to advocate princely claims, and hated it accordingly. As Church and State were united in the person of the prince, the legal and political object of a High School did not interfere with its ecclesiastical character. In the Wittenberg statutes of 1595 it was enacted that the faculty of Philosophy must belong to the church. Convocations for disputation and for conferring degrees in all faculties were held in the churches even after the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it was customary for all professors and doctors to take the oath on the sacred books.

It was fortunate for Germany that in the seventeenth century, the gloomiest of her history, her schools did not perish, but survived the Thirty Years' War.

Yet so unsatisfactory was their condition in respect both of morals and learning, particularly during the first decades of the century, that Germans willingly went abroad in search of better intellectual training, or to escape the tyranny of the fagging system, which amongst the wild students had become intolerable. Lawyers turned to the law schools of France, medical students to Italy-for Italy, owing to her schools of Padua and Pisa, and to the influence of men like Telesio, Baglivi, Fabrizio, Cardano, and Galileo, had become once again, though only for a short period, the instructress of Europe in philosophy and natural science.

At the close of the great war, in the year of the peace of Westphalia (1648), Valentine Andrea penned these sad words, which read almost like an epitaph on the intellect of Germany I have long known, by my own experience, that there is nothing more profane than our religion, nothing more unwholesome than our medicine, nothing more unjust than our justice.' 5

The latter days of the century exhibit a picture equally sad. When Germany was deeply sunk in political weakness and shame, when foreign arrogance and foreign

Henke, Georg Calixtus und seine Zeit, i. p. 48.

From a letter in Moser's Patriotisches Archiv, vi. 348.

avarice had gradually dismembered the feeble and paralysed body of the empire, when the Palatinate had been laid waste, and Heidelberg destroyed by fire, a death-like calm settled down upon our universities. Not a note of patriotic indignation was heard; not a voice was raised to wake the nation from its lethargy. Professors and students alike seemed wholly resigned and ready to submit to anything with dull indifference. The Catholic foundationsmany of which, as consisting only of one or two faculties, did not deserve even the name of university '-vegetated rather than possessed conscious life upon the meagre diet and in the scanty breathing space allotted to them. The Protestant educational bodies were overpowered by theological interests and controversies, and their history is almost exclusively a history of the strife between Lutheran orthodoxy on the one side, and Calvinism, eclecticism, and pietism on the other. Helmstädt formed a solitary exception. There classical learning was always promoted, and there laboured Hermann Conring, a man unrivalled in his day for diversity of talent-a professor of medicine, but at the same time eminent as a law student, a theologian, and an historian. His application of the historical method to German law and politics marks him as the prophet and pioneer of a scientific system of teaching, for the brilliant results of which, in later days, the German schools were indebted to him.

Until nearly the end of the seventeenth century, lectures in all faculties were delivered in Latin; German was excluded from the lecture rooms, although, according to Leibnitz, it is better suited than any other to be the language of philosophy and learning, since it takes nothing for granted and allows no room for groundless fancies.' Thus we Germans had taken centuries to deliberate before actually founding a university of our own, and even then had imported jurisprudence, philosophy, and natural science from Italy. Hence teachers in Germany were neither able nor willing to impart to others in any language but Latin

what they themselves had learnt in that tongue. At length Thomasius at Halle, and Budæous at Jena, began almost simultaneously to make use of the German language in their colleges. Yet the custom of lecturing in Latin was upheld with extraordinary tenacity, and a very long time elapsed before German came into general use. For nothing is easier or more welcome to inferior and narrow-minded teachers, who can work only in a groove, than the use of a dead language like the Latin. Under the cloak of the old idioms, even in their impoverished modern form, confusion of ideas and absence of thought are easily concealed; platitudes which would be insufferable in German sound more respectable in Latin.

