nimity, and rising, looked round the church. As his eye rested on me, in his displeasure, he added, The preacher has certainly not studied the Holy Scriptures, at least he has not learnt their spirit, or he would have known well that the inspired writings never flatter men, but on the contrary, humble them. A preacher who makes my troops feel their self-sufficiency, and puts them asleep when he ought to rouse them, I will not endure.' he made me translate. By mere chance it happened to be one that I had read before with my tutor; and when he began praising me for my performance, I told him go. Immediately his earnest countenance brightened up, he stroked me gently on the cheeks, and added, So ist's recht, lieber Fritz,—that's the right plan, my dear Fritz, always honest and without concealment. Never wish to seem what you are not; always be more than you appear. These words made a deep impression upon me; and dissimulation and misrepresentation of every kind I have, from my earliest years, held in the greatest detestation and abhorrence. "In 1809, when the king with his family returned to Berlin according to his former practice, he attended the celebration of the Lord's supper in the church at Potsdam with the congregation. The moving and elevating spectacle of a sovereign and his people "He exhorted me particularly to cultivate uniting on such consecrated ground, affected the French language; the language of diploevery heart so much that I thought some al-macy over the whole world, and by its flexilusion to the circumstance was necessary. But trifling as the allusion was it displeased him. I thank you for your sermon,' he said, afterwards; it was an excellent one, and it edified me. But it is painful to me when, in the preaching of the divine word, any mention is made of my name, especially in the way of praise.' I answered that his feelings on this subject were known to me, and that I honored such sentiments; but that in present circumstances the people would have been disappointed in their justest expectations, had I passed over in utter silence the subject which warms all hearts.' I added, 'If, however, on that account, I have displeased you, yet may the good intentions which I had excuse me.' The memorable words of the king in answer to me were, 'Your good intentions I have by no means mistaken, but I believe there is no king in a church in the eyes of God, no distinctions, no merit. The more earnestly and freely, and without respect of persons, a man preaches God's word, the more will I esteem him. The public worship of God, and the participation in it, is meant to improve man, and on that account real truth and disagreeable truth must be spoken as well to master as to servant.'" bility peculiarly adapted for that purpose. And, in fact, I do speak it (for it is more pliant) with greater readiness than German; but still I like the German better. Then, on dismissing me, Frederick, I remember, spoke seriously to this effect. Now, Fritz, werde was tüchtiges par excellence. Learn to do something thorough in the world. There are great events waiting for you. I am at the end of my career, and my work will soon be finished. I am afraid things will go pêlemêle in the world when I am gone. Every where I see a great deal of fermenting matter; and the men that should regulate and lay the approaching disturbance, especially in France, do all they can to nourish it. The masses are already beginning to move up from below; and when this comes to an outbreak, da ist der Teufel los-then the devil is loose. I fear you will have hard work of it some day. Make yourself ready; keep yourself in training; be firm. Remember me. Guard our honor and our fame. Do INJUSTICE TO NO MAN; BUT LET NO MAN DO INJUSTICE TO YOU.'" But the most prominent feature in the character of the late Prussian sovereign, and one which seems to have been com Beautifully illustrative of this deep-root-municated to the present monarch, was ed love of truth in the royal breast, is the following reminiscence from the king's own mouth of his early intercourse with the great Frederick in his latter days. It concludes with a prophetic intimation of the French revolution, inferior in interest and significance to nothing of the kind that is recorded: "Yes! a truly great man. On this very spot it was, here on this seat, that I saw and spoke to him for the last time. He was full of kindliness and tenderness. He examined his conscientious supervisorship of ecclesi- views me on the different subjects of study in which I was then receiving instruction, especially in history and mathematics. He made me converse with him in French; and then took out of his pocket Lafontaine's fables, one of which on are, indeed, both pre-eminently reli and a wide circumference. resolution, a guessing, an imagining, a play of opinion; now this way, now that way, to suit the many-colored and changing ideas of the age. gious; but the piety of the one is more and rests there; the philosopher in the subtleclosely bound to definite dogma and exter-ty of the thoughts which are ever passing through his speculative understanding; the nal institution, while that of the other par-physician in search