whom Germany owes much, disgusted with the stoical and
analytic spirit of the Kantian philosophy, had already attempted, and not
in vain, to throw the mind back to an appreciation of old history, and
especially had manifested an enthusiastic admiration of Hebrew literature;
but now, as if by one general movement, the public taste was turned to an
appreciation of the freshness of feeling, and fine elements of character,
which existed in the Christianity of the middle ages.(743)

This literary movement prepared the way for and accompanied another,
which, though occurring a little later, may be reckoned as the third
influence which caused a religious reaction. Indeed it is the one to which
the Germans attribute the chief effect. It is found in the outburst of
national patriotism which took place in the liberation wars of 1813;(744)
the spontaneous chivalry which made the heart of Germany beat as the heart
of one man, to endeavour to hurl back Napoleon beyond the limits of the
common fatherland. In that moment of deep public suffering, the poetry and
piety of the human heart brought back the idea of God, and a spirit of
moral earnestness. The national patriotism,(745) which still lives in the
poetry of the time, expelled selfishness: sorrow impressed men with a
sense of the vanity of material things, and made their hearts yearn after
the immaterial, the spiritual, the immortal: the sense of terror threw
them upon the God of battles. It was the age of Marathon and Salamis
revived; and the effect was not less wonderful.(746)

A fourth influence remains to be noticed, which was in its nature more
strictly theological, and limited to the church. When after the return of
peace the tercentenary of the Reformation was celebrated in 1817, an
obscure theologian at Kiel, named Harms,(747) published a set of theses as
supplements to the celebrated theses of Luther, which, by the excitement
and controversy unexpectedly occasioned by them, turned attention anew to
the study of the reformational and biblical theology, and created a
revival of the spiritual element which was too much forgotten.

Such were the four influences--the philosophical, the literary, the
political, the spiritual,--which entered into German life, and produced or
increased the reaction that took place in German theology in the period
which we are about to sketch.

We placed the limits of this second period from about 1810 till the
literary revolution caused by ala