Weimar Constitution of August 11, 1919, which the German people gave itself, exercising its sovereign vote for the first time in a long history, contains a special section devoted to the duties and rights of the state relative to the promotion and control of education. When the German democracy wrote into the Constitution the articles concerning education, however, it did not make any innovations. young democracy merely placed under the protection of the Constitution one of the most fertile and most valuable heirlooms accumulated by the monarchical regime, the celebrated Kulturstaatgedanke. That heirloom is the conception of the national state as guarantor and creator of the higher cultural and moral values. When, in particular, the Constitution in Article 142 proclaims that Art, science, and instruction in them [schools] are free and that The state guarantees their protection and participates in their promotion, again the Republican Constitution simply consecrates a century-old German tradition which has its roots in the inspiration of the early Reformation and has been fostered by many distinguished princes of the various Germanic lands. It was in the town of Halle, which came under the sovereignty of the Elector (Kurfiirst) of Brandenburg at the end of the Thirty Years' War (1648), that a university was founded in which the professors enjoyed the freedom of teaching (libertas philosophandi) in accordance with their best knowledge and belief, and the students were permitted the liberty of organizing their work entirely independent of the tutelage of instructors. A young instructor (Privatdozent) at the University of Leipzig, August Hermann Francke, established there the Collegium Philobiblicum for the systematic study of the Bible. Francke was inspired in his undertaking by the work of Philipp Jakob Spener, the originator of the pietist movement. Pietism was a protest against the dogmatic formalism which had gradually developed within the Lutheran Church and had been substituted for personal study of and meditation over the Bible, thus usurping in the religious life of the Lutherans the place which Luther had assigned to the Bible. pietist movement issued from religious meetings at which Spener preached, commented upon passages. of the New Testament, and encouraged his listeners to ask questions and to join in conversation on religious subjects. con-