strictly speaking, evidence to him. It is rather a state of mind which feels no need of evidence. Very likely, the believer will allege it, to prove or confirm in other minds the thing of which he is fully assured in his own. But, after all, he can only assert the fact that so he thinks. The moment we bring it to the test of comparing the objects of faith in different minds, of equal vigor and perspicacity, we find that the objective validity disappears. At most, we can say this: that a very vivid and intense conviction, in a gifted mind, has an incalculable power of creating the like conviction in other minds, like induced electricity or the magnetizing of a needle; and that the great historic faiths of mankind have in fact had this origin. And it is not difficult, once assuming a profound and vital experience in such a mind, to see how what was vision there becomes faith, then symbol, then creed, as it passes down through other minds. In the first, it was a primary fact of consciousness, which had no need of proof. In the others, it becomes an article of belief, resting either on the authority of the first, or else on a mood of experience which has in like manner kindled the emotion of the believer to a radiant heat.

Now, it is interesting to observe, in this whole chapter of religious history which we are reading, that systematic dogma is absolutely lost sight of, while the single aim is to vindicate the experience itself of the religious life. We are far as yet from any new structure, however spectral, of a speculative theology. The ground is only getting ready. It is, as yet, only a single step out of blank materialism. The next step in that direction was taken by a man widely different in mental outfit, training, and way of life from Jacobi, whose testimony is, however, fundamentally the same.

All the profounder schools of religious thought in this century date, it is said, from Schleiermacher (1768–1834). The great impulse received from him was at the very dawn of the century, in his Discourses (Reden, 1799), and Monologues (1800), both composed in the very crisis of reaction from materialism and revolutionary violence. With him,

too, religion is no system of dogma, but an ultimate fact of experience. Nay, he seems not even to appeal to it as evidence of any fact or opinion, except such as is contained in the experience itself. "Religion," he says, "was the mother's bosom, in whose sacred warmth and darkness my young life was fed and prepared for the world which lay before me all unknown; and she still remained with me, when God and immortality vanished before my doubting eyes." And, even in his later career, it remained to many "quite uncertain whether Schleiermacher believed or not in revelation, miracle, the divinity of Christ, the trinity, the personality of God, or the immortality of the soul. In his theological phrases, he would avoid all that could distinctly mean this or that."

All this, we notice with some surprise, is said of a man who is confessedly a great religious leader, and of that period in his life when his influence is most powerfully felt in the revival of religious faith. He addresses his argument to "the educated despisers of religion"; and we involuntarily contrast it with the way a similar phase of unbelief was met two generations earlier by Butler, who thinks it essential to begin by showing the probability of a future life and its penal judgments in the hardest form of positive dogma. Religious thought in England had kept "the terror of the Lord" quite visible in the background of argument. Here, on the contrary, we deal only with the primary fact of an experience having its root in "a feeling of dependence.' Christianity itself is defined as "pure conviction," quite apart from any historic testimony. We are asked to believe only this: that the emotional experience itself is genuine and vital.

If now we compare Schleiermacher with Jacobi, we shall find in him less of the busy and restless intelligence aiming to legitimate his thought in a clear and coherent statement; more of the vehement and impassioned utterance of the experience itself; more of the ardent appeal to kindred feeling in other minds. Here, too, we find in the doctrine an outgrowth of what was most intensely personal in the

life. The father of Schleiermacher was a good old-fashioned Calvinistic preacher, chaplain to a regiment; and, for convenience in some of his wanderings, he put the boy at school among the Moravian Brethren. These made the most pious of religious communities. In spiritual descent their tradition came down from Bohemian exiles, who carried into their retreat the same religious ardor that had flamed with such obstinate fury in the Hussite Wars; but in them, as in their followers, it was tempered to a sweet, somewhat austere, and most nobly self-sacrificing piety. It was the placid faith of a group of Moravian missionaries in a storm at sea that had touched John Wesley more profoundly than ever before with the reality and power of a religious life. And this obscure community was the "mother's bosom, warm and dark," which nourished the germs of that young life given to its charge.

