Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/461

Rh mediately thereafter; and the formation, in October, of a “ Catholic Apostolic Christian ” congregation which, while rejecting various practices of the Roman Church, retained the Nicene theology and the doctrine of the seven sacraments. Czerski had been at some of the sittings of the “ German Catholic” council of Leipsic ; but when a formula somewhat similar to that of Breslau had been adopted, he refused to ﬂ'_lllll)lt his signature because the divinity of Christ had been ignored, and he and his congregation continued to retain by preference the name of “Catholic Apostolic Christians ” which they had originally assumed. Of the German Catholic Congregations which had been represented at Leipsic some manifested a preference for the fuller and more positive creed of Schneidcmiihl, but a great majority continued to accept the Comparativer negative theology of the Breslau school. The number of these increased with Considerable rapidity, until in June 18.16 in Silesia alone the members of the G erman Catholiccommunion were reckoned by thousands, while the congregations scattered over Germany amounted in all to 173. In Austria, however, and ultimately also in hyaria, the use of the name German Catholics was oflici- ally prohibited, that of “Dissidents” beinrr substituted, while in l’russia the adherents of the new creed were laid under various disabilities; these and other circumstances, among which the frequent occurrence of internal dissensions was perhaps the gravest, conspired to check at an early stage the prosperous career of a movement which in its begin nings had been looked upon by many intelligent observers with considerable hopefulness. In 1859 some of the German Catholics entered into a union with the “Free Congregations,” when the united body took the title of “The Religious Society of Free Congregations.” Before that time many of the congregations which were formed in 1844 and the years immediately following had been dissolved, includ~ ing that of Schneidenuihl itself, which ceased to exist in 1.357. No very recent statistics of a trustworthy kind as to the numerical strength of the German Catholics are accessible. Their total in Prussia was (3395 in 1861, and 10,920 ‘in 1867, while in Saxony they numbered 1772 in 18w, and 3015 in 187l. At an early stage the movement attracted the attention of Gervinus, the eminent historian anl critic, who in 1816 published a pamphlet entitled Die .llission tics Denise/chit]:o/z'r'z'snws, to which. as well as to Kampe’s treatise Dds Wc’sen (lea Deutsrﬁkatkollkismus, reference may be made. See also the article by Schmid in Herzng's It’na/mu-g/rlo/Millie (1878).  GERMANICUS,, a distinguished Roman general and provincial governor in the reign of Tiberius, was born , and died His name Germanicus, the only one by which he is known in history, he inherited from his father Claudius Drusus Nero, the stepson of, and the most famous of his generals. His mother was the younger Antonia, the daughter of Marcus Antonius and niece of, and he married Agrippina the grand-daughter of the same emperor. It was natural that a prince so intimately allied both by birth and connexion with the reigning family should be regarded as a candidate for the purple. , it would seem, long hesitated whether he should name him as his successor, and as a compromise required Tiberius to adopt him, though Tiberius had a son of his own. When his uncle succeeded to the throne, Germanicus was the only rival that he feared; and the emperor’s jealousy and suspicion of him not only cut short his career of conquest but embittered the last of his life, and precipitated, if it did not indirectly cause, his unhappy and premature end. For the facts of his life our chief and, except a brief notice in Suetonius, almost our sole authority is Tacitus. Germanicus forms the central figure of the first two books of the Annals, and in the minute and graphic record of his campaigns, the unravelling of the court intrigues to which he was subject, and the pathetic description of his last hours and of the outburst of grief and indignation which followed the news of his death, the historian has put forth all his powers. But a modern biographer, though compelled to trust to Tacitus for his materials, may yet be allowed to put upon them his own construction, to make allowance for the glamour which surrounded an amiable and ill-starred prince, and to discount the exaggerations of a master of rhetoric who has set his favourite hero in a blaze of light in order to deepen the shadows of his masterpiece Tiberius, the darkest and saddest portrait in all history. The following article will consist of a brief abstract of the life as related by Tacitus, and an estimate of the character as it presents itself to us in the foregoing records. Of the early and education of Germanicus little is known. That he possessed considerable literary abilities, and that these were carefully trained, we gather, not only from the speeches which Tacitus puts into his mouth, but from the reputation he left as an orator, as attested by Suetonius and Ovid, and from the fragments of his works which have survived. At the age of twenty he served his apprenticeship in the art of war under his uncle Tiberius,‘and was rewarded with the triumphal insignia for his services in crushing the revolt in Dalmatia and Pannonia. In he was made consul, though he had neither attained the legal age nor passed through the grades of pl‘tCtOl‘ and aedile. Soon afterwards he was appointed by to the important command of the eight legions on the Rhine. The news of the emperor’s death found Germanicus at Lugdunum, where he was super- intending the census of Gaul. Close upon this came the report that a mutiny had broken out among his legions on the lower Rhine. Germanicus hurried back to the camp, which was now in open insurrection. The tumult was with difficulty quelled, partly by well-timed concessions for which the authority of the emperor was forged, but mostly by the help of his personal popularity with the troops. Some of the insurgents actually proposed that he should put himself at their head and secure for himself the empire, but their offer was rejected with righteous horror. In order to calm the excitement and prevent further disaﬂ'ection, Germanicus determined at once on an active campaign. Crossing the Rhine at the head of 12,000 legionaries and an equal number of allied troops, he attacked and routed the Marsi, and laid waste the valley of the Ems. In the following year he marched against Arminius, the conqueror of Yarns, and reached the fatal battlefield in the Teutoburg Forest. The bones of the Roman soldiers still lay bleaching on the ground near the altars where their tribunes had been im- molated, and the gibbets where the prisoners had been hanged. Having performed the last rites and erected a barrow to mark the spot, he led his army on, breathing vengeance against the foe. Arminius, however, favoured by the marshy ground, was able to hold his own, and it required another campaign before he was ﬁnally defeated. A masterly combined movement by land and water enabled Germanicus to concentrate his forces against the main body of the Germans encamped on the Weser, and to crush them in two obstinater contested battles. A monument erected on the ﬁeld proclaimed that the army of Tiberius had con- quered every tribe between the Rhine and the Elbe. Great as the success of the Roman arms had been, it was not such as to justify this boastful inscription. We read of renewed attacks from the barbarians, and plans of a fourth campaign for the next summer. But no more victories were in store for Germanicus. His success had already stirred the jealousy and fears of Tiberius, and he was reluctantly compelled to obey the imperial sum-