A N inspiring discussion of what Christian faith,
¦*- *¦ the belief in the Fatherhood of God as pro
claimed by Jesus Christ, means for mankind to-day.
Professor Bousset approaches religion from the side
of vital spiritual experience, not as a result of meta
physical inquiry, but as a personal venture, a reaching
out of faith into the unknown. His insistence on
personality links him on the side of philosophy with
"pragmatism"' and on the religious' side with the
doctrine of Martin Luther.
PUBLISHERS' NOTE.

THE FAITH OF A MODERN
PROTESTANT

The Faith of a
Modern Protestant

BY
WILHELM BOUSSET
¦««
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GOTTINGEN
AUTHOR OF "WHAT IS RELIGION?"

TRANSLATED BY F. B. LOW

NEW YORK i
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1909

Copyright, 1900, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published January, 1909

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION  3

CHAPTER I. THE QUESTION STATED  5

THE ANSWER OF FAITH
II. THE FOUNDATION : ALMIGHTY GOD  20
III. GOD AND THE SOUL  29
DEDUCTIONS FROM OUR FAITH
IV. PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER  51
V. GOD AND THE GOOD  66
THE SUMMIT
VI. REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS OF SINS ... 87

VII. ETERNAL HOPE  I07
v (vi blank)

THE FAITH OF A MODERN
PROTESTANT

THE FAITH OF A MODERN
PROTESTANT INTRODUCTION
TN every religion belief in God, or to express
it from a more universal point of view, be
lief in the gods, in the Godhead, is the central
idea. Where this is not so, as in the exceptional
case of the earliest form of Buddhism, we have
to deal with an attenuated religion, permeated
with a philosophic conception of the world.
Our object in this little book is to try to
define, by comparison, the peculiar position
and the characteristic qualities of our belief —
that is to say, of the Christian belief in God
— so far as it concerns the religious life of man
kind, and thus to comprehend the essential
character of the Christian religion. At the
same time we must put the question as to the
nature of the Christian belief in God. In the
history of Christianity we are confronted with
an "normous variety of forms, and among the
ever-varying phenomena we must seek to dis-
3

4 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
cover the permanent and the essential. We do
this by directing our glance backwards to the
creative starting point of this religion, to the
life of Jesus of Nazareth, and also by studying
the innumerable forms and expressions through
which that seed reached its development, as
well as the long list of heroes of the Christian
faith. But we cannot avoid putting our own
subjectivity into this stream of living events
and asking the question, Wherein lies the power
of the Christian belief in God, which works on
us, or can and must work on us ? Yet we ask
the question in such a way that we do not re
gard our subjectivity as sovereign and alone
decisive. We are prepared in the plenitude of
historical experience constantly to correct our
own point of view, voluntarily, without any ex
ternal compulsion laid upon us by authority.
All religious life, however, consciously or
unconsciously, is linked to definite, personal
needs, difficulties and problems which touch
most deeply our inmost being, our individual
ego. Faith frees us from these difficulties, and
gives an answer to the problems of life. Thus
it is with the Christian faith in God. We listen
both to the anxious questioning which arises
from our souls, and to the answer which our
faith in God gives us.

CHAPTER I
THE QUESTION STATED
TX7E human beings find ourselves with our
whole life and being a part of an uni
versal existence, and we ask ourselves concern
ing our relation to this existence, and the mean
ing of our life in it. We put that existence on
the one hand and our life on the other. And
the first feeling that comes to us — especially
to us modern men — is the tremendous feeling
of our own insignificance, powerlessness, and
dwarf-like nature. The men of the ancient
world could banish this feeling. Secure and
firm, the earth rested at their feet, in the centre
of the universe, surrounded by the constellations.
Over it rose the brazen arch of heaven, and
above, not too far off", dwelt the gods, the God
head. The man of the ancient world could
still feel himself lord on the globe, and so could
think of defying the gods and laughing at them.
And when death approached him, he saw
children and grandchildren — a long series of
generations who should rule the earth even as
s

6 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
he had done. To the most earnest and profound
minds of ancient days life offered, indeed, rid
dles which could not be banished. But still
the former frame of mind was always possible
and attainable. How different it is with us
children of a modern day when we consider
ourselves and our lives, if only for a moment!
For to us the world has grown immeasur
ably greater. According to our perception our
earth has been removed from the centre of the
universe, and now revolves as an atom round
the sun, and the latter again revolves round a
distant, unknown centre, and with all its starry
host occupies but a remote corner in the uni
verse. And those bodies which we call the
friendly stars, which illumine the heavens, are,
in truth, fiery volcanoes, so immense and so
terrifying that no human imagination can picture
them. But we, ourselves, are placed between
two infinities in time and space — the infinity of
the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. And
if astronomy with telescope and spy-glass leads
us into the world of the macrocosmos and shows
to our amazed imagination suns after suns,
systems after systems of fixed stars and central
suns, and reveals in nebulous spots, scarcely
visible to the eye, unknown worlds whose rela
tions of time and space bewilder us, on the other

THE QUESTION STATED 7
hand, biology, with its microscope and artificial
breeding of bacteria, introduces us into the
world of the microcosmos and teaches us the
wonderful delicacies of organic life. Whether
we cast our thoughts upward into the world of
the mysteriously great, or downwards into the
world of the wonderfully small, we are always
overcome with the feeling of looking into an
abyss which turns us dizzy. Our perceptions
and conceptions, our beliefs and our hypotheses
— by the help of which we seek to understand
the world rightly — all our ideas of space and
time, of cause and effect, of atoms and moleculae
of aether and aether vibrations, of cells and seeds,
contain, each of them, a whole series of new
questions. We, shadows of a day, are destined,
it would appear, to contemplate the universe
only from that side of it which is, by chance,
turned towards us, and we are incapable of any
real survey of the whole.
But within the limits of the infinitely great,
and the infinitely little what a rich source of
mysterious, inscrutable life in all its wealth;
what a rushing, mighty stream of events! We
believe that we have investigated to a great
extent the laws of these occurrences, and
understand some of them; for, truly, the hu
man understanding has penetrated very far in

8 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
its bold spirit of daring. It has shown from
what elements the starry worlds are built; it
has penetrated the laws of the tiniest living
organisms; it has succeeded in deciphering to
some extent, at least, the history of organic life
through the stages of its development on our
earth. Yet, even supposing we had entirely
completed this work, supposing we possessed
all knowledge and knew all the laws of nature,
we should still be confronted by a great and im
penetrable problem, the problem of life itself,
the problem of the concrete and individual
actuality of this world — that this world is such
as it is. We believe that we have discovered all
the laws according to which bodies move and
revolve in a system; but why there are just
these bodies of this size, at this distance, revolv
ing at this velocity, and arranged in these
definite systems, we do not know. In all our
knowledge there remains a final something
that is impenetrable; we are therefore obliged
to lift our thoughts to the infinite, and to derive
the finite from the infinite. And supposing we
knew, absolutely, all the elements, all the
foundation stones from which our world was
constructed, and knew all their qualities and
powers, yet we should still be face to face with
this insoluble problem — Why are they precisely

THE QUESTION STATED 9
these elements and these attributes ? And sup
posing we succeeded in expressing the charac
teristics of the elements in a definite arithmetical
scheme according to the weight, number, and
order of the atoms and moleculae, there would
still remain the question of why it was just this
scheme and no other. And if our scientists suc
ceeded in arranging all the organisms and
living things of the earth genealogically, in a
gigantic table, and in understanding their ori
gin according to historic evolution, there would
yet remain as impenetrable the concrete exist
ence of this tree of life which began with the
simplest cell formations and ended with man.
Modern biologists are especially interested in
the fact that every form of organic life, every
plant, even though it is in conformity with the
law of its development, has something peculiar,
individual, incalculable, in it. And it is this
same riddle that confronts us everywhere, that
meets us in human life, only with far greater
potency and distinctness. Every human indi
vidual life, however much may be known about
its being in conformity with law and evolution,
has yet at bottom something inexplicable,
unique, never to be repeated in exactly the
same form, absolutely impenetrable.
Thus all existence moves along according to

10 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
definite laws which we can understand. But
the fact that we exist here and in this particular
form ever remains inscrutable and eternally
mysterious; it cannot be explained according
to reason. It is, somehow or other, appointed
by some power; this enigmatical existence
which surrounds us has emerged from unat
tainable depths, from an unbounded, incalcu
lable Will.
And what are we in the midst of this mys
terious reality, with our life and our struggles ?
What is our meaning, our object in life ? Are
we merely sparks which fly upwards out of the
dark night, and pass away again into the dark
ness ? And even if we link our existence to
that of the community, the nation, humanity,
and try to be content with the contribution of
our life's work to the common stock of the
human race, yet we ask ourselves, What is the
meaning and object of mankind in the mass ?
Do we really march upwards and onwards in
our work ? Now and again the clouds appear
to lighten and we perceive something in the
course of events that looks like an universal
plan; but again the heavens are overcast and
deep mysteries surround us. Tremendous ob
stacles to a definite plan; the wholesale squan
dering of powers; senseless, harsh, destructive

THE QUESTION STATED n
events, and the powerful intervention of the
elemental forces of the world are apparent on
all sides. Is it, indeed, progress or retrogression,
or from one point of view advance, from another
descent, and on the whole an aimless oscilla
tion ? The strife between the opt'mists and the
pessimists is waged unceasingly, and the more
profound and thoughtful natures appear to
ally themselves with the hosts of the latter.
Let us, for the moment, pass once more from
the objective world to our own selves. Oh, if
only we might lead, within the narrow limits of
our possibilities, a life filled with a purpose! If
only we could consistently shape our lives as
the sculptor casts his clay, with a firm hand!
But how unskilfully as a rule we conduct our
lives! When we glance back over our life do we
not recognize our lost opportunities and the
mistakes which can never be made good ? And
how cruelly did the rough reality of the world
around us force its claims upon us! Did not
many among us sally forth to find something
truly great to conquer, something truly good,
and how miserable was the thing that we actu
ally found! The stream of life carried us to
quite a different place on the banks, far below
the spot where we thought to land. Thus we
stand in the midst of a great, dismal universe,

12 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
between two infinities, in the midst of a mani
fold life (which ascends from unknown depths)
and all its problems; we dwell on the boundary
line of day and night, between birth and death.
"... We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
And now an anxious question arises within
us : Is there a final meaning and abiding place
in our life ? Is our own existence anchored in
the depth of reality, or are we drifting about
on the surface of life, like the foam which the
waves of the ocean toss up ? Are we only like
falling, fading leaves which after a brief sum
mer pass away from the living world to prepare
the earth below for an eternal continuation of
the aimless game ?
We cannot help asking ourselves these ques
tions, and longing for something beyond the
unsatisfying conclusions to which we are led
by a consideration of the world around us. This
longing is not a mere idle wish or desire arising
from our feeling of powerlessness and insig
nificance and futility; we are forced to it by an
inward compulsion, by the feeling of our rela
tive greatness, of our inward spiritual superiority

THE QUESTION STATED 13
to all the classified and isolated phenomena of
existence, and we feel that we are more than all
the things around us which we include in the
term nature, that our true self is never quite
satisfied, but ever stretches forth beyond this
finite and imperfect existence to something that
is final and absolute. And the greatness of the
encompassing universe which crushes and op
presses us, which seems to deny all our claims
to superiority, where is it and how does it come
to us ? It exists in our own mind, we conceive
it; where there is no ego it does not exist. It is,
so to say, the human spirit which creates and
overcomes this profound, awe-inspiring reality.
In this insignificant, contemptible human nature
of ours dwells a will which is able to oppose all
outward resistance and to pursue its path in
spite of it — a will that may be crushed yet is
never entirely destroyed, and is never wholly
inert when it is a question of what we call the
good and the true. We cannot put on one side
"these obstinate questionings," they are an in
trinsic part of our life. Very varied, indeed, is
the form of these questions as asked by the indi
vidual, and manifold are the sources from which
an answer is sought. Some try to shelve them.
These are the inoffensive, easy-going people.
They have cast a cursory glance at the riddle of

14 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
life, but this frightened them, and they turned
away; they seek to forget it, and to spend
themselves in frivolity and amusement and the
gay dance of life. And they spend themselves
in the most disastrous sense of the word; they
deny their true self, do violence to themselves,
and lose their true nature in the encompassing
reality which drags them hither and thither
because they have lost their centre. It need not
be absorption in the coarse and hollow pleasures
of daily life; it may, indeed, be absorption in
what is called work, in manifold activities which
seem so full of purpose but are really without
meaning or value, in the eager grubbing for
earthworms, in the amassing of useless treas
ures. Such people have, indeed, only trifled
with the business of life. Because they were
not courageous enough to descend into the
darkness and the depths of existence, and to
tend the roots of life, they allowed them to
wither, and so they lead an aimless life, a prey
to all the chance currents of the moment, with
out an object or a support.
Opposed to these stands another set of
human beings. They perceive all the harsh
ness and the terror of the world around them;
they long for truth and reality, for a complete,
perfect life, for "deep, deep eternity." But

THE QUESTION STATED 15
they shut themselves off from the one thing
which can lead them farther in this world —
that is, from the crushing, overwhelming feeling
of their own nothingness. They refuse to see
the chains by which they are bound, and they
believe in the almighty power of their own ego
raised to a superhuman degree. Dwelling in
the presence of death and amid the unsolved
riddles of the universe, they yet raise the trium
phant song of life, and think to find the mean
ing of life in this existence which their own en
raptured enthusiasm has enriched and height
ened in value. And yet how deeply they are to
be pitied! Their fate forces them continually
to climb beyond their strength, and to raise
their voices louder and louder until they only
utter discordant notes. Solitary they pursue
their course, like the brilliant meteor which,
outside the laws of nature, explodes in brilliant
flashes and leaves behind in the world a dark
ness greater than ever.
And, further, we come to a third group:
they are too earnest and too thoughtful to pass
by the riddle of life, too wise and yet too cau
tious to squander their powers uselessly. But
to them, too, is denied the gift of freeing them
selves from their own ego and surrendering
themselves to a higher power. They mask

