believed in the Semitic myths of creation, as given in Genesis:
long before the end of it they had more or less explicitly
rectified their beliefs in the light of new natural science and
new archæology. The change became rapid after 1860; but it had
been led up to even in the period of reaction. While in France,
under the restored monarchy, rationalistic activity was mainly
headed into historical, philosophical, and sociological study,
and in England orthodoxy predominated in theological discussion,
the German rationalistic movement went on among the specialists,
despite the liberal religious reaction of Schleiermacher, [1766]
who himself gave forth such an uncertain sound. His case and that of
his father, an army chaplain, tell signally of the power of the mere
clerical occupation to develop a species of emotional belief in one who
has even attained rationalism. When the son, trained for the church,
avowed to his father (1787) that he had lost faith in the supernatural
Jesus, the father professed to mourn bitterly, but three years later
avowed that he in his own youth had preached Christianity for twelve
years while similarly disbelieving its fundamental tenet. [1767] He
professionally counselled compromise, which the son duly practised,
with such success that, whereas he originally addressed his Discourses
on Religion (1799) to "the educated among its despisers," he was able
to say in the preface to the third edition, twenty years later (1821),
that the need now was to reason with the pietists and literalists, the
ignorant and bigoted, the credulous and superstitious. [1768] In short,
he and others had been able to set up a fashion of poetic religion
among deists, but not to lighten the darkness of orthodox belief.
The ostensible religious revival associated with Schleiermacher's
name was in fact a reaction of temperament, akin to the romantic
movement in literature, of which Chateaubriand in France was the
exponent as regarded religious feeling. The German "rationalism"
of the latter part of the eighteenth century, with its stolid
translation of the miraculous into the historical, and its official
accommodation of the result to the purposes of the pulpit, had not
reached any firm scientific foundation; and Schleiermacher on the other
side, protesting that religion was a matter not of knowledge but of
feeling, attracted alike the religious emotionalists, the seekers of
compromise, and the romantics. His personal and literary charm, and
his tolerance of mundane morals, gave him a German vogue not unlike
that of Chateaubriand in France. His intellectual cast and ultimate
philosophic bias, however, together with his freedom of private life,
[1769] ultimately alienated him from the orthodox, and thus it was that
he died (1834) in the odour of heresy. Heresy, in fact, he had preached
from the outset; and it was only in a highly emancipated society that
his teaching could have been fashionable. The statement that by his
Discourses "with one stroke he overthrew the card-castle of rationalism
and the old fortress of orthodoxy" [1770] is literally quite false,
for the old compromising pseudo-rationalism survived a long while,
and orthodoxy still longer; and it is quite misleading inasmuch as
it suggests a resurgence of faith. The same historian proceeds to
record that some saw in the work "only a slightly disguised return
to superstition, and others a brilliant confession of unbelief." "The
general public saw in the Discourses a new assault of romanticism upon
religion. The clergy in particular were painfully aroused, and did not
dissemble their irritation. Spalding himself could not restrain his
anger." Schleiermacher's friend Sach, who had passed the Discourses
in manuscript, woke up to denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic,
and denuded of the ideas of God, immortality, and morality. [1771]
In England the work would have been so denounced on all sides; and
the bulk of Schleiermacher's teaching would there have been reckoned
revolutionary and "godless." He was a lover of both political and
social freedom; and in his Two Memoranda on the Church Question in
regard to Prussia (1803) he made "a veritable declaration of war on the
clerical spirit." [1772] Recognizing that ecclesiastical discipline
had reached a low ebb, he even proposed that civil marriage should
precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory; besides planning a
drastic subjection of the Prussian Church to State regulation. [1773]
In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, of which he
denied the authenticity, he played the part of a "destructive"
critic. [1774] He "saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of
confessionalism"--that is, the movement for an exact statement of
creed. [1775] Nor can it be said that, despite his attempts in later
life to reach a more definite theology, Schleiermacher really held
firmly any Christian or even theistic dogma. He seems to have been
at bottom a pantheist; [1776] and the secret of his attraction for
so many German preachers and theologians then and since is that he
offered them in eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of
faith which avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious
rationalism to reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and
the dogged refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to
explain away. Philosophically and critically speaking, his teaching
has no lasting intellectual substance, being first a negation of
intellectual tests and then a belated attempt to apply them. It is not
even original, being a development from Rousseau and Lessing. But it
had undoubtedly a freeing and civilizing influence for many years; and
it did little harm save insofar as it fostered the German proclivity to
the nebulous in thought and language, and partly encouraged the normal
resistance to the critical spirit. All irrationalism, to be sure, in
some sort spells self-will and lawlessness; but the orthodox negation
of reason was far more primitive than Schleiermacher's. From that side,
accordingly, he never had any sympathy. When, soon after his funeral,
in which his coffin was borne and followed by troops of students,
his church was closed to the friends who wished there to commemorate
him, it was fairly clear that his own popularity lay mainly with the
progressive spirits, and not among the orthodox; and in the end his
influence tended to merge in that of the critical movement. [1777]