future retribution. In speculative thought the prevailing
school, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of sense-knowledge,
till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of miracle and in
philosophy to a fundamental skepticism. Berkeley reverted to the ideal
philosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of the eternal seesaw of
metaphysics.

In Germany, Kant sank his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the working
of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But he
recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world
affords, the commanding sense of duty,--the "moral imperative;" and
through this he found the presence and the authoritative voice of a moral
deity.

Goethe lived through a rich and various experience, of book-culture,
emotion, conversance with men and affairs, in the attitude of an explorer
and observer, unbound by creeds, but open to all teaching from past
records or present impressions. The projection of this experience was an
ideal of life which gave large scope to all human faculties,--to
knowledge, pleasure, passion, service,--under a wise self-control, and
with theoretical allegiance to a moral law and a future hope not unlike
the law and the hope of Christianity. It was an ideal which appealed
only to the man of intellectual habit, and which lacked the note of
heroism and self-sacrifice.

It was the opposite quality, the passion of self-forgetful service, which
won for Christianity its most notable triumph in this century, in the
movement led by John Wesley. In Wesley, Protestantism came back to the
rescue of the poor, as Catholicism came back in Francis of Assisi. Among
the peasants and colliers of England, among the backwoodsmen of America,
swept an uplifting wave of love, joy, and hope.

Jonathan Edwards did Christianity the service of carrying Calvinism to
its logical extreme, and showing what it really meant. He started in
the New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not to
rest till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hell
as to which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted in
such lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessities
of human nature. The life of holiness and love--in himself a most
genuine reality--he defined in such terms of introspection and
self-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between the forms of
religion and the most sturdy and natural virtue of the t