Friedrich Daniel Ernst, a philosophic theologian of great eminence, was born at Breslau on the 21st of November 1768. He was the son of a poor army-chaplain in Silesia, who belonged to the reformed or Calvinistic communion; and hence he learned early the meaning of poverty and principle. The earliest instructions of young Schleiermacher was received from his mother, and he betrayed early great quickness and susceptibility. Removing from Pless, on the borders of Galicia, whither his family had gone to reside, and where he had the privilege of enjoying the instructions of a pupil of Ernesti, he was, at the age of fourteen, conducted to the educational establishment of the Moravians, at Niesky. He got through his term of years at this seminary of the United Brethren, with much profit, and no small questioning of the religious tenets taught him at this institution. Meanwhile, he remained lively, earnest, and thoughtful. At the age of seventeen he entered the theological seminary of the Herrnhuter, or Moravians, at Barby; and here he had to wrestle with his old doubts, grown tenfold stronger by reason of the keenness of his own vision. He cut his way through the narrow theological forms of the brotherhood; and proclaims to his father, that he has no chance of becoming a thorough theologian so long as he remains at Barby. The army-chaplain, whose mind had never been perplexed with the dark phantom-forms conjured up by religious doubt, answered him in a stern, unsympathizing tone: "O you fool of a son, who has bewitched you that you obey not the truth," and so forth; in what, in another case, would be called a decidedly savage style. This rough upbraiding hurt the poor lad's heart, which was one of the gentlest and tenderest. His days at Barby must now be short, and his religious guides manifest a mournful solicitude for the youthful Schleiermacher, going forth in such wild weather, in such a frail bark as was his to sail in. He must go, however, let the sea rage as it may, and be the bark of what texture it may. Schleiermacher left the Herrnhut communion in 1787, and entered the University of Halle, under the guardianship of his maternal uncle, the pastor Stubenrauch, who seems to have regarded his condition with more favour than had been shown by the army-chaplain. Here he studied with great distinction under Nisselt, Knapp, Eberhard, and Wolf. He paid great attention to philology and antiquities, as essential subordinates, in his estimation, to the study of theology, which was to be the study of his life. In May 1790, the young licentiate undertook a tutorship, till other work might turn up for him. He went to the residence of Count Dohna-Schlobitten, of Finkenstein, in Prussia, where he spent three fruitful years in educating that nobleman's children. On his removal from Finkenstein, he was engaged for some time at Berlin, as an assistant teacher in the Friedrich-Werder Gymnasium. In the spring of 1794 he went to assist a clergyman at Landsberg on the Wartha, where he gained much distinction as a preacher. Two years afterwards he was brought back to Berlin, to occupy the pulpit of the Charité, the chief hospital in the Prussian capital. Schleiermacher's mind was here exposed to new and stimulating influences, by which his views were widened and his sympathies increased. With his purely ideal views of human life, he would find much to unlearn amid the mixture of rudeness and refinement which met his eye, wherever he turned, among high and low, in the busy life of Berlin. He would come to correct his sweeping contempt for conventionality, and would nourish his love of the society of cultivated men and women. He began his literary career by aiding Sack in his translation of Blair's Sermons; by translating Fawcett's Sermons, in 1798; and by contributing several papers for the Athenæum, a journal then conducted by the brothers Schlegel. His friendship for the younger Schlegel was formed in 1797, and Schleiermacher's questionable, though innocent, commendation of his novel, Lucinde, has rendered their connexion somewhat notorious.

In 1799, Schleiermacher's outward life began. In this year he published his Discourses on Religion (Rechen über die Religion, an die Gebildeten unter ihnen Verächtern), and let the German world know what was yet in store for them. These Discourses were very characteristic. They were a product of the personal development of the author up to the time of their publication. F. Schlegel pronounced them the first of their kind in the German language. They were full of energy and fervour, and the doctrines were set forth in a style which, while it reminded one of the recent studies of their author in Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, they nevertheless exhibited an uncommon degree of individuality, and were set forth with a singularly brilliant eloquence. They are rather apologies for religion in general, than for Christianity; and they have been again and again accused, in more or less definite terms, of inculcating Pantheism. Certainly here and there he verges almost as close upon the doctrine as those who teach it in express language. But after the explanations which Schleiermacher has given of his more matured opinions, in the third edition of the Discourses, no one but the captious will be disposed to father over upon the man the production of his youth. It will be seen that this book is essentially a somewhat crude production; which Schleiermacher could only have produced at the time he wrote it. It has a slight smack of heathenism about it; but still it possessed the much higher merit of setting forth, in no unmistakable terms, the bases, or essentials, of the theology which he was afterwards to erect upon its foundation. It was full of deep, wide-reaching thought, and was better calculated than all the works that had gone before it to fill the minds of the educated classes with a profound reverence for religion. These Discourses, with all their defects, marked a new era in theology; their influence is still fresh, and the impulse which they communicated to the study of theological doctrine and history has not yet been expended. In 1800 he published a profound work called Monologien, eine Neujahrsgabe. The Monologues were followed by Briefe eines Predigers ausserhalb Berlin (Letters of a Preacher residing out of Berlin), being a reply to a public letter addressed by certain Jews to Teller, the Protestant theologian. He likewise agreed this year to join F. Schlegel in translating Plato, but afterwards undertook the task himself. This German translation of Plato is esteemed by scholars to be the most correct that has appeared in any European language. He wrote at the same time valuable introductions to each of the dialogues which he translated (for he unfortunately did not finish them), displaying a much deeper acquaintance both with the language and the thoughts of his author, than was at all common in the most learned country in Europe. These introductions to the Dialogues of Plato have been rendered into English by Dobson. In 1801 he sent forth a valuable set of Predigten, or sermons, which were followed up in succeeding years by six other collections. These discourses were characterized by what was a marked feature in all his productions, a singular luminousness of thought and vividness of expression, such as could only arise from remarkable dialectical gifts, and an uncommon faculty of language. Hence Schleiermacher and the school of theologians which he originated, have been called "Denkgläubigen," in contradistinction to the old school of literalism and pietism which prevailed in Germany at the time he appeared. Schleiermacher removed to Stolpe as court-preacher in 1802, and here he meditated his work on Morals, which he published next year under the title of Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre, and wrote his Zwei unvorgreifliche Gutechuten in Sachen des Protestantischen Kirchenwesens. He declined a call in 1804 from the University of Würzburg, at the request of the Prussian government, which appointed him to the chair of theology and philosophy at Halle. Schleiermacher was driven from Halle in 1806 by the violent political struggles of that year, and on his return to Berlin he bated no jot of high-hearted patriotism, but continued, both in the pulpit and out of it, to denounce in the most unmeasured terms the violent rapacity of their foreign oppressors. During these years he published Die Weihnachtsfeier, ein Gespräch, Halle, 1806; Ueber den sogenannten ersten Brief des Paulus an den Timotheus, Berlin, 1807; Ueber Universitäten, Berlin, 1808; and an Essay on Heracleitus for F. A. Wolf's Museum der Alterthums-wissenschaften.

