An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant by Edward Caldwell Moore
page 88 of 282 (31%)
page 88 of 282 (31%)
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singularly beautiful combination with other qualities. The emphasis is,
however, correct. He was the prophet of feeling, as Kant had been of ethical religion and Hegel of the intellectuality of faith. The entire Protestant theology of the nineteenth century has felt his influence. The English-speaking race is almost as much his debtor as is his own. The French Huguenots of the revival felt him to be one of themselves. Even to Amiel and Scherer he was a kindred spirit. It is a true remark of Dilthey that in unusual degree an understanding of the man's personality and career is necessary to the appreciation of his thought. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher was born in 1768 in Breslau, the son of a chaplain in the Reformed Church. He never connected himself officially with the Lutheran Church. We have alluded to an episode broadly characteristic of his youth. He was tutor in the house of one of the landed nobility of Prussia, curate in a country parish, preacher at the Charité in Berlin in 1795, professor extraordinarius at Halle in 1804, preacher at the Church of the Dreifaltigkeit in Berlin in 1807, professor of theology and organiser of that faculty in the newly-founded University of Berlin in 1810. He never gave up his position as pastor and preacher, maintaining this activity along with his unusual labours as teacher, executive and author. He died in 1834. In his earlier years in Berlin he belonged to the circle of brilliant men and women who made Berlin famous in those years. It was a fashionable society composed of persons more or less of the rationalistic school. Not a few of them, like the Schlegels, were deeply tinged with romanticism. There were also among them Jews of the house of the elder Mendelssohn. Morally it was a society not altogether above reproach. Its opposition to religion was a by-word. An affection of the susceptible youth for a woman unhappily married brought him to the verge of despair. It was an affection which his passing pride as romanticist |
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