They met in Schleiermacher. When quite young he was placed, first at Niesky and afterward at Barby, in the care of the Moravians. It was among these devout people that he became inspired with that enthusiastic love of inner religious feeling which characterized his entire career. The traces of Moravian piety are perceptible in all his writings. His own words concerning his early training are very touching. "Piety," says he, "was the maternal bosom, in the sacred shade of which my youth was passed, and which prepared me for the yet unknown scenes of the world. In piety my spirit breathed before I found my peculiar station in science and the affairs of life; it aided me when I began to examine into the faith of my fathers, and to purify my thoughts and feelings from all alloy; it remained with me when the God and immortality of my childhood disappeared from my doubting sight; it guided me in active life; it enabled me to keep my character duly balanced between my faults and virtues; through its means I have experienced friendship and love." He became a student at Halle, and thence removed to Berlin, where he was appointed chaplain to the _House of Charity_. While in that metropolis he had rare opportunities for the study of his times. He saw that the indifference and doubt which centered in the court and the university, controlled the leaders of theology, literature, and statesmanship. He drew his philosophy largely from Jacobi, exhibiting with that thinker his dissatisfaction at the existing condition of metaphysics and theology. Schleiermacher could not look upon the dearth around him without the deepest emotion. He asked himself if there was no remedy for the wide-spread evil. The seat of the disease appeared to him to be the false deification of reason in particular; and the general mistake of making religion dependent upon external bases instead of upon the heart and consciousness of man. His conclusion was that both the friends and enemies of Rationalism were mistaken, and that religion consists not in knowledge but in feeling. It was in 1799 that he wrote his _Discourses on Religion addressed to its Cultivated Despisers_. Striking at the principal existing evil, which was indifference, he aimed to show the only method for the eradication of them all.