dwelling; they were the far-famed _Collegia pietatis_, in which the books of the holy Scriptures were explained and commented upon by the men, whilst the women listened silently in a space set apart for them. When later he had to deliver these discourses in the church, they lost, for the zealous, the attractive power which in the calm exclusiveness of the select society they had exercised; parties arose, and a portion of his scholars separated from the church. He himself, after twenty years of active exertion, was called from Frankfort to Dresden, and from thence soon after to Berlin. Spener himself was disinclined to sectarianism, the mysticism of Arndt, and still more of Jacob Boehme, was repulsive to him, and he disapproved when some of his friends abandoned the church; he struggled incessantly against the enemies who wished to drive him out of it, and during the last half of his life maintained a quiet struggle against his own followers, who publicly showed their disrespect to the dogmas of the church. He was decidedly no enthusiast; that the Christian religion was one of love, that in one's own life one was to imitate that of Christ, and value little the transitory pleasures of the world, that, after his example, one was to show love to one's fellow-creatures: this was always the noble keystone of his teaching. And yet there was something in his nature, without his wishing it, which was favourable to the isolation and seclusion in which, in the following century, the religious life of the Pietists wore away. The stress which he laid upon private devotion, and the solitary striving of the soul after God, and, above all, the critical distrust with which he regarded worldly life, could not fail to bring his followers soon into opposition with it. The insignificance and shallowness of many pretenders to sanctity who clung yearningly to him, made it inevitable that a similar mode of feeling and of judging life would shortly become mere mannerism, which would show itself in language, demeanour, and dress.