hout going over
to the metaphysicians. What God is to us we can know simply as religious
men and solely upon the basis of religious experience. God is holy love.
That is a religious value-judgment. But what sort of a being God must be
in order that we may assign to him these attributes, we cannot say
without leaving the basis of experience. This is pragmatism indeed. It
opens up boundless possibilities of subjectivism in a man who was
apparently only too matter-of-fact.

There was a time in his career when Ritschl was popular with both
conservatives and liberals. There were long years in which he was
bitterly denounced by both. Yet there was something in the man and in
his teaching which went beyond all the antagonisms of the schools. There
can be no doubt that it was the intention of Ritschl to build his
theology solely upon the gospel of Jesus Christ. The joy and confidence
with which this theology could be preached, Ritschl awakened in his
pupils in a degree which had not been equalled by any theologian since
Schleiermacher himself. Numbers who, in the time of philosophical and
scientific uncertainty, had lost their courage, regained it in contact
with his confident and deeply religious spirit. A wholesome nature,
eminently objective in temper, concentrated with all his force upon his
task, of rare dialectical gifts, he had a great sense of humour and
occasionally also the faculty of bitterly sarcastic speech. His very
figure radiated the delight of conflict as he walked the Goettingen wall.

A devoted pupil, writing immediately after Ritschl's death, used
concerning Schleiermacher a phrase which we may transfer to Ritschl
himself. 'One wonders whether such a theology ever existed as a
connected whole, except in the mind of its originator. Neither by those
about him, nor by those after him, has it been reproduced in its
entirety or free from glaring contradictions.' It was not free from
contradictions in Ritschl's own mind. His pupils divided his inheritance
among them. Each appropriated that which accorded with his own way of
looking at things and viewed the remainder as something which might be
left out of the account. It is long since one could properly speak of a
Ritschlian school. It will be long until we shall cease to reckon with a
Ritschlian influence. He did yeoman service in breaking down the high
Lutheran confessionalism which had been the order of the day. In his
recognition of the excesses of the Tuebin