Church History Part 8

FOURTH SECTION. CHURCH HISTORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

I. General and Introductory.

-- 173. Survey of Religious Movements of Nineteenth Century.

A reaction had set in against the atheistic spirit of the French Revolution, and the victories of A.D. 1813, 1815, encouraged the pious in their Christian confidence. Princes and people were full of grat.i.tude to G.o.d. Alexander I., Francis I., and Frederick William III., representing the three princ.i.p.al churches, in A.D. 1815, after the political situation had been determined by the Congress of Vienna, formed "the Holy Alliance,"

a league of brotherly love for mutual defence and maintenance of peace, to which all the European princes adhered with the exception of the pope, the sultan, and the king of England. Through Metternich's arts it ultimately degenerated into an instrument of repression and tyranny.-Incongruous elements were present everywhere. The restoration of the papacy in A.D.

1814 had given a new impulse to ultramontanism, as did also the Reformation centenary of A.D. 1817 to Protestantism; while supernaturalism and pietism prevailing in the Lutheran and Reformed churches led to renewed attempts at union. Old sects were strengthened and new sects arose. Pantheism, materialism, and atheism, as well as socialism and communism, without concealment attacked Christianity; while pauperism and vagabondage, on the one hand, and the Stock Exchange swindling of capitalists, on the other, spread moral consumption through all cla.s.ses of society. The ultramontanes, led by the Jesuits, rea.s.serted the most arrogant claims of the papacy. The climax was reached when Pius IX.

obtained a decree of council affirming his infallibility, while by the Nemesis of history the royal crown was torn from his head.

-- 174. Nineteenth Century Culture in Relation to Christianity and the Church.

Down to A.D. 1840, when zeal for it began to abate, philosophy exercised an important influence on the religious development of the age, both in the departments of science and of life. While rationalism was not able to transcend the standpoint of Kant, the other theological tendencies were more or less determined formally, and even materially by the philosophical movements of this period. Alongside of philosophy, literature, itself to a great extent coloured by contemporary philosophy, exerted a powerful influence on the religious opinions of the more cultured among the people.

The sciences, too, came into closer relations, partly friendly, partly hostile, to Christianity; and art in some of its masterpieces paid a n.o.ble tribute to the church.

1. _The German Philosophy_ (-- 170, 10).-_Fries_, whose philosophy was Kantian rationalism, modified by elements borrowed from Jacobi, influenced such theologians as De Wette. _Sch.e.l.ling_, in his "Philosophy of Ident.i.ty," had advanced from Fichte's idealism to a pantheistic naturalism. From Fichte he had learned that this world is nothing without spirit; but while Fichte recognised this world, the _non-ego_, as reality only in so far as man seizes upon it and penetrates it by his spirit, and so raises it into real being, Sch.e.l.ling regards spirit as nothing else than the life of nature itself. In the lower stages of this nature-life spirit is still slumbering and dreaming, but in man it has attained unto consciousness. The nature-life as a whole, or the world-soul, is G.o.d; man is the reflex of G.o.d and the world in miniature, a microcosmos. In the world's development G.o.d comes into objective being and unfolds his self-consciousness; Christianity is the turning point in the world's history; its fundamental dogmas of revelation, trinity, incarnation, and redemption are suggestive attempts to solve the world's riddle.

Sch.e.l.ling's poetic view of the world penetrated all the sciences, and gave to them a new impulse. Though hateful to the old rationalists, this system found ardent admirers among the younger theologians. As Sch.e.l.ling to Fichte, so _Hegel_ was attached to Sch.e.l.ling, and wrought his pantheistic naturalism into a pantheistic spiritualism. Not so much in the life of nature as in the thinking and doing of the human spirit, the divine revelation is the unfolding of the divine self-consciousness from non-being into being. Judaism and Christianity are progressive stages of this process; Judaism stands far below cla.s.sic paganism; but in Christianity we have the perfect religion, to be developed into the highest form of philosophy. The Protestant church doctrine was now again accorded the place of honour. Marheincke developed Lutheran orthodoxy into a system of speculative theology based on Hegelian principles; while Goschel infused into it a pietist spirit, which made many hail the new departure as the long-sought reconciliation of theology and philosophy.

But after Hegel's death in A.D. 1831 the condition of matters suddenly changed. His school split into an orthodox wing following the master's ecclesiastical tendencies, and a heterodox wing which deified the human spirit. Strauss, Bauer, and Feuerbach led this heterodox party in theology, and Ruge in reference to social, aesthetic, and political questions. Persecuted by the state in A.D. 1843, the Young Hegelians joined the rationalists, whom they had before sneered at as "antediluvian theologians." _Sch.e.l.ling_, who had been silent for almost thirty years, took Hegel's chair in Berlin as his decided opponent in A.D. 1841, and with his dualistic doctrine of potencies, from which he finally advanced to a Christian gnosticism, obtained a temporary influence among the younger theologians. He died at the baths of Ragaz in Switzerland in A.D.

1854. He flashed for a moment like a meteor, and as suddenly his light was quenched.

2. The domination of the Hegelian philosophy was overthrown by the split in the school and the radicalism of the adherents of the left wing, and Sch.e.l.ling in the second stage of his philosophical development had not succeeded in founding any proper school of his own. A group of younger philosophers, with I. H. Fichte at their head, starting from the Hegelian dialectic, have striven to free philosophy from the reproach of pantheism and to develop a speculative theism in touch with historical Christianity.

