§ 159.3. =The Pietist Controversy in its First Stage.=--=Philip Jacob Spener= born in Alsace in A.D. 1635, was in his thirty-first year, on account of his spirituality, distinguished gifts, and singularly wide scholarship, made president of a clerical seminary at Frankfort-on-Main. In A.D. 1686 he became chief court preacher at Dresden, and provost of Berlin in A.D. 1691, when, on account of his intense earnestness in pastoral work, he had been expelled from Dresden. He died in Berlin in A.D. 1705. His year’s attendance at Geneva after the completion of his curriculum at Strassburg had an important influence on his whole future career. He there learned to value discipline for securing purity of life as well as of doctrine, and was also powerfully impressed by the practical lectures of Labadie (§ 163, 7) and the reading of the “Practice of Piety” and other ascetical writings of the English Puritans (§ 162, 3). Though strongly attached to the Lutheran church, he believed that in the restoration of evangelical doctrine by the Wittenberg Reformation, “not by any means had all been accomplished that needed to be done,” and that Lutheranism in the form of the orthodoxy of the age had lost the living power of the reformers, and was in danger of burying its talent in dead and barren service of the letter. There was therefore a pressing need of a new and wider reformation. In the Lutheran church, as the depository of sound doctrine, he recognised the fittest field for the development of a genuinely Christian life; but he heartily appreciated any true spiritual movement in whatsoever church it arose. He went back from scholastic dogmatics to Holy Scripture as the living source of saving knowledge, substituted for the external orthodox theology the theology of the heart, demanded evidence of this in a pious Christian walk: these were the means by which he sought to promote his reformation. A whole series of Lutheran theologians of the seventeenth century (§ 159) had indeed contributed to this same end by their devotional works, hymns, and sermons. What was new in Spener was the conviction of the insufficiency of the hitherto used means and the undue prominence given to doctrine, and his consequent effort vigorously made to raise the tone of the Christian life. In his childlike, pious humility he regarded himself as by no means called to carry out this work, but felt it his duty to insist upon the necessity of it, and indicate the means that should be used to realize it. This he did in his work of A.D. 1675, “_Pia Desideria_.” As it was his aim to recommend biblical practical Christianity to the heart of the individual Christian, he revived the almost forgotten doctrine “Of Spiritual Priesthood” in a separate treatise. In A.D. 1670 he began to have meetings in his own house for encouraging Christian piety in the community, which soon