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 would have made him think it prudish to discard, while the deep, underlying elements of his nature made it inconceivable that he should indulge.  Only in later years did he heal his wound in a happy married life.

The episode was typical of the experience he was passing through.  He understood the public with which his first book dealt.  That book bears the striking title, Reden ueber die Religion, an die Gebildeten unter ihren Veraechtern (translated, Oman, Oxford, 1893).  His public understood him.  He could reach them as perhaps no other man could do.  If he had ever concealed what religion was to him, he now paid the price.  If they had made light of him, he now made war on them.  This meed they could hardly withhold from him, that he understood most other things quite as well as they, and religion much better than they.  The rhetorical form is a fiction.  The addresses were never delivered.  Their tension and straining after effect is palpable.  They are a cry of pain on the part of one who sees that assailed which is sacred to him, of triumph as he feels himself able to repel the assault, of brooding persuasiveness lest any should fail to be won for his truth.  He concedes everything.  It is part of his art to go further than his detractors.  He is so well versed in his subject that he can do that with consummate mastery, where they are clumsy or dilettante.  It is but a pale ghost of religion that he has left.  But he has attained his purpose.  He has vindicated the place of religion in the life of culture.  He has shown the relation of religion to every great thing in civilisation, its affinity with art, its common quality with poetry, its identity with all profound activities of the soul.  These all are religion, though their votaries know it not.  These are reverence for the highest, dependence on the highest, self-surrender to the highest.  No great man ever lived, no great work was ever done, save in an attitude toward the universe, which is identical with that of the religious man toward God.