Kingdom of God cannot be deduced from God’s love, unless God removes the separation from Himself which operates in the sin which is common to men. For as the moral perfection of man in the Kingdom of God must at the same time be regarded as God’s final end in the world, sin is an obstacle to its realisation. And it is so not merely as immorality, but above all as a defect in reverence towards and trust in God (to use the words of the C. A. ii.), or, to use a positive expression, as indifference and mistrust of God. Viewed in this light, the pardon which is a precondition of the Kingdom, the forgiveness of sins which invalidates the guilt and the consciousness of guilt which separates men from God, likewise flow from the love of God, as a universal dispensation for behoof of the members of the Kingdom. Forgiveness, however, cannot come into collision with God’s moral legislation. For the latter, as the moral order prevailing in the Kingdom of God, comes to be valid only for those whom God, through His forgiveness, has led to trust His love. The result of this discussion, therefore, is that pardon or reconciliation, as a fundamental precondition of the Kingdom’s coming into existence and as presupposing universal sin, can be conceived in harmony with the love of God, and that it is in no way inconsistent with the Divine attribute of moral legislation.

But the question arises, whether still other reasons than the rejected notion of civil justice are not likely to call forth objections to this conclusion. This consideration makes it necessary to examine the sketch of the doctrine of reconciliation put forward by Schoeberlein, to the importance of which I have already drawn attention (vol. i. p. 650). He and I agree in our general definition of the problem of reconciliation, in holding, that is, that its ground is the love of God and its end the Kingdom of God, and that to estimate its possibility by the principles of civil law involves a doctrinal aberration. Schoeberlein starts so decisively with the idea that God is love that he will hear nothing of a Divine righteousness exercised in relation to the world of morality, and either preceding or accompanying it. However, he allows the conception of righteousness to operate as a modification of love as related to sinful humanity, inasmuch as the entrance of sin altered, not indeed the basal tendency of Divine love, but its method of revelation. For, as a recognition of the independence of man, respected by God, he contends that God manifests to sinners His love, which pain has altered, by the wrath and curse which make themselves felt in the consciousness of guilt and the ills of life. But as wrath is not the opposite of Divine love but a modification of it, these manifestations of wrath possess a significance of their own as means preparatory to reconciliation. For when looked at completely, the wrath of God is accompanied by compassion for human sin; thence springs grace; and in grace the pain of God’s love is eternally swallowed up in His blessed joy in humanity, beloved by God in His Son. These are the principal features of the theory, so far as it concerns the doctrine of God. The inferences it is made to yield for the interpretation of Christ’s life are not in place here.

There can be no doubt whatever that a very imperfect view was taken of God’s spiritual personality in the older theology, when the functions of knowing and willing alone were employed to illustrate it. Religious thought plainly ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it transformed, e.g., the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into the fixed purpose to punish sin. The revolt against this, which finds vent in Schoeberlein’s analysis of the Divine emotions, is on the whole fully justified. But it seems to me imperative to proceed very cautiously in this respect. The blessedness of God is a lucid and intrinsically clear conception, as expressive of His own feeling of His eternity. Now, as God’s eternity is knowable by us through the continuity and immutability of the necessary relation between His nature and His world-plan, Schoeberlein rightly declares that the blessedness of God likewise includes eternally joy in the humanity which He loves in His Son. We must judge thus, if we are to give a theological representation sub specie aeternitatis of the whole domain covered by the Christian view of the world. On the other hand, all our reflections about God’s wrath and compassion, His long-suffering and patience, His severity and sympathy, are based upon a comparison of our individual position with God’s, under the form of time. However indispensable these judgments may be in the texture of our religious experience, still they stand in no relation whatever to the theological conception of the whole from the view-point of eternity. That these different lines of thought do not merge in one another, is precisely the truth expressed by Schoeberlein’s principle, that the pain suffered by God’s love is eternally taken up by the good pleasure of His grace into the unity of His blessed joy in mankind. For by taking this view we eliminate from our thought the pain which, as an act in time, we formerly conceived as resulting from the contrast between the love of God and the sin of man. From the point of view of theology, therefore, no validity can be assigned to the idea of the wrath of God and His curse upon sinners as yet unreconciled; still less, from this theological standpoint, is any special mediation between the wrath and the love of God conceivable or necessary in order to explain the reconciliation of sinners with Him.

