one great wave, only to break upon some cold rock of inevitable fate, and go back, moaning, into emptiness.

In such hours men and women have cursed God and life, and thrown violently down and trampled under their feet what yet was left of life's blessings, in the fierce bitterness of despair. "This, or nothing!" the soul shrieks in her frenzy. At just such points as these, men have plunged into intemperance and wild excess; they have gone to be shot down in battle; they have broken life and thrown it away like an empty goblet, and gone like wailing ghosts out into the dread unknown.

The possibility of all this lay in that heart which had just received that stunning blow. Exercised and disciplined as he had been by years of sacrifice, by constant, unsleeping self-vigilance, there was rising there in that great heart an ocean tempest of passion; and for a while his cries unto God seemed as empty and as vague as the screams of birds tossed and buffeted in the clouds of mighty tempests.

The will that he thought wholly subdued seemed to rise under him as a rebellious giant. A few hours before, he thought himself established in an invincible submission to God's will that nothing could shake. Now he looked into himself as into a seething vortex of rebellion; and against all the passionate cries of his lower nature, could, in the language of an old saint, cling to God only by the naked force of his will. That will rested unmelted amid the boiling sea of passion, waiting its hour of renewed sway. He walked the room for hours; and then sat down to his Bible, and roused once or twice to find his head leaning on its pages, and his mind far gone in thoughts from which he woke with a bitter throb. Then he determined to set himself to some definite work; and taking his Concordance, began busily tracing out and numbering all the proof-texts for one of the chapters of his theological system,- till at last he worked himself down to such calmness that he could pray: and then he schooled and reasoned with himself, in a style not unlike, in its spirit, to that in which a great modern author has addressed suffering humanity:

"What is it that thou art fretting and self-tormenting about? Is it because thou art not happy? Who told thee that thou wast to be happy? Is there any ordinance of the universe that thou shouldst be happy? Art thou nothing but a vulture screaming for prey? Canst thou not do without happiness? Yea, thou canst do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness."

The doctor came lastly to the conclusion that blessedness, which was all the portion his Master had on earth, might do for him also; and therefore he kissed and blessed that silver dove of happiness which he saw was weary of sailing in his clumsy old ark, and let it go out of his hand without a tear.

He slept little that night: but when he came to breakfast, all noticed an unusual gentleness and benignity of manner; and Mary, she knew not why, saw tears rising in his eyes when he looked at her.

P

DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS

(1808-1874)

HE German renaissance, which had its beginnings in that great literary movement of which Goethe was the central

figure, was destined to express itself at a later period in an output of philosophical and religious thought almost without parallel in its comprehensiveness and in its subtlety. Like other manifestations of intellectual and spiritual vigor, it was not without its negative and destructive principle: a principle which found, perhaps, its most significant expression in the life and work of David Friedrich Strauss, -a man modern only in the letter of what he performed; in the spirit a dogmatist of almost mediæval intensity and

narrowness.

He was born at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, January 27th, 1808. His father, although a tailor by trade, devoted much of his time to literary pursuits; his mother was a woman of strong common-sense, whose piety was of an extremely practical character. The son inherited his father's taste for books, his mother's distaste of mysticism. Being designed for the church, he was sent in his thirteenth year to an evangelical seminary at Blaubeuren near Ulm, to study theology. Two of his teachers there, Professors Kern and F. C. Baur, were to have a deep influence upon his life. also he met Christian Märklin, a student whose biography he was afterwards to write. Four years later, in 1825, he entered the University of Tübingen; but finding in the curriculum little nourishment, he sought satisfaction for his needs in Schelling's pantheistic philosophy, and in the writings of the romanticists, Jacob Böhme, and others.

D. F. STRAUSS

There

In 1826 Professors Baur and Kern came to the University, resuming the intellectual oversight of their former pupils, Strauss and Märklin. Baur introduced Strauss to the works of Schleiermacher, whose mystical conception of religion, as having its roots in the emotional life, was for a time attractive to the future author of the

'Leben Jesu,' drawing him away from the influence of the rational philosophy of Kant and the pantheism of Schelling. But he was not to remain long a disciple of Schleiermacher. His own temperament, as well as outside forces, was drawing him to the consideration of the overwhelming Hegelian philosophy. In the last year at Tübingen he read Hegel's Phänomenologie,' — strong meat even for a German youth to digest. Hegel, in direct opposition to Schleiermacher, sought the roots of religion in thought, not feeling: his conception of Begriff and Vorstellung, of Notion and Representation, the Absolute, and the finite presentation of the Absolute, was to exert a tremendous influence upon Strauss; leading him at last to the inquiry embodied in the Life of Jesus,' how much of dogmatic religion is but the shadowing forth, the vorstellung, of great underlying truths.

