communion with God, to the point
where they have no need of Christ, seemed to him impious. There is no
way of knowing that we are in fellowship with God, except by comparing
what we feel that this fellowship has given us, with that which we
historically learn that the fellowship with God gave to Christ. This is
the sense and this the connexion in which Ritschl says that we cannot
come to God save in and through the historic Christ as he is given us in
the Gospels. The inner life, at least, which is there depicted for us
is, in this outward and authoritative sense, our norm and guide.

Large difficulties loom upon the horizon of this positivistic insistence
upon history. Can we know the inner life of Christ well enough to use it
thus as test in every, or even in any case? Does not the use of such a
test, or of any test in this external way, take us out of the realm of
the religion of the spirit? Men once said that the Church was their
guide. Others said the Scripture was their guide. Now, in the sense of
the outwardness of its authority, we repudiate even this. It rings
devoutly if we say Christ is our guide. Yet, as Ritschl describes this
guidance, in the exigency of his contention against mysticism, have we
anything different? What becomes of Confucianists and Shintoists, who
have never heard of the historic Christ? And all the while we have the
sense of a query in our minds. Is it open to any man to repudiate
mysticism absolutely and with contumely, and then leave us to discover
that he does not mean mysticism as historians of every faith have
understood it, but only the margin of evil which is apparently
inseparable from it? That margin of evil others see and deplore. Against
it other remedies have been suggested, as, for example, intelligence.
Some would feel that in Ritschl's remedy the loss is greater than the
gain.

This historical character of revelation is so truly one of the fountain
heads of the theology which takes its rise in Ritschl, that it deserves
to be considered somewhat more at length. The Ritschlian movement has
engaged a generation of more or less notable thinkers in the period
since Ritschl's death. These have dissented at many points from
Ritschl's views, diverged from his path and marked out courses of their
own. We shall do well in the remainder of this chapter to attempt the
delineation in terms, not exclusively of Ritschl, but of that which may
with some laxity be styled Ritschlianism. The v