On The Social Element in Religion 1799 by Friedrich Schleiermacher
Channel: Age of Enlightenment
Date: 20/03/2019

Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote of the cultural despisers of religion but he also wrote about the social element in religion as a way to try and make peace with the Enlightened University folk of his time. 
On The Social Element in Religion was published in 1799.
If religion exists at all, it must needs possess a social character; this is founded not only in the nature of man, but still more in the nature of religion. You will acknowledge that it indicates a state of disease, a signal perversion of nature, when an individual wishes to shut up within himself anything which he has produced and elaborated by his own efforts. It is the disposition of man to reveal and to communicate whatever is in him, in the indispensable relations and mutual dependence not only of practical life, but also of his spiritual being, by which he is connected with all others of his race; and the more powerfully he is wrought upon by anything, the more deeply it penetrates his inward nature, so much the stronger is this social impulse, even if we regard it only from the point of view of the universal endeavor to behold the emotions which we feel ourselves, as they are exhibited by others, so that we may obtain a proof from their example that our own experience is not beyond the sphere of humanity.