The worthy Semler, of whom more details will be given later, relates among his youthful reminiscences the sorrowful fate of his brother Ernst Johann, who returned in a distracted state to his parental home, from the regenerate circle of Magister Brumhardt and of Professor Buddeus at the University of Jena. The passage gives such a good insight into the period of decaying Pietism, that it shall be given here with a few abbreviations. "My brother was so habitually upright that he even mistrusted his own feelings. Easy though it was to many of the brotherhood to declare the day and the hour of their being sealed to redemption, which warranted their living in a state of pure, spiritual, heavenly joyfulness, and raised them to the rank of God's children, yet little could my brother forgive himself this spiritual falsehood; he could not coincide in what was so lightly and so repeatedly spoken of by others. He therefore fell into immoderate grief over the greatness of his sins, which were alone his hindrance; he not only prayed, but he moaned half the night before the Lord, but there was no change in his feelings. He seldom eat meat, no white or wheaten bread; he considered himself quite unworthy even of existence. Every night, when I had gone to sleep, he stole secretly out of bed, crept into the small adjoining library, knelt or lay down on the floor, and gradually lost, in his passionate emotions, all caution as to speaking softly and gently. His moaning and lamenting awoke me. I sought him out, and small confidence as I had in myself to produce any great effect--being as yet little advanced in conversion,--yet I repeated to him at intervals such beautiful lines and verses, both Greek and Hebrew, that he often embraced me and sighed, Haying, 'Ah, if this would but begin in me.' I answered sometimes hastily, that this was perversion instead of conversion, and how impossible it was for that way to be right and true, wherein one acted contrary to the intentions of God, and made one's-self into an utterly useless, helpless creature. 'Yes,' he said, 'that is what I am, and cannot sufficiently acknowledge it.' I talked with my mother, who wept over her son, who might now have been our mainstay, if he had not been spoilt by these false ideas. My father disapproved of all this still more strongly, and expatiated at such length from dogmatic and polemical divinity, that I could well see in what account he held these new spiritual institutions. Meanwhile he was obliged to be on his guard, for the whole Court were in favour of this party; many were undoubtedly very well-meaning Christians, but there were also undeniably many idlers and adventurers, who entered these institutions, and found their good, comfortable life very easy. All the evidence of their life in the flesh--which evidence was not rare nor imperceptible--was of no avail; who could succeed here? Occasionally there was a convert who lived in shame with his