after the laws and powers takes more largely of discursive specula-of Nature. To the soldier the word of comtion and desultory sentiment. From every mand is 'rule and type.' Each of these vothing of this kind, so common among cations has its alloted sphere to cultivate; and German philosophers, theologians, and it is to the limited nature of this sphere that poets, the plain, practical, prosaic mind, of all its consistency, steadiness, and calmness Frederick William III. was particularly are owing-this gives it at once a sure centre averse; and instead of the new lights by "On the other hand, I find in the clergymen which Hegel taught the modern divines to of our age a visible and tangible indefiniteinterpret the Nicæan doctrine of the Trini-ness and desultoriness of character-an irty, his majesty preferred the old and obsolete guidance of Luther and Melancthon. He was, indeed, not only a most pious, sincere and serious Protestant Christian, but like our notable James I. (with infinitely greater "I am aware that the stagnation of religion sense) a theologian, and like his son Charles, in a nation is corruption and death; but indecision begets insecurity, and in the fluctuation a manufacturer of liturgies. The deeply we lose hold of the basis and firm foundation religious tone of Frederick William's mind on which we ought to rest. Perfectionation sprang, no doubt, from an original and es- is the ever restless grand impulse of humanisential element of his character; but it re- ty; but without a deep, solid foundation, no ceived its full development, as the religious advance can be made towards this; and what faculty not unfrequently does, in his years with the charm of novelty for a certain period is found afterwards to of deep personal affliction and public pros-be but a vague wandering about and beating of tration; in the years 1807-8-9, when Nathe bush, in which real experience is lost, and poleon had forced him to flee from the a wild, hazardous, experimenting supplies its sight of his own enslaved capital to the far place. In a Christian clergyman I at least banks of the Pregel at Konigsberg. Here desire a man, who, both in word and deed, the humbled monarch found that spiritual shows that he is impressed with the deep conconsolation of which he stood in need, in viction that he is the servant of the Church. the evangelic words of Archbishop Borow- This is seen in many in nothing but their priestly garments-it is lost when in colored sky, a man whom he always looked up to and modish clothing they mix with the world with such emotions of reverence and gra- around them. I am certainly not of opinion titude, as belong to the converted man that the doctrinal scheme of the Church, acwhen he contemplates the apostolic agent cording to its symbolical books, ought to be of his conversion. In Borowsky the considered perfect, and remain for ever as it wounded majesty of Prussia found a heal- is; I am convinced rather that the Church would be revivified and would develop and ing power, that, on a mind constituted as retain a fresh and vigorous existence were his was, neither the profound subtlety of it to enrich itself out of the inexhaustible Kant, nor the iron energy of Fichte was fulness of God's word, and restricting itself to calculated to exercise. The following ex- this decisive authority still further to make tract is characeristic:use of the results of the progressive age for its own advantage. "You must contemplate Borowsky as a prophet of the Old Testament, and an apostle of the New; or, if this is saying too much, at least look upon him as a true copy of this original type. Every thing in him bears the stamp of his position-suggestive and solid, gentle and serene, artless and simple, truthful and open. The Christian minister only is seen and heard in him, free from all affectation and all pedantry. And so it shall and must be; and so it ever is when the vocation to which a man has devoted himself has penetrated his heart so as to become his second nature. It is this that is wanting in the clergymen of our times. Every profession gives to him who lives and breathes in it a peculiar and recognizable impress. The jurist is rooted in positive law may look like progress, "But a fixed system, in which she is what she is, and will be, and shall be, and by which she separates herself from other bodies, the Church must have, and moreover must watch over, as over a sacred possession; because only by means of a common element can a Christian community exist, and only in a community is there a cementing and self-preserving power. But where that which is the object of the Church's Faith is lost and split into opposing countless individual opinions, each man making a new religion to himself, into stead of accepting the one religion given to him in the Scriptures, and where men are allowed to use such discretionary power and to call it Protestantism, the inevitable result will be that they will go on protesting till not 349 one iota of the tenor and substance of Bibli- may go to heaven in his own way,' is one to cal Christianity is left remaining." which I cannot give my unconditional assent. Taken with reference to