and the Protestant population, there a proud philosophy entered and sat down. It lifted up its voice at every street-corner, and glided like a serpent into every bosom. And what has it done? There is no sacred thing which it has not profaned, there is no veil which it has not rent in twain, there is no shrine which it has not polluted, there is no honourable thing which it has not made vile. "Goethe and Schiller," says Gervinus with triumph, "Voss and Jean Paul, Winkelman and Wieland, Forster and Lichtenberg, have cleared all the barriers of dogmatical Christianity, and the educated portion of the people have followed their example, every man according to his best ability."

With a limitless faith in the future history of man, and in the inherent power of self-developement that pervades the species, it is not to be wondered at that mere progress should with them be the grand idea. Whither that progress at any given moment may be tending is less clear, and, in the estimation of its worshippers, of no great conscquence; for history, read with the eye of science, shews that the species has advanced through all changes and circumstances, toward and untoward. The individual or the nation may have gone down, but the great human family has been carried steadily forward to its maturity. They feel, and the business of the day is to declare it, that they have already attained (in Germany) a point of developement to which the Reformation, nay, all history, nay, Christianity itself, was only an introduction.

The new reformation has been the great subject of the year that is past, and a year in the present state of the world is worth a quarter of any former century. Where we at this moment write, in one of the busiest of the free imperial cities, it is the universal subject. By priest and peasant, by scholar and merchant, in the clubs and cafés, the German Catholic Church is the constant topic of discussion. An entire new literature has sprung up; and Buonaparte and the Kaisers, Goethe and Schiller, have yielded their place in the print-shops to Ronge and Kerbler. Scarcely have the anxietics of a rather troubled monetary period, and

VOL. XXXIII. NO. CXCVIII.

those of a deficient, or at least a doubtful harvest, been able to command their share in the labours of the periodical press. Since the synod of Leipzig, which rather rashly and prematurely announced a creed, conferences have been held in Stuttgart and in Berlin, in which all northern Germany has shared, and all southern Germany sympathised. In these the chief idea has been to widen the popular basis; even the state-andschool question has been broached — for the church-and-state question was virtually answered long ago, and is now passed by as frivolousand a so-called emancipation or enfranchisement of the female sex has been gravely propounded. In the meantime a certain sort of worship has been carried on. The pulpit and the altar have not ceased, but the pulpit has become a stage for the orator who is thrust into it, who bows his head to the audience, because they are the representative of that universal humanity which is his god; while the altar is but the convenient place where Christian worship may be parodied, and the holy sacraments profaned. They who know the heart of a Roman Catholic priest, must be aware what an entire overthrow all his faith and sentiments must have sustained ere he can look upon the altar with any eye but that of worship, or proclaim from his place that the holy sacrament is no longer a mystery.

Yet so

thoroughly are men loosed from their former anchorages, that it is affirmed of Dr. Theiner, the best man whom the New Reformation can boast of, that he has consented even to the principle that the holy Eucharist shall not be celebrated on other than holy days, except at the request of some individual who desires to partake of the communion.

While such things were going forward, Rome has been silent, contenting herself with excommunica

tions. With these her children have grown too familiar, and they have learned to despise them. They whose faith and allegiance have not been shaken, shrink from the rude blusterings of a popular gale, and are withdrawing themselves from public places and from mixed society. Such Protestants as have any faith or fear of God remaining in them, all

At

professionally orthodox and correct clergy, and especially that small body of earnest men who have sprung up in later years, and in whom one may see that the spark of Christianity has been preserved amid the ashes of a forsaken altar, sympathise with the Roman Catholic clergy, and stand aloof from men who would gladly reach to them the hand, and persuade them that they are embarked together in a common cause. first, indeed, the well-meaning and charitable, and the more meditative among them, indulged the hope that this reformed body, springing up within the bosom of the Romish Church, might, by a moderate and patient course, have subsisted in the midst of the corrupt mass till it should have gradually purified the whole and absorbed it. Germany offered advantages for such an attempt, such as could be found in no other country. Daily intercourse, frequent intermarriages, had created innumerable shades of transition between the Catholic and the Reformed. Jealousy of a foreign central authority was strong even among the higher clergy. The questions resulting from mixed marriages, and those secret uneasinesses which priestly influence and priestly arts occasion, had made Popery seem the great troubler of domestic happiness. Men saw their wives, their sisters, and their mothers, defrauded of their right to the sacraments, if they allowed their husbands to exercise a natural power over their children's education. The abuses and wickedness, not of the confessors, but of the prescribed confessional, had driven thousands away from the holy communion. A quiet and orderly change would have been, by the mass of the population, hailed as a deliverance. Would the civil governments, therefore, it was thought, only have energy and unity enough to hinder the reformers from being meddled with; would the reformers themselves only proceed with quietness, with tolerance, and conciliation, what blessed results might be looked for! Ay, and had the thing not been a creature of the time; had it not been from the first as a movement entirely popular; had not the movement been its own master, awaiting its own time for casting up a master for itself, a deus ex

