ART. III.-HERDER AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.* GOETHE, writing of recent events in Weimar, mentioned Herder as preaching like a god. Although the greatest of his listeners, the poet was not the only one of them to acknowledge their pastor's extraordinary power to illuminate and to persuade. Herder, however, was always loth to publish his sermons; he knew, like every great preacher, that the printed sermon is only dried foliage from which the life has escaped; and he had no love for the pressed leaves of his own rich mind. The sermons now extant are productions either of an earlier period or of some special occasion, so that we have no means of knowing just what Goethe referred to; whether the preacher's sweep and splendor of thought or his personal charm. Of the latter the poet has given us a vivid and almost startling description in his Wahrheit und Dichtung; the former we must construct from Herder's voluminous writings.

All these writings, though, are printed speech. Herder was essentially a talking genius; yet a talker moved more by the necessity of self-expression than by the desire to instruct; more by the disposition to compel his reader than to encourage him to independent thought. And especially in his theological writings does the whole man appear; not only Geist und Vernunft und Verstand but Herz und Gemüth.† His "Letters to Preachers," for example, were a fiery protest against reducing Christianity to a bare morality and the pastoral office to mere state service. The pastor should be der Redner Gottes, whose calling is to nourish faith and hope and love in the hearts of his flock; he is to speak to them, out of a soul transfigured by God's presence, not the formulas of a frozen orthodoxy or the propositions of a frigid rationalism but the latest news from God, the message divinely given to him for them in their time of need and opportunity. This view of the pastor's calling led Herder himself to a study of the Bible according to the law of his own soul. He brought to the

* An address delivered at the Herder celebration of the German Department of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

+ These five words have no exact equivalents in English, to which fact may be traced much misunderstanding of German thought.

Scriptures a sympathetic mind and a heart unchilled and unperverted; he gave the writers of the Bible a chance, as he had given Homer and Shakespeare a chance, to make their own impression. In this he resembled every great thinker who has shaped the thought of the world touching God's revelation of himself-Paul, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Wesley; who never approach the sacred scriptures of mankind as analysts and critics merely, least of all the Christian Scriptures. To Herder the Bible was a great historical product; the fruitage of generations of life. Deeds, events, are the soil from which the teaching springs as God's blessings out of rich ground. This fruitage is, to be sure, the outcome of the narrow national Jewish existence, the history of a fraction only of the human family, but it grows out of that fraction of it from which the Western world has derived its religion. Christianity is here, and it has brought these Scriptures with it; and these have influenced every crisis in its development, and in the development of modern Europe. This life, this history, from which our religion has come, can of course be understood thoroughly only in connection with the large human life of which it is a part. All forms of light are forms of the same radiant energy, diverse though they be. Even so all forms of religion are forms of the same divine energy, diverse though they be. The candle that was quenched by the rising sun, says Shakespeare, shone upon the darkness of a naughty world and only a fool speaks slightingly of its beams. And so with these feebler religions of mankind; not the meanest of them must be disdained. Herder thus led the way, or, to speak more carefully, was the chief of those that led the way to the study of all religions in their essence and in their relations to each other; he grasped, as no one had done since the days of St. Paul, the fact that the whole world, not Israel only, had knowledge of the law of God; the law, to use Paul's beautiful phrase, "the law that is written on man's heart."

The rationalists that followed Descartes had hunted for God in the individual reason; they had failed to find him in the shallow pool; and Kant at last showed why. Reason must remain forever in the phenomenal world. True, so far as conduct is involved we cannot get along without God, and what pure reason

may not do is permitted therefore to the practical reason; the principles of knowledge and the principles of conduct are different things. Now, to Herder, this was splitting up the soul only to glue the parts together again. God must be searched for not merely in the reason of the individual but in the whole man, and not only in man but in humanity; nature must be regarded as something sublimer than a vast coexistence of multitudinous and multifarious phenomena; it must be studied as a glorious procession of appearances; nature and humanity, the chief splendor of it, are in perpetual evolution; in this evolution, if anywhere, we shall touch the hem of God's garment. "The God whom I seek in history," Herder wrote, "must be the same as the God in nature; for man is only a small part of the universe, and his history, like that of the grub, is closely interwoven with the cell in which he lives. In this history all the laws of nature operate; so far from setting them aside, God reveals himself in them, in their mighty power, with a beauty unchanging, wise, and beneficent. And as God reveals himself in nature and in history so does he also reveal himself in the impulses of the individual. A beneficent Spirit watches within us, awakening our slumbering powers, saving us from excess and punishing the misuse of our energy. Call it reason, conscience, anything you please; the wise have always recognized it as the voice of God. This impulse has been evoked in many places and in divers manners; in Christianity it is aroused by awakening love." We understand then, according to Herder, both the Bible and Christianity more thoroughly if we penetrate to the significance of the literature of the world and of the religious life of all mankind. Christianity is that to which these all point and in which all the spiritual longings of humanity are realized.

