[July, and adaptation of part to part, produces the feeling that there must be a necessity for it. Men are like children, accustomed from birth to the luxuries of their father's house, until they think them things of course, and forget their obligation to his care and forethought in providing them. Secondly, there is in many hearts, undoubtedly, a sense of guilt, generating a half-unconscious fear; and that producing a willingness to find the proof of the existence of a righteous God defective. Even where the alienation from God is not sufficient to produce this reluctance to be convinced, it may be sufficient to produce exclusive devotion to other lines of thought, and consequent failure to appreciate the argument. But, thirdly, there are causes of dissatisfaction with the arguments of Paley, of the Bridgewater Treatises, and the Graham Lectures, more creditable to a Christian community. With some there is a strength of religious faith, springing from direct intuitions, that lays hold of God so firmly as to need no support of consciously drawn inferences; with others there is an intense longing for assurance, a quivering, trembling, burning hope, which fears that, perhaps, so ineffably precious a doctrine as the presence of a God of infinite wisdom and love, caring not only for all, but for each, of his children cannot be true. Would that these timid, longing, loving, souls could attain to our conviction, that the presence of such a Father is demonstrated by every possibility of argument; and that the language of Herbert Spencer concerning the existence of an ultimate cause may be justly used concerning the existence of God in the highest, the holiest, the most loving and tender sense, in which the happiest experience of a soul reconciled by Christ and sanctified by the Spirit can speak of him; namely, that we have a higher warrant for believing in God than for believing in any other truth whatever.

ARTICLE IV.

RICHARD ROTHE'S MINISTRY IN ROME.

BY REV. SAMUEL OSGOOD, D.D., NEW YORK CITY.

MODERN history has turned very much upon the relation between Rome and Germany. Since the year of our Lord 9, when the army of Varus was routed by the forces of Hermann in the forest of Teutoburg, and Tacitus found the stirring motive for his famous History of Germany, to the battle of Sedan, when King William overthrew Louis Napoleon, and by so doing crippled the French power in Rome, and made Victor Emanuel king of the Eternal City instead of Pius IX.-in that long interval, made so memorable by the alliances and the quarrels between the German emperors and the Roman powers, the eventful drama has been going on, until now the Kaiser openly defies the Pope, and instead of giving allegiance to the Roman bishops and archbishops he insists upon allegiance from them. Throughout all this struggle, perhaps, the same essential principles have been at issue under different names, and the North and the South have presented their great antagonism in the Teutonic and the Latin races. It was at first, probably, not so much any definite opinion or system that was in debate, but the question was one of personal power or prerogative; and the stout Germanic independence resisted to the death the aggressions of Roman centralization. In course of time the Germans became an imperial people, and as such they offered protection and asked sanction from the Roman priesthood. The crown given to Charlemagne in the year 800, by the Pope at St. Peter's, was held by his successors in the holy Roman empire for a thousand years, until Napoleon took it from the head of Francis II. in 1806, and his nephew, Louis Napoleon, virtually restored it to King William in 1870.

Undoubtedly our most characteristic modern thought owes its power in great part to its bearing upon this Germanic and Roman question. The Protestant Reformation was a social and political, as well as theological and religious uprising. Stout Martin Luther was that stalwart old Hermann come again; and when he beat a hole in the drum of Tetzel, and stopped the sale of indulgences, Varus was again defeated, and Rome felt the loss and the ignominy in her temples and her palaces. The great Germanic national heart was stirred, and kindred nations-Holland and England not least among them caught the fire of that electric life. The more recent German literature, art, and religion have followed the same drift, and the masters of the new thought from Emanuel Kant to Richard Rothe have carried the free banner of Hermann and Luther against the dominion of Rome. The motto so common of late "Rome or Reason," is translated frequently not in libraries and schools only, but in courts and senates, debates and battles, into very positive language, and undoubtedly strong men have died bravely in our time with the conviction that the cause of their fatherland is the cause of reason, and that the essential rights of the human mind march under the German banner in the conflict with the aggressions of the Latin race.

