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proval, so that, though he had powerful friends, he ceased his lectures on dogmatics and in 1767 gladly accepted a call to Berlin as supreme consistorial councilor and provost of KSlln.

At Berlin, in the reign of Frederick the Great, Teller was in his element. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1786, and though he was unsuccessful as a preacher, his printed sermons influenced wide circles. In 1772 he published at Berlin the first edition of his Worterbuch des NeuerE Testaments zur Erkldrung christlicher Lehre, in which he held that Christianity was designed to be merely " the wisest counsel to an ever ascending blessedness," and that many things must be altered to harmonize with riper religious concepts and changed conditions, so that " kingdom of heaven " means " the Christian Church," " to repent " is " to improve oneself," and " atonement " is " the union of the Jews with other peoples, and, thus of all mankind in one religion." This work, which naturally evoked orthodox hostility, and called forth several analogous books of an opposite tendency, received a supplement in his Religion der Vollkommnern (Berlin, 1792), in which he urged the abandonment of a number of doctrines, including that of justification and the furtherance of a practical knowledge of God and of his blessings for the benefit of man, this knowledge leading to good conduct and beneficent activity, while all dogma was to be excluded from sermons, which should be devoted simply to practical Christianity. In this same spirit Teller edited for ten years the Nexces Magazin fur Prediger, which he founded in 1792, and he likewise wrote upon classical and Germanic philology, his Voll standige Darstellung der deutscherE Sprache in Lathers Bibeliibersetzung (2 vols., Berlin, 1794) still being a book of value. Special mention should also be made of his Anleitureg zur Religion iiberhaupt and zum Allgemeinen des ChristerEtums besonders (Berlin, 1792), Sammlung eirEiger Gebete zum i Gebrauch bei 5,ferEtlicherc Gottesdiensten (1793), and Opuscula varli argumereti (Frankfort-on-theOder, 1780).

With the death of Frederick the Great, Teller's position became precarious. Long before he had tried to mold the religious views of the heir-apparent by his anonymous Valentinian. der Erste, oder geheime Unterreduregen eines MonarcherE mit seinem Thronfolger fiber die Religionsfreiheit der UrEterthanen (Brandenburg, 1777), and when the famous religious edict of Johann Christian Wollner (q.v.) was issued in 1788, he sought in a pamphlet to weaken its force. For several years he was more or less involved in a controversy, which he himself had started, regarding the admission of Jews to Christianity with the avowed purpose of securing civic equality with Christians, Teller's sole requirement being that such persons should state that Christ was the founder of a better religion than the one to which they had formerly belonged. In 1791 he defended the course of the notorious and rabid rationalist Johann Heinrich Schulz, pastor at Gielsdorf, who had attacked the elements, not only of Christianity, but of all religion; and for this position Teller was sentenced to suspension from office for three months, his salary during this time be-