The doctrine I here broach, is no strange one to Christian thought. To be sure the exhortation, “Save your soul from Hell,” was almost the sole incentive to religion in the middle ages, and is still the burden of most sermons. But St. Paul was quickened with a holier fire, that consumed and swept away such a personal motive, when he wrote: “Yea, I could wish that I myself were cast out from Christ as accursed, for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”[274-1] St. Augustine reveals the touch of the same inspiration in his passionate exclamation: “Far, O Lord, far from the heart of thy servant be it that I should rejoice in any joy whatever. The blessed life is the joy in truth alone.”[274-2] And amid the pæans to everlasting life which fill the pages of the _De Imitatione Christi_, the medieval monk saw something yet greater, when he puts in the mouth of God the Father, the warning: “The wise lover thinks not of the gift, but of the love of the giver. He rests not in the reward, but in Me, beyond all rewards.”[275-1] The mystery of great godliness is, that he who has it is as one who seeking nothing yet finds all things, who asking naught for his own sake, neither in the life here nor yet hereafter, gains that alone which is of worth in either. Pressed by such considerations, the pious Schleiermacher threw down the glaive on the side of religion half a century ago when he wrote: “Life to come, as popularly conceived, is the last enemy which speculative criticism has to encounter, and, if possible, to overcome.” The course he marked out, however, was not that which promises success. Recurring to the austere theses of Spinoza, he sought to bring them into accord with a religion of emotion. The result was a refined Pantheism with its usual deceptive solutions. What recourse is left? Where are we to look for the intellectual moment of religion in the future? Let us review the situation.