A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume...

Innovating in all things, he began, while still a Privatdocent at Leipzig University, a campaign on behalf of the German language; and, not content with arousing much pedantic enmity by delivering lectures for the first time in his mother tongue, and deriding at the same time the bad scholastic Latin of his compatriots, he set on foot the first vernacular German periodical,48 which ran for two years (1688–90), and caused so much anger that he was twice prosecuted before the ecclesiastical court of Dresden, the second time on a charge of contempt of religion. The periodical was in effect a crusade against all the pedantries, the theologians coming in for the hardest blows.49 Other satirical writings, and a defence of intermarriage between Calvinists and Lutherans,50 at length put him in such danger that, to escape imprisonment, he sought the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg at Halle, where he ultimately became professor of jurisprudence in the new university, founded by his advice. There for a time he leant towards the Pietists, finding in that body a concern for natural liberty of feeling and thinking which was absent from the mental life of orthodoxy; but he was “of another spirit” than they, and took his own way.

In philosophy an unsystematic pantheist, he taught, after Plutarch, Bayle, and Bacon, that “superstition is worse than atheism”; but his great practical service to German civilization, over and above his furthering of the native speech, was his vigorous polemic against prosecutions for heresy, trials for witchcraft, and the use of torture, all of which he did more than any other German to discredit, though judicial torture subsisted for another half-century.51 It was by his propaganda that the princes of Germany were moved to abolish all trials for sorcery.52 In such a battle he of course had the clergy against him all along the line; and it is as an anti-clerical that he figures in clerical history. The clerical hostility to his ethics he repaid with interest, setting himself to develop to the utmost, in the interest of lay freedom, the Lutheran admission of the divine right of princes.53 This he turned not against freedom of opinion but against ecclesiastical claims, very much in the spirit of Hobbes, who may have influenced him.

The perturbed Mosheim, while candidly confessing that Thomasius is the founder of academic freedom in Germany, pronounces that the “famous jurists” who were led by Thomasius “set up a new fundamental principle of church polity—namely, the supreme authority and power of the civil magistrate,” so tending to create the opinion “that the ministers of religion are not to be accounted ambassadors of God, but vicegerents of the chief magistrates. They also weakened not a little the few remaining prerogatives and advantages which were left of the vast number formerly possessed by the clergy; and maintained that many of the maxims and regulations of our churches which had come down from our fathers were relics of popish superstition. This afforded matter for long and pernicious feuds and contests between our theologians and our jurists.... It will be sufficient for us to observe, what is abundantly attested, that they diminished much in various places the respect for the clergy, the reverence for religion, and the security and prosperity of the Lutheran Church.”54 Pusey, in turn, grudgingly allows that “the study of history was revived and transformed through the views of Thomasius.”55

6. A personality of a very different kind emerges in the same period in Johann Conrad Dippel (1673–1734), who developed a system of rationalistic mysticism, and as to whom, says an orthodox historian, “one is doubtful whether to place him in the class of pietists or of rationalists, of enthusiasts or of scoffers, of mystics or of freethinkers.”56 The son of a preacher, he yet “exhibited in his ninth year strong doubts as to the catechism.” After a tolerably free life as a student he turned Pietist at Strasburg, lectured on astrology and palmistry, preached, and got into trouble with the police. In 1698 he published under the pen-name of “Christianus Democritus” his book, Gestäuptes Papstthum der Protestirenden (“The Popery of the Protestantizers Whipped”), in which he so attacked the current Christian ethic of salvation as to exasperate both Churches.57 The stress of his criticism fell firstly on the unthinking Scripturalism of the average Protestant, who, he said, while reproaching the Catholic with setting up in the crucifix a God of wood, was apt to make for himself a God of paper.58 In his repudiation of the “bargain” or “redemption” doctrine of the historic Church he took up positions which were as old as Abailard, and which were one day to become respectable; but in his own life he was much of an Ishmaelite, with wild notions of alchemy and gold-making; and after predicting that he should live till 1808, he died suddenly in 1734, leaving a doctrine which appealed only to those constitutionally inclined, on the lines of the earlier English Quakers, to set the inner

