n of self, which is at the same time the
realisation of self, through the life and service for others. The goal
of religion is the elimination of self, the swallowing up of self, in
the service of God. In truth, the unity of man with man is at bottom
only another form of his unity with God, and the service of humanity is
the identical service of God. Other so-called services of God are a
means to this, or else an illusion. This parallel of religion and morals
is to be set over against other passages, easily to be cited, in which
Schleiermacher speaks of passivity and contemplation as the means of the
realisation of the unity of man and God, as if the elimination of self
meant a sort of Nirvana. Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic. No
philosopher save Kant ever influenced him half so much as did Spinoza.
There is something almost oriental in his mood at times. An occasional
fragment of description of religion might pass as a better delineation
of Buddhism than of Christianity. This universality of his mind is
interesting. These elements have not been unattractive to some portions
of his following. One wearied with the Philistinism of the modern
popular urgency upon practicality turns to Schleiermacher, as indeed
sometimes to Spinoza, and says, here is a man who at least knows what
religion is. Yet nothing is further from the truth than to say that
Schleiermacher had no sense for the meaning of religion in the outward
life and present world.

In the _Reden_ Schleiermacher had contended that religion is a condition
of devout feeling, specifically the feeling of dependence upon God. This
view dominates his treatment of Christianity. It gives him his point of
departure. A Christian is possessed of the devout feeling of dependence
upon God through Jesus Christ or, as again he phrases it, of dependence
upon Christ. Christianity is a positive religion in the sense that it
has direct relation to certain facts in the history of the race, most of
all to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But it does not consist in any
positive propositions whatsoever. These have arisen in the process of
interpretation of the faith. The substance of the faith is the
experience of renewal in Christ, of redemption through Christ. This
inward experience is neither produced by pure thought nor dependent upon
it. Like all other experience it is simply an object to be described and
reckoned with. Orthodox dogmatists had held that the content of the
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