r things
quite as well as they, and religion much better than they. The
rhetorical form is a fiction. The addresses were never delivered. Their
tension and straining after effect is palpable. They are a cry of pain
on the part of one who sees that assailed which is sacred to him, of
triumph as he feels himself able to repel the assault, of brooding
persuasiveness lest any should fail to be won for his truth. He concedes
everything. It is part of his art to go further than his detractors. He
is so well versed in his subject that he can do that with consummate
mastery, where they are clumsy or dilettante. It is but a pale ghost of
religion that he has left. But he has attained his purpose. He has
vindicated the place of religion in the life of culture. He has shown
the relation of religion to every great thing in civilisation, its
affinity with art, its common quality with poetry, its identity with all
profound activities of the soul. These all are religion, though their
votaries know it not. These are reverence for the highest, dependence on
the highest, self-surrender to the highest. No great man ever lived, no
great work was ever done, save in an attitude toward the universe, which
is identical with that of the religious man toward God. The universe is
God. God is the universe. That religionists have obscured this simple
truth and denied this grand relation is true, and nothing to the point.
The cultivated should be ashamed not to know this. Then, with a sympathy
with institutional religion and a knowledge of history in which he stood
almost alone, he retracts much that he has yielded, he rebuilds much
that he has thrown down, proclaims much which they must now concede. The
book was published in 1799. Twenty years later he said sadly that if he
were rewriting it, its shafts would be directed against some very
different persons, against glib and smug people who boasted the form of
godliness, conventional, even fashionable religionists and loveless
ecclesiastics. Vast and various influences in the Germany of the first
two decades of the century had wrought for the revival of religion. Of
those influences, not the least had been that of Schleiermacher's book.
Among the greatest had been Schleiermacher himself.

The religion of feeling, as advocated in the _Reden_, had left much on
the ethical side to be desired. This defect the author sought to remedy
in his _Monologen_, published in 1800. The programme of theological
stu