THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
enment took up this problem. The controversy in principle concerned the place of supranaturalism in the search for truth. All sorts of compromises were tried by both sides. The enlightened were ready to defend revelation after they had proved that its content agreed with the investigations of reason, and the orthodox reversed the process. Finally, a new point of view was won in a changed apprehension of what is credible.
The contest was fought out chiefly in the fields of the natural sciences and history The faith of the Church, inevitably from its dependence on the Bible, was closely bound up with the ancient notions of the world and the Ptolemaic system. In spite of orthodox opposition, the new Copernican system steadily won more and more the adherence of thinking minds, and the new science even invaded the domain of religion with the so-called physico-theological argument for the existence of God. Herein it vindicated the power of the reason to attain real and sure belief in God. Had the new science issued only in skepticism or materialism, it must have disintegrated Protestantism. But when it brought the proof that reason is capable of independent and convincing achievement in the religious sphere, it opened the way to a general revision of the concept of God with the help of reason. Incidentally it cut at the root of the belief in miracles, and tended to make such things as the belief in a devil, in witches, and in magical powers obsolete in Protestant piety
In the field of history actual experience first shook faith in a special and positive revelation. The wrangling of denominations and sects and the misery of the religious wars indeed justified a doubt whether the true criterion of truth had been found. This was the background of the first deistic essays, which sprang expressly from religious interest. Then came deeper and wider study of past history, an expansion of geographical and ethnographical knowledge, and the first real acquaintance with heathen religions. It had to be admitted that antiquityoffers many examples of a noble religiosity, and when it was asserted that all religions have an identical kernel, orthodoxy, because of its theory of a primitive revelation, at least could not deny that this was probable. The way was opened wide to the acceptance, in the name of Christianity itself, of general moral reason as the supreme guide in religious things. Then the very citadel of orthodoxy was attacked. Locke declared the Bible the palladium of rational Christianity, and so simplified its moral teaching that the natural law seemed no longer a hinting at the latter but its real content. The conviction became established that orthodoxy had fallen far short of understanding the Bible.
About the middle of the eighteenth century Protestantism looked back upon its orthodox period as sunken in deep error, and considered pure Christianity the champion of a natural religion, rational in its metaphysics and its morality. The idea of striving after perfection, immanent in the human spirit, and to be educated and molded by Church and State, was now its guiding-star in morals. The solution of its problems, both moral and religious, was sought not so much by laying down statutory
requirements as by seeking underlying principles. Differences of individual opinion came to be tolerated, not because of an indifference to truth, but because it was recognized that the way of the Gospel is to convince.
Kant and Schleiermacher, the two greatest thinkers of Protestantism, refined its theological methods and raised it to a new level. Kant's distinction between pure and practical reason ac- 3. Kant and complished no more than to open up
Schleier- to theology new and fruitful paths of
macher. investigation. But his fundamental conception of reason as a law-giving potency was the culmination of the basal idea of the Enlightenment that the spirit is superior to all external nature, and it has permanent and farreaching religious value in so far as it has reference to no inborn empirically known function of reason, but to one which is to be understood and asserted only in the conviction that the spirit is of supernatural determination. Kant did not contribute much to the understanding of religion, but all the more to that of morality by his doctrine of the autonomy of the moral law. Schleiermacher made the daring attempt to free religion from intellectualism and moralism. His thought that the essence of religion is the absolute feeling of dependence is a profound one; it means that the pious man knows not that he lives, but that God lives in him; he lives not in his own power, but in a power received; he "is lived." Important also in Schleiermacher is the revival of a religious valuation of Christ. His system is loaded down, however, with esthetic and pantheistic notions, and more of the same sort has been brought into Protestantism by the school of Hegel. The most important idea of the latter, that of the consistent development of history, is now being tested.
The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed
a revival of orthodoxy, which was followed by a
new pietism that repeated all the excesses of the
older in its recoil from the Enlightenment. The
eager and fruitf ul ■ interest in world history which
characterized the century had its in-
4. The fluence on church history and Biblical
Nineteenth history, and made these departments
Century, the foremost in theological study. It seems to some that Albrecht Ritschl (q.v.) has rendered a distinct service to Protestantism by his powerful combination of the historical and the religious aspects of the person of Christ, but the time has not yet come for a system of dogmatics on the basis of investigable history. Neither is it possible at present to say what will be the ultimate significance for Protestantism of the latest school, that of comparative religion. It betokens a real gain in its interest in what was once thought alien and remote, while in its antagonism to all supranaturalism it betrays sympathies with the Enlightr enment. The social and political changes inaugurated by the French Revolution, and the rapid and unprecedented development of industry and commerce, have brought moral problems which at first inspire more alarm than courage. Under the burden of the day's work and duties it is easy to forget that the mills of God grind slowly. The century has