individuals indeed, These sentiments, so familiar to us in and single cases, the maxim is not merely this country, where most persons that are perfectly safe, but absolutely imperative. No Christians at all are so as believers in a man, no ruler, has the right to prescribe to another what he shall believe: faith cannot strictly miraculous and supernatural combe commanded; it is the freest possible act of munication, might not be worth quoting at a free mind. Every man appropriates to such length in this place, were it not that himself and assimilates the objects of his faith this very matter of religion, in this very shape according to his capacities and temperament; of a fixed and definite super-naturalism as this man with the understanding, that with opposed to a more free and floating ration- the heart. A perfect unanimity in matters of alism, is one of the great questions now this kind is an impossibility. And if an atagitated between the German people, and tempt is made to force such unanimity by the imposition of external forms, this outward the present King of Prussia. The strug compulsion must always remain a dead letter; gle is not merely between bureaucratists nay, worse, it will even excite hatred and opand constitutionalists, between central uni- position, for this plain reason, that the mind formity and local variety; but emimently of man, as soon as it begins to think, must and decidedly between one religious party assert its liberty in all directions, and especialof which the watchword is Church, and ly in the dominion of religion. Here to mainanother of which the watchword is Free-tain independent dignity, and to enjoy absolute liberty, are necessary correlatives. dom. It is a dangerous thing indeed, in some sense, for a people to have a very religious sovereign; at least all the great civil wars in Europe during the last three hundred years have been excited and cherished by the zeal of eminently religious kings. Ferdinand of Austria, in the year 1618, and Charles of England in 1638, a blaze by equally set their kindoms in their piety. Genius of any kind, indeed military no less than religious, is dangerous upon a throne; not because genius is a bad thing any where, but because it is often unaccompanied with sense; and genius with a sceptre in one hand, and a sword in the other, is a thing of all others the most apt to become despotical. We shall not, therefore, be surprised if we find the mild, sober, and tolerant personal piety of Frederick William III., taking a form upon the throne, in little distinguishable from the most obdurate bigotry and systematic intolerance. Most interesting and instructive in this view is the following pas sage, in which the royal theologian himself, with a curious casuistry (of which we have familiar examples nearer home), draws the line of distinction between the private conscience of the citizen, and the state conscience of the monarch. In his private capacity, according to this doctrine, the crowned individual must be comprehensively tolerant, and delicately polite; in the performance of his public duties intolerance may often become a necessary first principle, and persecution a natural result. "The often repeated sentiment of Frederick the Great-In my kingdom every man "So far Frederick's maxim is correct; and is the best practical rule that can be given to guard society against the evils of intolerance and sectarian hatred; but it becomes wrong and false whenever it is attempted to be applied to the serious relation in which a Protestant monarchy stands to a Protestant Church. This Church came into existence at first, only by the protecting power of those princes who adhere to its principles; and only by their subscription and executorial power did the Augsburg Confession receive public sanction and eclesiastical authority. The reformers, in order to give stability and permanence to the new Church, placed it under the protection of the supreme territorial authorities, and these are, therefore, the born patrons of the Church. This protectorate, by the free act of the Church, made their sacred duty, and intimately connected with every thing that possesses intense vitality under their government, has, by the peace of Westphalia, been secured as the sacred right of the princes of Germany. They must, therefore, take the Evangelical Church of the country under their protection, and this can, in common sense, mean nothing else than that they must watch over the maintenance and operative power of the fixed leading principles which constitute the spirit and the substance of the Evangelical Church; and through which, and in which, she has become that which she is, by which she distinguishes herself from other communions, and especially from the Roman Catholic; principles, in short, which she cannot surrender and lose, without giving up her own character and losing her own existence. For wherever this ordering, controlling, and leading hand is absent, the arbitrary will of the individual becomes supreme; and every where, in the state as well as in the Church, there is nothing more terrible than individual caprice. The lawless power having no boundaries to keep, scatters the