In contrast with this, that modern reflection which has taken the phenomenon known as religion and, specifically, that historic form of religion known as Christianity, as its object, has indeed also slowly revealed the fact that it is in possession of certain principles.  Furthermore, these principles, as they have emerged, have been felt to be new and distinctive principles.  They are essentially modern principles.  They are the principles which, taken together, differentiate the thinker of the nineteenth century from all who have ever been before him.  They are principles which unite all thinkers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, in practically every portion of the world, as they think of all subjects except religion.  It comes more and more to be felt that these principles must be reckoned with in our thought concerning religion as well.

One of these principles is, for example, that of dealing in true critical fashion with problems of history and literature.  Long before the end of the age of rationalism, this principle had been applied to literature and history, other than those called sacred.  The thorough going application of this scientific method to the literatures and history of the Old and New Testaments is almost wholly an achievement of the nineteenth century.  It has completely altered the view of revelation and inspiration.  The altered view of the nature of the documents of revelation has had immeasurable consequences for dogma.

Another of these elements is the new view of nature and of man’s relation to nature.  Certain notable discoveries in physics and astronomy had proved possible of combination with traditional religion, as in the case of Newton.  Or again, they had proved impossible of combination with any religion, as in the case of Laplace.  The review of the religious and Christian problem in the light of the ever increasing volume of scientific discoveries—­this is the new thing in the period which we have undertaken to describe.  A theory of nature as a totality, in which man, not merely as physical, but even also as social and moral and religious being, has place in a series which suggests no break, has affected the doctrines of God and of man in a way which neither those who revered nor those who repudiated religion at the beginning of the nineteenth century could have imagined.

Another leading principle grows out of Kant’s distinction of two worlds and two orders of reason.  That distinction issued in a new theory of knowledge.  It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the universe.  In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic movement had run out.  By it the philosopher gave standing forever to much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, yet had never been able to prove by any method which the ordered reasoning of man had provided.  Religion as feeling regained its place.  Ethics was set once more in the light of the eternal.  The soul of man became the object of a scientific study.