faith: “Nobody ought to be regarded as an infidel who sees in justice the great creed of human life, and who aims at an increasingly complete subjection of his will to his moral sense.” [58] Mr. Henry Ward Beecher. II. What is the possible value and the possible duration of this moral and metaphysical symbolism to which it is being attempted to reduce religion? [Sidenote: Logical hollowness of the position of the liberal Protestants.] Let us speak first of the liberal Protestants. Liberal Protestantism, which resolves the very dogmas of its creed into mere symbols, stands no doubt in the scale of progress in about the same relation to orthodox Protestantism as the latter does in relation to Catholicism. But far as it seems in advance of them from the point of view of morals and society, it is inferior to them in logic. Catholicism has been irreverently called a perfectly embalmed corpse, a Christian mummy, in an admirable state of preservation beneath the cold embroidered chasubles and surplices which envelop it; Luther’s Protestantism tears the body to shreds, liberal Protestantism reduces it to dust. To preserve Christianity while suppressing Christ the son, or at least the messenger of God, is an undertaking of which they alone will be capable who are little disposed to make much of what is known as logic. Whoever does not believe in Revelation ought frankly to confess himself a philosopher, and to hold the Bible and the New Testament as little authoritative as the dialogues of Plato, or the treatises of Aristotle, or the Vedas, or the Talmud. Liberal Protestants, as Herr von Hartmann, one of their bitterest adversaries, remarks, seize upon the whole body of modern ideas and label them Christianity. The process is not very consistent. If you are absolutely determined to rally round a flag, let it at least be your own. But the liberal Protestants wish, and honestly, to be and to remain Protestants; in Germany, they obstinately remain in the United Evangelical Church of Prussia, where they about as truly belong as a sparrow does in the nest of a swallow. Herr von Hartmann, whose zeal against them is unflagging, compares them to a man whose house is riven in many places and going to ruin, and who perceives and does all that in him lies still further to shatter it, and continues, nevertheless, tranquilly to sleep in it and even to call in passers-by and offer them board and lodging. Or again—always according to Herr von Hartmann—they are like a man who should seat himself in perfect confidence upon a chair after having first sawed through all four legs of it. Strauss had already said: “The instant that Jesus is regarded as no more than a man, one has no longer any right to pray to him, to retain him as the centre of a cult, to preach the whole year through on him, on his actions, on his adventures and maxims; in especial, if the more important of his adventures and actions have been recognized as fabulous, and if his maxims are