is in my opinion the third alternative. . . Are you better able to conceive of God as a person than as natura naturans? If you form to yourself a living conception of a person, must not this person of necessity be finite? Can an infinite reason and an infinite will really be anything more than empty words, when reason and will, by differing from each other, also necessarily limit each other? And if you attempt to annul the distinction between reason and will, is not the conception of personality destroyed by the very attempt? . . I maintain that one expression is as good and as imperfect as another; that we cannot form any real conception of the highest Being; but that philosophy properly consists in the perception that this inexpressible reality of the highest Being underlies all our thinking and all our feeling... Further than this, I believe, we cannot get.

The phrase natura naturans, quoted here with so much approbation, is itself a virtual acknowledgment that Schleiermacher's point of view is that of Spinoza, and it is interesting to compare with this his fervid eulogium of that philosopher in his youthful “Discourses." He is criticizing the idealism of his own day:

It annihilates the universe, while it professes to create it; reduces it to a mere allegory, to a worthless shadow-image of the one-sided limitation of its own empty consciousness. Offer with me reverently a lock of hair to the Manes of the holy and exiled Spinoza! Him the lofty Spirit of the World penetrated; the Infinite was to him the beginning and the end; the universe was his only and eternal love; in holy innocence and deep humility he mirrored himself in the eternal world, and saw how he also was its most lovely mirror; full of religion was he, and full of the Holy Spirit; and therefore too, he stands alone and unapproached, master in his art, but exalted above the company of the profane, without disciples and without rights as a citizen.

So Schleiermacher declares that it matters not whether we regard God as personal or not, so long as

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we have him in our feeling. God is the unity of the manifold which appears to us as world. God without world is pure mythology. To make God personal is to make him finite. Spinoza's abstract conception of infinity here fetters him. He fails to see that not infinity, but perfection, is the ruling conception, and that just so much infinity belongs to God as is consistent with perfection, and no more. Infinity, therefore, is not identical with the All; it does not include evil as well as good; it is only the infinity of righteousness and love; it is consistent with, nay, it expresses itself in, self-limitation. We who are made in God's image may and must represent him as like ourselves in that which is highest, that is, in that self-consciousness and self-determination which we call personality.

Schleiermacher practically grants all this when he says that his pantheism is entirely compatible with theism. In his early work, called "Monologues," he celebrates the freedom of the human spirit, and declares freedom to be just as important as dependence. And the same man who in his private correspondence denies God's personality asserts in his sermons the belief that prayer is an essential part of religion. Listen to the following:

To be a religious man and to pray are really one and the same thing. To join the thought of God with every thought of any importance that occurs to us; in all our admiration of external nature, to regard it as the work of his wisdom; to take counsel with God about all our plans, that we may be able to carry them out in his name; and even in our most mirthful hours to remember his all-seeing eye; this is the prayer without ceasing to which we are called, and which is really the essence of true religion.

And here is a prayer with which he prefaced a sermon on the text: "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God":

Heavenly Father, sanctify in thy truth all of us who are here assembled for common supplication, that our hearts may be purified and strengthened by the feeling of thy nearness and by the contemplation of thy love. However elsewhere we may be involved in the turmoil of the world, yet here is the dwelling of holy stillness and rest. Let it be for us all a place of freedom, where the heart oppressed is quickened and restored. However much we may have lost of external possessions, however many hopes of friendship may have been destroyed, here we enjoy a possession of which no power can rob us, here we turn our eyes to a hope that fadeth not away. Oh, that we all may feel rich in the consciousness that we belong to the number of thy children, feel happy and secure in the confidence that thou meanest well and doest well! If this feeling animates our hearts, then shall we rightly look about with the eyes of our spirit; if this rest of the children of God has taken up its abode in us, then shall we view with steadfast glance the course of thy leadings. O holy God, that thy ways may become ours, that we may learn to understand and to use in a manner worthy of thee everything which thou hast prepared for us, this is the aim of our wisdom. We all feel that we are yet far from this; we all fear more or less that it may be dark and comfortless where the light of earthly security and hope goes out; we all strive more or less against the wholesome medicine which offers nothing pleasant to the sick, yet which thou hast mixed for us. Oh, forgive thy children for the weakness from whose oppressive feeling we would be free! and when we draw hither from the world, in order to sink ourselves into the sea of thy love and thy wisdom, do thou move upon us by thy healing Spirit, to purify us more and more from all that displeases thee, and let us go hence mightily encouraged, endowed with the richest blessings, transformed into the image of thy Son, and through him united more intimately with thyself!

Proofs that Schleiermacher's whole life was one of communion with God might be multiplied indefinitely,

and yet in terms he denied God's personality. I am persuaded that his quarrel was with the word rather than with the thing, that with his heart he recognized what with his intellect he could not comprehend. With him, as with the Plato whom he so admired, the sense of personality was weak. The freedom he believed in was power to act according to previously dominant motive, rather than power to change motive. In other words, he was a determinist. He regarded man as an effect, not as a cause. The moral element is subordinate to the emotional. His theology is not a theology of conscience, but a theology of the sensibilities. And so the God who is imaged in man is not so much a God of righteousness as he is a God of power; a God who can be identified with the forces of nature, not a God who is above nature and who uses nature for moral ends.

What will be the attributes of this impersonal God? Schleiermacher does not regard these attributes as having any objective existence. They are mere names for our human conceptions of God. Causality is the one all-inclusive category. The attributes are our methods of conceiving the one Cause in its relations to the various phases of our religious feeling. We speak of attributes only to explain our feeling of dependence. There is nothing real in God to correspond to the attributes or to the differences between them. This is practical agnosticism, and a denial that we can have any correct idea of God. The divine nature is simple and ever like itself a complete reversal of the rule that complexity increases as we rise in the scale of being. All we can with safety assert, he would say, is

that our religious feelings must have a cause; there must be a mighty power that accounts for them; of all attributes, therefore, omnipotence is the chief, and all the rest are only modifications of this. Omniscience is the spirituality of omnipotence. Eternity is the timelessness of omnipotence. Holiness is omnipotence as the cause of our human conscience. Justice is omnipotence connecting suffering with sin. Love is omnipotence imparting itself in the work of redemption. Wisdom is omnipotence preparing the world for this self-impartation and determining its order and limitations.

There is a chilly meagerness about these definitions, which produces a very different effect from the representations of Scripture. In the Bible descriptions of God there is a niρwμa, a variety, a humanity, which Schleiermacher does not recognize, and which better explains religious experience than his philosophy can do. The absolute simplicity which he attributes to the divine Being has its bad influence also when he comes. to treat of the Trinity. Here he takes Sabellian ground. There are no hypostatic or ontologic distinctions. God is not eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The so-called persons in the Godhead are only modes of manifestation. There was no personal preexistence of Christ, nor does it appear that the Christ in us is anything more than the influence of his remembered words. And so with regard to the Holy Spirit. He is not a person, distinct from the Son and from the Father; but, as Christ's God-consciousness was simply the being of God in him, so our Christ-consciousness is simply the being of God in us. Schleiermacher