But no one can think except in his mother-tongue, and a dead language must always be foreign to our innermost thoughts and feelings: thus the double task was laid upon our youth of mentally turning the Latin into German, and then of understanding the translation. And this exercise was all the more futile, because in the case of abstract ideas German and Latin are not equivalent, and the most significant German words can with difficulty, and only by a paraphrase, be rendered into Latin. It is thus quite easy to understand that so long as this supremacy of Latin and its exclusive use in teaching continued in the High Schools, learning would inevitably first stagnate and then begin to retrograde, through being out of touch with the national life and all outside movement.

At the end of the seventeenth, and far into the following century, German universities in general were held in little esteem, and the princes were often the first to set the example of contempt for them. It is hardly possible for any public body to be made to suffer more acutely from scornful and contemptuous treatment than did Frankfort-onthe-Oder from the behaviour of King Frederick William I., or Halle from that of his son. They were looked upon

Comp. Stenzel's Geschichte von Preussen, iii. 504, and Tholuck's Vermischte Schriften, ii. 36.

and treated as the worn-out, though still indispensable, survivals of an earlier time, refuges of intellectual narrowness and literary pedantry quite useless for all practical purposes. Whilst the upper classes tended more and more to become French in customs and language-so that a prince, like the Landgrave Ernest of Hessen Rheinfels, and a scholar, such as Leibnitz, actually corresponded with each other for years in French-Thomasius, who had the restoration of the mother-tongue to its rights very near at heart, found it necessary to set his pupils in Halle exercises in German composition. Most of them, he says, could not even write a short German sentence or letter correctly. Whoever tries to restore the use of German is looked upon as a lunatic,' wrote Gabriel Wagner a few years earlier; the exclusive employment of foreign languages, especially for philosophical subjects, appeared to him an insufferable evil. It is significant of the utter disrepute into which the universities had fallen that Leibnitz, the greatest German scholar of his day, in his plans and proposals for the promotion of learning, made no allusion to the universities; he seems to have thought that they had sunk so low as to make any reformation hopeless.

From 1690 until about 1730 Halle took the lead amongst German High Schools, and could boast of teachers in all the faculties whose names are connected with the remembrance of real intellectual progress. In theology, philosophy, and legal science, thoughts and aims discouraged and suppressed in other schools here found refuge and free development; the institutions of Franke attracted the sympathetic attention of all Germany.

This freedom was crippled when the philosopher Wolf was expelled and Spangenberg banished, after which time the reputation and influence of Halle sank; and about 1734 the wealthier school of Göttingen came to the front, under the favour of British patronage and the guidance of a prudent statesman. Göttingen was the first school founded with the definite purpose of promoting in

tellectual reform in Germany. The names of Mosheim, Böhmer, Gessner, Haller, and after them of Pütter, Schlözer, Michaelis, Heyne, Lichtenberg, the freedom in teaching, the absence of censorship, the increasing number of educational books compiled by her professors and introduced into other universities, combined to secure to Göttingen, for about half a century, the first rank among the High Schools of Germany.

In one department especially, that of history, the influence exercised by Göttingen on the German mind was of great importance. From the middle of the sixteenth century historical lectures had, it is true, been delivered in other German universities, at least in the north; but they had taken the form of historical tales, selected for their application to particular purposes, rather than of history strictly so called, and the teacher was rightly called professor historiarum. Profane history served only as a background and illustration of church history; and church history was freely employed in the sectarian controversies which at the time were matters of the greatest importance in the eyes of Germans. Such parts of German and Italian history as dealt with questions of public and constitutional law were used as a storehouse or arsenal by political teachers; but before the beginning of the nineteenth century there was no tolerable textbook of universal history-the first was by Cellarius in Halle-nor before Köhler and Struve was there any readable history of Germany. Besides Mascov of Leipzic it is to such scholars of Göttingen as Pütter, Gatterer, Schlözer, and Spittler that we owe the dawn of a new era in German historical research. Looking back after the perusal of such a work as Spittler's "History of the European States,' which appeared in 1794, to works produced before 1750, it must be acknowledged that great progress had been made in those forty years; and it is a hopeful sign for the future of our German schools that such rich fruits of German research and German ingenuity were matured by them.