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All the religion in the world has come from the worship of nature, which, whether arising at one centre or at several, spread over the world, and is to be recognised, clearly or dimly, in the religions of all lands. This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by Otto Pfleiderer, and other German writers.
The influence of Hegel was felt upon them all. To this group belong Schweitzer, Biedermann, Lipsius, and Pfleiderer. The influence of Hegel was greatest upon Biedermann, least upon Lipsius. An estimate of the influence of Schleiermacher would reverse that order.
This again is a reason for including our reference to the reaction here. According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy may be said to have begun in Great Britain in the year 1825, with the publication of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection.
The bearing of this fact on the problem of the moral transformation of races could be easily shown. Said Prof. Pfleiderer to the writer in the winter of 1897: "I am sorry to know that the Japanese are deficient in religious nature."
An order of nature such as would be destroyed by God's action does not exist; God brings everything to pass; even the passage of motion from one body to another is his work. And with this our thinker appears as Pfleiderer emphasizes closely to approach the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz.
Pfleiderer, who had personal acquaintance with Strauss and held him in regard, once wrote: 'Strauss' error did not lie in his regarding some of the gospel stories as legends, and some of the narratives of the miraculous as symbols of ideal truths. So far Strauss was right. The contribution which he made is one which we have all appropriated and built upon.
No man's life is the working out of a fixed and ready-made plan. At any rate, he determined to go to Jerusalem in all likelihood, as Pfleiderer suggests, in order to win a victory over the hierarchy and to realize the prophetic ideal in the center of the religious life of the Jewish nation. The people received him enthusiastically but his opponents were too strong and clever for him.
Pfleiderer also judges that their contribution was as significant as any made to dogmatic theology in Great Britain in the nineteenth century. They achieved the same reconstruction of the doctrine of salvation which had been effected by Kant and Schleiermacher. At their hands the doctrine was rescued from that forensic externality into which Calvinism had degenerated.
At a later period, readings in the works of Renan, Pfleiderer, Cheyne, Harnack, Sayce, and others strengthened me in my liberal tendencies, without diminishing in the slightest my reverence for all that is noble in Christianity, past or present. Another experience, while it did not perhaps set me in any new trains of thought, strengthened me in some of my earlier views.
The number of editions in French and of translations into other languages is amazing. Beyond question, the critical position was made known through Renan to multitudes who would never have been reached by the German works which were really Renan's authorities. It is idle to say with Pfleiderer that it is a pity that, having possessed so much learning, Renan had not possessed more.
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