which inform both the Jewish-Christian Scriptures and the philosophic
absolutism of the Catholic theologies.

But the humanism of the eighteenth century comes most closely to grips
with the classic statements and concepts of religion in the critical
philosophy of Kant. It is the intellectual current which rises in
him which is finding its last multifarious and minute rivulets in the
various doctrines of relativity, in pragmatism, the subjectivism of
the neo-realists, and in the superior place generally ascribed by
present thinking to value judgments as against existential ones. His
central insistence is upon the impossibility of any knowledge of God
as an objective reality. Speculative reason does indeed give us the
idea of God but he denies that we have in the idea itself any ground
for thinking that there is an objective reality corresponding to it.
The idea he admits as necessitated by "the very nature of reason" but
it serves a purely harmonizing office. It is here to give coherence
and unity to the objects of the understanding, "to finish and crown
the whole of human knowledge."[3] Experience of transcendence thus
becomes impossible. As Professor McGiffert in _The Modern Ideas of
God_ says: "Subjectively considered, religion is the recognition of
our duties as commands of God. When we do our duty we are virtuous;
when we recognize it as commanded by God we are religious. The notion
that there is anything we can do to please God except to live rightly
is superstition. Moreover, to think that we can distinguish works
of grace from works of nature, which is the essence of historic
Christianity, or that we can detect the activity of heavenly
influences is also superstition. All such supernaturalism lies beyond
our ken. There are three common forms of superstition, all promoted
by positive religion: the belief in miracles, the belief in mysteries,
and the belief in the means of grace."[4] So prayer is a confession of