of regardless law, of all-destroying force, of cruel and indifferent fate.  From this men took refuge in the thought of a compassionate God, though they could not withdraw themselves or those whom they loved from the inexorable laws of nature.  They could not see that God always, or even often, intervened on their behalf.  It cannot be denied that these ideas prevail to some extent in the popular theology at the present moment.  Much of our popular religious language is an inheritance from a time when they universally prevailed.  The religious intuition even of psalmists and prophets opposed many of these notions.  The pure religious intuition of Jesus opposed almost every one of them.  Mystics in every religion have had, at times, insight into an altogether different scheme of things.  The philosophy, however, even of the learned, would, in the main, have supported the views above described, from the dawn of reflexion almost to our own time.

It was Kant who first began the resolution of this three-cornered difficulty.  When he pointed out that into the world, as we know it, an element of spirit goes, that in it an element of the ideal inheres, he began a movement which has issued in modern monism.  He affirmed that that element from my thought which enters into the world, as I know it, may be so great that only just a point of matter and a prick of sense remains.  Fichte said:  ’Why do we put it all in so perverse a way?  Why reduce the world of matter to just a point?  Why is it not taken for what it is, and yet understood to be all alive with God and we able to think of it, because we are parts of the great thinker God?’ Still Fichte had busied himself almost wholly with consciousness.  Schelling endeavoured to correct that.  Nature lives and moves in God, just as truly in one way as does man in another.  Men arise out of nature.  A circle has been drawn through the points of our triangle.  Nature and man are in a new and deeper sense revelations of God.  In fact, supplementing one another, they constitute the only possible channels for the manifestation of God.  It hardly needs to be said that these thoughts are widely appropriated in our modern world.  These once novel speculations of the kings of thought have made their way slowly to all strata of society.  Remote and difficult in their first expression in the language of the schools, their implications are to-day on everybody’s lips.  It is this unitary view of the universe which has made difficult the acceptance of a theology, the understandlng of a religion, which are still largely phrased in the language of a philosophy to which these ideas did not belong.  There is not an historic creed, there is hardly a greater system of theology, which is not stated in terms of a philosophy and science which no longer reign.  Men are asking:  ’cannot Christianity be so stated and interpreted that it shall meet the needs of men of the twentieth century, as truly as it met those of men of the first or of the sixteenth?’ Hegel, the last of this great group of idealistic philosophers whom we shall name, enthusiastically believed in this new interpretation of the faith which was profoundly dear to him.  He made important contribution to that interpretation.