machina from the midst of its own ebullitions; had there been any one to hold the balance, or any balance to hold; had it not been early laid down as a principle, resulting from the philosophy of history, that the good must be attained only through a series of blunders: had these things not been so, the muchdesired quiet and orderly change might possibly have been brought about. But thus things were, and well-meaning and meditative men were deceived, because they knew not the time nor understood the signs of it. Events overtook their slow steps of meditation, and hurried past them like the wind.

Of

He

Our readers may suppose that the orthodox Protestant clergy might have been able to exercise a salutary influence in the midst of this social change. We scarcely believe that they could; for, leaving out of sight the fact of their being an almost invisible minority, they do not know how to place themselves in a position whence they can do any good. ecclesiastical organisation they are entirely ignorant. They deny it on principle. The clergyman is regarded as no more than the organ of the people. His priesthood is but the representation of their priesthood. Whatever power or sacredness he has, they have conferred, and they can revoke. presides at their public worship and dispenses the sacraments, not because he has more right to do so than any other man who is present, but because for order and decorum's sake they have appointed him to exercise that function. In no respect does he represent to them any thing but themselves. This much, indeed, we have met with, that when a clergyman has been outvoted by his lay congregational council, and compelled to permit his church to be used for the occasional services of the German Catholics, he sighs and smites his breast, and says, My church has been desecrated." But of standing in the name and place of the Lord Jesus Christ, of speaking with authority as the messenger of God, of doing God's work, and believing that God does his work by their hands. of addressing men's conscience more than their reason, speaking from fait h to faith, and calling not for philoso

66

phical persuasion but for childlike obedience, of all this the orthodox Protestant clergymen know nothing. Nay, the truth which they do know is but sparingly brought to the pulpit; for, 1st, the consistory would not long permit it; and, 2dly, the clergyman is unwilling to diminish his congregation-his publicum, as he calls it-and so to curtail his opportunities of doing good. The consequence is that the chief excellency of their sermons is rhetorical. The clergy preach, and the people, where an able man happens to be, crowd to hear; but especially when the middle classes assemble, it is as at our modern tournaments, to see the beautiful armour, the glittering of the swords, the handling of the spear, and the helm striking fire-sparks under the blow of the champions. And to satisfy this empty craving, the earnest spirits of the few are disappointed; for the many are attracted by rhetorical flourishes merely, amid which the most that can be done is to insinuate from time to time a gentle plea for what they consider an antiquated and expiring religion.

The rest of the clergy offer a still more sorry hinderance to the corruption of the popular mind; for not only do they hold the same principle of which we have above spoken, but they go still further. According to them, whosoever possesses faith must attain to it through his own investigation and inquiry. He begins as an unbeliever. Inherited or derived faith, or the faith of a son or a disciple who believes because his father or his master has taught him, is looked upon as superstition. The end of education is, therefore, in their hands, individual perfection and developement to such a degree as to make every man a microcosm sufficient to himself.

Gervinus speaks of this class of persons somewhat in the following strain. "Our clergy have long occupied a defensive post, they are no longer a school of prophets, not even a propaganda, nor workers out of a reformation. And they know well enough that their modern dogmatic system is separated by a mighty chasm, that can never again be filled up, from that which Luther taught, and which must even yet be taught to that lowest class of

the people in whom the times of Luther are still lingering. Speculation and philosophy, researches in history and mythology, have taught them to discover in the Christian dogmas, yea, even in those which at first sight may seem to mock an intelligent man's reason, certain profound truths, unfolding to the freest thinker wonderful depths of that human spirit which has been present and operative alike in all religious and in all historical myths. But these are facts which our clergy, however much they may use them for satisfying their own inquiring minds, will on no account offer to the common man, in place of those mysteries which they have been accustomed to preach in order to answer his rude thoughts about the marvel of his being. They, therefore, in the terms which they employ, imitate, as far as may be, their predecessors of the sixteenth century, though their philosophical orthodoxy can no more become one with that of Luther, than times present can blend and become united with times gone by."