In 1809 he was chosen preacher at Trinity Church, Berlin, and next year he was appointed professor of theology in the new university of the same city. He was likewise attached to the Ministry of the Interior for the Department of Public instruction, and was chosen a member of the Academy of Sciences. He was no sooner appointed to his chair in Berlin, than the reforming spirit of his theology began to be felt. In 1811 appeared his Kurze Darstellung des Theologischen Studiums (Brief Outline of the Study of Theology), only a few sheets, but prankt full of new thoughts. In this wonderful little treatise, which has been given to the English public by Farrer, Edinburgh, 1850, theology appears under a fresh and inviting aspect by the originality of the lecturer's method and the strength and force of his theological ideas. He divides theology into philosophical, historical, and practical. Under the philosophical head he includes the principles of apologetics and the principles of polemics; under the historical head, he includes exegetical theology, the past history and present condition of Christianity, dogmatic theology, and ecclesiastical statistics; under the practical portion, he includes the principles of church service and of church government. This is perhaps the most thorough distribution theology has ever received. And to the filling up of this brief outline he set himself with great energy. His lectures are described as something wonderful. To his vast sweep of thought, now ranging round the outposts of theological systems, and again darting upon the smallest detail and opening it up to the light, he united immense learning, not of the cumbrous bibliographical sort so peculiar to Germans, but of the living facts and principles of all times, combined with a grand facility of utterance, which gave the most musical form to the most golden thoughts, holding his hearers in raptures while he spoke, and carrying them breathlessly away with him in his airy chariot of fire. No wonder that lectures like these still live although the speaker has been long silent. Schleiermacher was made secretary to the philosophical class in the academy, and was released from his connection with the Minister of Public Instruction. In 1817 he was chosen president of the synod of Berlin, and wrote his Ueber die Schriften des Lukas, ein Kritischer Versuch, Leipzig, 1817 (Critical Essay on the Writings of Luke), which has been translated into English in 1825, said to be by the Rev. Dr Connop Thirlwall, afterwards Bishop of St David's. Schleiermacher was engaged during these years in revising and editing afresh his former works; and in the course of the year 1817-18, he published a number of small polemical writings directed chiefly against Schmalz and Von Ammon. Although by the higher faculties of his nature he was kept free from degenerating into a mere controversialist, yet he relished immensely the occasional flagellation of a fat bishop or of a conceited "Prediger," which he did with approved elegance, spicing his drabbling with tart, attic salt, and letting his subject go just without killing him.

In 1821-22 Schleiermacher crowned his theological labours by the publication of his greatest work, viz., his Darstellung des christlichen Glaubens nach den Grundsatzen der evangelischen Kirche (Exhibition of the Christian Faith, according to the principles of the Evangelical Church). In this work we have all the characteristics of his earlier productions, mellowed by the light of a riper wisdom and a more matured Christianity. He gives a decided prominence from first to last to the positive character of the Christian system of belief, and has contributed in a high degree to give force to the genuine truth of the Christian faith. Tweten justly observes that "Schleiermacher, by conducting the science of dogmatics to the facts of the Christian consciousness, as its basis and its true object, secured faith itself against the assaults of a science which mistakes its own boundaries, as well as restored to the system of faith its own proper independence." The Studien und Kritiken, a genuine product of his spirit, was begun in 1828. In 1833, Schleiermacher visited England and opened the German chapel at the Savoy. He had not returned many months to Germany when he was seized with his last illness. His bodily constitution, which never had been strong, was now worn so much by the ceaseless activity which characterized him, that it became evident to his friends they must soon part with that gentle and loving heart which had beat so true amongst them. As he lay on his death-bed, he gave a short exhortation to the friends who were present to join him in celebrating the Lord's Supper, and after repeating the words, "Take, eat," &c., he said, "Upon those words of Scripture I abide; they are the foundation of my faith." He laid himself back upon his pillow, and in a few minutes he was taken away from among men. This was on the 12th of February 1834. His body lies interred at some distance from the city on its south side. A simple monument, with a marble bust executed by Rauch, marks the spot where one of Germany's greatest sons reposes. The whole of his works, published and unpublished, were issued after his death in 1835.