conceived of in different ways, sometimes practical, sometimes metaphysical, sometimes sensible; redemption is represented as an inward fact, and man's knowledge of God and the conversion of his will are shown to depend upon a knowledge of the great leaders of religion, of whom Christ is the chief. Fichte, who taught that the world is nothing without spirit, and Schelling, who taught that the world-soul is God, were the philosophers who most attracted the literary circle in which German Romanticism was cradled.

The word Romantic had already been used to describe the literature which appeals to a cultivated imagination, and it was now applied to an art which was distinct from, and even opposed to, the classical and antique. The beginning of the movement was marked by an interest in mediaeval poetry, especially that of the Romance nations, a poetry which includes a mythology which was external to the formulated belief of the mediaeval Church. Romanticism was not strictly a Catholic movement. But it gradually kindled an admiration for the social and religious institutions of the Middle Ages as well as the art of the Middle Ages, and in so doing it quickened and hallowed that historical sense in spiritual things which the subjectivism and individualism of both Pietism and Rationalism had brought to the verge of annihilation. It was instinctively opposed to Rationalism and to the spirit which begins to criticize before it has learned to appreciate. So the literary and aesthetic movement gradually became a religious movement, exciting a thirst for a faith that could satisfy both mind and heart. The result was twofold. It led a stream of distinguished converts, such as Stolberg, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Werner, into a reviving Roman Catholicism which possessed for them all the charm of novelty and the grace of antiquity. This Roman Catholicism was of a moderate type, disliking the Ultramontane view of the Papacy and convinced that Christianity can be combined

with modern learning and modern liberty. Such a religion would have been an inestimable blessing to Germany if it had not been crushed by Rome at the moment when it was most sorely needed.

The second result of Romanticism was to give some life to the union made by King Frederick William III of Prussia between the Lutheran and the Reformed, that is, Calvinist, Church, a union effected by his order in 1817. The king, though a Calvinist, had been impressed by the beauty and dignity of the services which he had witnessed in Vienna, and believed that he could render Protestant worship more attractive by the universal introduction of certain forms and ceremonies, which, while compatible with the older Lutheranism, were distasteful to the Rationalist and the Calvinist. As a general he perceived the possible advantage of presenting a united front to irreligion and to Rome, and as a general he ordered the union to take place and his Prayer Book to be adopted. The difficulty was not very serious because most of the Calvinists had given up the doctrine of absolute predestination and most of the Lutherans had given up the doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist, and both communities were deeply infected with unbelief. In the reception of the sacraments every individual was allowed to think as he pleased. The signs were kept as essential, but what was conveyed by those signs was left uncertain. The new community was given the name of the Evangelical Church. In spite of the good Pietists whom it included, its creation proved to be not only the token but also the instrument of the decay of definite religion, and sixty years later another King of Prussia had personally to intervene in order to prevent the Apostles' Creed from being struck out of the 'Evangelical' liturgy. The genuine Lutherans who rejected the union were harshly persecuted. Many of them migrated to Australia and America. In this way German Protestantism was deprived

of some of its best members, and the Christian world was left with a very impressive warning against methods of reunion which are not based upon spiritual convictions.

Among the sincerest promoters of this ecclesiastical union was Frederick Daniel Ernest Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the most imposing figure in German Protestantism since Luther.1 In the year 1800 he became preacher at the church of the Trinity in Berlin. His father was a Calvinist minister, but he was sent to a Moravian school, a fact which greatly influenced his whole religion; for his very conception of religion as a feeling of dependence upon God is derived from Moravian Pietism. His learning, his scholarship, his eloquence, and his intercourse with the leaders of the Romantic movement in Berlin, all contributed to his efficiency as a lecturer and a preacher, and he quickly initiated a great attempt to reconcile and to mediate. All founders of religion, he taught, had a new intuition of the universe, and Christ had, above all others, such an intuition. He beheld everywhere the divine element and everywhere the irreligious and the unspiritual, and the need and the means of overcoming the unspiritual by the spiritual. And the clearness with which Christ saw the need and the means constitute what is specific in Christ. Salvation can be sought only in redemption, in the gaining of union with Deity. Christ was conscious of a unique knowledge of God, and of being in God, and He knew that this knowledge could communicate itself and kindle religion in others. He is the cause of the new life, the ideal type of humanity, and His perfection is proved on the one hand by the existence of the Church and on the other hand by the fact that His religious consciousness cannot be explained by merely natural causes.

1 For Schleiermacher, see W. B. Selbie, Schleiermacher (Chapman & Hall, London, 1913); also the account in J. H. Kurtz, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, 14th edition (Neumann, Leipzig, 1906). The last division of this book gives a somewhat full outline of Continental Protestantism since

On the historical side Schleiermacher's system is weak, and this weakness is far-reaching. He under-estimated the connexion between Judaism and Christianity. Deeply attached to the Gospel of St. John he depreciated the Synoptic Gospels and agreed with the Rationalists in rejecting the virgin birth of Christ; a birth congruous with that essential sinlessness of Christ in which be believed. Imbued with the importance of the close relation between Christ and the fellowship of believers, he gave far too little weight to the fact that this fellowship was created, and could only have been created, by one who rose from the dead in the sense which the Gospels maintain. Hoping for a new unity of even the visible Church, he did not realize how the polity of the ancient Church depended upon unity and can once more become its safeguard. Mindful of the truth that the life of the Church proceeds from Christ, he did not recognize how admirably the ancient creeds and definitions of the faith serve to keep intact the witness of the Church to Christ, and in 1819 he not only advocated the view that Protestants cannot be bound by any dogmatic decisions of the past, but even urged that the only thing to which the Protestant clergy ought to be bound is a repudiation of Roman Catholicism.

His real work and his great work was to teach, and to teach from the heart, that the Christian religion was and is created by the impression which the Person of Christ produced and still produces in and through the Christian community. He returns to St. Paul when he emphasizes the reality of the Christian experience that Christ is our Redeemer as well as our Teacher and Example, and he returns to St. Paul in urging that at least the ideal is that there should be one Church to manifest belief in the one Redeemer.

1800. An English translation of an earlier edition of this part of Kurtz's work was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1890.

The mantle of Schleiermacher fell upon Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1887). Like his predecessor, Ritschl exercised a great influence upon German thought by the thoroughness with which he emphasized the value of religious experience, and also of the regulative use of the idea of religious fellowship. He emancipated himself from the Rationalism of the Tübingen school and adhered closely to what he believed to be the fundamental principles of the Lutheran confessions of faith. He laid great stress upon the truthfulness of the New Testament as an authentic witness of the primitive Church to the teaching and the Person of Christ. Religion he treated as essentially practical and social, a thing not of emotion but of ethical power. A knowledge of Christ is revealed in the community which has believed in Christ. Christ's position is unique; through Him we know that God is love, and the love of God is His will as directed towards the realization of His purpose in His kingdom. Ritschl argues back from the experience of Christians to the Person of Christ, in whom we find all the great determining ideas by the aid of which God and man, sin and redemption, are to be interpreted. The immediate object of theological knowledge is the faith of the community and on that positive religious fact theology has to build. As a philosopher he may be said to have been baptized into Kant, and even more definitely than Schleiermacher, he banishes all philosophy from the realm of theology. He not only depreciates 'metaphysic' and 'mysticism' in the realm of theology, but limits theological knowledge to what he himself conceives to be the bounds of human need and experience. His insistence on the relative character of this knowledge and its sharp difference from theoretical knowledge lead him into serious ambiguities and inconsistencies with regard to some of the vital truths of Christianity.1

1 Ritschl's most important work was Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung u. Versöhnung, of which an English translation by John S.