History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology

by J. F. Hurst

What we thus see developed in philosophy was equally manifest in regard to literature. There arose, as if by the enchanter's wand, a group of literary giants at Weimar, an insignificant town on the outskirts of the Thuringian Forest, who wielded an influence which was destined to be felt in coming ages. Through a combination of circumstances, Weimar became their common home. It grew into a modern Parnassus, and to this day bears the name of the German Athens. Karl August, imitating the example of Augustus Cæsar, gathered around him as numerous and powerful a cluster of literary men as his scanty revenue would allow. He paid but little regard to their theological differences; all that he cared for was their possession of the truly literary spirit. His little principality, of which this was the capital, could not possibly be elevated into either a second or third rate power. All hope of great influence being cut off in this direction, he secured the presence of those chiefs of letters who gave him a name and a power secured to but few in any age. The town of Weimar possesses a calm rustic beauty by which the traveler cannot fail to be impressed. You see only a few traces of architectural taste, but the memory of the departed worthies who once walked the winding streets is now the glory of the place. There, the church where Herder preached now stands; near by, the slab that covers the dust of Wieland; yonder, the humble cottage of Schiller, with the room just as it was when the mute minstrel was borne from it to his home in the earth; across the brook is Goethe's country villa; and back in the grove, the table whereon he wrote. There is a quiet sadness in the whole town, as if nothing were left but the mere recollection of what it once was. How different the picture sixty years ago, when all the literary world looked thither for the last oracle from one of these high-priests of poesy! Book-publishers went there to make proposals for the editorship of magazines, or for some other new literary enterprise. Napoleon himself craved an audience with Goethe, and it is the strongest grudge held by the Germans against the master of their literature that the oppressor of the fatherland was not denied his request. Young men went to Weimar from all parts of Europe to kiss the hand of these great transformers of æsthetic taste. There was not a sovereign within the pale of civilization who did not envy Karl August's treasures. The story of the literary achievements, of the Platonic friendships, and of the evening entertainments of Weimar, forms one of the most remarkable chapters in the whole history of letters.

The name of Herder demands our prominent notice because of its intimate connection with the theological movement we have been tracing. He was eminently adapted to his times. Perfectly at home with his generation, he looked upon his contemporaries as brethren, and aroused himself manfully to serve them in every interest. We notice in all his works a careful study to meet the emergency then pressing upon society. We will not say that Herder wrote every work just as it should have been, and that he was evangelical throughout. This he was not, but he was greatly in advance of his predecessors. Amid the labyrinth of philosophical speculations it is interesting and refreshing to meet with an author who, though endowed with the mind of a philosopher, was content to pass for a poet, or even for an essayist. His was a mind of rare versatility. What he was not capable of putting his hand to scarcely deserved the name of study. In philosophy, practical religion, literature, church history, education and exegesis he labored with almost equal success. He was the instrument of God, not to raise each of the crushed elements of Christian power to a lofty vitality, but to contribute to the moderate elevation of nearly every one of them. It might be expected that his later writings would not abound in such hearty tributes to devout religious life as we find so glowingly expressed in his earlier productions. The atmosphere of Weimar favored a perverted growth. The personal acquaintance of the men who surrounded him increased his literary power but did not make his religion more fervent and powerful. His training had been in the old purifying furnace of Pietism. His father had been a rare specimen of that class of devout householders, who, back in the days of Spener and Francke, were the real glory of the German people. Young Herder was accustomed to family worship every day, when the hard duties of temporal life were forgotten by those engaged in singing, in the leisurely reading of the Scriptures, and in prayer. One of the first books that had fallen under his notice was Arndt's "True Christianity." It was this work that inspired him with that respect for religion which never left him in subsequent life.

