J. M. Robertson

1. When two generations of Protestant strife had turned to naught the intellectual promise of the Reformation, and much of the ground first won by it had lapsed to Catholicism, the general forward movement of European thought availed to set up in Germany as elsewhere a measure of critical unbelief. There is abundant evidence that the Lutheran clergy not only failed to hold the best intelligence of the country with them, but in large part fell into personal disrepute.1 “The scenes of clerical immorality,” says an eminently orthodox historian, “are enough to chill one’s blood even at the distance of two centuries.”2 A Church Ordinance of 1600 acknowledges information to the effect that a number of clergymen and schoolmasters are guilty of “whoredom and fornication,” and commands that “if they are notoriously guilty they shall be suspended.” Details are preserved of cases of clerical drunkenness and ruffianism; and the women of the priests’ families do not escape the pillory.3 Nearly a century later, Arnold resigned his professorship at Giessen “from despair of producing any amendment in the dissolute habits of the students.”4 It is noted that “the great moral decline of the clergy was confined chiefly to the Lutheran Church. The Reformed [Calvinistic] was earnest, pious, and aggressive”5—the usual result of official hostility.

In such circumstances, the active freethought existing in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century could not fail to affect Germany; and even before the date of the polemic of Garasse and Mersenne there appeared (1615) a counterblast to the new thought in the Theologia Naturalis of J. H. Alsted, of Frankfort, directed adversus atheos, Epicureos, et sophistas hujus temporis. The preface to this solid quarto (a remarkable sample of good printing for the period) declares that “there are men in this diseased (exulcerato) age who dare to oppose science to revelation, reason to faith, nature to grace, the creator to the redeemer, and truth to truth”; and the writer undertakes to rise argumentatively from nature to the Christian God, without, however, transcending the logical plane of De Mornay. The trouble of the time, unhappily for the faith, was not rationalism, but the inextinguishable hatreds of Protestant and Catholic, and the strife of economic interests dating from the appropriations of the first reformers. At length, after a generation of gloomy suspense, came the explosion of the hostile ecclesiastical interests, and the long-drawn horror of the Thirty Years’ War, which left Germany mangled, devastated, drained of blood and treasure, decivilized, and well-nigh destitute of the machinery of culture. No such printing as that of Alsted’s book was to be done in the German world for many generations. But as in France, so in Germany, the exhausting experience of the moral and physical evil of religious war wrought something of an antidote, in the shape of a new spirit of rationalism.

Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political settlement,6 but the drift of opinion was markedly freethinking. Already in 1630 one writer describes “three classes of skeptics among the nobility of Hamburg: first, those who believe that religion is nothing but a mere fiction, invented to keep the masses in restraint; second, those who give preference to no faith, but think that all religions have a germ of truth; and third, those who, confessing that there must be one true religion, are unable to decide whether it is papal, Calvinist, or Lutheran, and consequently believe nothing at all.” No less explicit is the written testimony of Walther, the court chaplain of Ulrich II of East Friesland, 1637: “These infernal courtiers, among whom I am compelled to live against my will, doubt those truths which even the heathen have learned to believe.”7 In Germany as in France the freethinking which thus grew up during the religious war expanded after the peace. As usual, this is to be gathered from the orthodox propaganda against it, setting out in 1662 with a Preservative against the Pest of Present-day Atheists,8 by one Theophilus Gegenbauer. So far was this from attaining its end that there ensued ere long a more positive and aggressive development of freethinking than any other country had yet seen. A wandering scholar, Matthias Knutzen of Holstein (b. 1645), who had studied philosophy at KÖnigsberg, went about in 1674 teaching a hardy Religion of Humanity, rejecting alike immortality, God and Devil, churches and priests, and insisting that conscience could perfectly well take the place of the Bible as a guide to conduct. His doctrines are to be gathered chiefly from a curious Latin letter,9 written by him for circulation, headed Amicus Amicis Amica; and in this the profession of atheism is explicit: “Insuper Deum negamus.” In two dialogues in German he set forth the same ideas. His followers, as holding by conscience, were called Gewissener; and he or another of his group asserted that in Jena alone there were seven hundred of them.10 The figures were fantastic, and the whole movement passed rapidly out of sight—hardly by reason of the orthodox refutations, however. Germany was in no state to sustain such a party; and what happened was a necessarily slow gestation of the seed of new thought thus cast abroad.

Knutzen’s Latin letter is given in full by a Welsh scholar settled in Germany, Jenkinus Thomasius (Jenkin Thomas), in his Historia Atheismi (Altdorf, 1692), ed. Basel, 1709, pp. 97–101; also by La Croze in his (anon.) Entretiens sur divers sujets, 1711, p. 402 sq. Thomasius thus codifies its doctrine:—“1. There is neither God nor Devil. 2. The magistrate is nothing to be esteemed; temples are to be condemned, priests to be rejected. 3. In place of the magistrate and the priest are to be put knowledge and reason, joined with conscience, which teaches to live honestly, to injure none, and to give each his own. 4. Marriage and free union do not differ. 5. This is the only life: after it, there is neither reward nor punishment. 6. The Scripture contradicts itself.” Knutzen admittedly wrote like a scholar (Thomasius, p. 97); but his treatment of Scripture contradictions belongs to the infancy of criticism; though La Croze, replying thirty years later, could only meet it with charges of impiety and stupidity. As to the numbers of the movement see Trinius, Freydenker Lexicon, 1759, s. v. Knutzen. Kurtz (Hist. of the Christian Church, Eng. tr. 1864, i, 213) states that a careful academic investigation proved the claim to a membership of 700 to be an empty boast (citing H. Rossel, Studien und Kritiken, 1844, iv). This doubtless refers to the treatise of MusÆus, Jena, 1675, cited by La Croze, p. 401. Some converts Knutzen certainly made; and as only the hardiest would dare to avow themselves, his influence may have been considerable. “Examples of total unbelief come only singly to knowledge,” says Tholuck; “but total unbelief had still to the end of the century to bear penal treatment.” He gives the instances (1) of the Swedish Baron Skytte, reported in 1669 by Spener to the Frankfort authorities for having said at table, before the court preacher, that the Scriptures were not holy, and not from God but from men; and (2) “a certain minister” who at the end of the century was prosecuted for blasphemy. (Das kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, 2 Abth. pp. 56–57.) Even Anabaptists were still liable to banishment in the middle of the century. Id. 1 Abth. 1861, p. 36. As to clerical intolerance see pp. 40–44. On the merits of the Knutzen movement cp. PÜnjer, Hist, of the Christian Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437–8.

2. While, however, clerical action could drive such a movement under the surface, it could not prevent the spread of rationalism in all directions; and there was now germinating a philosophic unbelief11 under the influence of Spinoza. Nowhere were there more prompt and numerous answers to Spinoza than in Germany,12 whence it may be inferred that within the educated class he soon had a good many adherents. In point of fact the Elector Palatine offered him a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg in 1673, promising him “the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching,” and merely stipulating that he should not use it “to disturb the religion publicly established.”13 On the other hand, Professor Rappolt, of Leipzig, attacked him as an atheist, in an Oratio contra naturalistas in 1670; Professor MusÆus, of Jena, assailed him in 1674;14 and the Chancellor Kortholt, of Kiel, grouped him, Herbert, and Hobbes as The Three Great Impostors in 1680.15 After the appearance of the Ethica the replies multiplied. On the other hand, Cuffelaer vindicated Spinoza in 1684; and in 1691 F. W. Stosch, a court official, and son of the court preacher, published a stringent attack on revelationism, entitled Concordia rationis et fidei, partly on Spinozistic lines, which created much commotion, and was forcibly suppressed and condemned to be burnt by the hangman at Berlin,16 as it denied not only the immateriality but the immortality of the soul and the historical truth of the Scriptural narratives. This seems to have been the first work of modern freethought published by a German,17 apart from Knutzen’s letter; but a partial list of the apologetic works of the period, from Gegenbauer onwards, may suffice to suggest the real vogue of heterodox opinions:—

1662.	Th. Gegenbauer. Preservatio wider die Pest der heutigen Atheisten. Erfurt.
1668.	J. MusÆus. Examen Cherburianismi. Contra E. Herbertum de Cherbury.
1668. ,,	Anton Reiser. De origine, progressu, et incremento Antitheismi seu Atheismi.18 Augsburg.
1670.	Rappolt. Oratio contra Naturalistas. Leipzig.
1672.	J. MÜller. Atheismus devictus (in German). Hamburg.
1672. ,,	J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica (in German).
1673.	—— Besiegte Atheisterey.
1673. ,,	Chr. Pfaff. Disputatio contra Atheistas.
1674.	J. MusÆus. Spinozismus. Jena.
1677.	Val. Greissing. Corona Transylvani; Exerc. 2, de Atheismo, contra Cartesium et Math. Knutzen. Wittemberg.
1677. ,,	Tobias Wagner. Examen ... atheismi speculativi. TÜbingen.
1677. ,,	K. Rudrauff, Giessen. Dissertatio de Atheismo.
1680.	Chr. Kortholt. De tribus impostoribus magnis liber. Kiloni.
1689.	Th. Undereyck. Der NÄrrische Atheist in seiner Thorheit ueberzeugt. Bremen.
1692.	Jenkinus Thomasius. Historia Atheismi. Altdorf.
1696.	J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica. Reprint.
1697.	A. H. Grosse. An Atheismus necessario ducat ad corruptionem morum. Rostock.
1697. ,,	Em. Weber. Beurtheilung der Atheisterei.
1700.	Tribbechov. Historia Naturalismi. Jena.
1708.	Loescher. PrÆnotiones TheologicÆ contra Naturalistarum et Fanaticorum omne genus, Atheos, Deistas, Indifferentistas, etc. Wittemberg.
1708. ,,	Schwartz. Demonstrationes Dei. Leipzig.
1708. ,,	Rechenberg. Fundamenta verÆ religionis Prudentum, adversus Atheos, etc.
1710.	J. C. Wolfius. Dissertatio de Atheismi falso suspectis. Wittemberg.
1713.	J. N. Fromman. Atheus Stultus. TÜbingen.
1713. ,,	Anon. Widerlegung der Atheisten, Deisten, und neuen Zweifeler. Frankfort.

