The importance of the service Schleiermacher was destined to render has become signally apparent in the religious crisis at present agitating Germany. Had he never appeared to restrain the sceptical tendencies of one party, and to enlighten and stimulate the activity of another, the orthodox clergy in Germany would now find themselves completely alone. Few in numbers, and deficient in influence, their prospects must have been of the gloomiest description. But the recent convocation at Wittenberg has shown that a body of men far stronger than themselves are prepared to coalesce with them. The great majority of that assembly consisted of men who, having early embraced the principles of Schleiermacher, had all of them a leaning, more or less strong, towards orthodoxy. But though there were few of these divines who did not subsequently approach evangelicism still more nearly than their master had done, the strictly orthodox regarded them generally with a jealous distrust. Now, however, they will make common cause against a common antagonist,-the infidelity so prevalent. This coalition will be no less ultimately beneficial than it is at present expedient. The rigidly orthodox will become more liberal; the excesses of scepticism will warn, and intercourse with their new friends will evangelize, those farthest from orthodoxy.

But Germany requires no second Schleiermacher. She now needs a man, or rather many men, of a very different description. When he appeared, the head-quarters of infidelity lay still among the higher and educated classes. It prevailed wherever there was culture enough to allow a man to think himself authorized in extolling knowledge and depreciating faith. The early Rationalists had been content to leave religion where it was for the common people. Among them, however, indifferentism was almost universal. But now Hegel is popularized, and comfortless poverty is instructed in a comfortless atheism. The workman and the artisan are ready to meet the believer in God and immortality with some current philosophical reply. The last state is worse than the first. These evils must be encountered on their own ground. The German theo

logians have been too long men of theory only. Now practical effort is indispensable, and that not of the kind made by Schleiermacher, among the universities and the clergy, but effort among the masses of the people. Not that Christianity is to be deprived of erudition. The religious men of Germany have learnt the lesson which such a separation is sure to teach. All remember how an illiterate asceticism left the successors of Arndt, Spener, and Franke defenceless before the assaults of Semler, Baumgarten, and Michaelis. Schleiermacher did not, with the transcendentalist, virtually deny a historical Christianity. He did not, with the Unitarian, regard Christ as an example only. Yet he failed to apprehend evangelical truth in its fulness and its certitude. His system, with its arbitrary treatment of Scripture, and its oscillation between the sceptical and the mystical, occupies, by its very nature, an intermediate position. He himself, at the last, would scarcely have claimed for it more. As a step in the progress towards a belief at once more positive and more reasonable, the service it has rendered is great. As a system of faith definite and complete, it cannot maintain its ground. But that man has earned no common praise of whom it can be said that but for the preparation his labours afforded, many good and learned men would never have attained the belief they now enjoy. Though the theology of Schleiermacher should be a continuing city for no man, it has been a hospice for multitudes whom it has received, sheltered, and invigorated on their upward journey towards the Truth. But to reduce our English theology to his standard,—which some persons among us, we are sorry to see, appear disposed to do,-would be to send us back to an immature and mischievous style of thinking which Germany itself is fast outgrowing. The position of Schleiermacher was one of advance in his own day, and in Germany; it would be one of retrogression at present, and in England. In our passion for progress, it behoves us to be careful that we do not mistake the road. Change and onwardness are not identical.

SAVONAROLA AND HIS TIMES.*

A German professor

THIS poem scarcely sustains the reputation which its late author had acquired in Germany by his Faust. of Hebrew said in our hearing one day that he had attempted in vain to read it through. This might have been the case, and the book excellent notwithstanding, for the learned Orientalist was no poet. But his unfavourable verdict was not altogether unjust. Though possessing abilities of no mean order, Lenau has failed to give the life and spirit to his production which a theme so noble should have inspired. The poet has not sufficiently acclimated himself, as it were, to the age of which he writes. Too much the moralist and too little the painter, he has not portrayed the period and suffered it to speak for itself. He assumes his office of interpreter too frequently and with too little of concealment. Modern sentiments are placed in the mouths of speakers in the fifteenth century. The reader becomes aware that his author, in his vehement censure of the learned scepticism that prevailed in the Florentine Academy, is, in effect, anxious to hold up to abhorrence the pantheistic philosophy of modern Germany. The truth of the analogy is undeniable, the parallel is fair, the indignation righteous, but this expression of it is ill-placed. These bitter iambics are out of keeping; they mar the artistic beauty of an historic poem. The monu

