they lost,
for the zealous, the attractive power which in the calm exclusiveness
of the select society they had exercised; parties arose, and a portion
of his scholars separated from the church. He himself, after twenty
years of active exertion, was called from Frankfort to Dresden, and
from thence soon after to Berlin.

Spener himself was disinclined to sectarianism, the mysticism of Arndt,
and still more of Jacob Boehme, was repulsive to him, and he disapproved
when some of his friends abandoned the church; he struggled incessantly
against the enemies who wished to drive him out of it, and during the
last half of his life maintained a quiet struggle against his own
followers, who publicly showed their disrespect to the dogmas of the
church. He was decidedly no enthusiast; that the Christian religion was
one of love, that in one's own life one was to imitate that of Christ,
and value little the transitory pleasures of the world, that, after his
example, one was to show love to one's fellow-creatures: this was
always the noble keystone of his teaching. And yet there was something
in his nature, without his wishing it, which was favourable to the
isolation and seclusion in which, in the following century, the
religious life of the Pietists wore away. The stress which he laid upon
private devotion, and the solitary striving of the soul after God, and,
above all, the critical distrust with which he regarded worldly life,
could not fail to bring his followers soon into opposition with it. The
insignificance and shallowness of many pretenders to sanctity who clung
yearningly to him, made it inevitable that a similar mode of feeling
and of judging life would shortly become mere mannerism, which would
show itself in language, demeanour, and dress.

God was still the loving Father who was to be stormed by the power of
prayer, and might be moved to listen. But this generation had learnt
resignation, and a gentle whisper to God took the place of the urgent
prayer in which Luther had "brought the matter home to his Lord God."
The inscrutable ways of Providence had been imprinted by fearful
lessons on the soul, and the progress of science gave such presage of
the grandeur of the world's system, that the weakness and
insignificance of man had to be more loudly proclaimed. The sinner
had become more in awe of his God, the _naive_ ingenuousness of
the Reformation was lost. The craving for marvels had therefore
increased--increased