[Later came the works of Buddeus (1716) and Reimmann and Fabricius, noted above, vol. i, ch. i, § 2.]

3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly clerical and scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part sown in the seventeenth century; but the ground was not yet propitious. Leibnitz (1646–1716), the chief thinker produced by Germany before Kant, lived in a state of singular intellectual isolation;19 and showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises chiefly in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age, he was wont from his boyhood to grapple critically with every system of thought that came in his way; and, while claiming to be always eager to learn,20 he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm his own powerful bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies him to think how many men he has met who were at once intelligent and atheistic;21 and his propaganda is always dominated by the desire rather to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As early as 1668 (aet. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was published as a Confessio naturÆ contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza he reacted instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its first (anonymous) appearance an “unbearably bold (licentiosum) book,” and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it “dared to apply to sacred Scripture.”22 Yet in the next year we find him writing to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound orthodoxy of the Church. “A philosophic age,” he declares, “is about to begin, in which the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools, will spread even among politicians. Nothing is more likely to strengthen atheism and to upset faith, already so shaken by the attacks of great but bad men [a pleasing allusion to Spinoza], than to see on the one side the mysteries of the faith preached upon as the creed of all, and on the other hand become matter of derision to all, convicted of absurdity by the most certain rules of common reason. The worst enemies of the Church are in the Church. Let us take care lest the latest heresy—I will not say atheism, but—naturalism, be publicly professed.”23 For a time he seemed thus disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza on points of optics before he discovered the authorship; and he is represented later as speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even visited Spinoza in 1676, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript of the Ethica; but he remained hostile to him in theology and philosophy. To the last he called Spinoza a mere developer of Descartes,24 whom he also habitually resisted.

This was not hopeful; and Leibnitz, with all his power and originality, really wrought little for the direct rationalization of religious thought.25 His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the common stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is for the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account of an empiricism of which the “clearness” was really predetermined by the conviction of truth. His TheodicÉe,26 written in reply to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers27 a process of begging the question. Deity, a mere “infinition” of finite qualities, is proved À priori, though it is expressly argued that a finite mind cannot grasp infinity; and the necessary goodness of necessary deity is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant that such a philosopher, himself much given to denying the religiousness of other men’s theories, was nevertheless accused among both the educated and the populace of being essentially non-religious. Nominally he adhered to the entire Christian system, including miracles, though he declared that his belief in dogma rested on the agreement of reason with faith, and claimed to keep his thought free on unassailed truths;28 and he always discussed the Bible as a believer; yet he rarely went to church;29 and the Low German nickname LÖvenix (= Glaubet nichts, “believes nothing”) expressed his local reputation. No clergyman attended his funeral; but indeed no one else went, save his secretary.30 It is on the whole difficult to doubt that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere had been and has been for deism and atheism.31 He and Newton were the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age; and Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy of Newton32 tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic predecessor Descartes would not stand criticism.33 Spinoza being, according to him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,34 there remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and his ethic of optimism—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds—which seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to make thoughtful men give up the principle.

4. Other culture-conditions concurred to set up a spirit of rationalism in Germany. After the Thirty Years’ War there arose a religious movement, called Pietism by its theological opponents, which aimed at an emotional inwardness of religious life as against what its adherents held to be an irreligious orthodoxy around them.35 Contending against rigid articles of credence, they inevitably prepared the way for less credent forms of thought.36 Though the first leaders of Pietism grew embittered with their unsuccess and the attacks of their religious enemies,37 their impulse went far, and greatly influenced the clergy through the university of Halle, which in the first part of the eighteenth century turned out 6,000 clergymen in one generation.38 Against the Pietists were furiously arrayed the Lutherans of the old order, who even contrived in many places to suppress their schools.39 Virtues generated under persecution, however, underwent the law of degeneration which dogs all intellectual subjection; and the inner life of Pietism, lacking mental freedom and intellectual play, grew as cramped in its emotionalism as that of orthodoxy in its dogmatism. Religion was thus represented by a species of extremely unattractive and frequently absurd formalists on the one hand, and on the other by a school which at its best unsettled religious usage, and otherwise tended alternately to fanaticism and cant.40 Thus “the rationalist tendencies of the age were promoted by this treble exhibition of the aberrations of belief.”41 “How sorely,” says Tholuck, “the hold not only of ecclesiastical but of Biblical belief on men of all grades had been shaken at the beginning of the eighteenth century is seen in many instances.”42 Orthodoxy selects that of a Holstein student who hanged himself at Wittemberg in 1688, leaving written in his New Testament, in Latin, the declaration that “Our soul is mortal; religion is a popular delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so govern the world the better.”43 But again there is the testimony of the mint-master at Hanover that at court there all lived as “free atheists.” And though the name “freethinker” was not yet much used in discussion, it had become current in the form of Freigeist—the German equivalent still used. This, as we have noted,44 was probably a survival from the name of the old sect of the “Free Spirit,” rather than an adaptation from the French esprit fort or the English “freethinker.”

5. After the collapse of the popular movement of Matthias Knutzen, the thin end of the new wedge may be seen in the manifold work of Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who in 1687 published a treatise on “Divine Jurisprudence,” in which the principles of Pufendorf on natural law, already offensive to the theologians, were carried so far as to give new offence. Reading Pufendorf in his nonage as a student of jurisprudence, he was so conscious of the conflict between the utilitarian and the Scriptural view of moral law that, taught by a master who had denounced Pufendorf, he recoiled in a state of theological fear.45 Some years later, gaining self-possession, he recognized the rationality of Pufendorf’s system, and both expounded and defended him, thus earning his share in the hostility which the great jurist encountered at clerical hands. Between that hostility and the naturalist bias which he had acquired from Pufendorf, there grew up in him an aversion to the methods and pretensions of theologians which made him their lifelong antagonist.46 Pufendorf had but guardedly introduced some of the fundamental principles of Hobbes, relating morals to the social state, and thus preparing the way for utilitarianism.47 This sufficed to make the theologians his enemies; and it is significant that Thomasius, heterodox at the outset only thus far forth, becomes from that point onwards an important pioneer of freethought, toleration, and humane reform. 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 light above Scripture.59

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.

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 Christiansoe, 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.

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.

16. Much more notorious than any other German deist of his time was Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741–1792), a kind of raw Teutonic Voltaire, and the most popularly influential German freethinker of his age. In all he is said to have published a hundred and twenty-six books and tracts,135 thus approximating to Voltaire in quantity if not in quality. Theological hatred has so pursued him that it is hard to form a fair opinion as to his character; but the record runs that he led a somewhat Bohemian and disorderly life, though a very industrious one. While a preacher in Leipzig in 1768 he first got into trouble—“persecution” by his own account; “disgrace for licentious conduct,” by that of his enemies. In any case, he was at this period quite orthodox in his beliefs.136 That there was no serious disgrace is suggested by the fact that he was appointed Professor of Biblical Antiquities at Erfurt; and soon afterwards, on the recommendation of Semler and Ernesti, at Giessen (1771). While holding that post he published his “modernized” translation of the New Testament, done from the point of view of belief in revelation, following it up by his New Revelations of God in Letters and Tales (1773), which aroused Protestant hostility. After teaching for a time in a new Swiss “Philanthropin”—an educational institution on Basedow’s lines—he obtained a post as a district ecclesiastical superintendent in the principality of TÜrkheim on the Hardt; whereafter he was enabled to set up a “Philanthropin” of his own in the castle of Heidesheim, near Worms. The second edition of his translation of the New Testament, however, aroused Catholic hostility in the district; the edition was confiscated, and he found it prudent to make a tour in Holland and England, only to receive, on his return, a missive from the imperial consistory declaring him disabled for any spiritual office in the Holy German Empire. Seeking refuge in Halle, he found Semler grown hostile; but made the acquaintance of Eberhard, with the result of abandoning the remains of his orthodox faith. Henceforth he regarded Jesus, albeit with admiration, as simply a great teacher, “like Moses, Confucius, Sokrates, Semler, Luther, and myself”;137 and to this view he gave effect; in the third edition of his New Testament translation, which was followed in 1782 by his Letters on the Bible in Popular Style (Volkston), and in 1784 by his Completion (AusfÜhrung) of the Plan and Aim of Jesus in Letters (1784), and his System of Moral Religion (1787). More and more fiercely antagonized, he duly retaliated on the clergy in his Church and Heretic Almanack (1781); and after for a time keeping a tavern, he got into fresh trouble by printing anonymous satires on the religious edict of 1788, directed against all kinds of heresy,138 and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in a fortress—a term reduced by the king to one year. Thereafter he ended not very happily his troublous life in Halle in 1792.

The weakest part of Bahrdt’s performance is now seen to be his application of the empirical method of the early theological rationalists, who were wont to take every Biblical prodigy as a merely perverted account of an incident which certainly happened. That method—which became identified with the so-called “rationalism” of Germany in that age, and is not yet discarded by rationalizing theologians—is reduced to open absurdity in his hands, as when he makes Moses employ fireworks on Mount Sinai, and Jesus feed the five thousand by stratagem, without miracle. But it was not by such extravagances that he won and kept a hearing throughout his life. It is easy to see on retrospect that the source of his influence as a writer lay above all things in his healthy critical ethic, his own mode of progression being by way of simple common sense and natural feeling, not of critical research. His first step in rationalism was to ask himself “how Three Persons could be One God”—this while believing devoutly in revelation, miracles, the divinity of Jesus, and the Atonement. Under the influence of a naturalist travelling in his district, he gave up the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement, feeling himself “as if new-born” in being freed of what he had learned to see as a “pernicious and damnable error.”139 It was for such writing that he was hated and persecuted, despite his habitual eulogy of Christ as “the greatest and most venerable of mortals.” His offence was not against morals, but against theology; and he heightened the offence by his vanity.

