“THERE were but a few to flatter themselves with the hope of finding an answer to their questions, repose to their spirit and their conscience, and full relief of their necessities, in a system of philosophy. As the product of the human mind left to its own resources, philosophy had travelled through, and exhausted, every conceivable system, at an astonishing outlay of acuteness and speculative power; and still there was no appearance any where of a site upon which to found, or a creative spirit and fertile imagination with which to construct, the new edifice. Individual schools had run through and consumed their patrimony ; none had been able to maintain themselves, all were approaching dissolution. Men became more and more conscious of their own deepening aspirations after a God who was absolutely elevated above every thing earthly and mundane. A God they must have and they coveted, whom they could in all sincerity address in prayer, who, as all-ruling lord and judge, would be the object of dread and fear, and, as all holy and merciful, the cynosure of homage and love, satisfying every want of the troubled and longing heart. But the Stoics, though still the highest in repute among philosophers, had nothing to tender to men in this need of God, but their nature-power, bound up in matter, and only manifesting itself in the development of the universe, much as they laboured to attribute intelligence and bliss to this world’s soul of theirs, that contained every vital principle in it self, this god of the ether, ruling in the world with the arm of necessity. And then, as regarded conscience, they could do nothing but refer man, who had God within himself, was himself divine, and yet was wearied and woe-begone of his own godship, back to himself again and his own dignity. He was to pass judgment on his own actions, and to be summoned to answer for them, not before God’s tribunal, but his own ; to blush for himself and to himself, and to look on the moral law as one given by himself to himself alone. But a self-imposed law not being absolutely inviolable and holy; the question of the transgression of it would always revert, in the last instance, to the court of a man’s own judgment, who would acknowledge no higher authority, and no lawgiver external to and above himself; and this process might perhaps engender in him a confounding consciousness of his own malice and infirmity, but never that of sin.
— Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, The Gentile and the Jew in the courts of the Temple of Christ, (1862)
[Note: The posting of this excerpt from the historian Döllinger does not represent an endorsement of all his views, especially his later views on papal infallibility.]
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