XXV THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER, AS ILLUSTRATED BY HIS LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE1 I. ON the fifteenth of February, 1834, the city of Berlin witnessed a remarkable funeral. Twelve students of the university bore upon their shoulders a coffin covered with a black pall, upon which rested a large copy of the Bible. Twenty-four other students served as a guard of honor. Then came a procession on foot fully a mile in length, and this was followed by a hundred mourning coaches, those of the king and of the crown prince leading the way. Along the whole line of march the streets were bordered with dense crowds of reverent spectators, while additional thousands awaited the cortège at the cemetery. It was a day of universal sorrow, for the people of the German capital felt that their greatest intellectual and spiritual light had been put out. It was the funeral of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. To study Schleiermacher is to study a great man and a great life. Few men in history have so united intellectual acumen with tenderness of heart. He had extraordinary breadth of learning, but he had also an independent mind and the courage to stand for his 1 Lectures delivered before the McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Ill., December 5 and 7, 1911. MIA OL CYTILOKMIY 2 MISCELLANIES convictions. He taught New Testament introduction and interpretation, church history and the history of philosophy, dogmatic and practical theology, logic, psychology and metaphysics, philosophical and Christian ethics, æsthetics, pedagogics, and politics, and his published works on these subjects fill a score of volumes. Side by side with this university teaching proceeded his work as a preacher. For forty years there was scarcely a Sunday on which he did not address crowded congregations. He drew to hear him the wealth, the culture, the influence of Berlin. But the poor came as well as the rich, the unlettered as well as the learned, for he spoke of great things, of the love of God and of country, of communion with Christ and of family duty, of life and of death, until he was esteemed a sort of prophet and oracle, to whom a whole city looked for instruction, inspiration, and comfort, and in whom all men felt that they had a friend. All this was possible because of a natural warmth of temperament which sought affection, and gave affection in broad and unstinted ways. The life of Schleiermacher was a life of sensibility, of friendship, of love, quite as much as it was a life of intellect. But undiscriminating emotion would never have given him the influence which he exerted upon his contemporaries. What impressed and attracted men was the fact that this tremulous feeling was at the service of a clear judgment, and was used to enforce the claims of truth. He was no repeater of outworn phrases, no follower of current traditions. He was a man of insight; he preached what he had seen and felt; the |