17. Alongside of these propagators of popular rationalism stood a group of companion deists usually considered together—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). The last-named, a Jew, “lived entirely in the sphere of deism and of natural religion,”140 and sought, like the deists in general, to give religion an ethical structure; but he was popular chiefly as a constructive theist and a defender of the doctrine of immortality on non-Christian lines. His PhÆdon (1767), setting forth that view, had a great vogue.141 One of his more notable teachings was an earnest declaration against any connection between Church and State; but like Locke and Rousseau he so far sank below his own ideals as to agree in arguing for a State enforcement of a profession of belief in a God142—a negation of his own plea. With much contemporary popularity, he had no permanent influence; and he seems to have been completely broken-hearted over Jacobi’s disclosure of the final pantheism of Lessing, for whom he had a great affection.

Lessing, on the other hand, is one of the outstanding figures in the history of Biblical criticism, as well as of German literature in general. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Lessing became in a considerable measure a rationalist, while constantly resenting, as did Goethe, the treatment of religion in the fashion in which he himself treated non-religious opinions with which he did not agree.143 It is clear that already in his student days he had become substantially an unbeliever, and that it was on this as well as other grounds that he refused to become a clergyman.144 Nor was he unready to jeer at the bigots when they chanced to hate where he was sympathetic.145 On the side of religious problems, he was primarily and permanently influenced by two such singularly different minds as Bayle146 and Rousseau, the first appealing to and eliciting his keen critical faculty, the second his warm emotional nature; and he never quite unified the result. From first to last he was a freethinker in the sense that he never admitted any principle of authority, and was stedfastly loyal to the principle of freedom of utterance. He steadily refused to break with his freethinking friend Mylius, and he never sought to raise odium against any more advanced freethinker on the score of his audacity.147 In his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, indeed, dealing with a German play in which Mohammedanism in general, and one Ismenor in particular, in the time of the Crusades are charged with the sin of persecution, he remarks that “these very Crusades, which in their origin were a political stratagem of the popes, developed into the most inhuman persecutions of which Christian superstition has ever made itself guilty: the true religion had then the most and the bloodiest Ismenors.”148 In his early Rettungen (Vindications), again, he defends the dubious Cardan and impersonally argues the pros and cons of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a fashion possible only to a skeptical mind.149 And in his youth, as in his last years, he maintained that “there have long been men who disregarded all revealed religions and have yet been good men.150 In his youth, however, he was more of a Rousseauist than of an intellectual philosopher, setting up a principle of “the heart” against every species of analytic thought, including even that of Leibnitz, which he early championed against the Wolfian adaptation of it.151 The sound principle that conduct is more important than opinion he was always apt, on the religious side, to strain into the really contrary principle that opinions which often went with good conduct were necessarily to be esteemed. So when the rationalism of the day seriously or otherwise (in Voltairean Berlin it was too apt to be otherwise) assailed the creed of his parents, whom he loved and honoured, sympathy in his case as in Goethe’s always predetermined his attitude;152 and it is not untruly said of him that he did prefer the orthodox to the heterodox party, like Gibbon, “inasmuch as the balance of learning which attracted his esteem was [then] on that side.”153 We thus find him, about the time when he announces to his father that he had doubted concerning the Christian dogmas,154 rather nervously proving his essential religiousness by dramatically defending the clergy against the prejudices of popular freethought as represented by his friend Mylius, who for a time ran in Leipzig a journal called the Freigeist—not a very advanced organ.155

Lessing was in fact, with his versatile genius and his vast reading, a man of moods rather than a systematic thinker, despite his powerful critical faculty; and alike his emotional and his critical side determined his aversion to the attempts of the “rationalizing” clergy to put religion on a common-sense footing. His personal animosity to Voltaire and to Frederick would also influence him; but he repugned even the decorous “rationalism” of the theologians of his own country. When his brother wrote him to the effect that the basis of the current religion was false, and the structure the work of shallow bunglers, he replied that he admitted the falsity of the basis, but not the incompetence of those who built up the system, in which he saw much skill and address. Shallow bunglers, on the other hand, he termed the schemers of the new system of compromise and accommodation.156 In short, as he avowed in his fragment on Bibliolatry, he was always “pulled this way and that” in his thought on the problem of religion.157 For himself, he framed (or perhaps adopted)158 a pseudo-theory of the Education of the Human Race (1780), which has served the semi-rationalistic clergy of our own day in good stead; and adapted Rousseau’s catching doctrine that the true test of religion lies in feeling and not in argument.159 Neither doctrine, in short, has a whit more philosophical value than the other “popular philosophy” of the time, and neither was fitted to have much immediate influence; but both pointed a way to the more philosophic apologists of religion, while baulking the orthodox.160 If all this were more than a piece of defensive strategy, it was no more scientific than the semi-rationalist theology which he contemned. The “education” theorem, on its merits, is indeed a discreditable paralogism; and only our knowledge of his affectional bias can withhold us from counting it a mystification. On analysis it is found to have no logical content whatever. “Christianity” Lessing made out to be a “universal principle,” independent of its pseudo-historical setting; thus giving to the totality of the admittedly false tradition the credit of an ethic which in the terms of the case is simply human, and in all essentials demonstrably pre-Christian. His propaganda of this kind squares ill with his paper on The Origin of Revealed Religion, written about 1860. There he professes to hold by a naturalist view of religion. All “positive” or dogmatic creeds he ascribes to the arrangements that men from time to time found it necessary to make as to the means of applying “natural” religion. “Hence all positive and revealed religions are alike true and alike false; alike true, inasmuch as it has everywhere been necessary to come to terms over different things in order to secure agreement and unity in the public religion; alike false, inasmuch as that over which men came to terms does not so much stand close to the essential (nicht sowohl ... neben dem Wesentlichen besteht), but rather weakens and oppresses it. The best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest conventional additions to natural religion; that which least limits the effects of natural religion.”161 This is the position of Tindal and the English deists in general; and it seems to have been in this mood that Lessing wrote to Mendelssohn about being able to “help the downfall of the most frightful structure of nonsense only under the pretext of giving it a new foundation.”162 On the historical side, too, he had early convinced himself that Christianity was established and propagated “by entirely natural means”163—this before Gibbon. But, fighter as he was, he was not prepared to lay his cards on the table in the society in which he found himself. In his strongest polemic there was always an element of mystification;164 and his final pantheism was only privately avowed.

It was through a series of outside influences that he went so far, in the open, as he did. Becoming the librarian of the great Bibliothek of WolfenbÜttel, the possession of the hereditary Prince (afterwards Duke) of Brunswick, he was led to publish the “Anonymous Fragments” known as the WolfenbÜttel Fragments (1774–1778), wherein the methods of the English and French deists are applied with a new severity to both the Old and the New Testament narratives. It is now put beyond doubt that they were the work of Reimarus,165 who had in 1755 produced a defence of “Natural Religion”—that is, of the theory of a Providence—against La Mettrie, Maupertuis, and older materialists, which had a great success in its day.166 At his death, accordingly, Reimarus ranked as an admired defender of theism and of the belief in immortality.167 He was the son-in-law of the esteemed scholar Fabricius, and was for many years Professor of Oriental Languages in the Hamburg Academy. The famous research which preserves his memory was begun by him at the age of fifty, for his own satisfaction, and was elaborated by him during twenty years, while he silently endured the regimen of the intolerant Lutheranism of his day.168 As he left the book it was a complete treatise entitled An Apology for the Rational Worshipper of God; but his son feared to have it published, though Lessing offered to take the whole risk; and it was only by the help of the daughter, Elise Reimarus,169 Lessing’s friend, that the fragments came to light. As the Berlin censor would not give official permission,170 Lessing took the course of issuing them piecemeal in a periodical series of selections from the treasures of the WolfenbÜttel Library, which had privilege of publication. The first, On the Toleration of Deists, which attracted little notice, appeared in 1774; four more, which made a stir, in 1777; and only in 1778 was “the most audacious of all,” On the Aim of Jesus and his Disciples,171 published as a separate book. Collectively they constituted the most serious attack yet made in Germany on the current creed, though their theory of the true manner of the gospel history of course smacks of the pre-scientific period. A generation later, however, they were still “the radical book of the anti-supernaturalists” in Germany.172

As against miracles in general, the Resurrection in particular, and Biblical ethics in general, the attack of Reimarus was irresistible, but his historical construction is pre-scientific. The method is, to accept as real occurrences all the non-miraculous episodes, and to explain them by a general theory. Thus the appointment of the seventy apostles—a palpable myth—is taken as a fact, and explained as part of a scheme by Jesus to obtain temporal power; and the scourging of the money-changers from the Temple, improbable enough as it stands, is made still more so by supposing it to be part of a scheme of insurrection. The method further involves charges of calculated fraud against the disciples or evangelists—a historical misconception which Lessing repudiated, albeit not on the right grounds. See the sketch in Cairns, p. 197 sq., which indicates the portions of the treatise produced later by Strauss. Cp. PÜnjer, i, 550–57; Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 4. Schweitzer (Von Reimarus zu Wrede), in his satisfaction at the agreement of Reimarus with his own conception of an “eschatological” Jesus, occupied with “the last things,” gives Reimarus extravagant praise. Strauss rightly notes the weakness of the indictment of Moses as a worker of fraud (Voltaire, 2te Ausg. p. 407).

It is but fair to say that Reimarus’s fallacy of method, which was the prevailing one in his day, has not yet disappeared from criticism. As we have seen, it was employed by Pomponazzi in the Renaissance (vol. i, p. 377), and reintroduced in the modern period by Connor and Toland. It is still employed by some professed rationalists, as Dr. Conybeare. It has, however, in all likelihood suggested itself spontaneously to many inquirers. In the PhÆdrus Plato presents it as applied by empirical rationalizers to myths at that time.

