George Cross · 7 of 40
A. A Sketch of Schleiermacher’s Life. · EXPERIENCES AS TEACHER AND PREACHER
The examination pro licentia was duly passed and he was ordained by Mr. Sack, chaplain in ordinary to the king. The same gentleman secured for him a tutorship in the family of Count Dohna of Schlobitten in Prussia. Here he remained for three years. The new experience was extremely profitable. Participation in the happy home life of a wealthy and cultured family brought him a new freedom and polish of manners. The work of teaching, visiting the sick people of the community, and, after a time, of occasional preaching brought home to him a deeper sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a mission. This, he declared, more than made up for the want of a library to read and of money to buy one.
His sister Lotte’s influence becomes very manifest at this time. Before she left her father’s roof to live in the Moravian choir-house her father noticed what he playfully termed “the miserly idolatry” with which she brooded over Fritz’s letters. This noble young woman followed her gifted brother’s career with the most affectionate solicitude for his moral and spiritual well-being and proved more than once in times of danger a guardian angel to him. That he was conscious of making spiritual progress is evident from the occasional modest references he makes to his own inner state. For example, in a letter to his father he says, “I feel that I am becoming a better man.” He has the love of preaching and of sermon-making. He writes more sermons than he preaches and many sermons that he never preached were delivered several times over in thought. Some of the subjects selected are significant, as, “On the Duties Imposed by the Certainty of a Resurrection”; “On the History of Thomas (the Apostle) and Rational Belief”; “On the Coming of Christ as Putting an End to the Nonage of Man.” At this time also begins his personal acquaintance with the great leaders of German thought. In a letter to his father, written May 15, 1791, he speaks of spending at Königsburg “a half-hour with Mr. Kant and a few other professors.”
His stay with the Dohna family came to an end through his refusal, on account of personal , to conform to the parents’ ideas of education. He left Schlobitten in May, 1793. After four months again at Drossen he went to Berlin to teach in the Kornmesser Orphan Asylum. Here he also preached frequently, and a year later his desire to enter the regular pastorate was gratified by an appointment to a curacy at Landsberg on the Warthe. A letter from his sister in October, 1794, brought to him the news of his father’s death. At that time he wrote to her: “Had I felt when I lost my mother that which I now experience in giving up my father, it would have been too much for a human heart.” Then recalling the painful incident of his leaving Barby he says:
There was a period, the remembrance of which now often forces itself upon me, during which I mistook the heart of our excellent father; when I thought he was too hard upon me and judged me falsely, because I was not of the same opinion as he. A certain coldness of feeling toward him, which arose in consequence, now seems to me the darkest spot in my existence. But in secret I have acknowledged my injustice, and he forgave me without my asking it.
In this generous spirit he turns the blame for their trouble entirely upon himself. But when we search in this letter for some reference to the Christian of immortality we are disappointed at finding nothing except “Peace! peace be with his ashes, and may his soul ever delight itself in his children!” It may be that he had special reasons for reticence on this great subject, especially in a communication to such an ardent Herrnhuter as his sister, but it is most likely that he conscientiously refrained from anything explicit on a subject on which he seems at the time to have had no very settled conviction.
The next eight years of Schleiermacher’s life, from 1796 to 1804, represent the period during which he emerged from semi-obscurity to a recognized place among the scholars of his native country and began to exercise an influence in her affairs. Till 1802 he was chaplain of the Charité Hospital in Berlin, and then for two years he was court preacher at Stolpe in Pomerania. In 1804 he removed to Halle. For the greater portion of this time his life-story may be drawn from his correspondence. His letters disappoint us, however, by their very scanty references to his work as a preacher, but they relate principally to literary efforts and his relations with a brilliant circle of friends among whom he found a warm place. His course, though mainly controlled by high ideals, was marked at times by a wavering moral judgment and would scarcely anticipations of that power and eminence to which he afterward attained.
