to a school of colourless thought. It was the strong texture of his character which made Märklin the centre of his set of dreary Hegelians, which marked him out in that school of thin impersonal dialecticians as "distinguishable, honourable, and lovable, amidst the dim common populations." Märklin's character has great and noble features. Nor is it very easy to see how he can have felt drawn to the knot of Tübingen thinkers, of which Dr. Strauss has since become the leader. Indeed, it gave him no lasting satisfaction. Dr. Strauss himself represents his friend in later life as taking up the very same intellectual position which Carlyle has assumed in England. He turned away from a philosophy he found helpless, and a theology he believed to be false, into bitter satire on the helplessness of the day; holding up men of other ages for partial idolatry, and puzzling himself as to the sources of their health. History "still has truth; take refuge there," he said. He called on men to look away from the present confusion and morbid disease, to the free healthy public life of Greece and Rome. Had Germany a like public life, they might, he thought, be inspired to like sacrifices; but how to get such a public life without conditioning for impossible spiritual beliefs?

Christian Märklin and David Frederic Strauss were prepared together in the same Wirtemberg seminary from boyhood upwards for pastors of the German Protestant Church. It was between the years 1825 and 1830 that they studied together in the theological faculty of the University of Tübingen, and there arrived at those semi-Teutonic, semi-classical faiths or no faiths, which, with some English modifications, have often recently been the result of similar studies in English Universities, especially at Oxford. It was just at the time when the Classical and the Christian philosophy and literature were beginning to unite at their very fountains in human reason. Till now Christianity had come with a weight of external authority which scarcely rendered a real amalgamation possible. Classical literature had often floated like a kind of superficial oil over the stormy nature of both Catholic and Protestant scholars,―nay, sometimes it formed the deeper character, while the Christian element rose to the surface: but the two had never yet really mingled; they had totally different spheres ; biblical and ecclesiastical authority enforced Christianity, while mere literary taste drew men to the classical learning: the former was considered part of the fact and institution of life, the latter was ornamental culture. But as soon as the deeper question as to biblical authority began to be raised; when sceptics picked holes in the authenticity of Scripture, and believers found themselves obliged to found the main authority

of Christianity in its appeals to the conscience and spirit of man,- -then the Greek philosophy and the Roman type of character appealed on more equal terms to the mind of the student. They too might, so far as they could, approve themselves to the reason and conscience; if their chance of success was very unequal in degree, it was not wholly different in kind. When Schleiermacher was preaching a Christianity of sentiment, and Hegel demonstrating a Christianity of abstract reason, and even the highest adherents of the old school had to yield many essential points to the historical criticisms of their opponents, it was not possible wholly to refuse Plato's claim to be heard as a religious teacher, or to turn back the heroic types of Roman character with an intimation that they were not admissible claimants for a Christian's reverence or emulation; for they too, if they could establish a hold on the reason, might force their way into the new Christian philosophy; or, if they could touch the conscience and affections, would stand on the same basis with the remodelled Christian religion.

And it very soon began to be apparent that a thoroughly new struggle between the Classical and Christian types of thought so far as they were distinct-was really beginning in Germany. Candidates of theology,' who had been taught to appreciate Classical literature more thoroughly than Christian creeds, first sublimated their ecclesiastical facts, and then renounced all that was characteristic even in the faith itself. "All the young men," says Dr. Strauss, "who along with Märklin constituted the flower of the youth" then preparing for the theological classes in Tübingen,-"that set alone excepted which dreamt itself over, without experiencing any shock, from the Classical poetry into the Christian,-found their way, after a longer or shorter term of ecclesiastical service, into the class of teachers, or the private life of literary authorship." And in accounting for his friend Märklin's remarkable influence over this set, he goes on to say, "Many caught new ideas more quickly, but none worked them up more thoroughly; many surpassed him in memory, but few transformed their knowledge so completely into flesh and blood as he did. In reading the classics his own mind became antique, just as, later on, the study of philosophy turned in him to practical wisdom. His fellow-students early perceived that here there was really a character in process of formation. When there was a dispute to settle, a moral collision to disentangle, it was his opinion that was eagerly asked for, and respectfully and trustfully accepted." Strauss, Märklin, and their set, found little in the teaching of the Tübingen professors to modify the force with

which the new thoughts of Schleiermacher and Hegel seized on their minds. There is something wild and wayward in the influences of a German University, totally distinct from those of our own similar institutions. They have no stately overpowering Fellows or Dons,-only learned students, about as shy and awkward as their pupils. There is no settled, grave, immutable public opinion, keeping watch and ward over individual eccentricities, and setting practical limits to social and gregarious tendencies. There are enthusiasms which spread like wildfire, but no standing checks to such enthusiasms in the decorum and reserve which keeps a certain castle of retreat always open to the English student. The German students are like the masses-a great and often coherent democracy, always conscious of its power, within certain limits subject to compulsory laws, but scarcely under the influence of the University government. They attend when they please, and as long as they please, the only limit being the necessity of securing a certain number of certificates of attendance for future use. They work hard, but confine themselves to their favourite studies, and resist and reject influences foreign to their nature, and so get great attainments, but little culture. They wander about in the woods and hills, and work, and quarrel, and drink, and listen to their favourite orators in the lecture-room, and are a people. Nowhere is impulsive freedom so unlimited, elastic, and social, as in a German University. The professors and theologians of an old and unpopular school get empty benches and empty churches. Märklin, for instance, used to read Hegel to his set at Tübingen at the very hour when his old-school uncle preached in the University church; and often made that anxious relative sigh over his nephew's downward tendencies, when they met, just before serviceMärklin, with the heretic philosopher's book under his arm, bending his steps away from the church which the sensitive divine was approaching "clad," says Dr. Strauss, “in the Genevan gown and the power of the spirit."

