a mere expression from an environment which we know, flung out into the depths of that we cannot see.  If the language of personal relations helps men in living with their truth—­well and good.  It hinders also.  For himself he felt that it hindered more than helped.  His definition of religion as the feeling of dependence upon God, is cited as evidence of the effect upon him of his contention against the personalness of God.  Religion is also, it is alleged, the sentiment of fellowship with God.  Fellowship implies persons.  But to no man was the fellowship with the soul of his own soul and of all the universe more real than was that fellowship to Schleiermacher.  This was the more true in his maturer years, the years of the magnificent rounding out of his thought.  God was to him indeed not ‘a man in the next street.’  What he says about the problem of the personalness of God is true.  We see, perhaps, more clearly than did he that the debate is largely about words.  Similarly, we may say that Schleiermacher’s passing denial of the immortality of the soul was directed, in the first instance, against the crass, unsocial and immoral view which has disfigured much of the teaching of religion.  His contention was directed toward that losing of oneself in God through ideals and service now, which in more modern phrase we call the entrance upon the immortal life here, the being in eternity now.  For a soul so disposed, for a life thus inspired, death is but an episode.  For himself he rejoices to declare it one to the issue of which he is indifferent.  If he may thus live with God now, he cares little whether or not he shall live by and by.

In his Monologues Schleiermacher first sets forth his ethical thought.  As it is religion that a man feels himself dependent upon God, so is it the beginning of morality that a man feels his dependence upon his fellows and their dependence on him.  Slaves of their own time and circumstance, men live out their lives in superficiality and isolation.  They are a prey to their own selfishness.  They never come into those relations with their fellows in which the moral ideal can be realised.  Man in his isolation from his fellows is nothing and accomplishes nothing.  The interests of the whole humanity are his private interests.  His own happiness and welfare are not possible to be secured save through his co-operation with others, his work and service for others.  The happiness and welfare of others not merely react upon his own.  They are in a large sense identical with his own.  This oneness of a man with all men is the basis of morality, just as the oneness of man with God is the basis of religion.  In both cases the oneness exists whether or not we know it.  The contradictions and miseries into which immoral or unmoral conduct plunges us, are the witness of the fact that this inviolable unity of a man with humanity is operative, even if he ignores it.  Often it is his ignoring of this relation which brings him through misery to consciousness of