§ 173. SURVEY OF RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS OF NINETEENTH CENTURY.
A reaction had set in against the atheistic spirit of the French
Revolution, and the victories of A.D. 1813, 1815, encouraged the
pious in their Christian confidence. Princes and people were full of
gratitude to God. Alexander I., Francis I., and Frederick William III.,
representing the three principal churches, in A.D. 1815, after the
political situation had been determined by the Congress of Vienna,
formed “the Holy Alliance,” a league of brotherly love for mutual
defence and maintenance of peace, to which all the European princes
adhered with the exception of the pope, the sultan, and the king of
England. Through Metternich’s arts it ultimately degenerated into an
instrument of repression and tyranny.--Incongruous elements were present
everywhere. The restoration of the papacy in A.D. 1814 had given a new
impulse to ultramontanism, as did also the Reformation centenary of
A.D. 1817 to Protestantism; while supernaturalism and pietism prevailing
in the Lutheran and Reformed churches led to renewed attempts at union.
Old sects were strengthened and new sects arose. Pantheism, materialism,
and atheism, as well as socialism and communism, without concealment
attacked Christianity; while pauperism and vagabondage, on the one hand,
and the Stock Exchange swindling of capitalists, on the other, spread
moral consumption through all classes of society. The ultramontanes, led
by the Jesuits, reasserted the most arrogant claims of the papacy. The
climax was reached when Pius IX. obtained a decree of council affirming
his infallibility, while by the Nemesis of history the royal crown was
torn from his head.
§ 174. NINETEENTH CENTURY CULTURE IN RELATION TO
CHRISTIANITY AND THE CHURCH.
Down to A.D. 1840, when zeal for it began to abate, philosophy
exercised an important influence on the religious development of the
age, both in the departments of science and of life. While rationalism
was not able to transcend the standpoint of Kant, the other theological
tendencies were more or less determined formally, and even materially
by the philosophical movements of this period. Alongside of philosophy,
literature, itself to a great extent coloured by contemporary philosophy,
exerted a powerful influence on the religious opinions of the more
cultured among the people. The sciences, too, came into closer relations,
partly friendly, partly hostile, to Christianity; and art in some of its
masterpieces paid a noble tribute to the church.
§ 174.1. =The German Philosophy= (§ 171, 10).--=Fries=, whose
philosophy was Kantian rationalism, modified by elements borrowed
from Jacobi, influenced such theologians as De Wette. =Schelling=,
in his “Philosophy of Identity,” had advanced from Fichte’s
idealism to a pantheistic naturalism. From Fichte he had learned
that this world is nothing without spirit; but while Fichte
recognised this world, the _non-ego_, as reality only in so far
as man seizes upon it and penetrates it by his spirit, and so
raises it into real being, Schelling regards spirit as nothing
else than the life of nature itself. In the lower stages of this
nature-life spirit is still slumbering and dreaming, but in man
it has attained unto consciousness. The nature-life as a whole,
or the world-soul, is God; man is the reflex of God and the
world in miniature, a microcosmos. In the world’s development God
comes into objective being and unfolds his self-consciousness;
Christianity is the turning point in the world’s history; its
fundamental dogmas of revelation, trinity, incarnation, and
redemption are suggestive attempts to solve the world’s riddle.
Schelling’s poetic view of the world penetrated all the sciences,
and gave to them a new impulse. Though hateful to the old
rationalists, this system found ardent admirers among the younger
theologians. As Schelling to Fichte, so =Hegel= was attached
to Schelling, and wrought his pantheistic naturalism into a
pantheistic spiritualism. Not so much in the life of nature as in
the thinking and doing of the human spirit, the divine revelation
is the unfolding of the divine self-consciousness from non-being
into being. Judaism and Christianity are progressive stages of
this process; Judaism stands far below classic paganism; but in
Christianity we have the perfect religion, to be developed into
the highest form of philosophy. The Protestant church doctrine
was now again accorded the place of honour. Marheincke developed
Lutheran orthodoxy into a system of speculative theology based on
Hegelian principles; while Göschel infused into it a pietist
spirit, which made many hail the new departure as the long-sought
reconciliation of theology and philosophy. But after Hegel’s
death in A.D. 1831 the condition of matters suddenly changed.
His school split into an orthodox wing following the master’s
ecclesiastical tendencies, and a heterodox wing which deified the
human spirit. Strauss, Bauer, and Feuerbach led this heterodox
party in theology, and Ruge in reference to social, æsthetic,
and political questions. Persecuted by the state in A.D. 1843,
the Young Hegelians joined the rationalists, whom they had before
sneered at as “antediluvian theologians.” =Schelling=, who had
been silent for almost thirty years, took Hegel’s chair in Berlin
as his decided opponent in A.D. 1841, and with his dualistic
doctrine of potencies, from which he finally advanced to a
Christian gnosticism, obtained a temporary influence among the
younger theologians. He died at the baths of Ragaz in Switzerland
in A.D. 1854. He flashed for a moment like a meteor, and as
suddenly his light was quenched.
