I was looking up how to spell Friedrich Schleiermacher's name (he was an important figure in modern theology) and I found a section on his pastorate, two years before he moved to his first professorial job at the University of Halle. If you take the last line and shift it slightly, you could say "The obscurity of the pastor's style . . . prevented immediate success." One wonders how, amid translating Plato and writing a critique of "all previous moral systems," he found time for people! However, I admit that Wikipedia is not likely the best source from which to judge Schleiermacher's pastoral life.
Pastorate
From 1802 to 1804, Schleiermacher was pastor in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. He relieved Friedrich Schlegel entirely of his nominal responsibility for the translation of Plato, which they had together undertaken (vols. 1-5, 1804-1810; vol. 6, Repub. 1828). Another work, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803), the first of his strictly critical and philosophical productions, occupied him; it is a criticism of all previous moral systems, including those of Kant and Fichte — Plato's and Spinoza's find most favour. It contends that the tests of the soundness of a moral system are the completeness of its view of the laws and ends of human life as a whole and the harmonious arrangement of its subject-matter under one fundamental principle. Although it is almost exclusively critical and negative, the book announces Schleiermacher's later view of moral science, attaching prime importance to a Güterlehre, or doctrine of the ends to be obtained by moral action. The obscurity of the book's style and its negative tone prevented immediate success.
Read more here.
Anon and peace,
Chris
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