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tranquil and contented at home, he transmitted to his successor humbled, enfeebled, dissatisfied, prepared to undergo the reaction of the regency, and of the whole of the eighteenth century, and thus placed upon the fatal slope leading to the Revolution of 1789." (Pp. 585–587.)

Many thanks to you, M. Weiss, for your truly interesting volume. We are happy to assure you that it has been admirably translated. It has endeared to us, more than ever, the memory of the Protestants of France. It has held up the mirror to Providence, and disclosed scenes of its past doings, from which princes and priests would do well to take a lesson for the future. It teaches the persecutor to cease from boasting, and the persecuted never to despair. It has unfolded to us, in a documentary form, beyond all disputing, the malignant influence of Popery on the peace and prosperity of communities; and, at the same time, revealing the undying principles of the Protestant faith, it holds out the blessed prospect that these are yet destined to mould the fates of society, to cleanse its bosom of that "perilous stuff" which weighs upon its vitals, and to ameliorate the condition of the human family.

ART. VII.-Gallery of the Chief Living Theologians of the Universities of Germany.

[THE following series of tableaux by Dr Schaff was published in German in the course of last year, in the "Deutsche Kirchenfreund," the organ of the German Churches in the United States. We present an abridged translation of it to our readers, under the impression that the information which it contains respecting many of the most celebrated living theologians of Germany will be found both interesting and useful. Dr Schaff writes with all the advantage of one who is not only familiar with the writings of his distinguished countrymen, but who has enjoyed personal intercourse, more or less intimate, with the most of them. Allowance, however, will require to be made for the natural partiality with which he views them, for the thoroughly German standard by which he estimates their merits, and for the occasional introduction of his development theory, referred to in a previous paper in this Number.]

I. BERLIN.

The university of Berlin was founded so late as the year 1810; but in a short time,-partly through the liberality of its founder, Frederick William III., who gave for its use, besides many other privileges, a magnificent building in the finest part of the city, not far from the royal palace; partly from the

advantage of its position in the capital of the kingdom; but above all from a rare union of the highest talents in all its faculties, it had the good fortune to attain to an extraordinary degree of prosperity, and to take rank as the metropolis of German science and learning. There have taught together, or in succession, and in part still teach, theologians such as Schleiermacher, Neander, Marheineke, and De Wette; jurists such as Savigny, Heffter, Puchta, and Stahl; philosophers such as Fichte, Hegel, Steffens, and Schelling; philologists and investigators of antiquity such as Böckh, Lachmann, the two Grimms, and Lepsius; historians like Raumer, Ranke, and Pertz; naturalists and physicians like Ehrenberg, Müller, Schönlein, and others,-illustrious names which enjoy in their several departments a European fame, and even in the New World are pronounced with respect and admiration. According to the latest statistics, the number of its teachers, including the private-tutors (privat-docenten), exceeds 150, and that of the students 2000, so that it has recovered from the troubles of the revolution of 1848. The theological faculty has indeed recently lost its greatest celebrity, Dr Neander; but it is still one of the first, if not the very first in the world. It reckons at present five ordinary professors,-Twesten, Strauss, Nitzsch, Hengstenberg, Lehnerdt, in addition to several extraordinary professors and private tutors.

Dr Twesten.

Dr Twesten was called from Kiel to succeed Schleiermacher (who died in 1834), as professor of systematic theology, especially of dogmatics. Coming after the most gifted and celebrated, though by no means the most orthodox theologian of recent times, his position was a very difficult one,-and he had to meet demands of the largest kind, such as could only be satisfied by a natural genius as rare as that of his predecessor. And if in this respect he is inferior to him, he deserves, on the other hand, a decided preference with respect to his theological views, which are better adapted to meet the practical wants of students, and to promote the edification of the church, than the most able, acute, and stimulating hypotheses. Twesten feels indeed, as is meet, the greatest respect and gratitude towards Schleiermacher, and, in a general sense, belongs to his school, the peculiarity of which may be described in a few words to be this, that it strives to reconcile Christianity with the scientific culture of the age, revelation with reason, and our sense of God with our consciousness of nature; and in this effort it makes the personal Christ the living centre of the whole of theology, and leads back the latter from the abstract theories of rationalism and supernaturalism, as well as of

Hegelian intellectualism, to the living fountain of Christian experience, or of the so-called Christian consciousness-this experience, however, being viewed with too decided a preference for the subjective element, while the objective elements of biblical teaching and the teaching of the church are denied their full claims. Twesten defends, in his Introduction to Dogmatics, the fundamental idea of Schleiermacher with respect to the essence of religion, which, in our view, is a onesided one, and which Morell has recently endeavoured to naturalise in England, although with a misunderstanding of it of no small importance, and, as it seems, without much success, -this idea, namely, that the essence of religion is neither thought nor volition-neither theory nor practice-but feeling, -the feeling of absolute dependence upon God,* operating afterwards, it is true, upon both the other active powers of thought and volition. Against this definition, the very same objection of one-sidedness may be raised which Schleiermacher brings against the other two, which place the essence of religion either onesidedly in knowledge, or as onesidedly in volition; and the only true view appears to us to be this-that the essence of religion consists in the communion of the whole man with God-both as feeling, thinking, and willing; that it is a life, and, upon the specially Christian platform, a new supernatural life of regeneration-the life of Christ in manwhich is designated to interpenetrate and to glorify equally all the parts and powers of the natural life, head, heart, and will, and eventually even the body itself, and which is quite as much a life of freedom in God, as a life of dependence upon God. But Twesten, while agreeing in the main with Schleiermacher in his feeling-theory, lays more stress than he does upon the element of knowledge; and what is still more important, upon the knowledge which is apprehended by a sound faith. This shows itself especially in the second volume of his Dogmatics, which succeeded the first in 1837, after an interval of eleven years. There the predilection is evident which he feels for the old Protestant, and especially the Lutheran theology, which reduced the ideas of the Reformation to a well-arranged system; and in that work the spirit of the Schleiermacher school only serves to give a new life to the reproduction of the Lutheran scholasticism of the 17th century,-to clothe with flesh and blood, so to speak, the skeleton of its acute definitions and