§ 174.2. The domination of the Hegelian philosophy was overthrown
by the split in the school and the radicalism of the adherents
of the left wing, and Schelling in the second stage of his
philosophical development had not succeeded in founding any
proper school of his own. A group of younger philosophers, with
I. H. Fichte at their head, starting from the Hegelian dialectic,
have striven to free philosophy from the reproach of pantheism
and to develop a speculative theism in touch with historical
Christianity. Other members of this school are Weisse, Braniss,
Chalibæus, Ulrici, Wirth, Romang, etc.--=Herbart= renounces all
that philosophers from Fichte senior to Fichte junior had done,
and declares the metaphysical end of their systems beyond the
horizon of philosophy, which must limit itself to the province of
experience. His realism is in diametrical opposition to Hegel’s
idealism. Toward Christianity his philosophy occupies a position
of indifference. Influenced by Kant’s theory of knowledge as
well as by the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel idealism and Herbart’s
realism, with an infusion of Leibnitz’s monad doctrine, =Hermann
Lotze= of Göttingen has, since A.D. 1844, set forth a system of
“teleological idealism.” He develops his metaphysical principles
from what we have by immediate experience internal and external,
and the invariability of the causal mechanism in everything that
happens in the inner and outer world he explains as the realizing
of moral purposes.--=Schopenhauer’s= philosophy, which only in
the later years of his life (died A.D. 1860) began to attract
attention, is in spirit utterly opposed to the religion and
ethics of Christianity. Its task is to describe “The World as
Will and Idea;” first at that stage of entering into visibility
which is represented in man does will, the thing-in-itself,
become joined with idea, and makes its appearance now with it
over against the world as a conscious subject. But since idea
is regarded as a pure illusion of the will, this leads to a
pessimism which takes absolute despair as the only legitimate
moral principle. =E. von Hartmann= went still further in the
same direction in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” published
in 1869, of which an English translation in three vols. appeared
in 1884. He identifies the will with matter and idea with spirit,
demands in addition to the absolute despair of the individual
here and hereafter, the complete surrender of the personality to
the world-process in order to the attainment of its end, the
annihilation of the world. This dissolution of the world consists
in the complete withdrawal of the will into the absolute as
the only unconscious, so that at last the wrong and misery of
being produced by the irrational will are abolished in this
withdrawal. From this philosophical standpoint Hartmann attempted
in A.D. 1874 to take Christianity to pieces, showing some favour
to Vatican Catholicism, but pouring out the vials of his wrath
upon Protestantism. His “religion of the future” consists in a
yearning for freedom from all the burden and misery of being and
share in the world-process by relapsing into the blessedness of
non-being.--In France, England, and America much favour has been
shown to the atheistic-sensual Positivism of =Aug. Comte=, which,
excluding every form of theology and morals, requires only the
so-called exact sciences as the object of philosophy. On his later
notions of a “religion of humanity,” see § 210, 1. On essentially
similar lines proceeds =Herbert Spencer=, in his “System of
Synthetic Philosophy,” to whose school also Darwin belonged.
His followers are styled agnostics, because they regard all
knowledge of God and divine things as absolutely impossible,
and evolutionists, because their master endeavours to construct
all the sciences on the basis of the evolution theory.
§ 174.3. =The Sciences.=-Schelling’s profound theories were of
all the more significance from their not being restricted to
the philosophical strivings of his time, but inspiring the other
sciences with the breath of a new life. To the fullest extent
the natural sciences exposed themselves to this influence. There
was not wanting indeed a certain shadowy mysticism, to which
especially the fancies of mesmeric magnetism largely contributed;
but this fog gradually cleared away, and the Christian elements
were purified from their pantheistic surroundings. Steffens
and Von Schubert taught that the divine book of nature is to be
regarded as the reflex and expansion of the divine revelation in
Scripture. The Hegelian philosophy, too, seemed at first likely
to infuse a Christian spirit into the other sciences. In Göschel,
at least, there was a thinker who imparted to jurisprudence a
Christian character, and to Christianity a juristic construction.
In other respects Hegel’s philosophy in its application to the
other departments of science gave in many ways a predominance to
an abstruse dialectic tendency. Its adherents of the extreme left
sought to construct all sciences _a priori_ from the pure idea,
and at the same time to root out from them the last vestiges of
the Christian spirit.
The greatest names in natural science, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton,
Haller, Davy, Cuvier, etc., are household words in Christian
circles. All these and many more were firmly convinced that there
was no conflict between their most brilliant discoveries and
Christian truth. In A.D. 1825 the Earl of Bridgwater founded a
lectureship, and treatises on the power, wisdom, and goodness of
God as manifested in the creation, have been written by Buckland,
Chalmers, Whewell, Bell, etc. It was otherwise in Germany.
Even Schleiermacher, in his “Letters to Lücke,” in A.D. 1829,
expressed his fears of the prophesied overthrow of all Christian
theories of the world by the incontrovertible results of physical
research, and Bretschneider in his “Letters to a Statesman,” in
A.D. 1830, proclaimed to the world without regret that already
what Schleiermacher only feared had actually come to pass.
Physicists, awakening from the glamour of the Schelling nature
philosophy, pronounced all speculation contraband, and declared
pure empiricism, the simple investigation of actual things, the
only permissible object of their labour. And although they handed
over to theologians and philosophers questions about spirit in
and over nature, as not belonging to their province, a younger
generation maintained that spirit was non-existent, because it
could not be discovered by the microscope and dissecting knife.
Carl Vogt defined thought to be a secretion of the brain,
and Moleschott regarded life as a mere mode of matter and
man’s existence after life only as the manuring of the fields.
