Philalethes. or lovers of truth, as their name im- plies, won • a sect of infidels which arose at Kiel, in Ger- many, about Is 17. and who wished to ignore Chris- tianity altogether, and to use only the general forms of piety. See Rationalists.
Philanthropy (<pi\av&pwria,a term compounded of (piXoc. loving, and avdpwiroc, man), signifies tin love of mankind. It differs from benevolence only in this — that benevolence extends to every being that has life and sense, and i- of eour-e suscepl ible of pain and pleas- ure; whereas philanthropy cannot comprehend more than the human race. It differs from friendship, as this affection subsists only between a few individuals, while philanthropy comprehends the whole human species, h is a calm sentiment, « hich pi rhaps hardly e\ . r rist - to the warmth of affection, and certainly not to the heat of passion.
Christian philanthropy is universally admitted to he
superior to thai of any other ethical or religious system ; and it wo inquire what are the causes of this superior
pr inence given to active benevolence in the Christian
scheme ol ethics, we shall find, a- in other instances, that the peculiar character of the ethical fruit depends on the root of religion by which tin' plant is nourished.
and the theological soil in which it was planted. For surely it requires very little thought to perceive that 1 all that surpassing love of the human broth- erhooii lies iii the well-known opening words of the most catholic of prayers "Our Father, which an in heaven;" the aspect also of sin a- a contumacy, and a rebellion, and a guilt, drawing down a curse, necessarily leads to a more aggressive philanthropy, with the view of achieving deliverance from that curse; hut. above all. the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the terrible consequences necessarily involved in the idea
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of an eternal banishment from the sunshine of the di- vine presence, has created an amount of social benevo- lence and missionary zeal which under any less potent stimulus would have been impossible. The miseries of the more neglected and outcast part of humanity pre- sent an entirely different aspect to the calm Epicurean and to the zealous Christian. To the Christian the soul of the meanest savage and of the most degraded crimi- nal is still an immortal soul. Christian ethics requires us to love our enemies without betraying our rights, and this will become more and more practicable in the degree that international recognition becomes more common, and a large Christian philanthropy more dif- fused.
In the history of education philanthropy has ac- quired a special meaning. The influence exercised by Rousseau was not less great on education than on poli- tics, and was as visible in the pedagogues of Germany and Switzerland as in the men of the French Revolu- tion. It is to the brilliant and one-sided advocacy, by the author of Emile, of a return to nature in social life and in the training of the young, that Basedow owed his novel and enthusiastic educationalism, which he put to the practical test in the institution which was opened under his auspices at Dessau in 1774, and which was called Philanthropina. Other establishments of the same kind were founded in different parts of Germany, but the only one which still survives is Salzmann's Insti- tute at Schnepfenthal, near Gotha, opened in 1784. These philanthropina are of interest to us because they sought the religious and moral training of the young on an en- tirely original plan. Until the days of these Philan- thropists the Church had had the sole educational care of the rising generation, but these came forward to assume this responsibility, and to treat the child in a peculiar and altogether novel manner. The religious fervor was to be developed like love for any given study, and, instead of influencing the heart, religion be- came an intellectual acquisition. As philanthropism agreed no less with the absolutism of Russia than with the liberty of Switzerland, so, in the general private de- votional exercises, nothing should be done which would nut be approved of by every worshipper of God, whether he were a Christian, Jew, Mohammedan, or a deist. " In the temple of the Father of all, crowds of dissenting fellow-citizens will worship as brethren, and afterwards they will, with the same fraternal disposition, go, one to hear the holy mass, the other to pray with real brethren, 'Our Father,' the third to pray with real brethren, 'Father of us.' While the former education had viewed the minds of children as vessels into which a certain amount of knowledge and faith was to be infused, whether it was easy or difficult, philanthro- pism viewed these vessels as the chief thing, and the amount of knowledge as only secondary. In other words, knowledge was regarded merely as a means of training the human mind; and the aim was the nat- ural development of all man's powers and faculties" (Kahnis, Hist, of Genu. Prof. p. 47). See the Quart. Rev.JsLii. 1875, art. vi; Blackie, Hist. ofEurop. Moral.-:. p. "23G, 263; Wuttke, Christian Ethics (see Index in vol. vii). (J.H.W.)
Philar'ches. This word occurs as a proper name in the A. V. at 2 Mace, viii. 32, where it is really the name of an office, phylarch (7> (f)v\apx>K = 0 <!>v\apxoc, " the commander of the cavalry"). The Greek text seems to be decisive as to the true rendering; but the Latin version (" et Philarchen qui cum Timotheo crat . . .") might easily give rise to the error, which is very strangely supported by Grimm, ad loc— Smith.