The denial of this an error prevalent among the modern theologians of Germany, owing to their accepting Kant's argumentation against the possibility of apprehending God by the speculative or pure reason as conclusive. If religion have no rational foundation, it has no real foundation. Reason does not apprehend merely what is finite. True place of reason in religion. 8. Religion has often been resolved into feeling or sentiment, but erroneously, since whatever feeling is fixed on requires some explanation of its existence, and this can only be found in some act or exercise of intellect. 9. Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hume have traced religion to fear. 10. Fear explains atheism better than it explains religion, and in order even to be feared God must be believed in. Men fear a great many things. Mere fear founds nothing, but only causes efforts to avoid the presence or thought of its object. Fear enters into religion, and is filial in the higher, and servile in the lower, forms of religion. 11. Feuerbach resolves religion into desire--into an ignorant and illusive personification of man's own nature as he would wish it to be. 12. This view presupposes the truth of atheism, does not explain why man should refer to supramundane ends or objects, and is contradicted by the historical facts, which show that reason and conscience have at least co-operated with desire in the origination and development of religion. 13. Schleiermacher resolves religion into a feeling of absolute dependence--of pure and complete passiveness. Statement of his theory. Shown to rest on a pantheistic conception of the Divine Being. His reduction of the Divine attributes into _power_. 14. No such feeling can exist, the mind being incapable of experiencing a feeling of nothingness--a consciousness of unconsciousness. 15. Could it be supposed to exist, it would have no religious character, because wholly blind and irrational. 16. The theory of Schleiermacher makes the moral and religious consciousness subversive of each other, the former affirming and the latter denying our freedom and responsibility. 17. Mansel supposes the religious consciousness to be traceable to the feeling of dependence and the conviction of moral obligation; but the latter feeling implies the perception of moral law, and is not religious unless there be also belief in a moral lawgiver. 18. Schenkel represents conscience as 'the religious organ of the soul,' but this is not consistent with the fact that conscience is the faculty which distinguishes right from wrong. Schenkel's view of conscience shown to make its religious testimony contradict its ethical testimony. 19. Strauss combines the views of Epicurus, Feuerbach, and Schleiermacher; but three errors do not make a truth. Account of the criticism to which the Straussian theory of religion has been subjected by Vera, Ulrici, and Professor H. B. Smith.