Feuerbach proclaimed that “man is what he eats,” and Buchner
[Büchner] popularized these views into a gospel for social
democrats and nihilists. Oersted, the famous discoverer of
electro-magnetism, had sought “the spirit in nature,” but the
spirit which he found was not that of the Bible and the church.
The grandmaster of German scientific research, Alex. von Humboldt,
saw in the world a cosmos of noble harmony as a whole and in its
parts, but of Christian ideas in God’s great book of nature he
finds no trace. In A.D. 1859 the great English naturalist Darwin,
died A.D. 1882, introduced into the arena the theory of “Natural
Selection,” by means of which the modification and development of
the few primary animal forms through the struggle for existence
and the survival of the fittest by sexual selection is supposed,
in millions, perhaps milliards, of years, to have brought
forth the present variety and manifoldness of animal species.
Multitudes of naturalists now accept his theory of the descent
of men and apes from a common stem.--In =Medicine= De Valenti on
the Protestant side, with pietistic earnestness, maintains that
Christian faith is a vehicle of healing power; while a circle in
Munich on the Catholic side make worship of saints and the host a
_conditio sine qua non_ of all medicine. A more moderate attitude
is assumed by the Roman Catholic Dr. Capellmann of Aachen, in his
“Pastoral Medicine.”
§ 174.4. Of Christian =Jurists= we have, on the Protestant
side, Stahl, Savigny, Puchta, Jacobson, Richter, Meier, Scheuerl,
Hinschius, etc.; and on the Catholic side, Walther, Philipps, etc.
Among =Historians=, the greatest in modern times is Leopold von
Ranke, who, with his disciples, occupies a thoroughly Christian
standpoint. There has appeared, however, on the part of many
Protestant historians, such as Voigt, Leo, Mentzel, Vorreiter,
Hurter, Gfroerer [Gfrörer], etc., a tendency in the most
conspicuous manner to recognise and admire the brilliant
phenomena of mediæval Catholicism, even going to the length
of renouncing the vital principles of Protestantism, and
glorifying a Boniface, a Gregory VII., and an Innocent III.,
and characterizing the Reformation as a revolution. Ultramontanes
have been only too ready to turn to their own use all such
concessions, but show no inclination to make similar admissions
damaging to their side, so that with them history consists rather
in the abuse of everything Protestant as vile and perfidious,
instead of being a record of independent research. Janssen
[Jansen] of Frankfort stands out prominently above the billows
of the “_Kulturkampf_” (§ 197), as the greatest master of this
ultramontane style of history making.--=Geography=, first raised
to the rank of a science by Carl Ritter, received from its great
founder a Christian impress and owes much of its development to
the researches of Christian missionaries. Finally, =Philology=,
in the hands of Creuzer, Görres, Sepp, etc., unfolds in a
Christian spirit the religion and mythology of classical paganism;
and in the hands of Nägelsbach and Lübker expounds the religious
life of the ancient world in relation to Christian truth.
§ 174.5. =National Literature= (§ 171, 11).--To some extent
Goethe, but much more decidedly the romantic school of poets, was
attached to Schelling’s philosophy of nature. The romanticists
developed a deep religiousness of feeling, as shown in Novalis
and La Motte Fouqué, and violent opposition to rationalistic
theology as shown in Tieck, which in the case of Fr. Schlegel ran
to the other extreme of moral frivolity as seen in his “Lucinde.”
The romantic school as thus represented by Schlegel was joined by
the party of Young Germany with its gospel of the rehabilitation
of the flesh. Its mouthpiece was the gifted poet Heine.
The pantheistic deification of nature by Schelling, and
the self-deification of the Hegelian school obtained poetic
expression in Leop. Schafer’s _Laienbrevier und Weltpriester_,
as well as in Sallet’s _Laienevangelium_; while the sympathies
of the young Hegelians with the revolutionary movements gained
utterance in the poems of Herwegh, and in a more serious
tone in those of Freiligrath. More recently the views of
the _Protestantenverein_ (§ 180) have found their poetical
representative in Nic. Eichhorn, whose “Jesus of Nazareth,” a
tragical drama, 1880, deals with the life, works, and sufferings
of the “historical Christ,” after the style of free Protestant
science, with rich psychological analysis of the character in a
brilliant imaginative production. Though composed with a view to
theatrical representation, it has never yet been put on the stage.
§ 174.6. The Christian element was present in the noble patriotic
songs of E. M. Arndt[525] and Max. von Schenkendorf much more
distinctly than in the romantic school. Enthusiasm in the
struggle for freedom awakened faith in the living God. Uhland’s
lovely lyrics, with their enthusiasm for the present interests
of the Fatherland, entitle him to rank among patriotic poets, and
their brilliant and profound rendering of the old German legends
places him in the romantic school, which, however, in clearness
and depth he leaves far behind. Without being a distinctively
Christian poet, his warm sympathy with the life of the German
people gives him a genuine interest in the Christian religion.
The same may be said of Rückert’s highly finished poems, which
transplanted the fragrant flowers of oriental sensuousness
and contemplativeness into the garden of German poetry. A more
decided Christian consecration of poetic genius is seen in the
noble and beautiful lyrics of Emanuel Geibel, died 1884, the
greatest and most Christian of the secular poets of the present.
