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demigods, acting publicly in the face of a whole nation—such are the passions that Eschylus pourtrays, in words that sometimes stagger under their own weight, though always within the bounds of artistic seeming; not the more intricate wrongs and workings of the purely private breast, nor the luxurious woes that come to all the world from the white hand of Aphrodite. Lastly, as a poet of the ancient Greek religion, how much is Eschylus fitted to teach us! Here, to our surprise, in the writings of a Polytheist we shall find an idea of sin in general, as the prime fact of the world, which might be looked for in the works of the writer most true to the spirit of another faith; while, as regards one of the consequences of that idea-the eternally true doctrine that the justice of God pursues the sinner; that there is a paction and alliance between the Fates or the powers of nature without, and the Furies or the conscience of man within; and that guilt once committed goes on accumulating from generation to generation, till the hour of some fell explosion-it really seems, if we may judge from the prevalence of that doctrine in their literature, as if the contemporaries of Eschylus were more clear and more convinced than we. Or, if we read for nothing more than a speculative purpose, there is this curious fact, not often noted, which the writings of Eschylus and of his brother-dramatists might make very distinct to us-the fact that, in the Greek Polytheistic system, the local habitation assigned by the imagination to that part of the supernatural most intimately connected with human destinies was not the same as with us. When we pray,

we look upward; it is in the clear starry region that we are taught by habit and by instinct to place our hopes of a future life. The Greeks, on the other hand, looked downward; Zeus, indeed, occupied the realms above, but it was to the gods beneath that they most often prayed; it was to them that they poured out libations; it was from underneath the earth that they expected supernatural aid to arise; and it was thither that the souls both of good and of bad were, in their view, supposed to descend. The reason may have been in that imperfect astronomical knowledge which did not enable them to assign bounds to the earth; but, whatever may have been the reason, the fact is one of immense importance in any investigation into the peculiarities of Greek thought. With us the element of the supernatural is conceived as showering down from above; the Greeks conceived it, still more emphatically, as welling up from beneath.-All this, and much more, the English reader may learn from the translation of Eschylus.

Re-awakening of Christian life in Germany. 279

ART. X.-Tages-Ordnung des vierten Deutschen evangelischen Kirchentags, und des dritten Congresses für die Innere-Mission. Elberfeld, September, 1851.

THE struggles of Christianity in Germany have occasionally occupied a place in our pages, which at once their intrinsic importance, and the vital union of our British theology with that of the Continent, every day becoming more apparent and more intimate, would have more than justified. Hitherto, however, we have dealt with German Christianity more as a matter of speculation and criticism, than of living practical manifestation. Happily, a change in the subject-matter of our study affords a welcome occasion for a change in our procedure, and we rejoice to be able to speak of evangelical religion, as now for the first time since the Reformation, or at least since the Thirty Years' War, asserting its place as a force that ought to move, and to move in the right direction, the whole of German society. The transition is effectually made in that great nation from a scholastic to a popular Christianity; and as we hail this movement with unfeigned congratulation, we shall endeavour to give our readers some outline of the beginning and progress of a change which is probably fraught with as great blessing to Germany and the world as almost any religious occurrence of our times.

Ten years ago, had a spectator of somewhat sanguine temperament been solicited to forecast the destinies of religion in Germany, he would probably have anticipated a gradual rising of that healthful tide which had begun to set in even with the dawn of the century, and had been increased by the influences of the Liberation-war, and the tercentenary of the Reformation, until it should overspread the whole country. He would have laid great stress on the revival of the universities, and have prognosticated that by sending out an increasingly orthodox and fervent body of clergy, they would prove the fountainheads of national piety, as they had been in the days of Spener and Francke. He would have trusted to the zeal of the leading magistrates and nobility-more especially the all but canonized king of Prussia, whose patronage and influence were ever on the side of orthodoxy, and who was known to be disposed to resign to a revived Church the entire spiritual care of his subjects, the moment she was fit to meet the responsibility. And he would have dwelt on the improved constitution of consistories and other ecclesiastical boards of administration, by which the wants of the people would be continually better supplied, until by a happy necessity these somewhat arbitrary bodies should die a natural

death, and give place to the free self-government in presbyteries and synods of a Christianized nation. Such might have been the vaticinations of our theorist; and then he might have regaled his imagination by pictures more or less enchanting, of a recovered harmony between the spirit of the Reformation symbols and the genius of modern free inquiry, and of a lettered theology thus re-impressing the stamp of the age upon the solid gold of the past, and sending it forth amongst a believing people, to displace universally the mass of base coin still in circulation. Prophecies like these were in the mouths of many; the "Church of the Future" in more books than Bunsen's, hasted to put on its apocalyptic garments, and, upon the whole, the German Church, watered by the genial influences of power, and drawing from the deep soil of vigorous speculation, was looked upon as ready to expand in "all the leaves of its spring."

