hieved, where the individual is spared much bitter
conflict and loneliness. Nevertheless, so long as this unity of the life
of man with God is realised in the Church alone there remains a false
and harmful opposition between the Church and the world. Religion is
faced by a hostile power to which its principles have no application.
The world is denounced as unholy. With this stigma cast upon it, it may
be unholy. Yet the retribution falls also upon the Church, in that it
becomes artificial, clerical, pharisaical. The end is never that what
have been called the standards of the Church shall prevail. The end is
that the Church shall be the shrine and centre of an influence by virtue
of which the standard of truth and goodness which naturally belongs to
any relation of life shall prevail. The distinction between religion and
secular life must be abandoned. Nothing is less sacred than a Church set
on its own aggrandisement. The relations of family and of the State, of
business and social life, are to be restored to the divineness which
belongs to them, or rather, the divineness which is inalienable from
them is to be recognised. In the laws and customs of a true State,
Christianity first penetrates with its principles the real world. One
sees how large a portion of these thoughts have been taken up into the
programme of modern social movements. They are the basis of what men
call a social theology. A book like Fremantle's _World as the Subject of
Redemption_ is their thorough-going exposition in the English tongue.

We have no cause to pursue the philosophical movement beyond this point.
Its exponents are not without interest. Especially is this true of
Schopenhauer. But the deposit from their work is for our particular
purpose not great. The wonderful impulse had spent itself. These four
brilliant men stand together, almost as much isolated from the
generation which followed them as from that which went before. The
historian of Christian thought in the nineteenth century cannot
overestimate the significance of their personal interest in religion.

CHAPTER III

THEOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION

The outstanding trait of Kant's reflection upon religion is its supreme
interest in morals and conduct. Metaphysician that he was, Kant saw the
evil which intellectualism had done to religion. Religion was a
profoundly real thing to him in his own life. Religion is a life. It is
a system of thought only because life is a whole. I