——It is not necessary to speak here of the morality of the Order. It is
sufficiently recognized as the contradiction, that the idea of morality
insists upon the eternal necessity of every deed, but that in the
realizing of the action all determinations should be made relative and
should vary with the circumstances. As to discipline, they were always
guided by their fundamental principle, that body and soul, as in and for
themselves one, could vicariously suffer for each other. Thus penitence
and contrition were transformed into a perfect materialism of outward
actions, and hence arose the punishments of the Order, in which fasting,
scourging, imprisonment, mortification, and death, were formed into a
mechanical artificial system.——
(_b_) _Pietistic Education._
§ 256. Jesuitism would make machines of man, Pietism would dissolve
him in the feeling of his sinfulness: either would destroy his
individuality. Pietism proceeded from the principle of Protestantism,
as, in the place of the Catholic Pelagianism with its sanctification by
works, it offered justication by faith alone. In its tendency to
internality was its just claim. It would have even the letters of the
Bible translated into the vivacity of sentiment. But in its execution it
fell into the error of one-sidedness in that it placed, instead of the
actuality of the spirit and its freedom, the confusion of a limited
personality, placing in its stead the personality of Christ in an
external manner, and thus brought back into the very midst of
Protestantism the principle of monachism——an abstract renunciation of
the world. Since Protestantism has destroyed the idea of the cloister,
it could produce estrangement from the world only by exciting public
opinion against such elements of society and culture which it
stigmatized as _worldly_ for its members, e.g. card-playing, dancing,
the theatre, &c. Thus it became negatively dependent upon works; for
since its followers remained in reciprocal action with the world, so
that the temptation to backsliding was a permanent one, it must watch
over them, exercise an indispensable moral-police control over them, and
thus, by the suspicion of each other which was involved, take up into
itself the Jesuitical practice, although in a very mild and affectionate
way. Instead of the forbidden secrecy of the cloister, it organized a
separate company, which we, in its regularly constituted assembly, call
a conventicle. Instead of the cowl, it put on its youth a dress like
that of the world, but scant and ashen-colored; it substituted for the
tonsure closely-cut hair and shaven beard, and it often went beyond the
obedience of the monks in its expression of pining humility and prudish
composure. Education within such a circle could not well recognize
nature and history as manifestations of God, but it must consider them
to be limitations to their union with God, from which death can first
then completely release them. The soul which knew that its home could be
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