than they wrote.” * But it is, alas! even more true that many of the world's most cherished benefactors have written better than they lived. We do not ban all the works of Shakespeare or Burns or Solomon, or altogether repudiate the high civic services of some of the most efficient statesmen, because of their personal ethical defects; nor do we utterly execrate the memory of Milton because his theories of divorce were loose and destructive. Loquacious critics forget that the adored Schiller, who found in happy marriage with a noble woman a full solution of his moral difficulties, exhibited a vehement advocacy of beastliness in his earlier poems which finds no parallel in Goethe. The latter's Leipzig and Roman periods, especially, countenanced a destructive social order, and this fact cannot be too strongly condemned and deplored; on the other hand, no man has done more to glorify the highest bond of social order, a great pure passionate love-a love which leads to self-sacrifice and disciplinary development, a love unspeakably sacred to every man who Remembers how his father's eyes Once on his mother used to brood. For this reason Goethe's teachings in regard to the relations of the sexes are, in the main, wholesome and commendable. Humanity, in its lower stages, has required much emphasis of checks and safeguards. The fire, which warms and cheers and enlivens, contains the possibilities of the most fearful disaster. No house was ever swept from its foundations by a feeble rill, but shall this be preferred to the powerful stream, able to bear along the freights of a nation? There is a distrust of the stronger human emotions, not entirely unknown in America, which impoverishes life and countenances much misery; which everlastingly preaches repression, instead of going on to perfection; which advocates the false and morbid thought that all sensuous love is sinful; and which makes one believe that there may be even a need, in some places, of reviving the doctrine of the réhabilitation de la chair, not in the devilish and degrading sense of "Young Germany," of Walt Whitman and Le Gallienne, but in the spirit of Martin Luther or of Goethe in Hermann und Dorothea, to * Tischreden, iv, 373. which work we refer critics for a German picture of normal social life. Professor Windelband declares that no one can estimate Goethe who fails to recognize how essential an element of his character was his religious feeling.* It was this feeling which brought him into opposition to the absolute individualism of the Storm and Stress period. There had been a potent atmosphere of religious influence in Goethe's intimate surroundings from youth up. His strong friendship for such persons as Jung-Stilling, Fräulein von Klettenberg, and Lavater illustrates these tendencies. His religion settled into a conviction that man is shut in and determined by a higher, purer, unfathomable, eternal power, and that he must gladly and reverently surrender himself to its will. Prayer should chiefly be for lofty thoughts and a pure heart, and its result should be submission and gratitude. His belief in God was more directed toward the manifestations of his power in goodness, reason, and love than toward formal abstract theories as to his existence and personal nature. He believed in a deep religious reverence as the foundation of all character and usefulness. A dominating consciousness of union with God is taught by him to be indispensable for peace and successful activity. He believed in immortality as the logical continuance of the exercise of powers that had been developed by strenuous fidelity through life. "Those who have no hope of a future life," he said to Eckermann, "are already dead for this one." + His reverence for the Bible made him distinctly averse to the higher criticism. He called himself a Christian, and maintained a worshipful reverence toward Christ as the divine manifestation of the highest principle of virtue. "Let intellectual culture," he said, "advance as much as it may, it will not get beyond the loftiness and moral culture of Christianity." + His immense services to the intellectual life of Europe cannot be recounted here. He called German poetry into being; his diction supplied his nation with an art-implement such as it had vainly been striving to acquire since the days of the * Strassburger Goethevorträge, p. 96. ↑ Conversations, i, 85. + Conversations with Müller, April 7, 1830. 51-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XV. Reformation; the magic inspiration which he gave to the whole tribe of younger poets, such as Rückert, Geibel, Platen, and Heine, can never be measured. In an entirely different field he gave a great widening to the scope and method of the study of the natural sciences. Despite his unfortunate contest with Sir Isaac Newton in the field of physics, modern thought concedes that he laid for all time the foundations for the physiological and psychological study of color.