In a system of idealistic pantheism, like that of Hegel, God is the subject of religion as well as its object. Religion is God’s knowing of himself through the human consciousness. Hegel did not utterly ignore other elements in religion. “Feeling, intuition, and faith belong to it,” he said, “and mere cognition is one-sided.” Yet he was always looking for the movement of _thought_ in all forms of life; God and the universe were but developments of the primordial _idea_. “What knowledge is worth knowing,” he asked, “if God is unknowable? To know God is eternal life, and thinking is also true worship.” Hegel’s error was in regarding life as a process of thought, rather than in regarding thought as a process of life. Here was the reason for the bitterness between Hegel and Schleiermacher. Hegel rightly considered that feeling must become intelligent before it is truly religious, but he did not recognize the supreme importance of love in a theological system. He gave even less place to the will than he gave to the emotions, and he failed to see that the knowledge of God of which Scripture speaks is a knowing, not of the intellect alone, but of the whole man, including the affectional and voluntary nature. Goethe: “How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing. Try to do your duty, and you will know at once what you are worth. You cannot play the flute by blowing alone,—you must use your fingers.” So we can never come to know God by thinking alone. _John 7:17—_“If any man willeth to do his will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God.” The Gnostics, Stapfer, Henry VIII, all show that there may be much theological knowledge without true religion. Chillingworth’s maxim, “The Bible only, the religion of Protestants,” is inadequate and inaccurate; for the Bible, without faith, love, and obedience, may become a fetich and a snare: _John 5:39,40—_“Ye search the Scriptures, ... and ye will not come to me, that ye may have life.” See Sterrett, Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion; Porter, Human Intellect, 59, 60, 412, 525-536, 589, 650; Morell, Hist. Philos., 476, 477; Hamerton, Intel. Life, 214; Bib. Sac., 9:374. (_b_) Religion is not, as Schleiermacher held, the mere feeling of dependence; for such feeling of dependence is not religious, unless exercised toward God and accompanied by moral effort.