Herder's creed was the improvement of man. He expressed it in one word, humanity. But by this term he meant more than most men conceive in whole volumes. With him, it was that development and elevation of the race for which every true man should labor. We do not come into this life with a perfect humanity; but we have the germ of it, and therefore we should contribute to its growth with unceasing energy. We are born with a divine element within us, and it is for the maturity of this personal gift that all great and good men, such as lawgivers, discoverers, philosophers, poets, artists and every truly noble friend of his race, have striven, in the education of children, by the various institutions designed to foster their individual taste. To beautify humanity is the great problem of humanity. It must be done; man must be elevated by one long and unwearied effort, or he will relax into barbarism. Christianity presents us, in the purest way, with the purest humanity.

Herder was greatly interested in the poetic features of the Bible. His work on Hebrew Poesy is full of his warm attachment to the inspired pictures of early oriental life and history. Whatever divested the Scriptures of this eastern glow received his outright indignation. He censured Michaelis for having criticised all the heart out of the time-honored and God-given record. He compared the critical labors of the Rationalists to squeezing a lemon; and the Bible that they would give, he said, "was nothing save a juiceless rind." He totally rejected the scientific reading of the Bible for common purposes; and maintained, with great ardor, that the more simple and human our reading of God's word is, the nearer do we approach God's will. We must make use of our own thoughts, and we must imagine living scenes, with the inspired words as our thought-outlines. The whole policy of the new class of critics, he believed, was a thoroughly mistaken one. Instead of discarding the pictorial Biblical beauties, as they did with a few hasty dashes of the pen, he would elevate them to a loftier status, and lead the rising generation to imbibe their spirit as a useful element for later life. In his opinion, many of the Rationalists had not the keen insight into the marvelous beauty of the Bible which all should possess who would undertake to elucidate its language and doctrines. They were, therefore, not competent to decide upon it. The only proper method of studying the Scriptures for the instruction of others is by the exercise of a fine poetic sentiment. Hence the best poet makes the best exegete. This reminds us of Schiller's idea of historiography. Schiller said that, in his writing of history, he did not intend to feel continually hampered by the sequence of events, but that he would write as his own imagination approved. High above facts would he place æsthetic taste. A beautiful fancy! But heaven be praised that all historians are not Schillers, and that all commentators are not Herders.

From this representation of Herder's tenacity for the records of inspiration, and particularly for the Mosaic accounts, one would be led to infer that his attachment was due solely to his lofty views of the supernatural origin of these revelations. But we cannot think this was the fact. A careful estimate of his underlying sympathies leads us to conclude that he loved the Bible, not because it was inspired, as much as because it was the highest, earliest, and simplest embodiment of poetry,—for it traces out those things in our history which we are most interested in knowing. The poetic beauty of the Scriptures entranced him. Had each chapter of our canon been written in stately prose, Herder would have been one of its coldest admirers. He ransacked the myths and legends of various nations, and dwelt upon the stories of giants and demi-gods with scarcely less enthusiasm than if discoursing on the building of Babel or on the gift of the law on Sinai. Herder disliked the theories of Kant with cordial aversion. Of course the Königsberg sage had nothing in common with the Weimar rhapsodist. Had Herder only given a prominence to his belief in the fact of inspiration equally with an admiration of the method of it, his service to the cause of practical religion would have been incalculable. Yet, in his views of the person of Christ, he was far in advance of the times. He conceived Christ not as a mere innovating teacher, but as the great centre of faith. His belief in the sufficiency of the atonement stands out in bold contrast with the barren faith of his Weimar associates, who had such lofty ideas of human excellence that they thought man needed only one thing more to complete his perfection,—his emergence from ignorance into taste and knowledge. But Herder could see an abyss of depravity in the heart along with the germ of excellence. He held that Christ alone was able to annihilate the former and develop the latter. He believed that the first three evangelists gave the human side of Christ's character, and that it was John who revealed his divinity. With these four accounts before us we cannot be at a loss to form a sound opinion on the mission of the Messiah. He came to seek and save the lost. What he accomplished could have been effected by no other agency. Herder's own words are: "Jesus must be looked upon as the first real fountain of purity, freedom, and salvation to the world." Of the Lord's Supper he said, on his entrance upon his pastoral duties at Weimar, "The Lord's Supper should not be a mere word and picture, but a fact and truth. We should taste and see what joys God has prepared for us in Jesus Christ when we have intercourse with him at his own table. In every event and accident of life we should feel that we are his brethren and are sitting at one table, and that, when we refresh ourselves at the festival of our Saviour, we are resting in the will and love of the great King of the world as in the bosom of the Father. The high, still joy of Christ, and the spirit which prevails in the eternal kingdom of heaven should speak out from ourselves, influence others, and testify of our own love." It is a lamentable reflection, however, that Herder's lofty views of the mission of Christ, which had been formed in the paternal home, were, in common with many other evangelical views, doomed to an unhappy obscuration upon the advance of his later years by frequent intercourse with more skeptical minds.

