tian character with which this web of pietistic follies is interwoven. Take, for instance, the following short sketch:

"Hasenfeld was a long meagre man, with a piercing eye; he was the son of a corn-dealer, not a corn-Jew, however, but an honest man; and by early inclination he devoted himself to the study of theology. After finishing his studies at the university, he preached with great power, not like the doctors of the law, and filled the whole country with his reputation. On one occasion the following remarkable circumstance occurred. The chief magistrate of the town where he was preaching kept a mistress, and lived in such a licentious fashion as to be a cause of annoyance to the whole community. Hasenfeld knew this, and in the middle of his sermon was so carried away by a pious enthusiasm, as that, turning suddenly to the magistrate, he said, with a voice of thunder, 'And you, too, sir magistrate! it is not right that you keep a mistress !' This did not cure the evil certainly; but it was a noble exhibition of moral dignity, for which the worthy licentiate could afford to pay. He was arrested and confined in gaol twelve weeks, and fed on bread and water; but his pious friends sweetened his bread of tears with many kindnesses. After his release from prison he was interdicted from preaching, at least in the pulpit; but the people dragged him out of his retirement forcibly, and would have him to preach. He consented, and went to the church, but the magistrate ordered a policeman to stand ou the pulpit stairs, and not allow him to enter. What did the licentiate do? He cried, with a loud voice, 'Let us go forth without the gate bearing his shame!' The whole congregation followed him, and a more effective sermon was preached in the church-yard than ever was preached in the church. Hasenfeld was a very learned man, and as his honest enthusiasm had marred his prospects in the church, God provided a place for him, and he was made rector of a celebrated gymnasium. His love of truth, however, was the cause of much suffering to him even in this situation; he had no idea of paying any regard to symbols and confessions in his study of the Bible; it never entered his imagination that men calling themselves Protestant Christians should have virtually imprisoned the Holy Scriptures within the arbitrary limits of human creeds; he was accordingly discovered to be a heretic, and castigated and scourged till the blood came from him.* But all this availed nothing; Hasenfeld had a friend in high quarters, and was allowed to preach when and where he pleased. At length his zeal and unwearied application consumed him; but his death was more glorious than his life. He had waited several days with the utmost composure, expecting his dismissal from the body; to those who asked for his health, he always gave the same answer,' My things are packed, and I am ready

* We doubt whether to take this literally. But the stiff old orthodoxy of the Lutheran Church was capable of any thing, and the civil despotism was always at hand to second the ecclesiastical. In other parts of Stilling's works there are but too many traces of the prostration of every shape and semblance of liberty in the German states, during the early part of the last century. The wise despotism of Prussia was unknown before the French Revolution: the rottenness that preceded it is almost incredible.

for the journey.' At length, as his pulse began to sink, he fixed his eyes steadily upon the window, and with a hollow but strong voice, cried out Hallelujah!'—that was his latest breath.”*

What does the reader say to this? Is there not a living poetry in this methodism, for which you shall search in vain even in the pages of Wordsworth and Southey? Some people have celebrated Göthe's death, because he died as he lived, crying out "More light!" and others have admired the composure of David Hume, who stept into Charon's boat with a copy of Lucian in his hand; but here we have a poor despised German Methodist looking quietly at the grandeur of the sun, and breathing out his pure soul in the triumphs of a loud Hallelujah. Truly there are many beautiful scenes in the history of man's mind, that are not to be found in the orthodox chronicles of the Church, or in the pages of a fashionable novel.

We can afford merely to name another of Stilling's works, which we think may be able to command the attention of the English reader. We mean his Dialogues of the Dead, or "Scenen aus dem Geister-Reiche," as he calls them. Besides the usual element of pure Christian feeling which ennobles all Stilling's works, there is a good deal of fancy displayed in this; and the student of Church history also will find there much illustrative of the opinions and practices of the Neologists and other learned men in Germany, with reference to religion. Stilling's system of punishments in a future world is extremely ingenious; and his description of the different regions of Hades, from lowest Tartarus to highest heaven, is not less poetically beautiful than consistent with reason and the received opinions of a great part of the Christian Church. We must mention, however, that in all matters regarding a future state, Stilling takes the liberty of dissenting from his Protestant brethren, and holds with the Roman Catholics and the Universalists; he is heretical in two regards, not only believing in purgatory, but also denying strenuously the eternity of hell punishments. Into the service of this double heresy he brings both Greek and Hebrew, with much anxious learning, for he was a good scholar; but his principal argument he drew from his own heart.

The reader will have perceived from the prefixed list, that Stilling was a very voluminous writer. To put his works into English measure, the thirteen German volumes must be multiplied by three, which gives us thirty-nine; and the subject of all these volumes is one and the same; the eternal truth and beauty of

*Theobald der Schwärmer. Werke, vi. p. 119.

VOL. XXI. NO. XLII.

