rm at Strauss's work in 1835.(748) It was
in 1810, in the depth of Prussian humiliation, when Halle had passed into
one of the kingdoms dependent on France, that the university of Berlin was
founded. Schleiermacher, Neander, and De Wette, were its teachers. The
first was the soul of its theological teaching; and through his agency it
became the great source of a religious reaction. It is around these names
that our studies most centre. The signs indeed of some other movements are
traceable. The deistic rationalism is not dead, but it is dying: it is a
thing of the past: a return to strict dogmatic orthodoxy is also visible
in the Lutheran clergy rather than in the university; but it is as yet in
its infancy: and a new form of gnosticism is observable in the philosophy
of Hegel, but the full development of it belongs to the next period. The
field is now occupied by the partial reaction to orthodoxy, which aimed at
a reconciliation of science and piety, of criticism and faith.(749)
Schleiermacher, with is follower Neander, will typify the philosophical
and more orthodox side of it; perhaps De Wette, and at the end of the
period Ewald, the critical.

Schleiermacher(750) was by education and sympathy eminently fitted to
attempt the harmony of science and faith, to which he devoted his life.
Gifted with an acute and penetrating intellect, capable of grappling with
the highest problems of philosophy and the minutest details of criticism,
he could sympathise with the intellectual movement of the old rationalism;
while his fine moral sensibility, the depth and passionateness of his
sympathy, the exquisite delicacy of his taste and brilliancy of
imagination, were in perfect harmony with the literary and aesthetic
revival which was commencing. German to the very soul, he possessed an
enthusiastic sympathy with the great literary movements of his age,
philosophical, classical, or romantic. The diligent student and translator
of Plato,(751) his soul was enchanted with the mixture at once of genius,
poetry, feeling, and dialectic, which marks that prince of thinkers, and
he was prepared by it for understanding the speculations of his time. The
dialectical process through which Plato's mind had passed (30) represents
not improbably, in some degree, the history of Schleiermacher's own mental
development as traceable in his works. The conviction derived from Plato's
early dialogues, that the mind, in travelling outward to study the
obje