7. Among the pupils of Thomasius at Halle was Theodore Louis Lau, who, born of an aristocratic family, became Minister of Finances to the Duke of Courland, and after leaving that post held a high place in the service of the Elector Palatine. While holding that office Lau published a small Latin volume of pensées entitled Meditationes Theologicæ-Physicæ, notably deistic in tone. This gave rise to such an outcry among the clergy that he had to leave Frankfort, only, however, to be summoned before the consistory of Königsberg, his native town, and charged with atheism (1719). He thereupon retired to Altona, where he had freedom enough to publish a reply to his clerical persecutors.60

8. While Thomasius was still at work, a new force arose of a more distinctly academic cast. This was the adaptation of Leibnitz’s system by Christian Wolff, who, after building up a large influence among students by his method of teaching,61 came into public prominence by a rectorial address62 at Halle (1721) in which he warmly praised the ethics of Confucius. Such praise was naturally held to imply disparagement of Christianity; and as a result of the pietist outcry Wolff was condemned by the king to exile from Prussia, under penalty of the gallows,63 all “atheistical” writings being at the same time forbidden. Wolff’s system, however, prevailed so completely, in virtue of its lucidity and the rationalizing tendency of the age, that in the year 1738 there were said to be already 107 authors of his cast of thinking. Nevertheless, he refused to return to Halle on any invitation till the accession (1740) of Frederick the Great, one of his warmest admirers, whereafter he figured as the German thinker of his age. His teaching, which for the first time popularized philosophy in the German language, in turn helped greatly, by its ratiocinative cast, to promote the rationalistic temper, though orthodox enough from the modern point of view. Under the new reign, however, pietism and Wolffism alike lost prestige,64 and the age of anti-Christian and Christian rationalism began. Thus the period of freethinking in Germany follows close upon one of religious revival.

The 6,000 theologians trained at Halle in the first generation of the century had “worked like a leaven through all Germany.”65 “Not since the time of the Reformation had Germany such a large number of truly pious preachers and laymen as towards the end of the first half of the eighteenth century.”66 There, as elsewhere, religion intellectually collapsed.

As to Wolff’s rationalistic influence see Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 173; Pusey, pp. 115–19; Pünjer, p. 529; Lechler, pp. 448–49. “It cannot be questioned that, in his philosophy, the main stress rests upon the rational” (Kahnis, as cited, p. 28). “Francke and Lange (pietists) ... saw atheism and corruption of manners springing up from Wolff’s school” (before his exile). Id. p. 113. Wolff’s chief offence lay in stressing natural religion, and in indicating, as Tholuck observes, that that could be demonstrated, whereas revealed religion could only be believed (Abriss, p. 18). He greatly pleased Voltaire by the dictum that men ought to be just even though they had the misfortune to be atheists. It is noted by Tholuck, however (Abriss, as cited, p. 11, note), that the decree for Wolff’s expulsion was inspired not by his theological colleagues but by two military advisers of the king. Tholuck’s own criticism resolves itself into a protest against Wolff’s predilection for logical connection in his exposition. The fatal thing was that Wolff accustomed German Christians to reason.

9. Even before the generation of active pressure from English and French deism there were clear signs that rationalism had taken root in German life. On the impulse set up by the establishment of the Grand Lodge at London in 1717, Freemasonic lodges began to spring up in Germany, the first being founded at Hamburg in 1733.67 The deism which in the English lodges was later toned down by orthodox reaction was from the first pronounced in the German societies, which ultimately passed on the tradition to the other parts of the Continent. But the new spirit was not confined to secret societies. Wolffianism worked widely. In the so-called Wertheim Bible (1735) Johann Lorenz Schmid, in the spirit of the Leibnitz-Wolffian theology, “undertook to translate the Bible, and to explain it according to the principle that in revelation only that can be accepted as true which does not contradict the reason.”68 This of course involved no thorough-going criticism; but the spirit of innovation was strong enough in Schmid to make him undermine tradition at many points, and later carried him so far as to translate Tindal’s Christianity as old as Creation.

So far was he in advance of his time that when his Wertheim Bible was officially condemned throughout Germany he found no defenders.69 The Wolffians were in comparison generally orthodox; and another writer of the same school, Martin Knutzen, professor at Königsberg (1715–1751), undertook in a youthful thesis De æternitate mundi impossibili (1735) to rebut the old Averroïst doctrine, revived by modern science, of the indestructibility of the universe. A few years later (1739) he published a treatise entitled The Truth of Christianity Demonstrated by Mathematics, which succeeded as might have been expected.

