THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
eration of divine providence. Rationalism gave a high place to belief in providence as an essential part of natural theology Lessing, accordingly, in his Ueber die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, represents God as a teacher who instructs his pupils to help themselves, not as a deity who directly governs the world. So far as theodicy was concerned, Leibnitz took the most prominent position, with his Essai de thiodicte (Amsterdam, 1710). The actual existence of evil, he contended, does not disprove that the world was created by an all-good and an all-powerful activity. Physical evil is a necessary consequence of moral evil ; it is the natural punishment of sin. Moral evil is to be traced back to the limitation and to the finiteness of what is created; this is metaphysical evil. Since, however, the conception of creation involves finiteness, a world of perfect creatures would be a contradiction; a world without evil would be unthinkable. At the same time, the world is contingent and represents a choice of many possibilities; and since God has exercised this choice, the world is proved to be the best of all possible worlds. This optimism was severely shaken by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which was discussed in Voltaire's Candide with a characteristic union of irony, frivolity, and keenness, the result being pessimistic skepticism. A sharp contrast to this attitude is to be found in Kant, who recognized the value of the physico-theological proof, though he no more regarded it as a complete demonstration than he did the cosmological and ontological arguments. The attitude of more recent theologians and philosophers toward providence is naturally conditioned by their general, deistic, pantheistic, or theistic points of view. Among them special mention should be made of Schleiermacher, who held the relation between God and, the world to be represented in the feeling of dependence, though he denied that the interests of piety required any fact so to be conceived that its dependence on God removed it from the sphere of the operations of nature, since both the mechanism of nature and human consciousness are alike ordered by God. The results of these premises Schleiermacher developed in his treatment of miracles and in his conception of evil. Strauss represents the standpoint of Hegelian speculation, affirming that the cosmic powers and their relations testify to an immanent reason. Pantheistic tendencies, as represented by Spinoza or Hegel, were sharply opposed by Ritschl, who returned to the Reformers' standpoint, and found the basis of the belief of the religious governance of the world in the atonement.
The Christian teaching of divine providence must rest essentially on the form it takes in the Gospel;
what stands there must be brought to 9. Critical full expression. The certainty of Conclusion. Christian belief must be purified of all
those elements which in themselves have only a dogmatic interest, since, if they are not properly discussed, they endanger the Christian assurance of salvation. It is clear that the Bible does not bring divine providence into the sphere of theoretically scientific explanation of God and the world. The problem belongs in the forum of the subjective, practical, and teleological religious con-
sideration of faith. The interest of early Protestant teaching on the subject lies in its practical break with the intellectualism of scholastic philosophy, and in its insistence on the personal and ethical nature of belief in providence. Though for a time there was a return to pre-Reformation concepts, there is a general tendency among modern German Protestant theologians to reject these intellectualistic tendencies and to find the most fruitful results in carrying out the lines of thought initiated by Luther. To the quasi-scholastic distinctions of early Protestantism many objections may be alleged. Suffice it to say that the delimitations are unsatisfactory because of confusion in the categories to which they are assigned, errors in distinction of nature and character, artificiality in the classes postulated, and lack of sharpness of definition. Notwithstanding, moreover, the numerous attempts to derive the concept of providence from empirical views of the world, and to develop a socalled physico-theological proof of God's existence, it is clear that empiricism leads to polytheism or to dualism rather than to ethical monotheism. The conviction of divine providence is not built up through the teaching of retribution or thoughts of merit; but rests on the facts of moral consciousness, and on the practical recognition of the kingdom of God revealed by Jesus Christ, in which God's grace overcomes and heals man's moral and natural necessities. The atonement brings the conviction of the inexhaustible love of God for his children, the assurance that "all things work together for good to them that love God " (Rom. viii. 28). This is not a theoretical definition of a principle, but a practical solution to be applied by life itself. The Christian is convinced that all the elements of life's experiences, however contradictory they may seem, are but factors in the construction of the supernatural divine kingdom. This belief shows itself religiously in the recognition of the universal activity of divine love, in the practise of prayer, and in the certainty that it will be heard by God; and it is manifested ethically in the fulfilment of the duties arising from man's practical position in the world.
Although this type of practical conviction is not capable of theoretical proof, and does not require such demonstration, nevertheless individual problems arise which can be solved only by constructing a Christian philosophy of nature and history, i.e., the explanation of all development
10. Sub- in both fields as the means to God's sidiary eternal end. Such questions, therefore, Problems, as the relation of providence to Miracles and Prayer (qq.v.), to the freedom of man (see Will, Freedom op the), and to the actuality of evil and Sin (q.v.) must be mentioned briefly. The world as depicted by natural science is a construction of man's mind. Natural laws are, therefore, merely conceptual and subjective, not objective and real; they are only necessary psychological and logical formulas to enable man to arrange his knowledge of phenomenal reality; and they can claim no such metaphysical importance as though they represented the whole of reality or all the possibilities of existence. If this fact be