of the sun, arose a Chateaubriand, a St. Martin and his admirers, and other kindred spirits. Our present age is indeed a criticising and a critical one, wavering between the desire and the inability to believe,—a chaos of times struggling against one another but even a chaotic world must have a centre, revolution round that point, and an atmosphere; there is no such thing as mere disorder and confusion, but even that presupposes its opposite in order to begin. The present religious wars on paper and in the brain-very different from former ones, which were tempests full of heat, rage, devastation and fertilisationrather resemble the northern lights (thunder and lightning of the higher and colder quarters of the sky) full of noisy lights without blows, full of strange shapes and full of frost, without rain and in the night. Does not in fact, the bold self-consciousness-the life of this age-extend still further the original character of man and mind! And can the character of men, the mental waking, ever be too much awake? At present it is only not sufficiently so; for an object is necessary to reflection, as its absence is to thoughtlessness; and the common minds of the age are too impoverished to give a rich field to reflection. But there is one strange, ever-returning spectacle: That every age has regarded the dawning of new light as the fire-destroyer of morality; while that very age itself, with heart uninjured, finds itself raised one degree of light above the preceding! Is it, perhaps, that as light travels faster than heat, and as it is more easy to work upon the head than on the heart, the burst of light, by its suddenness, always appears inimical to the unprepared heart?

To the present age is ascribed productiveness and changeableness of opinions, and at the same time indifference to opinions. But that cannot arise from this: no man in all corrupted Europe can be indifferent to truth as such; for it, in the last resort, decides upon his life; but every one is at last become cold and shy towards the erring teachers and preachers of truth. Take the hardest heart and brain which withers away in any capital city, and only give him the certainty that the spirit which approaches brings down from eternity the key which opens and shuts the so weighty gates of his life-prison of death,

and of heaven,-and the dried-up worldly man so long as he has a care or a wish, must seek for a truth which can reveal to him that spirit.

The present march of light indicates anything rather than standing still; and it is only this which begets and immortalizes poison, as it is on stagnant air that tempests and whirlwinds break. Certainly we are very little able to determine in what manner a brighter age than that we have experienced will be educed from the present troublous fermentation. Every varied age,—and therefore our own, -is only a spiritual climate for an approaching spiritual seed; but we do not know what foreign seed heaven will cast into it.

Every sin appears new and near, as in painting black stands out most strongly; man is readily accustomed to the repetition of love, but not to the repetition of injustice. Thence every one regards his own age as morally worse, and intellectually better than it really is; for in science the new is an advance; but in morals the new, as a contradiction to our inner ideals and our historic idols, is ever a retrogression. As the errors of nations in past ages, unlike decorative paintings, seem very distorted and shapeless, because distance hides from us their finer and true completeness; so, on the other side, the black sin-stains of the past, of the Roman and Spartan for example, show softened and rounded, and, as on a moon, the high rugged shadow of the past falls round and transparent on the present. For instance, if men estimate the worth of the age after a war, that most ancient barbarism of humanity, and especially after the bad innovations consequent upon it, then the spirit of the age rises before this touch of death in frightful illumination and distortion. But war, as the general storm in the moral world, and the tongue and heart-confusing Babel of the physical world, had in every age repeated injustices which only appeared new because each had heard from the preceding age nothing save the number of the vanquished armies and towns; but experienced in itself the sufferings. On the contrary, our age has, more than any other, besides a certain humanity of war in respect to life, also a growing insight into its unlawfulness.

Among nations the head has at all times preceded the

heart by centuries, as in the slave trade; yes, by thousands of years, as will perhaps be the case in war.

§ 35.

Since modes of life beget modes of thought, and opinions actions, and head and heart, spiritually as well as physically, mutually improve or injure each other, so has fate, when both are to be healed at once, only one cure, and that a long one; the harsh viper-like cure of affliction. If sorrow purify men, why not nations? Certainly, and it is for this reason that men perceive it less, if wounds and fast-days improve the one, battle-fields and centuries of penance do the other, and generations must sink sadly and sorrowfully to destruction. Not by a splendid martial funeral with firing of cannon, but by a battle of the elements, is the sky made blue and the earth fruitful. At the same time in history, as in the almanac, the thick dull St. Thomas's day is shorter than the bright warm St. John's day, although both conduct into new seasons of the year.

