That critical theology, the child of the age of “enlightenment” and mistakenly committed to that scientific method which is prescribed for the profane sciences by their special subject matter, behaves as though Christianity is and must be a mere object of knowledge, a mere subject for scientific investigation, as though the living Christian faith could be resolved into a series of ideas and notions which might be examined, considered and classified according to their provenance and according to their relation to a supposed primitive Christianity or “Christianity of Christ.” Christianity then becomes, not unitary, original and abounding life, but a juxtaposition of ideas and conceptions, which, deriving from the most various sources, have gradually by the power of collective faith gathered round the person of Jesus of Nazareth and transformed His originally simple gospel into the sacramental and dogmatic Christianity which we know. Such is the rationalistic foundation of the critical theology, and it rests on a bad misunderstanding of the nature of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. For the most important representatives of the latest religious psychology—I refer to James, Osterreich, Scheler, Scholz—have established it as a fact accepted even by the non-religious that religion is something spontaneous and not a derivative thing, that it is a fundamental fact of the human spirit and therefore original, unitary life, and not mere thinking, a life that has its own legitimacy, its own inner unity and purpose. It is quite wrong to estimate a religion solely according to its conceptual content, or even according to this or that dominant idea alone, and not rather to regard the totality of the vital forms that spring from it in past, present and future. If this be true of religion in general, it is far more true of the life of Christ and of Christianity. As the history of Christianity shows, it is a life, which manifesting its power first in the Person of Jesus delivered the souls of men from an earth-bound existence, created a new, supernatural community, and through it for all time by word and sacrament provides humanity with streams of truth and grace. It is a life which not merely laid hold of the restricted group of His disciples, but in an incredibly short space of time gripped the whole ancient world and brought into being new civilizations, new peoples, new men, and which still alive and effectual among us, attests itself to our own day as a perennial source of spiritual life. We know of no spiritual movement on the earth which has worked upon men with such elemental power—and that of its own nature and being, and not through any external, foreign factors—so unitarily, comprehensively, fruitfully and vitally as has Christianity.