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Take, for instance, the Moravian Church, born and cradled amid the pietism of which Spener of Berlin and Franke of Halle were the acknowledged leaders; and it has given to the world a far larger number of missionaries in proportion to its membership than any church of the age.
Traces of all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and almost all other points of view one can think of are represented somewhere in the records of that one small people.
The altars were beaten down, the idols split to pieces with axes, or smashed by hammers. You would have thought it a field of battle. What a noise! what a breaking! what an echoing in the lofty ceiling!" Kessler. Mysticism and pietism yield to more consistent Catholicism; dogmatism, without symbolical books, which lose their authority where the press is free, succumbs to philosophy.
The devouring of facts, as they are found both in nature and in books, indulgence in social pleasures immoderately and constantly, pietism that feeds exclusively upon the things of religion, the feasting of the imagination upon the creations of fiction all these are debilitating; and a blessed thing to the world is it that they unfit the mind for writing at all, as the overfeeding of the body unfits its organs for labor.
In some respects this monastic pietism resembled the pharisaism of Saul, in the schools of Tarsus, a technical, rigid, and painful adherence to rules, fastings, obtrusive prayers, and petty ritualisms, which form the essence and substance of all pharisaism and all monastic life; based on the enormous error that man deserves heaven by external practices, in which, however, he can never perfect himself, though he were to live, like Simeon Stylites, on the top of a pillar for twenty years without once descending; an eternal unrest, because perfection cannot be attained; the most terrible slavery to which a man can be conscientiously doomed, verging into hypocrisy and fanaticism.
Then, after a long interval, came Transcendentalism, a pleasant mixture of literature and moral guidance, and to-day Boston is as earnest as ever in pursuit of vague ideals and soothing doctrines. But pietism has gradually yielded to the claim of culture.
No one did for England or for France what Schleiermacher had done for the Fatherland. Æsthetic Idealism Besides pietism, the Germany of the end of the eighteenth century possessed still another foil and counterpoise to its decadent rationalism. This was the so-called æsthetic-idealistic movement, which shades off into romanticism.
Unhappily for Mademoiselle Viereck’s friends, she was dark and in no way recalled the dear departed. Mademoiselle Dœnhof, on the other hand, was, according to the French Minister, “so perfectly fair that, while pretty in artificial light, in daylight she was as yellow as a lemon.” With the same charms as Mademoiselle de Voss, she had the same jumble of pietism and virtue.
In the midst of the Pharisaic formalism, the unbelief of the Sadducees, and the pietism of the Essenes, there was yet in Israel a seed of true worshipers, who, though not above the dogmatic prejudices of their time, had heart and mind open for the true religion, and who set the true blessing to be looked for from the Messiah in the satisfying of their religious and moral needs.
Among the Venetian painters there was no conflict between art and religion, or art and curiosity no reaction against previous pietism, no perplexity of conscience, no confusion of aims.
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