Though Lessing at many points oppugned the positions of the Fragments, he was led into a fiery controversy over them, in which he was unworthily attacked by, among others, Semler, from whom he had looked for support; and the series was finally stopped by authority. There can now be no doubt that Lessing at heart agreed with Reimarus on most points of negative criticism,173 but reached a different emotional estimate and attitude. All the greater is the merit of his battle for freedom of thought. Thereafter, as a final check to his opponents, he produced his famous drama Nathan the Wise, which embodies Boccaccio’s story of The Three Rings, and has ever since served as a popular lesson of tolerance in Germany.174 In the end, he seems to have become, to at least some extent, a pantheist;175 but he never expounded any coherent and comprehensive set of opinions,176 preferring, as he put it in an oft-quoted sentence, the state of search for truth to any consciousness of possessing it.177

He left behind him, however, an important fragment, which constituted one of his most important services to national culture—his “New Hypothesis concerning the evangelists as merely human writers.” He himself thought that he had done nothing “more important or ingenious”178 of the kind; and though his results were in part unsound and impermanent, he is justly to be credited with the first scientific attempt to deduce the process of composition of the gospels179 from primary writings by the first Christians. Holding as he did to the authenticity and historicity of the fourth gospel, he cannot be said to have gone very deep; but two generations were to pass before the specialists got any further. Lessing had shown more science and more courage than any other pro-Christian scholar of the time, and, as the orthodox historian of rationalism has it, “Though he did not array himself as a champion of rationalism, he proved himself one of the strongest promoters of its reign.”180

18. Deism was now as prevalent in educated Germany as in France or England; and, according to a contemporary preacher, “Berliner” was about 1777 a synonym for “rationalist.”181 Wieland, one of the foremost German men of letters of his time, is known to have become a deist of the school of Shaftesbury;182 and in the leading journal of the day he wrote on the free use of reason in matters of faith.183 Some acts of persecution by the Church show how far the movement had gone. In 1774 we find a Catholic professor at Mayence, Lorenzo Isenbiehl, deposed and sent back to the seminary for two years on the score of “deficient theological knowledge,” because he argued (after Collins) that the text Isaiah vii, 14 applied not to the mother of Jesus but to a contemporary of the prophet; and when, four years later, he published a book on the same thesis, in Latin, he was imprisoned. Three years later still, a young Jesuit of Salzburg, named Steinbuhler, was actually condemned to death for writing some satires on Roman Catholic ceremonies, and, though afterwards pardoned, died of the ill-usage he had undergone in prison.184 It may have been the sense of danger aroused by such persecution that led to the founding, in 1780, of a curious society which combined an element of freethinking Jesuitism with freemasonry, and which included a number of statesmen, noblemen, and professors—Goethe, Herder, and the Duke of Weimar being among its adherents. But it is difficult to take seriously the accounts given of the order.185

The spirit of rationalism, in any case, was now so prevalent that it began to dominate the work of the more intelligent theologians, to whose consequent illogical attempts to strain out by the most dubious means the supernatural elements from the Bible narratives186 the name of “rationalism” came to be specially applied,187 that being the kind of criticism naturally most discussed among the clergy. Taking rise broadly in the work of Semler, reinforced by that of the English and French deists and that of Reimarus, the method led stage by stage to the scientific performance of Strauss and Baur, and the recent “higher criticism” of the Old and New Testaments. Noteworthy at its outset as exhibiting the tendency of official believers to make men, in the words of Lessing, irrational philosophers by way of making them rational Christians,188 this order of “rationalism” in its intermediate stages belongs rather to the history of Biblical scholarship than to that of freethought, since more radical work was being done by unprofessional writers outside, and deeper problems were raised by the new systems of philosophy. Within the Lutheran pale, however, there were some hardy thinkers. A striking figure of the time, in respect of his courage and thoroughness, is the Lutheran pastor J. H. Schulz,189 who so strongly combatted the compromises of the Semler school in regard to the Pentateuch, and argued so plainly for a severance of morals from religion as to bring about his own dismissal (1792).190 Schulz’s Philosophical Meditation on Theology and Religion191 (1784) is indeed one of the most pronounced attacks on orthodox religion produced in that age. But it is in itself a purely speculative construction. Following the current historical method, he makes Moses the child of the Egyptian princess, and represents him as imposing on the ignorant Israelites a religion invented by himself, and expressive only of his own passions. Jesus in turn is extolled in the terms common to the freethinkers of the age; but his conception of God is dismissed as chimerical; and Schulz finally rests in the position of Edelmann, that the only rational conception of deity is that of the “sufficient ground of the world,” and that on this view no man is an atheist.192

Schulz’s dismissal appears to have been one of the fruits of the orthodox edict (1788) of the new king, Frederick William II, the brother of Frederick, who succeeded in 1786. It announced him—in reality a “strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition”193—as the champion of religion and the enemy of freethinking; forbade all proselytizing, and menaced with penalties all forms of heresy,194 while professing to maintain freedom of conscience. The edict seems to have been specially provoked by fresh literature of a pronouncedly freethinking stamp, though it lays stress on the fact that “so many clergymen have the boldness to disseminate the doctrines of the Socinians, Deists, and Naturalists under the name of AufklÄrung.” The work of Schulz would be one of the provocatives, and there were others. In 1785 had appeared the anonymous Moroccan Letters,195 wherein, after the model of the Persian Letters and others, the life and creeds of Germany are handled in a quite Voltairean fashion. The writer is evidently familiar with French and English deistic literature, and draws freely on both, making no pretence of systematic treatment. Such writing, quietly turning a disenchanting light of common sense on Scriptural incredibilities and Christian historical scandals, without a trace of polemical zeal, illustrated at once the futility of Kant’s claim, in the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, to counteract “freethinking unbelief” by transcendental philosophy. And though the writer is careful to point to the frequent association of Christian fanaticism with regicide, his very explicit appeal for a unification of Germany,196 his account of the German Protestant peasant and labourer as the most dismal figure in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland,197 and his charge against Germans of degrading their women,198 would not enlist the favour of the authorities for his work. Within two years (1787) appeared, unsigned, an even more strongly anti-Christian and anti-clerical work, The In Part Only True System of the Christian Religion,199 ascribed to Jakob von Mauvillon,200 whom we have seen twenty-one years before translating the freethinking romance of Holberg. Beginning his career as a serious publicist by translating Raynal’s explosive history of the Indies (7 vols. 1774–78), he had done solid work as a historian and as an economist, and also as an officer in the service of the Duke of Brunswick and a writer on military science. The True System is hostile alike to priesthoods and to the accommodating theologians, whose attempt to rationalize Christianity on historical lines it flouts in Lessing’s vein as futile. Mauvillon finds unthinkable the idea of a revelation which could not be universal; rejects miracles and prophecies as vain bases for a creed; sums up the New Testament as planless; and pronounces the ethic of Christianity, commonly regarded as its strongest side, the weakest side of all. He sums up, in fact, in a logical whole, the work of the English and French deists.201 To such propaganda the edict of repression was the official answer. It naturally roused a strong opposition;202 but though it ultimately failed, through the general breakdown of European despotisms, it was not without injurious effect. The first edict was followed in a few months by one which placed the press and all literature, native and foreign, under censorship. This policy, which was chiefly inspired by the new king’s Minister of Religion, Woellner, was followed up in 1791 by the appointment of a committee of three reactionaries—Hermes, Hilmer, and Woltersdorf—who not only saw to the execution of the edicts, but supervised the schools and churches. Such a regimen, aided by the reaction against the Revolution, for a time prevented any open propaganda on the part of men officially placed; and we shall see it hampering and humiliating Kant; but it left the leaven of anti-supernaturalism to work all the more effectively among the increasing crowd of university students.

Many minds of the period, doubtless, are typified by Herder, who, though a practising clergyman, was clearly a Spinozistic theist, accommodating himself to popular Christianity in a genially latitudinarian spirit.203 When in his youth he published an essay discussing Genesis as a piece of oriental poetry, not to be treated as science or theology, he evoked an amount of hostility which startled him.204 Learning his lesson, he was for the future guarded enough to escape persecution. He was led by his own temperamental bias, however, to a transcendental position in philosophy. Originally in agreement with Kant,205 as against the current metaphysic, in the period before the issue of the latter’s Critique of Pure Reason, he nourished his religious instincts by a discursive reading of history, which he handled in a comparatively scientific yet above all poetic or theosophic spirit, while Kant, who had little or no interest in history, developed his thought on the side of physical science.206 The philosophic methods of the two men thus became opposed; and when Herder found Kant’s philosophy producing a strongly rationalistic cast of thought among the divinity students who came before him for examination, he directly and sharply antagonized it207 in a theistic sense. Yet his own influence on his age was on the whole latitudinarian and anti-theological; he opposed to the apriorism of Kant the view that the concepts of space and time are the results of experience and an abstraction of its contents; his historic studies had developed in him a conception of the process of evolution alike in life, opinion, and faculty; and orthodoxy and philosophy alike incline to rank him as a pantheist.208

19. Meanwhile, the drift of the age of AufklÄrung was apparent in the practically freethinking attitude of the two foremost men of letters in the new Germany—Goethe and Schiller. Of the former, despite the bluster of Carlyle, and despite the Æsthetic favour shown to Christianity in Wilhelm Meister, no religious ingenuity can make more than a pantheist,209 who, insofar as he touched on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism of the school of Semler.210 “The great Pagan” was the common label among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries.211 As a boy, learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of view in regard to Biblical marvels,212 though he never became a scientific critic. He has told how, in his youth, when Lavater insisted that he must choose between orthodox Christianity and atheism, he answered that, if he were not free to be a Christian in his own way (wie ich es bisher gehegt hÄtte), he would as soon turn atheist as Christian, the more so as he saw that nobody knew very well what either signified.213 As he puts it, he had made a Christ and a Christianity of his own.214 His admired friend FrÄulein von Klettenberg, the “Beautiful Soul” of one of his pieces, told him that he never satisfied her when he used the Christian terminology, which he never seemed to get right; and he tells how he gradually turned away from her religion, which he had for a time approached, in its Moravian aspect, with a too passionate zeal.215 In his letters to Lavater, he wrote quite explicitly that a voice from heaven would not make him believe in a virgin birth and a resurrection, such tales being for him rather blasphemies against the great God and his revelation in Nature. Thousands of pages of earlier and later writings, he declared, were for him as beautiful as the gospel.216 Nor did he ever yield to the Christian Church more than a Platonic amity; so that much of the peculiar hostility that was long felt for his poetry and was long shown to his memory in Germany is to be explained as an expression of the normal malice of pietism against unbelievers.217 Such utterances as the avowal that he revered Jesus as he revered the Sun,218 and the other to the effect that Christianity has nothing to do with philosophy, where Hegel sought to bring it—that it is simply a beneficent influence, and is not to be looked to for proof of immortality219—are clearly not those of a believer. To-day belief is glad to claim Goethe as a friend in respect of his many concessions to it, as well as of his occasional flings at more consistent freethinkers. But a “great pagan” he remains for the student. In the opinion of later orthodoxy his “influence on religion was very pernicious.”220 He indeed showed small concern for religious susceptibilities when he humorously wrote that from his youth up he believed himself to stand so well with his God as to fancy that he might even “have something to forgive Him.”221

