t is a system of
thought only in the way of deposit from a vivid and vigorous life. A man
normally reflects on the conditions and aims of what he does. Religion
is conduct. Ends in character are supreme. Religions and the many
interpretations of Christianity have been good or bad, according as they
ministered to character. So strong was this ethical trait in Kant that
it dwarfed all else. He was not himself a man of great breadth or
richness of feeling. He was not a man of imagination. His religion was
austere, not to say arid. Hegel was before all things an
intellectualist. Speculation was the breath of life to him. He had
metaphysical genius. He tended to transform in this direction everything
which he touched. Religion is thought. He criticised the rationalist
movement from the height of vantage which idealism had reached. But as
pure intellectualist he would put most rationalists to shame. We owe to
this temperament his zeal for an interpretation of the universe 'all in
one piece.' Its highest quality would be its abstract truth. His
understanding of religion had the glory and the limitations which attend
this view.

SCHLEIERMACHER

Between Kant and Hegel came another, Schleiermacher. He too was no mean
philosopher. But he was essentially a theologian, the founder of modern
theology. He served in the same faculty with Hegel and was overshadowed
by him. His influence upon religious thought was less immediate. It has
been more permanent. It was characteristically upon the side which Kant
and Hegel had neglected. That was the side of feeling. His theology has
been called the theology of feeling. He defined religion as feeling.
Christianity is for him a specific feeling. Because he made so much of
feeling, his name has been made a theological household word by many who
appropriated little else of all he had to teach. His warmth and passion,
his enthusiasm for Christ, the central place of Christ in his system,
made him loved by many who, had they understood him better, might have
loved him less. For his real greatness lay, not in the fact that he
possessed these qualities alone, but that he possessed them in a
singularly beautiful combination with other qualities. The emphasis is,
however, correct. He was the prophet of feeling, as Kant had been of
ethical religion and Hegel of the intellectuality of faith. The entire
Protestant theology of the nineteenth century has felt his influence.
The English-speaking race is