igious spirit. Faith prescribes the objects
and the limitations of knowledge; everything is referred to the hereafter,
thought becomes prayer. Men speculate concerning the attributes of God, on
the number and rank of the angels, on the immortality of man--all purely
transcendental subjects. Side by side with these, it is true, the world
receives loving attention, but always as the lower story merely,[1] above
which, with its own laws, rises the true fatherland, the kingdom of grace.
The most subtle acuteness is employed in the service of dogma, with the
task of fathoming the how and why of things whose existence is certified
elsewhere. The result is a formalism in thought side by side with profound
and fervent mysticism. Doubt and trust are strangely intermingled, and a
feeling of expectation stirs all hearts. On the one side stands sinful,
erring man, who, try as hard as he may, only half unravels the mysteries of
revealed truth; on the other, the God of grace, who, after our death, will
reveal himself to us as clearly as Adam knew him before the fall. God
alone, however, can comprehend himself--for the finite spirit, even
truth unveiled is mystery, and ecstasy, unresisting devotion to the
incomprehensible, the culmination of knowledge. In mediaeval philosophy
the subject looks longingly upward to the infinite object of his thought,
expecting that the latter will bend down toward him or lift him upward
toward itself; in Greek philosophy the spirit confronts its object, the
world, on a footing of equality; in modern philosophy the speculative
subject feels himself higher than the object, superior to nature. In
the conception of the Middle Ages, truth and mystery are identical; to
antiquity they appear reconcilable; modern thought holds them as mutually
exclusively as light and darkness. The unknown is the enemy of knowledge,
which must be chased out of its last hiding-place. It is, therefore, easy
to understand that the modern period stands in far sharper antithesis to
the mediaeval era than to the ancient, for the latter has furnished it many
principles which can be used as weapons against the former. Grandparents
and grandchildren make good friends.

[Footnote 1: On the separation and union of the three worlds, _natura,
gratia, gloria_, in Thomas Aquinas, cf. Rudolph Eucken, _Die Philosophie
des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der Neuzeit_, Halle. 1886.]

When a new movement is in preparation, but there is a lack of c