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Francke and the Halle Pietists

Christian studies, as means of self-improvement supplementary to the ordinary ministrations. He treats in the same way the Collegia philobiblica for Divinity students in the University of Leipzig as a preparatory institution to promote efficiency in their future ministerial work. If separatist tendencies resulted from all this, it was contrary to the spirit and intention of Spener, whose sole aim was a return to apostolical piety and simplicity. These ecclesiolae were to be aids, not substitutes, for the Ecclesia. Towards Boehme and his disciple Gottfried Arnold, whose Church History inspired Mosheim to emulation, Spener maintained an attitude of benevolent neutrality. Gifted with a mild temperament rather than great force of will, possessing the tact acquired by constant intercourse with the cultured classes, and therefore apt to treat with gentle tolerance the extravagant vagaries of earnest though somewhat vulgar enthusiasts, he incurred the charge of facile self-accommoda tion, vagueness, and indiscriminate comprehensiveness, calculated, as was thought, to prepare the way for the indifferentism of the Aufklärung. It was left for the more powerful personality of August Hermann Francke to correct this tendency of his friend and fellow-worker.

Francke was a man of great force of character and determination, revered for his unfaltering faith and practical piety. He was the founder of the first orphanage in Germany and also one of the eight "Magisters" in Leipzig who, under Spener, were engaged in the work of academic revivalism by means of oratio, meditatio, tentatio; with a view to developing model Christians rather than sound theologians. Francke himself had passed, in a season of spiritual conflict, from doubt to faith, and set a high value on individual conversion. By natural disposition domineering, he was severe in his ascetical demands, more contentious and less compromising than Spener. Driven with Thomasius from Leipzig by the defenders of scholastic pedantry and religious formalism, he joined him in exercising a great influence upon the beginnings of the University of Halle, of which both were original professors, and imparted his own spirit to the Pietism of the Halle school. This movement in many respects resembles the Methodist revival at Oxford, as the Koethen Lieder proceeding from it correspond to the hymns of the two Wesleys. Much opposed by the orthodox party, notably by Valentin Ernst Löscher, who in his strictures speaks of Pietism as "malum pietisticum," this form of Pietism after a struggle of existence for thirty years in the Lutheran Church became at last a social power among the nobility and gentry and even among a few of the reigning Princes. This temporary alliance between Pietism and despotism unhappily led to the lamentable episode of the expulsion of Christian Wolff from Halle by Frederick William I of Prussia through the instrumentality of Francke and his school. In this effort to protect the youth of the University from what they considered the baneful teaching of the Wolffian philosophy (which in the main cod with that of Leibniz) - its determinism, and tendency to divorce

Dippel and pietistic literature

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morality from religion- they were ready to undo their own work of emancipating philosophical speculation from the dogmatism of the schools. It should be added, however, that they deeply regretted the success of their agitation, when they found that it led to the forcible removal of their victims from the University. Johann Conrad Dippel, "the Christian Democritus," is one of the few among those involved in these discussions who in his writings displays the saving grace of humour. He was a man of the world, with varied experiences, and many-sided literary activities. For some time under Arnold's influence and moving in pietistic circles, he afterwards took up an independent attitude and became a "free-thinker among the Pietists a radical Pietist. As such, he castigated with much critical acumen and in a piquant style both the solemn obtuseness of some of the Pietists and the unyielding pedantry of their orthodox opponents, charging both with neglecting the moral factor of religion in their disputes. In his own views he leaned towards Latitudinarianism; he was one of the earliest of his time to hold the view that the heathen may ultimately be saved, though instances of an approach to universalism are not altogether wanting among the Quietists of the seventeenth century in France and Germany. His satirical disposition entailed upon him litigation and imprisonment, and he ended as a solitary.

Among the literary productions of the movement in its later developments was the Berleburg Bible, published under the patronage of Count Casimir von Berleburg, who with his mother made their seat the centre of union for every shade of independent Pietism. This Bible in its annotations follows on the lines of Madame Guyon in a similar enterprise and dwells mainly on the conditions of the spiritual life, the soul's illumination and purification by immediate communion with God. Another publication was the journal called the Geistliche Fama, the organ of the movement, which addressed itself to the varied crowd of Pietists, now spread in different directions, which counted among its contributors individuals belonging to every section of society: lawyers and professors, medical men-one of this profession became its editor-teachers in elementary schools, masters and journeymen of various trades, ambassadors, generals, civil servants, political agents, and peasants - just as in England the name of the Latitude men was "daily exagitated among us, as one of them says, "in taverns and pulpits." But what held together this body of Pietists of various denominations in Germany was a community of thought and similarity of aims, rather than anything approaching to identity of opinion; small groups, like the " Inspirationsgemeinden" ("Congregations of Inspiration") were not even attached to any particular Church, but indulged in a kind of "Jesuscultus" of their own, while some individuals, like Johann Tennhart, who called himself "God's chancellor," took up a standpoint of individual independence, and all of them exhibited a strong tendency to abstain partially, or entirely,

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Würtemberg Pietism.

