tlie must urgent necessities of the moral life. It lias, indeed, other relations and aspects that tran- scend experience and, consequently, our under- standing. All that can be said there is, Exit in mystcria. Ilitscldian modesty is often misunder- stood. But it has served to clear the ground within the range of spiritual experience, and floods this ground with light. There is no true doctrine that can contradict this light, or shelter itself from its penetration.
The influence of Ritsclil is the predominant theo- logical force of the hour. It is felt wherever the attraction of religious problems is felt. He is best interpreted, not as the propounder of a ' theology without metaphysics,' or a ' religion without mysticism ' (for he propounds neither), but as an ex- Ijonent of the ' Christian consciousness ' of Schleier- macher. He closes so far the movement begun by the latter. That movement is familiar to religious tlunkers in this country in the more sober theology of Coleridge, of Maurice, and of Erskine of Lin- lathen, who may justly be termed the guides of the higher religious thinking in England in the flrst half of last century. Coleridge (1772-1834), adopting Kant's forms of thought and imbibing Schleiermacher's spirit, introduced the fruits of their teachings into England, where thought was dominated by Locke in philosophy and Paley in theology. The ' Reason ' of Coleridge is the ' Prac- tical Reason ' of Kant, which grasps the higher principles. Like Schleiermacher, he falls back on experience as the test of sacred truth. He believes Christian truth because it 'finds' him. Coleridge shared in all the characteristics of the German school from whom he borrowed. He was no meta- physician. He was a great interpreter of spiritual facts, a student of spix-itual life, a subject of spirit- ual experience. He saw in Christianity the true explanation of the facts of our spiritual being. He brought human nature near again to Christianity. He changed the conception of Christianity from being a traditional creed till it became a living expression of spiritual consciousness. ' After him,' says Mark Pattison, ' the evidence makers ceased as beneath the spell of some magician.' The line of thought marked out by the disjointed reflexions of Coleridge was continued by F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), who had been influenced also by Erskine, and still more by his own inner conflicts. His best energies were absorbed in the interpreta- tion of religious thought from the standpoint of the Incarnation. By it alone, according to his view, could our nature be sufficient for perfect life. Quite in the style of the later Ritschl, he rests faith on historic fact, and flnds the essential ground of human life in the Personality of Christ as the Revealer of the Divine will and character. Akin, in like manner, is his insight into the social aspects of Ciiristian truth, the spring of his abounding personal philanthropy, and the inspiration of that movement which had for its chief tenet the social utilization of religion, the movement of Christian Socialism. More apart and less orthodox stood Thomas Erskine, who recalls his friend Fichte in not a few touches of nature and conviction. He was no student as Coleridge, nor of practical bent as Maurice. Meditative and introspective, he sought the truth by patient thoughtfulness and deduction from his own experience — deeper thought, not larger knowledge. He brings out an aspect of the ' theology of consciousness ' not emphasized hitherto, viz. that religious experience is a grow- ing and endlessly fjroMing inner perception.
The experiential movement lias a second phase, which calls for some mention in its bearing on present-day ideas of Christ. It is a phase outside the Churolies, although not always, or necessarily, hostile to them. It shows itself in the rise of
ethical societies in America, France, Germany, Holland, and this country. Its aims are familiar to us in Britain from the writings of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). Much theological liberalism moves in the same direction.
In the last forty years a succession of writers has maintained that while the moral and practical elements of Christianity are entirely commendable and necessary, its theologj is discredited, and must be abandoned. The aspirations of such writers are not to be confounded with those of writers still more radical, who denounce not only the theology, but the ethics as well, of the Christian Church, — writers including men so widely parted from each other as Nietzsche the Darwinian and Maeter- linck the mystic. Of these societies it is relevant to our purpose to say that they cannot be viewed as within the line of progress. The Ethical Theology, and in particular the school of Ritschl, is sometimes set side by side with them. But without warrant. These societies, often divergent from one another, have a certain unity, and it is precisely by the principle of that unity that they separate themselves from the ethical movement in theology as well as from orthodox Christianity. The Person of Christ is all in all to these last. It is nothing to those schools. They are inimical not only to historical Christianity, but to the historical Christ. They combine in identifying all, in historical Christianity and in the historical Christ, that is not purely moral and spiritual, with the mere swathing-bands which the spirit is to outgrow. Nurtured on the niodern conscience, they have not drunk its deepest draught, that inner power of Divine mystery which awakens conscience and deepens it as nothing else. The spiritual side of the Christian conscience, in its sense of sin and revelation of Divine pity and forgiveness, is unfelt. It is here, too, that so much ' Broad ' or ' Liberal ' religious thought fails. There is a liberalism which is only the rich and complex mani- festation of the magnificent capacities of the Christian Faith claiming all life for Christ; and there is a liberalism which, when extracted from the haze which its upholders cast around it, is found to be, in its underlying postulates, totally incon- sistent with the historic faith. It seeks a purely spiritual Christ. And when it has found Him, He is neither truly human nor Divine ; He is at once a non-historical and a non-mysterious Being. Undogmatic Christianity is simply abstract theism. Against its empty abstraction of the Divine Spirit, and its anaemic conception of Christ's Person, the experience-theology is a passionate protest.