n view of
the world which it is not at all obliged to make or justified in making,
and forces upon religion a reform against the necessity and usefulness of
which not only religious feeling and need, but also deeper and more
consequent reflection on God and the world, just as strongly strives.

What remains to him as an independent realm for religion is nevertheless
worthy of recognition. As faith of the human mind in a transcendental unity
which manifests itself in the manifold and sensible, and carries through a
moral order of the world--although one which, by the before-mentioned
limitation of the natural connection of guilt and punishment, is very much
reduced--religion gives to the mind warmth and worship; as confidence of
the heart in an infinite possession in the anguish of the finite, it
creates confidence in God, gratitude, devotion, energy, courage of life; as
reverence for a holiness which stands unimpeachable above the fluctuating
inclinations of our will, awakens the consciousness of guilt, and abolishes
the guilt, it remains the basis of all moral action. Lang also sharply and
correctly points out the insufficiency of Strauss's "The Old Faith and the
New," as well as the conflict between his metaphysical naturalism which
only leads to the struggle for existence, and his demand of self-submission
to the universe, and of the moral and spiritual self-determination of man
as of a being which goes beyond nature. Nevertheless we can not follow Lang
in his {212} ways of reform. First--his conception of God is amazingly
meagre, and of more than a Spencerian unapproachableness. God is to him,
according to his "Dogmatics," nothing but the eternal, in itself perfect
cause of all being, exempted from all changes of the world's process. When
he gives the name of father to this primeval cause, as he does in his
sermons and elsewhere, without being able to admit relation of mutual love
of person to person, he only makes it glaringly evident how little his
abstract metaphysics can satisfy religious need. Second--that which is
claimed to be gained by this modern view of the world (namely, extension of
the supremacy of religion to everything, even to the affairs of daily
life), is not at all new, but is the effect of long-existing sound
religiousness, and is the essence of all sound religious doctrine; and we
therefore can not see how a view of the world, which, for instance, denies
divine providence, and limits the hearing o