10. To the same period belong the first activities of Johann Christian Edelmann (1698–1767), one of the most energetic freethinkers of his age. Trained philosophically at Jena under the theologian Budde, a bitter opponent of Wolff, and theologically in the school of the Pietists, he was strongly influenced against official orthodoxy through reading the Impartial History of the Church and of Heretics, by Gottfried Arnold, an eminently anti-clerical work, which nearly always takes the side of the heretics.70 In the same heterodox direction he was swayed by the works of Dippel. At this stage Edelmann produced his Unschuldige Wahrheiten (“Innocent Truths”), in which he takes up a pronouncedly rationalist and latitudinarian position, but without rejecting “revelation”; and in 1736 he went to Berleburg, where he worked on the Berleburg translation of the Bible, a Pietist undertaking, somewhat on the lines of Dippel’s mystical doctrine, in which a variety of incredible Scriptural narratives, from the six days’ creation onwards, are turned to mystical purpose.71 In this occupation Edelmann seems to have passed some years. Gradually, however, he came more and more under the influence of the English deists; and he at length withdrew from the Pietist camp, attacking his former associates for the fanaticism into which their thought was degenerating. It was under the influence of Spinoza, however, that he took his most important steps.

A few months after meeting with the Tractatus he began (1740) the first part of his treatise Moses mit aufgedecktem Angesichte (“Moses with unveiled face”), an attack at once on the doctrine of inspiration and on that of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The book was intended to consist of twelve parts; but after the appearance of three it was prohibited by the imperial fisc, and the published parts burned by the hangman at Hamburg and elsewhere. Nonetheless, Edelmann continued his propaganda, publishing in 1741 or 1742 The Divinity of Reason,72 and in 1741 Christ and Belial. In 1749 or 1750 his works were again publicly burned at Frankfurt by order of the imperial authorities; and he had much ado to find anywhere in Germany safe harbourage, till he found protection under Frederick at Berlin, where he died in 1767.

Edelmann’s teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic,73 with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he of course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspiration the appanage of all; and the gospels were by him dismissed as late fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could not be learned; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age, he estimated Jesus highly.74 A German theologian complains, nevertheless, that he was “more just toward heathenism than toward Judaism; and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity”; adding: “What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy, such things were unheard of.”75 The force of Edelmann’s attack may be gathered from the same writer’s account of him as a “bird of prey” who rose to a “wicked height of opposition, not only against the Lutheran Church, but against Christianity in general.”

11. Even from decorous and official exponents of religion, however, there came “naturalistic” and semi-rationalistic teaching, as in the Reflections on the most important truths of religion76 (1768–1769) of J. F. W. Jerusalem, Abbot of Marienthal in Brunswick, and later of Riddagshausen (1709–1789). Jerusalem had travelled in Europe, and had spent two years in Holland and one in England, where he studied the deists and their opponents. “In England alone,” he declared, “is mankind original.”77 Though really written by way of defending Christianity against the freethinkers, in particular against Bolingbroke and Voltaire,78 the very title of his book is suggestive of a process of disintegration; and in it certain unedifying Scriptural miracles are actually rejected.79 It was probably this measure of adaptation to new needs that gave it its great popularity in Germany and secured its translation into several other languages. Goethe called him a “freely and gently thinking theologian”; and a modern orthodox historian of the Church groups him with those who “contributed to the spread of Rationalism by sermons and by popular doctrinal and devotional works.”80 Jerusalem was, however, at most a semi-rationalist, taking a view of the fundamental Christian dogmas which approached closely to that of Locke.81 It was, as Goethe said later, the epoch of common sense; and the very theologians tended to a “religion of nature.”82

12. Alongside of home-made heresy there had come into play a new initiative force in the literature of English deism, which began to be translated after 1740,83 and was widely circulated till, in the last third of the century, it was superseded by the French. The English answers to the deists were frequently translated likewise, and notoriously helped to promote deism84—another proof that it was not their influence that had changed the balance of activity in England. Under a freethinking king, even clergymen began guardedly to accept the deistic methods; and the optimism of Shaftesbury began to overlay the optimism of Leibnitz;85 while a French scientific influence began with La Mettrie,86 Maupertuis, and Robinet. Even the Leibnitzian school, proceeding on the principle of immortal monads, developed a doctrine of the immortality of the souls of animals87—a position not helpful to orthodoxy. There was thus a general stirring of doubt among educated people,88 and we find mention in Goethe’s Autobiography of an old gentleman of Frankfort who avowed, as against the optimists, “Even in God I find defects (Fehler).”89

