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It was a new-attained progress in the Moral Development of man: hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms of the most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists."
A buzz of astonishment swelled through the synagogue, blent with heavier murmurs of protest from shocked pietists. But the more poetic Cabalists understood. They explained that it was the union of the Torah, the Daughter of Heaven, with the Messiah, the Son of Heaven, who was never to mate with a mortal. "Nay, the blasphemy is thine," replied the Bridegroom of the law quietly.
Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous. Moliere has only set them in motion.
Following are some of the aberrations of the Pietists in Halle: That doctrine was of minor importance for, and as compared with, piety; that sanctification was not contained in, but must be added to, faith; that repentance and conversion were urged in such a manner as if man himself could force them; that such Christians as could not tell of certain peculiar penitential struggles and sensations of grace were regarded as unconverted; that the assurance of salvation was not based on the objective Word of God, but on subjective marks, notably such us were found in those converted in the circles of the Pietists; that the afflicted, instead of being comforted with the Gospel of the unconditional pardon of the entire world, were bidden to feel the pulse of their own piety; that such as did not manifest the symptoms of conversion a la Halle, were judged uncharitably and looked down upon as not being truly converted; that the "revived" and "awakened" were regarded as the real church in the Church, the ecclesiolae in ecclesia.
Pietists may be shocked by such nonchalance in the face of their 'grim monster, but philosophers will admire an indifference to inevitable consequences resulting from profoundest love of truth and contempt of superstition.
The relation of Muehlenberg to the confessions was in his own lifetime openly questioned by some of his co-laborers in Pennsylvania, like Stoever and Wagner, who affirmed that the Halle Pietists were not sound Lutherans; the same hue and cry was raised in New York by Berkenmeyer and Sommer, who were representatives here of the orthodoxy, which in Germany contended against Pietism; other good men, like Gerock and Bager, who had not been sent from Halle, sympathized with this feeling, and finally, with some encouragement from Gerock, Lucas Raus, in whom personal enmity toward Muehlenberg had been rankling for years, brought direct charges of want of fidelity to the confessions against him before the ministerium and offered to support them with evidence in writing.
This literary movement that swept over Germany, Britain, France and Scandinavia at the opening of the Nineteenth Century, itself influenced to some degree by the religious revival of the German Pietists and the English Evangelicals, was a release of the emotions, and gave a completer expression to all the elements in human nature.
Pietists may be shocked by such nonchalance in the face of their 'grim monster; but philosophers will admire an indifference to inevitable consequences resulting from profoundest love of truth and contempt of superstition.
Gazali began as a philosopher, then lost confidence in the logical method of proof, pointed to the contradictions of the philosophers, to their disagreements among themselves, and went over to the Sufis, the pietists and mystics of the Mohammedan faith.
He rescued himself, however, by his rationalism and romanticism into a breadth and power of faith which made him the prophet of the new age. By him, for a generation, men like-minded saved their souls. As one reads, one realises that it was the pietists' religion which saved him, and which, in another sense, he saved.
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