16 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
themselves in the armor of irony and scepticism
of their own forging; they penetrate deeplyinto
the problems of life, but their hypercritical in
tellect prevents them from yielding to any deeper
feeling, their sophistical reasonings make them
think that perhaps, after all, there is nothing
serious and important in life, perhaps everything
is only the confused sport of their heated imag
ination. We must not, they seem to say, look
at things from such a one-sided, serious point of
view; we must repress our feelings! As they
stand for pure intellect and keen observation,
they regard the material world as a varied, de
lightful drama, a bubble whose brightly-colored
glories we admire, well knowing that it soon
bursts. They feel deeply unhappy and envy
the simple people to whom life is real and no
dream, and yet they think themselves far su
perior to the older children and fools of the day
at whom they ironically smile. And to a cer
tain extent they enjoy the varied play of their
own ego. They are voluntary wanderers in the
desert who lead a life of deliberate barrenness.
Above these stands another group which we
will now consider — those who have accepted
life with resignation. They have given up, once
for all, the idea of a solution to a problem of
which they are perfectly conscious. For them

THE QUESTION STATED 17
the universe, in its ultimate meaning, is some
thing like a machine which pursues its majestic
course from the unknown Whence to the un
known Whither; which acts in complete accord
ance with law and purpose, and is absolutely
indifferent to all individual life, even of the high
est kind. They themselves have learnt to acqui
esce. This modern feeling is more in accord
ance with truth than that of the Stoics, who
declared, often with exaggerated and false elo
quence, that this indifferent attitude towards
the universe and its laws constituted the indi
vidual's highest happiness. We no longer
maintain that we reach the highest happiness
by this path; we admit, calmly and with resig
nation, that this actual life can never completely
satisfy our needs, and that there is neither per
fect satisfaction nor final meaning in life. It is
simply a matter of making the best that is pos
sible out of this life, and of living in friendliness
and in sympathy with all mortal beings, and of
diffusing around us in this dark and cold world
a little warmth, a little sympathy, a little help,
and a little love.
One last group of men remains — those who
exercise the greatest attraction over our contem
poraries. These are they who preach the gospel
of beauty. They say : Whatever life may be in

1 8 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
its final meaning, whether the universe around
is horribly cruel and harsh, purposeless and un
meaning, all the same we delight in this horrible
life, for it is beautiful, it is sublime. All its rid
dles and confusions only enhance its wonders
and its sublime flights; everything that is ugly
and evil and wrong is only the necessary shadow
against which light and beauty stand out all the
more clearly. They look upon the great con
trasts that exist in life as a delightful iridescence.
And out of all the different tones of existence,
from the dull notes of the depths and the clear
sounds of the heights, from the full notes and
the shrill notes, from the chords and the dis
cords, there rushes towards them a glorious
harmony. They throw over the dark clouds of
reality the rainbow of beauty, they delight in
the colored reflection, they listen to the delicate
tones. The subtle vibrations and feelings which
are revealed in their own souls seem to them
more important than the rough matter-of-fact
things of life which only interest commonplace
minds. They declare that illusion is the final
reality, and a dream the highest truth; they
confuse night with day, and plunge with the
greatest delight into the unreal and the incom
prehensible. They can, indeed, address life thus
in heroic fashion : Strike us with many strokes,

THE QUESTION STATED 19
kill us, yet will we love thee, for thou art beau
tiful, thou art sublime.
But journeying along their own road, and
apart from all those who seek in different ways
to discover a solution of the riddle of life are
they who have found the answer of Faith.
We will hearken to the answer.

CHAPTER II
THE ANSWER OF FAITH
THE foundation: almighty god
' I aO believe, to be religious, implies that we
adopt a definite attitude towards the uni
verse around us, one absolutely different from
the uncertain views that have already been
mentioned. The man who really believes pene
trates, verily, to life's deepest foundations, and
does not pass them by with indifference. He
does not put himself in Titanic opposition to
the world, nor does he indulge in weary scepti
cism and passive resignation. Neither, again,
does he seek to delude himself over the problems
of life by the illusion of the Beautiful. He ac
cepts the universe courageously and reverently.
He believes that it is a part of an intelligent
unity, and he finds in it, behind it, and beyond
it, an absolute something which gives a final
support to his life. Even more than this, faith
teaches us that we are related to the profound-
est reality of existence in the very depth of our

THE FOUNDATION 21
being; that we may gain courage and find our
soul's peace in it, and that we are permitted to
call it "Our God." All belief which in the long
course of history has led mankind onwards, in
so far as it was really true and living, has striven
toward this goal, often by many by-paths and
circuitous ways, and through the lands of
shadows and of darkness. That of which the
religions of all ages and nations had but a glim
mering, which sounds clearly and unmistakably
in the announcement of Christ's gospel, fore
shadowed by the Old Testament prophets, is
the fact that the power revealed to us mysteri
ously in the world around us is our God.
The phrase our God has a twofold meaning.
He is on the one hand our God, who speaks to
us out of the plenitude of existence, whose
creatures we are, and before whose wonderful
and almighty reality we are conscious of our
own insignificance. On the other hand, He is
our God to whom we belong, whom we are
permitted to address as Thou, who draws us to
Him, and to whom we venture to draw near in
a perfect confidence which bridges over all dis
tance between God and His creatures. In both
these respects the Christian belief in God is
simply the clearest expression of ideas which
have painfully struggled to embody themselves

22 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
in the long history of religions. Throughout the
ages the religious life of the nations has oscil
lated between two poles: on the one hand, a
feeling, often amounting to frenzied anguish, of
the remoteness of the Divine Being; on the other
hand, a sense of His nearness, which has some
times cast respect and reverence behind it. Now
the one idea was more prominent, now the
other; danger and narrowness were to be en
countered on both sides. In the Christian re
ligion, however, both ideas are equally promi
nent; the noble and lofty edifice rests on two
pillars of equal strength.
God is our God: He is more than we are, and
different from us. This conception of God is
clearly seen; l even in the lowest stages of re
ligious life. The thought of the Godhead fills
men with feelings of fear, flight, and defence,
with wild anguish which is capable of the most
terrible sacrifices. In the old Greek religion
we have the acknowledgment that "the gods are
mightier than men," and the human presumption
which put itself on an equality with the God
head was regarded as the cardinal sin. The
spiritual import of the old Greek tragedy was
summed up in this thought: The gods crush
the pride of men. And how strongly the heroes
of the Old Testament emphasized this side of

THE FOUNDATION 23
their belief! He is the God who rages in the
tempest and in the darkness of the clouds
and then vanishes; the terrible, mysterious God,
who has determined on the annihilation of His
people, whose day is darkness and corruption,
whose message a burden which overwhelms the
soul, whose being is shrouded in mystery, whose
ways are higher than our ways, and whose
thoughts are above our thoughts. An entire
book of the Old Testament is devoted to the
mysterious, inexplicable God. Every line of
the Book of Job strikes this note. It is true that
in the New Testament, in the preaching of
Jesus of Nazareth, the opposite note is sounded,
that of the glad tidings of the ever-present God
who is close to us. Yet the dominnt note still
sounds in unimpaired strength, and gives to
Jesus's message its keynote and its power.
The Father of Jesus of Nazareth is also the
Lord of Heaven and of Earth, the wonderful
and inconceivably strong God, who permits the
sun to shine on the good and the evil, and the
rain to fall on the just and the unjust. He is
the mysterious and terrible God who cast the
shadow of night and of darkness over His Elect
One's life, and permitted it to end on the cross.
The greatest disciple of the Master proclaimed
the same God : the source and goal of our life

24 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
and being, the God who reveals Himself in mys
tery, who destroys mankind's ideas of wisdom
and might with the folly and shame of the cross,
in whose inscrutable will exist salvation and
damnation, and in whose hands we are as the
clay in the hands of the potter. On St. Paul
was founded the piety of St. Augustine, with its
fervor for God, so rugged and so austere, and
its boldness which trampled upon the human
being's own will. In the background of Luther's
belief also there stood the hidden, mysterious
God: "We must fear God above all else."
We children of a later age are, if we rightly
understand ourselves and our position, specially
inclined toward this severe and gloomy view of
religious life. For our faith tells us that this
reality, which, incalculable and immeasurable,
stretches before us in the eternally great and the
eternally little; this stream of life, with all its
riddles, is an expression of His being, the work
of His will. We cannot estimate the limits of
His creative power, nor measure the area of His
operations. Even if we unfurled all the sails of
our knowledge, and embarked on the great
ocean of facts, and if we flew on the wings of
fancy which carried us aloft to the summits of
all being, we should not reach the limits where
the mystery of infinity was revealed. On the

THE FOUNDATION 25
contrary, new depths of existence are disclosed
to us at every advance that we make in our
knowledge of the material world and its laws.
Every answer that we find to a question opens
up a series of new questions; for every prob
lem solved many fresh ones arise. The farther
we wonderingly penetrate, the clearer it becomes
to us that the world, as we know it, which we
consciously govern, is only an island in the
ocean, round which the unfathomable waves of
Divine life and creation rise and surge. It is not
a definite unity, a whole; it is merely a section,
a fragment, and behind this fragment, so far as
we can comprehend it, there lies hidden the
fulness of Divine being which is never perfectly
revealed to us. The higher we strive upward
and forward toward Him the more He seems to
withdraw from us. He does not allow us to
look upon Him face to face, and even the pa
triarchs of the Old Testament pronounced with
foreboding that whosoever looked upon the
face of God must die.
Daily He surrounds us in this world of ours
with mysteries and miracles. We do not mean
miracles in the extraordinary sense of the word
which a childish belief assigns to it. But, as we
have already said, this whole, concrete universe
by which we are daily surrounded is in itself an

26 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
insoluble and marvellous miracle. It is true
that this whole universe is governed by the in
violable regularity of law, and that nothing is
outside its sphere. But to believe that we can
explain by the term "law" life in its uniqueness
and peculiarity is as if we thought we could
drain the mighty ocean provided we had a large
enough net. Every hour of real true life that we
live refutes us with its abundant contents.
Each new blossoming of an individual human
life which is unfolded before our eyes in myste
rious quietude from out the mysterious deep,
which, even if it is apparently insignificant, has
something peculiar to itself which has never
existed before and will never recur, speaks to
us clearly of God's world of miracles in which
we live.
And now in contrast to this God we human
beings are a mere nothing, the work of His
creative power, placed in the universe by that
power; creatures who take everything and must
take everything from His hand; bowed in the
dust before Him, humiliated in the feeling of
our weakness and insignificance, and of our
powerless, purposeless will. Only to him who
can bear with tranquillity the terrible serious
ness of these thoughts has the Christian religion
anything to offer. But to those who can do this

THE FOUNDATION 27
it has even more and greater things to reveal.
These are not confined to an overwhelming
sense of our pettiness and nothingness and to a
mere feeling of fear. There are two words
which absolutely sum up the substance of our be
lief — reverence and humility. And reverence
includes, indeed, fear. Trembling, we stand
before Almighty God, and we are not ashamed
of this fear. Terrible is the reality of the living
God when He comes on the wings of the storm.
We must fear God above all else. Our faith is
no weak and sentimental emotion, no mere elo
quent declamation concerning the kind God
who is enthroned above the stars. He must be
hard, like flint and diamonds; yet He does not
only inspire anguish and fear, He inspires rever
ence also. We may freely offer to this all-
powerful, wondrous God honor and reverence.
And feeling thus, our soul soars above the pow-
erlessness of our own little ego to a joyous, rev
erent wonder and an adoration which delights to
serve; we are carried aloft to the heights of di
vine being and divine thoughts of which we
have a dim foreshadowing.
Humility, the highest human quality, affirms
by its self-renunciation and its voluntary, rev
erent self-sacrifice the great and sublime reality
of God and our own insignificance. "Whom

28 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
have I in heaven but Thee ? And there is none
upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh
and my heart faileth: but God is the strength
of my heart and my portion for ever." In this
feeling of humility we are equally far removed
from the proud and Titanic self-assertion of the
ego and from all sad and inconsolable resigna
tion. Whosoever draws near to God in rever
ence and humility draws hidden strength from
the fountains of His love. Security, joy, and
power to gain victory encompass his being, and
"this universe has become for him a castle in
which he can dwell securely."

CHAPTER III
THE ANSWER OF FAITH
GOD AND THE SOUL
"^J"OW we are confronted with another
question: How is it possible in our faith
to purify and ennoble that sense of sheer fear
and anguish, that feeling of the transitoriness of
life, which comes to us in the presence of God's
almighty being, so as to rise to the feelings of
reverence and humility ? And we answer : We
can do this because our faith has another side
to it. Our faith does not merely impress upon
us the harsh contrasts between the Creator's
almighty power and the creature's powerless-
ness. With a great "and nevertheless" it
throws a bridge from God to us and from us to
God. "Nevertheless I am continually with
thee: Thou hast holden my right hand." Our
faith tells us that the Almighty God is our God;
He inclines Himself to us, and we must rise to
Him. He belongs to us and we to Him, and
we are permitted to say Thou to the Almighty
God. 29

30 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
Here our Christian religion shows, in its per
fect expression, a characteristic which is com
mon to all religious life. The more strange and
mysterious the higher powers — the gods and the
Godhead — appeared to man, the stronger in
most cases was the feeling of a longing to strive
upward, and the perception of belonging to God.
And ever stronger grew the conviction that the
Godhead desires to come into contact with man,
that He accepts and offers gifts, that He listens
to the supplications and entreaties of believers,
that He affords us a final support and ultimate
protection, that He demands from man the ful
filment of holy and inviolable claims, but that
at the same time He gives a blessed reward.
And the higher man's life and faith rose the
more the nations and the generations — whilst
purifying their religion from the material de
mands so intimately bound up with it — included
in their belief in the Godhead their noblest and
best ideas, their most sacred possessions and
talents. Thus on the one hand they based on
the deepest reality those things which they val
ued most, whilst their thoughts of the Godhead
were purified, and ennobled, and filled with
a precious significance.
But it is true that here the greatest and most
essential differences in religions begin. For

GOD AND THE SOUL 31
what things has not the race of man in the long
course of its existence regarded as of the great
est value! And now the task is set us of defining
the peculiar position of our Christian belief in
God with regard to the various forms assumed
by the idea of highest value.
Far removed from the main stream of the
religions of the nations, the Indian religions
which dominated Eastern Asia have pursued
their course. The people of India, pressing
southward after they crossed the mountains
and thus separated from the main stream of our
races which shaped the world's history, fell, after
their conquest of the inferiororiginal inhabitants,
into a dreamy, passive state of which history
gives us no record — a state due to the enerva
ting southern climate. Gradually there stole
over these people a loathing of the practical life
of the concrete world, and they regarded it as
their worthiest object to retire from the varied
life of the world and society into their own self,
with its peace, and solitude, and rest. But they
connected their thoughts of God with this idea,
which they regarded as the noblest thing in life.
The Godhead is that great calm and rest of the
One life which lies behind the phenomena of
this motley world; and this apparently real
world is only the colored reflection of life, the

32 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
foam cast up by the waves which ebb and flow
in the eternal ocean of true being. When the
individual withdraws from all the varied occu
pations of daily life which are so aimless, and,
therefore, of necessity, so painful; when he ab
stains from all definite exercise of his powers of
will and thought, and absorbs himself in the
universal Being; he discovers in the depths of his
own consciousness the divine, universal, illim
itable, and indefinable Being. "That is reality,
that is existence, and Thou art reality and life."
Religion (from this standpoint) is complete
abnegation of the ego; religion means medita
tive absorption in the Divine, entire surrender
of self in the One and Universal Being. Thus
there arose the religion which may be described
as the classical embodiment of real and logical
Pantheism — Brahminism, with Hinduism its
corrupt offspring. And when we see here how
the one factor in religious life, the human ego,
is put on one side and almost reduced to zero,
we are not surprised to find that in Buddhism,
that offshoot of the Indian religion, which later
on, indeed, was to overshadow a world, the
other main factor in religion, belief in God, was
likewise lost; and religion became simply a
vague longing from out the depths of our neces
sarily painful existence for eternal annihilation.

