In many ways the personal history of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) reflects the most important changes in European philosophical, theological, political and educational history at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schleiermacher was born as a subject of the Prussian monarch to a family that had been rationalists but had undergone a spiritual awakening and enrolled him in a Moravian boarding school to be raised as a pietist. In his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (hereafter Speeches), published in 1799 and commonly taken in the history of theology to mark the beginning of the era of modern liberal theology, Schleiermacher writes, “Religion was the maternal womb in whose holy darkness my young life was nourished and prepared for the world still closed to it” (1996: 8). He had, however, a sceptical streak (he and some friends smuggled into the school and discussed the forbidden works of Kant). In a painful letter to his father the eighteen-year-old confessed that he could not bring himself to believe in the vicarious atonement and the divinity of Jesus. His father disowned him, writing that he no longer knelt at the same altar with him. Yet in 1802 Schleiermacher returned to the Moravian seminary and famously claimed that it was the religion he learned there that carried him through the storms of scepticism: “I have become a Herrnhuter [Moravian] again, only of a higher order”.