. When he pointed out that into the world, as we know it, an
element of spirit goes, that in it an element of the ideal inheres, he
began a movement which has issued in modern monism. He affirmed that
that element from my thought which enters into the world, as I know it,
may be so great that only just a point of matter and a prick of sense
remains. Fichte said: 'Why do we put it all in so perverse a way? Why
reduce the world of matter to just a point? Why is it not taken for what
it is, and yet understood to be all alive with God and we able to think
of it, because we are parts of the great thinker God?' Still Fichte had
busied himself almost wholly with consciousness. Schelling endeavoured
to correct that. Nature lives and moves in God, just as truly in one way
as does man in another. Men arise out of nature. A circle has been drawn
through the points of our triangle. Nature and man are in a new and
deeper sense revelations of God. In fact, supplementing one another,
they constitute the only possible channels for the manifestation of God.
It hardly needs to be said that these thoughts are widely appropriated
in our modern world. These once novel speculations of the kings of
thought have made their way slowly to all strata of society. Remote and
difficult in their first expression in the language of the schools,
their implications are to-day on everybody's lips. It is this unitary
view of the universe which has made difficult the acceptance of a
theology, the understandlng of a religion, which are still largely
phrased in the language of a philosophy to which these ideas did not
belong. There is not an historic creed, there is hardly a greater system
of theology, which is not stated in terms of a philosophy and science
which no longer reign. Men are asking: 'cannot Christianity be so stated
and interpreted that it shall meet the needs of men of the twentieth
century, as truly as it met those of men of the first or of the
sixteenth?' Hegel, the last of this great group of idealistic
philosophers whom we shall name, enthusiastically believed in this new
interpretation of the faith which was profoundly dear to him. He made
important contribution to that interpretation.

HEGEL

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. His father
was in the fiscal service of the King of Wuerttemberg. He studied in
Tuebingen. He was heavy and slow of development, in striking contrast
with Schelling. He served as tuto