After studying at the university in Halle and taking his examinations for ordination in 1790, he served briefly as a private tutor to the family of Count Dohna in East Prussia and as a minister in the Prussian town of Landsberg. In 1796 Schleiermacher settled in Berlin as a preacher, became a close friend of Friedrich von Schlegel, and emerged as an interpreter of religion to the romantic worldview that Schlegel himself epitomized.
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) gave Schleiermacher a national reputation at the age of thirty. The following year another publication,
Soliloquies, attested to Schleiermacher's thorough absorption of the spirit of romanticism, but at the same time it indicated the direction that his ethical interests were to take in the future, as in his
Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (Outline of a critique of previous ethical theory; 1803).
The relation between the religious and ethical dimensions of life constituted a major preoccupation of Schleiermacher's maturity, and it is here that his indebtedness to and divergence from Immanuel Kant are clearly evident. Of decisive importance during his Berlin sojourn was his embarking upon the translation of Plato, in the course of which his mind became imbued with the philosophy of the author of the Republic.
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