Christianity and the new idealism

THIS book is the outcome of lectures given at Jena on October 23 and 24, 1906, in connection with the Theological Vacation Course. These lectures grappled with certain problems which deal with the sharp oppositions that perplex our life to-day, and therefore seem to call very specially for elucidation. In the course of our inquiry we have sought to show as clearly as possible what these oppositions are, and have done our best to surmount them. The first lecture deals with the grounding of religion in the inner life. Our aim in this lecture is to find some mean between the older thought which favoured the cosmological approach to religion, and the newer which takes the human soul as its starting-point, but is so liable to the defects of vagueness and formlessness. Over against both these methods we proceed to elaborate a system which, while based on the inner life, still preserves a cosmic character. In this way a clear distinction is drawn between a religion of the spiritual life and a religion that is merely humanistic. The subject of the second section is " Religion and History." There is hardly anything so significant for the position of religion to-day as the tendency to refer continually to history. Whatever the advantages of such reference, we must not ignore its dangers. It was incumbent on us to weigh them well, and in particular to ascertain whether it were possible to overcome the evils of a stifling and enervating historicity, whilst still maintaining the significance of history in opposition to a radicalism which is hostile to it. This we could not do without framing certain fundamental convictions as to the meaning of history which shed a new light on the picture of life as a whole, and therefore concern each of us individually.