On the other hand, there were instances in Germany of the phenomenon, already seen in England in Newton and Boyle, of men of science devoting themselves to the defence of the faith. The most notable cases were those of the mathematician Euler and the biologist von Haller. The latter wrote Letters (to his Daughter) On the most important Truths of Revelation (1772)90 and other apologetic works. Euler in 1747 published at Berlin, where he was professor, his Defence of Revelation against the Reproaches of Freethinkers;91 and in 1769 his Letters to a German Princess, of which the argument notably coincides with part of that of Berkeley against the freethinking mathematicians. Haller’s position comes to the same thing. All three men, in fact, grasped at the argument of despair—the inadequacy of the human faculties to sound the mystery of things; and all alike were entirely unable to see that it logically cancelled their own judgments. Even a theologian, contemplating Haller’s theorem of an incomprehensible omnipotence countered in its merciful plan of salvation by the set of worms it sought to save, comments on the childishness of the philosophy which confidently described the plans of deity in terms of what it declared to be the blank ignorance of the worms in question.92 Euler and Haller, like some later men of science, kept their scientific method for the mechanical or physical problems of their scientific work, and brought to the deepest problems of all the self-will, the emotionalism, and the irresponsibility of the ignorant average man.

Each did but express in his own way the resentment of the undisciplined mind at attacks upon its prejudices; and Haller’s resort to poetry as a vehicle for his religion gives the measure of his powers on that side. Thus in Germany as in England the “answer” to the freethinkers was a failure. Men of science playing at theology and theologians playing at science alike failed to turn the tide of opinion, now socially favoured by the known deism of the king. German orthodoxy, says a recent Christian apologist, fell “with a rapidity reminding one of the capture of Jericho.”93 Goethe, writing of the general attitude to Christianity about 1768, sums up that “the Christian religion wavered between its own historic-positive base and a pure deism, which, grounded on morality, was in turn to re-establish ethics.”94

Frederick’s attitude, said an early Kantian, had had “an almost magical influence” on popular opinion (Willich, Elements of the Critical Philosophy, 1798, p. 2). With this his French teachers must have had much to do. Lord Morley pronounces (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 123) that French deism “never made any impression on Germany,” and that “the teaching of Leibnitz and Wolff stood like a fortified wall against the French invasion.” This is contradicted by much German testimony; in particular by Lange’s (Gesch. des Mater. i, 318), though he notes that French materialism could not get the upper hand. Laukhard, who expressed the highest admiration for Tindal, as having wholly delivered him from dogmatism, avowed that Voltaire, whom everybody read, had perhaps done more harm to priest religion than all the books of the English and German deists together (Leben, 1792–1802, Th. i, p. 268).

Tholuck gravely affirms (Abriss, p. 33) that the acquaintance with the French “deistery and frivolity” in Germany belongs to a “somewhat later period than that of the English.” Naturally it did. The bulk of the English deistic literature was printed before the printing of the French had begun! French MSS. would reach German princes, but not German pastors. But Tholuck sadly avows that the French deism (of the serious and pre-Voltairean portions of which he seems to have known nothing) had a “frightful” influence on the upper classes, though not on the clergy (p. 34). Following him, Kahnis writes (Internal History, p. 41) that “English and French Deism met with a very favourable reception in Germany—the latter chiefly in the higher circles, the former rather among the educated middle classes.” (He should have added, “the younger theologians.”) Baur, even in speaking disparagingly of the French as compared with the English influence, admits (Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 2te Aufl. p. 347) that the former told upon Germany. Cp. Tennemann, Bohn. tr. pp. 385, 388. Hagenbach shows great ignorance of English deism, but he must have known something of German; and he writes (tr. p. 57) that “the imported deism,” both English and French, “soon swept through the rifts of the Church, and gained supreme control of literature.” Cp. pp. 67–68. See Croom Robertson’s Hobbes, pp. 225–26, as to the persistence of a succession of Hobbes and Locke in Germany in the teeth of the Wolffian school, which soon lost ground after 1740.

