The following memorial, which I publish with the approval of the Prussian Minister of Worship and Education, is to inform the public at large of the establishment of an American Library of Theology at the University of Marburg. The scientific aims of this Library have the full approval not only of the Prussian government, but also of the theological Faculty of the University, of which I am a member. Thanks to a well-wisher, a German living in America, whose generosity made possible the founding of the Library, the Prussian government was in a position at the beginning of this year to call it actually into being, and to establish it at the University of Marburg as an official institution.

Churches in the great religions have been allies of all ancient governments and most modern ones. The Emperor of Japan was believed to have, and in the popular mind still has, intimate relations with the heavenly powers. He used to be held in a seclusion suitable for this peculiar relationship to Deity. The Emperor of China for thousands of years under various dynasties was a high priest, whose offerings and prayers were peculiarly acceptable to Deity, and frequently procured for his people good seedtimes and good harvests, although he sometimes failed to avert pestilences, droughts, floods, and famines. The Indian castes are family clans and trades-unions with strong religious sanctions. The Koran contains the foundations of civil law as well as of ecclesiastical, and the Sultan claims succession to the religious as well as to the civil authority of the Caliphs. Under the feudal system there was a chaplain in every great noble's house, and the king ruled “by the grace of God,” and by the same grace transmitted his office to his son. Both Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the Little claimed as Emperor the support of the Church; but Napoleon the Third never seemed to see the extraordinary pathos in the formula he used so much, “By the grace of God and the national will Emperor of the French.” The French Revolution tried to divorce civil government from religion, but failed to do so. National established churches supported by the state exist all over Europe, although their tenure is frail in several European countries. The American Republic has carried into practice complete religious toleration and complete separation of church and state; but every now and then some one proposes to bridge the gap between church and state by a phrase such as “Vox populi, vox Dei,” or to “recognize” the Divine Immanence by inserting the word God in the Constitution.

One of the best-known stories about Luther relates that while at Rome in December, 1510, he began climbing on his knees, for the indulgence to be thus acquired, the Scala Santa, but that, before he reached the top he remembered the text, “The just shall live by faith,” and he desisted. If authentic, this anecdote proves that he had thus early attained to the fundamental doctrine of the Reformation. The source of the story is a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul, who says that he heard it from his father when he was eleven years old but did not write it down until thirty-eight years later. Such testimony to any fact is necessarily unreliable at least in details, and now that the same story has been found, in a very different form, in one of Luther's own sermons, Paul's version of it must be abandoned. In 1545 the Reformer relates that, while at Rome, he ascended the Holy Stairs with the purpose of getting the soul of an ancestor out of purgatory, but that when he arrived at the top he thought, “Who knows whether this prayer avails?” As this is assuredly no proof that he had by this time arrived at the sola fides, the only decisive reason for placing his acquisition of that doctrine prior to 1510 disappears, and we are thrown back on the earlier, contemporary sources, which in any case are more trustworthy, to trace the gradual development of that important dogma in his mind.

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.

The multiplication of safety appliances for the protection of human life is a marked characteristic of our age. No humane ministry to society is more consistently and forcefully urged than the providing of automatic safety-devices to supplant the older method of reliance upon personal attention and intelligence. “Such accidents will happen until we eliminate the whole human element by means of automatic provisions,” observed a railroad operator after a recent disaster. He followed the statement with an informing discussion concerning the installing of safety-appliances on his own line of road, in response to the demands of the public conscience. There is always a position and a premium for the inventive genius who can substitute for fallible human attention an automatic response that works infallibly. The disabled switchman, the drunken watchman, the recreant employee, can be more and more dispensed with as his services are supplied by the mechanical device which never sleeps nor drinks whiskey, and whose integrity does not call for any subjective processes. Lives of employees and of patrons by the thousands are thus guarded and saved every year. And the principle is so humane and sound that we do not propose to halt while inventive skill is unexhausted or the reluctant employer remains unpunished.

Our object here is not to question the beneficence of these things; we are concerned rather with a by-product. What are the moral consequences of safety devices—their effect upon character? and what are the limitations of mechanical safety in the complex and responsible activities of human achievement? Does the elevator man become a more or a less responsible person when he feels that not his own skill and attention, but an automatic device, stands between his passengers and disaster? Do railway employees, when relieved of personal responsibility, develop the types of character that under the old system fitted them to advance as conductors, engineers, and managing officers? What is the effect upon a board of directors of knowing that they have provided “every device for the safety and comfort of their patrons”? In short, does the movement contribute to responsible character or does it not?

According to Professor Riehl of Berlin, the most widely read of serious writers in Germany today is Nietzsche. German ideas require time to cross the Channel and still more time to reach America; but already translations of Nietzsche's numerous works are appearing in England, and within three or four years three books have been devoted to him in this country. Probably erelong the thoughtful among us will have to attend to him, as we have had to attend to other German writers in the past. As yet very confused ideas are current about him; his disciples are more or less confused themselves. Nietzsche once half-humorously remarked that the first disciples of a doctrine really prove nothing against it.

Moreover, Nietzsche was a lonely, markedly individual thinker, caring more to express himself than to be comprehended by the ordinary reader, soliloquizing much; and he said many things that, unless we carefully, patiently attend, may mislead, have misled. I could easily quote passages from him that would offend you, as they did me when I first came upon them. No one needs to be studied more before he is judged. No one lends himself less to impressionist treatment, which is all he ordinarily gets from non-Continental writers. Indeed, I sometimes think that Nietzsche is a philosopher for philosophers and a moralist for moralists rather than for the common run of us, so subtle is his thinking, such an acquaintance with the history and refinements of philosophical and ethical speculation does he presuppose.

Accordingly, it may be most useful, as well as most conformable to my abilities, to cover a quite limited field this morning; and I shall content myself, after giving a few facts about his life and a very general characterization of him, to portray somewhat in detail his state of mind during one—the first—period of his career. What I say may thus serve as a kind of introduction to the subject; and happy shall I be if I interest any one sufficiently to take it up on his own account.

Professor Gray's commentary on Numbers (1903) not only filled a vacant place in English exegetical literature, but had to do with a book that has usually been perfunctorily treated by serial commentators; and this made an intrinsically valuable work doubly welcome. Isaiah, on the contrary, competes with the Psalms for the distinction of being the subject of more commentaries than any other book in the Old Testament, and of some of the best. The inevitable question therefore is, Wherein does the volume before us mark an advance beyond its predecessors? To answer this question it will be necessary to indicate the problems with which the critical study of Isaiah is at present chiefly concerned, and to show what progress has been made toward a solution of them.