Other members of this school are Weisse, Braniss, Chalibaeus, Ulrici, Wirth, Romang, etc.-_Herbart_ renounces all that philosophers from Fichte senior to Fichte junior had done, and declares the metaphysical end of their systems beyond the horizon of philosophy, which must limit itself to the province of experience. His realism is in diametrical opposition to Hegel's idealism. Toward Christianity his philosophy occupies a position of indifference. Influenced by Kant's theory of knowledge as well as by the Fichte-Sch.e.l.ling-Hegel idealism and Herbart's realism, with an infusion of Leibnitz's monad doctrine, _Hermann Lotze_ of Gottingen has, since A.D. 1844, set forth a system of "teleological idealism." He develops his metaphysical principles from what we have by immediate experience internal and external, and the invariability of the causal mechanism in everything that happens in the inner and outer world he explains as the realizing of moral purposes.-_Schopenhauer's_ philosophy, which only in the later years of his life (died A.D. 1860) began to attract attention, is in spirit utterly opposed to the religion and ethics of Christianity. Its task is to describe "The World as Will and Idea"; first at that stage of entering into visibility which is represented in man does will, the thing-in-itself, become joined with idea, and makes its appearance now with it over against the world as a conscious subject. But since idea is regarded as a pure illusion of the will, this leads to a pessimism which takes absolute despair as the only legitimate moral principle. _E. von Hartmann_ went still further in the same direction in his "Philosophy of the Unconscious," published in 1869, of which an English translation in three vols. appeared in 1884. He identifies the will with matter and idea with spirit, demands in addition to the absolute despair of the individual here and hereafter, the complete surrender of the personality to the world-process in order to the attainment of its end, the annihilation of the world. This dissolution of the world consists in the complete withdrawal of the will into the absolute as the only unconscious, so that at last the wrong and misery of being produced by the irrational will are abolished in this withdrawal. From this philosophical standpoint Hartmann attempted in A.D. 1874 to take Christianity to pieces, showing some favour to Vatican Catholicism, but pouring out the vials of his wrath upon Protestantism. His "religion of the future" consists in a yearning for freedom from all the burden and misery of being and share in the world-process by relapsing into the blessedness of non-being.-In France, England, and America much favour has been shown to the atheistic-sensual Positivism of _Aug. Comte_, which, excluding every form of theology and morals, requires only the so-called exact sciences as the object of philosophy. On his later notions of a "religion of humanity,"

see -- 210, 1. On essentially similar lines proceeds _Herbert Spencer_, in his "System of Synthetic Philosophy," to whose school also Darwin belonged. His followers are styled agnostics, because they regard all knowledge of G.o.d and divine things as absolutely impossible, and evolutionists, because their master endeavours to construct all the sciences on the basis of the evolution theory.

3. _The Sciences._-Sch.e.l.ling's profound theories were of all the more significance from their not being restricted to the philosophical strivings of his time, but inspiring the other sciences with the breath of a new life. To the fullest extent the natural sciences exposed themselves to this influence. There was not wanting indeed a certain shadowy mysticism, to which especially the fancies of mesmeric magnetism largely contributed; but this fog gradually cleared away, and the Christian elements were purified from their pantheistic surroundings. Steffens and Von Schubert taught that the divine book of nature is to be regarded as the reflex and expansion of the divine revelation in Scripture. The Hegelian philosophy, too, seemed at first likely to infuse a Christian spirit into the other sciences. In Goschel, at least, there was a thinker who imparted to jurisprudence a Christian character, and to Christianity a juristic construction. In other respects Hegel's philosophy in its application to the other departments of science gave in many ways a predominance to an abstruse dialectic tendency. Its adherents of the extreme left sought to construct all sciences _a priori_ from the pure idea, and at the same time to root out from them the last vestiges of the Christian spirit.

The greatest names in natural science, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Haller, Davy, Cuvier, etc., are household words in Christian circles. All these and many more were firmly convinced that there was no conflict between their most brilliant discoveries and Christian truth. In A.D. 1825 the Earl of Bridgwater founded a lectures.h.i.+p, and treatises on the power, wisdom, and goodness of G.o.d as manifested in the creation, have been written by Buckland, Chalmers, Whewell, Bell, etc. It was otherwise in Germany. Even Schleiermacher, in his "Letters to Lucke," in A.D. 1829, expressed his fears of the prophesied overthrow of all Christian theories of the world by the incontrovertible results of physical research, and Bretschneider in his "Letters to a Statesman," in A.D. 1830, proclaimed to the world without regret that already what Schleiermacher only feared had actually come to pa.s.s. Physicists, awakening from the glamour of the Sch.e.l.ling nature philosophy, p.r.o.nounced all speculation contraband, and declared pure empiricism, the simple investigation of actual things, the only permissible object of their labour. And although they handed over to theologians and philosophers questions about spirit in and over nature, as not belonging to their province, a younger generation maintained that spirit was non-existent, because it could not be discovered by the microscope and dissecting knife. Carl Vogt defined thought to be a secretion of the brain, and Moleschott regarded life as a mere mode of matter and man's existence after life only as the manuring of the fields.

