and two orders of reason. That distinction issued in a new theory of
knowledge. It laid a new foundation for an idealistic construing of the
universe. In one way it was the answer of a profoundly religious nature
to the triviality and effrontery into which the great rationalistic
movement had run out. By it the philosopher gave standing forever to
much that prophets and mystics in every age had felt to be true, yet had
never been able to prove by any method which the ordered reasoning of
man had provided. Religion as feeling regained its place. Ethics was set
once more in the light of the eternal. The soul of man became the object
of a scientific study.

There have been thus indicated three, at least, of the larger factors
which enter into an interpretation of Christianity which may fairly be
said to be new in the nineteenth century. They are new in a sense in
which the intellectual elements entering into the reconsideration of
Christianity in the age of the Reformation were not new. They are
characteristic of the nineteenth century. They would naturally issue in
an interpretation of Christianity in the general context of the life and
thought of that century. The philosophical revolution inaugurated by
Kant, with the general drift toward monism in the interpretation of the
universe, separates from their forebears men who have lived since Kant,
by a greater interval than that which divided Kant from Plato. The
evolutionary view of nature, as developed from Schelling and Comte
through Darwin to Bergson, divides men now living from the
contemporaries of Kant in his youthful studies of nature, as those men
were not divided from the followers of Aristotle.

Of purpose, the phrase Christian thought has been interpreted as thought
concerning Christianity. The problem which this book essays is that of
an outline of the history of the thought which has been devoted, during