GOD AND THE SOUL 33
It is easily to be understood that, owing to the
ever closer contact that tends to exist between
nations and civilizations, this religion of Indian
Pantheism has begun to exercise an influence
during the last century upon our European and
American civilization. Now and again this be
lief has been dominant in the upper classes of
our civilization, especially when it was com
bined with the glamour of great poetic or musi
cal skill. When, however, we consider the mat
ter quietly, we cannot believe that a religious
conception which seriously preaches the anni
hilation of all individual and social values would
ever gain the mastery, or indeed any consid
erable footing, in a world where life is lived so
strenuously yet so wholesomely, where human
beings are for ever striving upward and feeling
that they are destined for great tasks, convinced
that they stand at the beginning of their work
and not at the end. It may possibly be that
these ideas have now and again met with pass
ing success in periods when there was for the
time being little activity among certain nations
and in particular classes. We had experience
of this in the middle of the last century. It is
quite possible that owing to too great and ex
hausting stress and strain, which destroy our
nerves, and a too violent hurry and rush, a reac-

34 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
tion may set in and exhaustion be apparent.
But, generally speaking, we may say that this
whole world of ideas will remain remote from
our life and its characteristics. Even a prophet
like Tolstoy, with his proclamation of the worth-
lessness of all that we hold dear in life, is, and
will ever remain, remote from us; he cannot
offer us anything final and permanent, what
ever else he may have to tell us. At the most
his preaching can only have significance as a
corrective; he can warn us against over-valua
tion of the earthly goods which we procure for
ourselves, but he is no leader who conducts us
to a new life.
The adherents of this kind of religion and
religious life will be chiefly found in certain cir
cles, by no means very small ones, where people
do not regard religion seriously, where they de
sire and accept religion as aesthetic enjoyment
and where men and women who have rushed
through life and exhausted their strength and
overexcited their nerves turn in the twilight of
their days to these ideas. Such ideas seem to
offer them a stimulating and interesting antith
esis, they delight in the gay contrast, they
revel in the thoughts of the nothingness of life,
the impulse of which they have just felt in all
the fibres of their being. In the daytime they

GOD AND THE SOUL 35
listen to the march of life, in the evening to the
nocturne of its transitoriness. Such people de
sire to rise a little toward the heights, but they
will not pledge themselves to anything. We will
leave such circles; no one can think that there is
anything here that promises good in the future.
Religion desires and claims man's whole being,
and in truth the deeply serious Indian religion
is far too good to be regarded as a mere play
thing. The progressive Western peoples, the con
quering nations of the earth, have pursued quite
a different course in their religious life. They
did not seek God in the twilight, in a dreamy
dimness; to them faith was ever united with the
things that they held of highest positive value in
their life, with everything that led them upward
and onward beyond material existence.
To illustrate this, let us consider the highest
types of Western religion. Zarathustra, the
prophet of the Persian nation that was striving
for world dominion, connected the belief in his
god Ahura Mazda with the idea of human civi
lization. He dwelt among and influenced a
people who were just about to emerge from a
nomadic and barbaric existence into a civilized
one, and he gave as the foundation of this en
deavor a belief in God which had been revealed

36 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
to him. He announced to his people that it was
the will of Ahura Mazda that they should re
nounce their nomadic life and adopt the life of
civilized society and its ordinances. He who
builds houses for permanent settlement, who
engages in agriculture and cattle-rearing, who
extirpates the dangerous animals, who builds
bridges and plants trees, who lives peacefully
and honorably with his neighbor, and who leads
a holy war against the barbarians is a servant of
Ahura Mazda. Whosoever abstains from so
doing is a servant of the devil and his evil hosts.
In Greece belief in the gods was united with
the loftier spiritual life of a nation, as was shown
in the holy war against the barbarians, and,
above all, in the works of peace. Everything
that adorned and beautified, established and
made firm, ennobled and elevated, the life and
people of the Greek city was done in the name
of the gods and dedicated to their service. When
later, owing to the violence of the blows dealt
out by fate, Greek city life gradually passed
away, when the twilight of the gods descended
on the noble forms of the people's faith, the
wise men — Socrates and Plato and those who
followed them — rescued what was essential in
the Greek religion. The noblest men in the
period when the ancient world was decaying

GOD AND THE SOUL 37
and passing away were upheld by the belief
that behind this material, visible world, with its
difficulties, dulness, and imperfection, was a
higher world which struggled for expression
painfully and in fragmentary fashion in this
lower existence — the world of the gods, the
world of the eternal ideas of the Good, the True,
and the Beautiful. Placed in a world which they
gave up all claim to rule, which remorselessly
pursued its own way, such men lifted up their
eyes longingly to the higher world, the lost home
of their soul.
The great prophets of Israel likewise raised
their belief in the God of their fathers far above
the region of the actual national life in which
they exercised an influence, and filled this belief
with a new and higher significance. To their
conception God stood before them, prepared in
mighty anger and harsh indignation to destroy
the material existence of His people, and before
whose holy and indomitable will only one thing
in the world stood firm — right, justice, holiness.
"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk hum
bly with thy God?"
From out this world, ever striving upward,
the gospel, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth,

38 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
soared aloft, and human faith reached its climax
in a new creative and Divine fiat. Here, on the
heights, there sounds throughout this striving
upward a new, solemnly joyous and deeply po
tent note. The gospel announces a God who
seeks and desires above all else the individual
human soul. It unites in a security and a close
ness hitherto unknown belief in God with the
importance of the individual human life. It is
the religion of religious individualism raised to
its highest point. A new world was here re
vealed to religious belief. The Persian religion
of civilization had quickened but little the
actual individual life, and after the splendid
life and influence of its founder had passed
away it soon fell once more into a religion of
the most wearisome observance, in which the
ceremonial service stifled all individuality. The
philosophic religion of the dying classical world
set a value indeed on the individual, but it
created no close connection between him and
the Godhead. For the Godhead became an
abstract, bloodless phantom; it was hidden
behind the lofty ideas of the Good, the True,
and the Beautiful, of harmony and order, and
no human belief can live on the abstract. The
vision of the prophets also was directed toward
the fate of the whole people, of the nation, its

GOD AND THE SOUL 39
fall and its rise. Only very softly and timidly
was the note of religious individualism sounded
by the greatest of them. And is not the per
sonal belief of the pious psalmist overwhelmed
with the sense of uncertainty, with laments and
weeping and sighing of all kinds, with a defi
ant and wild thirst for revenge, with manifold
unsolved problems and unbearable burdens ?
When at last the later Jewish belief rose to the
thought of a future life which should explain
the problems of this life, it sank at the same
time into an impersonal, legal, and ceremonial
religion, and dragged itself listlessly and lan
guidly along the ground.
But now, with all its strength, the gospel
proclamation bursts forth with "God and the
soul," "For what shall a man be profited if he
shall gain the whole world, and forfeit his
life?" As the new religion was concentrated
and crystallized in the person of an individual
in such a way that in the religious life which
was dependent upon it person and idea were
inseparably united, it naturally addressed itself
above all to the individual. The gospel puts
the individual directly under God's eye and
God's judgment, and withdraws him from the
protection which encompassed him around
through his belonging to a nation, a sect, and

40 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
a religious body. The gospel addresses itself to
the individual with its claims and promises; it
gives to the individual the right to decide the
course of his own life, and puts the choice of
heaven and hell into his own hands. And, just
as in the words of the Sermon on the Mount,
" but I say unto you," all the power and signifi
cance of the individual in religion is clearly
shown, so in every word the gospel urges per
sonal decision and choice.
"God and the soul," we have said, for the
individual human life was, indeed, of no value
in itself, but was only of eternal value in so far
as it had freed itself from its own egoistic ma
terial nature, and had found its centre in God,
and the law of its being in His holy will. Only
those who are pure of heart are to see God.
The saying, "Whosoever would save his life
shall lose it," which was originally, perhaps,
spoken only with actual reference to the avowal
of faith and to martyrdom, must be taken by us
in the spirit of the gospel in a wider and deeper
sense. It means, really, that we must contin
ually risk our sensually inclined and mortal life
in order to win a higher and an eternal one.
It is in this sense, then, that the gospel
speaks of God and the individual, personal life.
It is not life in its unconsciousness, when it is

GOD AND THE SOUL; 41
absorbed in the universal nature, or life which
has abandoned its actual positive work and in
dulges in sad resignation and the twilight of in
activity; rather it means the individual life in
its greatest energy, in the active exercise of its
highest powers, in its individuality and unique
ness willed by God and ordained in His decree.
It is the individual life, foreordained from eter
nity and working toward eternity, for which
nothing else can be substituted.
This essential idea has remained peculiar to
the Christian belief. At the very beginning of
its history we are brought face to face with one
of the most wonderful and unique personalities
which the world has ever seen — a personality
which destroys the old world and creates a new
one; so unique, so individual, that the question
may be asked in all seriousness whether this
Paul is really to be considered as a disciple of
his Master, as he proclaimed himself to be, or
whether he may not be regarded as the second
founder of the Christian religion. In any case,
we see that in this matter we are considering
there is a close connection with the gospel of
Jesus of Nazareth. "We know that to them
that love God all things work together for good,
even to them that are called according to His
purpose." "If God is for us, who is against

42 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
us?" How clearly and simply, with what cer
tainty and triumph, is the essential idea of the
new message developed! When we read the
seventh chapter of Romans we see how the
new faith deepened and enlarged the human
soul and its consciousness. Have we ever
before been given a confession which is so
profound, so subtle, and so unique in its
psychology ?
We continue this line of thought, and a few
centuries later, we come across a wonderful
book which opens up new and unheard-of
paths, which ventures to depict to the outside
world the inner workings of a human soul, a
book in which all external events are only of
value in so far as they affect the inner life, and
where everything is regarded from the spiritual
point of view. I refer to St. Augustine's " Con
fessions." No other book throughout the
earliest and middle ages of the Church has
shown so clearly the uniqueness and peculiarity
of the new religion. "God and the soul I desire
to apprehend. Nothing else ? Nothing else
whatever." It was St. Augustine's "Confes
sions" which revealed to the youthful spirit of
the new nations the rich world of subjectivity
and the inner spiritual life — those new nations
which, when they had reached maturity, were

GOD AND THE SOUL 43
to be the makers of the history of the Middle
Ages. Whilst at the Italian Renaissance the
soul of man broke away from the idea of a Di
vine origin and won a new world by Titanic
striving and determination, and looked at itself,
sunned itself — alas! but for a moment — in the
glory and splendor of its own ego, at the Refor
mation the religious ego was once more revealed
in its divinely derived certainty and in its
strength rooted in the fulfilment of the Divine
will. After long struggles in bitter captivity,
the individual human soul soared to the free
dom of the Christian, and now the mountainous
obstacles which had so hemmed in the stream
of personal religious life rolled away. But what
ever is wholesome and promising in modern
life is ultimately to be connected with the free
ing of the religious ego accomplished in the
Reformation, though it may be admitted that it
was not merely a question of the freeing of the
will alone, but of its development. If we pur
sue this line of inquiry into our own days, we
see at the end of it the great philosopher on
whom our knowledge and, indeed, our life to
a great extent rest, who appears to have re
newed his glories in our own age. It was Im-
manuel Kant who taught us that we should
seek in vain for a final support for the Absolute

44 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
and the Eternal in the objective world of things
limited by time and space, but that we should
find this Absolute if we looked into the depths
of our own soul and discovered the self-existent
law around which the soul revolves. Him we
may rightly call the sage of the Christian age —
the philosopher of Protestantism.
Those spiritual movements which have so
deeply affected and influenced the history of
the Christian peoples, although they have re
mained to a certain extent apart from the
main trend of Christian belief in God, cannot
but acknowledge the influence of its spirit
and stand in most active relation to it. It is
true that the Christian religion, like the Indian
religion, developed the phenomenon of monas-
ticism, and this monasticism for a time concen
trated in itself the best and most distinctively
progressive forces. But what a difference be
tween Western monasticism and that of the
Hindu religious world! In the latter we have
a weary retirement of the human being into
himself, and a dreaming away of life in medita
tion and emptiness; in the latter we have active
energy which gained new and valuable things,
civilized the young barbarian nations, cultivated
territories, cut down forests, transferred the
treasures of an old world to a new, and in the

GOD AND THE SOUL 45
solitude of retirement delighted in the beauty
of this natural world.
If we study modern European pantheism
(which certainly almost lost sight of the value
of the individual life in its strong, one-sided
comprehension of the dominating reality of the
God-idea), we see what a great contrast there is
between the miserable, pessimistically resigned
Indian pantheism and this joyous, courageous
assertion of the universe with its plenitude and
order. Let us consider for a moment the math
ematical pantheism of Spinoza: To him the in
dividual is certainly no more than a number or
a dot in the vast one and universal existence.
But still he is a number, a number that stands
in a particular place, and if it did not stand pre
cisely there the whole world would fall to pieces.
Thus amazed and adoring, admiring and lov
ing, the individual raises his eyes to the universe
and its great and eternally fixed laws — amor dei
intellectualis. By the whole body of Indian
mystics such sounds would never be heard.
The same thing is to be observed in the so-
called revival of Spinozaism in German ideal
ism. Here, indeed, spirit and Nature form one
great unity, and with its aesthetic pantheism
man threatens to sink into a noble child of
nature. Niebuhr once called the personages in