Feuerbach proclaimed that "man is what he eats," and Buchner popularized these views into a gospel for social democrats and nihilists. Oersted, the famous discoverer of electro-magnetism, had sought "the spirit in nature,"

but the spirit which he found was not that of the Bible and the church.

The grandmaster of German scientific research, Alex. von Humboldt, saw in the world a cosmos of n.o.ble harmony as a whole and in its parts, but of Christian ideas in G.o.d's great book of nature he finds no trace. In A.D.

1859 the great English naturalist Darwin, died A.D. 1882, introduced into the arena the theory of "Natural Selection," by means of which the modification and development of the few primary animal forms through the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest by s.e.xual selection is supposed, in millions, perhaps milliards, of years, to have brought forth the present variety and manifoldness of animal species. Mult.i.tudes of naturalists now accept his theory of the descent of men and apes from a common stem.-In _Medicine_ De Valenti on the Protestant side, with pietistic earnestness, maintains that Christian faith is a vehicle of healing power; while a circle in Munich on the Catholic side make wors.h.i.+p of saints and the host a _conditio sine qua non_ of all medicine. A more moderate att.i.tude is a.s.sumed by the Roman Catholic Dr. Capellmann of Aachen, in his "Pastoral Medicine."

4. Of Christian _Jurists_ we have, on the Protestant side, Stahl, Savigny, Puchta, Jacobson, Richter, Meier, Scheuerl, Hinschius, etc.; and on the Catholic side, Walther, Philipps, etc. Among _Historians_, the greatest in modern times is Leopold von Ranke, who, with his disciples, occupies a thoroughly Christian standpoint. There has appeared, however, on the part of many Protestant historians, such as Voigt, Leo, Mentzel, Vorreiter, Hurter, Gfroerer, etc., a tendency in the most conspicuous manner to recognise and admire the brilliant phenomena of mediaeval Catholicism, even going to the length of renouncing the vital principles of Protestantism, and glorifying a Boniface, a Gregory VII., and an Innocent III., and characterizing the Reformation as a revolution. Ultramontanes have been only too ready to turn to their own use all such concessions, but show no inclination to make similar admissions damaging to their side, so that with them history consists rather in the abuse of everything Protestant as vile and perfidious, instead of being a record of independent research.

Janssen of Frankfort stands out prominently above the billows of the "_Kulturkampf_" (-- 197), as the greatest master of this ultramontane style of history making.-_Geography_, first raised to the rank of a science by Carl Ritter, received from its great founder a Christian impress and owes much of its development to the researches of Christian missionaries.

Finally, _Philology_, in the hands of Creuzer, Gorres, Sepp, etc., unfolds in a Christian spirit the religion and mythology of cla.s.sical paganism; and in the hands of Nagelsbach and Lubker expounds the religious life of the ancient world in relation to Christian truth.

5. _National Literature_ (-- 171, 11).-To some extent Goethe, but much more decidedly the romantic school of poets, was attached to Sch.e.l.ling's philosophy of nature. The romanticists developed a deep religiousness of feeling, as shown in Novalis and La Motte Fouque, and violent opposition to rationalistic theology as shown in Tieck, which in the case of Fr.

Schlegel ran to the other extreme of moral frivolity as seen in his "Lucinde." The romantic school as thus represented by Schlegel was joined by the party of Young Germany with its gospel of the rehabilitation of the flesh. Its mouthpiece was the gifted poet Heine. The pantheistic deification of nature by Sch.e.l.ling, and the self-deification of the Hegelian school obtained poetic expression in Leop. Schafer's _Laienbrevier und Weltpriester_, as well as in Sallet's _Laienevangelium_; while the sympathies of the young Hegelians with the revolutionary movements gained utterance in the poems of Herwegh, and in a more serious tone in those of Freiligrath. More recently the views of the _Protestantenverein_ (-- 180) have found their poetical representative in Nic. Eichhorn, whose "Jesus of Nazareth," a tragical drama, 1880, deals with the life, works, and sufferings of the "historical Christ," after the style of free Protestant science, with rich psychological a.n.a.lysis of the character in a brilliant imaginative production. Though composed with a view to theatrical representation, it has never yet been put on the stage.