* He is the transmitter of Germany's contribution to the common wealth of modern civilization, representing its "prophetic foresight, its clear-eyed perception of things as they are, its mathematical profundity, physical accuracy, philosophical elevation, keenness of intellect, mobility of poetic imagination, and harmless enjoyment of nature." He is a colossal manifestation of creative power. Napoleon, after looking at him attentively, said, " Vous êtes un homme;" and it is chiefly this fact that renders Goethe worthy of the earnest study of mankind. Jacob Stilling, Strassburger Goethevorträge, 147, ff. ↑ Goethe, in Farbenlehre, historischer Teil. James Left Harfield ART. X.-INFLUENCE OF JAMES ARMINIUS ON MODERN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. A GIFTED young Dutchman-who had passed through a long and varied curriculum of theological and philosophical study; who, in his progress through the intellectual stadium, had won golden opinions from the most learned, judicious, and distinguished men of his age, had excited the loftiest hopes of his most intimate and discerning friends, and had left the echoes of his academic fame resounding in three of the most celebrated universities in Europe-settles, in 1588, as pastor over one of the leading churches of the city of Amsterdam, at that time entitled on account of its close commercial relations with the great trading centers of Europe and the Orient to be called the hub of the mercantile universe. Handsome in person and aspect, graceful and dignified in manner, gifted with a melodious and admirably managed voice, eloquent, powerful, persuasive in speech, and exhibiting withal a ripeness of erudition, a maturity of judgment, a calmness and devoutness of temper, a power of self-command, and a mastery of all the principles of logical disputation quite beyond his years, the young clergyman soon becomes immensely popular in the great Dutch city. In addition to his renown as a scholar, theologian, preacher, and disputant there attaches to his personal history a certain element of pathos and romance which appeals powerfully to all noble and chivalrous natures. In 1555, only five years before his birth, in the old town of Oudewater, Charles V, with trembling hand resting on the shoulder of the tall and stately form of the young Prince of Orange, had tearfully handed over the government of his vast dominions in Europe and South America, including his rich Burgundian inheritance of the Low Countries, to his son, Philip, in the great hall of the palace of the Dukes of Brabant in Brussels, in presence of the knights of the order of the Golden Fleece and the lords and grandees of Belgium, Holland, and Spain.* Already the population of the country had been decimated by the * Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, vol. 1, p. 107. wasting but unwearied policy of the persecutor. Motley observes: The execution of the system was never permitted to languish. The number of Netherlanders who were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried alive, in obedience to his [Charles V's] edicts, and for the offenses of reading the Scriptures, of looking askance at a graven image, or of ridiculing the actual presence of the body and blood of Christ in a wafer, have been placed as high as one hundred thousand, and have never been put at a lower mark than fifty thousand.* Already the Inquisition and its ruthless agents had goaded a noble and intelligent people to madness. But the little finger of the Spanish Rehoboam is to be thicker than his father's loins. Philip II is yet to develop that character for cruelty and treachery which is to place him in an order by himself, even among the greatest monsters of history. The merciless tyranny of his tool, the Duke of Alva, and the struggle of the Netherlands for civil and religious freedom under the leadership of that wary diplomat and indomitable patriot, William of Orange-doomed at last to die by the hand of the assassin -are yet to come. Lovers of their native land are to be moved to tears as they contemplate the decline of trade, the decay of once prosperous communities, and the impoverishment of the national resources to relieve the chronic impecuniosity of a monarch to whom they owe no obligations of gratitude or affection, and as they look upon the growing terror and desolation brought about by war, wholesale judicial murder, and voluntary exile; and yet the cause of freedom is at length to triumph, and Spain is to be compelled to relinquish forever the fairest and most valuable of her possessions in either hemisphere, and to witness the beginning of that disintegration of her vast empire which is still progressing in our own day. But, if the period of twenty-eight years through which Arminius had already lived may be considered one of the most eventful and most disastrous of his country's annals, the story of his personal life during that same interval makes a recital equally pathetic and impressive. From the moment of his birth to the hour of his appearance in the strenuous public life *Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, vol. i, p. 114. |