consequence. seeds of destruction around; all ties are loos- same sovereign, who offered his territory ened, and social dissolution is the unavoidable as an asylum to the expatriated victims of Austrian bigotry in, the Tyrol, could lend "I am a decided enemy of every hierarchy because it is opposed to the spirit of Christian-his countenance and his arm to the expulity, and I detest above all things its despotical sion of the pious old Lutherans from Silesia. government; but if the Evangelical Church In the other application, we see how evanis without all government, and if every cler-gelical piety, inherited from his father, has, gyman is to have the right and the liberty to in the person of the present sovereign, beadminister the sacrament according to his come a synonym for bigotry, methodism, private opinion and caprice, if he may preach and every sort of selfish narrow-mindedness. and teach in one congregation so, and in the In an absolute monarchy, indeed, where the other congregation so, then all organic connexion is dissolved, and to talk of a confession personal feelings of the king are at no point of faith of the Evangelical Church (though separable from the public law of the land, every church must have some confession or a zealously religious man almost necessarily other,) becomes a practical absurdity. The becomes an energetic Erastian; he studies ecclesiastical element thus becomes identified Luther and Melancthon, he determines the with the whirl of every momentary and ephe-number of the sacraments, he makes and meral idea, and amid choosing and rejecting, unmakes bishops, he edits a new version of building up and pulling down, gradually undermines the evangelical faith of the people. the hymn-book, he fuses old Calvinists and 'EVANGELICAL ' The children have then a different faith from Lutherans into one new their parents; family worship and domestic Church; and in so doing, while matters piety have no longer any nucleus round which proceed smoothly enough with an indifferthey can form, and public worship loses every ent or a submissive people, he now and charm, and the Church itself all binding power then stumbles on a stump of obstinate old and authority. Binding, cementing, and controlling liturgical forms are, therefore, accord- orthodoxy; and in this case, if he will not ing to the precedent of the reformers, an essen- say peccavi, (which a king and a public man tial want of the evangelical as of every other can rarely do,) he becomes, with all his piety and peacefulness, a Henry VIII., and nothing less, in principle; and he also must victimize his score of Sir Thomas Mores, or other worthies, though in a bloodless down. The great matter always is, that the fashion, by the more decent and temperate officiating clergyman shall know how to keep martyrdom of the nineteenth century. Such himself at a distance from a mere cold and has hitherto been the history of evangelidead mechanism, and to breathe into the sim-cal' piety on the throne of Prussia; while ple and noble form the animating and elevating its present workings and expected explospirit which belongs to it. When this is done, sions chain the eye of the reflective, before the stable uniformity and the constant recur- all other parts of Europe, chiefly on Breslau, rence of these forms is, in fact, the very thing which clothes them with a peculiar charm; for on Königsberg, and on Berlin. it is consistent with the testimony of all experience, that Christian congregations, of the middle and lower classes especially, are so much the more edified with these forms the more familiarly and fondly they recur to them, as to a sure guide and a clear light amid the constant changes of earthly existence. I have thought and read much on this matter, pro and con., and what I have stated is my decided and well proved conviction, of which no man shall church. "These prescribed forms are by no means the essentials of religion, but they are the encircling and preserving cause of vital piety, and this often vanishes when these are broken rob me." This whole passage is pregnant with instruction; and equally so, whether we apply it as an interpreter to explain the most notable ecclesiastical events in Prussia since the peace, or as a prophet to predict the result of the struggle at present going on beyond the Elbe, between the Prussian people and the Prussian government. In the one application we see clearly how the · Let us now, to complete the outline, cast a glance on the political and military aspect of his majesty's character; and here we cannot do better than choose as our text the short characteristic of the Prussian Monarch given by his great adversary, Napoleon: Le roi de Prusse, comme curactère privé, est un loyal, bon, et honnête homme; mais dans sa capacité politique c'est un homme naturellement plié à la necessite; avec lui on est le maitre tant qu'on a la force, et qui la main est levée.'