6. The Christian element was present in the n.o.ble patriotic songs of E. M.

Arndt(81) and Max. von Schenkendorf much more distinctly than in the romantic school. Enthusiasm in the struggle for freedom awakened faith in the living G.o.d. Uhland's lovely lyrics, with their enthusiasm for the present interests of the Fatherland, ent.i.tle him to rank among patriotic poets, and their brilliant and profound rendering of the old German legends places him in the romantic school, which, however, in clearness and depth he leaves far behind. Without being a distinctively Christian poet, his warm sympathy with the life of the German people gives him a genuine interest in the Christian religion. The same may be said of Ruckert's highly finished poems, which transplanted the fragrant flowers of oriental sensuousness and contemplativeness into the garden of German poetry. A more decided Christian consecration of poetic genius is seen in the n.o.ble and beautiful lyrics of Emanuel Geibel, died 1884, the greatest and most Christian of the secular poets of the present. Of those ordinarily ranked as sacred poets may be named Knapp, Doring, Spitta, Garve, Vict. Strauss, etc., who for the most part contributed their sacred songs to Knapp's "_Christoterpe_" (1833-1853). A later publication of equal merit, called the "_Neue Christoterpe_," has been edited since 1880 by Kogel, Baur, and Frommel. But with all the Christian depth and spirituality, freshness and warmth, which we meet with in the productions of these Christian poets, none of them has been able to rise to the n.o.ble simplicity, power, popular force, and fitting them for church use, objectivity which are present in the old evangelical church hymns. In this respect they all bear too conspicuously the signature of their age, with its subjective tone and the noise and turmoil of present conflicts. Of all modern poets, Ruckert alone approaches in his advent hymn the measure and spirit of the old church song.-In the department of novels and romance there has been shown an almost invariable hostility toward Christianity, religion being either entirely avoided or held up to contempt by having as its representatives, simpletons, hypocrites, or knaves.

7. In _France_, Chateaubriand in his "_Genie du Christianisme_" p.r.o.nounces an eloquent eulogy on the half-pagan Christianity of the Middle Ages. In another work he makes the representatives of heathenism in the age of Constantine act like Homeric heroes, and those of Christianity speak "like theologians of the age of Bossuet." Lamartine may be described as a Christian romanticist. Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, Sue, Dumas, etc., influenced by the Revolution, developed an antichristian tendency; while naked naturalism, photographic realism in depicting the lowest side of Parisian life, especially adultery and prost.i.tution, is represented by Flaubert, Daudet, De Goncourt, Zola, etc.-In _Italy_, the amiable Manzoni gave n.o.ble expression to Christian feeling in his "_Inni Sacri_," and in his masterly romance "_Promessi Sposi_"; and the famous poet Silvio Pellico, in his "_La mia Prigioni_," affords a n.o.ble example of the sustaining power of true religion during ten years' rigorous imprisonment in an Austrian dungeon. The most gifted of modern Italian poets, Giacomo Leopardi, sank into despairing pessimism, which expressed itself in the domain of religion in biting satire and savage irony. Among the poets of the present who, with glowing patriotism, not only yearned for the deliverance and unity of Italy, but also lived to see these accomplished, and have since given expression, though from different political and religious standpoints, to the desire for the reconciliation of the free united kingdom with the irreconcilable church, the most distinguished, are Aleardi, Carducci, Imbriani, Guercini, Cavalotti.-In _Spain_, Caecilia Bohl von Faber, although the daughter of a German father, and educated in Germany, introduced, under the name Fernan Caballero, the modern romance in a thoroughly national Spanish style, and in a purely moral and catholic Christian spirit. In the _Flemish Provinces_, Hendrik Conscience, the able novelist, has described Flemish village life in a spirit fully in sympathy with Christianity.-_England_ had in Lord Byron a poet of the first rank, who more than any other poet had experience in himself of the convulsions and contradictions of his age. In powerful and impressive tones he sets forth the unreconciled disharmonies of nature and of human life. Incurable pain, despair, weariness of life, and hatred of mankind, without hope, yet without desire for reconciliation, enthusiastic admiration of the ancient world, pa.s.sionate love of liberty and t.i.tanic pride in human might mingle with scenes of grumbling, misery, and profligacy. On the other hand, the rich and mostly solid English novel literature is prevailingly inspired by a Christian spirit.

8. _Popular Education._-While the poetic national literature for the most part found entrance only among the cultured and adult circles, this age, almost as fond of writing as of reading, produced an enormous quant.i.ty of books for the people and for children. But only a few succeeded in catching the proper tone for the ma.s.ses and the youth, and still fewer supplied their readers with what was genuinely pious. Pestalozzi's "_Lienhard und Gertrud_," Hebel's "_Schatzkastlein_," and Tschokke's "_Goldmacherdorf_," respected at least the Christian feeling of the people, although they did not strengthen or foster it. But, on the other hand, in recent years a number of writers have appeared, thoroughly popular, and at the same time thoroughly Christian, who, as popular poets and novelists, have become apostles of Christian views, morals, and customs to the people. The most distinguished of these are Jeremiah Gotthelf (Albert Bitzius, died 1854), whose "Kate the Grandmother" was translated in the _Sunday Magazine_ for 1865, Von Horn, Carl Stober, Wildenhahn, Nathusius, Frommel, Weitbrecht, etc. In the Catholic church Alba.n.u.s Stoltz, died 1883, developed a wonderful power of popular composition, which, however, he subsequently put at the service of a fanatical ultramontanism, and so sacrificed much of its n.o.bility and worth. From the enormous ma.s.s of children's books only extremely few attain their aim. In the front rank stands the brilliant patriarch of Christian tale writing, Von Schubert, died 1860. After him are Barth, the author of "Poor Henry," Stober, and the Swiss Spyri, and the Catholic Christian Schmid, author of the "Easter Eggs."-The _Public Schools_, especially under Dinter (died 1831), member of the consistory and schoolboard of Konigsberg, were for a long time nurseries of the tame, flat, and self-satisfied rationalism of the _ancien regime_; but since 1830, and more particularly in consequence of the violent agitations of the seminary director Diesterweg, who died in 1866, put to silence in 1847, but still for his work in connexion with education always highly respected, many of the teachers took a higher flight in the naturalistic-democratic direction. By word and pen Diesterweg carried on a propaganda in favour of a free and liberal education for the people. His disciples, wanting his earnest Christian spirit, carried out recklessly his radical tendencies, and now the Christian faith has no more persistent foes than the teachers of the public schools. In A.D. 1870, a Teachers'

a.s.sociation in Vienna gave a vote of 6,000 in favour of radicalism. At a Hamburg meeting in A.D. 1872 of 5,100 teachers, progress was shown by individuals raising their voices in defence of Christianity, which, however, were generally drowned in shrieks and hisses. A Teachers'

