ARTICLE VI.-TWO REPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF GERMANY-SCHLEIERMACHER AND THOLUCK.

MARTIN LUTHER stamped his powerful and enduring impress upon the German pulpit. From its medieval puerility, and scholastic, dry, and dead forms of Aristotelian logic, he restored the true idea of preaching-divine truth communicated through the medium of a warm human heart. He was (as a preacher contradistinguished from a mere philosopher should be) intensely practical, holding that truth was of no value unless it bore upon the reality of things, and upon the kingdoms of good and evil in men's hearts. Next to his fidelity to Biblical truth, or the pure evangelic spirit that transfused all his utterances, he overcame men by his vast emotions, passions, vitality. He bore them down by his masterful and potent personality. His nature, full of great feelings and affections, was itself a mighty rhetorical power. Melancthon said that "Luther's words were born not on his lips but in his soul;" and hence they were "half-battles"-hence they moved men profoundly in spite of their occasional violence, unfairness, immoderateness. The creator, it might be said of the German language, he spoke it with amazing power, simplicity, and sweetness. His off-hand familiar discourses (Haus-Postillen) are finer than his more elaborate sermons (Kirche-Postillen). As he grew in the knowledge of the truth he came more and more to see the deeper spiritual aspects, the inner substance of Christian faith. He said "all the wisdom of the world is childish foolishness compared with the acknowledgment of Christ." He said again, "Jesus Christ is the only beginning and end of all my divine cogitations day and night, yet I find and freely confess that I have attained but only to a small and weak beginning of this deep and precious profundity." From this reason there is an immeasurableness, an exhaustless depth to his preaching, as if it opened into the infinite riches of God, compared with which the pulpit oratory of highly intellectual men is meagre, stereotyped, and soon comes to an end. Luther

also brought fresh nature into the pulpit, as well as knowledge, earnestness, and faith. He was even more humorous, realistic and bold in his preaching, than in his writings, for in the pulpit he was himself. He broke from precedents and rules. He gave expression to his individual, inner, heart-felt experience of the truth, and thus became a prophet of the people, making him the creator of a new time, and illustrating Neander's words, "a certain faculty of prophecy seems implanted in humanity; the longing heart goes forth to meet beforehand great and new creations; undefined presentiments hasten to anticipate the mighty future."

German preaching amid its manifold variations and degradations has, since Luther's day, retained much of the fresh nature and prophetic fire which the great reformer brought into it, being characterized by its lively exposition of the Scriptures, its practical and ethical quality, its hortatory earnestness, and its emotional glow.

After the signal falling away from the ardor of the reformed faith in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the apparently utter dying out of the evangelic spirit, the revival of the "pietistic" school represented by such men as Spener, Francke, and Anastasius Freylinghausen, though narrow respecting the use of reason and learning, infused into preaching some temporary life. Succeeding this the chilling period of the Wolffian pulpit orators with their dry morality and bald naturalism prevailed. In the middle of the eighteenth century there were, however, some able preachers as far as their style. and often their doctrine went, of whom a good example is Johann Lorenz von Mosheim; and afterwards there were many other illustrious pulpit orators more or less of an evangelic spirit though humanistic and literary in their modes of thought, like Cramer, Herder, Zollicoffer, Bretschneider, and Reinhardt; until we draw nearer our own day when we come upon the well-known names of Krummacher, Schleiermacher, Heubner, Nitzsch, Hagenbach, Julius Müller, Theremin, Schweitzer, and Tholuck. The strong national genius shows itself in the German sermon. The German sermon is homelier and heartier than the French. It is less polished and oratorical. It is more popular, robust, and sympathetic. It is freely expository rather than severely

didactic; indeed it has been charged with wanting body, or theological substance. It gives free play to æsthetic and poetic sentiment, sometimes causing the stern old Protestant cathedral fairly to blossom as with spring flowers. In its plan it is simpler than the Puritan discourse, making, in fact, but two grand elements to the sermon-the text and the disposition. But in the pulpit discourses of a preacher like Julius Müller there is a predominance of the theological and dialectic element; and in Schleiermacher there is more of the German subjectivity than is usual; but even in his most philosophical preaching Schleiermacher sought by his own spiritual sympathy to develope the Christian consciousness in his hearers, and to bring them into inner accord with Christ. He sought for the spirit of things, and cared not so much, perhaps not enough, for dogmatic expression. As the greatest modern preacher of Germany we would endeavor rapidly to delineate him, and also, as a complement of him and existing because of him-though intellectually inferior-the late Dr. Tholuck. In regard to the outward facts and circumstances of these lives we draw them directly from German sources.

