Our most profitable mode of procedure would seem to be this.  We shall seek to follow, as we may, those few main movements of thought marking the nineteenth century which have immediate bearing upon our theme.  We shall try to register the effect which these movements have had upon religious conceptions.  It will not be possible at any point to do more than to select typical examples.  Perhaps the true method is that we should go back to the beginnings of each one of these movements.  We should mark the emergence of a few great ideas.  It is the emergence of an idea which is dramatically interesting.  It is the moment of emergence in which that which is characteristic appears.  Our subject is far too complicated to permit that the ramifications of these influences should be followed in detail.  Modifications, subtractions, additions, the reader must make for himself.

These main movements of thought are, as has been said, three in number.  We shall take them in their chronological order.  There is first the philosophical revolution which is commonly associated with the name of Kant.  If we were to seek with arbitrary exactitude to fix a date for the beginning of this movement, this might be the year of the publication of his first great work, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in 1781.[1] Kant was indeed himself, both intellectually and spiritually, the product of tendencies which had long been gathering strength.  He was the exponent of ideas which in fragmentary way had been expressed by others, but he gathered into himself in amazing fashion the impulses of his age.  Out from some portion of his works lead almost all the paths which philosophical thinkers since his time have trod.  One cannot say even of his work, Der Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793, that it is the sole source, or even the greatest source, of his influence upon religious thinking.  But from the body of his work as a whole, there came a new theory of knowledge which has changed completely the notion of revelation.  There came also a view of the universe as an ideal unity which, especially as elaborated by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, has radically altered the traditional ideas of God, of man, of nature and of their relations, the one to the other.

[Footnote 1:  In the text the titles of books which are discussed are given for the first time in the language in which they are written.  Books which are merely alluded to are mentioned in English.]

We shall have then, secondly, to note the historical and critical movement.  It is the effort to apply consistently and without fear the maxims of historical and literary criticism to the documents of the Old and New Testaments.  With still greater arbitrariness, and yet with appreciation of the significance of Strauss’ endeavour, we might set as the date of the full impact of this movement upon cherished religious convictions, that of the publication of his Leben Jesu, 1835.