648 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 



nature. You must penetrate the soul of men in the past; you 

 must feel as living realities what was living in their mind, in their 

 heart, in their conscience; you must lay hold not only of the dead 

 formula but of the very spirit. We should not go back to the edifying 

 kind of history, as practiced by the pietists or by Neander. We leave 

 to preachers and to moralists the important duty of working up the 

 precious lessons which history affords them. We claim only justice 

 and truth. So long as we have not acknowledged the feelings, the 

 emotions, even the impressions produced by a doctrine, by a relig- 

 ious personality, 1 institution, cult, or any other religious state- 

 ment; so long as we have not caught what needs they satisfied, and 

 to what moral dispositions they gave satisfaction; so long we may 

 not claim to know them really. History of dogmas or of cultural 

 observances is the intellectual notation of religious and moral 

 experiences; as long as we have not recognized what these experi- 

 ences are, we have the shell but not the nut of religion. 



In different terms we ought to give more place in our historical 

 works to religious psychology, but to a psychology large-minded and 

 open for all forms of religious life in human kind, an unsectarian 

 psychology, gifted with that generous sympathy which alone enables 

 us to penetrate the inmost nature of other people and to understand 

 even those moral experiences which are most unfamiliar to ourselves, 

 because it makes us lay aside our own peculiarities and revive in 

 others. Secularized ecclesiastical history ought not to be a withered 

 history, mere anatomy. We have to present to our contemporaries, 

 not fossils, but living beings, who have worshiped, cried for assist- 

 ance, glorified, who have sung and lamented, who have trembled 

 before the Great Mystery, who revolted and bethought themselves, 

 who loved and prayed, not only theologians, priests, or rituals. 



1 In religious history an important place is to be assigned to great personalities. 

 The experience of our day as well as the most trustworthy records of the past 

 bear witness to the intensity of the influence of certain personalities, which are pro- 

 ductive of moral and religious life. Those who believe in some one are perhaps 

 more numerous than those who believe in something (a doctrine, an idea, or the 

 virtue of a practice). This is especially true in ethic religions. 