Evangelical a.s.sociation held its ninth a.s.sembly at Hamburg in A.D. 1881 with 1,500 members. Christian opinions are now ably represented in schools, educational journals, and literature. A burning question at present is whether the national school should be preferred to the denominational school. Liberals in church and state say it should; conservatives say it should not; while both parties think their views supported by the experience of the past. The Prussian minister of education, Falk, A.D. 1872-1879, firmly insisted upon the development of the national system, but his successors Von Puttkamer and Von Gossler reverted to the denominational system. The German Evangelical School Congress of Hamburg in October, 1882, demanded that both elementary and secondary schools should have a confessional character.

9. _Art._-The intellectual quickening called forth with the opening of the new century imparted new spirit and life to the cultivation of the arts.

Winckelmann, died A.D. 1768, had opened the way to an understanding of pagan cla.s.sical art, and romanticism awakened appreciation of and enthusiasm for mediaeval Christian art. The greatest masters of _Architecture_ were Schinckel, Klenze, and Heideloff. The foundation stone of the final part of the Cologne cathedral was laid by a Protestant king, Frederick William IV., in A.D. 1842, and the work was finished by a Protestant builder in A.D. 1880. _Statuary_ had three great masters, who gave expression to profound Christian ideas in bronze and marble, the Italian Canova, the German Dannecker, and greatest of all, the Dane Thorwaldsen, whose Christ and the Apostles and other works form a main attraction to visitors in Copenhagen. Three younger German masters of the art, who have heired their fame, are Rauch, Rietschl, and Drake.-In _Painting_ too a new era now began. A group of gay German artists in Rome, with Overbeck at their head, formed a Society in A.D. 1813, and mostly became perverts to Romanism. Peter Cornelius, the ablest of the school, himself born a Catholic, answered his friends' request to place Luther in a picture of the last judgment, in h.e.l.l: "Yes, but with the Bible in his hands and the devils trembling before him;" and in a subsequent picture of the judgment, he gave the German reformer his place among the saints in heaven. His pupil, Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld is well known by his "_Bibel in Bildern_." Ludwig Richter, the Albert Durer of the nineteenth century and creator of the modern woodcut, has filled German houses with his artistic and poetic creations, which breathe of G.o.d, nature, and the family fireside. The Frenchman, Gustave Dore of Stra.s.sburg, has also ill.u.s.trated the Bible in a manner worthy of ranking alongside of Schnorr, though a characteristically French striving for effect is everywhere discernible.-_Painted Gla.s.s_ (-- 104, 14) for church windows had during the eighteenth century pa.s.sed almost wholly out of use, but again in the nineteenth came into favour, and was made at Dresden, Nuremberg, and Munich. The most eminent artist in this department was Ainmiller of Munich, specimens of whose workmans.h.i.+p are to be seen in all parts of the world.

10. _Music and the Drama._-In Vienna the three great masters of musical composition, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, produced in the department of sacred music some of their n.o.blest works. Mendelssohn, in his St. Paul and Elijah and in his Psalms, sought to reproduce the power and truth of the simple word of G.o.d. An early death prevented him giving expression to his ideal of Christ in music. The Hungarian virtuoso Liszt sacrifices sacred calmness and dignity to theatrical effect. His son-in-law, Richard Wagner, inspired by Schopenhauer's philosophy, a richly endowed poet and composer, proclaimed by his followers as the Messiah of the music of the future, going back to mediaeval legend, has produced a _quasi_-Christian musical drama, in which the gospel of pessimism takes the place of the gospel of the grace of G.o.d.-Quite different is the Pa.s.sion Play of the Bavarian village Oberammergau, which is a reproduction of the mediaeval mysteries (-- 115, 12). It originated in a vow made in 1633 on the occasion of a plague which visited the place, and is repeated every ten years on the Sundays from the end of May to the middle of September. The history of the Saviour's pa.s.sion is here represented with interludes from Messianic Old Testament pa.s.sages explained by a chorus like that of the cla.s.sical tragedy, with appropriate scenery, drapery, and musical accompaniment. In the presence of an immense concourse of strangers for whose accommodation a large amphitheatre was been built, almost all the villagers, men, women, and children, take part in the performance and show rare artistic power.

The text of the drama for the most part agrees with the gospel narrative, only occasionally interspersed with legend, and quite free from ultramontane hagiology and mariolatry. The performance of A.D. 1850, and still more that of A.D. 1880, attracted crowds of pilgrims and tourists to the quiet and remote valley. An independent exhibition, falling little behind the original in the artistic character of its composition and production, was given, in 1883, on the Sundays of July and August in the Tyrolese village of Brixlegg, and was visited by similar crowds.

