Charity_. While in that metropolis
he had rare opportunities for the study of his times. He saw that the
indifference and doubt which centered in the court and the university,
controlled the leaders of theology, literature, and statesmanship. He
drew his philosophy largely from Jacobi, exhibiting with that thinker
his dissatisfaction at the existing condition of metaphysics and
theology. Schleiermacher could not look upon the dearth around him
without the deepest emotion. He asked himself if there was no remedy
for the wide-spread evil. The seat of the disease appeared to him to be
the false deification of reason in particular; and the general mistake
of making religion dependent upon external bases instead of upon the
heart and consciousness of man. His conclusion was that both the friends
and enemies of Rationalism were mistaken, and that religion consists not
in knowledge but in feeling. It was in 1799 that he wrote his
_Discourses on Religion addressed to its Cultivated Despisers_. Striking
at the principal existing evil, which was indifference, he aimed to show
the only method for the eradication of them all.

The late Mr. Vaughan, in speaking of the position of this work, says:
"In these essays Schleiermacher meets the Rationalist objector on his
own ground. In what aspect, he asks, have you considered religion that
you so despise it? Have you looked on its outward manifestations only?
These the peculiarities of an age or a nation may modify. You should
have looked deeper. That which constitutes the religious _life_ has
escaped you. Your criticism has dissected a dead creed. That scalpel
will never detect a soul. Or will you aver that you have indeed looked
upon religion in its inward reality? Then you must acknowledge that the
idea of religion is inherent in human nature, that it is a great
necessity of our kind. Your quarrel lies in this case, not with religion
itself, but with the corruptions of it. In the name of humanity you are
called on to examine closely, to appreciate duly what has been already
done towards the emancipation of the true and eternal which lies beneath
these forms,--to assist in what may yet remain. Schleiermacher separates
the province of religion from those of action and of knowledge. Religion
is not morality, it is not science. Its seat is found accordingly in
the third element of our nature--the feeling. Its essential is a right
state of the heart. To degrade religion to the position of