'The contracted religiosity which narrows itself to a point in the heart must make that heart's softening and contrition the essential factor of its new birth; but it must at the same time recollect that it has to do with the heart of a spirit, that the spirit is the appointed authority over the heart, and that it can only have such authority so far as it is itself born again. This new birth of the spirit out of natural ignorance and natural error takes place through instruction and through that faith in objective truth and substance which is due to the witness of the spirit. This new birth of the spirit is besides _ipso facto_ a new birth of the heart out of that vanity of the one-sided intellect (on which it sets so much) and its discoveries that finite is different from infinite, that philosophy must either be polytheism, or, in acuter minds, pantheism, &c. It is, in short, a new birth out of the wretched discoveries on the strength of which pious humility holds its head so high against philosophy and theological science. If religiosity persists in clinging to its unexpanded and therefore unintelligent intensity, then it can be sensible only of the contrast which divides this narrow and narrowing form from the intelligent expansion of doctrine as such, religious not less than philosophical.' After an appreciative quotation from Franz von Baader, and noting his reference to the theosophy of Böhme, as a work of the past from which the present generation might learn the speculative interpretation of Christian doctrines, he reverts to the position that the only mode in which thought will admit a reconciliation with religious doctrines, is when these doctrines have learned to 'assume their worthiest phase--the phase of the notion, of necessity, which binds, and thus also makes free everything, fact no less than thought.' But it is not from Böhme or his kindred that we are likely to get the example of a philosophy equal to the highest theme--to the comprehension of divine things. 'If old things are to be revived--an old phase, that is; for the burden of the theme is ever young--the phase of the Idea such as Plato and, still better, as Aristotle conceived it, is far more deserving of being recalled,--and for the further reason that the disclosure of it, by assimilating it into our system of ideas, is, _ipso facto,_ not merely an interpretation of it, but a progress of the science itself. But to interpret such forms of the Idea by no means lies so much on the surface as to get hold of Gnostic and Cabbalistic phantasmagorias; and to develope Plato and Aristotle is by no means the sinecure that it is to note or to hint at echoes of the Idea in the medievalists.'