To guide the New Reformation, as it has been called, no commanding leaders have appeared. In defect, therefore, of any individual person, the history of whose proceedings might be the history of the movement, and to whose writings one might look for an exposition of the principles on which it is to perfect itself, we must hearken to the voice of those who for the time have taken up the task of giving utterance to the popular mind, who have laid hold of the banners of the gathering host, and point to the object towards which the spirit that is in the masses is urging them. The present temporary leaders are men of the philosophical and literary class, accustomed to view all things as mere subjects of study, and far removed from the business of the world and the experience of human life. With such as these the wings of speculative thought are not clipped by suggestions of a mechanical or matter-of-fact nature. To them war or revolution is but a subject of abstract interest. It is not a thing of worldly loss, of suffering, blood, and death. They see a picture, and nothing more. It brings to them no personal terrors; at the worst, it

no

as

inflicts other wounds than those which happen in a painful dream. Whether remembered past, or imagined as possible in the course of future events, the woes of the generations through which any great change in the condition of human society works itself out, are to them like a pageant on the stage. They can think of them as necessary, unavoidable, transient, the fair price of a thing that must be purchased. Such are the best men for the present stage of the work. They can tell the people what the people have in their minds; they can read to them their own thoughts and smooth the way for that which shall be thought next.

To this class Gervinus belongs; and we may take him as the representative and spokesman of a large number of the same. The principles which he unfolds and the measures and methods which he suggests to his countrymen, are set forth with a characteristic display of candour; for he never speaks, except respectfully, either of creeds or of their profes

sors.

Yet all this is an unreal homage. It is the graciousness and condescension of a proud man. Rather it is the traitor's kiss. All these honoured and reverenced things are things that were. They must now be overleaped, and flung back into the region of mere history. With the poetry and fable of the past they serve only to shew us the times and conditions which humanity has outlived, and to stimulate us to further selfemancipation and developement; for the day of man's majority has, at least, in Germany, been attained, and tutors and governors are needed no more. Lest our readers should suppose that we are colouring this picture, let them read what follows. Our author is speaking of the absence of any need for a leader in the present movement :

"In the past century there arose in France certain genial spirits, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, who sapped the foundations of the then existing intellectual world, and of the old conceptions; but in Germany, Legion is the name for those men who, though individually scarce reaching mediocrity of genius, shall, by their union, prepare the very same overthrow, if before long political hinderances

... la

be not thrown in their way. such a time as the 16th century Luther, that hero of faith, could arise, who lived, as it were, back in the patriarchal condi. tions of the people of Israel, who could see God and Satan in conflict for the lordship of the world; who bade from his presence the Human Understanding, when she pretended to penetrate the mysteries of revelation and to master that word of the Bible which he willed blindly to follow. Could any one in our day de ceive himself, or think of deceiving others, into the idea that this faith of Luther's might once more revive among the mul titude, or that any other religious faith of similar narrowness could ever meet again with such intensity of persuasion? The one and the other are alike for ever vanished with Luther's century, and if they ever do return, it must happen in a time wherein all the men and all the relations of our day shall have disappeared, wherein God shall have broken this cultivated German world into pieces like a potter's vessel, or molten it in the furnace of centuries, with the mass of an again commingling humanity. But as the times are presently constituted, between which and the era of Luther's religion a whole century is stretched-a century that has seen Latitudinarianism enthroned, that has given birth to Science, and made science the sap of every twig of the social life of man-a century that has read in the book of nature a new, an eternal, an irrefutable revelation, in so many waysextinguishing the letter of the written Revela. tion a century in which the human spirit has attained to a bold self-regard,-yea, self-deification-and both the burdenbearing common man stirs up the best strength of his being, and the educated man of leisure devotes his mental resources, to force their way through philosophical channels into every secret of creation and of Godhead; has there not been fixed an impassable gulf, such as utterly to preclude the possibility of a return to that condition in which Religion sat alone as mistress amid the demands of human nature and the opinions and projects of men? It is of no use to wish to cheat one's self into the persuasion that things are not so, however displeasing it may be to many to think that they are. Things are so, and it is not mere human acts that have produced them. I know, indeed, how to respect and honour that faith of Luther, and every other form of faith in every man, if it have flowed from true inward impulse; and yet I see in every such man, and all the more the more upright and single-hearted he is, an entire stranger and foreigner, and a wanderer strayed from another time; and since we have seen the Zinzendorfs and the Lavaters stand forth as reformers,