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Pietism in its original shape had done its work. Its defects had become much more apparent in the second and third generation than they were at first; its tendency to fix the attention of the Christian within, on his own states of feeling and chances of salvation, produced in some cases, when Pietism had become fashionable and profitable, a hypocritical simulation of such feelings; in others a timid anxious tone of mind, inclined to morbid self-scrutiny and religious melancholy. Its discouragement of many legitimate forms of occupation as well as of recreation, which it stigmatized as worldly, incapacitated it from keeping abreast of the new tide of intellectual activity which rolled through Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century; it had no place in its scheme of life for the new learning, and art, and science. And for a time it seemed swept aside, but it had in it a germ of true and deep spiritual life, and this never died out; it was handed down through a Lavater, a Claudius, a Jung Stilling, an Arndt, a Falk, till in our own days it is blossoming again in vast works of Christian charity, which can spring only from a life rooted through Christ in God.

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