*The feeling of absolute dependence, and not "the absolute feeling of dependence," as Morell, in "The Philosophy of Religion," erroneously translates the phrase of Schleiermacher, "Schlechthiniges Abhängigkeitsgefühl," although Schleiermacher's exacter definition of it, and his whole explanation, (Dogmatik Th. I. § 4,) proves clearly enough that the absolute belongs to the dependence and not to the feeling. This is an important difference, for we cannot, with any propriety, speak of an absolute feeling. The objections, therefore, which have been made to Morell's doctrine, in this respect, have weight indeed, as against him, but none at all as against Schleiermacher.

distinctions to adapt it to the advanced modern taste, and to the scientific views of the present day, an adaptation, however, which involves several peculiar modifications and developments of the old system. For Twesten by no means regards the old Lutheran orthodoxy as infallible and incapable of improvement. Substantially, it is true, he goes back to the symbolical books, herein departing from the example of Schleiermacher, and casting away his heretical views; but this retrogressive movement is, at the same time, an advance,-an advance corresponding to the progress made since the time of Schleiermacher in the needs of the Protestant theology and church. Another point in which he departs from the strict spirit of confessionalism, is his attachment, though with a preponderance of the Lutheran spirit, to the union of the two confessions in the Prussian church. Upon this subject he expresses himself very distinctly in the preface to the second volume, page 15, in the following words:

No one

"It was the great error of the older Lutheran theologians,—but not of the Lutheran alone, but more or less of all alike, that they would only suffer trees of one kind to grow within the enclosure of the church, at least of the Lutheran church. No one can more deeply regret than I do that the two evangelical churches kept themselves apart, that the Melancthonian type of doctrine was excluded, and that a Calixtus, an Arndt, a Spener, were encountered by such violent hostilities. can more heartily rejoice than I do, that in this respect a new era has arrived, that in a large part of Germany, both Lutheran and Reformed have come to an understanding with one another (I assume from real conviction, and not from any compulsion done to conscience,) to consider their confessional differences as no hindrance to church fellowship,that, where people are assured of agreement in the chief points of the gospel, they do not stand upon the letter of symbolical forms, in order to recognise each other as of one mind and spirit. Only it should not be overlooked that the old Lutheran doctrine must also have its right to be recognised and represented; and that when men claim liberty for every other view, but grudge it to this one, they act not less onesidedly and intolerantly than they blame it for having done. The theology of the present age, indeed, is by no means a mere reiteration of the old; but while, according to Schleiermacher, it concerns the sound and vigorous life of the church, that both tendencies should be represented in it, both the tendency which insists upon the permanent importance and reality of the old, which is often too lightly set aside, and the tendency which labours to cast every thing into a new shape, yet is it more the first of these tendencies than the second, to which the theology of our times adheres."

The dogmatic position of Twesten may therefore be briefly indicated thus the scholastic Lutheran orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, melted down and moulded anew by the scientific influence of Schleiermacher, and by the spirit of the

evangelical union. The great and invaluable points of superiority in his system, so far as it has appeared, are above all, its accuracy, thorough solidity, and transparent clearness. He writes nothing which he has not first considered on all sidessearched in every corner, and thoroughly digested. This peculiarity of his mind, which is connected with his strict conscientiousness, is no doubt also the reason of the remarkable slowness with which the excellent, and, in its kind, invaluable work, advances. The first edition of the first volume appeared so long ago as the year 1826, and even yet the work is not carried farther than the Angelology. The whole of the Anthropology, the Christology, the Soteriology, and the Eschatology, is yet wanting; and as caution, solidity, and conscientiousness are wont to grow with years and experience, the work perhaps may never be completed in his lifetime. It would be exceedingly unjust to find fault with the author on this account. It is rather to be traced, as already said, to a moral feature of his character. But Dr Twesten's inferiority in literary fertility to many other less gifted and less learned contemporaries is compensated by his zealous activity as an academic teacher, in which capacity he is distinguished, in a high degree, by an animated style of delivery, and by a rare gift of exposition. As a member of consistory, and an able man of business, he exercises a salutary conservative influence upon the government of the church.

Dr Nitzsch.

Dr Nitzsch was called from Bonn to Berlin several years ago, to succeed Marheineke. He takes rank among the first theologians of the present day, and is, moreover, a person of distinguished moral excellence, of impressive seriousness of character, and unassuming worth. He, too, belongs to the school of Schleiermacher, in the wider sense of the term, when it is viewed as including those theologians who have been more or less touched by the stimulating influence of that mighty genius, but who still, at the same time, possess a high degree of independence, and deviate from many of his peculiar views and innovations. Nitzsch has gone beyond him especially in this, that he lays much more stress than he did upon the practical and biblical elements of religion and theology, as Twesten does upon the theoretical and orthodox church divinity. While Twesten has gone back chiefly to the Lutheran church doctrine, Nitzsch, in his best-known work, "The System of Christian Doctrine" (5th edition, 1844), has given with compressed brevity an exhibition of dogmatics and ethics in their organic connection (without, however, intending to disapprove

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