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in accordance with its own needs, and it may be that the deepest things of the inner life can be expressed only in idiomatic and domestic forms, difficult of assimilation by men of another race. Yet, on the other hand, religious literature characterized by a certain elevation is always timeless. As the Psalms are timeless, and many passages in the Gospels and the New Testament-for the sake of brevity I refer only to the eighth chapter of Romans and the thirteenth of First Corinthians-it must still be possible to-day, and must have been possible in every generation, to express these things with a timeless power and warmth.

What, then, I ask, are the facts? What do we possess in common? As a matter of course, the enquiry raises at once the double issue: What have we in common as a literature of edification, and what in the realm of theology? I invite you to a brief excursion through ecclesiastical history. You need have no anxiety that it will prove too long; it will be but a rapid automobile journey, but we may observe a few facts en route.

As our starting-point let us select the Commencement of the third century of our era. Ignoring the unimportant and ignoring mere beginnings, Christianity then possessed only one language in which she uttered herself, the Greek; and she formed from Lyons to Alexandria, and from Carthage to Edessa, a single spiritual unity. As her devotional literature is one, the works originating in the second century have spread everywhere with astonishing swiftness; a book written in Sardis or Pergamum in Asia Minor is within a few years to be read in Alexandria, Rome, Carthage and Lyons. The Christianity of the commencement of the third century had an essential unity of language, and, thanks to the magnificent means of communication throughout the Roman Empire, an essential

unity of literature. The conditions of that period have never since obtained, nor could they again arise. Moreover, devotional and scientific literature coincided; no division had yet been made.

Now let us consider ourselves as having passed on to the close of the fourth century. We have no longer merely a Greek Christianity, but from the point of view of language we have two great Christianities, the Greek and the Latin-the Syriac might be added, as lying on the border-line between the great and the lesser. About this time we have also to reckon in Christian literature with the Armenian and the Coptic, and there are already found the beginnings of the German-Gothic; so that on linguistic grounds there must be enumerated three great and three lesser ecclesiastical regions. How were these able to arrive at a common understanding? The period displays an extraordinary industry applied to translation from the Greek into all other national languages spoken by Christians; if one recounts what was generally known throughout the three chief areas of the Church's activity, the Greek, the Latin, and the Syriac, about the year 400, through translation from the Greek, the sum-total is surprisingly large. Alongside the Old and New Testaments, which are translated into these languages, there is found a fine series of Christian letters, such as Clement's Epistle, the Epistle of Ignatius, the Epistle of Polycarp; a common liturgy has been sketched in its fundamental characteristics; the decisions of synods held in Syria or Asia Minor are forthwith issued in far-off districts; a great number of so-called apocryphal histories of apostles are common; the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, in all probability of Irenæus, considerable extracts from Origen, legends of martyrs, and calendars of saints are common. The churches of the newer languages manifested about

A.D. 400 an intense eagerness to introduce into their own areas as much as possible of the Greek Christian literature; and, when men of moderate attainments tired of the work, there were found at the close of the epoch (during which the separation had become accentuated) such men as Hilary, Ambrose, Rufinius, Jerome and Augustine, who, from the rich treasures of Greek Christian philosophy, exegesis and dogmatics, poured their translations as it were by cartloads into the lap of the Latin Church. In considering how matters then stood in regard to the unity of the world of ideas, we find entirely independent forms of thought distinctive of the Greek and Latin spirit; yet on the whole, and despite the opposition of East and West, already conspicuous in the profane history of the age, the ties of community in experiences, judgments, and feelings remained extraordinarily far-reaching.

With the fifth and sixth centuries these ties are rent asunder, and for a double reason. In the first place, the Greeks have never been able to learn anything from the Latins, and therefore the Greeks have been involved in such ruin as has overtaken them in relation to the progress of their spiritual life; they were always too conceited to learn from the Latins, and until the time of Augustine they had not much to learn from them. But in Augustine appeared the man whosince the Greeks did not translate him -imparted to their entire development a separate direction; for it is the loss of losses in the story of the Christian Church that Augustine, and the fruitful thoughts flowing from him, have left unaffected the whole of the Eastern Church. In that fact, above all others, lies the breach between the Orient and the Occident. For we Westerns-whether we be Roman Catholic or Protestant of any denomination-continue to think the thoughts

of Augustine in spite of the modern world, and, indeed, to speak with his words. The ascetic literature of every nation furnishes the proof. Select a hymn-book or a devotional work, be it Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinistic, or aught else denominationally, and if it contains three hundred pages, assuredly two hundred are transcribed from the thoughts of Augustine.

