MEANWHILE the hearts of Christian men and women, in the Netherlands and in Germany, had been awakened to desire more earnestly a reformation of the Reformed and of the Lutheran churches.
There were thousands who had not followed Labadie, but who saw, as he did, the great and awful abyss which divided the church from the world. Their eyes had been opened to the fact, that only by faith in Christ can the soul pass from the one side of this great chasm to the other. They saw on the one side the unsaved, " those not born again," as they commonly expressed it ; on the other side the children of God, born of the Spirit, gathered out and delivered from this present evil world to witness for Christ and to serve Him.
" We should remember," wrote one of the " awakened " amongst the Reformed pastors, that our hearers are of two entirely different sorts, a fact which is, alas ! scarcely noticed by theologians. In all our sermons we have two great masses of hearers before us, who are as widely different from one another as light from darkness, and who cannot therefore by any possibility be addressed in the same manner, I mean unconverted sinners, and converted Christians.
" For these last alone have any claim to the name of Christians, and I do not know under what plea the former should be included as having a title to it. On the contrary, thus to include the unregenerate, is to encourage them in a good opinion of themselves, by allowing them to regard themselves as being Christians.
" Whereas, if it were plainly told them that all outward knowledge and profession of the truth can by no manner of means make them to be Christians, they would be driven out of all their holes and corners, and led to regard themselves as they really are. To them should be addressed the invitations and the threatenings of God, but to the others His consolations only."
And did not the Churches which overlooked this great and solemn fact, which classed together the children of God and the unconverted children of the world, need a reformation deeper and far more radical than the reformation which Luther preached ? If a reformation of doctrine had been needed, was not a reformation of life needed all the more urgently ?
For if it were true that their fathers had been brought out of the evil teaching of Rome to assent to the truths of the Bible, was it not a fall into deeper sin thus to boast of the light, and to care nothing for the life ?
Had the old reformers won for them nothing but sound doctrines ? Were they not as the Church of Sardis, having a name to live, and yet dead in the eyes of God ?
Thus had Father Lodensteyn and Dr. Voet and Labadie and many hundreds described them, and thus they now confessed themselves to be. And they remembered the blessing spoken by the Lord on the Church of Philadelphia, which had but a little strength, yet had not denied His name in life and practice.
Not only amongst the Calvinist Reformed Churches was the need felt and mourned. Amongst the Lutherans the call had sounded to a reformation equally needed.
We cannot give the time or space to an account of this awakening of Lutheran Christians ; but, amongst many others, the name of Philip Spener should be remembered, as one whose voice aroused the German people from the Rhine to Saxony, and whose labours are now owned as having made an era of the utmost importance in the history of Germany. And to Labadie chiefly did Spener trace the longing of his heart to bring back Protestant Germany to Christ. He had spent a year at Geneva whilst Labadie preached there, and left the old city with a heart burning for the return of orthodox Protestants to the life and love of the days of the apostles.
The life of Spener is worth a careful study, with all that resulted from his work—the founding of the " Pietist" University of Halle, the orphanage of Francke, the missions to heathen lands, the mighty tide of prayer and praise which flowed over the barren places and made the desert to rejoice.
Spener tells us that it was in the year 1694 that the name of Pietist was first given to these awakened Protestants at Frankfort-on-the-Maine—a name of reproach, but to them a name of honour ; the name by which these crusaders for the heavenly city were henceforth to be known in the pages of history.
It should also be here remarked, that the extraordinary awakening amongst the noble families of Western Germany, which marked the beginning of the eighteenth century, can be traced in great measure to Spener. As a child, he had been to a great extent brought up by the pious old Countess Agatha of Rappoltstein. "FIe grew up," writes Barthold, "almost on the knees of the Countess Agatha, the pious, serious lady who had perhaps learnt much from Tauler's sermons, so well known in her Alsatian home, and who had been driven by the troubles of the Thirty Years' War to seek for heavenly rest and comfort."
Her death, when Spener was thirteen years old, so filled him with grief, that he prayed earnestly that God would take him also to heaven. Later on the families related to the good countess retained a great affection for Spener, and his intercourse with them was the beginning of the remarkable work of God which extended from family to family amongst the nobles, before so corrupted and so godless.
But we are looking on too far into the times beyond. We must return at last to the little town of Meurs, and to good Henry Tersteegen, from whom we have wandered so long.