20. No less certain is the unbelief of Schiller (1759–1805), whom Hagenbach even takes as “the representative of the rationalism of his age.” In his juvenile Robbers, indeed, he makes his worst villains freethinkers; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion against all assailants; but hardly ever after that piece does he give a favourable portrait of a priest.223 He himself soon joined the AufklÄrung; and all his Æsthetic appreciation of Christianity never carried him beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency (Anlage) to the highest and noblest, though that was in general tastelessly and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that in a certain sense it is the only Æsthetic religion, whence it is that it gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only among women is it to be met with in a tolerable form.224 Like Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane of possibility,225 in the manner of the liberal theologians of the period; and like him he often writes as a deist,226 though professedly for a time a Kantist. On the other hand, he does not hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed no morality, no Natur-recht,227 and no political metaphysic) required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it.228

21. The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) may be said to represent most comprehensively the outcome in German intelligence of the higher freethought of the age, insofar as its results could be at all widely assimilated. In its most truly critical part, the analytic treatment of previous theistic systems in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he is fundamentally anti-theological; the effect of the argument being to negate all previously current proofs of the existence and cognizableness of a “supreme power” or deity. Already the metaphysics of the Leibnitz-Wolff school were discredited;229 and so far Kant could count on a fair hearing for a system which rejected that of the schools. Certainly he meant his book to be an antidote to the prevailing religious credulity. “Henceforth there were to be no more dreams of ghost-seers, metaphysicians, and enthusiasts.”230 On his own part, however, no doubt in sympathy with the attitude of many of his readers, there followed a species of intuitional reaction. In his short essay What is Freethinking?231 (1784) he defines AufklÄrung or freethinking as “the advance of men from their self-imputed minority”; and “minority” as the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. “Sapere aude; dare to use thine own understanding,” he declares to be the motto of freethought: and he dwells on the laziness of spirit which keeps men in the state of minority, letting others do their thinking for them as the doctor prescribes their medicine. In this spirit he justifies the movement of rational criticism while insisting, justly enough, that men have still far to go ere they can reason soundly in all things. If, he observes, “we ask whether we live in an enlightened (aufgeklÄrt) age the answer is, No, but in an age of enlightening (aufklÄrung).” There is still great lack of capacity among men in general to think for themselves, free of leading-strings. “Only slowly can a community (Publikum) attain to freethinking.” But he repeats that “the age is the age of aufklÄrung, the age of Frederick the Great”: and he pays a high tribute to the king who repudiated even the arrogant pretence of “toleration,” and alone among monarchs said to his subjects, “Reason as you will; only obey!”

But the element of apprehension gained ground in the aging freethinker. In 1787 appeared the second edition of the Critique, with a preface avowing sympathy with religious as against freethinking tendencies; and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) he makes an almost avowedly unscientific attempt to restore the reign of theism on a basis of a mere emotional and ethical necessity assumed to exist in human nature—a necessity which he never even attempts to demonstrate. With the magic wand of the Practical Reason, as Heine has it, he reanimated the corpse of theism, which the Theoretic Reason had slain.232 In this adjustment he was perhaps consciously copying Rousseau, who had greatly influenced him,233 and whose theism is an avowedly subjectivist predication. But the same attitude to the problem had been substantially adopted by Lessing;234 and indeed the process is at bottom identical with that of the quasi-skeptics, Pascal, Huet, Berkeley, and the rest, who at once impugn and employ the rational process, reasoning that reason is not reasonable. Kant did but set up the “practical” against the “pure” reason, as other theists before him had set up faith against science, or the “heart” against the “head,” and as theists to-day exalt the “will” against “knowledge,” the emotional nature against the logical. It is tolerably clear that Kant’s motive at this stage was an unphilosophic fear that Naturalism would work moral harm235—a fear shared by him with the mass of the average minds of his age.

The same motive and purpose are clearly at work in his treatise on Religion within the bounds of Pure [i.e. Mere] Reason (1792–1794), where, while insisting on the purely ethical and rational character of true religion, he painfully elaborates reasons for continuing to use the Bible (concerning which he contends that, in view of its practically “godly” contents, no one can deny the possibility of its being held as a revelation) as “the basis of ecclesiastical instruction” no less than a means of swaying the populace.236 Miracles, he in effect avows, are not true; still, there must be no carping criticism of the miracle stories, which serve a good end. There is to be no persecution; but there is to be no such open disputation as would provoke it.237 Again and again, with a visible uneasiness, the writer returns to the thesis that even “revealed” religion cannot do without sacred books which are partly untrue.238 The doctrine of the Trinity he laboriously metamorphosed, as so many had done before him, and as Coleridge and Hegel did after him, into a formula of three modes or aspects of the moral deity239 which his ethical purpose required. And all this divagation from the plain path of Truth is justified in the interest of Goodness.

All the while the book is from beginning to end profoundly divided against itself. It indicates disbelief in every one of the standing Christian dogmas—Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles, and the supernatural basis of morals. The first paragraph of the preface insists that morality is founded on the free reason, and that it needs no religion to aid it. Again and again this note is sounded. “The pure religious faith is that alone which can serve as basis for a universal Church; because it is a pure reason-faith, in which everyone can participate.”240 But without the slightest attempt at justification there is thrown in the formula that “no religion is thinkable without belief in a future life.”241 Thus heaven and hell242 and Bible and church are arbitrarily imposed on the “pure religion” for the comfort of unbelieving clergymen and the moralizing of life. Error is to cast out error, and evil, evil.

All the while, however, Kant’s theism was radically irreconcilable with the prevailing religion. As appears from his cordial hostility to the belief in ghosts, he really lacked the religious temperament. “He himself,” says a recent biographer, “was too suspicious of the emotions to desire to inspire any enthusiasm with reference to his own heart.”243 This misstates the fact that his “Practical Reason” was but an abstraction of his own emotional predilection; but it remains true that that predilection was nearly free from the commoner forms of pious psychosis; and typical Christians have never found him satisfactory. “From my heart,” writes one of his first biographers, “I wish that Kant had not regarded the Christian religion merely as a necessity for the State, or as an institution to be tolerated for the sake of the weak (which now so many, following his example, do even in the pulpit), but had known that which is positive, improving, and blessed in Christianity.”244 He had in fact never kept up any theological study;245 and his plan of compromise had thus, like those of Spencer and Mill in a later day, a fatal unreality for all men who have discarded theology with a full knowledge of its structure, though it appeals very conveniently to those disposed to retain it as a means of popular influence. All his adaptations, therefore, failed to conciliate the mass of the orthodox; and even after the issue of the second Critique (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) he had been the subject of discussion among the reactionists.246 But that Critique, and the preface to the second edition of the first, were at bottom only pleas for a revised ethic, Kant’s concern with current religion being solely ethical;247 and the force of that concern led him at length, in what was schemed as a series of magazine articles,248 to expound his notion of religion in relation to morals. When he did so he aroused a resentment much more energetic than that felt by the older academics against his philosophy. The title of his complete treatise, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is obviously framed to parry criticism; yet so drastic is its treatment of its problems that the College of Censors at Berlin under the new theological rÉgime vetoed the second part. By the terms of the law as to the censorship, the publisher was entitled to know the reason for the decision; but on his asking for it he was informed that “another instruction was on hand, which the censor followed as his law, but whose contents he refused to make known.”249 Greatly incensed, Kant submitted the rejected article with the rest of his book to the theological faculty of his own university of KÖnigsberg, asking them to decide in which faculty the censorship was properly vested. They referred the decision to the philosophical faculty, which duly proceeded to license the book (1793). As completed, it contained passages markedly hostile to the Church. His opponents in turn were now so enraged that they procured a royal cabinet order (October, 1794) charging him with “distorting and degrading many of the chief and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity,” and ordering all the instructors at the university not to lecture on the book.250 Such was the reward for a capitulation of philosophy to the philosophic ideals of the police.

Kant, called upon to render an account of his conduct to the Government, formally defended it, but in conclusion decorously said: “I think it safest, in order to obviate the least suspicion in this respect, as your Royal Majesty’s most faithful subject, to declare solemnly that henceforth I will refrain altogether from all public discussion of religion, whether natural or revealed, both in lectures and in writings.” After the death of Frederick William II (1797) and the accession of Frederick William III, who suspended the edict of 1788, Kant held himself free to speak out again, and published (1798) an essay on “The Strife of the [University] Faculties,” wherein he argued that philosophers should be free to discuss all questions of religion so long as they did not handle Biblical theology as such. The belated protest, however, led to nothing. By this time the philosopher was incapable of further efficient work; and when he died in 1804 the chief manuscript he left, planned as a synthesis of his philosophic teaching, was found to be hopelessly confused.251

The attitude, then, in which Kant stood to the reigning religion in his latter years remained fundamentally hostile, from the point of view of believing Christians as distinguished from that of ecclesiastical opportunists. What were for temporizers arguments in defence of didactic deceit, were for sincerer spirits fresh grounds for recoiling from the whole ecclesiastical field. Kant must have made more rebels than compliers by his very doctrine of compliance. Religion was for him essentially ethic; and there is no reconciling the process of propitiation of deity, in the Christian or any other cult, with his express declaration that all attempts to win God’s favour save by simple right-living are sheer fetichism.252 He thus ends practically at the point of view of the deists, whose influence on him in early life is seen in his work on cosmogony.253 He had, moreover, long ceased to go to church or follow any religious usage, even refusing to attend the services on the installation of a new university rector, save when he himself held the office. At the close of his treatise on religion, after all his anxious accommodations, he becomes almost violent in his repudiations of sacerdotalism and sectarian self-esteem. “He did not like the singing in the churches, and pronounced it mere bawling. In prayer, whether public or private, he had not the least faith; and in his conversation as well as his writings he treated it as a superstition, holding that to address anything unseen would open the way for fanaticism. Not only did he argue against prayer; he also ridiculed it, and declared that a man would be ashamed to be caught by another in the attitude of prayer.” One of his maxims was that “To kneel or prostrate himself on the earth, even for the purpose of symbolizing to himself reverence for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man.”254 So too he held that the doctrine of the Trinity had no practical value, and he had a “low opinion” of the Old Testament.