From the point at which Greek Christendom separates itself from Western until the present day, we find no more an international spiritual unity of the entire Christian Church, notwithstanding the work of individuals moving from one church to another. In that age was granted to the Church a man who, through the power of his thought, the depth of his religious experience, through his receptiveness and his ability to utter that which he had received, has gathered the whole of the West within his gentle grasp, and holds it until this day.

The second factor accounting for the separation within Christendom at this period was the circumstance that the Greeks did not succeed-for what reasons we may here leave aside-in establishing their language as the religious and ecclesiastical speech of the entire Orient. You are aware that from the fifth century the communities of the Orient parted asunder into communities of Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and then, above all, of Slavonic, Christians. What was unattained by Greek Christianity the Roman bishop was able to achieve; he maintained the Latin language as that of religion, and even, when necessary, enforced it. Thereby he secured a result of great advantage, since the Latin language was never enforced in private intercourse, but the popular speech was of set purpose left alongside it, so that a spiritual unity came into being in Western Christendom in spite of the persistence of national dialects. A

man who had studied Christianity, or was beginning to study it, might find himself in Oxford or Palermo, in Paris or Bologna, in Cologne or Naples, he was intelligible everywhere; he could to-day be transferred from any one of these cities and to-morrow take up work in another, as easily as if he were remaining in his fatherland and in the circle of his friends.

How came it to pass that a scientific theology, treating of the religious experience and outlook, was shaped in those days, a theology which, by all who are not enslaved to prejudice, can only be gazed on with astonishment and admiration; how came into existence this spiritual unity, which only sheer folly could depreciate? I have named the two chief influences, the Roman bishops and Augustine. But there succeeded immediately the period of triumphant barbarism; in the sixth and seventh centuries all civilization sank into decay; how is it that Augustine has survived? If the question is raised as to who-leaving aside the ecclesiastical institutions-created the spiritual unity of the Middle Ages, to whom is the chief credit due, I answer without hesitation: England. The great triple constellation, Bede, Boniface and Alcuin, represents the concrete effective theology and the religious culture of the time. Rome in the seventh century was not in a position directly to offer the gifts of civilization and theological culture to the peoples whom she influenced; but in the Green Island and in Great Britain after the coming of Augustine of Canterbury, work was carried on with such devotion that already about the year 700 the metropolis of theological science and antiquarian knowledge, so far as such then existed, was in Great Britain. Thence Charlemagne was supported by Alcuin and others; they created the college at Tours; they revived Augustine; and their effective

ness endures to the present day, for it may be said that the letters which we now write and print are those which, after the barbarism of the Merovingian period, were fashioned in the school of Alcuin according to the best examples of antiquity. We write to-day in Alcuin's characters. To Englishmen who came to the Continent is due what the Middle Ages possessed of science, intellectual vigor, and alertness.

This unity remained an effective force until the thirteenth century. Distinctive qualities-ignoring quite isolated exceptions-asserted themselves only within the limits of this general conception; although individualism in abundance was found, there appeared no individuality in which this LatinRoman spirit was not manifest, and which did not strike root and bear fruit in this soil.

But everything has its own time. The separate nations arose, attaining their maturity through the Roman Church and mediæval science, but also as a matter of course through the native energy rooted in themselves; and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries beheld the first serious, and henceforth unsleeping, opposition between the internationality of the Church and nationality. The internationality of the Roman Church called forth successive national counter-movements in Christendom, science and art, in the effort to preserve life in its own distinctive forms. The various peoples had little or no correspondence with neighboring States; although at certain periods there are found vital reciprocal relations between France and England, it remains true that in general each people carried on its battle for itself. There is really only one statesman in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and again he is found in England, in the person of Wiclif, who exercised a most energetic direct influence upon the Bohemian Movement, and indi

rectly through this and other channels also upon us. If we ask, what is the greatest national movement of preReformation times, contending with that internationality which no longer sufficed, the answer must again be that the greatest national movement within Christendom before the Reformation is the English Movement under Wiclif, since this had certain not inconsiderable international consequences for the whole of Western Christianity. From this period, when in the realms of devotion, theology, and jurisprudence the nation is already at strife with internationality, comes the one devotional work of the Catholic Church which today possesses an international significance, Thomas à Kempis' Imitatio Christi. I know of no other book from this whole period, still extant among us, whose effects are comparable with those of this work, since even Thomas Aquinas, Francis, and Anselm have not become international in the sense that the majority of educated Christians know of their works or have read them.

