the churches of that day were empty, that of Harms was crowded; many from among the educated classes, who had ceased to attend divine service, became his hearers, and strangers in great numbers attended his ministry. Many among them may have been drawn merely by the originality of the preacher; but others no doubt found the spiritual food for which they had long endured sad hunger. Some even compared him with Luther, so that, encouraged by such opinions, Harms may have felt himself called to step forth as a Reformer. He at least thought that the best way for him to commemorate the Reformation was to place by the side of the ninety-five theses which Luther nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg ninety-five others which he regarded as fitting for the times, and which attacked Rationalism with sturdy words. He spoke of a popery of reason, from which the Church of the nineteenth century must be delivered, as was the Church of the sixteenth from Romish tyranny. He laid bare many ecclesiastical defects, with which he had become acquainted, first in Holstein, but afterward in collective Germany, and in the Protestant Church generally. He demanded a return to the old Lutheran faith, to the old pious customs of the fathers. We have no reason to suspect that he was led to adopt this course by vanity, or by a desire to make for himself the name of a second Luther; we doubt not that zeal for the safety of the Church, which he believed to be in great danger from Rationalism, was the prompting motive; still we are required by candor to confess that the manner in which his zeal found vent was better calculated to rouse the feelings than to make matters clear to the understanding. Upon many it could only make the impression that Harms condemned the use as well as the abuse of reason in matters of religion, that he was disposed entirely to forget the history of three centuries and violently to compress the spirit of the nineteenth century into the forms of the sixteenth. The theses made at all events, a great stir; they produced joy among the strictly orthodox, who

windows. Deeply moved and pale, for a few seconds he was silent, appearing to listen, and then with a voice suppressed, but continually swelling out more and more, he cried out: "Hearken, my beloved Church! the Lord has heard you, the Lord passes over you, and his feet drip with blessings." See Rheinwald's Repertorium.

had long kept silence and sighed under the rule of Rationalism, but irritation among the friends of Illuminism. The reproach of popery was thrown back upon the author, modesty was commended to him, and he was reminded, not very gently, of his humble origin,* which, it was said, did not especially qualify him to pronounce judgment upon questions which men more learned than himself had not been able to clear up. Many called him a blockhead, a Jesuit, even a hypocrite, and allowed themselves to offer him the grossest personal insults. Many who had awarded him a high position as a preacher, were offended and deserted him; others, on the contrary, were attracted to him, and cheered him on in the way in which he had begun. The agitation was greatest in Holstein, and even in Kiel. There the strife between the parties reached even to the relations of social and family life. So far did things proceed, that not only social circles were dissolved on account of these theses, but even marriage engagements were broken.t Soon the pens of the learned were set in motion for and against the theses. The most remarkable thing was that the learned Ammon, chief court preacher at Dresden, hitherto regarded rather as a defender of Rationalism, now came forward as the friend of these theses, and greeted in them the dawn of a new and better era. This was too much for Schleiermacher's patience. He regarded Harms, as he himself assures us, as a well-disposed, ingenious, and truly Christian man, inspired by a noble zeal; he rejoiced in his wide-spread and beneficial activity, but the publication of the theses he regarded as a blunder, or rather as a mere piece of arrogance. He knew the condition of the Protestant Church and theology too well to be persuaded that any fundamental advantage could result from the bold utterances of mere authority. Schleiermacher was by no means the friend of bald, vulgar Rationalism, (if he was, he aided in overturning it ;) and he who was so far in advance of Harms in scientific culture could not conceal from himself that the wants, religious and ecclesiastical, of the nineteenth century were different from those of a former *He might carry his sacks to mill as he used to do.

The children in the streets, playing upon his name, (Harm in German meaning grief,) sung the song:

Roses scattered in the way

And your grief (Harms) forgotten.

period. And he could only be the more offended when such men as Ammon, who were farther separated from the old orthodoxy than himself, gave their unconditional assent to the Harmsian theses. The affair brought keen definitions and discussions, and did not end without bitterness. One result of this thesis battle was that a livelier interest arose in matters of Church life, and the strife between the Rationalistic faith and that of the Bible, which since the time of Reinhard had been mostly an affair of the theological schools, now became a question about which, in the interests of their own salvation, the Churches, the heads of families, and individuals, began to trouble themselves. It now became less a proof of weakmindedness than it had been for ten or twenty years past, for a man to be more concerned about Christian affairs than about the news of the day. Conversation began to turn more than formerly upon religion.