Yet his effort at compromise had carried him to positions which are the negation of some of his own most emphatic ethical teachings. Like Plato, he is finally occupied in discussing the “right fictions” for didactic purposes. Swerving from thoroughgoing freethought for fear of moral harm, he ends by sacrificing intellectual morality to what seems to him social security. His doctrine, borrowed from Lessing, of a “conceivable” revelation which told man only what he could find out for himself, is a mere flout to reason. While he carries his “categorical imperative,” or À priori conception of duty, so extravagantly far as to argue that it is wrong even to tell a falsehood to a would-be murderer in order to mislead him, he approves of the systematic employment of the pulpit function by men who do not believe in the creed they there expound. The priest, with Kant’s encouragement, is to “draw all the practical lessons for his congregation from dogmas which he himself cannot subscribe with a full conviction of their truth, but which he can teach, since it is not altogether impossible that truth may be concealed therein,” while he remains free as a scholar to write in a contrary sense in his own name. And this doctrine, set forth in the censured work of 1793, is repeated in the moralist’s last treatise (1798), wherein he explains that the preacher, when speaking doctrinally, “can put into the passage under consideration his own rational views, whether found there or not.” Kant thus ended by reviving for the convenience of churchmen, in a worse form, the medieval principle of a “twofold truth.” So little efficacy is there in a transcendental ethic for any of the actual emergencies of life.

On this question compare Kant’s Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, StÜck iii, Abth. i, § 6; StÜck iv, Th. ii, preamble and §§ i, 3, and 4; with the essay Ueber ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lÜgen (1797), in reply to Constant—rep. in Kant’s VorzÜgliche kleine Schriften, 1833, Bd. ii, and in App. to Rosenkranz’s ed. of Werke, vii, 295—given by T. K. Abbott in his tr. of the Critique of Judgment. See also Stuckenberg, pp. 341–45, and the general comment of Baur, Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts, 1862, p. 65. “Kant’s recognition of Scripture is purely a matter of expedience. The State needs the Bible to control the people; the masses need it in order that they, having weak consciences, may recognize their duty; and the philosopher finds it a convenient vehicle for conveying to the people the faith of reason. Were it rejected it might be difficult, if not impossible, to put in its place another book which would inspire as much confidence.” All the while “Kant’s principles of course led him to deny that the Bible is authoritative in matters of religion, or that it is of itself a safe guide in morals.... Its value consists in the fact that, owing to the confidence of the people in it, reason can use it to interpret into Scripture its own doctrines, and can thus make it the means of popularizing rational faith. If anyone imagines that the aim of the interpretation is to obtain the real meaning of Scripture, he is no Kantian on this point” (Stuckenberg, p. 341).

22. The total performance of Kant thus left Germany with a powerful lead on the one hand towards that unbelief in religion which in the last reign had been fashionable, and on the other hand a series of prescriptions for compromise; the monarchy all the while throwing its weight against all innovation in doctrine and practice. In 1799 Fichte is found expressing the utmost alarm at the combination of the European despotisms to “rout out freethought”;255 and so strong did the official reaction become that in the opinion of Heine all the German philosophers and their ideas would have been suppressed by wheel and gallows but for Napoleon,256 who intervened in the year 1805. The Prussian despotism being thus weakened, what actually happened was an adaptation of Kant’s teaching to the needs alike of religion and of rationalism. The religious world was assured by it that, though all previous arguments for theism were philosophically worthless, theism was now safe on the fluid basis of feeling. On the other hand, rationalism alike in ethics and in historical criticism was visibly reinforced on all sides. Herder, as before noted, found divinity students grounding their unbelief on Kant’s teaching. StaÜdlin begins the preface to his History and Spirit of Skepticism (1794) with the remark that “Skepticism begins to be a disease of the age”; and Kant is the last in his list of skeptics. At the close of the century “the number of Kantian theologians was legion,” and it was through the Kantian influence that “the various anti-orthodox tendencies which flourished during the period of Illumination were concentrated in Rationalism”257—in the tendency, that is, to bring rational criticism to bear alike on history, dogma, and philosophy. Borowski in 1804 complains that “beardless youths and idle babblers” devoid of knowledge “appeal to Kant’s views respecting Christianity.”258 These views, as we have seen, were partly accommodating, partly subversive in the extreme. Kant regards Jesus as an edifying ideal of perfect manhood, “belief” in whom as such makes a man acceptable to God, because of following a good model. “While he thus treats the historical account of Jesus as of no significance, except as a shell into which the practical reason puts the kernel, his whole argument tends to destroy faith in the historic person of Jesus as given in the gospel, treating the account itself as something whose truthfulness it is not worth while to investigate.”259 In point of fact we find his devoted disciple Erhard declaring: “I regard Christian morality as something which has been falsely imputed to Christianity; and the existence of Christ does not at all seem to me to be a probable historical fact”—this while declaring that Kant had given him “the indescribable comfort of being able to call himself openly, and with a good conscience, a Christian.”260

While therefore a multitude of preachers availed themselves of Kant’s philosophic licence to rationalize in the pulpit and out of it as occasion offered, and yet others opposed them only on the score that all divergence from orthodoxy should be avowed, the dissolution of orthodoxy in Germany was rapid and general; and the anti-supernaturalist handling of Scripture, prepared for as we have seen, went on continuously. Even the positive disparagement of Christianity was carried on by Kantian students; and Hamann, dubbed “the Magician of the North” for his alluring exposition of emotional theism, caused one of them, a tutor, to be brought before a clerical consistory for having taught his pupil to throw all specifically Christian doctrines aside. The tutor admitted the charge, and with four others signed a declaration “that neither morality nor sound reason nor public welfare could exist in connection with Christianity.”261 Hamann’s own influence was too much a matter of literary talent and caprice to be durable; and recent attempts to re-establish his reputation have evoked the deliberate judgment that he has no permanent importance.262

Against the intellectual influence thus set up by Kant there was none in contemporary Germany capable of resistance. Philosophy for the most part went in Kant’s direction, having indeed been so tending before his day. Rationalism of a kind had already had a representative in Chr. A. Crusius (1712–1775), who in treatises on logic and metaphysics opposed alike Leibnitz and Wolff, and taught for his own part a kind of Epicureanism, nominally Christianized. To his school belonged Platner (much admired by Jean Paul Richter, his pupil) and Tetens, “the German Locke,” who attempted a common-sense answer to Hume. His ideal was a philosophy “at once intelligible and religious, agreeable to God and accessible to the people.”263 Platner on the other hand, leaning strongly towards a psychological and anthropological view of human problems,264 opposed first to atheism265 and later to Kantian theism266 a moderate Pyrrhonic skepticism; here following a remarkable lead from the younger Beausobre, who in 1755 had published in French, at Berlin, a treatise entitled Le Pyrrhonisme Raisonnable, taking up the position, among others, that while it is hard to prove the existence of God by reason it is impossible to disprove it. This was virtually the position of Kant a generation later; and it is clear that thus early the dogmatic position was discredited.

23. Some philosophic opposition there was to Kant, alike on intuitionist grounds, as in the cases of Hamann and Herder, and on grounds of academic prejudice, as in the case of Kraus; but the more important thinkers who followed him were all as heterodox as he. In particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who began in authorship by being a Kantian zealot, gave even greater scandal than the Master had done. Fichte’s whole career is a kind of “abstract and brief chronicle” of the movements of thought in Germany during his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of Pforta, we find him and his comrades already influenced by the new currents. “Books imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were secretly obtained, and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great part of the night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland, Lessing, and Goethe were positively forbidden; yet they found their way within the walls, and were eagerly studied.”267 In particular, Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze; and Lessing’s lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought, as distinct from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker, Fichte in his student and tutorial days is found professing at once determinism and a belief in “Providence,” accepting Spinoza and contemplating a village pastorate.268 But while ready to frame a plea for Christianity on the score of its psychic adaptation to “the sinner,” he swerved from the pastorate when it came within sight, declaring that “no purely Christian community now exists.”269 About the age of twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the Kantian philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Reason, and threw over determinism on what appear to be grounds of empirical utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within a year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend that “Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor proved it,” and that he himself has “discovered a new principle, from which all philosophy can easily be deduced.... In a couple of years we shall have a philosophy with all the clearness of geometrical demonstration.”270 He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza’s influence, to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant’s anti-rational ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and claimed, as did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish theism on rational grounds. Rejecting, further, Kant’s reiterated doctrine that religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on the contrary, religion is knowledge, and that “it is only a corrupt society that has to use religion as an impulse to moral action.”

But alike in his Kantian youth and later he was definitely anti-revelationist, however much he conformed to clerical prejudice by attacks upon the movement of freethought. In his “wander-years” he writes with vehemence of the “worse than Spanish inquisition” under which the German clergy are compelled to “cringe and dissemble,” partly because of lack of ability, partly through economic need.271 In his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (“Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation”), published with some difficulty, Kant helping (1792), he in effect negates the orthodox assumption, and, in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but with more directness than they had shown, concludes that belief in revelation “is an element, and an important element, in the moral education of humanity, but it is not a final stage for human thought.”272 In Kant’s bi-frontal fashion, he had professed273 to “silence the opponents of positive religion not less than its dogmatical defenders”; but that result did not follow on either side, and ere long, as a professor at Jena, he was being represented as one of the most aggressive of the opponents. Soon after producing his Critique of all Revelation he had published anonymously two pamphlets vindicating the spirit as distinguished from the conduct of the French Revolution; and upon a young writer known to harbour such ideas enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took the form of charges of atheism. It does not appear to be true that he ever told his students at Jena: “In five years there will be no more Christian religion: reason is our religion”;274 and it would seem that the first charges of atheism brought against him were purely malicious.275 But his career henceforth was one of strife and friction, first with the student-blackguardism which had been rife in the German universities ever since the Thirty Years’ War, and which he partly subdued; then with the academic authorities and the traditionalists, who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings, accused him of attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the worship of reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of Weimar and acquitted; but his wife was insulted in the streets of Jena; his house was riotously attacked in the night; and he ceased to reside there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of Knowledge,” 1794–95) he came into conflict with the Kantians, with whom his rupture steadily deepened on ethical grounds. Again he was accused of atheism in print; and after a defence in which he retorted the charge on the utilitarian theists he resigned.