Then follows the Reformation, of German origin in its starting-point and in its motive power. In earlier generations the Germans have offered nothing to internationality, but now they appear with full hands. For although a Reformed Church may here be named from Zwingli, there from Calvin, elsewhere from any third, fourth or fifth, the great eye of Luther beams always behind all. He has nevertheless been unable to make the worth and charm of his personality felt anywhere outside Germany; internationally, Luther as a personality is as little understood and as inadequately interpreted as if he were but an obscure professor of the third rank. This fact does not exclude the possibility of saying what I have already said in the case of Augustine (where the statement is still more obviously

true) that the words of to-day are his words, the thoughts of to-day his thoughts, and that behind Calvin, Bucer, Cranmer, and whatever others we may name, in their grandest achievements and widest conquests of knowledge, is discernible the great figure of Luther. Notwithstanding this, he has not exercised an international influence upon literature. In England you have created for yourselves your scientific and devotional writings. Bucer, indeed, has been absorbed by you as if he were one of yourselves; you have erased the German elements of his influence, and he has, in fact, become half an Englishman. In the sphere of the Western Church nationalism had already become so powerful that the Reformation at first created neither a common theological nor a common devotional literature. There is only one exception before the nineteenth century-namely, the German hymnody, which, although it penetrated but feebly into the sister Churches of Protestantism, has passed over to them, and passes over to-day in enlarging volume.

When arose, then, a new community? Little as we desire to undervalue that which, in spite of national limitations, was common in the fundamental ideas and opinions of the Reformed Churches of the sixteenth century, this gained no prominence, but slumbered in the depths of the heart; nowhere in literature or society is internationality to be met with: all is national. Then again England appears, to call forth a movement, as to whose worth our opinions would probably differ seriously-I place it very high-which became really international. This was the English Deistic Aufklärung in the seventeenth century. We cannot here discuss how this originated in English political and social relations; it is a simple fact that these men, of whom but a few were of the

first rank, but very many of the second, have changed the spiritual (geistig) face of Europe. The English theosophy, the movement of Aufklärung proceeding from England in the second half of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, worked as a unity, and as a penetrating ferment, upon the educated society of Europe. The Aufklärung of the eighteenth century is in its modern and valuable issues far less conditioned by Voltaire than by the English Deists, whose writings were copiously translated into German and are an essential pre-condition of our Rationalism and our Aufklärung; they created at that time among Christian men the consciousness of a spiritual depth mediated by God. Not until Jean Jacques Rousseau did the significance and influence of the English Deists cease to be the first in Western Europe.

Then followed the nineteenth century, the century of cosmopolitanism, of ideas intended to link humanity, emphatically an epoch of history, and therefore of nationalism. Yet in this century much has taken place in the interchange of Christian ideas and works among the nations, and especially between you and ourselves. Admittedly, let us at once say, we have made no great advance in common devotional literature. Certain preachers of yours, such as Kingsley and Robertson-to name only these two-have found many hearers among us. The works of one man whom I would reckon among the preachers of edification, Carlyle, are so highly esteemed by us, and so many seek their edification from him, that he can hold no higher place even in his own land. In these men we have been granted a common possession, for edification and for the deepening of our insight into human relations.

On the other hand, I scarcely think it possible to name a German devotional work, or a German preacher

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of the last sixty years, that may be said to have edified many nations. is very much easier to produce six brilliant scientific treatises than to deliver or write one sermon which is timeless. I venture, nevertheless, the opinion that in the realm of spiritual culture a common possession is arising, and this is of the highest importance, for man lives from such bread, even if the newspapers know little of it!

As to theological literature, we stand under the mighty, the gigantic influence of the great men granted us at the commencement of the nineteenth century-some of whom are looking down upon you here -Fichte and Hegel, Neander and Schleiermacher-and by them we are entrusted, whether we will or not, with the carrying through of a great scientific task. The task is, in fact, thrust upon us through the work of these men; and if it is occasionally said that the Germans maintain a "two-Power standard" in theological science, we are entitled to reply that we do so not of set purpose, but as something included within the range of the duties laid upon us by our ancestors.

However, within the last decades, of which we now speak, the English have accomplished a task which the Greeks did not: they have translated us. I gladly embrace the opportunity of thanking them to-day. In that matter we are far behind you, and have only one excuse to offer-perhaps it is sufficient-that we also understand you without translation. That, however, cannot suffice if we desire that our students and such as have not been driven, as I have by the necessities of life, to learn English, should also be able to read you. It was a remarkable display of foresight on the part of the English that from the beginning, as theology raised her head in Germany, they

3 A reference to the busts adorning the walls of the Aula.

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