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fassung (1837). Inherent in the nature of all religions, he asserts, there is the radical impulse of self-expression. In the Christian religion, the process of such manifestations has for its goal the consummation of the kingdom of God on earth, as promised by Christ. But the State, as the most comprehensive structure wrought by mind into matter, is the actual realization of all moral life, which, in its final perfection, must immanently involve religion. In contrast, the Church, by virtue of its intrinsic character, shall ever serve purely religious ends. Therefore the kingdom of God on earth can present itself only in the form of a perfected state or organism of states, wherefore the Church becomes gradually superfluous. For the present, however, the Church still has a lofty significance. The idea of the Church sprang from an internal necessity, and began to achieve its fulfilment. As a matter of fact, the formation of the Church followed soon after the destruction of Jerusalem, when the surviving apostles instituted the episcopate as an organic expedient for the outward unity of Christian fellowship. Incipiently, the idea of the Church was vaguely identified with this empirical Church. As all sorts of contingencies arose to make this identification less congruous, there developed, over against the heresies, with increasing certainty, the recognition of the papal Church of Rome. This fiction, however, was bound ere long to give rise to a contradietion resting fundamentally upon the fact that the Church, as a whole, is not the form of the Christian life in correspondence with it. For the first time was the question fundamentally involving the transition from Apostolic Christianity to the hierarchical Roman Catholic Church so definitely raised. In comparison with Neander's treatment of church history, whereby the inner life of the individual Christian personalities received a one-sided emphasis, there was a distinct advance with Rothe, when he placed due importance upon the general development of Christianity in its social forms. A reciprocal defect appeared, however, in that, according to Rothe, the idea of the Church realized itself essentially only by the adoption of constitutional forms; and that this abstraction of a constitution did not appear to be evolved from the inner life of the Church, but was externally instituted by the apostles. In this view a reaction from his earlier admiration of Roman Catholicism can not be mistaken, while his thought of a gradual resolution of the Church into the State becomes clear in the light of his impressions in childhood, and his subsequent transition from narrow Pietism to the wider sphere of life at Rome. Rothe did not publish any further historical development of this view, and his lectures were published in fragmentary form, Vorlesungen fiber Kirchengeschichte (2 vols., Heidelberg, 1875-76).

Rothe's first production in church history impelled him to a purely systematic work. Only then did he approach the task for which he was best fitted, by which he most amply developed his gifts. He sought to arrive at an explanation of his views on Christianity, Church, and State on the basis of the clear representation of the relation between the religious and the ethical. This was the purpose of

his ethics. While he assigned dogmatics to historical theology, ethics, as the conclusive part of specu-

lative theology, was to unfold its subTheological ject only in accordance with the law

point of departure from the consciousness of God; and this, contrary to Schleiermacher, from its objective content. Rothe thus proceeds deductively from God to the creation of the world as the necessary means whereby he is distinguishable, and from the infinite process of creation to its continuation in the ethical process, which subsists in the unity, fixed in the human mind, of personality and material nature. Inasmuch as this concept of the ethical appears in the threefold form of moral good, virtue, and duty, Rothe's ethics falls under three main heads. The first sets forth the ethical process, namely, the original unity of morality and religion; its disturbance by the evil which subsists in the predominance of the nature of sense over personality; the redemption from evil through the second Adam; the primarily religious, then moral efficacy of this redemption upon individual men, through the kingdom of God, first resolved in the form of a church and finally fulfilled in a Christian state organism; and the end of all things. Compared with this comprehensive thought outline of the first part, all else in his ethics, although containing many beautiful details, is like a superfluous appendix.

Concerning the fundamental views of his religiousethical system in the first part, his effort to derive the entire organism of Christian truth by logical de-

duction from a single concept can not Estimation. be upheld. It proved itself incapable

of logical conclusion, and led to the tendency of a pantheistic confusion of God and the world; of conceiving the divine and the moral in natural terms; of thinking of the spiritual as a mere product of matter; and of denying, in determinist fashion, all freedom of divine and human action. Yet this tendency was contradicted by Rothe's strong ethical and theistic temperament, as well as by his positive supernaturalism, such as he exhibited in his admirable 7.ur Dogmatik (Goths, 1863). This inconsistency occasioned many palpable contradictions and defects in his system. His identification of religion with morality, whence emanated his evidently erroneous ideas on the relation of Church and State, was also involved with a pantheistic inclination. A practical consequence of these views was his mode of participation during his closing years in the affairs of the State Church of Baden. In the liberation of culture and of its exponents from domination by the Church, he saw nothing short of an operation by his Savior. Therefore he believed that he was serving him best when he cooperated in the plan of introducing the congregational principle in constitutional polity, whereby cultivated laymen, with their " unconscious Christianity," were to be associated in congregational autonomy, and when by the " Protestant Union " (q.v.) Christianity became effectually emancipated from its ecclesiastical restrictions offensive as these were to the cultured. Thus Rothe though abhorring all partizan tactics, himself proved a Partizan. Finally,