it.  Man as moral being is but an individuation of humanity, just as, again, as religious being he is but an individuation of God.  The goal of the moral life is the absorption of self, the elimination of self, which is at the same time the realisation of self, through the life and service for others.  The goal of religion is the elimination of self, the swallowing up of self, in the service of God.  In truth, the unity of man with man is at bottom only another form of his unity with God, and the service of humanity is the identical service of God.  Other so-called services of God are a means to this, or else an illusion.  This parallel of religion and morals is to be set over against other passages, easily to be cited, in which Schleiermacher speaks of passivity and contemplation as the means of the realisation of the unity of man and God, as if the elimination of self meant a sort of Nirvana.  Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic.  No philosopher save Kant ever influenced him half so much as did Spinoza.  There is something almost oriental in his mood at times.  An occasional fragment of description of religion might pass as a better delineation of Buddhism than of Christianity.  This universality of his mind is interesting.  These elements have not been unattractive to some portions of his following.  One wearied with the Philistinism of the modern popular urgency upon practicality turns to Schleiermacher, as indeed sometimes to Spinoza, and says, here is a man who at least knows what religion is.  Yet nothing is further from the truth than to say that Schleiermacher had no sense for the meaning of religion in the outward life and present world.

In the Reden Schleiermacher had contended that religion is a condition of devout feeling, specifically the feeling of dependence upon God.  This view dominates his treatment of Christianity.  It gives him his point of departure.  A Christian is possessed of the devout feeling of dependence upon God through Jesus Christ or, as again he phrases it, of dependence upon Christ.  Christianity is a positive religion in the sense that it has direct relation to certain facts in the history of the race, most of all to the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  But it does not consist in any positive propositions whatsoever.  These have arisen in the process of interpretation of the faith.  The substance of the faith is the experience of renewal in Christ, of redemption through Christ.  This inward experience is neither produced by pure thought nor dependent upon it.  Like all other experience it is simply an object to be described and reckoned with.  Orthodox dogmatists had held that the content of the Christian faith is a doctrine given in revelation.  Schleiermacher held that it is a consciousness inspired primarily by the personality of Jesus.  It must be connected with the other data and acta of our consciousness under the general laws of the operation of the mind.  Against rationalism and much so-called liberal Christianity, Schleiermacher contended that Christianity is not a new set of propositions periodically brought up to date and proclaimed as if these alone were true.  New propositions can have only the same relativity of truth which belonged to the old ones in their day.  They may stand between men and religion as seriously as the others had done.