of lightning over northern Europe, and produced at length the clear and steady light of the Reformation.

It is singular to remark, however, that in all the fierce discussions of the time relative to religious liberty, which formed the very basis of the Reformation, and in the violent rejection of the papal authority in matters of faith and religious practice, there was no direct or at least no efficient application of the same principles to civil rights. The governments continued as despotic as before; and the question of any possible political reform does not seem to have been seriously agitated. But in England, the more practical tendency of the people produced, in time, the natural results of a struggle for liberty of any kind. The same principles and reasonings that led men to burst the shackles which ecclesiastical tyranny had imposed on them for ages, led them also to call in question the validity of that civil tyranny, by which they were deprived of their natural rights. It is thus that the Reformation in Germany, operating also upon England, and there extended to the kindred question of political liberty, may be regarded as the great ultimate cause, which led to the settlement of this western world. It is the great principle of liberty of thought, suggested to the mind of the Monk of Wittemberg, and by him spread out before the world,-and in England coupled with the great kindred principle of liberty of action, that has lain at the foundation of all the mighty movements of succeeding centuries. If it were right to refer to a single individual that which was but the expression of the spirit of an age, we might thus ascribe to Luther not only the Reformation in Germany and England, but also regard his exertions as the germ, from which have sprung all the great political events that have since astonished and convulsed the world; the revolutions of England and of France; and with happier results, the foundation of a new empire in a new hemisphere; with the revolution by which this last threw off the pressure of a foreign yoke, and founded, on a basis unknown in history, institutions of freedom which will bear the test of experience, so long as virtue and intelligence shall be the characteristics of the people; but which, it requires not the power of prophetic vision to foresee, will be surely swept away, whenever ignorance and irreligion shall become predominant in the land.

The light of the Reformation has not yet departed from Germany; although its glory has been obscured in these latter days, by urging to an extreme the fundamental principles on which it

proceeded. The Reformers, with all their zeal for liberty of thinking and freedom of investigation, never had a thought of subjecting the form and matter of revelation to the decisions of human reason. With them the Bible was THE ONLY AND SUFFICIENT RULE OF FAITH AND PRACTICE. Their reason acknowledged its authority as paramount to all other, and yielded with reverent submission to the guidance of its holy precepts. In modern times, men whose hearts have been opposed to the truths of revelation, have carried their freedom of investigation to the extreme of calling in question and denying, not only the fact of an actual revelation, but also the possibility of one at any time and in any circumstances. The reason of man has been proclaimed the source and the interpreter of all religion; the Scriptures declared to be the production of merely human wisdom; and all systems of faith and practice deduced from their pages, denounced as the imposition of a crafty priesthood upon the ignorant and credulous. All this however is nothing more than had already taken place, and with still greater virulence, in other nations; especially in England and France. The difference is, that in the latter countries these enemies of revelation were not enrolled under the banners of the church; they attacked her as open adversaries; while in Germany the poison has spread through the body of the church itself; and those who have solemnly bound themselves to make the Bible their only rule of faith and practice, have been among the first to discard its authority and contest its doctrines. The rationalism of Germany is the deism of England. The latter was professed by a few; the former has spread among the many; and its advocates, by pressing their consistency to its ultimate results, have already produced a reaction, which promises, by the blessing of God, in time to bring back the German churches to the faith and practice of the Gospel, as exhibited in the principles of the Reformation.

To an American who goes to reside for a time in Germany, the object of the greatest interest is not to study human nature in a different hemisphere, for that is every where much the same. It is not to observe manners and customs unlike those of his own land, for the novelty of these soon wears away, and they cease to make an impression on his mind. But it is rather to trace the developments of national character and feeling, as acting upon, or as affected by, their forms of religious faith and practice; it is especially the fact, that he is treading on histori

cal ground. We as a nation have no antiquity, and no history, except of recent date; and our very spirit of change and improvement prevents us from preserving that which is old, merely for the sake of its antiquity. But in Germany all is different. There a love of antiquity predominates in external things, although discarded in regard to intellectual matters; and centuries seem there to be less remote from one another, than we have here been accustomed to conceive them. The period of the Reformation seems hardly separated from the present time. The names of Luther and Melancthon are as familiar in the mouths of the people, as with us those of Washington and Franklin; and the great Reformer is regarded with the same sort of filial veneration, as is our great champion of civil liberty. You pass through the small city of Eisleben, and visit his father's house. An inscription above the door announces that this was the birth place of Luther. A school for poor children is now kept in the house, the master of which shews you around, and explains to you the relics they have collected in the room where the Reformer was born. At Wittemberg you visit his cell in the old convent, now the location of a theological seminary; you see there the table, the huge stove, the seat in the window, just as when occupied by Luther in the beginning of his career; and it requires no great stretch of imagination to behold him and Melancthon, engaged in discussions which they little expected were to agitate the world. You enter the ancient church by the door on which Luther posted up his celebrated theses; within, the two friends lie entombed over against each other in front of the pulpit, and their portraits hang upon the walls. You go to the spot where Luther publicly burned the pope's bull, and thus cut off all hope of reconciliation; you walk the streets of the city; and all now remains as it was then. The persons and the generation are gone; but their place, and their houses, and their streets, and all the objects by which they were surrounded, are still before you, and are now presented to your eyes, just as once they met their view. In such circumstances it is almost with a painful feeling, that you wake as it were from a dream, and call to mind, that all this refers back to a hundred years before the earliest settlement of your native land. The ruined castles and massy churches which one every where sees, are monuments of still earlier ages; and are associated with the history and the legends of a thousand years. The past and the present here take hold of each other; and the ages that lie between them seem annihilat