46 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
Goethe's "Wahlverwandtschaft" "innocent ani
mals in a menagerie." But yet how spiritualized
is this conception of nature! The whole uni
verse is comprehended as a great, purposeful
evolution, as a power which develops through
universal growth to ever higher forms, and dis
plays the fulness of life in the gradation of
events which serve a definite purpose. We are,
therefore, no longer astonished that this con
ception of the world which united nature and
spirit, but laid the emphasis on the spiritual
aspect of the world, became gradually changed
in the old age of that great world genius Goethe
into theism and the personal religion of Chris
tian belief.
Thus the rivulets flow away from the main
stream of the Christian faith, some, appar
ently, to be lost in the sand, some to return to
it. But the principal stream has ever remained
the same — faith in the God of our life who
anchors our being to deepest reality, to Him
self. Or, if we look at it from the other side, we
may say it is belief in a spiritual, personal God.
Jesus of Nazareth created a clear and illumi
nating symbol for this faith when He addressed
God as " Father." He was not the first to strike
this note; it was sounded before in the Jewish
as well as in the Greek world of religion. But

GOD AND THE SOUL 47
nowhere else do we get this belief in God the
Father expressed with such certainty and sim
plicity, with such strength and conviction, and
nowhere else is it so definitely connected with
the individual life. This belief in God as the
Father has always remained the leading star of
the Christian faith. To what heights does this
belief attain in St. Paul's epistles: "To us there
is one God, the Father, of whom are all things,
and we unto Him." With what certainty is this
belief shown in the simplicity with which all the
writings of the New Testament and those like
wise of early Christian days speak of this God !
We need only to compare this calmness and
simplicity with the false and forced pathos of
later Jewish literature, which lavished attributes
of all kinds on God.
It is true that there have always been times
in the history of Christendom when the strong
personal belief in God threatened to disappear.
Already in the first centuries it was threatened
with extinction in the confused mass of specu
lations concerning the triune God, the con-
substantiality of the Father and the Son, and
the two natures of the God-man. In Eastern
Christendom, indeed, personal belief in God
has been partly lost, but in the West springs
of mysterious depths were once more revealed.

48 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
Through all the abstractions and sophistries
of speculation, through all the forms of dogma,
the human soul struggled toward the living,
personal God whom it could and might address
as "Thou." "Thou hast made us unto Thy
self, and our heart is restless until it rests in
Thee." "Oh! for Thy mercies' sake, tell me,
O Lord my God, what Thou art unto me. Say
unto my soul, 'I am thy salvation.' So speak
that I may hear." And these notes of Augus-
tinian piety are sounded in spite of the Papacy
and the worldliness of the Church and its organ
ization, in spite of scholasticism and the ossifi
cation of the Christian religion into a system
throughout the Middle Ages, until with the
Reformation and Martin Luther this mighty
Thou rises once more to the living God.
This acknowledgment of God as a Father
may seem specially difficult to us children of
to-day, for modern natural science has shown
us God's workings and Being in an infinity and
a sublimity which dazzle us; and our thought,
in so far as it is religious, urges us forward in the
direction of comprehending God as an absolute
Being far surpassing anything that is finite and
individual. Yet it is required of us that we also
shall venture to address the living God as
"Thou." One thing we must make perfectly

GOD AND THE SOUL 49
clear to ourselves : When we speak of God as a
person and a spirit, when we term Him the
Father of our individual life, it must not be
thought that we have thereby given an adequate
theoretical account of God's nature. We know
only too well that all our language about His
inscrutable nature remains mere stammering
and faltering, an attempt to demonstrate in
picture and symbol the impalpable and the in
tangible. On the other hand, we know equally
well that a purely abstract idea of God will
never lead man to Him, and that picture and
symbol are the only things, and the most precious
things, that we possess, and can never be re
placed by or resolved into pure thought. The
symbol of God the Father which our faith gives
us teaches that God's deepest and most mys
terious being is to be found in what we call per
sonality and spirit — perhaps, indeed, far beyond
these, but certainly not in the direction of a
natural being that lacks personality. When we
call God the Father we wish to express the idea
that in this concrete Being there rules a strength
and a might which determine and affirm our
personal life so far as it is truly worthy. But it
always is and remains a daring act of our faith,
transcending all knowledge, when, in spite of
the distance between us and God, we address

50 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
the Almighty as Thou and pray to Him as
"our Father in heaven."
And now we will combine both aspects of our
faith. Our faith shows us the remote, veiled
God and the revealed God, ever near us; it
permits us to say to the all-powerful God, be
fore whom our inmost being trembles, "And yet
we belong to Thee," and transforms our trem
bling fear and anguish into reverence, humility,
and joyous surrender. And, on the other hand,
it prevents us from approaching God's presence
carelessly and presumptuously, and saying the
Lord's Prayer as if it were a natural, self-evi
dent truth. Thus our faith becomes a blessed
miracle and a mystery, and with the early
Christians we acknowledge both when we say,
" I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker
of heaven and earth."

CHAPTER IV
DEDUCTIONS FROM OUR FAITH
PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER
"pvEPENDENCE on God and confidence in
"^"^ His personal care for us are intimately
bound up in our belief in the all-powerful God
as the God of our life. This belief is announced
in the gospel with absolute boldness. The indi
vidual human being, so far as he turns toward
the higher life within himself, so far as he up
lifts his soul to God, is of more value than any
thing around him in Nature; of more value than
the lilies of the field, the birds of the air, and all
the glories of Nature which God's goodness so
lavishly spreads around him, and he is quite
sure of his Father's love and care. " We know
that to them that love God all things work to
gether for good." Our faith here touches a
depth and a mysteriousness before which the
reflective intellect of man must tremble. It re
quires our utmost religious energy to live truly
in this confidence in the personal providence of
Si

52 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
God. Wherever people have lost their feeling
for the simple truths of religion in the cobwebs
of human wisdom and artificial dogma they
have dared to disregard the belief in Divine
Providence, in the Christian "Trust in the
Lord," as something of very little specific value.
Those who do this know what they are doing.
One thing only may be said in their excuse:
that in an age when men's thoughts were nar
row and limited, and little reverence was felt
for the mighty and mysterious reality of our
own existence, the belief in a divine Providence
was calmly accepted as being a self-evident fact
attainable without difficulty by the common-
sense of mankind. How far removed are these
times and these ideas from us children of a later
day! There is no point which is more open to
doubt than this concerning belief in a Divine
Providence and care for the individual being.
We must guard ourselves with all our strength
against these doubts which assail us on all sides.
And this we can do if we observe two things:
First of all, we must look into our own personal
life; we must shut our eyes to the terrible reality
around us, with all its problems and inscrutable
mysteries. We are not called upon to solve all
these problems and to penetrate these mys-

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 53
teries, "to digest the universe metaphorically."
We are here to find out a way and a path for
ourselves amid the great inscrutability of exist
ence, to discover pillars to which we can cling.
And, further, a second thing is to be noticed:
We must not, as so often happens, compare our
happiness and unhappiness and strike the bal
ance between them. Who says that we are here
to be happy ? But we are certainly here to know
and do the work which life has assigned to us,
to stand firm at the post to which we are ap
pointed, to develop the higher powers of our
own life, to find God, and in Him the object,
the measure, and the meaning of our own life.
And when we thus acknowledge the object of
our existence, we shall ask ourselves for the
first time whether there is not to be recognized
in the guiding of our life a friendly, fatherly
Power which surrounds us everywhere with
His care, and draws us to our life's goal, not
by harsh, legal compulsion, but by loving
promises. When, trembling and hesitating, you take the
first step, you find that life and the world around
you begin to grow bright. And in what you
have until now called the blind caprice and
arbitrariness of fate or sport of chance, in the
important things as in the insignificant, in the

54 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
bliss of happiness and in the bitter, heart-break
ing, agonizing moments of your life, in the light
of clear day and in the darkness of anguish and
misery, you will seek to grasp the hand of God,
who bears and supports your life. He speaks
to you; question Him, pay heed, listen, hear.
Softly the voice speaks to you out of the eternal
heights, like the voice of a mother calling to her
child who has wandered away in the wood.
Louder and more distinctly, more and more
frequently it speaks to you, and seldom does it
leave you, even in the hurry and bustle of every
day life. Undreamt of powers descend upon
you. That terrible feeling of oppression which
burdened your soul, the fear of all that can and
may happen in this strange life of ours, gradu
ally disappears. Doubt and uncertainty begin
to pass away; step by step at first we gropingly
feel our way, but ever more and more clearly
our path in life is revealed to us. And now
there begins to awaken in our heart that rest
and holy tranquillity which is never disturbed
by disappointments or adversity. Even heavy
misfortune no longer appears as a fate which
overwhelms us, but as a task which obliges us to
develop new powers; for all burdens strengthen
the powers of our life, and tribulations stimu
late our energies. And when through the heavy

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 55
blows of fate God takes away our strength, bars
our way and shuts the door, we must watch to
see if new paths are not revealed, new doors
opened, and we must learn to say with St.
Paul, "For when I am weak then am I strong."
Thus we are in agreement with the following
pious confession: "There are moments in each
man's life when he is conscious of a design
which runs through his whole existence, a plan
which he has not designed and does not com
plete, the thought of which delights him as
much as if he had planned it out himself, and
the execution of which seems to bring him
blessings and peculiar advantages, though his
own hands have not carried it out. He is free,
as the chess-player is free to make his moves,
but at the same time he is not his own master
any more than the chess-player who is forced to
move by a superior opponent. He is conscious
that the end of the game will not be checkmate
for him, but victory through defeat, and the
nearer this end draws the more impatiently he
awaits it, rejoicing in the will, scarcely to be
misunderstood any longer, of Him who has
forced free man into a position where the high
est freedom will be found, because unlimited
opportunity for the development and display of
his capacities will be granted him" (Lagarde).

56 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
This belief in the personal God who guards
our life, so far as it really deserves to be called
life, is, essentially, belief in a wonderful God
who works miracles. We touch here the very
kernel of the Christian belief in miracles; we
see the abiding truth of the saying, "A miracle
is the best-beloved child of faith."
Hence our faith denies a conception of the
world in which the world would resemble an
artificially contrived machine regulated in every
separate part, which would revolve in accord
ance with law after it had received the first im
pulse from the Almighty. For that would be,
above all else, a universe where belief in a per
sonal Providence could not thrive. On the
contrary, we believe that our God is present in
all that happens in the world, that He is always
at work. Out of the richness and depths of His
being new powers and new manifestations con
tinually stream into the ever-growing creation,
and human individualities are the centres of His
creating and His moving power so far as they
rise from the lower material life toward the
height of His being and nature.
On the other hand, our belief in no wise de
mands what is called the abrogation, violation,
and alteration of the course of nature. We do
not need this proof of the reality and power of

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 57
our God, and, indeed, we consider it a sign of
want of faith to seek for events in the world
which may show clearly to the gross senses of
man and to his intellect, with its rationalistic
conceptions, that here there is an undeniable
interposition of Almighty God.
On the contrary, it is an essential part of our
faith in the self-revealed God who is ever near
to us that He should keep within the ordinances
which He Himself has decreed. We believe
God to be a God of law and order, and not of
mere caprice and arbitrary will. We believe in
the God of goodness and loving-kindness, who
has granted us to apprehend, at least in part, the
laws and regulations of His operations, who
gave us understanding, and does not arbitrarily
mock at it. We know our God desires that we
should dwell in confidence on the sure founda
tion of a known and controlled reality — however
small may be the part of this reality known to
us — and that we should not be kept in anguish
and apprehension by a crushing and capricious
despotism. Further, we do not fear that be
cause we possess knowledge, which is after all
but fragmentary, and power to rise to a sense of
security and to a control of Nature, at best but
partial, we shall thereby lose our belief in the
greatness and inscrutability of our God and our

58 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
reverence for Him. Our faith only claims that,
humanly speaking, our God knows a thousand
ways and means within the limits of the given
laws, ordinances, and connections of approach
ing the individual, surrounding him with His
goodness and care, uplifting him to the com
munity of spirits whose spiritual link He is, and
raising him toward Himself. Our faith claims
that this reality, in the deepest sense of the
word, is not a law which crushes us, but Divine
will, Divine goodness. It is Divine will within
the law. It is Divine will which does not, noisily
and with uproar, destroy all opposition; but
gently, noiselessly, softly, and wisely, visible
only to the eye of the believer, it operates in the
affairs of the world.
When we want to form a picture, a symbol of
Divine activity, we think of a great, dominating,
human personality. What is the secret of that
charm, the influence of which almost approaches
omnipotence ? It is not to be found in the vio
lent destruction of all obstacles, in the assertion
of power. It is quite otherwise. We believe
that this personality guides and controls from
within, as it were. It seems as if it is to be
found again and again guiding events and
human beings. It does not compel from with
out; it works with the very essence of things.