-- 175. Intercourse and Negotiations between the Churches.

Protestants could recognise, as Catholics could not, elements of truth and beauty in the creeds of their opponents. When a peaceful and conciliatory spirit was shown by individual Catholic clergymen, it was the occasion of suspicion and persecution on the part of the old Romish party. Schemes of union were entertained by the Old Catholics (-- 190), and negotiations were entered on by the Greek Orthodox church, on the one hand, and the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, on the other, but in both cases without any practical result. On the union negotiations between the different Protestant sects, see -- 178; and on the Prusso-Anglican bishopric of Jerusalem, see -- 184, 8. Of the numerous conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism and from Catholicism to Protestantism, we can here mention only such as have excited public interest in some special way.

1. _Romanizing Tendencies among Protestants._-Not only in England, where an important high-church party embraced a more than half-Catholic Puseyism (-- 202, 2), but even in Protestant Germany a Romanizing current set in on many sides. A taste for the romantic, artistic, historical (-- 174, 5, 9, 4), as well as feudalist-aristocratic and hyper-Lutheran ecclesiastical tendencies led the way in this direction. Many sought rest in the bosom of the church "where alone salvation is found," while others, too deeply rooted in evangelical truth, bewailed the loss of "n.o.ble and venerable"

inst.i.tutions in the wors.h.i.+p, life, and const.i.tution of the church, but were unable to accept the various unevangelical accretions which made void the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This was the position of Lohe of Neuendettelsau, in point of doctrine a strict Lutheran, who published a selection of Catholic legends as patterns of self-denial for his deaconesses, wished to restore anointing of the sick, etc. Some Protestant pastors expressed warm sympathy with the Pope during his misfortunes in A.D. 1860, and approved of the continuance of the papacy and the pope's temporal dominion. A conference of Catholics (Count s...o...b..rg, Dr. Michelis, etc.) and Protestants (Leo, Bindewald, etc.) at Erfurt in A.D. 1860, on the basis of a common recognition of the moral advantages of the papacy, sought to bring about a union of the churches.

Still more remarkable is the story told by the Old Catholic professor Friedrich. Just before the opening of the Vatican Council, certain evangelical pastors of Saxony wrote letters to Bishop Martin of Paderborn, which Friedrich himself read, urging that at the council permission should be given to priests to marry and to give the cup in the communion to the laity, and promising that in that case they themselves and many like-minded pastors would join the Romish church. That the letters were written and received is unquestionable; but it is doubtful whether folly and imbecility or a wish to hoax and mystify, directed the pen. The writer or writers, as the examination before the consistory of the locality proved, are not to be sought among the pastors whose names are appended.

How far the Protestant ultra-conservative reactionary party goes with the ultramontanes and how far it would aid the overthrow and undermining of the Protestant state and evangelical church, is shown by the conduct of the Privy Councillor and Chief Justice Ludwig von Gerlach (-- 176, 1), who, in 1872, in the Prussian House of Representatives, took his place among the ultramontane party of the centre, hostile to the empire and friendly to the Poles, and in his pamphlet "_Kaiser und Papst_" of 1872 described the new German empire as an incarnate antichrist. Also the Lutheran Guelphs of Hanover are zealous supporters of all the demands of the centre in the Prussian parliament and in the German Reichstag.

2. _The Att.i.tude of Catholicism toward Protestantism._-Every Catholic bishop has still on a.s.suming office to take the oath, _Haereticos pro posse persequar_. The Jesuits, restored in A.D. 1814, soon pervaded every section with their intolerant spirit. The huge lie that Protestantism is in matters of State as well as of church essentially revolutionary, while Catholicism is the bulwark of the State against revolution and democracy, was affirmed with such audacity that even Protestant statesmen believed it. The Roman Jesuit Perrone (-- 191, 9) taught the Catholic youth in a controversial Italian catechism that "they should feel a creeping horror come over them at the mere mention of the word Protestantism, more even than when a murderous attack was made upon them, for Protestantism and its defenders are in the religious and moral world just the same as the plague and plague-stricken are in the physical world, and in all lands Protestants are the sc.u.m of all that is vile and immoral," etc. In a pastoral of A.D. 1855, Von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz, compared the Germans, who by the Reformation rent the unity of the church, to the Jews who crucified the Messiah. Romish prelates have vied with one another in their abuse of Protestants and Protestantism. In A.D. 1881, Leo XIII.

speaking of the spread of Russian nihilism, charged Protestant missionaries with spreading the dominion of the prince of darkness. Prof.

