life, confidence that this life is not all.  These phrases, taken together, would describe the consciousness of salvation.  This consciousness of sin and salvation is a fact in individual men.  It has evidently been a fact in the life of masses of men for many generations.  The facts have thus a psychology and a history from which reflection on the phenomenon of faith must take its departure.  There is no reason why, upon this basis, and until it departs from the scientific methods which are given with the nature of its object, theology should not be as truly a science as is any other known among men.

This science starts with man, who in the object of many other sciences.  It confines itself to man in this one aspect of his relation to moral life and to the transcendent meaning of the universe.  It notes the fact that men, when awakened, usually have the sense of not being in harmony with the life of the universe or on the way to realisation of its meaning.  It notes the fact that many men have had the consciousness of progressive restoration to that harmony.  It inquires as to the process of that restoration.  It asks as to the power of it.  It discovers that that power is a personal one.  Men have believed that this power has been exerted over them, either in personal contact, or across the ages and through generations of believers, by one Jesus, whom they call Saviour.  They have believed that it was God who through Jesus saved them.  Jesus’ consciousness thus became to them a revelation of God.  The thought leads on to the consideration of that which a saved man does, or ought to do, in the life of the world and among his fellows, of the institution in which this attitude of mind is cherished and of the sum total of human institutions and relations of which the saved life should be the inward force.  There is room even for a clause in which to compress the little that we know of anything beyond this life.  We have written in unconventional words.  There is no one place, either in Ritschl’s work or elsewhere, where this grand and simple scheme stands together in one context.  This is unfortunate.  Were this the case, even wayfaring men might have understood somewhat better than they have what Ritschl was aiming at.

It is a still greater pity that the execution of the scheme should have left so much to be desired.  That this execution would prove difficult needs hardly to be said.  That it could never be the work of one man is certainly true.  To have had so great an insight is title enough to fame.  Ritschl falls off from his endeavour as often as did Schleiermacher—­more often and with less excuse.  The might of the past is great.  The lumber which he meekly carries along with him is surprising, as one feels his lack of meekness in the handling of the lumber which he recognised as such.  The putting of new wine into old bottles is so often reprobated by Ritschl that the reader is justly surprised when he nevertheless recognises the