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 59
The irresistible nature of its influence rests upon
this fact that everything appears to happen
spontaneously, to take place owing to its own
impulse. Thus such a man expresses what the
world around is already trying to achieve,
realizes the inarticulate longings of men, and
embodies their unconscious strivings and ten
dencies. High on his shoulders he carries his
race and his age, and, swiftly carried along
by the shouts of enthusiasm, he reaches his
goal. Again let us consider the influence of a real
personality in narrower circumstances. What
a wonderful, marvellous spectacle it is! We
may, perhaps, be able to guess at his goal, but
we shall not be able to foresee the path by which
it is reached. Where dizzy and steep precipices
stand between him and his goal, and where the
eyes of the average man would see no way across,
he finds one and traverses it safely. Confidently
and with undimmed vision he finds out of the
thousand possible ways just the one which
leads to his goal.
If we once have the courage to think of God's
being and operations as of the nature of per
sonality transfigured, we shall then understand
something of the mystery; we shall begin to
see how God works within the law in things

60 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
and with things, yet in such a way that, finally,
it is not the law with its mechanical necessity
that is the moving impulse, but the living God,
to whom every necessity of the law becomes
but a means to His end.
Prayer corresponds in the practical conduct
of our religious life with the belief in the per
sonal providence of God. Christianity is the
religion of prayer; prayer is its crown and its
pearl. The central idea of Indian piety is
meditation, the absorption of the individual in
the life-spirit, the experience of identity with
the universality and oneness of the Godhead.
Our faith in personal providence breathes and
lives in prayer in which the reality that sustains
us and surrounds us with its goodness is united
with a person whom we can address as "Thou."
Here prayer is the only means of intercourse.
Everything else that was of significance in the
other religions — sacrifice and worship, oracles,
ceremonies, and observances — no longer plays
a part in the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Sac
ramental observances also were unknown to
Jesus; He did not institute baptism in His life
time, and it is merely tradition that ascribes its
institution to the risen Lord. He could hardly
have thought of the feast of the Last Supper as
an act to be repeated. But the Gospels tell us

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 61
how He Himself prayed, how He went up into
the mountain alone to converse in solitude with
His heavenly Father, and, above all, they tell us
how Jesus taught His disciples to pray. The
most precious legacy that He bequeathed to His
followers, a bond of union to-day and in days to
come, which may be rightly called the sole and
genuine symbol of the Christian Faith for all
ages and all generations, is the Lord's Prayer;
and wherever Christianity has deliberated about
itself, stripped off its ancient vestments and
destroyed old worn-out forms, the simple, per
sonal prayer has again become the palladium of
our religion.
But what is prayer ? It is, when we compre
hend it in its deepest and most peculiar signifi
cance, a dialogue between our innermost self
and Almighty God, a real and true experience.
It is an uplifting of the human soul to the
highest reality, God condescending and bend
ing toward the individual human soul. It is
a mystery of whose deepest and innermost
truth and splendor we are, perhaps, only fully
conscious at rare moments in our lives.
It is of the highest importance to maintain
this point of view in order to meet an objection
which is often raised far too rashly and capri
ciously when the question of prayer is consid-

62 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
ered. Have we the right, and is it possible, to
pray for this and that — to pray that definite
outward events and incidents should come to
pass ? It is here that disputes and scepticism
come in which strike at the most important and
holiest part of our religious life, and shake its
very foundations. For an apologetic, wrongly
applied, has directed its attention to this very
point, and feels obliged to assert that the course
of events and outward affairs is indeed altered
through prayer, otherwise prayer would really
effect nothing, and it would simply be mere
feeling and declamation.
We must try to get rid of this doubt to which
an over-zealous faith has exposed prayer; we
must establish the most important fact in our
religious life on a perfectly sure foundation.
Let us at once admit quite frankly that nothing
in the outside material world will be altered
through our prayer, that nothing will happen
that would not have happened without our
prayer. How then do matters stand ? In spite
of this, prayer remains an absolutely real and
efficacious fact. Everything around us may,
indeed, remain unchanged, but we ourselves, at
any rate, are changed by prayer. And this sig
nifies a very great deal. For God's personal
care for us, in which we believe, would be per-

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 63
fectly ineffectual if we individuals did not under
stand and comprehend it, if we did not rightly
interpret and understand the guidance which
God brings to our life, if we went to the left
when God commanded us to go to the right.
Prayer, then, may be regarded above all else as
listening to His will which is revealed to us as
the personal appropriation of His providence.
Only through prayer does the actual world with
which God surrounds us become, as it were,
clear to us. Chance is revealed as God's own
design, and the apparently meaningless in life
becomes full of meaning. Prayer and Divine
Providence are the two closely connected poles
of our higher life dedicated to God, and one
without the other is inconceivable. Thus prayer
becomes a very serious and a very real thing.
Prayer means that we penetrate through the
outward appearances of things to the truth and
to the real meaning of our life which springs
from God. To pray means to live truly, but it
also means "to stand in judgment of ourselves,"
to place ourselves with all our wilfulness and
our perversity before God, to abjure the foolish
ness and the selfish desires of our lower self.
Thus in this universal and broad sense of the
word prayer becomes a task of our life which
we must never neglect. To pray is to lead our

64 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
life under God's eyes and to accept our life
from His hands. It is in this sense that the
New Testament speaks of "Prayer without
ceasing." If our life is based on this foundation, this
attitude will again and again be concentrated
in definite prayers for this and that. We shall
again and again think and feel that a definite
course of events may be of the utmost impor
tance for our inward, higher life — perhaps, in
deed, according to our judgment, necessary for
its successful development. Now, so our faith
tells us, we are not forbidden to ask God con
cerning the shaping of outward events and oc
currences, and in such cases there is no absolute
and permanent dividing line between the im
portant and the unimportant, the inward life
and outward facts. But, indeed, at each special
prayer we tell ourselves that God knows what
we need before we ask Him, and gives according
to His judgment; and to every such prayer we
add what Jesus taught us in the darkest hour
of His life, "Not my will, but Thine be done."
And so our prayer of entreaty is but the expres
sion and the vivid, intuitive feeling that in a par
ticular case we receive our whole life from God's
hands. Prayer and Divine Providence stand together

PROVIDENCE AND PRAYER 65
as ebb and flow; our selfish obstinacy must
dwindle away, the natural man must be checked,
so that the eternal will of God by which He
encompasses our whole being may stream in
upon us.

CHAPTER V
DEDUCTIONS FROM OUR FAITH
GOD AND THE GOOD
TT is an essential characteristic of our belief
that it is bound up with the individual life,
so far as this is concerned with God and the
higher things of life. When we ask what the
important things in life are, we at once admit
that moral good occupies the first and the most
conspicuous place among them. Moral good
and the value of the individual life are two
things which are most intimately connected.
Let us consider in relation to this the value
of human civilization. No one can deny that
civilization furnishes us with valuable things
and possessions, but they are and remain physi
cal, material. Civilization merely procures for
us the means and the material for the building
up of our personal life; it takes man to the
point where the work of his own life must begin.
Hence this civilization may become an unbear
able burden, when, owing to the enormous bulk
66

GOD AND THE GOOD 67
of its wealth and the breathlessness of its
activity, it deprives the individual of the energy
to lead his own life according to the law of his
own nature. It may become a fatal danger, for
it threatens to reduce the individual to a mere
tool, to a tiny wheel in the enormous machine
which it drives. When this happens we hear
from time to time the despairing cry of man,
"Away with civilization, let us return to the
simplicity and plainness of Nature." But, in
truth, to follow this cry would be to add a
second mistake to the first. It is as difficult for
man to dispense with civilization as to bear it.
Civilization and individual personality are two
powers which, forever in serious conflict, are
yet dependent on each other.
Let us consider, further, those things con
nected with human society which are of higher
value than civilization. We will first of all take
law. Law has certainly a value which enters
very deeply into the moral and religious life,
but it must keep in its right place according to
its value. The history of religion shows us
clearly that a too close connection between re
ligion and law injures both. During long ages,
religion, through the power of its holy tradition,
has burdened the law with foreign ingredients,
whilst religion has suffered deeply by allowing

68 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
legal conceptions to predominate. All specifi
cally legal conceptions when applied to religion
have always been harmful to it. For law, in
accordance with its very nature, acts in the
region of the impersonal, or, at any rate, remote
from the personal. It has always striven to find
and to establish rules and regulations which are
legally absolute, universally binding, and only
to be enforced by compulsion. It gives to human
life in society its proper foundation, and thereby
helps toward the successful development of the
higher things in human life, but it must not be
confused with these higher things.
Then who would forego the mighty value of
wisdom and knowledge and truth ? Woe to the
religion which stifles the search for truth ! Woe
to the faith which shuts out free thought and
investigation! According to our faith we are
to worship God in spirit and in truth. It is,
however, an old saying that has almost become
stereotyped, that piety and faith are not by any
means knowledge and understanding. That is
quite true; all real knowledge and understand
ing ceases just at the point which our faith tells
us is the highest point. It ceases when we come
to the individual life and personality. Knowl
edge extends to the universal, to the investiga
tion of necessary relations and laws; the final

GOD AND THE GOOD 69
living thing which is evolved is and remains
eternally mysterious and incomprehensible. If
it were to be comprehended by knowledge, it
would no longer be life. The man who devotes
himself to knowledge and understanding in a
spirit of truth and single-mindedness must sur
render his own life in this work of his; he must
be "objective," and allow all kinds of things,
people, and facts, to speak for themselves, he
must be prepared to put on one side continually
his wishes and hopes and his dislikes and his
likes. In the building up of our inner personal
life knowledge has a critical but not a creative
value. And lastly there is the world of the Beautiful.
Manifold are the lines which cross and intersect
each other and join art and religion. And in
this mutual connection each has helped the
other, provided that each has remained true to
its own nature, and has not overstepped the
dividing lines, often so delicate. But in accord
ance with their nature, art and aesthetic pleasure
lead to the opposite regions from those in which
the life of personal belief breathes and flour
ishes. They take us to the regions where our
personal existence is brought into close union
with the world of nature; they extend our ego,
so that it beats in sympathy with the pain and

70 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
joy of the universe surrounding us, and oscillates
in harmony with the rhythm of the great uni
versal life that pulsates around us.

" Spirit sublime, didst freely give me all —
This glorious Nature thou didst for my kingdom give,
deep within her breast to read
As in the bosom of a friend, didst grant me.
Thou leadest past mine eyes the long array
Of living things, mak'st known to me my brethren,
Within the silent copse, the air, the water.
When in the wood the tempest roars and creaks,
Then to the sheltering cave dost lead me, then
Me to myself dost show."
Along this path must the human being jour
ney when he strives after the higher things of
life. If our faith reveals to us the deep abysses
of our existence, presses us to a decision, urges
us upward and forward, and places before us
the Divine thou shalt, and thou shall not, art
shows us a world in harmony and union, or in
the bewitching beauty of greatness and sub
limity. In the beautiful semblance and in the
illusions of fancy it foreshadows for us the
deeper relations of reality and a higher har-

GOD AND THE GOOD 71
mony of life, of which our faith speaks hope
fully, as of a future city and an eternal world.
Herein lies the ultimate possibility of an alli
ance between religion and art and a furtherance
of each other's aims. But the difference and
partial opposition still remain. Faith must not
bind itself too closely with an earthly power
which consciously builds upon the beautiful
appearance of things; faith must accept this
world as it actually is, must put up with circum
stances as they exist in this imperfect and in
explicable universe. History teaches that art,
seemingly in union with religion, again and
again became "the betrayer of religion."
Thus the ideal of moral good still remains
the most faithful companion of faith. It has
become a familiar thought to us, children of a
later day, that the value, strength, and perma
nence of the individual life are best secured in
morality and its claims. Here, and here alone,
the individual life finds an absolute and final
anchorage. Here we have a power that is equal
to all the opposing forces of outward circum
stances, a miracle that is more astonishing and
more profound than anything i'n the natural
world around us. In the command thou shalt,
which rules our behavior and our acts, we pos
sess a bulwark and a shield which screen and

72 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
guard us against everything in the whole world.
For whilst we perceive everywhere in Nature
the ebb and flow of things, that command of
thou shalt urges us forward, makes us conscious
of growth from a lower to a higher stage, and
indicates that there is likewise a similar steady
growth in the mighty reality around us.
But, on the other hand, morality is meant to
be perfected through faith. By itself it would
ever remain a fragment, a riddle, an unendura
ble, aimless burden. Who are we men, impris
oned and conditioned everywhere in space and
time by the iron laws of existence, and placed
in an infinite world whose depths we cannot
sound, much less govern — who, I say, are we
men that we should arrive at the belief that we
possess within ourselves a final, eternal, invio
lable pattern, an absolute law of our being, and
the capacity freely to shape our own life ? Like
the waves which wash against the rock and
crumble it to pieces, these doubts, ever return
ing, assail the only thing in our life that is fixed
and certain. And these would destroy the rock
(and have already destroyed it almost every
where) if faith did not approach morality and
say to us, "You are not the sport of natural
law, you stand in close connection with the deep
est spiritual reality. What you feel to be the law

GOD AND THE GOOD 73
of your existence and the higher life within you
is the expression of the will of this reality which
forces itself on you; it is the voice of your God,
and the law through which He leads us all to
the development of our higher self."
It is a characteristic of our Christian religion
that it unites in the simplest fashion piety freed
from everything that is non-essential, and moral
good purified of all deformities. Jesus of Naz
areth gave to His God and Father a title of
honor which was not to be shared with any one :
"None is good, save One, even God." God is
good, and he who desires to find God must
seek Him in the good.
But now the questions which arise urge us on.
If, then, the Christian belief regards God and
moral good as one, what is this moral good,
what is its meaning ? We reply with one word,
"Love." "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself."
Love — at first sight there seems very little
that is new and original to be said about it.
We must, however, comprehend it very pre
cisely, and consider it from the point of view
of the history of religion.
Love occupied a very prominent position
in the ethic of Brahminism and Buddhism.
"Everything that we do in this life to gain

74 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
religious desert is not worth a sixteenth of the
value of love," so Indian piety asserts! But the
meaning is there quite different from our defini
tion. To us love means a sympathetic active
will toward and with another. To us love is
trust and delight in something of incomparable
value which we find in another's life. In the
Indian ethic love is based upon compassion;
to love means to sympathize with another's suf
ferings, to help to bear his burdens, to suffer
with him, for all individual life is necessarily
painful, purposeless, meaningless. Individual
beings, having all to bear the common burden
of existence, must unite in sympathy which
binds the sufferers together. There is in all this
no common purpose and, pressing forward and
upward, no common aim; at its best it is a
common desire for the dissolution or annihila
tion of the individual existence and its suffer
ings — that is to say, there is a will -which, in
stead of becoming stronger and more powerful,
and lending the individual wings wherewith to
rise, grows ever weaker and weaker and finally
sinks into nothingness.
The word love confronts us, likewise, in the
lofty civilization of the Greek world; and here
the word has a full and vigorous sound, a char
acteristic which is directly opposed to the ideal

GOD AND THE GOOD 75
of love described above, for its roots are fixed
only too firmly in material, concrete existence.
Love is here the higher, purer, and nobler
brother of sensual love and natural desire.
Love, as it streams out toward us in Plato's
symposium in the "Phaedrus" is friendship, the
sympathy of affinities, the rushing together of
kindred souls. Love is the very flower of life
which it fills with intoxicating fragrance; it is
the harmony of spirits, not without a touch of
sensual feeling, the sensual perceptions lending
strength and intensity to the harmony, while the
harmony ennobles and consecrates the sensual
perceptions. To this genuinely Hellenic con
ception of love and friendship there was added
in the later Hellenic philosophy a more humane
and cosmopolitan conception, the feeling of a
duty toward every one, toward even slaves and
barbarians; a perception of the solidarity of
the whole human race which derived its origin
from the same mighty Power and was subject
to the same laws; of existence. But these new
thoughts and conceptions lacked, to a very con
siderable degree, the strength by which the old
ideas had taken possession of the hearts of the
Greeks. They rose to no lofty heights, they did
not inspire great deeds; there was too much
mere reflection and declamatory pathos.