* Now, if the part of this portraiture which relates to the king's political character be softened down a little, and expressed in phrase a trifle more polite, it seems to give the whole truth of the matter, so far as we can judge, fairly enough. In the political career of Freder *Las Casas,' in Fain, 1813. Vol. I., p. 99. * quo ick William III. we see nothing of that the battle of Jena, in October, 1806. consistent and homogeneous character Frederick William III. found his kingdom which is impressed on his ecclesiastical isolated from the great European alliance movements; an incoherent alternation of against France, by the peace of Basle, made caution and rashness, liberalism at the helm in 1795. At what period precisely he should to-day, and despotism to-morrow, indicate have taken up arms against the even more plainly enough that in this sphere the osten- glaring acts of Gallic insolence, we shall sible leader of affairs was in reality led, not undertake to decide; certain it is, that and that the royal movements were in all he took them up at the very time when he cases the result, not the cause, of the cir- ought not to have done so; and the crowncumstances, with which they were connect- ed Corsican, by the slowness and indecision ed. We have, therefore, to seek for the po- of his adversary, had the full advantage, litical history of Frederick William III. with regard to Germany, of that old Roman more in the times than in the man; for he maxim, so skilfully exhibited by the sentenwas, in fact, nothing of a born king and a tious Tacitus, Dum singuli pugnant, uniruler of men; the great stage of public life versi vinicuntur.' But on this part of the was not his natural element; and he was king's conduct, so unlike the bold preventive by temperament utterly ignorant of the style of his great ancestor, we have the grand, and to kingly actions in critical benefit of direct evidence from a man who times indispensable, science of DARING. Could say of those eventful days, with a more He had one great virtue, however, which just pride that any man in Prussia, Et q our Charles I. did not possess; he had rum pars magna fui.' In Von Gagern's modesty and sense enough, when necessity correspondence with Stein, we have the pressed hard, to allow himself to be used following most instructive utterances from by those circumstances which he could not the fiery old baron control. If he could not be the steam in the coach, as little would he be the drag, much "It was not Frederick William II.," says he, less would he be the impertinent peg, that commenting on Gagern, "but his successor, Frederick William III., who is to be blamed by pushing itself in at every hole, where it for the long duration of the peace with France. was not required, might even cause an ex- The former wished for war-loved war-hated plosion. In his long reign of forty-three the French, and allowed the peace of Basle years, while, on the one hand, ill-timed to be made against his will; and there was timidity and vacillation had reduced the king- nothing for which he was so eager as that it dom of the great Frederick almost to the should be broken with all possible convenience. bounds of the original electorate; on the He was well read in history, and with his high other hand, well-timed decision and steady sibly alive to the danger that threatened Europe notions of royal dignity could not but be senresolution achieved in the course of a few from French preponderance. Had this king years a social regeneration in Prussia, more been alive in 1799 he would have taken part important in its consequences than the po- in the war against France. Both with the litical importance acquired to the same army and with the people at that time there country by the European renown of the was a very general desire for war. Neither famous Seven Years' War. A man naturally were the ministers to blame. Lombard was not a shallow nor a weak man: as little was cautious, and a king essentially conservaHaugwitz. Both had good understandings, the tive, the preacher of moderation and pro- former a great deal of classical learning, a gressive development in all things, became, thorough knowledge of French literature, and in fact, under the sudden pressure of urgent no vulgar poetical talents. Both were immoral circumstances, a bold state surgeon, ampu- and roués; Lombard of low birth (his father tating limbs by wholesale, cutting off thou- was a wig-maker, and therefore he often used sands of legs (as Nero wished to do necks) having been bred in the licentious school of to say mon père de poudreuse memoire,) both at one fell swoop; was, unquestionably, as Riezen and Lichtenau. Haugwitz wished one of his own academical men said, the war in 1799. In the conference which he, the most radical reformer in Europe.' Such an Duke of Brunswick, and the king, held at Peexcellent thing is it, when a man, however tershagen in May, 1809, war was in fact refar out of his natural place, still retains solved on, and Prussia was to take part with that one virtue, which is the soil of many Russia. Haugwitz went to Berlin for the purvirtues, docility, or the capacity of benefit-pose of arranging the final details with Count Panim. The king, however, on the road from ing by the hard lessons of experience! Minden to Wesel, took back his resolution, The first great era in the king's political life is that from his accession, in 1797, to * ' Antheil.,' iv., 48. |