It is further noteworthy that Brucker’s copious Historia Critica Philosophiæ (1742–44), which as a mere learned record has great merit, and was long the standard authority in Germany, gives great praise to Locke and little space to Wolff. (See Enfield’s abstract, pp. 614, 619 sq.) The Wolffian philosophy, too, had been rejected and disparaged by both Herder and Kant—who were alike deeply influenced by Rousseau—in the third quarter of the century; and was generally discredited, save in the schools, when Kant produced the Critique of Pure Reason. See below, pp. 337, 345.

13. Frederick, though reputed a Voltairean freethinker par excellence, may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of the rationalizing philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire, written in 1736, four years before his accession, he promises to send him a translation he has had made of the “accusation and the justification” of Wolff, “the most celebrated philosopher of our days, who, for having carried light into the darkest places of metaphysics, and for having treated the most difficult matters in a manner no less elevated than precise and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism”; and he speaks of getting translated Wolff’s Treatise of God, the Soul, and the World. When he became a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear, for Voltaire at this time had produced no explicit anti-Christian propaganda. At first the new king showed himself disposed to act on the old maxim that freethought is bad for the common people. In 1743–44 he caused to be suppressed two German treatises by one Gebhardi, a contributor to Gottsched’s magazines, attacking the Biblical miracles; and in 1748 he sent a young man named Rüdiger to Spandau for six months’ confinement for printing an anti-Christian work by one Dr. Pott.95 But as he grew more confident in his own methods he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration he allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create strife.

With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians, and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would;96 and when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find, he answered with the gospel precept, “Love your enemies.”97

Beyond the toleration of all forms of religion, however, he never went; though he himself added to the literature of deism. Apart from his verses we have from him the posthumous treatise Pensées sur la Religion, probably written early in his life, where the rational case against the concepts of revelation and of miracles is put with a calm and sustained force. Like the rest, he is uncritical in his deism; but, that granted, his reasoning is unanswerable. In talk he was wont to treat the clergy with small respect;98 and he wrote more denunciatory things concerning them than almost any freethinker of the century.99 Bayle, Voltaire, and Lucretius were his favourite studies; and as the then crude German literature had no attraction for him, he drew to his court many distinguished Frenchmen, including La Mettrie, Maupertuis, D’Alembert, D’Argens, and above all Voltaire, between whom and him there was an incurable incompatibility of temper and character, and a persistent attraction of force of mind, which left them admiring without respecting each other, and unable to abstain from mutual vituperation. Under Frederick’s vigorous rule all speech was free save such as he considered personally offensive, as Voltaire’s attack on Maupertuis; and after a stormy reign he could say, when asked by Prince William of Brunswick whether he did not think religion one of the best supports of a king’s authority, “I find order and the laws sufficient....

Depend upon it, countries have been admirably governed when your religion had no existence.”100 Religion certainly had no part in his personality in the ordinary sense of the term. Voltaire was wont to impute to him atheism; when La Mettrie died, the mocker, then at Frederick’s court, remarked that the post of his majesty’s atheist was vacant, but happily the Abbé de Prades was there to fill it. In effect, Frederick professed Voltaire’s own deism; but of all the deists of the time he had least of the religious temperament and most of sheer cynicism.

The attempt of Carlyle to exhibit Frederick as a practical believer is a flagrant instance of that writer’s subjective method. He tells (Hist. of Friedrich, bk. xviii, ch. x) that at the beginning of the battle of Leuthen a column of troops near the king sang a hymn of duty (which Carlyle calls “the sound of Psalms”); that an officer asked whether the singing should be stopped, and that the king said “By no means.” His “hard heart seems to have been touched by it. Indeed, there is in him, in those grim days, a tone (!) as of trust in the Eternal, as of real religious piety and faith, scarcely noticeable elsewhere in his history. His religion—and he had in withered forms a good deal of it, if we will look well—being almost always in a strictly voiceless state, nay, ultra voiceless, or voiced the wrong way, as is too well known.” Then comes the assertion that “a moment after” the king said “to someone, Ziethen probably, ‘With men like these, don’t you think I shall have victory this day!’” Here, with the very spirit of unveracity at work before his eyes, Carlyle plumps for the fable. Yet the story, even if true, would give no proof whatever of religious belief.

