assigned to almost any other source.  He desired to cut off the possibility of what seemed to him often a tragic delusion.  The margin of any mystical movement stretches out toward monstrosities and absurdities.  For that matter, what prevents a Buddhist from declaring his thoughts and feelings to be Christianity?  Indeed, Ritschl asks, why is not Buddhism as good as such Christianity?  He is, therefore, suspicious of revelations which have nothing by which they can be measured and checked.

The claim of mystics that they came, in communion with God, to the point where they have no need of Christ, seemed to him impious.  There is no way of knowing that we are in fellowship with God, except by comparing what we feel that this fellowship has given us, with that which we historically learn that the fellowship with God gave to Christ.  This is the sense and this the connexion in which Ritschl says that we cannot come to God save in and through the historic Christ as he is given us in the Gospels.  The inner life, at least, which is there depicted for us is, in this outward and authoritative sense, our norm and guide.

Large difficulties loom upon the horizon of this positivistic insistence upon history.  Can we know the inner life of Christ well enough to use it thus as test in every, or even in any case?  Does not the use of such a test, or of any test in this external way, take us out of the realm of the religion of the spirit?  Men once said that the Church was their guide.  Others said the Scripture was their guide.  Now, in the sense of the outwardness of its authority, we repudiate even this.  It rings devoutly if we say Christ is our guide.  Yet, as Ritschl describes this guidance, in the exigency of his contention against mysticism, have we anything different?  What becomes of Confucianists and Shintoists, who have never heard of the historic Christ?  And all the while we have the sense of a query in our minds.  Is it open to any man to repudiate mysticism absolutely and with contumely, and then leave us to discover that he does not mean mysticism as historians of every faith have understood it, but only the margin of evil which is apparently inseparable from it?  That margin of evil others see and deplore.  Against it other remedies have been suggested, as, for example, intelligence.  Some would feel that in Ritschl’s remedy the loss is greater than the gain.

This historical character of revelation is so truly one of the fountain heads of the theology which takes its rise in Ritschl, that it deserves to be considered somewhat more at length.  The Ritschlian movement has engaged a generation of more or less notable thinkers in the period since Ritschl’s death.  These have dissented at many points from Ritschl’s views, diverged from his path and marked out courses of their own.  We shall do well in the remainder of this chapter to attempt the delineation in terms, not exclusively of Ritschl, but of that which may