and recondite questions of history and criticism-are thorough in the highest degree. The general themes and the technical themes are treated with equal ingenuity and candor. In no theology is there such variety, such individuality, among the writers. That is one of the discoveries that we have made. We classify German writers by "schools;" but we find that the theological writers in that land, more than any other, are apt to leave the ranks, to make "excursions," and to disregard the rules of party drill. The study and influence of these writers have helped to emancipate our own sectarians from their strict allegiance, and to give a certain visible freedom, both of thought and expression. That there are so many freethinkers who are not infidels, who are free while they profess to be orthodox and hold to the sound words of the creed, who take their own way, and are not bound by the rules of the schools and by theological traditions; that there is so much individuality among our preachers and writers, comes from the freedom which German theological studies have brought in. This influence is not less real that it is indirect, and that some of the ablest of these freethinkers are themselves not German scholars. The German spirit has found entrance, and has established itself in our methods of persuasion and appeal. Such writers as Bushnell, such preachers as Beecher, naturally come after the adoption of free ways of inquiring and thinking. If preaching has less power in the German land than it had in the middle age, the scholarship which Germany has sent out has given a larger range and a richer abundance to preaching in other lands. Even the staid dignity of the English Church has bent to take the gift, and has gained new elasticity of nerve and joint by that humiliation. Germany has dictated to Oxford, and the Broad Church redeems the desperate dulness of Anglican proprieties. In America, not one of the larger sects, and hardly one of the smaller, has remained unaffected by the influence of this free German air, so subtle and so penetrating. Baptist theology, Methodist theology, Universalist theology, have borrowed more than they know from the lore which was once under ban as the source of

spiritual perdition. Even those who still have fear, and hold to the prejudice which has been transmitted, make use of the teaching which they imagine themselves to shun, and sing, like the followers of Wesley, for sacred melodies, what are really the Devil's tunes.

Not the least of the good works which German theological studies have done, is the support they have given to scientific students and teachers. In the last generation, if a professor ventured to tell his class the doctrine of rocks and fossils as it was clearly written on the face of Nature, and to show how the world was created, there was no end of outcry; and his livelihood was in peril. It was almost impossible for an intelligent naturalist or geologist to be at once honest and orthodox. Now such a man has ample warrant in theological concessions and permissions for any scientific hypothesis. The revealed word of God has been unbound, and the scientific word need not be bound. The theological doctors will put no hindrance in the way of the "physicist;" or, if they do, he can confound them by their own authorities. German theology has brought freedom into other lecturerooms than those of the theological schools, and has more debtors than the critics and the dogmatists.

This religious objection to German studies was the most important. But there were other objections not less confidently urged. It was said that the Germans were a visionary people, held "the empire of the air," were dreamy and unpractical, and that there was no satisfaction in attempting to follow their flights and vagaries. To study German was to bewilder the brain by idle and worthless speculations, to venture into a transcendental region where there was no foothold and no clear sight of any reality, a region which was neither earth nor heaven. It was supposed that all the literature of this dreaming people was vague and obscure, where it was not fantastic; and adventure in it was compared to voyage in perpetual fog, depressing and disheartening, with no landmarks in sight, and no certainty of progress. Wise heads predicted that the fond enthusiasts would soon lose all spiritual reckoning in that aimless drifting, and be

happy enough to get back to the solid shore of English good sense. The first utterance of the transcendental philosophy partly justified this idea of the German language. If " Transcendentalism" were the German speech, if the poetry and prose of the "Dial" represented the literature which they glorified, one might be excused for doubting its transparency and its substantial worth. Its pilot balloons to these shores were certainly in large measure airy bubbles, bursting at the touch, with very small residue. It was no disparagement to the intellect of the giant Boston lawyer, that he could not understand what his daughters saw to be so beautiful, or that such clouds of words would not hold up the weight of his heavy thought and brain. "Orphic sayings," verses from the West, evolutions from the depths of consciousness, all that spray and spatter of German metaphysics would not commend the study which must be pursued in such mental confusion. To not a few practical men, German studies seemed to be a sign of hallucination and mental disorder; taking clouds for substance, ghosts for men and women, fantastic shapes for the forms of real things. They were denounced as substituting darkness for light, and interfering with all clear ideas of things actual, and of things abstract as well. Schleiermacher's talks, so profoundly unintelligible, were taken as the signs of all German speculation; and his name seemed happily to signify the special office of himself and all of his fraternity. Our practical men were pleased to say, that all Germans were "veil-makers," and that the language itself only lifted a mist, sometimes of violet and purple, but oftener gray and leaden, around those who strayed into its precincts. The warning was, that nothing substantial could come out of all this moonshine; and the mockery of the wise Preacher was turned to describe these fancies of the foolish soul, nothing but "vanity of vanities," airy nothings, with no habitation, and no name clearly defined or understood. That objection, too, reasonable as it seemed, has been quite fully set aside. Nobody makes the mistake now of assigning to the Germans the special realm of the air, or supposing that they are a race of speculators and dreamers.

