They retained, after a short period of friction, a smug
and latitudinarian orthodoxy, which Methodism did little to change. In
France not only was the Huguenot Church annihilated, but the Jansenist
movement was savagely suppressed. The tyranny of the Bourbon State and
the corruption of the Gallican Church which was so deeply identified
with it caused the rationalist movement to bear the trait of a
passionate opposition to religion. In the time of Pascal, Jansenism had
a moment when it bade fair to be to France what pietism was to Germany.
Later, in the anguish and isolation of the conflict the movement lost
its poise and intellectual quality. In Germany, even after the temporary
alliance of pietism and rationalism against the Church had been
transcended, and the length and breadth of their mutual antagonism had
been revealed, there remained a deep mutual respect and salutary
interaction. Obscurantists and sentimentalists might denounce
rationalism. Vulgar ranters like Dippel and Barth might defame religion.
That had little weight as compared with the fact that Klopstock, Hamann
and Herder, Jacobi, Goethe and Jean Paul, had all passed at some time
under the influence of pietism. Lessing learned from the Moravians the
undogmatic essence of religion. Schleiermacher was bred among the
devoted followers of Zinzendorf. Even the radicalism of Kant retained
from the teaching of his pietistic youth the stringency of its ethic,
the sense of the radical evil of human nature and of the categorical
imperative of duty. It would be hard to find anything to surpass his
testimony to the purity of character and spirit of his parents, or the
beauty of the home life in which he was bred. Such facts as these made
themselves felt both in the philosophy and in the poetry of the age. The
rationalist movement itself came to have an ethical and spiritual trait.
The triviality, the morbidness and superstition of pietism received
their just condemnation. But among the leaders of the nation in every
walk of life were some who felt the drawing to deal with ethical and
religious problems in the untrammelled fashion which the century had
taught.

We may be permitted to try to show the meaning of pietism by a concrete
example. No one can read the correspondence between the youthful
Schleiermacher and his loving but mistaken father, or again, the
lifelong correspondence of Schleiermacher with his sister, without
receiving, if he has any religion of his