The boy proved a boy of genius, of splendid, capacious, and indefatigable intelligence, who soon outgrew his masters. By his father's consent, he was duly transferred to a German university; and here, against his father's vehement remonstrance, he made a deliberate study of the objections which free-thinkers had urged against the Christian faith. "I have been over all that ground myself," his father writes, "and know how hard it is to win back the peace you are so ready to throw away. Faith is the immediate gift of God: go to him for it on your knees, and do not tempt him by making light of that gift." He bids his son study Lessing, especially The Education of the Human Race; and is sure, if he has intellectual difficulties, he will find them answered there.

But books speak one thing to the grave, experienced man, who reads the running comment of his own life between the lines; quite another thing to the eager student who has eyes and ears only for what meets the present demand of his impatient spirit. He will know all that can be said in doubt or denial of the faith he is so sure of. At least, the one miracle of redemption (Erlösung) which he is conscious of in his own soul, there can be no doubting

or denying that! Still, he seems to have misreckoned his strength of mind; and he confesses to his father a sort of despair in seeing so much give way that was built in with his faith, which there is little prospect that he can ever win back. His father can only answer, as before, that faith is the immediate gift of God, and must be had again on the same old terms, none other.

This experience, in which everything external had been cut down to the quick, happening to him on the verge of manhood, was what prepared the way for that singular and unalterable religious confidence which runs through all the phases of his later mental life. These we see most intelligibly in his autobiographic letters; for, by temperament, he eagerly craved sympathy, and his correspondence is all translucent to the light that beams steadily at the centre. There is something sensitive, emotional, feminine, in his style of piety. We find it too sentimental. We miss a certain manliness in the tone. Especially, we are surprised to find so free a thinker one who has perhaps done more than any other man to dissolve away the shell of dogma from the religious life so keenly sensitive to external rites and ecclesiastical symbolism. We have followed him, it may be, through the widest ranges of pagan and Christian speculation into regions where the creed and the very name of Christianity seem sublimated to a viewless ether; yet his last act is to call for cup and platter to administer the eucharist, feebly, with dying hands and lips, and even then to justify himself against some imaginary charge that he has neglected some lesser formularies of the evangelical Church.

In reading a biography which exhibits so much more of the sentiment of the religious life than the dignity and massiveness of character we might have looked for, we must still bear in mind, to do him justice, the great wealth of his scholarly attainment, and the vast intellectual service he has rendered to his generation. His translating and expounding of Plato is reckoned one of the great exploits of German learning; his works are a considerable library

of professional and historic lore; and his volumes of systematic theology, in particular, are the fountain-head of much of the "liberal Orthodoxy" of our day. For our present subject there are two points of view from which we have to regard his work.

The first is the genuine, unquestionable, and powerful impulse which he gave to the educated mind of Germany by his earlier Discourses. These were not delivered as addresses, but were printed and circulated as essays. It is ́not easy to describe or account for the effect they are said to have had on the general mind. One is inclined to ascribe this effect less to anything they say than to their way of saying it. Not in respect of literary style; for, to our mind at least, that is vague and long-drawn, as is the manner of most German prose. Nor is it vividness and force of diction, which, with rare exceptions, we hardly find in them. But, more than almost any writings of their class, they give the rush of abrupt and unpremeditated discourse, a frank boldness of appeal, a torrent of impetuous conviction, a passion and glow of moral earnestness, which transfigure and irradiate the dull forms of speech, and fully explain the emotion with which they were received. It is as if the young man thirty-one had sprung by an uncontrollable impulse to some spot by the wayside, where his eager speech, his impassioned gesture, his prophetic glow, suddenly arrest the idle crowd, and he is felt to speak "as one having authority." It is but a single thing he has to say. He has only to add his word of testimony to the reality of the religious life; to urge that testimony in face of the events that make the time grave; to show what is the one thing needful in the intellectual life of Germany at such a time. And, in doing this, he has, perhaps without knowing it, taken the first step in a great and unique phase of religious development in all Protestant Christendom.

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The other thing that comes within our view is the method which Schleiermacher applies in the treatment of religious questions; in particular how, from data so vague and formless as seem to be indicated thus far, he attempts to body forth the forms of Christian faith.