It is compelled to
confess the recent advance of evangelical doctrines in the German mind,
but sees only evil in the fact, and utters this jeremiade: "This church
sentiment, which has seized upon the whole of the _noblesse_ in North
Germany is becoming every year the sentiment of the clergy. The
theological radicalism of the last period is now quite a thing of the
past. The present is an epoch of restoration. Scientific criticism has
no longer any interest; it is, who can be most orthodox, and reproduce
more precisely the ideas of the sixteenth century. As the scientific and
critical school is defunct, the mediation-theology, whose business was
to compromise between the results of learning and the principles of
orthodoxy, is necessarily in a state of decay. Its occupation is gone.
This school of theologians, which numbers in its ranks some of the most
respectable names in Germany, and which traces its origin to
Schleiermacher, can scarcely be said now to make head against the
sweeping current of Pharisaical orthodoxy.
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