Of those ordinarily ranked as sacred poets may be named Knapp,
Döring, Spitta, Garve, Vict. Strauss, etc., who for the most
part contributed their sacred songs to Knapp’s “_Christoterpe_”
(1833-1853). A later publication of equal merit, called the
“_Neue Christoterpe_,” has been edited since 1880 by Kögel, Baur,
and Frommel. But with all the Christian depth and spirituality,
freshness and warmth, which we meet with in the productions of
these Christian poets, none of them has been able to rise to
the noble simplicity, power, popular force, and fitting them for
church use, objectivity which are present in the old evangelical
church hymns. In this respect they all bear too conspicuously the
signature of their age, with its subjective tone and the noise
and turmoil of present conflicts. Of all modern poets, Rückert
alone approaches in his advent hymn the measure and spirit of the
old church song.--In the department of novels and romance there
has been shown an almost invariable hostility toward Christianity,
religion being either entirely avoided or held up to contempt by
having as its representatives, simpletons, hypocrites, or knaves.
§ 174.7. In =France=, Chateaubriand in his “_Genie du
Christianisme_” pronounces an eloquent eulogy on the half-pagan
Christianity of the Middle Ages. In another work he makes the
representatives of heathenism in the age of Constantine act like
Homeric heroes, and those of Christianity speak “like theologians
of the age of Bossuet.” Lamartine may be described as a Christian
romanticist. Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, Sue, Dumas,
etc., influenced by the Revolution, developed an antichristian
tendency; while naked naturalism, photographic realism in
depicting the lowest side of Parisian life, especially adultery
and prostitution, is represented by Flaubert, Daudet, De Goncourt,
Zola, etc.--In =Italy=, the amiable Manzoni gave noble expression
to Christian feeling in his “_Inni Sacri_,” and in his masterly
romance “_Promessi Sposi_;” and the famous poet Silvio Pellico,
in his “_La mia Prigioni_,” affords a noble example of the
sustaining power of true religion during ten years’ rigorous
imprisonment in an Austrian dungeon. The most gifted of modern
Italian poets, Giacomo Leopardi, sank into despairing pessimism,
which expressed itself in the domain of religion in biting
satire and savage irony. Among the poets of the present who,
with glowing patriotism, not only yearned for the deliverance
and unity of Italy, but also lived to see these accomplished,
and have since given expression, though from different political
and religious standpoints, to the desire for the reconciliation
of the free united kingdom with the irreconcilable church, the
most distinguished are Aleardi, Carducci, Imbriani, Guercini,
Cavalotti.--In =Spain=, Caecilia Böhl von Faber, although
the daughter of a German father, and educated in Germany,
introduced, under the name Fernan Caballero, the modern romance
in a thoroughly national Spanish style, and in a purely moral and
catholic Christian spirit. In the =Flemish Provinces=, Hendrik
Conscience, the able novelist, has described Flemish village
life in a spirit fully in sympathy with Christianity.--=England=
had in Lord Byron a poet of the first rank, who more than any
other poet had experience in himself of the convulsions and
contradictions of his age. In powerful and impressive tones he
sets forth the unreconciled disharmonies of nature and of human
life. Incurable pain, despair, weariness of life, and hatred
of mankind, without hope, yet without desire for reconciliation,
enthusiastic admiration of the ancient world, passionate love of
liberty and titanic pride in human might mingle with scenes of
grumbling, misery, and profligacy. On the other hand, the rich
and mostly solid English novel literature is prevailingly
inspired by a Christian spirit.
§ 174.8. =Popular Education.=--While the poetic national
literature for the most part found entrance only among the
cultured and adult circles, this age, almost as fond of
writing as of reading, produced an enormous quantity of books
for the people and for children. But only a few succeeded in
catching the proper tone for the masses and the youth, and
still fewer supplied their readers with what was genuinely pious.
Pestalozzi’s “_Lienhard und Gertrud_,” Hebel’s “_Schatzkästlein_,”
and Tschokke’s “_Goldmacherdorf_,” respected at least the
Christian feeling of the people, although they did not strengthen
or foster it. But, on the other hand, in recent years a number of
writers have appeared, thoroughly popular, and at the same time
thoroughly Christian, who, as popular poets and novelists, have
become apostles of Christian views, morals, and customs to the
people. The most distinguished of these are Jeremiah Gotthelf
(Albert Bitzius, died 1854), whose “Kate the Grandmother” was
translated in the _Sunday Magazine_ for 1865, Von Horn, Carl
Stöber, Wildenhahn, Nathusius, Frommel, Weitbrecht, etc. In the
Catholic church Albanus Stoltz, died 1883, developed a wonderful
power of popular composition, which, however, he subsequently put
at the service of a fanatical ultramontanism, and so sacrificed
much of its nobility and worth. From the enormous mass of
children’s books only extremely few attain their aim. In the
front rank stands the brilliant patriarch of Christian tale
writing, Von Schubert, died 1860. After him are Barth, the author
of “Poor Henry,” Stöber, and the Swiss Spyri, and the Catholic
Christian Schmid, author of the “Easter Eggs.”--The =Public
Schools=, especially under Dinter (died 1831), member of the
consistory and schoolboard of Königsberg, were for a long time
nurseries of the tame, flat, and self-satisfied rationalism of
the _ancien régime_; but since 1830, and more particularly in
consequence of the violent agitations of the seminary director
Diesterweg, who died in 1866, put to silence in 1847, but
still for his work in connexion with education always highly
respected, many of the teachers took a higher flight in the
naturalistic-democratic direction. By word and pen Diesterweg
carried on a propaganda in favour of a free and liberal education
for the people. His disciples, wanting his earnest Christian
spirit, carried out recklessly his radical tendencies, and now
the Christian faith has no more persistent foes than the teachers
of the public schools. In A.D. 1870, a Teachers’ Association in
Vienna gave a vote of 6,000 in favour of radicalism. At a Hamburg
meeting in A.D. 1872 of 5,100 teachers, progress was shown by
individuals raising their voices in defence of Christianity,
which, however, were generally drowned in shrieks and hisses.
