with some laxity be styled Ritschlianism.  The value judgments of religion indicate only the subjective form of religious knowledge, as the Ritschlians understand it.  Faith, however, does not invent its own contents.  Historical facts, composing the revelation, actually exist, quite independent of the use which the believer makes of them.  No group of thinkers have more truly sought to draw near to the person of the historic Jesus.  The historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, is the divine revelation.  That sums up this aspect of the Ritschlian position.  Some negative consequences of this position we have already noted.  Let us turn to its positive significance.

Herrmann is the one of the Ritschlians who has dealt with this matter not only with great clearness, but also with deep Christian feeling in his Verkehr des Christen mit Gott, 1886, and notably in his address, Der Begriff der Offenbarung, 1887.  If the motive of religion were an intellectual curiosity, a verbal communication would suffice.  As it is a practical necessity, this must be met by actual impulse in life.  That passing out of the unhappiness of sin, into the peace and larger life which is salvation, does indeed imply the movement of God’s spirit on our hearts, in conversion and thereafter.  This is essentially mediated to us through the Scriptures, especially through those of the New Testament, because the New Testament contains the record of the personality of Jesus.  In that our personality is filled with the spirit which breathes in him, our salvation is achieved.  The image of Jesus which we receive acts upon us as something indubitably real.  It vindicates itself as real, in that it takes hold upon our manhood.  Of course, this assumes that the Church has been right in accepting the Gospels as historical.  Herrmann candidly faces this question.  Not every word or deed, he says, which is recorded concerning Jesus, belongs to this central and dynamic revelation of which we speak.  We do not help men to see Jesus in a saving way if, on the strength of accounts in the New Testament, we insist concerning Jesus that he was born of a virgin, that he raised the dead, that he himself rose from the dead.  We should not put these things before men with the declaration that they must assent to them.  We must not try to persuade ourselves that that which acted upon the disciples as indubitably real must of necessity act similarly upon us.  We are to allow ourselves to be seized and uplifted by that which, in our position, touches us as indubitably real.  This is, in the first place, the moral character of Jesus.  It is his inner life which, on the testimony of the disciples, meets us as something real and active in the world, as truly now as then.  What are some facts of this inner life?  The Jesus of the New Testament shows a firmness of religious conviction, a clearness of moral judgment, a purity and force of will, such as are not found united in any other figure