In point of fact, Frederick was a much less “religious” deist than Voltaire. He erected no temple to his unloved God. And a perusal of his dialogue of Pompadour and the Virgin (Dialogues des morts) may serve to dispose of the thesis that the German mind dealt reverently and decently with matters which the French mind handled frivolously. That performance outgoes in ribaldry anything of the age in French.

As the first modern freethinking king, Frederick is something of a test case. Son of a man of narrow mind and odious character, he was himself no admirable type, being neither benevolent nor considerate, neither truthful nor generous; and in international politics, after writing in his youth a treatise in censure of Machiavelli, he played the old game of unscrupulous aggression. Yet he was not only the most competent, but, as regards home administration, the most conscientious king of his time. To find him a rival we must go back to the pagan Antonines and Julian, or at least to St. Louis of France, who, however, was rather worsened than bettered by his creed.101 Henri IV of France, who rivalled him in sagacity and greatly excelled him in human kindness, was far his inferior in devotion to duty.

The effect of Frederick’s training is seen in his final attitude to the advanced criticism of the school of d’Holbach, which assailed governments and creeds with the same unsparing severity of logic and moral reprobation. Stung by the uncompromising attack, Frederick retorts by censuring the rashness which would plunge nations into civil strife because kings miscarry where no human wisdom could avoid miscarriage. He who had wantonly plunged all Germany into a hell of war for his sole ambition, bringing myriads to misery, thousands to violent death, and hundreds of his own soldiers to suicide, could be virtuously indignant at the irresponsible audacity of writers who indicted the whole existing system for its imbecility and injustice. But he did reason on the criticism; he did ponder it; he did feel bound to meet argument with argument; and he left his arguments to the world. The advance on previous regal practice is noteworthy: the whole problem of politics is at once brought to the test of judgment and persuasion. Beside the Christian Georges and the Louis’s of his century, and beside his Christian father, his superiority in judgment and even in some essential points of character is signal. Such was the great deist king of the deist age; a deist of the least religious temper and of no very fine moral material to begin with.

The one contemporary monarch who in any way compares with him in enlightenment, Joseph II of Austria, belonged to the same school. The main charge against Frederick as a ruler is that he did not act up to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. In reply to the demand of the French deists for an abolition of all superstitious teaching, he observed that among the 16,000,000 inhabitants of France at most 200,000 were capable of philosophic views, and that the remaining 15,800,000 were held to their opinions by “insurmountable obstacles.”102 This, however, had been said by the deists themselves (e.g., d’Holbach, préf. to Christianisme dévoilé); and such an answer meant that he had no idea of so spreading instruction that all men should have a chance of reaching rational beliefs. This attitude was his inheritance from the past. Yet it was under him that Prussia began to figure as a first-rate culture force in Europe.

14. The social vogue of deistic thought could now be traced in much of the German belles-lettres of the time. The young Jakob von Mauvillon (1743–1794), secretary of the King of Poland and author of several histories, in his youth translated from the Latin into French Holberg’s Voyage of Nicolas Klimius (1766), which made the tour of Europe, and had a special vogue in Germany. Later in life, besides translating and writing abundantly and intelligently on matters of economic and military science—in the latter of which he had something like expert status—Mauvillon became a pronounced heretic, though careful to keep his propaganda anonymous.

The most systematic dissemination of the new ideas was that carried on in the periodical published by Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) under the title of The General German Library (founded 1765), which began with fifty contributors, and at the height of its power had a hundred and thirty, among them being Lessing, Eberhard, and Moses Mendelssohn. In the period from its start to the year 1792 it ran to 106 volumes; and it has always been more or less bitterly spoken of by later orthodoxy as the great library of that movement. Nicolai, himself an industrious and scholarly writer, produced among many other things a satirical romance famous in its day, the Life and Opinions of Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, ridiculing the bigots and persecutors the type of Klotz, the antagonist of Lessing, and some of Nicolai’s less unamiable antagonists,103 as well as various aspects of the general social and literary life of the time. To Nicolai is fully due the genial tribute paid to him by Heine,104 were it only for the national service of his “Library.” Its many translations from the English and French freethinkers, older and newer, concurred with native work to spread a deistic rationalism, labelled Aufklärung, or enlightenment, through the whole middle class of Germany.105 Native writers in independent works added to the propaganda.