He was not at once, however, to apply the Hegelian philosophy to the doctrines of the Christian religion. In 1830 he passed his examination with honor, becoming soon after assistant to a country clergyman; but a man of his restless and eager intellect could not long remain in the quiet atmosphere of a country parish. In 1831 he resigned his pastorate, to study under Schleiermacher and Hegel in the University of Berlin. The latter dying suddenly, shortly after Strauss's coming to Berlin, he removed to Tübingen, where he became a repetent or assistant professor, lecturing upon logic, history of philosophy, and history of ethics. In 1833 he resigned this position to devote himself to writing the 'Life of Jesus.' In 1834 the first volume, and in 1835 the second volume, was published.

In the Life of Jesus,' Strauss attempted to apply the Hegelian philosophy to the dogmatic system of the Christian religion: or rather, influenced by the Hegelian principle that the Absolute is expressed in finite terms, he attempted to show that the miraculous elements in the life of Jesus were ideally but not historically true; that the immaculate conception, the transfiguration, the resurrection, the ascension into heaven, were symbols of profound truth, myths created out of the Messianic hopes of the followers of Christ. This mythical theory was directly in the face of the theory of the deists, that the miraculous events in Christ's life were proof of the fallibility of the evangelists; and in the face of the theory of the rationalists, that those events were capable of natural explanation. The mythical theory of Strauss was not original with him. It had been applied to certain parts of the Old Testament by Eichhorn, Bauer, and others; in the secular domain, it was being applied by Niebuhr to early Roman history, and by Wolff to the Homeric poems: but no one before Strauss had applied it to the four Gospels thoroughly and exhaustively,- thoroughly and exhaustively, however, only in so far that Strauss never lost sight of his theory for one moment, bending

everything to its shape. Of the critical study of the gospels in the modern sense Strauss knew little,- his dogmatic temper being impatient of the restraints of scholarship; added to that, a certain irreverence of temperament prevented him not only from appreciation of the essential in Christianity, but by a kind of paradox, from arriving at anything like scientific truth. He disproved everything but proved nothing. The Jesus of Strauss's 'Life' is not even a historical personage like the Jesus of Renan's 'Life'; but a faint shadow, just discerned through dead mists of theory. The great work was to have but a negative mission: it prepared the way by its blankness for positive scholarship, for positive criticism; it is the reflection of the colorless mood of one standing between two worlds, without the spiritual insight necessary to understand that between the old order and the new there must be an organic link, else both will perish.

The replies to the 'Leben Jesu,' by Neander, Ullmann, Schweizer, and others, led to a reply from Strauss in 1837. In 1839 a third edition of the work appeared, in which concessions were made to the critics, to be withdrawn in the edition of 1840, of which George Eliot made an English translation. In the same year Christliche Glaubenslehre,' a history of Christian doctrines in their disintegration, appeared. Strauss meanwhile had been elected to the chair of theology in the University of Zurich, but the opposition this appointment aroused led to its annulment. In 1842 he married Agnes Schebest, an opera singer, with whom he lived until their separation in 1847, and who bore him three children. In 1847 he published a satire, in which he drew a parallel between Julian the Apostate and Frederick William IV. of Prussia. In 1848 he was nominated a member of the Frankfort Parliament, but was defeated; was elected to the Würtemberg Chamber, but his constituents asked him to resign because of his conservative action.

In 1849 he began to publish those biographies which contribute most directly to his literary fame. The Life of Schubart' was followed by the Life of Christian Märklin,' in 1851; the Life of Frischlin,' in 1855; and the 'Life of Ulrich von Hutten,' 1858-60. In 1862 appeared the 'Life of Reimarus'; in 1877, 'A Life of Jesus for the German People,'-in substance much like the former Life.' Previous to its publication, The Christ of Dogma and the Jesus of History' had appeared in 1865. In 1872 Strauss took up his residence at Darmstadt, where he made the acquaintance of the Princess Alice and the Crown Princess of Germany, who befriended him, and before whom he lectured on Voltaire. In 1870 these lectures were published; in the same year occurred his correspondence with Renan on the subject of the Franco-Prussian War,—a correspondence which led to the severing of their friendship.