own, a touching impression of
what the pietistic religion meant. The father had long before, unknown
to the son, passed through the torments of the rational assault upon a
faith which was sacred to him. He had preached, through years, in the
misery of contradiction with himself. He had rescued his drowning soul
in the ark of the most intolerant confessional orthodoxy. In the crisis
of his son's life he pitiably concealed these facts. They should have
been the bond of sympathy. The son, a sorrowful little motherless boy,
was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby. He was to
escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which
his father had passed. Even there the spirit of the age pursued him. The
precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race
was wrestling with. He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the
man he so revered. Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself
upon his father's mercy, only to be abused and measurelessly condemned.
He had his way. He resorted to Halle, turned his back on sacred things,
worked in titanic fashion at everything but the problem of religion. At
least he kept his life clean and his soul sensitive among the flagrantly
immoral who were all about him, even in the pietists' own university. He
laid the foundations for his future philosophical construction. He
bathed in the sentiments and sympathies, poetic, artistic and
humanitarian, of the romanticist movement. In his early Berlin period he
was almost swept from his feet by its flood. He rescued himself,
however, by his rationalism and romanticism into a breadth and power of
faith which made him the prophet of the new age. By him, for a
generation, men like-minded saved their souls. As one reads, one
realises that it was the pietists' religion which saved him, and which,
in another sense, he saved. His recollections of his instruction among
the Herrnhuter are full of beauty and pathos. His sister never advanced
a step upon the long road which he travelled. Yet his sympathy with her
remained unimpaired. The two poles of the life of the age are visible
here. The episode, full of exquisite personal charm, is a veritable
miniature of the first fifty years of the movement which we have to
record. No one did for England or for France what Schleiermacher had
done for the Fatherland.

AEsthetic Idealism

Besides pietism, the Germany of the end of the eighteenth ce