Hohoff of Paderborn, in his "Hist. Studies on Protestantism and Socialism," Paderb., 1881, reiterated the accusation: "Yes, it is so, Protestantism has begotten atheism, materialism, scepticism, nihilism. The Reformation was the murderer of all science, the greatest foe of culture and learning, and the falsifier of all history.... Melanchthon's _Loci_ may be styled the most unscientific production in the domain of dogmatics.... Yes, the Reformation has proved a prime source of superst.i.tion, a step backward in the history of civilization.... The Catholic church has been the champion of conscience, reason, and freedom.... No one is thoroughly capable of judging historical facts without prejudice as the believing Catholic Christian."-But while the vast majority of Catholic writers thus abuse Protestantism, others like Seltmann of Eberswald seek to win over to the ranks of the Romish church those who can be befooled by fair speeches. The "Protestant"

correspondents in Seltmann's periodical write under the cloak of anonymity.-In Spain the Reformation was long attributed to the Augustinians, who were jealous of the Dominicans as the only dispensers of indulgences, and to Luther's desire to marry; but the poet Nunez de Arca in his "_Vision de Fray Martin_," attributed it to the corruption of the church and papacy of its time, and regarded with sympathy the spiritual struggles of the reformer. Though as a good Catholic he concludes his poem with the ban of the church against Luther, he yet describes him as a just and well-deserving man.

3. _Romish Controversy._-In the beginning of A.D. 1872 the Waldensian Professor Sciarelli published as a challenge the thesis that the Apostle Peter never set foot in Rome, and Pius IX. with childlike simplicity gave his consent to a public disputation, which came off at Rome on 9th and 10th February. Three Protestant champions, with Sciarelli at their head, were confronted by three Catholics, headed by Fabiani, before 125 auditors admitted by ticket. Both sides claimed the victory; but the shorthand reports were more widely read through Italy than could be agreeable to the papal court.

4. _Roman Catholic Union Schemes._-While American Protestant missionaries strove zealously for the conversion of the schismatical Eastern Churches, Rome with equal diligence but little success endeavoured to win over these and the orthodox Greeks to her own communion. There was great joy over the conversion of the _Bulgarians_ to Romanism in A.D. 1860. Taking advantage of a national movement for the restoration of a patriarchate independent of Constantinople (-- 207, 3), some French Jesuits succeeded in persuading a small number of malcontents to agree to a union with Rome. In 1861 the pope consecrated an old Bulgarian priest, Jos. Sokolski, archbishop of the united Bulgarian church. Very soon, however, he and almost all his followers returned to their allegiance to the Greek Orthodox church. Leo XIII. in his _encyclical_ of A.D. 1880, by giving conspicuous honour to Cyril and Methodius, and uttering kind sentiments about the Christian church in the East, and conferring high rank on dignitaries of the Eastern church, seeks to smooth the way for a union of the two great churches.

5. _Greek Orthodox Union Schemes._-In A.D. 1867 the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed a letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople and the whole Eastern church, to open the way to a common understanding and union of the churches, sending a modern Greek translation of the Book of Common Prayer, and asking their a.s.sistance at the consecration of an Anglican church at Constantinople. The patriarch Gregorius granted this request, and answered the letter in a friendly manner, pa.s.sing over the Anglican's warnings against superst.i.tious additions to the doctrine, _e.g._ mariolatry, but characterizing all the contrary doctrines of the Thirty-nine Articles as "very modern." At the same time vigorous measures were being taken with a similar object by members of the Russian and of the Anglican churches. In 1870 Professor Overbeck of Halle undertook to act as intermediary in these negotiations. He had in 1865 published, in answer to the papal encyclical with syllabus of December 8th, 1864 (-- 185, 2), a tract with the motto _Ex oriente lux_, in which he placed the claims of the Orthodox eastern church before the Roman Catholic as well as Protestant. On the opening of the Vatican Council in 1869 he advocated in a pamphlet the breaking up of the papal church and the formation of Catholic national churches. In North America Professor Bjerring, of the Catholic seminary for priests at Baltimore, took the same position. In March, 1871, he went to St. Petersburg, was there ordained as an Orthodox priest, and on his return to New York inst.i.tuted a Sunday service in the English language according to the Greek rite. Of any further advance in this direction of union nothing is known.

6. _Old Catholic Union Schemes._-Dollinger (-- 191, 5) in A.D. 1871 was hopeful of a union not only with the Greek, but also with the Anglican church, and similar hopes were entertained in England and Russia, and distinguished representatives of both communions took part in the Old Catholic congresses (-- 190, 1). On the invitation of Dollinger, as president of the committee commissioned by the Freiburg Congress of A.D.

1874 to treat about union with the Anglican church, forty friends of union from Germany, England, Denmark, France, Russia, Greece, and America met in conference at Bonn. After a lively debate the cleft between East and West was bridged over by a compromise treating the _filioque_ as an unnecessary addition to the Nicene symbol, and a.s.serting that, however desirable a mutual understanding on doctrinal questions might be, existing differences in const.i.tution, discipline, and wors.h.i.+p presented no bar to union. The Catholics presented the Anglicans with fourteen theses essential to union, in which the anti-Protestant doctrines were for the most part toned down, but transubstantiation distinctly a.s.serted. Subsequent conferences never got beyond these preliminaries. It was, however, agreed that, in case of necessity, Anglicans and Old Catholics might dispense the supper to one another.

7. _Conversions._-The most famous converts of the century were Hurter, the biographer of Innocent III., the Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn, writer of religious romances, Gfroerer, the church historian, the radical Hegelian Daumer, the historian of ante-tridentine theology Hugo Lammer, and Dr. Ed.