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Christianity, and the superiority of the supersensible over the sensible world. A silly employment this last (though by the way, radically identical with the other), will no doubt appear to us "practical Sadducees;" but it remains yet to be proved that studying animal magnetism, and concocting matter into mind, is a less ennobling employment than commenting on Jeremy Bentham, and converting right and wrong into mere pleasure and pain; and it may also be doubted whether collecting ghost stories be a less edifying employment than fabricating lies for newspapers, and political orations. Once and for all, every honest truth-loving man must make a decided unconditional protest against the one-sidedness of English Materialism; at the same time we are willing to confess, that the Spiritualism of the Germans is often a thing vague and unsubstantial, like the souls of the New South Wales savages, (as they say), coming from clouds, and going back into clouds again; also that the dew of watery tears is too plenteous; and that the soul of man is made to comport itself like a mimosa pudica-all nerve and no muscle-so that a German man seems less manly than a British child; there is also too much of old wives' gossip, of a morbid anxiety about small things, of a provincial importance given to trifles, and of a national, sometimes also a universal dignity, to petty domesticities, and specially we are willing to confess, and we forewarn the economical reader, that a great part of Jung Stilling's works can come under no better category than that of pious drivel. We have much that does not rank far above the vulgar style of street preaching; a great puff and a loud bark, but not a single tooth to bite. The "Home-sickness," for instance, is a very strange, but also a very wearisome freak of pious fancy; and no wonder; from a Germanization of John Bunyan, and a sanctification of Tristram Shandy (so the author himself explains it), something singularly fantastic, but at the same time singularly diluted and pithless, was to have been expected. It is a most singular imagination, an expansion and universalizing of Stilling's own singular existence; a jumble of real and ideal, of plain and allegorical; heaven and earth thrown into one lumber-room, and shaken so together that you know not whether the one has been solidified into stone, or the other evaporated into clouds. Then we have the book of the Revelations, and the number of the beast; and the Old and New Testament changed into the "The Tales of a Grandfather;" and pious hymns and prayers, and a "golden treasury" of meditations for every day in the year, and for every text in the Bible; and "a grey man" gliding quietly through the throng and glitter of this wicked world, and prophesying that in the year 1836 (now past)

the millennium is to commence, or the devil to be let loose-we forget which. The reader will excuse our going at large into the criticism of these works; they might have possessed-we believe they did possess considerable religious influence in their day; but they are altogether destitute of literary value,—and even in a religious point of view they are mere syllabub and whisked foam. The fact is, Stilling (like many greater men) spoiled himself by writing too much; and he was spoiled also by writing exclusively for a certain set of very amiable people, who looked up to him as a sort of god. Even in sensible Britain, these things take place daily; how much more in Germany!

But there is yet one work of this singular individual, not of a strictly religious character, that deserves special mention. We mean the "Theorie der Geister-Kunde;" a complete system of the supersensible world, wherein the rights of ghosts and spirits, the authenticity of visions, and extraordinary visitations of all sorts, are most nobly and manfully vindicated against the incredulity of all gross, full-blooded men, who eat beef-steaks, drink porter, laugh loudly, and have their portion only in the material. It would be premature to enter into any serious examination of this matter, so long as the pretended facts (?) of animal magnetism remain uninvestigated. These facts, when ascertained and calmly and impartially looked into, may possibly throw great light on the whole philosophy of dreams, visions, and apparitions. The misfortune is that impartial juries, and keen, quick-witted barristers on each side, are seldom at hand to try the evidence on which such extraordinary occurrences rest. In the meanwhile Jung Stilling sets out from a transcendental principle, which we are afraid will not go far to conciliate his English readers. He borrows again a leaf from Immanuel Kant; he proves, from the first chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason,' that space and time have no existence except in the mind; they are mere ways of looking at things, not things themselves; they have no permanent reality; consequently the whole of the modern philosophy, which is founded on the relations of space and time-the mechanical systems, as Stilling styles them, of Copernicus and Newton-are equally phantastical, equally unreal. There is no permanent reality except in God, and in the world of angels and spirits, which the word of God reveals. But this supersensible world is independent of all vulgar relations of space and time, and cannot be legitimately judged of by the laws that regulate the co-existence and succession of material facts. The scoffs and sneers of the Sadducean merely prove his own ignorance. The empirical man is himself the shadow into which he would convert the

intelligible universe. Such is the wide and all-embracing basis on which Stilling proposes to rebuild the sacred temple in which ghosts and spirits, dreams, omens, and presentiments, were wont to be worshipped; and perhaps if the English nation were not so much accustomed to think by the same laws that regulate steamcoaches and spinning-jennies, the scheme might not appear altogether unreasonable. There is at least this advantage (as Kant says) in going beyond the limits of experience, that no experience can be brought to contradict us.

To conclude. Henry Jung used to say, that he had received more real Christian kindness from that one heathen, Göthe, than from all his brother Pietists at Elberfeld put together. Possibly, if we were to try the experiment, we might find that there is more of the spirit of true Christianity to be borrowed from one of these heterodox neologians, or anti-neologic German pietists, than from a host of our own most orthodox doctors. There is nothing strange in this. The mere novelty and contrast of the foreign mode of thought acts as a beneficial stimulus to the reflective faculties. But, independent of this, where shall we find such a sincere reverential love of truth, such a scrupulous conscientiousness of investigation, such a vital breathing in the atmosphere of all that is most holy, as amongst these Germans? It is high time that we should do them justice in the domain of religion, as we have already done in the more familiar walks of literature. Hitherto, in respect of matters theological, we have comforted ourselves too much like Penelope's suitors; we feed upon another man's substance, and call the master of the house a bravo. We furnish the shelves of our libraries with the fruit of their industrious research in classical literature and biblical criticism, and then we turn round upon them and denounce them as infidels and atheists, because those very habits of inquiry by which we profit have led some of them to doubt on some points, with regard to which we have never taken the trouble even to inquire. Is this Christian? Is this gentlemanly? Verily, if we can learn nothing else from German theology, we may learn toleration, and that, though a mere negative thing, is a great deal, for it is negative of folly, and puts a gag upon the greedy maw of the allswallowing EGO of dogmatism. The virtue of religious tolerance, as we are accustomed to exercise it, is a mere material and outward thing. A man may preach as much nonsense as he pleases, and we will not incarcerate him. Very good. This is tolerating another man's nonsense; it is but one step above savage barbarity to do so; but how shall we learn to tolerate another man's sense? This is indeed a hard thing for flesh and