If the mind of Schleiermacher everywhere influenced the most important ecclesiastical events, it was that same mind also which, in his twofold position of learned theologian and preacher, wrought so instructively and edifyingly and decisively upon the religious conviction. His Dogmatic, (Glaubenslehre,) first printed in 1821, was designed as a dogmatic for the evangelical, that is, the united Church, and was meant to meet alike the religious and scientific demands of the period. We cannot here enter into a detailed exhibition and estimate of it, but must be content with its fundamental features. What most of all distinguishes the Dogmatic of Schleiermacher from the earlier treatises of the kind, is that his book is indeed a dogmatic, an exposition of that which ought to be, and is believed; not the product of a philosophical school. Schleiermacher himself, in the noblest sense philosophically cultivated, and as an author distinguished in the sphere of philosophy, still set himself in earnest opposition to all attempts to mingle philosophy with theology.* With him theology does not stand or fall with any philosophical system whatever; it stands and falls, according to him, only with religion and the Church. Where

* Speculation and faith are often viewed as standing in relations of hostility to each other; but it was the peculiarity of this man to unite them most cordially, without prejudice to the freedom and depth of the one or to the simplicity of the other.

FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.-27

there is no religion there is no theology; and where there is no experience in divine things such things cannot be understood, no matter how rich and extensive the philosophical knowledge. Religion, indeed, is not in the first place a matter of knowledge, but of innermost self-consciousness, of the feeling, our feeling of dependence on God. Upon this feeling of dependence Schleiermacher founds his whole theology. Not what God is in himself, but what he is in his relation to this pious feeling of ours, that is the problem which a dogmatic (Glaubenslehre) has to solve. Inasmuch, however, as this pious feeling is only developed in communion, a Christian dogmatic must also represent this common Christian feeling as it lives in the Church. The Christian Church, according to Schleiermacher, however, is not a crude mass of people of every variety of opinion, accidentally brought together; but a religious organism, that body of which Christ is the head. Christ the Redeemer, not merely an ideal thought-image, but the real historical Christ, as he once lived personally in history, and as he now lives a spiritual personality, and continues to work in the Church, is, according to him, the very center of Christian theology. He knows nothing of a doctrine of Jesus which can be conceived of and represented merely as doctrine, apart from his person; but only by coming into life-communion with the Redeemer can we become partakers of Christianity according to its true nature. He proclaimed everywhere, in the pulpit and in his writings, with the greatest earnestness, that with Christ begins an entirely new era, both in the history of the world and in the life of the individual; that with him the sinless One, the sole dominion of nature, the dominion of sin, first ceases, and the kingdom of grace, the sovereign rule of the Divine Spirit, commences and spreads, and that thus out of Christ and without him there is no salvation; and in this way he brought theology back to the faith from which it had departed. This with him was the great aim. The man who in everything was elevated above the letter, and who from his very nature was compelled to conceive profoundly and spiritually of whatever he touched, could not desire to establish a timid, slavish faith in the letter. While, therefore, with his distinct faith in Christ, from which he would not abate an iota, he might appear on the one side to many as a mystic, as a philosophizing Moravian, who with

his dialectics could make even nonsense appear plausible; on the other side, he did not fail to give offense by the free-thinking style in which he expressed himself respecting particular doctrines, as well as individual books of Holy Scripture, and their relation to the whole; for with him the essence of Christianity depended on none of these, but only on the free grace of God in Christ.

ART. V.-REV. ENOCH MUDGE.

THE city of Lynn, the oldest and one of the principal seats of the extensive shoe manufacture of the United States, is situated in Essex county, Massachusetts, ten miles east of Boston. The larger portion of it stands on a plain, skirted on the north by a range of wooded hills. On the west stretch away between that place and Chelsea immense salt marshes, intersected by numerous rivers, in the midst of which is a beautiful wooded island, the location of "the Half-way House," which rises out of the marsh like an oasis in the desert. On the east the city rises into high ground, a portion of which is rocky eminences. On the south is its spacious, but shallow harbor, while beyond are the "beaches," one of which is two miles in length, washed on both sides by the sea, and at the end of which is the rocky promontory of Nahant, the great watering place of Boston and its vicinity, which stretches out into the waters of the bay. South of the great beach "Egg Rock," with its light-house, and the solitary dwelling of its keeper, rises up out of the Atlantic, constituting no unimportant feature in this enchanting scenery. The whole view from the high hills, either on the north or east, affords one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and especially is not to be exceeded by its vast affluence of variety. This spot Bishop Asbury, no mean judge in such matters, after having seen some of the finest scenery in Great Britain and the United States, at his first visit in 1791, pronounced, as did the psalmist Mount Zion, "the perfection of beauty."

Here, on the 28th of June, 1776, within sight of where