our state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind.  Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty, are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee of the completeness of what one hopes or desires.  Clearness and completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending anything—­i.e., of understanding the necessary connection between the various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given presuppositions.  The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is possible now” (Rechtfertigung und Versoehnung, vol. iii., chap. vii., 52).  All this is very rational, but ...

In the first edition of Melanchthon’s Loci Communes, that of 1521, the first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all Trinitarian and Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology.  And Dr. Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian’s commerce with God (Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott)—­a book the first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most perfect Lutheran manual—­tells us in another place,[18] referring to this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that “the effective knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is something entirely different.  Nothing ought to find a place in Christian doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth.  Until that time—­that is to say, until Luther—­the Church had accepted much as doctrina sacra which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience.”  For my part, I cannot conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that are not sure of their perdurability after death.  “The desire for the soul’s salvation,” Hermann continues, “must at last have led men to the knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation.”  And in his book on the Christian’s commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran doctor is continually discoursing upon trust in God, peace of conscience, and an assurance of salvation that is not strictly and precisely certainty of everlasting life, but rather certainty of the forgiveness of sins.

And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that in the conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest reach in music, in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic expression.  This, then, is what Protestantism dissolves into—­celestial music![19] On the other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is most material, tangible, and permanent—­for the vehicle of sounds is air—­in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may give us life.