ed. This feeling, it is true, is carried to a still higher degree of solemnity and sublimity at Rome; where the monuments of ancient grandeur seem like the relics of another world.

The Germans, in their love of antiquity, are also eminently lovers of history. They require for every opinion and every doctrine, not only the proofs of reason and Scripture, but also the historical proof. They thus make history what it really is, the record of the experience of past ages; and they are slow to give credit to that which has not been tested by this experience. In this way the history of the church has become to them one of the prime elements of the study of theology; and without this, one would no more be accounted an accomplished theologian, than he would be without a knowledge of the original languages of the Bible. One part of this history, viz. Dogmengeschichte, the history of doctrinal theology, or of the rise and development of the doctrines which are and have been current within the pale of the church, is almost peculiar to Germany. It cannot be denied that this is a department of very great importance; or that a doctrine or system of doctrines will ordinarily be better understood, if we know the occasion of their rise, the circumstances and character of those by whom they were first advanced, the discussions and contests they have undergone, the various modifications they may have received,-in short, all the historical facts and events connected with them, through the influence of which they have assumed the shape in which they are now presented to us. This subject has usually been treated of in Germany as a branch of ecclesiastical history in general; though several works of merit have appeared, devoted to the separate and more detailed consideration of it.*

As a suitable transition to the more immediate object of the present article, it may be observed, that the universities of Germany are also intimately connected with the history and antiquities of the country. Of those which still exist, the following were founded before the Reformation, viz. Prague in 1348, Vienna 1365, Heidelberg 1386, Leipsic 1409, Rostock 1419,

*The best history of doctrinal theology is found in NEANDER, Allgemeine Geschichte der christl. Religion u. Kirche, Hamb. 1826 ff.-The best separate works are, MüNSCHER, Handbuch der christl. Dogmengeschichte, 4 vols. 8vo. Marburg 1804-18. A short outline of this work for the use of lectures (Marb. 1812), has been translated by Dr Murdock, New Haven, 1830.--AuGESTI, Lehrbuch der christl. Dogmengesch. Leips. 1820. 3d ed.-Bertholdt, Handbuch der Dogmengesch. 2 vols. Erlangen, 1822.

Greifswalde 1456, Freiburg 1457, Tübingen 1477, Wittemberg 1502. This last, which in the first twenty years of its existence became to its immortal honour the cradle of the Reformation, was in 1815 transferred to Halle and united with the younger university of that place. This was done by the Prussian government on very sufficient grounds, after the union of that part of Saxony with Prussia; but it was done greatly against the wishes and the will of the people at large, to whom that spot had become consecrated in history. To quiet the people of Wittemberg, a theological seminary was established there in place of the university, in which young men who have finished their university course, may still pursue their studies. There is here free provision for twenty two pupils; and the number of those who support themselves is not limited. Two of the old professors of the university, Schleusner and Nitzsch, were left here to sleep out the remainder of their lives; while the general superintendence and instruction is entrusted to Heubner, a learned and pious man. The seminary however is little frequented.—In all the universities above-mentioned, the rights and privileges, the organization, the modes of teaching, indeed the whole external character of the institutions, have come down from a period anterior to the Reformation, except so far as they were necessarily modified by the changes which then took place. Throughout protestant Germany, the system of university education is in its leading features one and the same. It is the result of the experience of several centuries, and is now so interwoven with the character and principles, with the affections and prejudices of the people, that a change would be in a measure impossible.

In preparing an article on the state of theological education in Germany, it was the first intention of the writer to incorporate in it a cursory notice of the universities of that country, so far only as they have a direct influence on this branch of education. As however these institutions constitute in themselves a subject of great importance, and also of great interest to the literary men and students of our own country, and have moreover so much connexion with and bearing upon theological learning and literature; it has been thought best to treat of them under a distinct head; and thus divide the article into two parts, one of which may serve as a species of introduction to the other. Our attention will be chiefly confined to the universities of protestant Germany.