76 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
Let us carry the analysis farther and see what
love meant in the Old Testament. Here we
find indeed the text, "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself," but at the same time it is
clear that this command was at first limited to
fellow-countrymen, and that love rested on the
basis of natural sympathy and nationality.
Only very gradually did there enter into later
Judaism the thought of the solidarity of all
mankind, and man was put almost on a level
with a compatriot. I say almost on a level, for
the above-mentioned feeling of national obliga
tion was never really completely overcome. It
is only in the gospel that we get the final and
real freedom; it was accomplished quietly; the
old forms were not destroyed utterly, but under
mined. And we know how powerful these were,
for we see how Jesus the Deliverer had to wrestle
with the old ideas in His own soul. It is, never
theless, a fact that in the gospel of Jesus and
His personality a new and higher ideal of life
was given to mankind, which united man and
man leaped over the boundaries of all nation
alities. A generation later St. Paul announced
triumphantly the breaking down of all these bar
riers and the unification of mankind in Chris
tianity. In truth a great abyss yawns between Jesus's

GOD AND THE GOOD 77
gospel of love and the conception held by the
Pharisees of later Judaism, the roots of which
reach far back to the Old Testament. The con
tradiction was felt instinctively on both sides.
On the one hand the pious among the people
did not understand Jesus's work of love. They
saw in Him an unpractical and even, perhaps,
a dangerous philanthropist. "He eats with
publicans and sinners." On the other hand —
however much it may be disputed — it is prob
able that in the Parable of the Prodigal Son
Jesus expressed this antithesis. The elder
brother, his deepest feeling offended and
wounded in his zeal for justice and duty, who
stands in such perplexity before the boundless
love of the father for the prodigal son, was
a symbol to Jesus of the correct society of the
pious of His age. What was the difference be
tween Jesus and His contemporaries ? To the
Pharisees love signified something quite other
wise from what it did to Him. To them it
meant doing what was right and straightfor
ward, doing what another can rightly demand
of us, not doing what we should not like another
to do to us. The fulfilment of duties, reasona
bleness, justice — these are the pillars of the
Pharisaic system of ethics.
The gospel means much more than this; it

78 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
desires the text, " Love thy neighbor as thyself, "
to be taken quite literally. "As thyself" — this
means that we are to surround our neighbor,
our fellow-man, with the same warmth and the
deep sympathy which we give to ourselves. To
love one's neighbor does not mean merely to give
him what belongs to him by right and equity, as
if justice and equity are the only points of view
from which I contemplate myself. To love
one's neighbor means not merely to further his
aims, to make them one's own; it means to feel
joy in intercourse with him, and by so doing to
reach in this common life a truer, more real,
and higher life than if we stood isolated. To
love one's neighbor, one's fellow-man — even if
we have no personal sympathy with him — not as
our fellow-sufferer in the universal, inevitable
wretchedness, but as a fighter and ally in the
struggle for the highest things in life — that is
something of what the gospel means when it
demands love of its followers.
Is, then, this demand reasonable, and is its
fulfilment possible ? The coolly reasoning, com
mon-sense intellect answers "No," a thousand
times over. It judges that such love is impos
sible, or only possible, perhaps, so far as the
basis of sympathy extends, but impossible
toward mankind as such. The dull, stupid,

GOD AND THE GOOD 79
commonplace crowd who grovel on the earth,
and spend themselves in commonplace, every
day things — are we to love these; and not only
those who are beautiful and glorious, who are
healthy, happy, and strong, but the ugly, the
sick, the weak, and the disagreeable — life's
step-children ? And those who try our patience
a thousandfold, who often wrong us, who check
us and hinder us — are we to love them ? That
is impossible; here it is surely our duty to hate.
Love would be contemptible compliance and
cowardice, or weak, idle good-nature. And,
moreover, are we to love our enemy ? Love of
an enemy is a mere phrase of hypocrisy, or sim
ply deceitful and concealed prudence which tri
umphs all the more certainly over the enemy
by cool, calculating self-control and restrained
anger. The gospel replies to this No with a decided,
quiet Yes. Jesus lived this love. He loved just
the commonplace, ordinary people — just those
to whom He was not attracted by sympathy,
who indeed shocked His holy and upright soul,
and whom good society passed by with con
tempt. Yet no one can reproach Jesus with
weakness and sentimental philanthropy. His
was an austere, proud, and kingly nature. He
gripped the soul of men to whom He turned in

80 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
love; He roused and stirred their whole being
and forced them to an absolutely new life.
The gospel gives us the solution of the prob
lem. It demands and proclaims this love in
God's name. Supposing such love is impossible
to man's natural self, faith in God gives a
strength which removes mountains and flings
the trees into the ocean. With faith nothing is
impossible. Now, this is the explanation:
When a man believes in a living God, who,
in all His plans for the world, fixes His at
tention first and foremost on the individual,
personal life, and whose will and thought are
directed toward a great company of individual
spirits, between whom He desires to be the con
necting link, he gradually becomes capable, in
the great struggle of life, of exercising love in the
sense of the gospel. This love is not dependent
on the hypothesis of natural, human sympathy,
but is based on the belief in the value of every
human soul in God's sight, and in the Divine
idea which exists in every human soul, though
often concealed by ugly wrappings and hidden
in dross or distorted beyond recognition. Thus
it becomes comprehensible how such love as
this never changes into mere weak good-nature.
For as we are conscious that we ought only to
have pleasure in ourselves, and sympathy with

GOD AND THE GOOD 81
our own life in so far as we develop this idea of
God within us, we feel that our neighbor is only
worthy of love in this sense. Love of our neigh
bor may therefore be united with genuine, pas
sionate anger, for this love hates everything that
destroys God's handiwork in us and in our
neighbor. Such love as this may become a ham
mer and chisel to knock away all the barren
rocks which have hidden the precious metal.
Thus a new vital element came into the
world with the advent of the gospel — the will to
love, powerfully directed toward the individual;
the will to love, demanded by God and made
possible in and with the faith in God. No one
has, indeed, recognized this more clearly than
the apostle Paul when he speaks of faith which
works through love and of love as the fulfilling
of the law. No one recognized more clearly
than he how the Christian's love of his fellow-
men did not spring from rational reflection, but
from a God-given strength and inspiration,
from the enthusiasm of a heart filled with faith
in God. St. Paul named this wonderful new
power in life the Spirit of God. Christians are
those who are impelled by the Spirit of God.
It is true that with all this we are only at the
very beginning of all those difficult and serious
questions which concern Christian life on its

82 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
moral side. For now we find that the individual
human being, especially if we consider his real
self and his higher life, is most closely connected
with the life of human society in its narrower
and wider circles, in marriage and the family,
as one who pursues a civil calling, as a member
of a profession and a class, as a part of the
State, the nation, and mankind, with all its
eternal efforts toward the Good, the True, and
the Beautiful. And, again, these moral posses
sions of the community are most intimately con
nected with those efforts and labors which,
broadly speaking, we regard as the work of civi
lization. For all these efforts are based upon
a natural, material existence, from which they
derive their natural powers, and they wither
whenever the roots are neglected. In the gospel
of Jesus and in primitive Christianity these
questions remain absolutely in the background.
The gospel goes straight to the heart of things,
concerns itself directly with the highest moral
and religious efforts of human life, tells us on
what everything ultimately depends, and in its
transcendental idealism overleaps almost all the
means and conditions by which, and under
which, the higher life of man works and devel
ops. It has only impressed upon our conscience
one thing with unmistakable clearness — that

GOD AND THE GOOD 83
man does not reach to his highest development
in solitude, but in society. But when the gospel
speaks of human society, it is only referring to
the simplest relations between man and man
and not (speaking generally) to all the compli
cated forms and shapes of a society in which
human life actually moves and has its being.
Only a new seed was sown which awaits devel
opment, the first impetus which demands fur
ther independent and creative force.
Thus, whilst in the long course of the history
of Christianity, in opposition to its original
simplicity, questions of human life in society in
its narrower and wider relations rose imperiously
and demanded consideration, the primitive, in
dividualistic idealism of the gospel became sub
ject to sharp tension and almost unbearable
antagonisms. The centre of gravity of all moral
effort appears to be shifted; the endeavor after
universal good, the labor on behalf of the forms
and laws of human life in society, and for the
sake of possessions and things of value which
here come into consideration, seem constantly
to be of far more importance and essential sig
nificance than the activity and energy of love
applied to the individual. But as this work in
the shaping of human life as lived in society is
again directly connected with the works and

84 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
the acquisitions of material civilization, and
with the scientific and technical government of
the material world around us, there is always
a danger of the truly moral work of the human
race being confused with that of general civiliza
tion and becoming identified with it. And then,
lastly, as this necessary work of the human race
which is directed toward the universe and the
universal basis of human life is, to a very large
extent, conditioned by the laws of nature, and
consequently is subordinate to other laws, the
difficult problem arises as to whether the moral
demands of the gospel can co-exist with this
great work of our civilized nations, in which the
laws of the natural struggle for existence and
questions of power and capacity play such an
important part. This problem specially presses
upon us children of a later day, when the work
of mankind everywhere has grown so enor
mously, and has given rise to the conflict of
international rivalry, of international world-
industry; and when the national struggles of
the races, ranks, and callings absorb all energies
in such a way that the claims of the individual
life threaten to be stifled.
In these matters there is for the Christian
faith no covenant and no surrender. It will no
longer deny the necessity of all such work; it

GOD AND THE GOOD 85
will gain courage joyfully to acknowledge and
affirm it up to a certain definite point. But it
will never permit itself to become weary of lift
ing the conscience of the individual above and
beyond all the busy life of man. It will have to
hold up to the spiritual eye of mankind the
great scales for judging ultimate truth and
reality. It will not cease to tell mankind that
the final issue does not depend on the abstract
questions of the Good, the True, and the Beau
tiful, but on the individual human soul in which
these abstract questions "live and move and
have their being"; that the final significance of
all that gigantic work which we call civilization
consists in this, that the individual and as many
individuals as possible in the varied and mani
fold labors of their life, penetrate to the deepest
reality and dwell with it in their soul. Faith
teaches us to recognize that the value of human
activity, whatever form it takes, whether it is
engaged on the periphery and helps to fashion
the universal, natural foundation of our exist
ence, or whether it lies nearer the centre of all
life, is measured according as the worker is
faithful to Almighty God, who wills that we
should find in work our higher, true self. It
tells us that the highest value of our existence
is not to be found in the moments of a great

86 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
worldly success, but in all the quiet times of our
life when soul met soul, individual existence
touched individual existence and strove together
for the final reality. It has the courage to call
the great little and the little great, and does not
allow itself, to be bewildered by human life,
which is ever growing vaster and vaster in its
work and its opposing forces; but, like the
needle of the compass, it points unweariedly in
one definite direction. And yet in spite of all
conflict and opposition, faith is, indeed, indis
pensable to that universal human work; it pre
serves it from becoming purposeless and from
finally collapsing.
But this is not the place to enter more fully
into the separate and manifold difficult ques
tions and problems which here confront us.
We desire to understand the Christian belief
in its unique character, not to defend it. And
in all that we have dealt with so far, we have not
yet reached the highest and final point.

CHAPTER VI
THE SUMMIT
REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS OF SINS
' I AHE Gospel shows us moral good, and our
task and work toward it to be so far-
reaching and deep that an instinctive feeling is
awakened in us with regard to it — that, of our
own impotence and even of the opposition of
our sensual self. The one always co-exists with
the other — the Divine command which streams
through our innermost being in all its majesty,
and the knowledge that our earth-born nature
revolts against this command, and feels it to be
in contradiction to its own being. This contra
diction and this discord are not to be argued
away. For we cannot regard the evil in us as
something that is not yet good, as a necessary
stepping-stone to higher perfection, rather we
feel it as a contradiction, as something that
ought not to exist under any circumstances; nor
can we diminish the majesty of God's holy will
or abate His claims. We are confronted here
87

88 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
with the insoluble discord of a lower and a
higher world, of will and ought. The gospel
frees us from this lack of harmony by faith in
God; its nature and its significance reach their
highest point in the proclamation of redemption
and the forgiveness of sins.
Belief in redemption, the longing for redemp
tion, lie hidden at the basis of all religion. In
all religions the impelling force is the endeavor
of man to rise above his own small and condi
tioned world, to get free of selfish desires, and
to find a surer support than his own self can
offer him. Hence the phenomena of self-sur
render, of self-sacrifice carried to the extent of
sacrificing the bodily life, the child, and sexual
honor, are frequently to be found in the lowest
stage of religious life.
Thus the thought of redemption runs through
the religions and grows with their growth. What
has not mankind, indeed, understood by re
demption in the course of the history of religion ?
In the province of national religions people
hoped to obtain from the Godhead redemption
from national misfortune and national misery.
A classic example of this is the national religion
of Israel, with its belief in Jehovah the Deliv
erer and Avenger. In the Jewish religion of the
Law redemption or reconciliation meant release

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 89
from material and ritualistic impurity which
hindered the individual from approaching his
God. When an Israelitish woman had borne
children she was obliged to cleanse herself from
her impurity by religious preparations and
acts. Impurity and sin are still considered of
almost like significance. The ideal of redemp
tion held by the prophets rises to a far higher
level. The deliverance of the people of Israel
is not the first thing that they long for; they
can, indeed, even bear the thought of the de
cline of their own nation and reconcile it with
their faith. But that righteousness should con
quer and triumph, and that unrighteousness
should be overcome — it is toward this that their
faith in redemption is directed. Their God is
the Redeemer and the Deliverer because He
accomplishes that.
In the expiring Greek world likewise the idea
of redemption plays an important part, and in
the striving for redemption which here arises it
means to get free from the sensual and material
world, from the whole sphere of illusion and
semblance, of dulness and slothfulness, of ugli
ness and discord; to press forward to the eternal
world of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, to the
world of the holy gods from whom man, in the
best part of his nature, is descended. Finally,

