Troeltsch is reported to have said, during the centenary celebration of the publication of Schleiermacher's chief works, that “Schleiermacher's program remains the great program of all scientific theology and only needs working out, not the substitution of new methods.” My purpose is to discuss, not the theology or the sociology of Troeltsch as the subject of this paper may imply, nor the theology of Schleiermacher, but Troeltsch's pronouncement on Schleiermacher's program and method of all scientific theology.

The first dozen years of the nineteenth century were momentous ones in the history of our country. Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800, and his inaugural in March of the next year marked the republicanization of the government. John Adams in 1801 signed the treaty with France that prevented another European war and led to the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803. Late in the same year Meriwether Lewis went into camp with his subordinates at St. Louis preparatory to starting westward the following spring on the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. Events leading to the War of 1812 followed and the conflict settled disputed points that allowed this country to feel comparatively safe from European interference.

The early American frontier imported all of its basic religious ideas, yet was not slow in taking very significant liberties with them. The carriers of these various concepts represented a number of rather distinct cultural groups with antecedents reaching back to the British Isles and to the continent of Europe. A common background of Christian tradition existed, most of it Protestant; and English was the prevailing tongue. As in the case of every great movement of population, there came about of necessity a continuous exposure to new environmental influences which, in turn, placed their mark upon the attitudes, ideas and institutions making up the religious and general cultural life of the migrating people. It is natural, therefore, that our interest should be attracted not only to such ideas and attitudes as may appear to have been more or less indigenous to the very soil of the frontier, but more perhaps to such traditional religious concepts as may have assumed new forms or taken on new emphasis in the process of becoming acceptable to the frontiersman who again and again found himself confronted by entirely unlooked-for problems.