A Teachers’ Evangelical Association held its ninth assembly
at Hamburg in A.D. 1881 with 1,500 members. Christian opinions
are now ably represented in schools, educational journals,
and literature. A burning question at present is whether the
national school should be preferred to the denominational school.
Liberals in church and state say it should; conservatives say
it should not; while both parties think their views supported by
the experience of the past. The Prussian minister of education,
Falk, A.D. 1872-1879, firmly insisted upon the development of the
national system, but his successors Von Puttkamer and Von Gossler
reverted to the denominational system. The German Evangelical
School Congress of Hamburg in October, 1882, demanded that both
elementary and secondary schools should have a confessional
character.
§ 174.9. =Art.=--The intellectual quickening called forth with
the opening of the new century imparted new spirit and life to
the cultivation of the arts. Winckelmann, died A.D. 1768, had
opened the way to an understanding of pagan classical art, and
romanticism awakened appreciation of and enthusiasm for mediæval
Christian art. The greatest masters of =Architecture= were
Schinckel, Klenze, and Heideloff. The foundation stone of the
final part of the Cologne cathedral was laid by a Protestant king,
Frederick William IV., in A.D. 1842, and the work was finished
by a Protestant builder in A.D. 1880. =Statuary= had three great
masters, who gave expression to profound Christian ideas in
bronze and marble, the Italian Canova, the German Dannecker,
and greatest of all, the Dane Thorwaldsen, whose Christ and the
Apostles and other works form a main attraction to visitors in
Copenhagen. Three younger German masters of the art, who have
heired their fame, are Rauch, Rietschl, and Drake.--In =Painting=
too a new era now began. A group of gay German artists in Rome,
with Overbeck at their head, formed a Society in A.D. 1813, and
mostly became perverts to Romanism. Peter Cornelius, the ablest
of the school, himself born a Catholic, answered his friends’
request to place Luther in a picture of the last judgment,
in hell: “Yes, but with the Bible in his hands and the devils
trembling before him”; and in a subsequent picture of the
judgment, he gave the German reformer his place among the saints
in heaven. His pupil, Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld is well known
by his “_Bibel in Bildern_.” Ludwig Richter, the Albert Dürer
of the nineteenth century and creator of the modern woodcut,
has filled German houses with his artistic and poetic creations,
which breathe of God, nature, and the family fireside. The
Frenchman, Gustave Doré of Strassburg, has also illustrated the
Bible in a manner worthy of ranking alongside of Schnorr, though
a characteristically French striving for effect is everywhere
discernible.--=Painted Glass= (§ 104, 14) for church windows
had during the eighteenth century passed almost wholly out of
use, but again in the nineteenth came into favour, and was made
at Dresden, Nuremberg, and Munich. The most eminent artist in
this department was Ainmiller of Munich, specimens of whose
workmanship are to be seen in all parts of the world.
§ 174.10. =Music and the Drama.=--In Vienna the three great
masters of musical composition, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven,
produced in the department of sacred music some of their noblest
works. Mendelssohn, in his St. Paul and Elijah and in his Psalms,
sought to reproduce the power and truth of the simple word of
God. An early death prevented him giving expression to his ideal
of Christ in music. The Hungarian virtuoso Liszt sacrifices
sacred calmness and dignity to theatrical effect. His son-in-law,
Richard Wagner, inspired by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, a richly
endowed poet and composer, proclaimed by his followers as the
Messiah of the music of the future, going back to mediæval legend,
has produced a _quasi_-Christian musical drama, in which the
gospel of pessimism takes the place of the gospel of the grace of
God.--Quite different is the Passion Play of the Bavarian village
Oberammergau, which is a reproduction of the mediæval mysteries
(§ 115, 12). It originated in a vow made in 1633 on the occasion
of a plague which visited the place, and is repeated every
ten years on the Sundays from the end of May to the middle
of September. The history of the Saviour’s passion is here
represented with interludes from Messianic Old Testament passages
explained by a chorus like that of the classical tragedy, with
appropriate scenery, drapery, and musical accompaniment. In
the presence of an immense concourse of strangers for whose
accommodation a large amphitheatre was been built, almost all the
villagers, men, women, and children, take part in the performance
and show rare artistic power. The text of the drama for the
most part agrees with the gospel narrative, only occasionally
interspersed with legend, and quite free from ultramontane
hagiology and mariolatry. The performance of A.D. 1850, and still
more that of A.D. 1880, attracted crowds of pilgrims and tourists
to the quiet and remote valley. An independent exhibition,
falling little behind the original in the artistic character
of its composition and production, was given, in 1883, on the
Sundays of July and August in the Tyrolese village of Brixlegg,
and was visited by similar crowds.
§ 175. INTERCOURSE AND NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN THE CHURCHES.