90 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
if we look toward the East, toward the ancient
religions of India, we shall see that there the
idea of redemption is very powerful. It means
freedom from this manifold, diversified, and
necessarily painful individual existence; in
Brahminism it is absorption into the universal,
one, Divine Being; in Buddhism it is entering
into the peace of eternal annihilation.
The Christian belief also is eminently a belief
in redemption. It is not St. Paul who is the
originator of this belief; it is very clearly pro
nounced in the gospel. If, indeed, the cate
gorical imperative predominates in the latter,
there yet rings close to it the joyous, clear sound
of the message of redemption. For the gospel
is the proclamation of God's kingdom, of God
who is near us in His kingdom. And if this
proclamation signifies on the one hand judg
ment and repentance, on the other hand it
means felicity and redemption. "Blessed are
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven. Blessed are they that hunger and
thirst after righteousness, for they shall be
filled." And in the preaching of God's king
dom Jesus promises not merely redemption
from personal misery and from the misery of
national life; His redemption stretches far be
yond this. A new and higher time is to come,

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 91
and in it and with it a new and higher life; and
this life has so little to do with the other, is so
little commensurable with it, that in losing the
one man finds the other. And this has ever
been the idea throughout the history of the
Christian religion. Wherever its leaders, be it
St. Paul, or St. Augustine, or Luther, or Schlei-
ermacher, have grasped the Christian faith in
its fullest significance it has always been re
vealed to them as belief in redemption.
If we desire to understand the nature of the
Christian belief with regard to redemption, we
may say as follows: Redemption in the sense of
the gospel means to get free and to escape from
the natural, sensually inclined self that sees in
itself the object of its life and strivings. To be
redeemed means to be caught up by the power
of God; redemption signifies the experience by
which the / is removed from the centre of the
individual's contemplation of the world and is
forced to revolve with its whole life round God.
Redemption no longer means to us freedom
from this or that particular" thing in regard to
this or that external matter, but we feel that it
touches the very roots of our existence. For all
the oppression, anguish, and misery of life arise
from this, that our ego in all the experiences of
its life looks upon itself in its isolation and not

92 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
on the will of the almighty God which is there
by revealed; and all these miseries vanish as
soon as this presumptuous standpoint is aban
doned and exchanged for the contrary one.
Redemption in the Christian sense of the word
does not mean, indeed, surrender to abstract
powers and laws, be it the power of righteous
ness and holiness or the ideals of the Good, the
True, and the Beautiful, but surrender to the
personal, almighty God. And finally it means,
not a casting away and contempt of life, but
elevation to a higher life. We surrender to God
our being, which until then had desired to be
self-sufficing and to revolve on its own axis,
in order to receive this self from Him again,
consecrated and ennobled. We no longer
arrange the course of our life in accordance
with our own will, but we accept the law
of our life from His hand; yet at the same
time we very soon learn to recognize this law
jas the expression of our own higher being
and life. -^
\ Thus our faith in God is a very profound
experience, and wherever it is so felt it is bound
up with deep sufferings. To accept God, to
come to Him, always means to give up part of
our being. We do not attain to God in so
simple a way that we merely have to bethink us

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 93
of the primal basis of our nature and find Him
there. But God affects us as a harsh necessity,
as a strong compulsion, which we resist, as the
sculptor's hammer which strikes the hard stone.
Something within us — often a great deal — must
be broken and destroyed, something must be
utterly cast away if the new life is to arise. All
true faith is conversion, though not of such
a kind that we experience it in a flash, objec
tively and comprehensibly to the senses. But
our religious feeling develops through the
struggle which, spread over a long period of
time, sometimes assumes gentler, sometimes
more violent forms; which sometimes is most
active, sometimes quiescent, but yet always ex
ists. It is also said of our lives, but in a broader
sense, "Whosoever would save his life shall
lose it."
In and with this redemption which is accom
plished in us when we encounter the reality of
God in our life, our powers for good in the
gospel sense of the word are now freed. For
the main obstacle which arises within us against
the claim of loving our neighbor is our sensual
egoism, the efforts of the ego to receive the laws
of life from its own material, isolated being
alone. But if this egoistic passion of man is en
tirely annihilated in the presence of God's ma-

94 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
jestic reality, if we are cast out from the centre
of our own contemplation, and God is placed
there, the road is now open for moral goodness.
And, on the other hand, in faith we compre
hend God as the common bond which binds
spirits together, as the almighty will who has
appointed to each the measure and the goal of
his life, and unceasingly acts so that those who
recognize in His will the law of their life live to
gether in harmony, whilst wherever this does
not happen there is meaningless friction and
waste of force.
Thus our faith in God brings a deep dishar
mony into our life, but at the same time it frees
us from it. Whenever faith enters a human soul
it causes the lower, sensual nature to rise in re
volt, and at the same time it gives the power to
overcome this opposition.
In truth, we may go farther and assert that in
this belief in redemption is rooted, not merely
the power for good, but the permanency of our
whole, higher, spiritual life. For is not this
spiritual life of ours directed toward, and estab
lished upon, the redemption of our sensual,
lower being and its release from sensual fetters ?
In all the inquiries and investigations concern
ing truth, when, transcending purely empirical
knowledge, we declare this to be fictitious and

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 95
that fact, this dream and illusion and that
reality, we are in truth freeing our ego from the
conditions and the barriers of sensual experi
ence. We are proceeding with our own laws of
thought, and though we have gained these
through experience, yet with regard to this ex
perience we estimate it by the laws we have
gained, and freeing ourselves from illusion, we
press forward, step by step, to the deeper reality.
When we consider existence all around us with
a receptive mind for the Beautiful, the Harmo
nious, and the Sublime, we control and drive
back our directly sensual impressions of natural
pleasure and displeasure, and free ourselves
from sensual passions. And stepping out of the
isolation of our own self, we stretch our grop
ing, fumbling hands toward a Being related to
us and comprehensible to us, who reveals Him
self in the nature around us. And finally, when
in the work of our life we evolve a moral person
ality — a true self — then, to a certain extent, we
free ourselves from the conditions of the exter
nal world, and we learn gradually to employ
everything that comes to us from without as
stones and material for the building of our own
life which we erect from within outward, ac
cording to its own laws, however imperfect they
may still be. We feel that we are no longer

96 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
driven aimlessly hither and thither by events
and occurrences, but are strengthened in the con
sciousness of our own freedom.
Thus all our higher, spiritual striving aims at
redemption and release, but it threatens, indeed,
to break down without support if it does not
obtain its foundation in faith. Carking doubts
cling around on all sides. Is it really a fact that
our search for truth brings us nearer to the
reality, that our knowledge and understanding
are equal to this reality ? Or does not our
knowledge and understanding lead us farther
away from it ? All questions of knowledge end
in a final question which knowledge itself cannot
decide. And all that we feel in the enjoyment
of the Beautiful and the Sublime — is all that,
perhaps, but an illusion, a. fata morgana, a mere
trick of the imagination, and not the colored
reflection of a higher reality which is full of
promise ? And when we think to shape our
life freely from within outward, is that not only
miserable deception ? Are we, perhaps, only
free as a bird that is fastened to a long string,
and thinks itself free for a while as it flies about
in the air, until it becomes all the more bitterly
conscious of its delusion ? What are we who
desire to penetrate, master, and control the
universe ? Are we not beings limited in all the

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 97
fibres of our existence, and, moreover, strangely
powerless in our strivings and our willing ?
It is only faith which gives the true basis to
all our higher, spiritual striving; for it tells us
that this struggle is not merely an emanation of
arbitrary despotism, by which the little and
circumscribed will opposes an antagonistic en
vironment which would necessarily crush it.
It tells us that all is in obedience to the Divine
Will, a Divine obligation that is laid upon our
being, which we, at the same time, perceive to
be the law of our own being. It is faith which
gives us the courage and the strength to illumine
with the torch of our knowledge the hidden
corners of existence. For it is our God's world
which we acknowledge, and the laws of our
thinking are given by Him. Faith gives us the
courage and the strength rightly to rejoice in
the Beautiful, to stand reverently before the
Sublime, the Awful, and the Terrible — for it is
God's nature which reveals itself in all things —
and to build up our life in accordance with the
law of inward freedom — for it is God who gives
it us. Or let us once more consider it from the
other point of view; in faith we experience, with
concentrated strength, the fact that we are freed
from our egoistic, sensual self which stands in
isolation. No power and might in the world are

98 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
strong enough to accomplish this release. But
when God frees us, then are we free indeed.
Thus, then, faith works as a redeeming and
releasing power in its widest application, on all
our higher life and spiritual striving. In our
innermost soul, indeed, we experience its power
in the direct uplifting of the soul to God and in
the unlocking and freeing of the will to do
good, in the strength to love, in surrender to the
good and Divine Will which is directed toward
a community of spirits.
But now we are further confronted with the
experience that this striving to rise from the
lower sensual life to the higher life willed by
God, or indeed this ascent through Divine
strength, is not straightway accomplished in us,
but only amid constant opposition and con
tinual checks which proceed from our lower
nature; there is defeat and victory, falling and
rising. We are here brought face to face with
the absolutely irrational fact of sin and evil.
For however much, indeed, the reflective under
standing might force us to acknowledge that,
because everything is to be traced back to God,
therefore what we call sin is somehow condi
tioned by Him, yet our conscience will always
make us responsible for our sin. But here it is

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 99
not a matter for us of the theoretical solution of
these final questions, but of the way out of this
misery, which our faith procures for us. And
so we say, finally, that our faith is a faith of the
forgiveness of sins, and finds therein its com
pletion and consummation. Everything that
we call sin is an act against our higher and
God-given destiny, is, therefore, a wrong done
to God and His holy will, is an interruption of
our personal relation to God. But this interrup
tion must be put an end to, and this is accom
plished by a spontaneous and inscrutable act of
Divine love, by which He forgives sin.
The gospel of Jesus — and here we have the
highest and greatest thing in it — makes us cer
tain and secure of a God who forgives sins. In
His most beautiful parables Jesus proclaimed
the God who, out of the fulness of His loving-
kindness, in fatherly love, pardons and forgives
sins. In the prayer which He taught His dis
ciples to pray the requests for the forgiveness of
sins and for redemption are at the end, the
climax. But Jesus did not merely teach the
forgiveness of sins; He poured it forth upon the
world. Only thus could the belief become liv
ing. For it is a belief that is beyond all calcu
lation. Our reflective understanding does not
tell us that God forgives sins, rather it tells us

ioo FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
that God repels sinful man. It shows us
Almighty God resting on Himself, on the hid
den depths of His own being, who in no wise
needs us, who offers no reason why He should
not destroy the vessels of His almighty power
which do not correspond to His will. A Divine
power was required to fetch down the fire of
Divine grace from heaven; and from Jesus
there streamed forth the certainty of the for
giveness of sin. He comprehended the Divine
grace revealed in the forgiveness of sins in its
perfect absoluteness and unconditionalness. He
possessed the courage to proclaim, however
strong His conviction was of the corruption of
His race and of the human nature around him,
that God forgives sins without conditions wher
ever the souls of men yearn for the Divine for
giveness of sins in vital need and with genuine
longings. And finally, He proclaimed the for
giveness of sin as a free, personal act of the
living God, without any mediation whatever
through deeds, things, and outward acts.
He did not only teach all this, but He acted
it. And wherever there still existed one last
spark of longing in a human heart, one last
faint desire for communion with the living God,
He cast the full beam of Divine grace into the
human soul, and performed the miracle of

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 101
kindling new life in a dead man. He made
possible the apparently impossible. Thus a
stream of certainty concerning the forgiveness
of sins has flowed into our world through Him,
and continues to exercise an influence in a
thousand links and chains through the com
munion of His Spirit.
And we must not hesitate to acknowledge
that this is the highest and final point in our
faith in God when we can accept and conceive
God as the God who forgives sins. We know
that we do not keep and preserve this belief as
the result of our rational reflection but it is
borne in upon us by the power of the Spirit
which is living in the communion of our faith.
We do not desire, thereby, to over-emphasize
and exaggerate the belief in the forgiveness of
sins. In the history of Christianity this procla
mation often assumes a form which threatens
to check the spirit and the activity of the new
life which it should kindle. There are Chris
tians to whom the thought of their sinful
ness appears to have become everything; from
whom we might get the impression that being
a Christian consists in considering oneself a
wicked person. There are Christian circles
which are menaced with the danger that the
avowal of sinfulness threatens to become no

102 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
longer an experience, but a doctrine, a promi
nent dogma; especially is this the case when this
avowal is united with untenable speculations
concerning the nature and origin of sin. There
is in Christian life a certain frame of mind in
which people are so fascinated with the thoughts
of sin that they forget there is a higher goal in
Christian life than forgiveness of sins — com
munion with God and eternal life.
In opposition to these ideas, we desire to hold
firmly to this, that religion, faith, is primarily
a joyful advance and progress. To believe is
to find God, and in Him rest. Belief signifies
certainty, joy, a feeling of being at home. It is
thus that the religious life awakens in the souls
of children if they are left undisturbed by any
dogmatically introduced teaching. Only grad
ually do we become conscious of the other and
darker side of religious life. But the former
aspect dwells with us. To believe means to
feel oneself placed before the good and holy
will of God, and therewith before the greatest
task of our life: "Ye therefore shall be perfect,
as your heavenly Father is perfect." That is the
first and the last word, and it must never be
forgotten. But it is, indeed, just when we do this, when
we place our soul in the presence of the holy

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 103
God and His good-will, that there arises in us
from our experience the feeling of our insuf
ficient strength, of our constant falling short of
the goal appointed for us. Then, trembling
and stammering, we stand before the Holy
One, and know that nothing can release us
from our misery but belief in the forgiveness of
sins. And we know, further, that we do not
only need forgiveness of sins for this or that
particular case; an absolutely impassable abyss
separates us from the holy, almighty God. For
all our moral strivings and the work of our life
are, and remain, at best, imperfect and frag
mentary. But God wills completion and per
fection. From out of this misery of our life
faith alone rescues us, which here again breaks
in with its "and yet," and tells us that God
wants us as we are, if we will only let ourselves
be influenced by His elevating power, by His
mercy, which covers our imperfections. Paul
called this experience and this certainty, which
did not refer to a particular case but to human
life generally, justification. Let us put on one
side, for the moment, the word which Paul
coined, and the speculations which, to Paul,
were bound up in the doctrine of justification,
especially those concerning the reconciliatory
means of justification — Christ's blood or Christ's