In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs of the Gods were the Gods’ affair, he found harbourage; and sought to put himself right with the religious world by his book Die Bestimmung des Menschen (“The Vocation of Man,” 1800), wherein he speaks of the Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason so far as human reason is right—the old counter-sense and the old evasion. By this book he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling and the Schlegels; while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who chose another tactic, wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review, and “could hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of it.”276 A few years later Fichte was writing no less contemptuously of Schelling; and in his remaining years, though the Napoleonic wars partly brought him into sympathy with his countrymen, from whom he had turned away in angry alienation, he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and warred upon all round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a religionist “for his own hand,” who rejected all current religion while angrily dismissing current unbelief as “freethinking chatter.”277 If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as that of Spinoza.278 That he was conscious of a vital sunderance between his thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer, in 1805, to the complaint that the people had lost their “religious feeling” (ReligiositÄt). His retort is that a new religious feeling has taken the place of the old;279 and that was the position taken up by the generation which swore by him, in the German manner, as the last had sworn by Kant.

But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all rising out of the “Illumination” of the eighteenth century, have been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of thought than the internecine strife of the systems which insisted on “putting something in the place” of the untenable systems of the past. They have been but so many “toppling spires of cloud.” Fichte, like Herder, broke away from the doctrine of Kant; and later became bitterly opposed to that of his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel in his turn. Schleiermacher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile to Fichte; and Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher280 and developing Fichte, give rise to schools arrayed against each other, of which the anti-Christian was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the product of the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle upon which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends of the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical, and physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.

24. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias of the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to take every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy, provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were many of them with this inexpensive method that they positively resisted the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their special dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents. Bent solely on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential considerations which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of source, and error of literary tradition; while scholars bent on saving “inspiration” were often ready in some measure for such recognitions. These arrests of insight took place alternately on both sides, in the normal way of intellectual progress by alternate movements. All the while, it is the same primary force of reason that sets up the alternate pressures, and the secondary pressures are generated by, and are impossible without, the first.

25. The emancipation, too, was limited in area in the German-speaking world. In Austria, despite a certain amount of French culture, the rule of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century was too effective to permit of any intellectual developments. Maria Theresa, who knew too well that the boundless sexual licence against which she fought had nothing to do with innovating ideas, had to issue a special order to permit the importation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois; and works of more subversive doctrine could not openly pass the frontiers at all. An attempt to bring Lessing to Vienna in 1774, with a view to founding a new literary Academy, collapsed before the opposition; and when Prof. Jahn, of the Vienna University—described as “freethinking, latitudinarian, anti-supernaturalistic”—developed somewhat anti-clerical tendencies in his teaching and writing, he was forced to resign, and died a simple Canon.281 The Emperor Joseph II in his day passed for an unbeliever;282 but there was no general movement. “Austria, in a time of universal effervescence, produced only musicians, and showed zest only for pleasure.”283 Yet among the music-makers was the German-born Beethoven, the greatest master of his age. Kindred in spirit to Goethe, and much more of a revolutionist than he in all things, Beethoven spent the creative part of his life at Vienna without ceasing to be a freethinker.284 “Formal religion he apparently had none.” He copied out a kind of theistic creed consisting of three ancient formulas: “I am that which is”: “I am all that is, that was, that shall be”: “He is alone by Himself; and to Him alone do all things owe their being.” Beyond this his beliefs did not go. When his friend Moscheles at the end of his arrangement of Fidelio wrote: “Fine, with God’s help,” Beethoven added, “O man, help thyself.”285 His reception of the Catholic sacraments in extremis was not his act. He had left to mankind a purer and a more lasting gift than either the creeds or the philosophies of his age.

1 Cp. Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character ... of the Theology of Germany, 1828, p. 79.?

2 Bishop Hurst, History of Rationalism, ed. 1867, p. 56.?

3 Id. pp. 57–58 (last ed. pp. 74–76), citing Tholuck, Deutsche UniversitÄten, i, 145–48, and Dowding, Life of Calixtus, pp. 132–33.?

4 Pusey, p. 113.?

5 Hurst, p. 59.?

6 Cp. Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 303–309. “The result of the Thirty Years’ War was indifference, not only to the Confession, but to religion in general. Ever since that period, secular interests decidedly occupy the foreground” (Kahnis, Internal History of German Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856, p. 21).?

7 Quoted by Bishop Hurst, ed. cited, p. 60 (78).?

8 Preservatio wider die Pest der heutigen Atheisten.?

9 Dated from Rome; but this was a mystification.?

10 Kahnis, p. 125; La Croze, Entretiens, 1711, p. 401.?

11 Even Knutzen seems to have been influenced by Spinoza. PÜnjer, Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437. PÜnjer, however, seems to have exaggerated the connection.?

12 Cp. Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 318 (Eng. tr. ii, 35).?

13 EpistolÆ ad Spinozam et Responsiones, in GfrÖrer, liii.?

14 Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in GfrÖrer’s ed. of the Opera, 1830, pp. lv, lvi.?

15 PÜnjer, as cited, i, 434–30: Lange, last cit. Lange notes that Genthe’s Compendium de impostura religionum, which has been erroneously assigned to the sixteenth century, must belong to the period of Kortholt’s work.?

16 PÜnjer, p. 439; Lange, last cit.; Tholuck, Kirch. Leben, 2 Abth. pp. 57–58.?

17 It was nominally issued at Amsterdam, really at Berlin.?

18 This writer gives (p. 12) a notable list of the forms of atheism: Atheismus directus, indirectus, formalis, virtualis, theoreticus, practicus, inchoatus, consummatus, subtilis, crassus, privativus, negativus, and so on, ad lib.?

19 Cp. Buckle and his Critics, pp. 171–72; PÜnjer, i, 515.?

20 Letter cited by Dr. Latta. Leibniz, 1898, p. 2, note.?

21 Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 26; Martineau, Study of Spinoza, p. 77.?

22 Letter to Thomas, December 23, 1670.?

23 Quoted by Tholuck, as last cited, p. 61. Spener took the same tone.?

24 Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 34; ii, 563; Latta, p. 24; Martineau, p. 75. Cp. Refutation of Spinoza by Leibnitz, ed. by Foucher de Careil. Eng. tr. 1855.?

25 His notable surmise as to gradation of species (see Latta, pp. 38–39) was taken up among the French materialists, but did not then modify current science.?

26 The only lengthy treatise published by him in his lifetime.?

27 M. A. Jacques, intr. to Œuvres de Leibniz, 1846, i, 54–57.?

28 Cp. Tholuck, Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2 Abth. pp. 52–55. Kahnis, coinciding with Erdmann, pronounces that, although Leibnitz “acknowledges the God of the Christian faith, yet his system assigned to Him a very uncertain position only” (Int. Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 26).?

29 Cp. PÜnjer, i, 509, as to his attitude on ritual.?

30 Latta, as cited, p. 16; Vie de Leibnitz, par De Jaucourt, in ed. 1747 of the Essais de ThÉodicÉe, i, 235–39.?

31 As to his virtual deism see PÜnjer, i, 513–15. But he proposed to send Christian missionaries to the heathen. Tholuck, as last cited, p. 55.?

32 Lettres entre Leibnitz et Clarke.?

33 Discours de la conformitÉ de la foi avec la raison, §§ 68–70; Essais sur la bontÉ de Dieu, etc., §§ 50, 61, 164, 180, 292–93.?

34 The Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement humain, refuting Locke, appeared posthumously in 1765. Locke had treated his theistic critic with contempt. (Latta, p. 13.)?

35 Amand Saintes, Hist. crit. du Rationalisme en Allemagne, 1841, ch. vi; Heinrich Schmid, Die Geschichte des Pietismus, 1863, ch. ii.?

36 Saintes, p. 51; cp. Pusey, p. 105, as to “the want of resistance from the school of Pietists to the subsequent invasion of unbelief.”?

37 Hagenbach, German Rationalism, Eng. tr. 1865, p. 9.?

38 Id. p. 39; Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Causes of German Rationalism, 1828, pp. 88, 97; Tholuck, Abriss einer Geschichte des UmwÄlzung ... seit 1750 auf dem Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland, in Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5.?

39 Pusey, pp. 86, 87, 98.?

40 Cp. Pusey, pp. 37–38, 45, 48, 49, 53–54, 79, 101–109; Saintes, pp. 28, 79–80; Hagenbach, pp. 41, 72, 105.?

41 Pusey, p. 110. Cp. Saintes, ch. vi.?

42 Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2 Abth. p. 58.?

43 Id. pp. 56–57.?

44 Vol. i, p. 6.?

45 H. Luden, Christian Thomasius nach seinen Schicksalen und Schriften dargestellt, 1805, p. 7.?

46 Cp. Schmid, Geschichte des Pietismus, pp. 486–88.?

47 Pufendorf’s bulky treatise De Jure NaturÆ et Gentium was published at Lund, where he was professor, in 1672. The shorter De Officio hominis et civis (also Lund, 1673) is a condensation and partly a vindication of the other, and this it was that convinced Thomasius. As to Pufendorf’s part in the transition from theological to rational moral philosophy, see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iv, 171–78. He is fairly to be bracketed with Cumberland; but Hallam hardly recognizes that it was the challenge of Hobbes that forced the change.?