On the contrary, the German emigration has proved that this dreaming people are especially practical, matter of fact, expert in mechanic arts, and more interested in real things than in any metaphysics or poetic fancies. And as we have come to know the German philosophy better, it is found to be as intelligible, as rational, and as near to real life as the speculations of the French or the Scotch schools, or the dry pleadings of "John Locke, Gent." If this philosophy is not accepted as satisfying, it is at any rate no longer stigmatized as flighty and fantastic. Kant and Schelling and Fichte and Hegel are no longer classed with Merlin the Enchanter or with medieval mystics. Schleiermacher has honor as a reformer and a worker; and his centennial birthday is kept by the same men who would keep the birthdays of Bacon or Franklin. We go to the Germans now not only for philosophical ideas, but for the history of the philosophical ideas of all other nations, ancient or modern. They tell us better than any others the doctrines of the Greek philosophers, of the Hindoo and Persian sages; and bring into the comparison the ideas of France and Italy, of England and Scotland, better than any writers of these other nations. They have not less firm tread upon the earth, because they know the way of the air; and their aeronauts come down as easily as they go up. The camel evoked from the depths of consciousness is quite as genuine a specimen of the race as the stupid brute which the Englishman describes. We are disabused of the notion, that German philosophy confuses and bewilders, when we find men trained in that school so clear in their distinctions and so close and logical in their reasonings. The logical faculty is in no more danger now from the transcendentalism of the Königsberg philosopher than from the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte; and the study of that ideal system is commended as a good prophylactic against the materialist tendencies of the age. It is refreshing to rise a little way above this din and whirl of material forces into the serener region of abstractions, and to investigate the laws and ways of the pure reason. The very philosophy which was once ridiculed as visionary and bewildering is now a

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relief from the worse confusion of so much tangle and crossplay of the exact sciences. Men go to it as to a countryretreat among the hills, where the rounded forms and the gentler music of nature may rest the soul from the scream of railway and factory whistles and the whirl of the crowded streets. Schleiermacher's "Reden " are commended as good bracing reading, purifying the spiritual atmosphere, and clearing away the smoke and the vapors which the cares of material gain and progress so thicken upon the souls of men.

Then there was the objection to the language itself, — to its structure and shape, to its words and sentences, to its involved movement and its guttural sounds. How should one ever get out from the endless labyrinth of its paragraphs? How should a well-placed larynx ever catch that jangle of unutterable compounds? The venerable Sales, so long pedagogue of the French and Spanish tongues in Harvard College, was wont to round off his praise of the other languages English among them with a contemptuous grunt, as expressing the sentiment of the barbarous Dutch: "et la langue Allemande, c'est pour les cochons." What good could come from this jargon of Goths and Vandals? What sensible man would ever speak a language which gave no rest to thought, put always the cart before the horse, and went pushing its load of hard words all along the way? Were not these long periods, broken by parentheses, weighted with sesquipedalian words, bunches of roots upon one stem, beyond all human patience? Well might beginners despair of ever mastering a language in which the breath must be held so long, and the eye wander so wildly up and down. It was predicted that this complicated dialect, with its compounded words and its fearful prolixity of syntax, would spoil the simplicity and directness of the English style, and bring in mud to the wells of English undefiled. The verbosity without the smoothness of the old English pedants would return to the style which successive generations of nervous writers had made crisp and sparkling. Professors of rhetoric warned their classes against that fatal German style, wheels within wheels, nests of Chinese boxes, ending in a very small