104 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
death. It is experience itself that is indispen
sable to the Christian faith. The believer needs
the universal certainty that in spite of all oppo
sition and hindrances God belongs to him and
he to God; and he attains this when he joins
the stream of religious certainty which went
forth from Jesus of Nazareth, and flows along
with it.
Now, all this means no weakness of our life's
energy, and no yielding to a weary and ex
hausted frame of mind, but a deeper, more
earnest, and true comprehension of reality; and
truth and reality can never crush and paralyze
strength, but only exalt it. In order to perceive
this let us once more compare Christianity
and the ancient philosophy which, together
with Christianity, ruled the earlier world. How
closely, in many ways, this spiritual power,
represented by the names of Socrates, Plato,
and the Stoics approaches Christianity; how
much on either side there is that is closely con
nected! But on this one point the basic differ
ence is seen. The characteristic of the Greek
classical world which finds here its highest ex
pression is absolute self-confidence and trust in
the goodness of Nature. Let us imagine a Stoic
confronted with the Lord's Prayer — he would
have been able to join in joyfully with the first

REDEMPTION AND FORGIVENESS 105
half of it, but when he came to the request for
the forgiveness of sins he would have shut his
lips tightly, and his sympathies would have
vanished. And even when, in later times, trust
in the goodness of this world and in a recogniz
able meaning of the universe disappeared more
and more, the endeavor was still directed then,
as before, toward upholding one thing in this
mysterious, impenetrable and cold world — con
fidence in one's own ego, the stoical attitude.
Then there arose in this world, which was
profoundly ill at ease and did not know how to
rid itself of the evils of life, a new and conquer
ing power. It conquered because it had under
stood more profoundly truth and reality. And
it announced that it was the highest thing for
man to abandon this inflexible and unyielding
attitude, and to learn one thing — the surrender
of his own self, surrender as it was understood in
its deepest and most vital sense, in the experi
ence of redemption and forgiveness of sins
(justification). The Christian belief brought
into the world that was growing old the great
mystery of death and re-birth, and with this
mystery arose victorious the new redeeming life.
Redemption and the forgiveness of sins —
both, finally, are most closely connected. If in
redemption we experience, primarily, the power

106 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
which frees from sin, and releases the will
toward the good, in the forgiveness of sins or
reconciliation we lose the oppressive feeling of
moral guilt which paralyzes our powers. In the
Indian religion the deepest longing for redemp
tion was summed up in the cry of "get rid of
life"; in Christianity it was "get rid of sin and
get rid of guilt and press forward to a higher
life." And thus, on this final point, the exalted
spiritual character of our faith in God comes
once more prominently forward. Its posses
sions lie beyond the maintenance or the sur
render of this natural life.

CHAPTER VII
ETERNAL HOPE
' I AHUS our faith in God is entirely based on
personality. We believe in the Almighty
God, who surrounds us with the profundity of
His nature and His works, as the God of our
life, as our heavenly Father, who keeps His
glance directed toward the individual, personal,
spiritual life of man, and surrounds it with His
providence. We believe in the God whose
world-design finds its goal in a kingdom of
spirits, the connecting link of all our higher
spiritual fellowship. We find this God when
we free ourselves from our lower, sensual being
and selfish existence, and discover in His
thoughts which He communicates to us the law
of our higher life. Or, better, we find Him in
letting Him find us, when we experience His
redeeming power and His grace which releases
us from sin. And what we experience is the
freeing of the higher personal life, and what we
are freed from is the misery of personal insuf
ficiency and guilt. 107

108 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
This Christian belief is completed in Hope.
But Hope has as its contents the eternal value
and import of this higher personal life. And
as this depends, finally, on the individual and is
nowhere present but in the ego and the many
single individualities which experience this
higher life, the Christian hope rises boldly to the
belief in the eternal value and import of the
individual life, so far as this has emerged from
a sensual state to a higher existence and has
found in God the law of its being.
It must be carefully noted that this hope is
the summit of the whole building, and not its
foundation. And we must not take it for
granted that those who in an age so disinclined
for this thought cannot assent to this hope are,
therefore, without the foundations of the Chris
tian faith. No demand and no law must be
laid down here. Hope is never to be demanded.
It resembles the hope of the blossoming of
plants whose development is patiently awaited.
But, on the other hand, it must also be said that
in the long course of the history of Christianity
the hope of eternal life has always been united
with a living and strong faith. It is true that
in the process of the development of the Chris
tian idea of the Cosmos all those varied and
fantastic expectations of a more or less immi-

ETERNAL HOPE 109
nent end of the world — of one great Judgment
Day, of the bursting open of the graves at the
trumpet call, of the bodily resurrection of the
dead, and the coming of the Judge of all the
world — have more and more disappeared, or, at
least, have been removed to the periphery of our
religious life. But the hope of the eternal life
of human personality pervaded by God's Spirit
has been preserved throughout the whole course
of the history of Christianity. It has also been
preserved by the leaders on whom the founda
tions of our modern intellectual life rest. Kant's
rational belief in God which rested on a dualistic
basis, and Goethe's view of the world, compre
hending nature and spirit as far as possible as
one, yet ending in theism, meet here.
This hope of Christian life stands, indeed, on
a height not to be reached by rational proof; it
is deep rooted in faith and is only attainable
through it; but through it it is attainable, and
indeed faith is indispensable for its perfection
and consummation. Christian faith in God,
whenever it was active and living, has always
and at all times been a matter of Thou and /,
however small and insignificant the human /
may appear in contrast with Almighty God.
The goal of a perfect, mystically quietistic ab
sorption in God has always remained essentially

no FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
foreign to our faith. But whoever has found
God after the manner of our faith has had an
experience which lends eternal value and sig
nificance to our life here below. From eternity
our destiny was pre-ordained in God's all-com
prehensive plan, and we were appointed to our
place; an eternity depends upon how we fulfil
our life at the place assigned to us. Everything
that meets us in our transitory life we learn to
focus through the power of faith, to harmonize
into a whole which has still much that is incom
plete and imperfect, but which yet is and must
be essentially an affirmation of the thought
implanted in us by God. And whenever our
faith is genuine we are conscious in everything
of a strength which nothing in the world can
overpower, a joy and quiet composure which
can never be taken away from us. But in every
one who has experienced this truly there arises
the joyous presage of the eternal character of
this our life; he perceives in himself a strength
independent of all external events.
It is not, however, only the strength and the
power, the confidence and the certainty stream
ing forth from our belief in God, but the un
solved questions (which, indeed, the believer
puts on one side) and the troublous and painful
experiences with which he is burdened that all

ETERNAL HOPE in
point to the final solution offered to us by
Christian hope.
Our faith bears us upward and onward. We
are conscious of this in the favored hours of our
life when there are, apparently, no hindrances
and obstacles, when our journeying resembles
a vigorous ascent, when we feel ourselves up
lifted by God's strength as on the wings of an
eagle. But side by side with these there are
hours of weariness and failure, when cast, faint
ing, from the heights, we lie on the ground with
broken wings. Faith reveals to us the joyous
certainty that we, placed under a higher guid
ance, are carrying out in our life a plan which
was thought out for us by a higher power; and
when we discover this our soul is filled with re
joicing, as is the miner's when he discovers
a precious silver vein in the rock. But at the
same time our hearts are filled with sorrow and
consternation. For when our life's destiny is
gradually seen to be nobler we perceive how
many mistakes we have made, how much time
we have lost, and how many misspent hours
and wasted opportunities burden our life.
But our hope tells us that a time shall come
when perfect aspiration shall inspire our life,
when life shall fly upward as the arrow from
the tensely drawn bow; a time shall come

112 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
when our life shall be no more a continual seek
ing, an alternate losing and picking up again of
threads. But its path shall lie quite clear before
our eyes, and our glance will gaze freely over
the furthest distance.
Through faith we have found God in the
very centre of the universe. But yet how mys
terious and hidden does He remain to us in His
workings and in His nature ! Through faith we
build, indeed, strong pillars to which we cling,
but round about us surge the problems of life.
We think of all the unsolved questions in the
lot of the individual and the nations which bur
den our life; we think of all those whom death
has early snatched away before they had at
tained to a full and true life, of those who are
plunged in the darkness of incurable illnesses
and of madness; we think of the gloomy con
dition of a great portion of the human race on
the lowest stage of existence, of the violent
destruction of civilized nations.
Hope tells us that what we see here are un
finished lines which await continuation, broken
fragments which await completion. But we are
to experience this completion. Now our God
when we see Him in His working hides Himself
behind dark clouds of mystery; but we shall
see Him face to face.

ETERNAL HOPE 113
Our faith points to the great aim of spiritual
communion and its perfection. Here, also, we
are confronted with difficult questions and rid
dles. We asked earlier: Is progress really dis
cernible in the history of mankind in the sense
of getting nearer to the attainment of God's
kingdom on earth ? Will the nations some day
live together in harmony ? Will war cease ?
And even if that is so will there be a cessation or
an alleviation of the less violent yet very intense
antagonisms ? Will there be a time when the
merciless war of competition in international
industry will cease, when the weak will no
longer be oppressed and down-trodden by the
strong, and class conflicts and class rivalry will
pass away ? Will the miseries of society ever
be even partially alleviated ? When the struggle
for life is made lighter in the relatively higher
classes will not misery and poverty descend to
those of a lower stratum and assert their exist
ence, inevitably and without possibility of ex
tinction ? Is there a real contact and com
munion of the nations in the deepest matters of
spiritual life, in the most important things at
least — in faith, in religion ? Even if we believed
in the victory of Christianity over the opposing
religions, will not the victorious Christian re
ligion consist of a whole series of firmly knit

ii4 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
organizations, in which an inward and mutual
understanding is made extremely difficult ?
With the wealth of life we see how its tasks,
riddles, and problems increase. We shall never
master this sphinx! Our works and our efforts
throughout the ages are fragmentary and im
perfect. And when we look at our own personal social
existence, what hidden faults and imperfections
we perceive! We run and hurry past one an
other, and do not know one another — "ships
that pass in the night." Even when we think
we are most closely in touch and in harmony
with those who are dear to us, how often little
events of our daily life make it clear that in
great stretches of our individual life we were
solitary and uncomprehended. The confused
lines of our life are often so indistinct and
vague to us ourselves; how, then, should we
make them clear to another ?
Our Christian hope speaks to us of a higher
existence in which spirits free from earthly
dross will be visible to one another, will mingle
in an inconceivably higher harmony, and will
lead their life together on a higher plane; when
the common life of man will have lost its fears
and pains and problems, and will only betoken
united effort and a higher flight for the indi-

ETERNAL HOPE 115
vidual, and God's will is the visible bond be
tween man and man.
Yet, withal, Christian hope is no weak,
emotional, and sentimental belief. Material
istic personal desire must be entirely cast on one
side; the hope of seeing again our beloved dead
— a feeling so often predominant in faith — can
only exist as a part of the whole belief. There
is something austere and mighty about the hope
of our faith. All material coverings must fall
away; it will be, indeed, a higher life for which
we hope. We can only faintly divine it. In this
higher life will there be a continuity of self-con
sciousness ? We can only suggest an answer to
this question. What is the connection between
the inner life of a butterfly and a caterpillar ?
In the awakened consciousness of the man how
little there remains of the impressions and ex
periences of the child's soul, how little we are
conscious of what we were as children! "Now
that I am become a man I have put away child
ish things." Some day there will be an awak
ing as from a confused dream, and what moved
us most here on earth in our hopes, our plans,
our wishes, and our desires will lie behind us in
the far distance. We shall take over with us
into eternity only a very little — only the really
great and true and profound things which

116 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
touched our life closely. And it will be the
same thing with our life in society. Age, race,
family, calling, position, nationality — all these
will fall away from us, only those things in
our personal relationships will remain which
reach down to the very roots, there where souls
come into contact with the final and eternal
things. There will be a great casting off of wrappings.
Borrowed finery, vain trifles and baubles will
vanish, and hidden beauties, truth, and reality
will come to light. There will be a great ex
change of roles: the first shall be last and the
last first. "Oh, Eternity, thou word of thun
der!" Beyond all personal hope, yet bound up in
it, there stretches something still higher — a vast
and mighty prospect; an eternal, infinite king
dom of personal spirits, which consists of the
past, present, and future generations, in which
each generation has its position and its place.
And we who are still in the process of develop
ment are not solitary in our earthly wanderings.
We are already citizens of a higher world, and
linked with it. Already we are conscious of un
seen greetings, unheard whispers and calls. So
we pursue our life's journey between the stars
above and the graves beneath. "We bid you

ETERNAL HOPE 117
to hope." And over all echoes through the ages
the majestic saying of the apostle — "that God
may be all in all."

This is our faith in God. Finally the ques
tion may be asked, How do we come to such
a faith ? But that is a question that cannot be
answered theoretically; it can only be experi
enced. But one thing, however, must be very
clearly expressed: Belief does not come to us
from mere necessity, it does not arise from the
anxieties of our life. If that were so, it would
be nothing more than a desire and an illusion.
No; we experience faith, it is true, as an answer
to our anxious questions concerning life; not
as our own compulsory answer, however, but as
a higher power, which forces itself upon us, as
a revelation which streams in upon us. We re
gard it, not merely as an answer to our ques
tions and a release from the troubles of our life,
but also as something which lies beyond it and
leads onward. We look upon faith as a neces
sity which raises us beyond our former existence,
as a harsh compulsion which is laid upon us;
and in proportion as it frees us from the misery
of our existence it lays heavy burdens upon us,
brings conflicts into our life. To believe is to

118 FAITH OF A MODERN PROTESTANT
experience revelations of a new world, of a
deeper reality.
Those to whom there has been vouchsafed in
an especial degree the gift of seeing this deeper
truth, of expressing it in words and impressing
it on others, we call the }eaders of religion, the
pious in a special sense, prophets and founders
of religion. But the mystery of the origin of
faith consists in this: The mighty ones of the
earth, the leaders of religious life, the great per
sonalities to whom God's Word was compre
hensible, and was revealed with inward cer
tainty, flash the Divine light from person to
person. And among all these teachers favored
by God, who have forced open the heavens for
us and called down the fire of faith, stands the
figure of Jesus of Nazareth, towering high above
all others, as all eyes can see. All that we ex
perience in our faith is at every point most
closely connected with His personal life, and
is entirely inseparable from Him. And thus
there is certainly an answer to the question
which has been asked; and although it is true
it does not reach back to the mystery of the
origin of faith, it points in that direction. We
have and we hold our faith in God in the spir
itual communion created by Jesus of Nazareth.
Place thyself in the electric current of this life,

ETERNAL HOPE 119
transmitted by His Spirit, His Holy Spirit, and
open thy soul to its influence. The Almighty
God will so work that contact will be made and
the current will flow through thy soul also.