Nevertheless, the following consideration serves to make the matter clear. According to Scripture, we are not justified in regarding God’s wrath as an altered form of His love, nor in relating it to sin as such (vol. ii. pp. 129, 137); according to the New Testament, God’s wrath signifies His determination to destroy those who definitively set themselves against redemption and the final end of the Kingdom of God (vol. ii. p. 154). The authority of Holy Scripture gives us no right to relate the wrath of God to sinners as such, for ex hypothesi we conceive sinners to be known and chosen by God, as partakers in His Kingdom and objects of His redemption from sin. If we assume that God foresees their final inclusion in His Kingdom, as theologians we have no alternative but to trace their redemption back to His love in an unbroken line, even though these very redeemed ones may, as their ideas take a temporal form, have the impression of a change from Divine wrath to Divine mercy (vol. i. p. 163). We must come to the same conclusion, too, regarding the phenomena of those cases where men are conscious of guilt and regard evils as the effects of God’s curse. For while these experiences, looked at from God’s side, may also be regarded as means to conversion, yet from the standpoint alike of reconciliation as an accomplished fact and of God’s overruling will of love—that is, from the only standpoint of interpretation open to theology — they appear with their meaning reversed, as dispensations of God’s goodness and grace. The notion that there is a temporal change in God’s attitude and even in God’s feeling towards us may therefore remain safe and intact within its own domain, for our individual lives being parts of the whole, we cannot like God survey the entire world-order. But when in our theological study of the whole we place ourselves, even temporarily, at God’s standpoint, we cannot combine the idea of a change in His tone of feeling towards the individual situation of individual men with the conception of the Divine knowledge and government of the whole. And so even Paul clothes the idea of God’s wrath against those who are lost in the guise of a perpetual determination of His will, all the characteristics of a passing emotion being stripped away—even though, from the standpoint of experience in time, he also recognises a manifestation towards them of Divine long-suffering (Rom. ix. 22). Conversely, the knowledge of God as Father possessed by those who must ultimately be viewed as children of God, implies that every evil they experience even in consequence of sin should be reckoned, never as a destructive penalty, but as a means of education (§ 9). Whatever in this respect may excite a different feeling for the moment may—when we look at it later from the standpoint of the reconciliation and Divine sonship we have gained—be traced back to the antecedent and never-failing love of God, any feelings we may have of an opposite kind being set aside as delusive. But according to this view—and it is the ultimately valid one—any theology which keeps to the standpoint of the reconciled community must assert that into the life of the reconciled there can come from God’s side no curse or damnatory punishment, and that God’s love, as the antecedent ground of reconciliation, cannot be modified by any such feeling or action on His part towards those who are to be reconciled. For it is unthinkable that there should be for God a gulf between His intention and its accomplishment, such as might prove a ground of uncertainty or of an alteration in His judgment and His attitude.

It is of the greatest importance for the systematic procedure of theology that this difference, between our individual religious thinking and the form of theological cognition sub specie alternitatis, should never be forgotten. Our self-consciousness is bound up with time, and it is never given us to survey the whole of the Divine order within which we move as parts, so that we simply cannot but regard and judge our relation to God under the form of time; and thus we reproduce, in the idea that God’s relations to us change, the alterations of our own experience. But if this way of looking at things were made determinative for theology too, either we should never get further than a history of Divine revelations, or we should drag the being of God down into the process of historical change. In orthodox theology itself this error is found in combination with its attempt to represent God as pure Being and as the latent moral character of perpetually self-identical justice. By the very fact that to these presuppositions is added a delineation of God’s revealing acts, the conception of God is made subject to the form of becoming (§ 32). This procedure was facilitated by the fact that eternity was likewise regarded as equivalent to endless time, in which God is just as much liable to change as the world, while neither can we ever conceive the world as non-existent (§ 37). Not till the conception of God had been correctly defined as the love of a Will perpetually directed to the eternally beloved community of the Kingdom of God, was there attained a positive idea of eternity according to which temporal change in God’s action does not appear as change in His being. Now it is not to be wondered at that this should mean the rejection of all those theological theories which introduce change into the essential relations of the Divine will. For a method which in one respect is inevitably followed by unsophisticated religious thought, is not determinative for the systematic construction of theology, even though the Biblical writers simply could not avoid attaching their lines of religious thought to temporal change in the Divine intentions and operations.