Andreas Riem (1749–1807), a Berlin preacher, appointed by Frederick a hospital chaplain,106 wrote anonymously against priestcraft as no other priest had yet done. “No class of men,” he declared, in language perhaps echoed from his king, “has ever been so pernicious to the world as the priesthood. There were laws at all times against murderers and bandits, but not against the assassin in the priestly garb. War was repelled by war, and it came to an end. The war of the priesthood against reason has lasted for thousands of years, and it still goes on without ceasing.”107 Georg Schade (1712–1795), who appears to have been one of the believers in the immortality of animals, and who in 1770 was imprisoned for his opinions in the Danish island of Christiansœ, was no less emphatic, declaring, in a work on Natural Religion on the lines of Tindal (1760), that “all who assert a supernatural religion are godless impostors.”108 Constructive work of great importance, again, was done by J. B. Basedow (1723–1790), who early became an active deist, but distinguished himself chiefly as an educational reformer, on the inspiration of Rousseau’s Émile,109 setting up a system which “tore education away from the Christian basis,”110 and becoming in virtue of that one of the most popular writers of his day.

It is latterly admitted even by orthodoxy that school education in Germany had in the seventeenth century become a matter of learning by rote, and that such reforms as had been set up in some of the schools of the Pietists had in Basedow’s day come to nothing.111 As Basedow was the first to set up vigorous reforms, it is not too much to call him an instaurator of rational education, whose chief fault was to be too far ahead of his age. This, with the personal flaw of an unamiable habit of wrangling in all companies, caused the failure of his “Philanthropic Institute,” established in 1771, on the invitation of the Prince of Dessau, to carry out his educational ideals. Quite a number of other institutions, similarly planned, after his lead, by men of the same way of thinking, as Canope and Salzmann, in the same period, had no better success.

Goethe, who was clearly much impressed by Basedow, and travelled with him, draws a somewhat antagonistic picture of him on retrospect (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. xiv). He accuses him in particular of always obtruding his anti-orthodox opinions; not choosing to admit that religious opinions were being constantly obtruded on Basedow. Praising Lavater for his more amiable nature, Goethe reveals that Lavater was constantly propounding his orthodoxy. Goethe, in fine, was always lenient to pietism, in which he had been brought up, and to which he was wont to make sentimental concessions. He could never forget his courtly duties towards the established convention, and so far played the game of bigotry. Hagenbach notes (i, 298, note), without any deprecation, that after Basedow had published in 1763–1764 his Philalethie, a perfectly serious treatise on natural as against revealed religion, one of the many orthodox answers, that by Pastor Goeze, so inflamed against him the people of his native town of Hamburg that he could not show himself there without danger. And this is the man accused of “obtruding his views.” Baur is driven, by way of disparagement of Basedow and his school, to censure their self-confidence—precisely the quality which, in religious teachers with whom he agreed, he as a theologian would treat as a mark of superiority. Baur’s attack on the moral utilitarianism of the school is still less worthy of him. (Gesch. der christl. Kirche, iv, 595–96). It reads like an echo of Kahnis (as cited, p. 46 sq.).

Yet another influential deist was Johann August Eberhard (1739–1809), for a time a preacher at Charlottenburg, but driven out of the Church for the heresy of his New Apology of Sokrates; or the Final Salvation of the Heathen (1772).112 The work in effect placed Sokrates on a level with Jesus,113 which was blasphemy.114 But the outcry attracted the attention of Frederick, who made Eberhard a Professor of Philosophy at Halle, where later he opposed the idealism of both Kant and Fichte. Substantially of the same school was the less pronouncedly deistic cleric Steinbart,115 author of a utilitarian System of Pure Philosophy, or Christian doctrine of Happiness, now forgotten, who had been variously influenced by Locke and Voltaire.116 Among the less heterodox but still rationalizing clergy of the period were J. J. Spalding, author of a work on The Utility of the Preacher’s Office, a man of the type labelled “Moderate” in the Scotland of the same period, and as such antipathetic to emotional pietists;117 and Zollikofer, of the same school—both inferribly influenced by the deism of their day. Considerably more of a rationalist than these was the clergyman W. A. Teller (1734–1804), author of a New Testament Lexicon, who reached a position virtually deistic, and intimated to the Jews of Berlin that he would receive them into his church on their making a deistic profession of faith.118