ment of a hero should not be placarded with rewards offered for the

Second

* Savonarola. Ein Gedicht von NICOLAUS LENAU. Zweite durchgesehene Auflage. 1844. (Savonarola. A Poem. By NICHOLAS LENAU. Edition, revised, 1844.)

VOL. I.

I

apprehension of a criminal. But, though defective in this respect, and occasionally abstract and tedious, the poem contains many admirable passages.

We propose, in briefly sketching the career of Savonarola, to give some account as we proceed of the religious condition of Europe towards the close of the fifteenth century. It was a principle with that master of landscape-gardening, Shenstone, that when the eye has viewed a principal object from the proper point, the foot should travel towards it by another route. A similar canon will hold good with regard to a narrative circumscribed by limits like the present, and in which the writer, like the gardener, has to make the best of his space. The course of our observations will, accordingly, bring us at first directly in view of our hero; then we shall lose sight of him for awhile, wandering somewhat deviously among the lights and shadows of the adjacent scenery, in order to approach him once more on emerging from our survey of preceding and contemporary history, enabled the more justly to appreciate his position and his character.

The principal biographies of Savonarola are four in number, two ancient and two modern. The two earlier are by Francesco Pico della Mirandola (nephew of the celebrated Giovanni Pico) and the Dominican Burlamacchi. Both these writers have decorated their narratives with marvellous additions, after the manner of the Lives of the Saints; credulous, both as partisans and as religionists, they will reject no story which in their estimate would contribute to exalt the subject of their memoirs. The two later accounts, by Professors Rudelbach and Meier, appeared almost simultaneously; the one in 1835, and the other in the following year. Professor Rudelbach has produced the more attractive book; he writes well, sometimes even eloquently, and has brought much to bear upon his subject from other quarters. Professor Meier, though his work is less generally interesting, and in some points less complete, has been equally indefatigable in the research immediately requisite, and displays greater accuracy and caution in the conclusions at which

he arrives. Both these volumes are highly favourable specimens of those monographies which Germany has produced in such numbers

of late years.

The day of St. George the Martyr was celebrated at Ferrara with festivities which rivalled in their magnificence those of the Florentines in honour of their patron St. John. The great ducal houses which had acquired rule in Italy, and, like the Emperors of Rome, were sovereigns among the vestiges of republicanism, wisely availed themselves of these annual occasions to conciliate the people, at once by dazzling and by employing them. On the morning of the twenty-third of April, in the year 1475, all Ferrara was early awake to celebrate, under the auspices of Hercules d'Este, a St. George's day which should outshine the gayest of its predecessors. This prince had been invested with the vicariat only four years previously, but the city displayed already the results of his able policy. Stately buildings were rising in many quarters, giving occupation to numerous workmen. The fortifications had been strengthened at great cost. Embankments were in progress to confine the floods of the Po, which had formerly covered so large a space of the surrounding flats. The peasants had already reaped a harvest on some spots where, till recently, the eye had seen from the city walls only straggling poplars, or the grey willows stretching away, islanded among the stagnant waters.

On the day in question, there was a brilliant assemblage of nobles and courtiers in the court of the great castle of Este, under those walls which, seventy years before, had witnessed the execution of Hugo and Parisina, and beheld

The crowd in a speechless circle gather,

To see the son fall by the doom of the father.'

Those dark-red, square towers, slanting outwards at the base with such massiveness-the numerous archways, like prison-vaults-and the projecting battlements, overhanging heavily the dull waters of the moat-must have looked more than ever gloomy in contrast with the gay figures that passed to and fro under the teeth of the