ents of the Order, in which fasting,
scourging, imprisonment, mortification, and death, were formed into a
mechanical artificial system.--

(_b_) _Pietistic Education._

Sec. 256. Jesuitism would make machines of man, Pietism would dissolve
him in the feeling of his sinfulness: either would destroy his
individuality. Pietism proceeded from the principle of Protestantism,
as, in the place of the Catholic Pelagianism with its sanctification by
works, it offered justication by faith alone. In its tendency to
internality was its just claim. It would have even the letters of the
Bible translated into the vivacity of sentiment. But in its execution it
fell into the error of one-sidedness in that it placed, instead of the
actuality of the spirit and its freedom, the confusion of a limited
personality, placing in its stead the personality of Christ in an
external manner, and thus brought back into the very midst of
Protestantism the principle of monachism--an abstract renunciation of
the world. Since Protestantism has destroyed the idea of the cloister,
it could produce estrangement from the world only by exciting public
opinion against such elements of society and culture which it
stigmatized as _worldly_ for its members, e.g. card-playing, dancing,
the theatre, &c. Thus it became negatively dependent upon works; for
since its followers remained in reciprocal action with the world, so
that the temptation to backsliding was a permanent one, it must watch
over them, exercise an indispensable moral-police control over them, and
thus, by the suspicion of each other which was involved, take up into
itself the Jesuitical practice, although in a very mild and affectionate
way. Instead of the forbidden secrecy of the cloister, it organized a
separate company, which we, in its regularly constituted assembly, call
a conventicle. Instead of the cowl, it put on its youth a dress like
that of the world, but scant and ashen-colored; it substituted for the
tonsure closely-cut hair and shaven beard, and it often went beyond the
obedience of the monks in its expression of pining humility and prudish
composure. Education within such a circle could not well recognize
nature and history as manifestations of God, but it must consider them
to be limitations to their union with God, from which death can first
then completely release them. The soul which knew that its home could be
found only in the future world, must feel itself to be a stranger