Preuss, who had written against the immaculate conception and for criminal conduct had to flee the country. In A.D. 1844 Carl Haas, a Protestant pastor, went over to the Romish church, but the two new dogmas of Pius IX.

led him to study the works of Luther. He now returned to the Lutheran church, vindicating his procedure in a treatise ent.i.tled, "To Rome, and from Rome back again to Wittenberg, 1881." Also the Mecklenburg Lutheran pastor, Dr. A. Hager, who, after his conversion, had undertaken the editors.h.i.+p of an ultramontane newspaper in Breslau in 1873, was obliged in a few years to resign the appointment. His return to the evangelical church was being talked about, when he suddenly died in 1883, after having received the last sacrament in the Catholic church. The climax of abuse of Luther and the Lutheran church was reached by the Hanoverian Evers, who had gone over in 1880; in all his scandalous and vituperative writings he describes himself on the t.i.tle page as "formerly Lutheran pastor." His mud-throwing, however, was carried so far, that even the ultramontane _Koln. Volkszeitung_ was constrained to advise him to write more decently.

8. The Mortara affair of A.D. 1858 attracted special attention. The eight-year old son of the Jew Mortara of Bologna was violently taken from his parents to Rome because his Christian nurse said that two years before, during a dangerous illness, she had baptized him. The church answered the entreaties of the parents and the universal outcry by saying that the sacrament had an indelible character, and that the pope could not change the law. Again in A.D. 1864, the ten-year old Jewish boy, Joseph Coen, apprentice weaver in Rome, was decoyed by a priest to his cloister and there persuaded to receive baptism. In vain his mother, the Jewish community, and even the French amba.s.sador, urged his restoration; and when, in A.D. 1870, the temporal power of the pope was overthrown, the lad, now sixteen years old, had himself become such a fanatical Catholic that he refused to have anything to do with his mother as an unbeliever.

9. In the Tyrol in A.D. 1830 there were numerous conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism (-- 198, 1). A Catholic priest in Baden, Henhofer of Muhlhausen, influenced by the writings of Sailer and Boos, went over to the Lutheran church in A.D. 1823, and continued down to his death in A.D. 1862 a vigorous opponent of the prevailing rationalism.

Count Leopold von Seldnitzsky, formerly Prince-Bishop of Breslau, felt obliged in 1840, in consequence of the conscientious objections he had to perform his official duties toward church and state during the ecclesiastico-political controversies of 1830 (-- 193, 1), to resign his appointments. He was subsequently led in A.D. 1863, through reading the Scriptures and Luther's works, after a sore struggle, to join the evangelical Church. He devoted all his means to the founding of Protestant educational inst.i.tutions at Berlin and Breslau. He died in A.D. 1871, in his eighty-fourth year. The proclamation by the Vatican of the dogma of infallibility drove many pious and earnest Catholics out of the Romish communion. Of these Carl von Richthofen, Canon of Breslau, engages our special interest. Son of a pious Lutheran mother, and trained up under Gossner's mild spiritual direction (-- 187, 2), his gentle and deeply religious nature had attached itself to the Roman Catholic church of his father only under the illusion that the Romish doctrine of justification was not wholly irreconcilable with the evangelical doctrine. He at first submitted to but soon renounced the Vatican decree; was excommunicated by Archbishop Forster, voluntarily resigned his emoluments; joined the Old Catholics in A.D. 1873, and the separated Old Lutherans in A.D. 1875. In the following year he died a painful death from the explosion of a petroleum lamp.-Upon the whole Rome has made most converts in America and England; and she has suffered losses more or less severe in France, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Bohemia.

10. _The Luther Centenary, _A.D._ 1883._-The celebration of Luther's birth was carried out with great enthusiasm throughout all Germany, more than a thousand tracts on Luther and the Reformation were published, statues were erected, special services were held in all Lutheran churches, high schools, and universities, and brilliant demonstrations were made at Jena, Worms, Wittenberg, and Eisleben. There were founded at Kiel a Luther-house, at Worms and at the Wartburg Luther libraries, in Leipzig and Berlin Luther churches. At Eisleben a bronze statue of the reformer was solemnly unveiled representing his tearing the papal bull with his right hand and pressing the Bible to his heart with his left. Another n.o.ble monument was raised by the munificence of the emperor by the issuing during this year of the first volume of pastor Knaake's critical edition of Luther's works. A "German Luther Inst.i.tute" aims at a.s.sisting children of the poorer clergy and teachers, and a "Reformation History Society" has undertaken the task of issuing popular tracts on the persons, events and principles of that and the succeeding period based upon original doc.u.ments. Protestants of all lands, with the exception of the English high-church party, contributed liberally; the Americans had a copy of the great Luther statue of the Worms monument (-- 178, 1) made and erected in Was.h.i.+ngton. Even in Italy the liberal press eulogised Luther, while the ultramontanes loaded his memory with unmeasured calumny and reproach. The threatened counter-demonstrations of German ultramontanes fell quite flat and harmless. The _Zwingli Centenary_ of January 1st, A.D. 1884, was celebrated with enthusiasm throughout the Reformed church, especially in Switzerland. On the other hand, the celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Wiclif's death on December 31st, 1884, created comparatively little interest.