15. If it be true that even the rationalizing defenders of Christianity led men on the whole towards deism,119 much more must this hold true of the new school who applied rationalistic methods to religious questions in their capacity as theologians. Of this school the founder was Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), who, trained as a Pietist at Halle, early thought himself into a more critical attitude,120 albeit remaining a theological teacher. Son of a much-travelled army chaplain, who in his many campaigns had learned much of the world, and in particular seen something of religious frauds in the Catholic countries, Semler started with a critical bias which was cultivated by wide miscellaneous reading from his boyhood onwards. As early as 1750, in his doctoral dissertation defending certain texts against the criticism of Whiston, he set forth the view, developed a century later by Baur, that the early Christian Church contained a Pauline and a Petrine party, mutually hostile.

The merit of his research won him a professorship at Halle; and this position he held till his death, despite such heresy as his rejection from the canon of the books of Ruth, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, the Song of Solomon, the two books of Chronicles, and the Apocalypse, in his Freie Untersuchung des Canons (1771–1774)—a work apparently inspired by the earlier performance of Richard Simon.121 His intellectual life was for long a continuous advance, always in the direction of a more rationalistic comprehension of religious history; and he reached, for his day, a remarkably critical view of the mythical element in the Old Testament.122 Not only did he recognize that Genesis must have pre-Mosaic origins, and that such books as the Proverbs and the Psalms were of later date and other origin than those traditionally assigned:123 his historical sense worked on the whole narrative. Thus he recognized the mythical character of the story of Samson, and was at least on the way towards a scientific handling of the New Testament.124 But in his period and environment a systematic rationalism was impossible; he was always a “revelation-believing Christian”; his critical intelligence was always divided against itself;125 and his powers were expended in an immense number of works,126 which failed to yield any orderly system, while setting up a general stimulus, in despite of their admitted unreadableness.127

In his latter days he strongly opposed and condemned the more radical rationalism of his pupil Bahrdt, and of the posthumous work of Reimarus, here exemplifying the common danger of the intellectual life, for critical as well as uncritical minds. After provoking many orthodox men by his own challenges, he is roused to fury alike by the genial rationalism of Bahrdt and by the cold analysis of Reimarus; and his attack on the Wolfenbüttel Fragments published by Lessing is loaded with a vocabulary of abuse such as he had never before employed128—a sure sign that he had no scientific hold of his own historical conception. Like the similarly infuriated semi-rational defenders of the historicity of Jesus in our own day, he merely “followed the tactic of exposing the lack of scientific knowledge and theological learning” of the innovating writer. Always temperamentally religious, he died in the evangelical faith. But his own influence in promoting rationalism is now obvious and unquestioned,129 and he is rightly to be reckoned a main founder of “German rationalism”—that is, academic rationalism on theologico-historical lines130—although he always professed to be merely rectifying orthodox conceptions. In the opinion of Pusey “the revival of historical interpretation by Semler became the most extensive instrument of the degradation of Christianity.”

Among the other theologians of the time who exercised a similar influence to the Wolffian, Töllner attracts notice by the comparative courage with which, in the words of an orthodox critic, he “raised, as much as possible, natural religion to revelation,” and, “on the other hand, lowered Scripture to the level of natural light.”131 First he published (1764) True Reasons why God has not furnished Revelation with evident proofs,132 arguing for the modern attenuation of the idea of revelation; then a work on Divine Inspiration (1771) in which he explicitly avowed that “God has in no way, either inwardly or outwardly, dictated the sacred books. The writers were the real authors”133—a declaration not to be counterbalanced by further generalities about actual divine influence. Later still he published a Proof that God leads men to salvation even by his revelation in Nature134 (1766)—a form of Christianity little removed from deism. Other theologians, such as Ernesti, went far with the tide of illuminism; and when the orthodox Chr. A. Crusius died at Leipzig in 1781, Jean Paul Richter, then a student, wrote that people had become “too much imbued with the spirit of illuminism” to be of his school. “Most, almost all the students,” adds Richter, incline to heterodoxy; and of the professor Morus he tells that “wherever he can explain away a miracle, the devil, etc., he does so.” Of this order of accommodators, a prominent example was Michaelis (1717–1791), whose reduction of the Mosaic legislation to motives of every-day utility is still entertaining.