rians have passed over in silence. If facts like these, evidenced by the royal monuments, must be accepted though they have been passed over without mention by ancient historians, why should it be esteemed any disparagement to the credit of the book of Esther, that the abortive decree against the Jews and the fall of the king's favorite are not mentioned by Herodotus for whom they were of no particular interest and who had no occasion to record them; especially since they are confirmed by the regular observance of the feast of Purim among the Jews, which was established to commemorate these very events and has been perpetuated ever since?

ART. VI.-AN OBITUARY OF DR. LIEBNER BY DR.

DORNER.*

THE printing of the present number had hardly begun when the Editors received the intelligence, as surprising as it was painful, of the departure of our dear and honored friend, our associate in founding and publishing the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie, Dr. Karl Theodor Albert Liebner, Chief CourtPreacher, Ecclesiastical Privy-Counsellor, and Vice-President of the Royal Consistory of Saxony at Dresden, who died June 24, John the Baptist's day, at Meran, in the Tyrol.

The Editors regard it as a precious duty to give expression to the feeling of gratitude which German theology, but especially this Review, owes to the departed. The writer of these lines has for many years enjoyed the intimate friendship and confidence of the deceased, and had the happiness two years since, on the shore of the lake of Lucerne, in familiar intercourse with him, with Dr. Martensen, Bishop of Seeland, and other friends, to hold a reunion which had been previously arranged, and to pass with him hours of higher spiritual refreshment. The sad though honorable duty of devoting to the deceased a memorial Article has therefore been laid upon him. It does not claim to

*The above obituary Sketch of the life and works of Dr. Liebner is translated from the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie," No. 2, 1871, at the request of the editor of this Review, by Prof. W. A. Packard, Princeton, N. J.

give a complete picture of the rich life and personality of the departed, but such a one as may aid in keeping his dear form alive, and operative, through grateful recollection, even upon earth, after he has himself passed on to better regions. Not being in possession of sufficient materials for a comprehensive view of the life and work of this superior man, I shall have particularly to enter into that side of it which relates to his theological and ecclesiastical position.

66

I begin with the words with which a daily journal, published at his last home, has spoken of his departure, and which reflect the immediate impression which the deeply lamented man has left behind in his more immediate neighborhood. "One of the most admirable and noble men," it says, has departed; and what he has been by the wealth and depth of his knowledge, as well as by the loveliness and mildness of his character for theological science and the Evangelical church, as well as for the circle of his friends, and of his family, will never be forgotten. He belonged to the small number of those theologians, who through investigation, profound, truly creative, and such as extends the bounds of knowledge, have given a decisive impulse and direction to their age. It was ever that which is central and fundamental which he held in his eye, in order to set forth clearly the depths of the gospel, and therefore with him, that which gives unity stood above that which divides, the eternal import above the changing form, immediate piety above unfruitful knowledge. His entire theological activity was sustained and permeated by a rich, inwardly fixed and clearly arranged view of the world, which knew nothing dismembered, but beheld everything in the whole, and therefore also in God. For this reason, however, his mind, directed to the ideal and to the objects of contemplation-the supremely Ideal is also always the supremely Practical-has left behind enduring fruit for theology and for the church."

Liebner was born March 3d, 1806, in Schköten, near Naumburg. His father, late pastor in Altenroda in Thuringia, an earnest and severe, and a very well informed man, kept him under the parental roof until his own death; at which time the son, who had early lost his mother, was just thirteen years old. Since he was an orphan left without resources, (his step-mother helped him indeed, according to her ability, but was herself in

narrow circumstances) he passed no easy period of youth; and it is all the more a proof of his sturdy strength of mind, that he lost thereby nothing of energy, freshness and cheerfulness. Music, for which he had gifts in an unusual degree, was early his refreshment, and by the help of friends a support for his outward life, which was early accustomed to regularity and economy, and remained simple in its demands.

From his fathers's house he came well prepared to the Thomas school in Leipsic. Unusual talent and early maturity allowed him when only in his seventeenth year, to exchange the Gymnasium for the University of Leipsic, at which he also completed his academical studies. After a theological examination, brilliantly passed, he was, however, attracted to the University of Berlin, where, at that time, Schleiermacher, Neander, and Marheinecke were teaching. While his education in Leipsic had been, after the older Saxon style, preponderatingly philological, and historico-critical, there opened now to the youthful spirit new and higher views. Questions of speculation and the philosophy of religion employed him henceforth more and more, and he allowed no relaxation in studies which were fitted to inform him upon the present position of questions, and the problems of the time.