-Bogatzky

from the use of Church services and sacraments, and exhibited a studied indifference to ecclesiastical forms and ceremonies. This attitude produced an edict in Würtemberg in 1694 warning the authorities against permitting the introduction of the writings of Poiret, Antoinette de Bourignon, Mrs Leade, Arnold, and the Petersens, members of the extreme left of pietistic enthusiasts. This was followed by another edict in 1707 designed to stop private religious meetings and compel some of the recalcitrant Pietists to quit the country. A further rescript contains prophylactic measures directed against the disintegrating influences of all such sectarian innovations and irregularities.

Würtemberg was called by some of the Pietists the "Augapfel Gottes" on account of its privileged position, as compared with the rest of Germany, after the Thirty Years' War. For the duchy possessed a constitution; and the Cynosura Ecclesiastica, which formed part of it, secured co-ordinate rights for the Church in the Diet. The latter had considerable power in limiting the ducal authority. Here, then, constitutionalism and Pietism, introduced by Spener during his stay at Stuttgart and Tübingen (1662), were often united in opposing autocratic excesses a union of democracy and Puritanism on a minor scale. The chief representatives of this Pietism are Beata Sturm, the Mère Angélique of Protestant Pietism some compare her to the poor Armella of the Catholic hagiology in the seventeenth century; the noble Johann Jacob Moser, a pietist statesman, who suffered for conscience' sake in prison, and the genial theologian Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, who, in his love of metaphysics, came into close contact with the Wolff-Leibnizian philosophy. Brought under the influence of August Gottlieb Spangenberg at Jena and Count Zinzendorf on a visit to Herrnhut, he tried here to introduce his philosophia sacra, which represents Christ as the author of the Physicum verum. His aim was to combine science with revelation, and chemistry with religion; and in so doing Oetinger lost himself in a cloud of theosophy and mysticism after the manner of Boehme and Swedenborg. In his closing days he became a legendary figure in the history of Pietism, itself then approaching the stage spiritual exhaustion. It now deteriorated into a kind of effeminate sentimentalism, producing among its members a feeling of morbid selfdepreciation, or lachrymose self-complacency, mainly expressed in religious verse, voluminous as to quantity and feeble in quality- Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky alone published three hundred and sixty-two hymns in his sixtieth year-the swan-song of Pietism in the Lutheran Church.

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What little remained of force in the movement was to some extent absorbed in the Pietism of the Moravian community, which had in 1729 found an asylum in Herrnhut from religious persecution in the Austrian dominions. Its members were living under strict discipline in a kind of common life, which, in its protest against the corruptions of social life and religious decadence, revived the idea of Christian socialism. Nothing

Effects of Latitudinarianism and Pietism

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resembling a community of goods existed in the Moravian settlement; but it was expected "that all inhabitants would take a voluntary share, according to their ability, in defraying the necessary public expenses, and as good citizens conform to the municipal regulations of the settlement." It thus marks a new departure from a purely pietistic egoism to altruistic endeavour, from self-conscious and self-introspective mysticism to practical self-surrender, thus preparing the way for the secularisation of Pietism in the eighteenth century.

Thus, in tracing the two movements of Latitudinarianism and Pietism to a common source, and following their course, as determined by national character and local environment, and augmented by tributaries of thought arising out of the peculiar circumstances of the time, we perceive in their ultimate results corresponding differences. In England the effect of Latitudinarianism was a broadening of the current of thought, which broke the power of ecclesiastical tyranny, and, with a "depression of theology," produced a gradual liberation of the mind, while at the same time favourably affecting the growth of political freedom and promoting a soberly ordered social life. In Germany, where governmental repression and narrow particularism hampered free development, forcing the mind to prey on itself, Pietism favoured the growth of intellectual concentration, led on to critical enquiry and religious speculation, and gradually freed itself from the trammels of Protestant scholasticism. This had the effect of quickening the sensibility of the soul-life and intensifying inward piety, producing at the same time indifference to creeds and forms of worship, and ending in Gefühlsreligion (the religion of feeling), or in romantic mysticism, such as that of Goethe's "Beautiful Soul," an idealised picture of Fräulein von Klettenberg.

In their combined effect, Latitudinarianism in England and the English-speaking countries oversea, on the one hand, and Pietism in Germany and the neighbouring countries in northern and central Europe, influenced by German thought, on the other, appear as mutually supplementary movements, the one more practically, the other more ideally, affecting the course of European thought and life. Thus they succeeded in establishing the supremacy of reason and the complete autonomy of conscience, and brought about a partial recovery from religious lethargy and moral enervation. To measure accurately the force and extent of this dual movement in its ultimate effects and to assign to each its proper share is beyond our power. Streams, however deep or broad, are merged at last in the sea, blending with it and thus losing their own distinctive colouring. So it is with the two streams or tendencies discussed in the foregoing pages. They entered the ocean of general thought and feeling. They left their effect in broadening and deepening the current, as well as in raising the level and changing the complexion, of European thought and its translation into action; and their impress thus remains on that transition period which began in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

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