tive: one always
found them too short, and wished them of double length." Schiller spoke
of his sermons as plain, natural, and adapted to the common life, and
adds that Herder's preaching was "more pleasing to him than any other
pulpit exercise to which he had ever listened."

Herder was the great theological writer of Weimar, and as such, his
impression upon theology and religion in general was decided. Though he
opposed the Kantian philosophy, because of its petrifying tendency, his
antagonism was counteracted by others of the Weimar celebrities. Goethe
and Schiller eclipsed all other names in their department of thought,
and were the culmination of the new type of literature. Herder might
preach, but it was only to a comparatively small world. Goethe and
Schiller were, on all points of literature, the oracles of Europe. Like
Kant, they stamped their own impress upon theology, which at that day
was plastic and weak beyond all conception. Under the Koenigsberg thinker
it became a great philosophical system as cold as Mont Blanc. Then came
Poetry and Romance, which, though they could give a fresh glow to the
face, had no power to breathe life into the prostrate form.

Schiller shares with Goethe the loftiest niche in the pantheon of German
literature. But the former is more beloved than the latter, for the
reason that his countrymen think that he had more soul. Schiller
endeared himself to his land because of his ardent aspirations to
political freedom. The poet of freedom is long-lived, and France will no
sooner forget her Beranger, nor America her Whittier, than the German
fatherland will become oblivious of Schiller. Like Herder, Schiller had
been trained carefully in household religion. In his earliest outbursts
of religious feeling there prevailed that ardent and devout spirit
which, had it been fostered by a healthy popular taste, might have
matured into something so transcendentally brilliant and useful, that
the writer of _The Robbers_ would have proved one of the reformers of
his people. If his education had reaped its appropriate harvest, his
probable bearing upon the regeneration of Germany can be but faintly
imagined by the aid of Klopstock's example. These were the sincere
thoughts of Schiller's over-burdened soul when, one Sabbath in 1777, he
addressed himself to the Deity: "God of truth, Father of light. I look
to thee with the first rays of the morning sun, and I bow before thee.
Thou seest me, O God! T