PROGRESS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 641 



of that which the rationalistic historians of the "pragmatic school," 

 like Schrock or Planck, wrote before. These took up with the data 

 of the historical witnesses, linked the facts together with the tend- 

 encies and the needs of the individuals who carried them out; they 

 explained the course of history by general and exterior teleology, 

 and judged men or facts of the past at the measure of their own 

 reason and their own conscience, without taking into account the 

 difference of time and country. Neander had already reacted against 

 this quite exterior manner of writing history. He did not attach 

 much importance to institutions or to the concrete realities of social 

 life, but tried to penetrate into the inmost personality of the souls and 

 to raise up some great representative men of the past for illustrating 

 the successive periods of Christian history. Endowed with an intense 

 power of bountiful and generous sympathy, he took up especially 

 the edifying side of history. It was for him a school of Christian 

 experience. But, if he has indeed depicted with a masterful talent 

 the history of some very best Christians, he left thus a series of por- 

 traits rather than an organic history such as a scientifically trained 

 mind requires. 



Baur, on the contrary, treats the history of Christianity as before 

 all the evolution of ideas. Great individualities are neglected by 

 him, or, better, they are but representatives of ideas; I might rather 

 say, nearly symbolic persons. They are not the agents of history; 

 they are themselves the instruments of the internal dialectics which 

 are unfolding through centuries. A grand and imposing structure, 

 indeed, and let us say immediately not only a theoretical 

 work, for his materials are elaborated by an untiring scholarship and 

 by strong critical researches; but, after all, sometimes an artificial 

 building, where the intellectual part, the ideas, are preponderating 

 to the prejudice of sentiment, piety, and intuition. 



Baur's work, however fundamental, wanted thus to be amended 

 and completed. Some of his pupils, like Ed. Zeller and Weizsacker, 1 

 tried to do so. Others, like Ritschl and his school, engaged with 

 a really excessive passion in a reaction against the too abstract and 

 too speculative tendency of his historical conception. Others still, 

 the continuators of ancient rationalism, like Gieseler and Hase, 2 

 although availing themselves of the "Tiibinger School," took good 

 heed not to be urged by speculation and, as they preserved them- 



1 The historians who proceed directly or indirectly from the Tiibinger School 

 are very numerous. We shall mention only: Schwegler, Kostlin, Hilgenfeld, H. 

 Holtzmann, Hausrath, Holsten, and Pfleiderer. 



2 Ancient rationalism had its last survivor in Dr. Paulus. But it had been re- 

 newed by Kant's philosophy, with scholars like Bretschneider and Wegscheider, 

 and, under the influence of Schleiermacher and of the philosopher Fries, it had been 

 enlivened by de Wette. It seems inconvenient to speak here of the supernatural- 

 ist, doctrinaire and intellectualist school of Hengstenberg, because he made his 

 scholarly work wholly dependent on doctrine and ecclesiastical tradition. 



