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had its effect on Protestant dogmatics; and in our own day theology has been strongly influenced by the modern theory of knowledge and by psychology generally, as well as by the theory of development.

This is all so evident and so notorious that there is no need to expatiate on the fact that without a knowledge of the history of philosophy we cannot study the history of the Church. But Hegel and his followers ask us to take a step further: Christian doctrine and philosophy, they say, are not only intertwined with each other, are not only akin to each other, but are in the last resort identical. The considerations leading to this hypothesis are as follows: Religion exhibits the relation between man and the Absolute, and a knowledge of the Absolute is that to which our intellectual efforts are directed. In the lower stages of religion, however, this relation is at best only felt; and hence these stages are incomplete, particularistic, and encumbered with alien matter. As development progresses they become more and more pure and spiritual, until they reach their culminating point in Christianity. God is then revealed and recognized as the absolute and immanent Spirit. According to this view, the history of the formation and development of Christian dogma is the real history of the Christian religion; and the most important elements, too, in dogma are the speculative assertions, especially those on the nature of the Trinity and on Christology; for in them the pure, pantheistic knowledge of God comes to expression, in part clearly and plainly, in part only lightly veiled. In this way the history of philosophy and the history of higher, especially of the Christian, religion are, rightly understood, identical; nay, in their identity we get not only the true history of the human spirit but also the history of God Himself: In this

history the Absolute Spirit "has come to itself."

This magnificent conception of the history of the Church is not, indeed, without some value; but, for all that, it cannot be accepted. That the knowledge of God as the Absolute Spirit forms a main element in the Christian religion is true. On the other hand, since the aim of philosophy is to get at the ultimate reasons for everything, and these are not to be found in anything material, an elective affinity is thereby established between philosophy and spiritual religion. Moreover, the higher forms of religion have at all times made use of philosophical thought in order to justify the idea of God and give it a fuller development; and, conversely, philosophy has taken account of the ideas expressive of religious and more particularly of Christian faith. But these circumstances must not blind us to the fact that religion and a philosophical theory of the world, so long as the latter keeps to its own ground, are two different things. Religion is a definite state of feeling and will, basing itself on inner experience and on historical facts. This it remains even in its higher stages; and hence the intellectual element in it, although an absolutely necessary element, always takes the second place. Again, religion is never "disinterested," as any theory must be; on the contrary, it has to do with hopes and aspirations; nay, we may even say that religion is the instinct of self-preservation in a higher forman instinct, however, which in the Christian religion is not concerned with the empirical Ego and with earthly life, but with the inmost core of this Ego, which in another world, the world of Freedom and the Good, sees its true home. Philosophy cannot and may not know anything of all this, except in so far as it calls religion to its ald when it attempts to study the philos

ophy of religion. For without religion philosophy remains bound down to the five senses and the whole apparatus of psychology and logic, which everywhere carry it back to at least two fundamental factors and one uniform process. In religion, on the other hand, it is one fundamental factor and two processes which we are led to accept. The obscurities to which this state of things sometimes give rise; the "belief" of philosophy in the unity of the fundamental factor, and the half-belief of the theologians in the God of religion, have produced endless confusion in the course of history, and brought about the erroneous notion that the results of pure knowledge and of religion are essentially akin to each other or even identical. No! they are different; they are two parallel lines which religious philosophy apart, which is not pure philosophy-are connected only, as it were, by the bridge of certain analogies, or by the flights of fancy which merge their different fields in one in order to give them life. However-be the distance between them what it may-in the actual history of things they are very closely bound up with each other. They have done each other great service, and together they represent the higher life of humanity. How much does religion, even the Christian religion, owe to the progressive achievements of philosophy and the various forms of knowledge! How much they have done to purify it, to clear it of false ideas, and to free it from impossible pretensions! ligion, no doubt, is very tenacious in clinging to old prejudices, and the history of the relation between philosophy and religion is also the history of a struggle. Andrew White has described it for us. Religion seems always to have had to surrender; but it only seems. All that it did was to abandon outworks that were no longer of any use to it. It shed the leaves in which

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there was no more life. On the other hand, in none of the intellectual systems that have prevailed from time to time has the human mind ever spoken its last word, and nearly all of them have borrowed something from religion. The human mind has had to take these systems back again and again, and put others in their place. The more closely and attentively the ecclesiastical historian examines this struggle of the mind in itself and in its relation to religion, the deeper he will go, and the more indispensable he will make the study of his subject to the science of history as a whole.

