The universe is God.  God is the universe.  That religionists have obscured this simple truth and denied this grand relation is true, and nothing to the point.  The cultivated should be ashamed not to know this.  Then, with a sympathy with institutional religion and a knowledge of history in which he stood almost alone, he retracts much that he has yielded, he rebuilds much that he has thrown down, proclaims much which they must now concede.  The book was published in 1799.  Twenty years later he said sadly that if he were rewriting it, its shafts would be directed against some very different persons, against glib and smug people who boasted the form of godliness, conventional, even fashionable religionists and loveless ecclesiastics.  Vast and various influences in the Germany of the first two decades of the century had wrought for the revival of religion.  Of those influences, not the least had been that of Schleiermacher’s book.  Among the greatest had been Schleiermacher himself.

The religion of feeling, as advocated in the Reden, had left much on the ethical side to be desired.  This defect the author sought to remedy in his Monologen, published in 1800.  The programme of theological studies for the new University of Berlin, Kurze Darstellung des Theologischen Studiums, 1811, shows his theological system already in large part matured.  His Der christliche Glaube, published in 1821, revised three years before his death in 1834, is his monumental work.  His Ethik, his lectures upon many subjects, numerous volumes of sermons, all published after his death, witness his versatility.  His sermons have the rare note which one finds in Robertson and Brooks.

All of the immediacy of religion, its independence of rational argument, of historical tradition or institutional forms, which was characteristic of Schleiermacher to his latest day, is felt in the Reden.  By it he thrilled the hearts of men as they have rarely been thrilled.  It is not forms and traditions which create religion.  It is religion which creates these.  They cannot exist without it.  It may exist without them, though not so well or so effectively.  Religion is the sense of God.  That sense we have, though many call it by another name.  It would be more true to say that that sense has us.  It is inescapable.  All who have it are the religious.  Those who hold to dogmas, rites, institutions in such a way as to obscure and overlay this sense of God, those who hold those as substitute for that sense, are the nearest to being irreligious.  Any form, the most outre, bizarre and unconventional, is good, so only that it helps a man to God.  All forms are evil, the most accredited the most evil, if they come between a man and God.  The pantheism of the thought of God in all of Schleiermacher’s early work is undeniable.  He never wholly put it aside.  The personality of God seemed to him a limitation.  Language is here only symbolical,