He had thankfully received from supernaturalism, a spirit of exegetical research, culture, and reverence for the holy Scriptures; from rationalism the striving for something beyond mere faith in authority. But the lifeless method of reflection, commou to both, which taught one to speak of but not out from the subject, was in the deepest contradiction to the character of his mind, which impelled him to go back to principles, to grasp them in the centre, and, from the attained point of unity, to observe the multiplicity of things. His was in a word a speculatively endowed nature. On the other side, however, pure intellectualism had no attractiveness for him. The ethical characteristic which was developed in him by his actual education, and also by the Saxon rationalism and supernaturalism opposed this. United with this moral characteristic there was also in him a powerful tendency to mysticism, to immediateness in religion; and hence to him the displacement of the moral by that hostile pair of brethren seemed as he afterwards expressed himself, "Ethicismus." In so far now as he felt in

the new speculation (of Hegel, Schleiermacher, but especially Schelling and Franz V. Baader) a direction from the surface into the depth of things, and into their central point of union, a more living conception of God, in fine, a drawing towards mysticism to that degree he felt himself attracted by it. And this was still more the case when he saw it (especially in Schelling and Franz V. Baader, just as in Böhm) working outwards from spiritual intuition, and not occupied only in a dialectic artificial fastening together of the elements.

The more now these ferments of thought intermingled in him, the more clear they grew, and the more completely they were gathered up in the unity to which they were to be reduced in his mind, so much the more evidently there rose before him as his goal the union of living religious contemplation with philosophico-religious speculation. And this goal he pursued with rare perseverance, freshness of mind and power, and with rich result when subsequently teaching, writing, and stimulating by personal intercourse, as he had before pursued it in his own reflection and reading.

Before, however, we follow his later course of life, we must mark how the idea of the Church of Christ, as a living organism, as the body of the Lord-which idea supernaturalism had well nigh lost-rose living before him. In this Schleiermacher may be regarded as having influenced him most powerfully by his writings and by word of mouth. He felt himself, however, notwithstanding the mysticism of Schleiermacher, separated from him by the indifference of the latter towards a real knowledge of God; nay, more, by his harsh separation of religion and philosophy, thankful as he was to him that he had again won for religion, and the science of religion, their independence. He would not allow philosophy to prescribe what should be received in Christianity, but he held that the Christian should also possess and employ the power of reason that he has to take up Christian truth into his rational thinking and set it in harmony with the universally human; and he reckoned it a part of the duty of a Christian theologian to strive on his part that Christian truth become a common possession, and that even philosophy rise to its height.

After his stay in Berlin he was received into the Seminary for

preachers at Wittenberg, where, under the guidance of Heubner and Rothe, he was introduced to practical theology and to the discharge of official duty in the Church. Rothe, a few years older than Liebner, does not seem as yet to have influenced him more deeply. Heubner's venerable and strong form, however, made great impression upon him. Heubner was the model of a Lutheran in supernaturalistic form, imposing not by science, but by plain, sound piety, by purity of character, by warmth of nature, and by ardent zeal in the office of preacher, in the care of souls, and in the preparation of the students for their practical calling.

The scientific spirit was not quenched in Liebner under such strong practical incitements, but he found a sphere in which both were united. He began a literary activity in the sphere of the ancient mysticism. His first production, so far as I know, was a treatise, accompanied by a preface by Ullmann, on the supposed Tractatus Theologicus of Hildebert, of Tours, in regard to which he sought to show that it was identical with the Summa of Hugo of St. Victor. The article appeared in the Studien und Kritiken, 1831, pp. 254 ff. Thereupon he published his still valued work," Hugo of St. Victor and the Theological Tendencies of His Time." He followed these investigations later by several publications relating to the mysticism of the middle ages. To these belongs his article on Gerson's Mystical Theology, Studien und Kritiken, 1835, p. 297 ff. There followed two programmes Richardi a Sancto Victore de contemplatione doctrina, Gott 1837 and 1839. Finally, the edition of the Liber Secundus of the Imitatio Christi, ascribed to Thomas a Kempis, appeared as a Whitsuntide Programme, in Gottingen, in 1842. He was especially enchained by the spirit of the Victorini, since they presented in the middle ages a peculiar connexion of practical, living piety with desire for knowledge, especially knowledge of God, upon the union of which, in his view, everything depended. At the same time, however, these studies also led him more or less into scholasticism.

In the same year, 1832, the pastorate in Kreisfeld, near Eisleben, was offered to him. After he had held it some three years, Abbot Dr. Lücke, from Gottingen, appeared one Sunday with a high commission, to hear him preach and to make his personal acquaintance. He had it in view to find a university