Three or four years before Schlegel embraced the Catholic faith, the signal for a return to the ancient church was given by the illustrious Count Stolberg. The religious impulse, which this great man imparted to German literature, was simultaneous with that Christian regeneration of philosophy, commenced in France by the Viscount de Bonald. And these two illustrious men, in the noble career which five and thirty years' ago they opened in their respective countries, have been followed by a series of gigantic intellects, who have restored the empire of faith, regenerated art and science, and renovated, if I may so speak, the human mind itself.[3] Forty years' ago, the Catholics of Germany, as I said, were in a state of the most humiliating intellectual inferiority to their Protestant brethren--they could point to few writers of eminence in their own body--Protestantism was the lord of the ascendant in every department of German letters:--and yet so well have the Catholics employed the intervening time, they now furnish the most valuable portion of a literature, in many respects the most valuable in Europe. In every branch of knowledge, they can now shew writers of the highest order. To name but a few of the most distinguished, they have produced the two greatest Biblical critics of the age--Hug and Scholz--profound Biblical exegetists, like Alber, Ackermann, and, recently, Molitor, who has created a new era not only in Biblical literature, but in the Philosophy of History--divines, like Wiest, Dobmayer, Schwarz, Zimmer, Brenner, Liebermann, and Moehler, distinguished as they are for various and extensive learning, and understandings as comprehensive as they are acute--an ecclesiastical historian pre-eminent for genius, erudition, and celestial suavity, like Count Stolberg--philosophic archaiologists, like Hammer and Schlosser--admirable publicists, like Gentz, Adam Müller, and the Swiss Haller--and two philosophers, possessed of vast acquirements and colossal intellects, like Goerres, and the subject of this memoir. In Germany and elsewhere, Catholic genius seems only to have slumbered during the eighteenth century, in order to astonish the world by a new and extraordinary display of strength. It is undoubtedly true that several of the above-named individuals originally belonged to the Protestant church--and that that church should have given birth to men of such exalted genius, refined sensibility, and moral worth, is a circumstance which furnishes our Protestant brethren with additional claims to our love and respect. We hail these first proselytes as the pledges of a more general, and surely not a very distant, re-union.