Protestants could recognise, as Catholics could not, elements of
truth and beauty in the creeds of their opponents. When a peaceful and
conciliatory spirit was shown by individual Catholic clergymen, it was
the occasion of suspicion and persecution on the part of the old Romish
party. Schemes of union were entertained by the Old Catholics (§ 190),
and negotiations were entered on by the Greek Orthodox church, on
the one hand, and the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, on the
other, but in both cases without any practical result. On the union
negotiations between the different Protestant sects, see § 178;
and on the Prusso-Anglican bishopric of Jerusalem, see § 184, 8.
Of the numerous conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism and
from Catholicism to Protestantism, we can here mention only such as
have excited public interest in some special way.
§ 175.1. =Romanizing Tendencies among Protestants.=--Not only
in England, where an important high-church party embraced a more
than half-Catholic Puseyism (§ 202, 2), but even in Protestant
Germany a Romanizing current set in on many sides. A taste for
the romantic, artistic, historical (§ 174, 5, 9, 4), as well
as feudalist-aristocratic and hyper-Lutheran ecclesiastical
tendencies led the way in this direction. Many sought rest in
the bosom of the church “where alone salvation is found,” while
others, too deeply rooted in evangelical truth, bewailed the
loss of “noble and venerable” institutions in the worship, life,
and constitution of the church, but were unable to accept the
various unevangelical accretions which made void the doctrine
of justification by faith alone. This was the position of Löhe
of Neuendettelsau, in point of doctrine a strict Lutheran,
who published a selection of Catholic legends as patterns of
self-denial for his deaconesses, wished to restore anointing of
the sick, etc. Some Protestant pastors expressed warm sympathy
with the Pope during his misfortunes in A.D. 1860, and approved
of the continuance of the papacy and the pope’s temporal dominion.
A conference of Catholics (Count Stolberg, Dr. Michelis, etc.)
and Protestants (Leo, Bindewald, etc.) at Erfurt in A.D. 1860,
on the basis of a common recognition of the moral advantages of
the papacy, sought to bring about a union of the churches. Still
more remarkable is the story told by the Old Catholic professor
Friedrich. Just before the opening of the Vatican Council,
certain evangelical pastors of Saxony wrote letters to Bishop
Martin of Paderborn, which Friedrich himself read, urging that at
the council permission should be given to priests to marry and to
give the cup in the communion to the laity, and promising that in
that case they themselves and many like-minded pastors would join
the Romish church. That the letters were written and received is
unquestionable; but it is doubtful whether folly and imbecility
or a wish to hoax and mystify, directed the pen. The writer or
writers, as the examination before the consistory of the locality
proved, are not to be sought among the pastors whose names are
appended. How far the Protestant ultra-conservative reactionary
party goes with the ultramontanes and how far it would aid the
overthrow and undermining of the Protestant state and evangelical
church, is shown by the conduct of the Privy Councillor and
Chief Justice Ludwig von Gerlach (§ 176, 1), who, in 1872, in
the Prussian House of Representatives, took his place among
the ultramontane party of the centre, hostile to the empire
and friendly to the Poles, and in his pamphlet “_Kaiser und
Papst_” of 1872 described the new German empire as an incarnate
antichrist. Also the Lutheran Guelphs of Hanover are zealous
supporters of all the demands of the centre in the Prussian
parliament and in the German Reichstag.
§ 175.2. =The Attitude of Catholicism toward
Protestantism.=--Every Catholic bishop has still on assuming
office to take the oath, _Hæreticos pro posse persequar_. The
Jesuits, restored in A.D. 1814, soon pervaded every section with
their intolerant spirit. The huge lie that Protestantism is in
matters of State as well as of church essentially revolutionary,
while Catholicism is the bulwark of the State against revolution
and democracy, was affirmed with such audacity that even
Protestant statesmen believed it. The Roman Jesuit Perrone
(§ 191, 9) taught the Catholic youth in a controversial Italian
catechism that “they should feel a creeping horror come over them
at the mere mention of the word Protestantism, more even than
when a murderous attack was made upon them, for Protestantism and
its defenders are in the religious and moral world just the same
as the plague and plague-stricken are in the physical world, and
in all lands Protestants are the scum of all that is vile and
immoral,” etc. In a pastoral of A.D. 1855, Von Ketteler, Bishop
of Mainz, compared the Germans, who by the Reformation rent
the unity of the church, to the Jews who crucified the Messiah.
Romish prelates have vied with one another in their abuse
of Protestants and Protestantism. In A.D. 1881, Leo XIII.
speaking of the spread of Russian nihilism, charged Protestant
missionaries with spreading the dominion of the prince of
darkness. Prof. Hohoff of Paderborn, in his “Hist. Studies on
Protestantism and Socialism,” Paderb., 1881, reiterated the
accusation: “Yes, it is so, Protestantism has begotten atheism,
materialism, scepticism, nihilism. The Reformation was the
murderer of all science, the greatest foe of culture and learning,
and the falsifier of all history.... Melanchthon’s _Loci_ may
be styled the most unscientific production in the domain of
dogmatics.... Yes, the Reformation has proved a prime source of
superstition, a step backward in the history of civilization....
