George Cross · 15 of 40

A. A Sketch of Schleiermacher’s Life. · CHARACTERISTICS AS PROFESSOR AND PREACHER

During all these years and up to the close of his life, Schleiermacher was carrying concurrently the work of his professorial chair and of his pulpit in Holy Trinity. Though continually accusing himself of laziness he was more abundant in labors than al most any other man of his day. At one point in the war, about the time of the battle of Leipsic, when all Berlin was full of excitement, he was the only professor who kept up his lectures. There have been more popular and able lecturers but his students were always numerous and enthusiastic. That his lectures were not written out in complete form need cause no surprise when we remember that he treated at one time or another every subject in the theological curriculum. However, what his lectures lacked in form and system was compensated for by their richness and suggestiveness. It will be generally acknowledged that Schleiermacher’s pre-eminence as a theologian is principally due to the rich veins of thought which he only tapped and opened up for other and less comprehensive thinkers to explore.

As a preacher he has had few, if any, superiors in Germany. Old Trinity church has become famous as the place where thousands felt the thrill of his warm, attractive personality and those stirring appeals that found their way into so many hearts. W. Robertson Nicoll quotes a German writer as saying that “thousands were won by him to the Savior.” Many others received through him a deeper spiritual life. The subject-matter of his sermons and his theological writings were substantially the same, but of course the methods differed. The topics chosen were of very wide range, but those relating to personal experience predominated. His sermons were prepared in rather an extraordinary way. They were never written but were composed while his other work was in progress, or even in the midst of those social festivities which were such a common feature of his home life. He was often observed on a Saturday evening, when his home was filled with guests, to step aside from the company into some corner of the room and there, in a few moments, write some notes on the subject on which he had been ruminating, and this “brief” he carried into the pulpit on the following day. The final form of the discourse depended largely on the inspiration of the occasion. A striking characteristic of his delivery was the frequent occurrence of long, involved sentences which would fill a page or more of common octavo, but, though they were composed on the instant, his hearers never detected in them an instance of incorrect or defective grammatical construction. We are indebted to Miss Rowan for a translation of the following portion of Lücke’s description (“Erinnerungen,” etc., Stndien und Kritiken, 1834) of his delivery:

Those who knew the secret [of his method of preparation] could follow the artistic structure of his discourse. They perceived how, at first, he spoke slowly and deliberately, somewhat in the ordinary tone of conversation, as if gathering and marshaling his thoughts; then, after a while, when he had, as it were, spread out and again drawn together the entire net of his thoughts, his words flowed faster, the discourse became more animated, and the nearer he drew to the encouraging or ad monishing peroration, the fuller and richer the stream. . . . . He had modes of expression peculiar to himself and also a sphere of thought peculiar to himself. But the richness of his mind and the fulness of Christian life in him never allowed any of the ordinary defects of extemporaneous preaching to be apparent in his sermons and caused one to contemplate with unalloyed pleasure his wonderful mastery of the homiletical art and the rich fruits it bore. . . . . It is true that he expected a good deal from his hearers, yet in reality no more than attention and familiarity with the Scriptures; and as he knew how to rivet the attention of the less educated by the freshness and vivacity of his mode of delivery and by the constant application of even the deepest ideas to practical life and to the actual conditions of the church, of family life, and of the fatherland, this explains how it was that, although his congregation mostly belonged to the educated classes, persons of the lower ranks and even be longing to other congregations were constantly seen in his church. I believe that this portion of his congregation steadily increased, for just as his whole system of theology was ever in living progression, so also the fervor and Christian simplicity of his mode of preaching increased year by year in proportion as his experience was enlarged and his inner life expanded.

Considering his immense popularity it is astonishing to find how seldom in his correspondence he makes reference to this part of his work or gives us a hint of his influence. But we find a very interesting incidental remark in one of his letters to his wife: “Today I preached in the Cathedral with great fire and to my own satisfaction, which is by no means always the case.” He also took great interest in improving the liturgical part of the service, especially the singing--thanks to his Moravian training--and, quite in harmony with his view of the nature of religion, favored a form of worship of high aesthetic quality.