IT seems desirable that those who make public references to a man of note should have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with his opinions and character. A religious paper some time ago filled up a corner with this little piece of intelligence: “It is a very notable fact that a son of Hegel, a son of Schelling, and a daughter of Schleiermacher, are not only orthodox Christians, but most deeply interested in the progress of religion.” Another periodical presently repeated the paragraph, prefaced by the remark that what is true in regard to faith—that it is not hereditary—is happily no less true in regard to unbelief. No; faith is not hereditary in the strictest sense, as Schleiermacher took pains to make clear, enforcing in his baptismal addresses, as well as on other occasions, the truth, “that which is born of the flesh is flesh.” And yet we know, not only from Scripture, but from the undeniable witness of history, public and private, that there is a blessed heritage of faith; that “the seed of the righteous is blessed”; and she were no true daughter of Schleiermacher who should be otherwise than most deeply interested in the progress of true religion. As to orthodoxy, that is a term in these days so difficult to define that the readers of this volume must be left to judge for themselves whether or not it is anything wonderful that a child of the author of these sermons should be an orthodox Christian. This is, on every ground, more desirable than that a translator unversed in the fine distinctions and definitions of theologians, should attempt to give a categorical statement of the views of one to whom has been imputed, on the one hand, every shade of heterodox opinion,—who has been denounced in turn as pietist, rationalist, pantheist, even atheist; and who, on the other hand, has been held to fill a place in the Christian Church not inferior to that of Luther or even of Paul.
The sermons have been selected with a view to as wide a range of subjects as possible, from the four volumes of Schleiermacher’s published discourses; and they are arranged, so far as this could be done, according to the order of time in which they appeared, that the reader may be more able to judge of the development and progress of the author’s mind. It will also tend to a clearer understanding and a juster appreciation of the sermons, as well as give them a more living and personal interest, that the reader be made acquainted with something of the author’s history, and of the times in which he lived and worked.
Friedrich Ernst Schleiermacher, born at Breslau, November 21st, 1768, was the firstborn son of a poor army chaplain of the Reformed faith; a man of earnest, evangelical piety, whose heart, as well as that of the mother, was set on the spiritual prosperity of their children. The little Fritz, in the frequent necessary absences of his father, took his first steps in education under his mother’s care. At five years old he went to school, where, as he tells us, by his ready memory and the ease with which he acquired mere verbal knowledge, he came to be thought very clever,—an opinion with which he himself entirely agreed; and so became very conceited. But from the character of his master’s school reports, it is plain that the boy was not only clever, but a uniformly good and diligent pupil. The removal of his parents, when he was in his tenth year, to Pless, and then to Anhalt, brought a change that was greatly to the benefit of the delicate child. For nearly two years he lived much in the open air in the country, his mother wisely judging that if he kept up the book-knowledge he had, it was enough for his years. “Fritz,” she says, “is all spirit, and Carl all body.” So, for the time, Fritz occupied himself in making Latin and French translations, acted as schoolmaster to his wild little brother, teaching him reading and arithmetic, and, these duties accomplished, shared his games and rambles out of doors, sometimes joined by the quiet, retiring elder sister Lotte, the loving, beloved and trusted friend of Fritz through all changing circumstances till the day of her death in 1831.
But even in those earliest years the boy was a thinker; and open and docile as he was to all his good mother’s Christian instructions, the active, inquiring mind could take nothing for granted. “I had already,” he tells us, “sustained manifold internal religious conflicts. The doctrine of eternal punishment and reward had already exercised a disturbing power over my childish imagination; and in my eleventh year I spent several sleepless nights in consequence of not being able to come to a satisfactory conclusion concerning the mutual relation between the sufferings of Christ and the punishment for which these sufferings were a substitute.” A boy of ten losing his sleep, not through anxiety as to his own spiritual safety, but in the endeavour to solve a theological problem which has exercised the minds of devout and scholarly men in every age of the Church! It was clear this boy’s life would not run on common or smooth lines. He spent most of two years in a boarding-school at Pless, where scepticism attacked him in the form of doubting the authenticity of all the ancient authors, because he himself did not know any proofs of their genuineness. But a politic fear of losing his much-valued reputation for cleverness, by betraying his ignorance, made him keep a wise silence about those doubts until he should be able to sift the matter for himself.