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 in the ark of the most intolerant confessional orthodoxy.  In the crisis of his son’s life he pitiably concealed these facts.  They should have been the bond of sympathy.  The son, a sorrowful little motherless boy, was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby.  He was to escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which his father had passed.  Even there the spirit of the age pursued him.  The precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race was wrestling with.  He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the man he so revered.  Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself upon his father’s mercy, only to be abused and measurelessly condemned.  He had his way.  He resorted to Halle, turned his back on sacred things, worked in titanic fashion at everything but the problem of religion.  At least he kept his life clean and his soul sensitive among the flagrantly immoral who were all about him, even in the pietists’ own university.  He laid the foundations for his future philosophical construction.  He bathed in the sentiments and sympathies, poetic, artistic and humanitarian, of the romanticist movement.  In his early Berlin period he was almost swept from his feet by its flood.  He rescued himself, however, by his rationalism and romanticism into a breadth and power of faith which made him the prophet of the new age.  By him, for a generation, men like-minded saved their souls.  As one reads, one realises that it was the pietists’ religion which saved