George Cross · 2 of 40

A. A Sketch of Schleiermacher’s Life. · PARENTS AND FAMILY

Schleiermacher belonged to a family of preachers on both sides of the house, His father was chaplain, of the Reformed church (the name given to the Calvinistic Protestants of the continent) to a Prussian regiment of soldiers. His mother was a daughter of Royal Chaplain Stubenrauch and sister to Professor Stubenrauch, of the University of Halle. The family were poor, but intelligent and pious. The father’s early theological studies led him in his twenty-fourth year to inward renunciation of Calvinism, though, perhaps for prudential reasons, he made no outward sign of it. In a letter written to his son many years later he admits having preached orthodoxy without actually believing it. He was a Freemason and a keen student of philosophy in his young manhood, and in respect to religious opinions he was only one out of a multitude of preachers in Protestant Europe who at that time conformed in their public ministrations to established doctrine but in their hearts held a rationalistic view that true religion and essential Christianity consisted in the belief in God, virtue, arid immortality. Strangely enough his experience was partly duplicated for a time in his son.

The mother was a noble-minded woman, of an ardent temperament, devoted to the care of her three children, strict and even severe in discipline, and prayerful. In the father’s continual absence from home the burden of their training fell to her lot. She took a great interest in their studies, observed the development of their mental characteristics and their moral tendencies with much solicitude, and exercised a close supervision of their reading. So far as spiritual preferences are concerned she seemed to hold with her husband that a straight morality is the one important thing.

But in 1778 the father, being then fifty-one years of age, experienced an inward change. His regiment was quartered at that time at Gnadenfrei in Silesia. There he came into contact with the Moravian Brethren. This much-persecuted sect, whose origin dates back to the times of John Huss, had long maintained a precarious existence in Bohemia and Moravia, and at length a portion of them, under the leadership of Christian David, sought a refuge in Saxony. Count Zinzendorf gave them an asylum on his estate at Berthelsdorf and later became a prominent leader. This new home they named Herrnhut (“Watch of the Lord”). From this center they spread into other communities. At the time above referred to Gnadenfrei was one of their chief centers. Through one of the Brethren, named von Bruiningk, Chaplain Schleiermacher became a convert to their views and believed himself a subject of that supernatural grace on which they laid so much stress. Henceforth all was changed. He became anxious for the conversion of his wife and children. His efforts were rewarded by the wife’s finally hearty, though at first hesitating, response to her husband’s new attitude of mind. Henceforward both endeavored to instil the same religious experience into the minds of their children, all three of whom ultimately entered the community of the Brethren. It is worth noting here that the father never became a member of the Brethren’s church, and years later, when the elder son renounced his father’s views, the latter himself gradually receded from the Herrnhuterite position, though he retained to the end of his life their faith in Christ and a deep regard for those who had mediated that faith to him.