PiStas, a virtue which denotes veneration for the Deity, and love and tenderness to our friends, and es- pecially dutifulness to parents. It received divine hon- ors among the Romans, and was made one of their gods. Acilius Glabrio first erected a temple to this new divin- ity, on the spot where a woman had fed with her own milk her aged father, who had been imprisoned by order of the senate, and deprived of all aliment. The goddess is seen represented on Roman coins as a matron, throw- ing incense upon an altar, and her attributes are a stork and children. See Cicero, De Die. 1 ; Val. Maximus, v, 4 ; Pliny, vii, 36 ; Zumpt, in the Class. Museum, iii, 452.
Pietism is the specific appellation of a phase of re- ligious thought which developed itself especially within the pale of the German Lutheran Church in the 18th century. Like English Methodism, it originated in a period of indifference to religion, and, like it also, aimed to supersede dead faith, knowledge without life, form without spirit, worldliness under the cloak of religion, by life—a. spiritual and living faith. Like Methodism, it laid great stress on the necessity of the new birth ; it prohibited certain amusements and modes of life until then considered as at least harmless ; and it encouraged private assemblies of Christian persons for purposes of edification, such as the study of the Scriptures or the interchange of spiritual experiences. Like Methodism, too, it encountered at first no little ridicule, and even persecution. It was accused of being an attempt to found a new sect, and was vehemently opposed on this ground; but, unlike Methodism, though it did here and there give rise to some insignificant bodies of separa- tists, it never broke off from the national Church of the country, but remained as a movement within its pale.
The development of German Lutheranism, which really means German Protestantism, repeats in a most peculiar manner the course of the general Church pre- vious to it. As in the first four centuries the productive spirit of the Church proposed to itself the view of Chris- tianity as a whole, so also was the time from the beginning of the Reformation to the A ugsburg Confession (q. v.) one pre -eminently creative, and it laid the foundation of the Lutheran Church as regards its confession of faith. With the endeavor pervading the 5th, 6th, and
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7th centuries more distinctly to work out the mngle doc- trines corresponds the work of the Lutheran Church up to iIh' time of the Formula Concordia (q. v.), by which the various differences of doctrines were to be settled. As thi < burch of the Middle Ages had handed down to it, as a firm foundation, the doctrinal matter produced by the fathers and sanctioned by the Church, which scholasticism then undertook to work out and digest in a sy~i.ni.iiir manner, so there arose in the 17ih century — i he Protestant Middle Ages— a scholasticism which put into a regular form the Lutheran confession of faith embodied in the Foi main Concordia. As in the Middle iticism stands side by side with the strict repre- sentatives of scholasticism, so the Protestanl mystics, Jacob Bohme (q. v.), Arndt, and others, stand by the side of an effete orthodoxy. This mystical tendency acquired an importance about the end of the 17th and the beginning of the L8th centuries. A parallel again between this period and that of the 14th century is obvious. In the llih century the romantic Bpirit had become extinct ; scholasticism had outdone itself; from France there flowed over Europe a worldly spirit : the Roman spirit had decayed; everything was in dissolu- tion. Then from the reaction against the externalized scholasticism and secularized life there broke forth on all sides and in the most varied forms mysticism, which had in itself a Reformatory feature. In like manner after the Thirty-years' War the blossom of Germany had withered; the religious spirit, which since the period of the Reformation had been the first power in Germany, had stepped into the background; while, on the other hand, the secular spirit had been let loosej along with a powerful retinue of immorality, espe- cially by the preponderance of France under Louis XIV. It was a dreary period in German history.
Politically the empire had fallen asunder into a num- ber of separate despotic little states; and the sentiment of national unity had become so nearly extinct that the loss of the fertile and beautiful Alsace to France seems to have been viewed with wonderful indifference. So- cially the life of the people had greatly deteriorated. The rural population was terribly diminished in num- bers and wealth; their means of communication were restricted by the destruction of their horses and the neglect of the roads: their schools had disappeared, and were but very slowly replaced; their new houses and churches were bare and barn-like compared to the old our-: their periodical gatherings for certain purposes of local self-go> ernment or for festivities had fallen into disuse. It was a vegetating sort of existence, and the
writer- of the following age hear testimony to the illit- eracy and coarseness of manners which prevailed to- ward- the end of the 17th century even among the -entry of the country districts. In the towns things were but little better. The commerce of Germany had received a serious check; her merchant -princes had sunk to the level of petty traders, and adopted the manners and culture of the latter class. Her old free cities were decaying; only a few of the newer ones iwing, and what intellectual life then exi ted cent re. I iii them, as at Hamburg or Berlin, or at the - who specially protected lett< rs, or still more at the universities. Throughout this pe- riod* m\ contributed only one really .ureal name to