(1) The conception of God which is given in the revelation received through Christ, and to which the trust of those who are reconciled through Christ attaches itself, is that of a loving Will which assures to believers spiritual dominion over the world and perfect moral fellowship in the Kingdom of God as the summum bonum.

(2) This final end of God in the world is the ground from which it is possible to explain the creation and government of the world in general, and the interrelations between nature and created spirits.

(3) The reconciliation of sinners by God, if it is to be conceived, is conceivable without inconsistency as the means used for the establishment of the Kingdom of God by God’s love.

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Footnotes

1. Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. p. 331. ↩

2. With what follows cf. Julius Köstlin, Die Beweise für das Dasein Gottes, in Stud. u. Kritiken, 1875, Heft 4; 1876, Heft 1. ↩

3. Examples in Flügel, op. cit., p. 157. ↩

4. The line of thought set forth here has been met by the contemptuous objection that it bases Christianity upon morality. The sapient persons who thus prefer the charge that I, like Kant in his Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, make religion a subordinate appendix to morals, though my mode of doctrine shows the very opposite, would do better to acquire a thorough knowledge of the elementary distinction between the ratio essendi and the ratio cognoscendi, instead of sitting in judgment on me, ↩

5. Die alte und neue Glaube, p. 140. ↩

6. Die christl. Glaubenslehre, i. p. 504. ↩

7. Cf. Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. p. 565 ff. ↩

8. Cf. Theologie und Metaphysik, p. 13 ff. ; 2nd ed. p. 15 ff. ↩

9. The various forms of the first theory are dealt with in my “Studies towards the Christian Doctrine of God” (three articles), in the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie, 1865, 1868. ↩

10. Within this general framework there appear modifications. The Nominalists represent God as having the power to grant or not to grant salvation to any one; the Socinian Crell limits the Divine omnipotence over the creatures at least thus far, that God may not bring into existence any innocent creature destined to eternal torments; the Arminian Episcopius views the lordship of God over men as limited a priori by respect for His own dignity, and for the natural situation of men. ↩

11. Although Socinianism is an obsolete form of theology, the theory it offers deserves to be reviewed here. Another inference drawn from the dominium absolutum of God is quietistic mysticism, which derives its principles from Duns Scotus. From the same conception of God as the orthodox of the Reformed Church have extracted from the doctrine of predestination, the Pietists of the Reformed Church have drawn the same quietistic inference—that the believer ought to lose himself in God through formal self-abnegation, i.e. as judging that before God we are nothing, and that our own will as such is not steadfast. The way to this goal should be sought in loving interplay with God after the mode of the Song of Solomon. In this method, therefore, there are also combined unwarranted equality with God, and an utter absence of rights against Him in the status of grace. ↩

12. I borrow this general conception of punishment as a legal institution from Heinze,—“ Strafrechtstheorien und Strafrechtsprincip,” in Handbuch des deutschen Strafrechts, vol. i. p. 321 ff. ↩

13. Cf. Jahrb. f. deutsche Theologie, 1868, p. 286 ff. ↩

14. Op. cit. p. 291: I there brought forward from Hoornbeck, Socinianismus confutatus, an attempt of the kind, which utterly failed. ↩

15. For this reason the theosophical assertion of a “nature in God” is likewise false. But I cannot enter upon a special examination of such theories. ↩

16. Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, p. 142. ↩

17. I refer the reader to Leopold Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen (1882), 2 vols. ↩

18. Op. cit. ii. p. 258. ↩

19. Instead of this, Philippi (Kirchliche Dogmatik, ii. p. 20 ff.) arranges the attributes of God according to the “ three moments in which the Divine nature discloses itself to us in an ascending series ”: God (1) as absolute Substance, a. eternity, b. omnipresence; (2) as absolute Subject, a. omnipotence, b. omniscience; (3) as holy love, a. wisdom, b. justice, c. goodness. The first of these strata is the Areopagitic conception of God, in so far as, through affirmation, it is brought into relation to the world; the second is the Aristotelian conception. Now this “Church” theologian assures us, indeed, that “there is here no development successively from lower to higher; rather, we merely separate out the lower from the higher for preliminary examination.” For what purpose this is necessary, he does not say: in my opinion it may be used to prove that this kind of theology contains the germ of all rationalism. The Socinian Crell (Jahrb. für deutsche Theol. xiii. p. 256) proceeds exactly as does Philippi. Now if Philippi meant the remark seriously, that the prior strata in the conception of God are separated out merely provisionally, in order to exhibit their defectiveness, then he ought to have deduced all the attributes of God afresh from the conception of holy love. As he does not do so, he has no conception of the unity of God, and leaves open to rationalism the possibility of accepting only so much of the Christian conception of God as harmonises with the first or the second stratum. ↩

20. To both may be applied Schleiermacher’s distinction between action that is symbolic (representative), and action that is organising (disseminative). ↩

21. Cf. Köstlin, Luther’s Theologie, ii. p. 380; Melanchthon, Loci theol. C. R. xxi. pp. 519, 920; my lecture on “Ulrich Zwingli” (Jahrb. für deutsche Theol. xvii. pp. 109-137); Zwinglii Opera, viii. pp. 174-184 (Letter to Ambrosius Blarer); C. R. iii. pp. 240-258 (de iure reformandi); Schenkel, On the original relation of the Church to the State within the bounds of German Protestantism (Stud. u. Krit. 1850, pts. 1, 2); Calvini Inst. chr. rel. ii. 15. 4, 5; iv. 12. 1; 20. 1-3, 9; Weingarten, The Churches of the English Revolution, pp. 35 f., 128 ff.; Conf. Scoticana (1560),cap. 24, in Niemeyer’s Coll. Conff. p. 355. ↩

22. De civ. dei, xii. 17: “Non aliter deus afficitur cum vacat, aliter cum operatur… . Novit quiescens agere et agens quiescere.” ↩

23. Cf. Lotze, Microcosmus, iii. 599 ff. ↩

24. Microcosmus, iii. p. 20 ff. ↩

25. Lotze, Microcosmus, iii. p. 380 ff. ↩

26. Conc. Trid. Sess. vi. Decr. de iustificatione, 1: “Etsi in eis (servis peccati) liberum arbitrium minime exstinctum esset, viribus licet attenuatum et inclina- tum.” Conf. Aug. xviii. : “Humana voluntas habet aliquam libertatem ad efficiendam iustitiam civilem et deligendas res rationi subiectas, sed non habet vim sine spiritu sancto efficiendae iustitiae dei seu iustitiae spiritualis.” ↩

27. De civitate dei, xix. 13: “ Deus dedit hominibus quaedam bona huic vitae congrua, id est pacem temporalem pro modulo mortalis vitae in ipsa salute et incolumitate ac societate sui generis, et quaeque huic paci vel tuendae vel recuperandae necessaria sunt: eo pacto aequissimus, ut qui mortalis talibus bonis paci mortalium accommodatis recte usus fuerit, accipiat ampliora atque meliora, ipsam scilicet immortalitatis pacem, eique convenientem gloriam et honorem in vita aeterna ad fruendum deo et proximo in deo: qui autem perperam, nec illa accipiat et haec amittat.” ↩

28. In the above-cited passage Paul says expressly that whoever resists the government is opposing what God has ordained. The Augsb. Conf. xvi. here subjoins the exception, nisi cum magistratus iubent peccare, tunc enim Christiani magis debent obedire deo quam hominibus. But no command to sin is to be found in State laws which make the privileges of definite denominations dependent on positive legal conditions. The Christian owes obedience to these laws as indirect Divine ordinances, and it is a misuse of Scripture to oppose them, as human ordinances, to any Divine commandment whatsoever. For Peter’s declaration in Acts v. 29 is aimed, not at State laws as human and infra-Divine, but at an injunction of the Church authorities; bishops and pastors’ conferences, therefore, fall under the principle that we ought to obey God rather than them. ↩