Product Code Database
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: quotation to fix the severest blame on him. Yet in the dispute with Ritschl and his school this has been the most usual form of polemic. So it was just last August in the large assembly held under the auspices of the Brandenburg Church Council. Ritschl never defended himself in this struggle. He did his work, and for the rest was silent. The ground of the hostility to Ritschl was his unsparing exposure of professionalism. There must be something in Ritschl and his work to explain the passionate attacks on him. It cannot be for no reason that men who otherwise have some regard to their love of truth, are in the controversy with him constrained to say the reverse of truth so openly. Such a widespread movement is not to be explained by personal antipathy. Is it the case that the ministers who have passed through his school have roused opposition by bringing confusion into their congregations and causing trouble to their ecclesiasticalsuperiors? Nay; the very opposite has been repeatedly testified by the Council of the Church in which Ritschl worked. According to this evidence Ritschl's pupils have rather been distinguished in the pastoral office by waiting quietly and faithfully on their glorious ministry, not moved by the perilous impulse to put themselves forward in the noise of party assemblies. The reason lies in something else, which, for those who knew him more closely, found strong expression in Ritschl's personal bearing. He observed in religious intercourse an extraordinary strictness with himself. That he lived in the world of ideas contained in the Christian faith, certainly made itself so strongly felt in his conversation that a less powerful intellect was apt to become tired with it. In his house and here in Marburg I have been with him for days on end without
|
