Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion 165 



sentiments, on the one hand a just and irritated God and on the 

 other a merciful God. The rehgious conscience thus finds the 

 cause of impressions which natural objects do not explain to it. In 

 this way the religious sentiment, seeking its significance and its 

 foundation in the sacred books, becomes more and more clear, rich, 

 and steady. It passes the individual " ego " and can communicate 

 with the sentiment of other people in a Church. 



The essential office of internal disposition is therefore dimin- 

 ished, because it is, after all, in sentiment and in immediate 

 experience that religion is realised. If the Gospel is true, it is 

 not because the intellect recognises it as such, but because the 

 conscience judges it worthy of being true. This is judgement 

 of its value and not of its existence. 



One could object (and this has been observed by a pupil of 

 Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann) that the theological formulae which 

 are found, for example, in St. Paul, represent religious experiences 

 belonging to him, but which we probably have not undergone. 

 How can we adopt them .? Hermann solves the difficulty by 

 distinguishing the foundation of faith from its contents. The 

 foundation is absolutely necessary, and is identical in all individual 

 consciousnesses. It is sufficient to expound faithfully this part of 

 Revelation alone, because it is directly experienced by every sincere 

 soul. But the special content of faith, the definite form of dogma, 

 represents a more determinative experience, which may vary with 

 individuals and may be expressed in different ways. For example, 

 the consideration of the inner life of Christ produces in the human 

 soul such an impression that it believes in Him out of moral necessity; 

 but the special idea of a vicarious expiation realised by the death of 

 Christ is merely a contingent expression, which may vary or be 

 lacking in different individuals. There is no longer, therefore, 

 dogma or Church in the traditional sense of the word. The in- 

 dividual cannot come out of himself. He sees in dogmas metaphors 

 which he interprets according to his own experience. A Church 

 is for him a group of men united with the idea of rejecting every 

 compulsory creed. 



Thus we see in Hermann very clearly that subjectivism which 

 Ritschl in vain tried to overcome by having recourse to the uni- 

 versal element of revealed truth. When, in fact, the criterion of 

 the validity of Revelation has been brought into agreement with 

 sentiment and into the possibility of vivifying it with our immediate 



