ideas and values in present civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism of the moment.  Thus the nature and place of man, under the influence of these “uninspired” literatures and cultures, became more and more important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures, 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 weakness, not a source of strength.

[Footnote 3:  See The Critique of Pure Reason (Mueller, tr.), pp. 575 ff.]

[Footnote 4:  Harvard Theo.  Rev., vol.  I, no. 1, p. 16.]