But until, and in order that our children and children's children may pass through the winter centuries, this it is that nearly affects us and education. We must meet the great entanglement by partial unravellings. The child must be armed against the future; yes, even against the close pressing present, with a counterbalancing weight of three powers against the three weaknesses of the will, of love, and of religion. Our age has only a passionate power of desire, like the brute, the madman, the sick, and each weakest thing; but not that energy of will which was most nobly displayed in Sparta and Rome-in the Stoa, and in the early Church. And now the arts, as the stato formerly did, must harden the young spirit and subdue the will. The uniform colour of a stoic oneness must extinguish the vulgar praise of the various tiger-spots and serpent brilliancy of passionate agitation; the girl and the boy must learn that there is something in the ocean higher than its waves; namely, a Christ who calls upon them.

When the stoic energy of will is formed, there is then a loving spirit made free. Fear is more egoistic than

courage because it is more needy; the exausting parasitical plants of selfishness only attach themselves to decayed trunks. But power kills what is feeble, as strong decoction of quassia kills flies. If man, created more for love than for opposition, can only attain a free clear space, he possesses love; and that is love of the strongest kind, which builds on rocks, not on waves. Let the bodily heart be the pattern of the spiritual; easily injured, sensitive, lively, and warm, but yet a tough free-beating muscle behind the lattice work of bones, and its tender nerves are difficult to find.

As there is no contest about the nature of power and love, but only about the ways to attain them (these, however, penetrate deep into the matter); but as about religion, on the contrary, the doubts of many must first be solved as to whether there be only one, and whether different paths lead to it; so the third point, according to which the child is to be educated against the age, must aim at placing before the soul first, not the means, but the right to educate religiously. Power and love are two opposing forces of the inner man; but religion is the equal union of both, the man within the man.

CHAPTER IV.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

§ 36.

RELIGION is now no longer a national, but a household goddess. Our little age is a magnifying glass, through which, as is well known, the exalted appears flat and level. Since we now send all our children out into a town.. like futurity, in which the broken church bells only dully call the populous market place to the silent church, we must, more anxiously then ever, seek to give them a house of prayer in the heart, and folded hands, and humility before the invisible world, if we believe in a religion and distinguish it from morality.

The history of nations determines that there is this separation. There have been many religions, but there is only one code of morals; in those a god has always become a man, and, therefore, been concealed under many folds ; in this a man has become God, and been clearly manifested. The middle ages had, along with moral churchyards full of dead bodies and rank vegetation, full of cruelty and lust, also churches and spires for the religious sentiment. In our times, on the contrary, the sacred groves of religion are cleared and trodden down, and the public roads of morality made straighter and more sure. Ah! a contemporaneous decline of religion and morality would be too sad! The age will conceal the departure of une sense for the heavenly by the greater sharpness and severity of that for the mcral; and at least by small, delicate, and therefore more numerous sides, acquire a moral breadth. As men in towns, where they cannot build in width build in height, so we, reversing the matter, build in width instead of in height; more over the earth than into the sky. We may truly say that France, in general, with its chemical, physical, mathematical and warlike noon-day lights, can hardly behold in the starry heaven of religion. more than a last shadowy quarter of the moon, resembling rather a cloud than a star; whilst in England and Germany religion is still at least seen as a distant milkyway, and on paper as a star chart; but one could not, without injustice, describe the religious difference of these countries as a moral one. Was, therefore, and is Stoicism, this noble son of morality, as love is its daughter, in and by itself religion? If the difference between religion and morality were not founded on something true, it were incomprehensible how so many fanatical sects of the early and later centuries-for instance, the Quietists-could have arrived at the illusive belief that in the inmost enthusiastic love of God enduring sinfulness consumes itself, so that none remains as it does in the worldly man. It is true that religiousness, in its highest degree, is identical with morality, and this with that; but that equally pertains to the highest degree of every power; and every sun wanders only through the heavenly ether. All that is divine must as certainly meet and unite with morality, as