pecially their associations, she is accused of pride, and of an assumption of superiority; if she lowers her standard of duty in these respects she is misrepresented in the opposite direction. If she from principle is a keeper at home, she is misinterpreted; if from a desire to conciliate she goes much abroad, the motive thereof is misconstrued. This picture, unhappily, is not overdrawn, although it is by no means a portrait of every Church or congregation: far from it. If there be any woman who should receive charitable judgment from Christian people, it is the preacher's wife. As we said at the commencement of this article, her position is most difficult and delicate. She has responsibilities without power, and duties which reach to the very verge of contradictory obligations. Her sense of duty points in so many directions at the same time, that she is often sadly perplexed how to act, her very anxiety often giving a seeming uncertainty to her movements as she staggers beneath the burden of having to satisfy the expectations of a many-minded Church membership. Say we not truly that it is her right to have all her actions judged in a spirit of Christian love and charity?

She has an undoubted claim also to the fervent prayers and active sympathies of the whole Church. Prayer should be made for her continually, with special reference to her endowment with those qualities of mind and heart which are peculiarly necessary for one in her prominent position. It is painfully true that those who account her the servant of the Church, in the same sense and almost in the same degree as her husband, fail to remember her as uniformly and specifically in their prayers as they do him. Such have no excuse for this forgetfulness of her. But whatever position be assigned to her in the Church, the preacher's wife needs special grace and wisdom, and should have ever with her the encouraging consciousness that her husband's people are earnestly praying for her; that

"When in secret, solemn prayer,

Their happy spirits find access;
When they're breathing all their care,

Sweetly at a throne of grace,"

they present her also before God and are prevailing on her behalf. To prayer for her should be added a tender and active

sympathy, manifested by those little courtesies grateful to every woman, especially to one in a responsible public position, and by acts of kindness delicately performed. Let her feel that there is quite as much disposition to promote her happiness as to exact a round of duties from her, and the result will be an increased union and affection between the preacher's wife and the people of her husband's charge.

There is another point on which we think a mistake is made with respect to the duty of a preacher's wife, and by which her time and energies are taxed far beyond what is just to her husband and family. We refer to the practice of expecting and requiring the pastor's wife to be principal manager or directress of the numerous benevolent societies which, to the honor of the Church, exist in its various charges. This error has been glanced at in the preceding remarks, but it deserves special mention because unmerited censure has too often been cast upon the most excellent of women, who have not found it convenient or even practicable, consistently with their duty as Christian wives and mothers, to take this position when it has been assigned to them by their sisters in the Church. Every rule has its exceptions, and there may be cases where, to some considerable extent, a minister's wife may comply with this requirement, as when she has no family, and her husband's salary permits good and sufficient domestic help; or where her family are grown up, and no longer need a mother's constant watchfulness and arduous care. When circumstances thus favor her it may be very proper, may, indeed, become her duty, to bear her full share of such responsibilities. But only in such exceptional cases can we see any reason why the onerous burdens of such offices should be imposed upon her. These associations belong to the membership and not to the pastorate. They are lay and not clerical organizations. The labor and the honor of their management and direction, therefore, should devolve upon the wives of laymen: of trustees, or leaders, or stewards, or private members. And this for the obvious reason that, however much consideration and delicacy may be shown to the preacher's wife in the matter of trespassing upon her time and domestic occupations, her regard for her husband's acceptability and her own good name in the Church will lead her to make visits and perform other acts

which are not expected from other wives. These, let it be kindly remembered, are on her part acts of pure benevolence and Christian love, and are additional to those ministerial and pastoral duties for which her husband, and not she, is pecuniarily remunerated.

ART. IV. SCHLEIERMACHER, DE WETTE, AND HARMS.

[FROM HAGENBACH'S HISTORY OF THE CHURCH IN THE XVIII
AND XIX CENTURIES.]

SCHLEIERMACHER was born in Breslau, Nov. 21, 1768, and acquired his earlier education, secular as well as theological, at the Moravian Institutions of Niesky and Barby. And if somewhat later he left the brotherhood and continued his studies at Halle upon a different system, still, down to the end of life, he never ceased to acknowledge the beneficial influence of his early Moravian training. "Piety," says he, "was the maternal womb in whose holy obscurity my young life was nourished and prepared for the world to which it was still a stranger; in it my spirit breathed before it had found its sphere in science and the experience of life." While chaplain in the hospital in Berlin from 1796 to 1802, Schleiermacher fell into intimate relations with the brothers Schlegel and other bold spirits of the Romantic school, and to this period, in which his Platonic studies fall, belong his two early works, "The Discourses concerning Religion," and the "Monologues." We begin with the latter because they present us with a better view of the interior life of the man than could be given by any merely outward biography, and because they reveal him as he stood before his own consciousness and that of his cotemporaries.