The Catholic church has been the champion of conscience,
reason, and freedom.... No one is thoroughly capable of judging
historical facts without prejudice as the believing Catholic
Christian.”--But while the vast majority of Catholic writers
thus abuse Protestantism, others like Seltmann of Eberswald seek
to win over to the ranks of the Romish church those who can be
befooled by fair speeches. The “Protestant” correspondents in
Seltmann’s periodical write under the cloak of anonymity.--In
Spain the Reformation was long attributed to the Augustinians,
who were jealous of the Dominicans as the only dispensers of
indulgences, and to Luther’s desire to marry; but the poet Nuñez
de Arca in his “_Vision de Fray Martin_,” attributed it to the
corruption of the church and papacy of its time, and regarded
with sympathy the spiritual struggles of the reformer. Though as
a good Catholic he concludes his poem with the ban of the church
against Luther, he yet describes him as a just and well-deserving
man.
§ 175.3. =Romish Controversy.=--In the beginning of A.D. 1872
the Waldensian Professor Sciarelli published as a challenge
the thesis that the Apostle Peter never set foot in Rome, and
Pius IX. with childlike simplicity gave his consent to a public
disputation, which came off at Rome on 9th and 10th February.
Three Protestant champions, with Sciarelli at their head, were
confronted by three Catholics, headed by Fabiani, before 125
auditors admitted by ticket. Both sides claimed the victory; but
the shorthand reports were more widely read through Italy than
could be agreeable to the papal court.
§ 175.4. =Roman Catholic Union Schemes.=--While American
Protestant missionaries strove zealously for the conversion of
the schismatical Eastern Churches, Rome with equal diligence but
little success endeavoured to win over these and the orthodox
Greeks to her own communion. There was great joy over the
conversion of the =Bulgarians= to Romanism in A.D. 1860.
Taking advantage of a national movement for the restoration
of a patriarchate independent of Constantinople (§ 207, 3),
some French Jesuits succeeded in persuading a small number of
malcontents to agree to a union with Rome. In 1861 the pope
consecrated an old Bulgarian priest, Jos. Sokolski, archbishop
of the united Bulgarian church. Very soon, however, he and almost
all his followers returned to their allegiance to the Greek
Orthodox church. Leo XIII. in his _encyclical_ of A.D. 1880, by
giving conspicuous honour to Cyril and Methodius, and uttering
kind sentiments about the Christian church in the East, and
conferring high rank on dignitaries of the Eastern church,
seeks to smooth the way for a union of the two great churches.
§ 175.5. =Greek Orthodox Union Schemes.=--In A.D. 1867 the
Archbishop of Canterbury addressed a letter to the Patriarch
of Constantinople and the whole Eastern church, to open the way
to a common understanding and union of the churches, sending a
modern Greek translation of the Book of Common Prayer, and asking
their assistance at the consecration of an Anglican church at
Constantinople. The patriarch Gregorius [Gregory] granted this
request, and answered the letter in a friendly manner, passing
over the Anglican’s warnings against superstitious additions
to the doctrine, _e.g._ mariolatry, but characterizing all the
contrary doctrines of the Thirty-nine Articles as “very modern.”
At the same time vigorous measures were being taken with a
similar object by members of the Russian and of the Anglican
churches. In 1870 Professor Overbeck of Halle undertook to act
as intermediary in these negotiations. He had in 1865 published,
in answer to the papal encyclical with syllabus of December 8th,
1864 (§ 185, 2), a tract with the motto _Ex oriente lux_, in
which he placed the claims of the Orthodox eastern church before
the Roman Catholic as well as Protestant. On the opening of the
Vatican Council in 1869 he advocated in a pamphlet the breaking
up of the papal church and the formation of Catholic national
churches. In North America Professor Bjerring, of the Catholic
seminary for priests at Baltimore, took the same position. In
March, 1871, he went to St. Petersburg, was there ordained as
an Orthodox priest, and on his return to New York instituted a
Sunday service in the English language according to the Greek
rite. Of any further advance in this direction of union nothing
is known.
§ 175.6. =Old Catholic Union Schemes.=--Döllinger (§ 191, 5) in
A.D. 1871 was hopeful of a union not only with the Greek, but
also with the Anglican church, and similar hopes were entertained
in England and Russia, and distinguished representatives of both
communions took part in the Old Catholic congresses (§ 190, 1).
On the invitation of Döllinger, as president of the committee
commissioned by the Freiburg Congress of A.D. 1874 to treat
about union with the Anglican church, forty friends of union from
Germany, England, Denmark, France, Russia, Greece, and America
met in conference at Bonn. After a lively debate the cleft
between East and West was bridged over by a compromise treating
the _filioque_ as an unnecessary addition to the Nicene symbol,
and asserting that, however desirable a mutual understanding
on doctrinal questions might be, existing differences in
constitution, discipline, and worship presented no bar to
union. The Catholics presented the Anglicans with fourteen
theses essential to union, in which the anti-Protestant doctrines
were for the most part toned down, but transubstantiation
distinctly asserted. Subsequent conferences never got beyond
these preliminaries. It was, however, agreed that, in case of
necessity, Anglicans and Old Catholics might dispense the supper
to one another.