FRIEDRICH ERNST DANIEL SCHLEIERMACHER, born at Breslau in 1768, was the son of a clergyman of the Reformed Church, a man of stern piety, who reared him in the precepts of the straitest orthodox sect. He was early sent to the Moravian institution at Niesky. Here by the narrowness of the religious tenets inculcated he was driven into doubt, and into a most harrowing controversy with his father upon the subject of his Christian faith, although the affectionate and earnest type of religion, exhibited by the Moravian brotherhood, made a healthful and lasting impression upon his mind. In 1787 he went as a student to Halle, and at the end of his academic course acted for a while as lecturer in that University. Having recovered in a measure his faith, he became assistant preacher at Langsberg-on-the-Warthe, and after two years removed to Berlin. Here he formed the friendship of Friedrich Schlegel, Scharnhorst, Alexander Dohna, Wilhelm vou Humboldt, and other leading minds. He now preached constantly, and his discourses upon religion (Reden über die Religion), and Monologues (Monologen), by their extraordinary philosophic

and spiritual depth brought him into notice. Appointed regular preacher in Berlin he published other discourses of a profound character, and also his translation of Plato's works with a commentary, so that from his Platonic studies and the idealistic cast of his philosophy, he has been called "the Plato of Germany." In 1804 he was named University Preacher and Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Halle. During the period of the "War of the Liberation," being broken up at Halle, he returned to Berlin and became the center of patriotic influence in those troubled times when all seemed failing and falling; so that a German writer says of him, "That small insignificant looking man became the soul of the warlike activity of Berlin." His eloquent "Christmas Festival discourse" (Die Weihnachtsfeier) breathing the soul of a thorough German patriotism which sprang from a deep-grounded Protestant faith, roused Germany like Luther's discourses to the German people of old. It was the speech of a man who, suffering intensely with all the woes of his fatherland, could become her counsellor and mouth-piece. In 1809 he was appointed pastor of Trinity Church, Berlin; and, soon after, in harmony with his own efforts and views, the University of Berlin was re-instituted, of which he became the most renowned light. His last great work was "The Christian Faith systematically presented according to the Fundamental Propositions of the Evangelical Church," (Der Christliche Glaube nach den Grundsaetzen der Evan. Kirche in Zusammenhange dargestellt.)

Six series of his sermons (Predigten) have been published, the first in 1801, and the last in 1833. He died at Berlin, February, 1834.

Schleiermacher's style as a preacher was without much ornament, but, at the same time, it had a classic finish, an onward movement, and an original and vigorous thought that held his hearers spell-bound. He was He was a man who brought into his preaching the results of great erudition and profound thinking, and yet he strove to distinguish the true elements of Christian faith from the dogmatic forms which had grown up around it. and obscured its life. He sought for the springs of Christian faith in the real union of the soul with God. In this Godconsciousness (Gott-Bewustsein) he placed the source of religion.

Christ revealed the true God-consciousness. He knew of no Christianity that was without Christ; and even as his own pure life welled forth from that fountain of innermost personal union with the personal Christ, so he thought that the life of all believers, and of the Christian church, should and could only, spring from the same source.

Schleiermacher has wrought a profoundly shaping influence upon the new and more truly evangelical views which have sprung up in Germany regarding the immediate relation of Christian faith to Christian life. Such writers and preachers. as, first of all, Neander, after him, Twesten, Nitzsch, Jul. Müller, Dorner, Martensen, Lücke, Tholuck; and those of other lands, like Vinet, Archdeacon Hare, Maurice, F. W. Robertson, and Horace Bushnell, have drunk deeply, if sometimes unconsciously, into the thinking and theology of Schleiermacher. His was a large and hospitable theology that brought into it all there was revealed of God in the human mind, in nature, in science, in art, in literature, in the State and the household. Schleiermacher fairly turned the tide of rationalism in Germany. He discovered in his own consciousness of humanity the need of the soul to be perfect, and that this want could not possibly be met in the human soul itself by reason of its moral imperfection, and this was the death-blow of rationalism. He also discovered the truth that in Jesus there was a perfect and holy humanity upon which to rest this mediatorship between the sinful soul and a holy God. He was firm amid the confusing voices of his doubting age in his faith of the unassailable holiness of the human nature of Christ. If temptation had but one slightest point of contact whereby to assail the character of the Saviour, he would have been no longer the Saviour of humanity. Yet it must be admitted that Schleiermacher built his theology too exclusively upon consciousness, upon this purely subjective basis, and that there was not enough in it of the positive element of revealed truth to make it a firmly reliable system for other men; yet he probably did more than any other man to reconcile philosophy and faith, and to show that the objective truth of Christianity harmonized with the absolute needs of the soul. His theology went far to meet the deepest questions of man's own nature.