Down to A.D. 1840, when zeal for it began to abate, philosophy exercised an important influence on the religious development of the age, both in the departments of science and of life. While rationalism was not able to transcend the standpoint of Kant, the other theological tendencies were more or less determined formally, and even materially by the philosophical movements of this period. Alongside of philosophy, literature, itself to a great extent coloured by contemporary philosophy, exerted a powerful influence on the religious opinions of the more cultured among the people. The sciences, too, came into closer relations, partly friendly, partly hostile, to Christianity; and art in some of its masterpieces paid a noble tribute to the church. § 174.1. =The German Philosophy= (§ 171, 10).--=Fries=, whose philosophy was Kantian rationalism, modified by elements borrowed from Jacobi, influenced such theologians as De Wette. =Schelling=, in his “Philosophy of Identity,” had advanced from Fichte’s idealism to a pantheistic naturalism. From Fichte he had learned that this world is nothing without spirit; but while Fichte recognised this world, the _non-ego_, as reality only in so far as man seizes upon it and penetrates it by his spirit, and so raises it into real being, Schelling regards spirit as nothing else than the life of nature itself. In the lower stages of this nature-life spirit is still slumbering and dreaming, but in man it has attained unto consciousness. The nature-life as a whole, or the world-soul, is God; man is the reflex of God and the world in miniature, a microcosmos. In the world’s development God comes into objective being and unfolds his self-consciousness; Christianity is the turning point in the world’s history; its fundamental dogmas of revelation, trinity, incarnation, and redemption are suggestive attempts to solve the world’s riddle. Schelling’s poetic view of the world penetrated all the sciences, and gave to them a new impulse. Though hateful to the old rationalists, this system found ardent admirers among the younger theologians. As Schelling to Fichte, so =Hegel= was attached to Schelling, and wrought his pantheistic naturalism into a pantheistic spiritualism. Not so much in the life of nature as in the thinking and doing of the human spirit, the divine revelation is the unfolding of the divine self-consciousness from non-being into being. Judaism and Christianity are progressive stages of this process; Judaism stands far below classic paganism; but in Christianity we have the perfect religion, to be developed into the highest form of philosophy. The Protestant church doctrine was now again accorded the place of honour. Marheincke developed Lutheran orthodoxy into a system of speculative theology based on Hegelian principles; while Göschel infused into it a pietist spirit, which made many hail the new departure as the long-sought