ounding out of his thought. God was to him indeed
not 'a man in the next street.' What he says about the problem of the
personalness of God is true. We see, perhaps, more clearly than did he
that the debate is largely about words. Similarly, we may say that
Schleiermacher's passing denial of the immortality of the soul was
directed, in the first instance, against the crass, unsocial and immoral
view which has disfigured much of the teaching of religion. His
contention was directed toward that losing of oneself in God through
ideals and service now, which in more modern phrase we call the entrance
upon the immortal life here, the being in eternity now. For a soul so
disposed, for a life thus inspired, death is but an episode. For himself
he rejoices to declare it one to the issue of which he is indifferent.
If he may thus live with God now, he cares little whether or not he
shall live by and by.

In his _Monologues_ Schleiermacher first sets forth his ethical thought.
As it is religion that a man feels himself dependent upon God, so is it
the beginning of morality that a man feels his dependence upon his
fellows and their dependence on him. Slaves of their own time and
circumstance, men live out their lives in superficiality and isolation.
They are a prey to their own selfishness. They never come into those
relations with their fellows in which the moral ideal can be realised.
Man in his isolation from his fellows is nothing and accomplishes
nothing. The interests of the whole humanity are his private interests.
His own happiness and welfare are not possible to be secured save
through his co-operation with others, his work and service for others.
The happiness and welfare of others not merely react upon his own. They
are in a large sense identical with his own. This oneness of a man with
all men is the basis of morality, just as the oneness of man with God is
the basis of religion. In both cases the oneness exists whether or not
we know it. The contradictions and miseries into which immoral or
unmoral conduct plunges us, are the witness of the fact that this
inviolable unity of a man with humanity is operative, even if he ignores
it. Often it is his ignoring of this relation which brings him through
misery to consciousness of it. Man as moral being is but an
individuation of humanity, just as, again, as religious being he is but
an individuation of God. The goal of the moral life is the absorption of
self, the eliminatio