De Wette was, like Schleiermacher his friend and colleague at Berlin, a man in whom can be seen all the marks of a transition-character. There are two sides to his theological views, one bearing upon the old Rationalism and in sympathy with it, the other directly tending to revive faith and religion. Even before Schleiermacher became generally known, De Wette had openly declared that religion can be based upon feeling alone, and that a personal Saviour is the necessary centre of Christian faith. The entire theology of De Wette was the outgrowth of the cold, critical philosophy of Kant and the more earnest and living system of Fries. He was, therefore, a two-fold personage, and it is not an easy task to harmonize his theories. One set of his opinions was based upon truth, the other on beauty. Religion has two elements, faith and feeling; doctrines and aesthetics. Religion may exist aesthetically, but it can only become vital in the feeling, or self-consciousness. Religious feeling embraces three shades: enthusiasm or inspiration, resignation, and devotion. Every history is, in a certain sense, symbolical. It is the mere reflection or copy of the human mind in its activity. So are the appearance of Christ, his life, and death, in some degree symbolical. In this symbolism consists the character of the Christian revelation. Here have appeared the eternal ideas of reason in their greatest purity and fullness; and Rationalism is nothing more than a philosophical view of the Christian revelation of faith, or the knowledge of the relations in which idea and symbol stand to each other in Christianity. Therefore, we must judge the miraculous accounts of the evangelists as symbols of the ideas existing in the early history of Christianity.