The reference to experience which underlies all that was said above was particularly congruous with the mood of an age grown weary of Hegelianism and much impressed with the value of the empirical method in all the sciences.  Another great contention of our age is for the recognition of the value of what is social.  Its emphasis is upon that which binds men together.  Salvation is not normally achieved except in the life of a man among and for his fellows.  It is by doing one’s duty that one becomes good.  One is saved, not in order to become a citizen of heaven by and by, but in order to be an active citizen of a kingdom of real human goodness here and now.  In reality no man is being saved, except as he does actively and devotedly belong to that kingdom.  The individual would hardly be in God’s eyes worth the saving, except in order that he might be the instrumentality of the realisation of the kingdom.  Those are ideas which it is possible to exaggerate in statement or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their quality as half-truths.  But it is hardly possible to exaggerate their significance as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness, inadequacy, and artificiality both of the official statement and of the popular apprehension of Christianity.  These ideas appeal to men in our time.  They are popular because men think them already.  Men are pleased, even when somewhat incredulous, to learn that Christianity will bear this social interpretation.  Most Christians are in our time overwhelmingly convinced that in this direction lies the interpretation which Christianity must bear, if it is to do the work and meet the needs of the age.  Its consonance with some of the truths underlying socialism may account, in a measure, for the influence which the Ritschlian theology has had.

As was indicated, Ritschl’s epoch-making book bears the title, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation.  The book might be described in the language of the schools as a monograph upon one great dogma of the Christian faith, around which, as the author treats it, all the other doctrines are arranged.  The familiar topic of justification, of which Luther made so much, was thus given again the central place.  What the book really offered was something quite different from this.  It was a complete system of theology, but it differed from the traditional systems of theology.  These had followed helplessly a logical scheme which begins with God as he is in himself and apart from any knowledge which we have of him.  They then slowly proceeded to man and sin and redemption, one empirical object and two concrete experiences which we may know something about.  Ritschl reversed the process.  He aimed to begin with certain facts of life.  Such facts are sin and the consciousness of forgiveness, awareness of restoration to the will and power of goodness, the gift of love and of a spirit which can feel itself victorious even in the midst of ills in