upon
the earth, and from such an opinion there must arise an indifference and
even a contempt for science and art, as well as an aversion for a life
of active labor, though an unwilling and forced tribute might be paid to
it. Philosophy especially was to be shunned as dangerous. Bible
lectures, the catechism and the hymn-book, were the one thing needful to
the "poor in spirit." Religious poetry and music were, of all the arts,
the only ones deserving of any cultivation. The education of Pietism
endeavored, by means of a carefully arranged series of representations,
to create in its disciples the feeling of their absolute nothingness,
vileness, godlessness, and abandonment by God, in order to displace the
torment of despair as to themselves and the world by a warm, dramatic,
and living relation to Christ--a relation in which all the Eroticism of
the mystical passion of the begging-friars was renewed in a somewhat
milder form and with a strong tendency to a sentimental sweetishness.

_2. The Ideal of Culture._

Sec. 257. Civil Education arose from the recognition of marriage and the
family, of labor and enjoyment, of the equality of all before the Law,
and of the duty of self-determination. Jesuitism in the Catholic world
and Pietism in the Protestant were the reaction against this
recognition--a return into the abstract asceticism of the middle ages,
not however in its purity, but mixed with some regard for worldly
possessions. In opposition to this reaction the commonwealth produced
another, in which it undertook to deliver individuality by means of a
reversed alienation. On the one hand, it absorbed itself in the
conception of the Greek-Roman world. In the practical interests of the
present, it externalized man in a past which held to the present no
immediate relation, or it externalized him in the affairs which were to
serve him as means of his comfort and enjoyment; it created an abstract
idealism--a reproduction of the old view of the world--or an abstract
Realism in a high appreciation of things which should be considered of
value only as a means. In one direction, Individuality proceeded towards
a dead nationality; in the other, towards an unlimited
world-commonwealth. In one case, the ideal was the aesthetic
republicanism of the Greeks; in the other, the utilitarian
cosmopolitanism of the Romans. But, in considering the given
circumstances, both united in the feeling of humanity, with its
reconciliatory and p