While Goethe regards self-scrutiny and self-observation as something morbid, Schleiermacher asserts exactly the opposite, and seems to have Goethe in his mind when he says: "Whoever knows and sees only the outer manifestations of the spirit, instead of the life which moves concealed within; whoever,

is

instead of contemplating himself, does nothing but gather together from far and near an image of his outer life and its vicissitudes, must ever remain a slave of time and necessity, and whatever he thinks and devises must bear their stamp." From the Monologues of Schleiermacher a spirit breathes upon us like to that of Fichte. To get possession of himself, to bear eternal life in himself even in this world, to become conscious of his Ego as something indestructible, this was the goal toward which everything tended. "Begin now," said he, "thine eternal life in perpetual self-inspection, grieve not for that which is passing away, but be careful not to lose thyself, and weep if thou art borne away by the stream of time without carrying heaven within thee. To be a man a single resolve is sufficient; whoever makes it a man forever; whoever ceases to be a man never was one." Thus with proud satisfaction did the preacher recall the hour in which he had found the consciousness of humanity, not by means of a system of philosophy, but through the inner revelation of one luminous moment, by his own act; and he assures us that from that hour he never lost himself. In distinct opposition to the abstract, generalizing ethics which regards all men as mere mathematical quantities, as fragments of one and the same mass, Schleiermacher declares in the Monologues that every man must develop humanity in his own way. He freely confessed that the vocation of the artist, who moulds the outer world into shapes of beauty and rejoices in the perfection of form, was something quite foreign to him; and herein we again see him distinctly contrasted with Goethe. He regarded it as his mission, his destiny, not to represent a permanent work without, but to labor upon himself within. And this destiny, this mission, he expected to work out only in communion with others. With him, however, the true communion was that wherein each freely allows the other to act according to his own peculiarities, and yet each completes the other, so that altogether they may exhibit the true picture of humanity. A strong but noble self-reliance, rising almost to prophecy in respect to his own future, finds utterance in the following striking passage from the Monologues:

Unenfeebled will I bring my spirit down to life's closing period; never shall the genial courage of life desert me; what gladdens me

...

now shall gladden me ever; my imagination shall continue lively, and my will unbroken, and nothing shall force from my hand the magic key which opens the mysterious gates of the upper world, and the fire of love within me shall never be extinguished. I will not look upon the dreaded weakness of age; I pledge myself to supreme contempt of every toil which does not concern the true end of my existence, and I vow to remain forever young. The spirit which impels man forward shall never fail me, and the longing which is never satisfied with what has been, but ever goes forth to meet the new, shall still be mine. This is the glory I shall seek, namely, to know that my aim is infinite, and yet never to pause in my course. . . I shall never think myself old until my work is done, and that work will not be done while I know and will what I ought. To the end of life I am determined to grow stronger and livelier by every act, and more vital through every self-improvement; I will wed youth to age, so that the latter may be filled and thoroughly penetrated with inspiring warmth.. Through self-study man raises himself to a position which despondency and weakness cannot approach, for eternal youth and joy sprout from the consciousness of inward peace and its action. So much has been accomplished and shall never be yielded; therefore when the light of my eyes shall fade, and the gray hairs shall sprinkle my blond locks, my spirit shall still smile. No event shall have power to disturb my heart; the pulse of my inner life shall remain fresh while life itself endures.

Schleiermacher kept his word. All who knew him in his later years will recall with pleasure the impression made upon them by the appearance of this youthful old man. And yet, whoever will be at the pains to compare this language of the Monologues with the author's later writings must be struck with the fact that the moral courage, the trust in his own strength, the almost reckless moral boldness here expressed, is widely different from the meekness of that feeling of dependence which finally became the root of Schleiermacher's theology. Schleiermacher felt this himself in after years, and in a new edition of the Monologues explained that he had only given an ideal of his nature, toward which he strove, and that the self-inspection was therefore made solely from the ethical standpoint, while its religious element did not appear. He was anxious on account of the onesided notion of his own personality, produced by the Monologues, practically to counteract them, and by a series of religious soliloquies to supply what the little book lacked, but he never did it. This lack, however, may be considered as measurably supplied by his Discourses on Religion, which apFOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.-26