One of the chief services rendered the church by Herder was his persistent attempt to elevate the pastoral office to its original and proper dignity. He held that the pastor of the church should not be solely a learned critic but the minister of the common people. In his day, the pastor was considered the mere instrument of the state, a sort of theological policeman;—a degradation which Herder could hardly permit himself to think of without violent indignation. In his Letters on the Study of Theology, published in 1780, and in subsequent smaller works, he sought to evoke a generation of theologians who, being imbued with his own ideas of humanity, would betake themselves to the edification of the humble mind. He would eject scholasticism from the study of the Bible, and show to his readers that simplicity of inquiry is the safest way to happy results. He would place the modern pastor, both in his relations to the cause of humanity and in the respect awarded him by the world, close beside the patriarch and prophet of other days. And that man, in his opinion, was not worthy the name of pastor who could neglect the individual requirements of the soul. According to Herder, the theologian should be trained from childhood into the knowledge of the Bible and of practical religion. Youths should have ever before them the example of pious parents, who were bringing them up with a profound conviction of the doctrines of divine truth. To choose theology for a profession from mercenary aims would preclude all possibility of pastoral usefulness. "Let prayer and reading the Bible be your morning and evening food," was his advice to a young preacher. Some of the most eloquent words from his pen were written against the customary moral preaching which so much afflicted him. "Why don't you come down from your pulpits," he asks, "for they cannot be of any advantage to you in preaching such things? What is the use of all these Gothic churches, altars, and such matters? No, indeed! Religion, true religion, must return to the exercise of its original functions, or a preacher will become the most indefinite, idle, and indifferent thing on earth. Teachers of religion, true servants of God's word, what have you to do in our century? The harvest is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray the Lord of the harvest that he will send out laborers who will be something more than bare teachers of wisdom and virtue. More than this, Help yourselves!"

The counsel given by Herder to others was practised first by himself. He lived among critical minds, who spurned humble pastoral work, but he felt it his duty, and therefore discharged it to the best of his ability. His preaching was richly lucid, and not directed to the most intelligent portion of his auditors. He took up a plain truth and strove to make it plainer. Yet, while the masses were most benefited by his simplicity of pulpit conversation, those gifted men who thought with him arose from their seats profoundly impressed with the dignity and value of the gospel. A witty writer of the time, Sturz, gives an account of Herder's preaching that throws some light upon the manner in which the plain, earnest exposition of God's word always affected the indifferent auditor. "You should have seen," says this man, "how every rustling sound was hushed and each curious glance was chained upon him in a very few minutes. We were as still as a Moravian congregation. All hearts opened themselves spontaneously; every eye hung upon him and wept unwonted tears. Deep sighs escaped from every breast. My dear friend, nobody preaches like him. Else religion would be to every one just what it should be, the most valuable and reliable friend of men. He explained the gospel of the day without fanaticism, yet with a grand simplicity which needed not to ransack the world for its wisdom, its figures of speech, or its scholastic arts. It was no religious study, hurled in its three divisions at the heart of stony sinners; nor was it what some would call a current article of pulpit manufacture. It was no cold, heathen, moral lecture, which sought nothing but Socrates in the Bible, and would therefore teach that we can do without both Christ and the Scriptures. But he preached the faith which works by love, the same which was first preached by the God of love, the kind which teaches to suffer and bear and hope, and which, by its rest and contentment, rewards bountifully and independently of all the joys and sorrows of the world. It seems to me that the scholars of the apostles must have preached thus, for they did not tie themselves down to the hard dogmatics of their faith, and therefore did not play with technical terms, as children with their counting pennies." William von Humboldt said of Herder's sermons that they were "very attractive: one always found them too short, and wished them of double length." Schiller spoke of his sermons as plain, natural, and adapted to the common life, and adds that Herder's preaching was "more pleasing to him than any other pulpit exercise to which he had ever listened."

