clay-cold under his moral tirades, woke up to serve themselves heirs of immortality, tasting of that meat which solaced the fainting spirit of the Master at the well of Sychar, all the hours of the day were too narrow for the ardour of his spirit. He catechised in the family, kept a class for young men, to which they came from the remotest distance, visited the sick, dying, and bereaved, and made as faithful preparation for preaching to these illiterate assemblies as ever after for the most polished city audiences. Schleiermacher only came forth in his full strength after he was transplanted to Berlin. In that intellectual centre he found the stimulus his mind needed, and he rose to the occasion. When he saw literary men, men in high station, officers, and even crowds of Jews gathering round his pulpit, he poured forth the riches and grace of his eloquence.

From the outset he drew wondering crowds, that listened to his stately paragraphs and mysterious paralogisms; for poor human souls, ready to stagnate in the monotony of everyday life, are ready to find in every voice that strikes an unusual chord the angel that has come down to stir the pool of healing virtue. But, though startled to a moment's thought by such sentences as "It is in some cases better to have religion without a God than with one;" "First identify yourselves and your being with the great All, and then come and inquire further about the immortality of the soul;" "Rise above the rules of conventional morality and confide in the unsophisticated promptings of the heart," the hearers carried away little but an unbounded admiration of the speaker. We hear of no similar case in Berlin to that of the two youths who met after a sermon of Chalmers's in a neighbouring plantation, confessed to each other that their eyes had been opened to know themselves sinners, and began a concert for prayer for the Divine blessing, which made them friends for life in the pilgrimage to Zion. Later in life Schleiermacher grasped the person of Christ as his ideal, transcending all that appeared on the field of history, and, presenting it with all the force and ardour of his genius, induced many who had concluded that Christ and his gospel were effete, to inquire anew, and thus many, as is known, who received the first impression from Schleiermacher, obtained worthier views than their teacher.

Berlin and Glasgow.

301

But he himself knew nothing of a Redeemer from sin, and wrought nothing but a vague adoration. His magniloquent. platitudes that “every man is by his very being in the image of God" fired some to such a degree that one of his hearers records that if "but for that one utterance, he could have worshipped him." But Chalmers's faith was very earnest, he knew himself in possession of the instrument that could renew man in the image of his Maker, a consciousness which led to the restless consideration and employment of all appliances to secure the result in as many cases as possible. Let us follow him, too, after he was called to the largest city in his native country, as he gathered around him, by his commanding genius, crowds of sympathetic hearers.

Turning from the admiring multitudes who were quickened and made blessed by his word, he considered street upon street, and house upon house, in the great city, teeming with families fortified by spiritual inertia against common motives, and, like a man who was aware of having a blessing in his hand, sufficient to rescue all from the spiritual ruin in which they were buried, he formed the project of parcelling and subdividing the huge masses of poverty and ignorance into manageable sections, and by himself, or his aides-de-camp, visiting from house to house, and getting the message of salvation carried to every human ear! What but a vital possession of truth could have shown itself capable of such enterprise? The truth is from God and for man, and knows no respect of persons. The same man who could hold the highest circles entranced was equally at home among the mechanics who met in a cotton-mill or workshop with their greasy jackets and unwashed countenances, and the grateful response of the lower classes testified that the word from God was equally for them. Different from that truth which the philosopher has in view, the truth from heaven can be implanted in the tender hearts of children never to be eradicated; and we see this servant of God set on foot agencies to go after children and draw them within the circle. of the gospel's beneficent operation, following high and low, learned and unlearned, young and old, and manifesting by his zeal as much as by his talent the value of the boon he commended to them. It was possible for Schleiermacher to go

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serenely, after the labour of composition or of the desk was discharged, to spend the evening in recreation in a circle of friends or in the saloons of the great, to the recruiting of mind and body. He never breathes a syllable indicating that the moral wastes of Berlin caused him a heart-break. How should the philosophic sceptic care for the illiterate or for children? He has nothing to give them. It was Jesus, and only he who said, "Suffer little children to come to me," and who had compassion on the multitudes. The recreation of the sceptic will be in consistency with the rest of his system. Compare Spinoza, when he fattened spiders with large flies, and then took pleasure in making them fight and tear each other to pieces, with the Christian philanthropist, who, after he had done his part well in the loftier intellectual regions of society, turned to scheme and mine in the more obdurate recesses of human ignorance and ungodliness, the Howard, on the spiritual side, in ceaseless endeavours to make the treasure that had gladdened his own heart available for the most forlorn and desolate of the species.