Alas for time, which so perversely frustrates the tokens of seers, and "makes diviners mad!" Preliminary signs of the total incompetency of this remedy were furnished ere the last crowning demonstration brought it home to every heart. The unhappy schism in the camp of positive Christianity, between the disciples of Schleiermacher and Hengstenberg, which came to a head in 1845, shewed how little was to be effected by academic concord; while the growing reaction against the union of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Prussia brought out the utter powerlessness of kings and consistories as the leaders in religious progress. More damaging still to all such hopes of a speedy convalescence of the German Church, were the German Catholic movement, and that of the Friends of Light. It was not so much the undisguised rationalism of these kindred struggles, far spread and widely supported as they were, that was fitted to alarm-it was much more the popular éclat with which they sought to invest themselves, and the degree to which they brought in the democratic element into the settlement of Church questions. In this respect they form an epoch; and contemptible as they were in themselves, they were the ominous shadow of that terrible crisis which was so soon to come. Henceforth there was an open breach between democracy and the Church-an assize of the Church at the bar of the multitude, which nothing but the reconversion of the multitude to the Church could hinder from entailing the most fatal consequences. No such counterevangelistic effort, however, was yet called forth. The Church was willing to lose the more turbulent of these her sons, if they would only quietly withdraw and liberty of dissent being conceded by the royal edict of March 1847, there was a danger that the very opening of this safety-valve would close the agitation and permit the awakening Church again to relapse into her old delusive

Crisis of the Revolution.

281

confidence. The decrees of the Berlin Synod of 1846, weak, ambiguous, and temporizing, were a proof how ready peace was to triumph over principle, and by a latitudinarian extension of the old Confessions, to rest in a hollow union with those who might otherwise have urged on the rationalist separation.

It was in this posture of affairs, when religious liberty without religion had already obtained a decisive triumph on the constitutional battlefield of the Prussian Parliament, and when the leaders of the Church were looking around in all directions to prevent defections to the infidel separatists without, and to hinder the not less infidel multitude within from degrading the Church into a mere political club with an ecclesiastical frontispiece, that the terrific storm of 1848 swept over Germany. The national character of this movement could not be disputed, and the attitude which it soon assumed in relation to the Church, and to every thing that bore the name of religion, broke upon all with the force of a novel and startling revelation. A whole people seemed ready to cast off religion as an imposture and a delusion. Liberty shook hands with infidelity, and even with atheism; and on all sides the abolition of Christianity, under the name of the separation of Church and State, was demanded with a unanimity, and carried through with a celerity-so far as revolutionary measures could carry it-altogether portentous. In the dreadful period of anarchy which succeeded the March revolution of 1848, the moral and social plagues that had so long festered in the heart of the German nation came everywhere to light. Whole tracts of country were illuminated by the blaze of smoking castles. In the towns and cities communism raised its head. Every man's hand seemed turned against his brother, and the vision of German unity floated a hideous spectre over the scenes of discord and bloodshed that were perpetrated in its name. A revolutionary crisis is indeed a stern test of character; but the German nation (we grieve to state it, for we truly love them) stood that test worse than could have been anticipated. The "men of the people," by whom they submitted for months to be duped, were almost without exception men without standing or principle-" unruly and vain talkers," unless, indeed, when they urged in secret clubs or open parliaments schemes of rapine and licentiousness too hideous to be named. If the hopes of German liberty and unity, in the highest sense of the terms, have for the time been frustrated, we must trace the failure, not only to the pedantry and incompetence of the constitutional party, or to the faithlessness and tyranny of the re-actionaries— but much more to the recklessness, brutality, and heaven-daring impiety of German radicalism, which in those qualities has almost exceeded that of France. We do not need to recapitulate

the characteristic passages of the revolutionary history-the excesses of the Berlin mob-the murder of Lichnowski and Auerswald in the streets of Frankfort-the rising in Dresden-the invasion of Baden by the free corps, with its disastrous issues. These events, even the worst of them, admit of some faint extenuation from political excitement. To us it marks a deeper stage of moral degeneracy and corruption that William Marr, the avowed apostle of atheism, was by a great majority returned for the city of Hamburg, and that Robert Blum was canonized as a martyr by a religious celebration in one of the churches in Leipsc.

Let us not do injustice, however, to the dupes or even the promoters of revolutionary and infidel madness. The worst excesses of this tragic period bore a character of judicial retribution on the neglects and wrongs of bye-gone years. The masses were lawless and anarchical; but they had long been denied their rights as citizens, and that in breach of solemn promises and when at length concessions were slowly made, it was as from the ground of divine prerogative and not of constitutional equity. The press abused its liberty, and poured forth incessant streams of scurrility and blasphemy: but who could forget its unjustifiable restraints, and the extent to which religious writings had thus been hindered from making their way among the multitude? Secret clubs and democratic conspiracies were but the fruit of that miserable policy, which, through long years had crippled the freedom of lay association, and forbidden more than nineteen persons to assemble for any act of worship. The general excitement of public opinion against the clergy was but a reaction against the hypocrisy and selfishness which had exacted baptismal, confirmation, and burial fees, for services which their performers were known inwardly to despise; and where it was men of a better stamp who were exposed to contumely, and even to violence, though hatred of serious religion no doubt played its part, the multitude assailed them not less as obstructives of all reform, and as bigoted adherents of the "right divine of kings to govern wrong." The infidel cry that sounded through the country was but the whisper of thousands of pulpits proclaimed upon the house-tops; Communism, the extemporized heaven upon earth of a people whose religious teachers had filched away from them a future life and immortality. There was, in short, a terrible truth, even in the excesses of the revolution, well fitted to put the falsehood and hollow-heartedness of moderate rationalistic Christianity to shame; and for our parts we do not wonder, that a national religion of which (with many beautiful exceptions) this was the prevailing type, was not thought worthy of being kept up, with all its negations and hypocrisies, either in connexion with the common

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