In these days of world-wide intercommunication, the hope of unity and demand for it among men are very strong, so strong that the optimistically inclined often think they already see the rosy hues of a dawn heralding the day of universal harmony. Perhaps these good people are right; but in no respect do modifying considerations appear more clearly than in matters of religion and religious thought. In these things racial as well as individual differences exist; and even between nations so near akin as Germany and the United States mutual understanding seems hard to attain. No doubt the average religious man in America looks upon Germany as a hot-bed of religious radicalism, opposed to all those principles of piety which good men wish to see preserved. There is ground for this opinion, in that German theologians have led the way in the application of the critical method to the facts of religion, and it is often still true, though far less than a few decades ago, that the theories advanced contain poison for the springs of pure religion. But this is not the whole of the picture. Besides the forces of stanch conservatism, which are as strong and as active in Germany as elsewhere, there exists also there at present a vigorous and increasing body of men, as much interested in religion as any conservatives, who are attempting to mediate the great truths of religion to the modern man, whose views are no longer in agreement with orthodoxy. To some these teachers may seem radical, but to those who realize that the great crux is the religious life itself and not this or that particular formulation of it, they convey a distinct impression of constructive renewal—renewal, because they reckon with the knowledge and forces of the new day; constructive, because they build upon and further the knowledge which the past has bequeathed and the forces to which man has ever turned for help and strength.

Such a man is Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg, too little known on this side of the Atlantic, but a man to be reckoned with in the future here, as he already is in his own land. That a new school will form itself about him is unlikely; his teaching is too individualistic for that. But many a student is attracted by his powerful reasoning, fearlessly critical of all the prevailing tendencies—orthodox, Ritschlian, Hegelian, pragmatic—and gets from him a deeper hold on the realities of the spiritual life and a stronger faith in Christianity as the permanent expression of that life. It is this broad aspect of Troeltsch's teaching which will interest us here rather than his views concerning the history of Protestant Christianity, which is his special field.