rmany_. For the first time did the people become conscious how great
may be the results of many with small means working together. It is not
surprising that this experience seemed then to the people like a
fabulous tale, when one considers that in the ten years before and
after 1700, the "_Stillen_" must have collected in the countries where
the German tongue is spoken, far more than a million of thalers for
orphan-houses and other similar benevolent institutions; this was,
undoubtedly, not from private sources alone, but in that poor and
depopulated country such sums are significant.

Thus did Pietism prepare men for rapid progress in many directions, and
its best offering to its votaries, a more elevated sense of duty, and a
greater depth of feeling, passed from the "_Stillen im lande_" into the
souls of many thousands of the children of the world; it contributed
scarcely less than science to the beginning of that period of
enlightenment, by mitigating the wild and rough practices which
everywhere prevailed in the second half of the seventeenth century, and
by giving to the family life of Germans, at least in the cities,
greater simplicity, order and morality. The families from whom our
greatest scholars and poets have sprung, the parental houses of Goethe
and Schiller, show the influence which the Pietism of the last
generation exercised on their forefathers.

That many of the Pietists might lose themselves in extravagancies and
dangerous by-ways, is easily comprehensible.

It was natural that with those who, after inward struggles and long
strivings, had obtained strength for a godly life, the delivery of man
from sin should become the main point; and as they were yearning, above
all, for the direct working of God on their own life, it followed that
they ascribed this awakening to the special grace of God; that they
sought earnestly in prayer for the moment when this special
illumination and sanctification should take place by a manifestation of
the divinity; and that when, after severe tension of the soul, they
reached a state of exaltation, they considered this as the beginning of
a new life to which the grace of God was assured. Luther, also, had
striven for this illumination; he also had experienced the transports
of exaltation, inward peace, repose, certainty, and a feeling of
superiority to the world; but it had been with him, as with the
strong-minded among his contemporaries, an ever-enduring struggle, a