Who would not rejoice to see such men thrust forward, out of the rut of professional and literary life, to give proof of themselves in the political arena on some grand question of national life? Accordingly we find both called to cast their votes into the scale in the question affecting classes struggling under social disabilities; the Roman Catholics in England, and the Jews in Germany. A priori, we would be disposed to expect that the Freethinker would be foremost to sweep away all such arbitrary shackles laid upon men on the ground of name or dissent or opinion. Not so fast! Hobbes and Hegel both ended in advocating tyranny on the one side and servility on the other in the state. Chalmers at once took an uncompromising position as the champion of civil freedom apart from religious considerations. He held truth too high to require the support of a statute-book, and invited Protestants to renounce all weapons but those spiritual ones with which Christianity had originally prevailed, and trusted by according Roman Catholics equal participation in the politics of the realm to despoil error of a factitious advantage as persecuted. We think Chalmers was wrong in overlooking the fact that Popery is by no means a purely religious sect, but a

mighty political league, with its ramifications in every country under heaven engaged in a conspiracy to bring all per fas et nefas under the yoke of the Romish priest-king; but yet the part he took is a valuable evidence how the spirit of truth carries man above all prejudices, and all regard to the objections of those associated with him when it concerns the interests of those whom he supposes to be wronged. This was very different from Voltaire's argument for toleration, which treats all Christians alike as fools. There it is the truth with open eyes pleading for the supposed rights of a fanatical sect, whose dangerous character it at the same time knows and owns. Let us turn to Schleiermacher and the Jews. In 1799 a number of Jewish fathers of families in Berlin drew up an address to Probst Teller praying for information as to what steps should be taken for the incorporation of the Jewish people in the Christian Church! Who can but dwell on this moment with interest: for the reception of the Jews in Berlin would have been a signal for all the Jews in the world turning to the gospel. Teller was an extreme rationalist, but in such esteem with his contemporaries that in his funeral sermon the preacher said if such men as Jesus, Luther, and Teller, were to arise all would soon be in order in religion. Teller would have been inclined to make all kinds of concessions to the petitioners. But Schleiermacher came before the public with a pamphlet against the reception of the Jews, where he appears in a more favourable light than usual, treating the proposal for making concessions in Christianity with the severest sarcasm. But what were his reasons? None other than the fear that if the Jews entered the Christian Church in numbers they would add strength to the Pharisaic or positive side that adhered to the letter of the Scriptures. Not believing in conversion, he supposed the Jews would under the Christian name only be what they were before. On the other hand, he came forward in favour of a measure to confer upon the Jews unlimited social emancipation with the one proviso, that they renounced the hope of the Messiah! As if Protestants had assented to Roman Catholic emancipation on condition that Romanists renounced all connection with the Pope.

Schleiermacher appears in his greatest strength and greatest weakness in the part he took in the Church revolution which

gave birth to the Evangelical Church of Prussia in its present form. Frederick-William the Third had gained the persuasion that the moment was near for effecting the long-desired union of the Lutherans and the Reformed, and making one Protestant Church throughout his dominions. It seemed as if the most had, under the Rationalist era, lost all concern for the points of difference, and that the measure needed only to be proposed to be accepted. Schleiermacher cast himself with his whole soul into the scheme for remodelling the Church, as the prospect was held out of getting it freed from the despotism of consistories, and constituted in presbyteries and synods after the pattern of the early Church. In a presbytery or synod he had the assurance that he, as Reformed, could hold his own, and more. It was a rare faculty which enabled him, educated in German Erastianism, to embrace this scheme on the ground of its intrinsic truth. He was originally Reformed as contrary to Lutheran, and difficult as it was in his early days for such to get on against predominant Lutheranism, he never deserted his colours. All was going on smoothly, and Prussia would have been under his auspices a Presbyterian country, when the "rebuff of an opposing cloud," such as sent Satan back from the abysses of chaos, shelved the scheme. The murder of Kotzebue by a democratic student furnished Austria with a pretext for interference, and, with the zealous co-operation of our Wellington, she put her veto on such a church constitution as a too great concession on the side of liberty. The result was the present Prussian State Church, in which the servants of Government, including the clergy, exert a quiet but effective pressure upon every remonstrance of the popular will. But that was not all! The king proceeded to prescribe of his own proper authority, as "summus episcopus," an Agende or Liturgy for the whole. church, which was to be neither Lutheran nor Reformed, but an amalgamation of both. Naturally this compound was offensive to both. The Reformed took offence at lighted tapers by noonday, kneeling before the altar, chanting of the clergy from the altar, and that the priest, as the Lutherans call him, turned his face to the crucifix and his back to the congregation; while the Lutherans were displeased that the expressions in the Communion, and many other things, were