Schiller's famous line, "Nimmer, das glaubt mir, erscheinen die Götter nimmer allein,"* leaps to memory with the thought of Herder and his contemporaries. Lessing was his older and Goethe was his younger brother; and they shared with him this view of history and of revelation. We know also from his own words that he felt himself akin to Wesley, the English preacher, and had he

"Never, believe me, never appear the gods alone."

lived a few years longer he would have been drawn to Wordsworth, the English poet; to the preacher because of his recognition of the will of God in the deep of the human soul, and to the poet because of his splendid interpretations of the will of God in nature and in human life. Each of these was a mystic, and so was Herder. To him as to Wordsworth there were hours

He too could see a glimpse of God's bright face

When on some gilded cloud or flower

His gazing soul would dwell an hour
And in those weaker glories spy

Some shadow of eternity.

But Herder went farther than any of these, and in going farther anticipated the thought that has dominated these recent decades, the historical conception of nature, of life, of humanity—the tremendous thought of evolution; and this saved Herder from a purely natural theology. For he saw that nations as well as individuals have their peculiar endowments; that as the Greeks were the more artistic so the Hebrews were the more religious people, and this too by a divine arrangement. His Archæology of the Hebrews combined the result of his researches in the early history of poetry and in the origins of religion. In the first chapter of Genesis he detected, so he thought, a national religious poem; to treat it as dogma seemed to him contrary to taste and to reason. The prophet is indeed taught of God; this poem is not human but divine, not an oriental myth, but a revelation from above.

He pursued this subject farther in his famous Spirit of Hebrew Poesy. Perhaps no single work has done so much as this one to transform conceptions of the Old Testament. It opened the way to the beauty of these remarkable writings and to the discovery of their sources. Herder, though, was not satisfied to know these things and to write splendidly and discursively about them. He was eager to reconcile culture and Christianity, and especially eager to teach theological students how to unite "Serious Christian thought with genuine humanity, freedom of inquiry with reverence for the Bible, and a fine sense of the value of

antiquity with a clear recognition of the needs of the hour." And as he sought to reform preaching so he sought also to reform religious teaching and religious song. Unfortunately, he lacked serenity; his nature was full of energy and fire and fight; and Goethe's description of him shows us how physical suffering had rendered him irritable and moody and mistrustful and capricious. He lacked too-and this was the greatest misfortune he lacked the architectonic faculty; the genius that takes infinite pains, that works steadily upon a masterpiece until it stands complete for all time. He resembled Michael Angelo in the multitude and sublimity of his plans; he was like him also in the multitude of his unfinished undertakings.

As he thought more profoundly and studied more widely he drew closer to Lessing and became enraptured with Spinoza. The idea of humanity possessed him and penetrated all his thinking. The law of spiritual evolution took distinct shape in his mind and Christianity appeared to him as the revelation of a perfect humanity. Christ, the Son of man, was at once the flower of antiquity and the seed of the future; the Bible became in his thought the archives of the method of the divine revelation. Four of his weightiest essays expound this view of Christianity. They are astonishing productions; astonishing for their insight and their eloquence; astonishing even more for their prolepsis; that is, for their anticipation of the main currents of future thought in Germany and in Europe. The student who masters these, whether he accepts or rejects their teaching, need never again inquire what are the essential and permanent elements of Christianity. Two of these essays, "The Redeemer of Mankind according to the Three First Gospels" and "The Son of God the Saviour of the World,” were the heralds of modern New Testament criticism, and have been quite properly designated as the beginnings of the vast literature upon the Life of Jesus. The historian of theology, as he recognizes the nearness of the Man of Nazareth to the modern world in its painting, its poetry, its music, in its ethical ideals and in its religious conceptions, may well stand with bared head at the grave of this man of sorrows who suffered at Weimar so keenly while he worked so restlessly to recover for humanity the