IV.

We said just now that the human mind has never spoken its last word in any of the intellectual systems that have prevailed from time to time. Is that true? Have we not, perhaps, its last word in the theory which tells us that it is economic conditions-I mean food, the supply of food, and the place where it can be obtained-which ultimately determine all intellectual life and all higher development, including that of religion? I must not try within the limits of this lecture to explain my reasons for declining to accept such a theory. I may say, however, that it seems to me to be refuted by the mere fact that the most material element acting upon man always produces feelings and ideas which themselves act as forces in their turn, and stand in no simple proportionate relation to their material causes. Moreover, as long as men continue to sacrifice their possessions, their blood, and their life, for ideal aims, it will be impossible for anyone to maintain the materialistic view of history except with the help of sophisms.

But although we decline to explain everything that happens by the play of economic conditions, we may still

gratefully acknowledge that this latest, the economic, view of history has shed and will continue to shed a great deal of light on the history of the Church. Let me show what I mean by a few examples. The great extension of Christianity in the early centuries cannot be explained without keeping the social and economic views and practices of the Christian communities in view. Every one of these communities not only tried to relieve the poor, to provide for widows and orphans, the sick, the weak, those who were out of work or persecuted, etc., but it was also a regular association for mutual help. By the union of all these communities in the Empire into a firm alliance with one another a social organism arose which could not fail to attract, in the highest degree, the economically unfortunate. That this is really what happened is shown by pagan writers themselves. It was shown, for instance, by Lucian in his Peregrinus Proteus.

But not only did the Church step in where social relations were concerned; its thoughts and ideas were also determined by its attitude in questions of economics. The distrust which the Church shows towards wealth and capital is in part to be explained by the poverty of the early communities; and here, too, its theories about earthly possessions have one of their roots. When it afterwards came to number both rich and poor in its ranks, it retained that distrust. This had a very paradoxical result: The dangers of wealth, it was said, exist only for the individual Christian; they do not exist for the Church, which is preserved from them by its sacred character. There is no harm, then, in the Church becoming rich. Rich, accordingly, it became. Part of its wealth was due to the fact that in the dark days of inner and outer convulsion a man's possessions and his capital were still safest under its protection. Hence men

often handed over their property to the Church, not only in order to save their souls, but also to secure themselves from high-handed acts or sheer robbery. The Church entered on the Middle Ages as a great and wealthy and therefore aristocratic power; and the immense struggles between Emperor and Pope, Princes and Bishops, were all in the last resort struggles for wealth and dominion.

The whole history of the Church in the Middle Ages may therefore, nay must, be studied from the economic point of view. This is very evident even in the history of Monasticism. Up to the time when the orders of mendicant friars arose, the development of Western Monasticism has a place in the history of the large landed estate. An abbey would sometimes form the centre of such an estate, and the abbot nolens volens had to provide for his monastery before he provided for the spiritual welfare of his monks. But even the movement which produced the mendicant friars very quickly became in its turn part and parcel of an economic movement, although of a different kind. Light may also be shed on the development of the Papacy from the same source, for one of the conditions of its becoming a sovereign power was the possession of landed property. In the struggle about the investiture of the bishops the questions at issue were concerned just as much with property as with dominion; and as a European power whose possessions were not on a par with its position, the Papacy was especially affected by the economic upheaval which took place in the 14th and 15th centuries. If it was to survive, ready money had to be collected from all sides. To get money it had to raise its spiritual pretensions in every direction, and make them into fresh rights; nay, more, it had to multiply the means of grace which the Church offered, and exploit

them as financial resources. Just because it was a financial power, however, the Papacy now began to excite distrust and dislike, and this it was that paved the way for the reforming movements. We can thus see how greatly religious theories and ecclesiastical arrangements were dependent on this development. Of the new sacramental observances, of the multitudinous rites and ceremonies, and of the fresh dogmas framed upon them, a large number had their origin in economic and financial necessities.

