1912] on the Eff'eds of the Thirty Years' War. ;^97 



Lutheran pastor intent through all the troubles of the times of reach- 

 ing the inmost recesses of his people's souls. I should not take my 

 example from the well-known tigure of Paul Gerhaixl, the greatest of 

 liUtlieran liymn-writers after Luther, whose sufferings are ])artly 

 legendary and who long survived the Thirty Years' War. I should 

 rather take it from the experiences of Joliann Arndt, who has lieen 

 sometimes called the earliest of the Pietists, and who, whether or not 

 he is entitled to that designation, is remembered as having by two 

 books, which he wrote during the AVar, carried edification and comfort 

 to innumerable humble homes in the midst of trouble and distress. 

 His True Christianity, which exposed him to some tribulation (which 

 indeed he was hardly spared at any time of his life), and his book of 

 prayers in prose and verse called the Little Paradise, were cherished 

 in numerous editions as the Arndtenbuch, by the evangelical popula- 

 tion ; and his mantle, there can be no doubt, fell upon the long suc- 

 cession of good pious men of whose names the best known to us are 

 those of Spener and Francke, Thus, it came to pass that the Thirty 

 Yeai's' War was instrumenta' in bringing about, throuyh. tlie very 

 pressure of the evils that followed in its train, a religious reaction 

 against the formalism of contending creeds, and, at the same time, a 

 deep and powerful protest against the rampant irreligion, of which 

 among the great wars of modern times this War, by reason of its 

 widespread, all-absorbing character and long endurance, was the most 

 prolific. Of later German mysticism the most prominent represent- 

 ative, Jacob Boehme, with whom our great modern English mystic 

 William Law was to familarize our own religious public, belongs to the 

 period of the Thirty Years' War ; but his, to tell the truth, is an isolated 

 figure on its canvas ; and although there is an undeniable inner connec- 

 tion between him and his predecessor Weigel and the great Pietistic and 

 its successor the great Evangelical Movement, on which I will not dwell 

 here, they stand historically apart from it in the period which we 

 have been discussing, for they abstained from any thought or inten- 

 tion of direct influence upon Christian society and the progress of 

 the world, and withdrew themselves into the sphere of cosmic specula- 

 tion, seeking to harmonize their idea of religion with their conception 

 of the world, its creation and government. The Pietists on the other 

 hand, whether we reckon them from Arndt or from his immediate 

 succesors, directly addressed themselves to the practical problems 

 which Christianity — and Protestant Christianity in especial — saw be- 

 fore it, instead of carrying on the perennial controversy as to which 

 is the true Christian Church, and which are its relations to the other 

 Christian churches. Though it was in Calvinist Holland and in the 

 person of Gisbert Voet (the adversary of Descartes, another contem- 

 porary of the Great War) that Pietism has been held to have first 

 taken its origin in a period partly coinciding with that of the War, it 

 was nevertheless in the Lutheran body and on German soil that it 

 attained to its first continuous growth — and there we nuist leave it. 



