us. Yet for Kant our salvation had no closer
relation to the historic revelation in Jesus. Furthermore, so much was
this change an individual issue that we may say that the actualisation
of redemption would be the same for a given man, were he the only man in
the universe. To hold fast to the ethical idealism of Kant, and to
overcome its subjectivity and individualism, was the problem.

The reference to experience which underlies all that was said above was
particularly congruous with the mood of an age grown weary of
Hegelianism and much impressed with the value of the empirical method in
all the sciences. Another great contention of our age is for the
recognition of the value of what is social. Its emphasis is upon that
which binds men together. Salvation is not normally achieved except in
the life of a man among and for his fellows. It is by doing one's duty
that one becomes good. One is saved, not in order to become a citizen of
heaven by and by, but in order to be an active citizen of a kingdom of
real human goodness here and now. In reality no man is being saved,
except as he does actively and devotedly belong to that kingdom. The
individual would hardly be in God's eyes worth the saving, except in
order that he might be the instrumentality of the realisation of the
kingdom. Those are ideas which it is possible to exaggerate in statement
or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their quality as
half-truths. But it is hardly possible to exaggerate their significance
as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness, inadequacy, and
artificiality both of the official statement and of the popular
apprehension of Christianity. These ideas appeal to men in our time.
They are popular because men think them already. Men are pleased, even
when somewhat incredulous, to learn that Christianity will bear this
social interpretation. Most Christians are in our time overwhelmingly
convinced that in this direction lies the interpretation which
Christianity must bear, if it is to do the work and meet the needs of
the age. Its consonance with some of the truths underlying socialism may
account, in a measure, for the influence which the Ritschlian theology
has had.

As was indicated, Ritschl's epoch-making book bears the title, _The
Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation_. The book might
be described in the language of the schools as a monograph upon one
great dogma of the Christian faith, around which, as th