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Such a prospect may well fill us with horror; and it is terrible to find some of the ablest thinkers of Germany, such as Ernst Troeltsch, writing calm elegies over 'the death of Liberalism' and predicting the advent of an era of cut-throat international competition. Juvenal speaks of the folly of propter vitam vivendi perdere causas; and who would care to live in such a world?
Troeltsch argues with much cogency that the Catholic Church must be regarded rather as the last creative achievement of classical antiquity than as the beginning of the Middle Ages. Its growth belongs mainly to the political history of Europe; the strictly religious element in it is quite subordinate.
Troeltsch tries to show that the German idea of freedom is different from, and indeed superior to, that of all other peoples. The French, he says, rest their idea of freedom upon the doctrine of the equality of all citizens, but in reality lawyers and plutocrats prevail.
More recently Troeltsch, writing as a Protestant, has emphasised the institutional side of religion in the most uncompromising way.
Troeltsch and the "Reichsbote" asked whether Haeckel had purposely concealed this fact, and Schmidt now explains that Haeckel first became acquainted with the "Thoughts on Religion" through him towards the end of January, 1900.
Freedom in economic matters, like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition. The latter easily became imbued with religious significance. English puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will of God and its performance the test of grace.
Troeltsch first in our own day has given us a satisfactory account of the vast achievement of the movement in every department of human life. It annihilated the theological notion of the State. In the period after the Thirty Years' War men began to question what had been the purpose of it all. Diplomacy freed itself from Jesuitical and papal notions.
No one has put the point better than Professor E. Troeltsch: 'The decisive point here is the conception, peculiar to the Middle Ages, of what is Christian as Supernatural, or rather the full elaboration of the consequences involved in the conception of the Supernatural.
I believe, however, that the aberrations or exaggerations of institutionalism have been, and are, more dangerous, and further removed from the spirit of Christianity than those of mysticism, and that we must look to the latter type, rather than to the former, to give life to the next religious revival. Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu für den Glauben, pp. 25 sq.
Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.
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