' B}- religiosity — the inner power and spirit of religion — I understand not an instinct groping towards the Divine, and not mere emotional devoutness ; for God, if He be God, must be the very heart of life, of all thinking and all action, and not a mere object of devout passion or of belief. That is no real knowledge of God where He is merely object ; either God is not known at all, or He is at once subject and object of knowledge. He must be at once our very self, our heart of hearts, yet comprehending all other hearts.' ' Faith is to be understood in its original sense of a trust and confidence in the Divine.' Fundamentally this is Schleiermacher's view, when he bases his thought on ' experience' (Reden iiber die Religion).
Religion is the element of life whose influence penetrates all other parts of life. Religion is not a knowing ; nor an action : it is a feeling. It is not as science, the knowledge of finite things in relation to each other. It is not as philosophy, the knowledge of the nature of the Supreme Cause. It is not as morals, which is rather the full exercise of its impulses in action. It contemplates the universe indeed, but not to discover the relations of its parts ; rather to watch it reverently in the representations and acts characteristic of it, and to let itself be seized and filled in childlike passivity by its immediate in- fluences. It is the immediate consciousness of the universal being. ' Thus to see and find in all that lives and moves, in all becoming and change, in all action and suffering, thus to have and know life itself only in immediate feeling as this being, this is religion.' Its seat is in the soul. The central quality of the soul or self-consciousness is a certain emotion engendered by
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the contact of the objective world with the individual • an emotion which is prior to both thoujfhland action, and animates both. It is this emotion which, as the centre of existence and the meetmg-point of the individual and the universe, constitutes the religious sphere of man. It is thus not the mystical sense of absorption m the Infinite. Mysticism has always supposed that the experience of God can be reached only by means which are independent of the world and the ordinary experiences of life ; it takes the whole world of sensible objects and human interests to be a barrier between the soul and God ; the way of perfection consists in escaping from all these until the "im- passioned soul in its upward flight loses itself in the formless and viewless light of God. Schleiermacher, on the contrarv, teaches that the experience of God's real existence is not some- thing apart from all the human interests of life. It can come through these interests only b}' deepening them. The roots that join man to God are the same as those that join men to one another and to Nature, only they go deeper. The religious experience, again, is marked by spontaneity. It is in every man with the original impress which his individuality gives it. Its range and variety are infinite. It nia.\' be known to us, shining, as it were, through the beauty and glory of the world in which we live. Sometimes in sorrow and suffering it conies aa 'a deeper voice across the storm.' So, too, it may arise when the presence of something true or beautiful or good uplifts us above ourselves. In short, everything visible and invisible, every part and event of experience, may become an appearance of God, and be a means of grace. Every experience may be a religious experience. A strong current of individuality is characteristic of religion. There is no such thing as an absolute religion. And there is no man without religion. Hence, too, the relation of the founder or teacher of any historic religion to that religion is intimate and necessary ; the study of his character indispensable to the true understanding of it and its after growths.
On the basis of these ideas Schleiermacher con- structs his view of Christ and the Christian religion (Bedcn, and Der Christl. Glaube). Here the point of departure is Christian experience and the historic Jesus. For Schleiermacher there is not religion, but simply religions ; the historical relationships of the religions he does not know. Every new religion rests upon a new intuition of the universe. Jesus of Nazareth had such an intuition. What was it ? The idea of Christianity is stated, in the fifth Rede,, to be that the niin of the finite in its alienation from God is removed : ' niin and re- demption are in this mode of feeling inseparably bound up with each other, and form the funda- mental relations by which its form is determined.' Christianity makes ' religion itself the matter of religion.' Christ discerned in all things the Divine element. He discerned at the same time an irreligious principle everywhere. And the clearness with which He saw the need and the means of overcoming the unspiritual by the spiritual constitutes what is specific to Him and His faith. What is Divine in Him is not His purity or originality of character ; but tlie ' splendid clearness with which the idea He had come to represent shaped itself in His soul, the idea that all that is finite needs the help of something higher to be connected with the Deity ; and that for the man who is entangled in the finite and particular, salvation is to be sought only in re- demption.' ' This consciousness of the uniqueness of His knowledge of God and being in God, and of its power to communicate itself and stir up re- ligion, this was the consciousness of His mediator- ship and Divinity.' To those who come to know Christ it does communicate itself with salutary energy, so that they become new creatures : He is the cause of the new life. In this relation He is the ideal type of humanity, and pos.sessed a unique perfection. The proof lies in the existence of the Church, on the one hand, and the inex- plicability of His religious consciousness by natural forces. He is perfect in what concerns His re- ligious consciousness ; here He was what He was by a primitive communication from God, in virtue of which also He was sinless. Otherwise He was truly man and subject in all respects to the laws of human growth. Divine in a sense. He was not veritably God; had no pre-temi)oral bemg, or miraculous birth, or bodily resurrection. He is