Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/416

 392 S P E S P E 1662 he visited the universities of Basel, Tiibingen, and Geneva, and commenced the study of heraldry, which he pursued throughout his life. In Geneva especially his religious views and tendencies were turned in the direction of his subsequent Pietism. He returned to Strasburg in 1663, where he was appointed preacher without pastoral duties, with the right of holding lectures in the university. Three years afterwards he was invited to become the chief pastor in the Lutheran church at Frankfort-on-the-Main. He had previously married a lady of his mother's choice, who made him an excellent wife and bore him eleven children. Immediately after his removal to Frankfort he commenced that line of pastoral work which issued in the movement called PIETISM (q.v.). In 1686 he accepted the invitation to the first court chaplaincy at Dresden. But the elector John George III., at whose personal desire the post had been offered to him, was soon offended at the fearless conscientiousness with which his chaplain sought to dis- charge his pastoral duties ; and the opposition of the Saxon university of Leipsic to the Pietistic movement and to Spener personally served to render the chaplain more de- cidedly a persona ingrata to the elector. Spener refused to resign his post, and the Saxon Government hesitated to dismiss him. But in 1691 the Saxon representative at Berlin induced the court of Brandenburg to offer him the rectorship of St Nicolas in Berlin with the title of " con- sistorialrath." In Berlin Spener was held in high honour, though the tendencies of the court and the Government officials were rather rationalistic than pietistic. One of the most important works of this period of his life was the foundation of the university of Halle (1691), which he directed. All his life long Spener had been exposed to the incessant attacks and abuse of the orthodox Lutheran theologians, who generally charged him with the errors in doctrine and extravagances in practice of followers who had borrowed from him everything rather than his wisdom and caution. With his years his opponents multiplied, and the movement which he had inaugurated presented increasingly matter for hostile criticism. In 1695 the theological faculty of Wittenberg formally laid to his charge 264 errors, and only his death (5th February 1705) released him from these fierce conflicts. Though Spener has been justly called " the father of Pietism," hardly any of the errors and none of the extravagances of the movement can be ascribed to him personally. So far was he from sharing them that Ritschl maintains (ii. p. 163) that " he was him- self not a Pietist," as he did not advocate the quietistic, legalistic, and semi-separatist practices of Pietism, though they were more or less involved in the positions he assumed or the practices which he encouraged or connived at. The only two points on which he departed from the orthodox Lutheran faith of his day were the requirement of regeneration as the sine qua non of the true theo- logian, and the expectation of the conversion of the Jews and the fall of Papacy as the prelude of the triumph of the church. He did not, like the later Pietists, insist on the necessity of a conscious crisis of conversion, nor did he encourage a complete breach be- tween the Christian and the secular life. Spener was a voluminous writer. The list of his published works comprises 7 vols. folio, 63 quarto, 7 octavo, 46 duodecimo ; and in one year he had answered 622 and had still to answer 300 letters. The most important of his works for their bearing on his history are Tkeologische Bedenken, in 4 parts, Halle, 1700-1702 ; Letzte thcologische Bedenken, with a life of Spener by Canstein, Halle, 1711 ; Concilia et judicia theologica Latino, (posthumous), Frank- fort, 1709. See Hossbach, Philipp Jakob Spener und seine Zeit (Berlin, 1828, 2d eel. 1853, 3d ed. 1S61); Tholuck, in Herzog-Plitt's Real-EncyUopadle (2d ed., vol. xiv.) ; Gass, Protestantische Dogmatik (Berlin, 1857) ; Ritschl, Gesch. des Pietismus, ii. p. 97, sq. (Bonn, 1884); and Sachsse, Ursprung und Wesen des Pietismus (Wies- baden, 1884). SPENNYMOOR, a market town of Durham, England, is situated on the Ferryhill and Bishop Auckland branch of the North-Eastern Railway, 3| miles north-west of Ferry- hill and 6 south of Durham by road. Within recent years it has increased with great rapidity owing to the production of coal and iron, and in 1865 it was formed into a market town under a local board of health. It possesses a town- hall, a mechanics' institute and reading room, and two market halls. A school board was formed in 1875. The population of the urban sanitary district (area 176 acres) in 1871 was 4627, and in 1881 it was 5917. SPENSER, EDMUND (c. 1552-1599), Elizabethan poet, was born in London about the year 1552. The received date of his birth rests on a passage in sonnet Ix. of the Amoretti. He speaks there of having lived forty -one years; the Amoretti was published in 1595, and described on the title-page as "written not long since"; this would make the year of his birth 1552 or 1553. We know from the Prothalamion that London was his birthplace. This at least seems the most natural interpretation of the words " Merry London, my most kindly nurse, That to me gave this life's first native source." It would appear from a recent discovery by Mr R. B. Knowles 1 that the relationship of the poet to the noble family of Spencer, if it existed at all and official names such as Spenser (Dispenser) or Stewart (Steward) carry no proof of consanguinity was remote, and that the poet's kinsmen must be sought among the humbler Spensers of north-east Lancashire. Robert Nowell, a London citizen, left a sum of money to be distributed in various charities, and in the account-books of his executors Mr Knowles has discovered among the names of other beneficiaries "Edmund Spensore, scholar of the Merchant Taylor School, at his going to Pembroke Hall in Cambridge." The date of this benefaction is 28th April 1569. As the poet is known to have been a sizar of Pembroke, the identification is beyond dispute. Till this discovery it was not known where Spenser received his school education. The speculations as to the poet's parentage started by the Nowell MS. are naturally more uncertain. Mr Knowles found three Spensers in the books of the Merchant Taylors, and concluded that the poorest of them, John Spenser, a " free journeyman " in the "art or mystery of clothmaking," might have been the poet's father, but he afterwards abandoned this theory. Mr Grosart, however, adheres to it, and gives a confident solution of Mr Knowles's difficulties. Nothing approaching certainty can be reached on the point, which is not itself of much importance. The connexion of Spenser with Lan- cashire is also supported by the Nowell MS. Several Spensers of that county appear among the "poor kins- folk " who profited by Nowell's bounty. It is natural that a poet so steeped in poetry as Spenser should show his faculty at a very early age ; and there is strong reason to believe that verses from his pen were published just as he left school at the age of sixteen or seventeen. Certain pieces, translations from Du Bellay and Petrarch, afterwards included in a volume of poems by Spenser published in 1591, are found in a miscellany, Theatre for Worldings, issued by a Flemish Protestant refugee, John van der Noodt, on the 25th of May 1569. The translations from Du Bellay appear in blank verse in the miscellany, and are rhymed in sonnet form in the later publication, but the diction is substantially the same ; the translations from Petrarch are republished with slight variations. Poets were so careless of their rights in those days and publishers took such liberties that we cannot draw for certain the conclusion that would be inevitable if the facts were of more modern date ; but the probabilities are that these passages in Van der Noodt's Theatre, although the editor makes no acknowledgment, were contributed by the schoolboy Spenser. As the exercises of a schoolboy writing before our poetic diction was enriched by the great Elizabethans, they are remarkable for a sustained command of expression which many schoolboys might ex- 1 See The Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell, privately printed, 1877.