dies for the new University of Berlin, _Kurze Darstellung des
Theologischen Studiums_, 1811, shows his theological system already in
large part matured. His _Der christliche Glaube_, published in 1821,
revised three years before his death in 1834, is his monumental work.
His _Ethik_, his lectures upon many subjects, numerous volumes of
sermons, all published after his death, witness his versatility. His
sermons have the rare note which one finds in Robertson and Brooks.
All of the immediacy of religion, its independence of rational argument,
of historical tradition or institutional forms, which was characteristic
of Schleiermacher to his latest day, is felt in the _Reden_. By it he
thrilled the hearts of men as they have rarely been thrilled. It is not
forms and traditions which create religion. It is religion which creates
these. They cannot exist without it. It may exist without them, though
not so well or so effectively. Religion is the sense of God. That sense
we have, though many call it by another name. It would be more true to
say that that sense has us. It is inescapable. All who have it are the
religious. Those who hold to dogmas, rites, institutions in such a way
as to obscure and overlay this sense of God, those who hold those as
substitute for that sense, are the nearest to being irreligious. Any
form, the most _outre_, bizarre and unconventional, is good, so only
that it helps a man to God. All forms are evil, the most accredited the
most evil, if they come between a man and God. The pantheism of the
thought of God in all of Schleiermacher's early work is undeniable. He
never wholly put it aside. The personality of God seemed to him a
limitation. Language is here only symbolical, a mere expression from an
environment which we know, flung out into the depths of that we cannot
see. If the language of personal relations helps men in living with
their truth--well and good. It hinders also. For himself he felt that it
hindered more than helped. His definition of religion as the feeling of
dependence upon God, is cited as evidence of the effect upon him of his
contention against the personalness of God. Religion is also, it is
alleged, the sentiment of fellowship with God. Fellowship implies
persons. But to no man was the fellowship with the soul of his own soul
and of all the universe more real than was that fellowship to
Schleiermacher. This was the more true in his maturer years, the years
of the magnificent r
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