It is very curious to note how the Greek culture amalgamated with the German wants in all the literary and religious tendencies of the day. At first sight there is little analogy between the two peoples: the one lively, witty, graceful, definite-minded, quick-eyed, external; the other hearty, earnest, awkward, mystic, contemplative, inward :—and still less between the character of their religious admirations. Yet it is evident that the modern German speculation has taken its impress very much from the Greek schools; and it is still more certain, that even when men like Strauss and Märklin have totally given up "every thing objective" in religion, they still

continue to make it a real religious obligation to strive at bringing the private and social life of Germany back into the classical mould. Thus Strauss quotes for us his friend's favourite motto, taken from Don Carlos:

"His spirit kindles for a newer virtue,

Which, proud, and sure, and for itself sufficient,
To no faith goes a-begging,"

And adds the following passage, which expresses, at greater length, a similar conviction: "That greatness of moral disposition which distinguishes the true antique characters, a disposition which seeks the good for its own sake, and is satisfied in the possession and enjoyment of it alone,-is to be found seldomer amongst us; and it cannot be otherwise, as long as it is a kind of article of faith among us, supported by the Church, that the weakness of human nature requires other motives to good beside the beauty of goodness itself; while Philosophy, with her injunction to do good for its own sake only, is laughed at as moonshine.”

There can be no doubt that one point of sympathy, both practical and intellectual, between the old Greek culture and the modern German is, the common passion for freedom in the two nations. During the same years when Strauss and Märklin were maturing their Hegelianism in Tübingen, Goethe was reading Guizot, and praising him for saying that "the Germans introduced the idea of personal freedom, which was peculiar to this people more than any other." "Is not that good?" said Goethe to Eckermann; "and is he not quite in the right? and is not this idea as operative as ever in the present day? The Reformation originated in this idea, and the Burschen conspiracy on the Wartburg also-wisdom and folly alike. The motley character of our literature, the passion of our poets [and philosophers?] for originality, and the belief of every one that he must strike out a new path; again, the separation and isolation among our learned men, each one standing alone and starting from his own centre,-all this is due to the same thing. The French and English, on the other hand, hold much more together, and are much more inclined to follow lead. They aim at some similarity in dress and behaviour. They fear, indeed, to differ widely from one another, lest they should excite remark, or even seem ridiculous. But the German does every thing of his own head, and only cares to satisfy himself: he never asks about other people, for in all of them lives, as Guizot has rightly pointed out, the idea of personal freedom; out of which, as I said, proceeds much that is excellent, but also much that is absurd."

This is a very striking and true description of the German

passion for freedom; and yet it points to a real difference between the kind of freedom, both practical and intellectual, which is the characteristic passion of Germany, and that which was the characteristic passion of Greece. The German love of liberty springs from the intense elasticity of their own impulses, which rise up against any actual suppression, and throw it off with one violent spring. It requires to be thwarted before its power is felt. The German heart and intellect is at first yielding, and any thing but dogged. There is no hard metal in it. But only try and compress it, and then you feel its power; the more it is apparently conquered, the greater is the explosion; it gathers all its force under the sense of constraint, and cannot rally it until it has felt the constraint. It is not a dread of the dishonour of servitude to another, such as was the root of the Greek love of liberty; it is not dread at all; it is reaction against actual present confinement. The German states did not rise against Napoleon as Greece rose against Xerxes. They waited to be subdued first in the tamest fashion, and then blew up under the yoke. The Greeks felt that it was shame and infamy to be under a foreign rule; but, once fairly suppressed, they were apt to lose heart and submit. The Germans have but little acute sensitiveness of this sort to the degradation of compulsion. They will accept subjection at first as a fate, and go down into the depths of humiliation under it. But the bigger the weight, the more surely will they throw it off. The Reformation is a case directly in point. There was no jealousy of Rome, no deep-rooted conspiracy, no national revolt against the alien rule (as was the case in England), no stern indignation against Catholic ambition. To the last Luther was anxious to avoid a schism, and would have been content to have obtained a partial lightening of the galling sacerdotal slavery in which the spirit was bound. It was the chafing of the iron law against spiritual impulses, not the irritation of a foreign rule, which brought on the collision. Rome pressed too hard; and so the whole roof of the church was blown off, when but one or two open skylights might probably have saved it. It is constraint, not specially extraneous constraint, that is the antipathy of German spirits; scarcely will they endure any kind even of self-constraint. Their desire is to be "a law unto themselves," not in the sense of imposing their own laws, but of endowing all that is spontaneous with the sacredness of law. Every thing naturally sacred in Germany is of spontaneous growth: they professed a religion of faith because it was more spontaneous (more free) than "works of the law;" and later on a religion of sentiment, because it was more spontaneous than faith. "In fact," says Strauss,