gen school all would now agree.
In his feeling against mere sentimentalities of piety many sympathise.
In his emphasis upon the ethical and practical, in his urgency upon the
actual problem of a man's vocation in the world, he meets in striking
manner the temper of our age. In his emphasis upon the social factor in
religion, he represents a popular phase of thought. With all of this, it
is strange to find a man of so much learning who had so little sympathy
with the comparative study of religions, who was such a dogmatist on
behalf of his own inadequate notion of revelation, the logical effect of
whose teaching concerning the Church would be the revival of an
institutionalism and externalism such as Protestantism has hardly known.

Since Schleiermacher the German theologians had made the problem of the
person of Christ the centre of discussion. In the same period the
problem of the person of Christ had been the central point of debate in
America. Here, as there, all the other points arranged themselves about
this one. The new movement which went out from Ritschl took as its
centre the work of Christ in redemption. This is obvious from the very
title of Ritschl's great book, _Die Christliche Lehre von der
Rechtfertigung und Versoehnung_. Of this work the first edition of the
third and significant volume was published in 1874. Before that time the
formal treatises on theology had followed a traditional order of topics.
It had been assumed as self-evident that one should speak of a person
before one talked of his work. It did not occur to the theologians that
in the case of the divine person, at all events, we can securely say
that we know something as to his work. Much concerning his person must
remain a mystery to us, exactly because he is divine. Our safest course,
therefore, would be to infer the unknown qualities of his person from
the known traits of his work. Certainly this would be true as to the
work of God in nature. This was not the way, however, in which the minds
of theologians worked. The habit of dealing with conceptions as if they
were facts had too deep hold upon them. So long as men believed in
revelation as giving them, not primarily God and the transcendental
world itself, but information about God and the transcendental, they
naturally held that they knew as much of the persons of God and Christ
as of their works.

Schleiermacher had opened men's eyes to the fact that the great work of
Christ in redem