been revealed, there remained a deep mutual respect and salutary
interaction. Obscurantists and sentimentalists might denounce
rationalism. Vulgar ranters like Dippel and Barth might defame religion.
That had little weight as compared with the fact that Klopstock, Hamann
and Herder, Jacobi, Goethe and Jean Paul, had all passed at some time
under the influence of pietism. Lessing learned from the Moravians the
undogmatic essence of religion. Schleiermacher was bred among the
devoted followers of Zinzendorf. Even the radicalism of Kant retained
from the teaching of his pietistic youth the stringency of its ethic,
the sense of the radical evil of human nature and of the categorical
imperative of duty. It would be hard to find anything to surpass his
testimony to the purity of character and spirit of his parents, or the
beauty of the home life in which he was bred. Such facts as these made
themselves felt both in the philosophy and in the poetry of the age. The
rationalist movement itself came to have an ethical and spiritual trait.
The triviality, the morbidness and superstition of pietism received
their just condemnation. But among the leaders of the nation in every
walk of life were some who felt the drawing to deal with ethical and
religious problems in the untrammelled fashion which the century had
taught.

We may be permitted to try to show the meaning of pietism by a concrete
example. No one can read the correspondence between the youthful
Schleiermacher and his loving but mistaken father, or again, the
lifelong correspondence of Schleiermacher with his sister, without
receiving, if he has any religion of his own, a touching impression of
what the pietistic religion meant. The father had long before, unknown
to the son, passed through the torments of the rational assault upon a
faith which was sacred to him. He had preached, through years, in the
misery of contradiction with himself. He had rescued his drowning soul