Herder was the great theological writer of Weimar, and as such, his impression upon theology and religion in general was decided. Though he opposed the Kantian philosophy, because of its petrifying tendency, his antagonism was counteracted by others of the Weimar celebrities. Goethe and Schiller eclipsed all other names in their department of thought, and were the culmination of the new type of literature. Herder might preach, but it was only to a comparatively small world. Goethe and Schiller were, on all points of literature, the oracles of Europe. Like Kant, they stamped their own impress upon theology, which at that day was plastic and weak beyond all conception. Under the Königsberg thinker it became a great philosophical system as cold as Mont Blanc. Then came Poetry and Romance, which, though they could give a fresh glow to the face, had no power to breathe life into the prostrate form.

Schiller shares with Goethe the loftiest niche in the pantheon of German literature. But the former is more beloved than the latter, for the reason that his countrymen think that he had more soul. Schiller endeared himself to his land because of his ardent aspirations to political freedom. The poet of freedom is long-lived, and France will no sooner forget her Béranger, nor America her Whittier, than the German fatherland will become oblivious of Schiller. Like Herder, Schiller had been trained carefully in household religion. In his earliest outbursts of religious feeling there prevailed that ardent and devout spirit which, had it been fostered by a healthy popular taste, might have matured into something so transcendentally brilliant and useful, that the writer of The Robbers would have proved one of the reformers of his people. If his education had reaped its appropriate harvest, his probable bearing upon the regeneration of Germany can be but faintly imagined by the aid of Klopstock's example. These were the sincere thoughts of Schiller's over-burdened soul when, one Sabbath in 1777, he addressed himself to the Deity: "God of truth, Father of light. I look to thee with the first rays of the morning sun, and I bow before thee. Thou seest me, O God! Thou seest from afar every pulsation of my praying heart. Thou knowest well my earnest desire for truth. Heavy doubt often veils my soul in night; thou knowest how anxious my heart is within me, and how it goes out for heavenly light. Oh yes! A friendly ray has often fallen from thee upon my shadowed soul. I saw the awful abyss on whose brink I was trembling, and I have thanked the kind hand that drew me back in safety. Still be with me, my God and Father, for these are days when fools stalk about and say, 'there is no God.' Thou hast given me my birth, O my Creator, in these days when superstition rages at my right hand and skepticism scoffs at my left. So I often stand and quake in the storm; and oh, how often would the bending reed break if thou didst not prevent it; thou, the mighty Preserver of all thy creatures and Father of all who seek thee.

"What am I without truth, without her leadership through life's labyrinths? A wanderer through the wilderness, overtaken by the night, with no friendly hand to lead me and no guiding star to show me the path. Doubt, uncertainty, skepticism! You begin with anguish and you end with despair. But Truth, thou leadest us safely through life, bearest the torch before us in the dark vale of death, and bringest us home to heaven, where thou wast born. O my God, keep my heart in peace, in that holy rest during which Truth loves best to visit us. The sun refuses to reflect itself in the stormy sea, but it is down into its calm mirror-like flood that it beams its face. Even thus keep my heart at peace, O God, that it may be fit to know thee and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent; for this alone is the truth which strengthens the heart and elevates the soul. If I have truth then I have Christ; if I have Christ, then have I God; and if I have God, then I have everything. And could I ever permit myself to be robbed of this precious gem, this heaven-reaching blessing by the wisdom of this world, which is foolishness in thy sight? No. He who hates truth I will call my enemy, but he who seeks it with simple heart I will embrace as my brother and my friend.