iptural than those of their master. Thus
the light kindled by him waxed purer and purer. The mantle remained
after the prophet's spirit had ascended to the God that gave it."[58]

De Wette was, like Schleiermacher his friend and colleague at Berlin, a
man in whom can be seen all the marks of a transition-character. There
are two sides to his theological views, one bearing upon the old
Rationalism and in sympathy with it, the other directly tending to
revive faith and religion. Even before Schleiermacher became generally
known, De Wette had openly declared that religion can be based upon
feeling alone, and that a personal Saviour is the necessary centre of
Christian faith. The entire theology of De Wette was the outgrowth of
the cold, critical philosophy of Kant and the more earnest and living
system of Fries. He was, therefore, a two-fold personage, and it is not
an easy task to harmonize his theories. One set of his opinions was
based upon truth, the other on beauty. Religion has two elements, faith
and feeling; doctrines and aesthetics. Religion may exist aesthetically,
but it can only become vital in the feeling, or self-consciousness.
Religious feeling embraces three shades: enthusiasm or inspiration,
resignation, and devotion. Every history is, in a certain sense,
symbolical. It is the mere reflection or copy of the human mind in its
activity. So are the appearance of Christ, his life, and death, in some
degree symbolical. In this symbolism consists the character of the
Christian revelation. Here have appeared the eternal ideas of reason in
their greatest purity and fullness; and Rationalism is nothing more than
a philosophical view of the Christian revelation of faith, or the
knowledge of the relations in which idea and symbol stand to each other
in Christianity. Therefore, we must judge the miraculous accounts of the
evangelists as symbols of the ideas existing in the early history of
Christianity.

De Wette reflects somewhat on the moral character of John, perhaps
without intention, when he supposes him to have written late in life--a
time when his faith would naturally predominate over his love of facts.
Strauss couples De Wette with Vater, as having placed upon a solid
foundation the mythical explication of the history of the Bible.[59]
According to De Wette, the narrator may intend to write history, but he
obviously does it in a poetic way. The first three evangelists betray a
legendary and even a mythical c