National-Literatur (1845). Geschichte der deutschen National-Literatur (Marburg, 1846). Handbüchlein für Freunde des deutschen Volksliedes (1866). Ueber Goethes Tasso (Frankfort, 1869). Lebensbilder deutscher Dichter (edited by Karl Wilhelm Piderit, Marburg, 1869). Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli (Frankfort, 1869). He also worked on the reformation of religious instruction in the gymnasia. Deeming that the gymnasium was designed to train up Christian leaders of the nation, and that religious instruction should assume a distinctively churchly character, Vilmar set forth his views in a series of contributions to Hengstenberg's Evangelische Kirchenzeitung in 1841 (ed. J. Haussleiter, under the title Ueber den evangelischen Religionsunterricht in den Gymnasien, Marburg, 1888). He also prepared for use in the gymnasia a Kleines evangelisches Gesangbuch (Marburg, 1838); taking part also in the struggle on behalf of the old hymnals, as well as in the preparation of the Deutsches evangelisches Kirchengesangbuch (Stuttgart, 1855). The Church, Vilmar believed, was about to enter upon a new era, when there would be foil recognition of the absolute unity of the visible and the invisible church, and of the communion of saints with one body on earth, foreshadowing the church of the Apocalypse, the New Jerusalem. With such a conviction, Vilmar found before him two tasks: The first of these concerned the creed of the church of Hesse, Vilmar maintaining that its future depended on its absolute fidelity to the confessions of the Church from the Apostles' Creed to the unaltered Augsburg Confession. To prove that the creed of the so-called Reformed church of Lower Hesse was this unaltered Augsburg Confession cost Vilmar immense toil. The second task was Vilmar's decided advocacy of the freedom of the Church from the State. In 1839 Vilmar took part in the Hessian confessional controversy, in which the attempt was made to discard the Augsburg Confession. Against such an endeavor Vilmar wrote his Verhältnis der evangelischen Kirche in Kurhessen zu ihren neuesten Gegnern (Marburg, 1839). In like spirit, after the faculty of Marburg had required the use of the Heidelberg Catechism in the schools and had designated the doctrines set forth in the Hessian Catechism as "Reformed" (1855), Vilmar sought to prove, especially in his Geschichte des Konfessionsstandes der evangelischen Kirche in Hessen (Marburg, 1860), that the church of Lower Hesse was termed "Reformed" not because of the doctrines prevailing in it, but because of the form of worship introduced by the Landgrave Maurice in the Verbesserungspunkte in 1605, although