We propose in this Article to treat of the relation of Germany to Rome in a very quiet and unambitious way, by presenting the life and thoughts of Richard Rothe during his few years service as preacher there in 1824-28, under the auspices of Bunsen and the Prussian Court. No man would have been less forward to claim such representative distinction than he; and when, in the year 1824, that modest, intense, affectionate, devout, little pictist, at the age of twenty-five, entered the Roman gates with his blooming bride, the last thing that he could have thought of was the idea of ever being held up as a prominent leader of German thought and policy in relation to the Latin power. But such undoubtedly he is, and we have no hesitation in saying that Rothe is the most interesting, instructive, and significant moralist and

theologian that Germany has produced in our time, and that his name constantly rises as his mind and character are better known. To us he has been a cherished companion for some twenty years, and the fascination and astonishment that came with the first pages of his Theological Ethics so long ago are not lost, but sweetened and exalted by the charming biography which Friedrich Nippold has made so largely and richly from Rothe's own original correspondence. The whole book is well worth translating; but it seems best for us now to give one portion somewhat fully, instead of trying to grasp at the whole in an ambition that would probably end in a dry syllabus, little better than a table of contents. Those four years at Rome bring before us the man as he had been formed by previous study and experience, and they also present with some fulness the influences that so transformed him there, and made of the recluse pietist the bold thinker, the profound moralist, and the sturdy patriot and reformer.

I. We must take a glance at his previous life before coming to Rome, in order that we may fairly understand his development there. Often as he is named in connection with Schleiermacher, and closely as their names are brought together in the history of German theology, they were born and bred under widely different influences, and they thought and worked for quite different ends. Schleiermacher was educated very much under pietist influences, and the schools of Spener and Zinzendorf and others gave him a devotional turn which very readily took a critical-theological direction, and led him to seek the foundations of faith in scientific thinking and in the revision of the Christian doctrines. His characteristic book is the famous "Christian Faith." But Rothe was trained under quite other auspices, and he not only was free from all early bias towards the Herrnhut pietism, but he did not feel in childhood the attractions of the parsonage, or have any especial fancy for clerical or ecclesiastical life. His first impressions came from a circle in which the State was the main thing, not disparaged as the mere world, but revered as the very shrine of life. We are

indebted to Nippold's biography for bringing out this important fact so clearly, and tracing to his birth and first education his little liking for clerical prerogative and ecclesiastical dignities, and the strong secular Christianity that is embodied in his Ethics, and made him prefer ethics to dogma.

He was born in Posen, Prussia, January 30, 1799. His father was a privy councillor, and a great stickler for the honor of Frederick the Great, with ready disposition to work as well as to talk for the glory of Prussia. His mother was the daughter of a court councillor, and on both sides of the house the military and official influence was very strong, and quite in the face of the early pietistic tendencies of the son. The parents seem to have been conscientious and reverential in their treatment of religion, but they did not say much upon the subject, and their tendencies were more secular and rationalistic than churchly and orthodox. The son turned the other way, and was so recluse and serious that his mother said when he was but three or four years old, that she hoped to see him in the pulpit one day. He showed signs also of the brooding, speculative temper that marked his matured mind; and he was very fond of picture-books, voyages and travels, the theatre, and whatever tended to stir the fancy of a delicate and somewhat sickly child of seven or eight years. He went with his parents to Breslau in 1810, and there studied in the Frederick Gymnasium; and during his school years he grew in religious spirit without falling into unsocial, ascetic ways. He received confirmation most devoutly, and the diary which he kept is full of his religious experiences; yet he was an enthusiast for the literature and art of his day, and Schiller, Goethe, Richter, the Schlegels, Tieck, and their peers were his favorite authors; but from his sixteenth year he came under the fascination of Novalis, and probably this influence had much to do with his strong drift towards supernaturalism against the prevailing rationalism.

He entered the University of Heidelberg in 1817, and was there under the instruction of famous men such as Daub, Schwartz, Abegg, Paulus, Creutzer, Hegel, Schlosser, whose