sed men to despair of
themselves and gravely to misrepresent God. It is no wonder if in the
age of rationalism this dogma was largely done away with. The religious
sense of sin was declared to be an hallucination. Nothing is more
evident in the rationalist theology than its lack of the sense of sin.
This alone is sufficient explanation of the impotency and inadequacy of
that theology. Kant's doctrine of radical evil testifies to his deep
sense that the rationalists were wrong. He could see also the
impossibility of the ancient view. But he had no substitute. Hegel, much
as he prided himself upon the restoration of dogma, viewed evil as only
relative, good in the making. Schleiermacher made a beginning of
construing the thought of sin from the point of view of the Christian
consciousness. Ritschl was the first consistently to carry out
Schleiermacher's idea, placing the Christian consciousness in the centre
and claiming that the revelation of the righteousness of God and of the
perfection of man is in Jesus. All men being sinners, there is a vast
solidarity, which he describes as the Kingdom of Evil and sets over
against the Kingdom of God, yet not so that the freedom or
responsibility of man is impaired. God forgives all sin save that of
wilful resistance to the spirit of the good. That is, Ritschl regards
all sin, short of this last, as mainly ignorance and weakness. It is
from Ritschl, and more particularly from Kaftan, that the phrases have
been mainly taken which served as introduction to this paragraph.

For the work of God through Christ, in the salvation of men from the
guilt and power of sin, various terms have been used. Different aspects
of the work have been described by different names. Redemption,
regeneration, justification, reconciliation and election or
predestination--these are the familiar words. This is the order in which
the conceptions stand, if we take them as they occur in consciousness.
Election then means nothing more than the ultimate reference to God of
the mystery of an experience in which the believer already rejoices. On
the other hand, in the dogma the order is reversed. Election must come
first, since it is the decree of God upon which all depends. Redemption
and reconciliation have, in Christian doctrine, been traditionally
regarded as completed transactions, waiting indeed to be applied to the
individual or appropriated by him through faith, but of themselves
without relation to faith.