§ 175.7. =Conversions.=--The most famous converts of the century
were Hurter, the biographer of Innocent III., the Countess Ida
von Hahn-Hahn, writer of religious romances, Gfroerer [Gfrörer],
the church historian, the radical Hegelian Daumer, the historian
of ante-tridentine theology Hugo Lämmer, and Dr. Ed. Preuss, who
had written against the immaculate conception and for criminal
conduct had to flee the country. In A.D. 1844 Carl Haas, a
Protestant pastor, went over to the Romish church, but the two
new dogmas of Pius IX. led him to study the works of Luther. He
now returned to the Lutheran church, vindicating his procedure
in a treatise entitled, “To Rome, and from Rome back again to
Wittenberg, 1881.” Also the Mecklenburg Lutheran pastor, Dr. A.
Hager, who, after his conversion, had undertaken the editorship
of an ultramontane newspaper in Breslau in 1873, was obliged
in a few years to resign the appointment. His return to the
evangelical church was being talked about, when he suddenly died
in 1883, after having received the last sacrament in the Catholic
church. The climax of abuse of Luther and the Lutheran church was
reached by the Hanoverian Evers, who had gone over in 1880; in
all his scandalous and vituperative writings he describes himself
on the title page as “formerly Lutheran pastor.” His mud-throwing,
however, was carried so far, that even the ultramontane _Köln.
Volkszeitung_ was constrained to advise him to write more
decently.
§ 175.8. The Mortara affair of A.D. 1858 attracted special
attention. The eight-year old son of the Jew Mortara of Bologna
was violently taken from his parents to Rome because his
Christian nurse said that two years before, during a dangerous
illness, she had baptized him. The church answered the entreaties
of the parents and the universal outcry by saying that the
sacrament had an indelible character, and that the pope could not
change the law. Again in A.D. 1864, the ten-year old Jewish boy,
Joseph Coën, apprentice weaver in Rome, was decoyed by a priest
to his cloister and there persuaded to receive baptism. In vain
his mother, the Jewish community, and even the French ambassador,
urged his restoration; and when, in A.D. 1870, the temporal power
of the pope was overthrown, the lad, now sixteen years old, had
himself become such a fanatical Catholic that he refused to have
anything to do with his mother as an unbeliever.
§ 175.9. In the Tyrol in A.D. 1830 there were numerous
conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism (§ 198, 1).
A Catholic priest in Baden, Henhöfer of Mühlhausen, influenced
by the writings of Sailer and Boos, went over to the Lutheran
church in A.D. 1823, and continued down to his death in A.D. 1862
a vigorous opponent of the prevailing rationalism. Count Leopold
von Seldnitzsky, formerly Prince-Bishop of Breslau, felt obliged
in 1840, in consequence of the conscientious objections he had
to perform his official duties toward church and state during
the ecclesiastico-political controversies of 1830 (§ 193, 1),
to resign his appointments. He was subsequently led in A.D. 1863,
through reading the Scriptures and Luther’s works, after a sore
struggle, to join the evangelical Church. He devoted all his
means to the founding of Protestant educational institutions at
Berlin and Breslau. He died in A.D. 1871, in his eighty-fourth
year. The proclamation by the Vatican of the dogma of
infallibility drove many pious and earnest Catholics out of the
Romish communion. Of these Carl von Richthofen, Canon of Breslau,
engages our special interest. Son of a pious Lutheran mother, and
trained up under Gossner’s mild spiritual direction (§ 187, 2),
his gentle and deeply religious nature had attached itself to
the Roman Catholic church of his father only under the illusion
that the Romish doctrine of justification was not wholly
irreconcilable with the evangelical doctrine. He at first
submitted to but soon renounced the Vatican decree; was
excommunicated by Archbishop Förster, voluntarily resigned
his emoluments; joined the Old Catholics in A.D. 1873, and
the separated Old Lutherans in A.D. 1875. In the following
year he died a painful death from the explosion of a petroleum
lamp.--Upon the whole Rome has made most converts in America
and England; and she has suffered losses more or less severe
in France, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Bohemia.
§ 175.10. =The Luther Centenary, A.D. 1883.=--The celebration of
Luther’s birth was carried out with great enthusiasm throughout
all Germany, more than a thousand tracts on Luther and the
Reformation were published, statues were erected, special
services were held in all Lutheran churches, high schools, and
universities, and brilliant demonstrations were made at Jena,
Worms, Wittenberg, and Eisleben. There were founded at Kiel a
Luther-house, at Worms and at the Wartburg Luther libraries, in
Leipzig and Berlin Luther churches. At Eisleben a bronze statue
of the reformer was solemnly unveiled representing his tearing
the papal bull with his right hand and pressing the Bible to his
heart with his left. Another noble monument was raised by the
munificence of the emperor by the issuing during this year of
the first volume of pastor Knaake’s critical edition of Luther’s
works. A “German Luther Institute” aims at assisting children
of the poorer clergy and teachers, and a “Reformation History
Society” has undertaken the task of issuing popular tracts on the
persons, events and principles of that and the succeeding period
based upon original documents. Protestants of all lands, with the
exception of the English high-church party, contributed liberally;
the Americans had a copy of the great Luther statue of the Worms
monument (§ 178, 1) made and erected in Washington. Even in
Italy the liberal press eulogised Luther, while the ultramontanes
loaded his memory with unmeasured calumny and reproach. The
threatened counter-demonstrations of German ultramontanes fell
quite flat and harmless. The =Zwingli Centenary= of January 1st,
A.D. 1884, was celebrated with enthusiasm throughout the Reformed
church, especially in Switzerland. On the other hand, the
celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Wiclif’s death
on December 31st, 1884, created comparatively little interest.