In this respect the upheaval which the Reformation denoted did not involve any radical change. Here, too, economic and social conditions played a great part. That the Reformation got the upper hand among a portion of the German people was due, first and foremost, to the Princes, who aimed at creating territorial Churches for themselves and being masters in their own house. In this connection, however, we must not forget that in the larger towns and in the country districts the Reformation assisted the class-consciousness of certain aspiring orders in the community, and that, on the other hand, the knights of the Empire, who were in a bad way economically, attempted by its means to regain their previous position. But it is in France and, above all, in England, that the close connection between the Reformation and social and economic conditions is particularly plain. Even after England had shaken off the Papacy it was social and economic conditions which determined religious parties and struggles: the King and the aristocracy held to the Church of the Thirty-nine Articles; the higher middle classes were Presbyterian; the aspiring lower middle classes were Puritan and rallied to Cromwell's flag. When we look, too, at the way in which, both there and in Protestant Germany, the character and aims of the Church were then settled

by the theologians, it is plain that side by side with political conditions the theories adopted were strongly acted on by social influences as well. These influences extend even to dogmatics and ethics (the "divinely appointed" orders), and to show that in detail is one of the tasks of the future. We must never allow ourselves to forget, however, that behind the economic factors there are always the political, and that it is these that really turn the scale. In power and effect they outweigh all other factors, so far as externals are concerned.

That the history of the Church is most closely bound up and interwoven with all the great branches of general history, is what I have tried to show. In recognizing this fact, and in shaping our study accordingly, there may possibly be some risk of our losing sight of or undervaluing the special character which attaches to the history of the Church. We shall guard ourselves against any such danger if we always bear in mind that all our labors in this sphere ought to help us to throw light on the question, What is the Christian religion? This must ever remain the guiding-star of our researches, however wide the range which they will have to take. If ecclesiastical history loses sight of that guiding-star, it will also lose the right to form a special subject of study within the science of history. If it follows that star, then what is characteristic of every independent subject of knowledge will also hold good of it-that it unveils itself only to the man who devotes himself entirely to it. Grimm once made the fine observation that knowledge has no secrets, though it has its secrecies; it has no Geheimnisse, but it has Heimlichkeiten. The history of the Church also has its Heimlichkeiten. The man who is half-hearted in his efforts about it will see nothing; it is only when he

woos it with the loyalty of a Jacob that he will win the bride.

In the history of the Church, however, these Heimlichkeiten go very deep and are very precious. We have seen that there is no such thing as a double history, and that everything that happens enters into the one stream of events. But there is a single inner experience which everyone can possess; which to every one who possesses it is like a miracle; and which cannot be simply explained as the product of something else. It is what the Christian religion describes as the New Birth-that inner, moral, new creation which transmutes all values, and of the The Contemporary Review.

slaves of compulsion makes the children of freedom. Not even in the history of the Church can anyone get a direct vision of this inner evolution accomplished in the individual, nor by any external facts whatever can anyone be convinced of its possibility and reality. But the light which shines from it throws its rays on what happens on the stage, and lets the spectator feel in his heart that the forces of history are not exhausted in the natural forces of the world, or in the powers of head and hand. This is the Heimlichkeit of the history of the Church because it is the Heimlichkeit of religion.

Adolf Harnack.

THE WAR IN THE FAR EAST.-V.

THE FALL OF Tsingtau, September.

The flag-lieutenant leaned wearily on the rail. It would have been difficult to have adequately analyzed his thoughts. They were conjured up by the weariness of life which possessed his body, and the fierce despair and utter humiliation which had crushed his soul. The rim of the beam from the search-light on Golden Hill, as it was lighting the water-way for passage of the last of the battleships, flooded the superstructure of the flagship as she rode at anchor. Yet it was more than the intensity of the unnatural light that blanched the faces of the little group of officers on the bridge. It was not fear,-Russians are not cowards: besides, the officers of the Russian Pacific Squadron were past fear. It was the utter hopelessness which knowledge of physical incompetency breeds in the vicinity of death. The crestfallen consciousness of impotency that might be seen in the face of an inexpert motorist if the chauffeur suddenly had fainted; but

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not what one would have anticipated in the faces of men to whom a great nation still looked for the successful shaping of its destinies.

It was a weird scene. Three great white beams of light pierced a background that was otherwise impenetrable in its inky blackness. They focussed their concentration upon one point, and illuminated with dazzling contrasts the gaunt hull and heavy tops of the battleship in their every detail, as with laborious toil it was towed between the artificial sags,— legacies of Japanese efforts to obstruct the fairway. In front of it three launches were dragging a mine-trawl. The busy panting of the tugs and the swirl of the water beneath the trawlhawse were the only sounds in the vicinity. But other sounds punctuated the stillness of the night,-there was ever present the dull reverberation of the Japanese shells from the investing lines, as they burst wih maddening monotony on the hill-crests of the outer defences. Just for a moment the rim

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