48 FreimÜthige, lustige und ernsthafte, jedoch vernunft- und gesetzmÄssige Gedanken, oder MonatgesprÄche Über allerhand, vornehmlich Über neue BÜcher. There had been an earlier Acta Eruditorum, in Latin, published at Leipzig, and a French Ephemerides savantes, Hamburg, 1686. Other German and French periodicals soon followed that of Thomasius. Luden, p. 162.?

49 Schmid, pp. 488–92, gives a sketch of some of the contents.?

50 Pusey, p. 86, note. It is surprising that Pusey does not make more account of Thomasius’s naturalistic treatment of polygamy and suicide, which he showed to be not criminal in terms of natural law.?

51 Compare Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Lit. § 81 (ed. 1880, pp. 90–91); Pusey, as cited, p. 114. note; Enfield’s Hist. of Philos. (abst. of Brucker’s Hist. crit. philos.), 1840. pp. 610–612; Ueberweg, ii, 115; and Schlegel’s note in Reid’s Mosheim, p. 790, with Karl Hillebrand, Six Lect. on the Hist. of German Thought, 1880, pp. 64–65. There is a modern monograph by A. Nicoladoni, Christian Thomasius; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der AufklÄrung, 1888.?

52 Baron de Bielfeld, ProgrÈs des Allemands, 3e Éd. 1767, i, 24. “Before Thomasius,” writes Bielfeld, “an old woman could not have red eyes without running the risk of being accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake.”?

53 Schmid, pp. 493–97. Thomasius’s principal writings on this theme were: Vom Recht evangelischen FÜrsten in Mitteldingen (1692); Vom Recht evangelischen FÜrsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (1696); Vom Recht evangelischen FÜrsten gegen Ketzer (1697).?

54 Ec. Hist. 17 Cent. sect. ii, pt. ii, ch. i, §§ 11, 14. It is noteworthy that the Pietists at Halle did not scruple to ally themselves for a time with Thomasius, he being opposed to the orthodox party. Kahnis, Internal Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 114.?

55 Pusey, as cited, p. 121. Cp. p. 113.?

56 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrh., 2te Aufl. i, 164. (This matter is not in the abridged translation.)?

57 See the furious account of him by Mosheim, 17 C. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. i, § 33.?

58 Hagenbach, last cit. p. 169.?

59 Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Th. iii, Kap. 1; Bruno Bauer, Einfluss des englischen QuÄkerthums auf die deutsche Cultur und auf das englisch-russische Projekt einer Weltkirche, 1878, pp. 41–44.?

60 Pref. to French tr. of the Meditationes, 1770, pp. xii–xvii. Lau died in 1740.?

61 Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 10.?

62 Trans. in English, 1750.?

63 Hagenbach, tr. pp. 35–36; Saintes, p. 61; Kahnis, as cited, p. 114.?

64 Hagenbach, pp. 37–39. It is to be observed (Tholuck, Abriss, p. 23) that the Wolffian philosophy was reinstated in Prussia by royal mandate in 1739, a year before the accession of Frederick the Great. But we know that Frederick championed him.?

65 Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 5.?

66 Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 6.?

67 Kahnis, p. 55.?

68 PÜnjer, i, 544. Cp. Tholuck, Abriss, pp. 19–22.?

69 Tholuck, Abriss, p. 22. Schmid was for a time supposed to be the author of the WolfenbÜttel Fragments of Reimarus (below, p. 327).?

70 Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, 1699–1700, 2 tom. fol.—fuller ed. 3 tom. fol. 1740. Compare Mosheim’s angry account of it with Murdock’s note in defence: Reid’s ed. p. 804. Bruno Bauer describes it as epoch-making (Einfluss des englischen QuÄkerthums, p. 42). This history had a great influence on Goethe in his teens, leading him, he says, to the conviction that he, like so many other men, should have a religion of his own, which he goes on to describe. It was a re-hash of Gnosticism. (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. viii; Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 344 sq.)?

71 Cp. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 171: PÜnjer, i, 279.?

72 Die GÖttlichkeit der Vernunft.?

73 Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 2: Saintes, pp. 85–86; PÜnjer, p. 442. It is interesting to find Edelmann supplying a formula latterly utilized by the so-called “New Theology” in England—the thesis that “the reality of everything which exists is God,” and that there can therefore be no atheists, since he who recognizes the universe recognizes God.?

74 Naigeon, by altering the words of Diderot, caused him to appear one of the exceptions; but he was not. See Rosenkranz, Diderot’s Leben und Werke. Vorb. p. vii.?

75 Kahnis, pp. 128–29. Edelmann’s Life was written by Pratje. Historische Nachrichten von Edelmann’s Leben, 1755. It gives a list of replies to his writings (p. 205 sq.). Apropos of the first issue of Strauss’s Leben Jesu, a volume of Erinnerungen of Edelmann was published at Clausthal in 1839 by W. Elster; and Strauss in his Dogmatik avowed the pleasure with which he had made the acquaintance of so interesting a writer. A collection of extracts from Edelmann’s works, entitled Der neu erÖffnete Edelmann, was published at Bern in 1847; and the Unschuldige Wahrheiten was reprinted in 1846. His Autobiography, written in 1752, was published in 1849.?

76 Betrachtungen Über die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der Religion. Another apologetic work of the period marked by rational moderation and tolerance was the Vertheidigten Glauben der Christen of the Berlin court-preacher A. W. F. Sack (1754).?

77 Art. by Wagenmann in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.?

78 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 355.?

79 PÜnjer, i, 542.?

80 Kurz, Hist. of the Christian Church from the Reformation, Eng. tr. ii, 274. A Jesuit, A. Merz, wrote four replies to Jerusalem. One was entitled Frag ob durch die biblische SimplicitÄt allein ein Freydenker oder Deist bekehret ... werden kÖnne (“Can a Freethinker or Deist be converted by Biblical Simplicity alone?”), 1775.?

81 Cp. Hagenbach, i, 353; tr. p. 120. Jerusalem was the father of the gifted youth whose suicide (1775) moved Goethe to write The Sorrows of Werther, a false presentment of the real personality, which stirred Lessing (his affectionate friend) to publish a volume of the dead youth’s essays, in vindication of his character. The father had considerable influence in purifying German style. Cp. Goethe, Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. ii, B. vii; Werke, ed. 1866. xi, 272; and Hagenbach, i, 354.?

82 Goethe, as last cited, pp. 268–69.?

83 Lechler, Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 447–52. The translations began with that of Tindal (1741), which made a great sensation.?

84 Pusey, pp. 125, 127, citing Twesten; Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, p. 36, citing Ernesti. Thorschmid’s Freidenker Bibliothek, issued in 1765–67, collected both translations and refutations. Lechler, p. 451.?

85 Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i. 405 (Eng. tr. ii, 146–47).?

86 Lange, i, 347, 399 (Eng. tr. ii, 76, 137).?

87 Lange, i, 396–97 (ii, 134–35).?

88 Goethe tells of having seen in his boyhood, at Frankfort, an irreligious French romance publicly burned, and of having his interest in the book thereby awakened. But this seems to have been during the French occupation. (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. iv; Werke, xi, 146.)?

89 Id. B. iv, end.?

90 Translated into English 1780; 2nd ed. 1793. The translator claims for Haller great learning (2nd ed. p. xix). He seems in reality to have had very little, as he represents that Jesus in his day “was the only teacher who recommended chastity to men” (p. 82).?

91 Rettung der Offenbarung gegen die EinwÜrfe der Freigeister. Haller wrote under a similar title, 1775–76.?

92 Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, iv, 599.?

93 Gostwick, p. 15.?

94 Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. viii; Werke, xi, 329.?

95 Schlosser, Hist. of Eighteenth Cent., Eng. tr. 1843. i, 150; Hagenbach, tr. p. 66.?

96 Hagenbach, tr. p. 63.?

97 Id., Kirchengeschichte, i, 232.?

98 Kahnis, p. 43; Tholuck, Abriss, p. 34.?

99 See the extracts of BÜchner, Zwei gekrÖnte Freidenker, 1890, pp. 45–47.?

100 ThiÉbault, Mes Souvenirs de Vingt Ans de SÉjour À Berlin, 2e Édit. 1805, i, 126–28. See i, 355–56, ii, 78–82, as to the baselessness of the stories (e.g., Pusey, Histor. Inq. into Ger. Rationalism, p. 123) that Frederick changed his views in old age. ThiÉbault, a strict Catholic, is emphatic in his negation: “The persons who assert that [his principles] became more religious ... have either lied or been themselves mistaken.” Carlyle naturally detests ThiÉbault. The rumour may have arisen out of the fact that in his Examen critique du SystÈme de la Nature Frederick counter-argues d’Holbach’s impeachment of Christianity. The attack on kings gave him a fellow-feeling with the Church.?

101 Cp. the argument of Faure, Hist. de Saint Louis, 1866, i, 242–43; ii, 597.?

102 Examen de l’Essai sur les prÉjugÉs, 1769. See the passage in LÉvy-Bruhl, L’Allemagne depuis Leibniz, p. 89).?

103 G. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, 11te Aufl. p. 99.?

104 Zur Gesch. der Relig. und Philos. in Deutschland—Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 63–64. Goethe’s blame (W. und D., B. vii) is passed on purely literary grounds.?

105 Hagenbach, tr. pp. 103–104; Cairns, p. 177.?

106 This post he left to become secretary of the Academy of Painting.?

107 Cited by PÜnjer, i, 545–46.?

108 Id. p. 546.?

109 Hagenbach, tr. pp. 100–103; Saintes, pp. 91–92; PÜnjer, p. 536; Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 7.?

110 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 298, 351.?

111 Id. i, 294 sq.?

112 The book is remembered in France by reason of Eberhard’s amusing mistake of treating as a serious production of the Sorbonne the skit in which Turgot derided the Sorbonne’s findings against Marmontel’s BÉlisaire.?

113 Hagenbach, tr. p. 109.?

114 Eberhard, however, is respectfully treated by Lessing in his discussion on Leibnitz’s view as to eternal punishment.?

115 Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 8.?

116 Saintes, pp. 92–93.?

117 Cp. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 348, 363.?

118 Id. i, 367; tr. pp. 124–25; Saintes, p. 94; Kahnis, p. 45. Pusey (150–51, note) speaks of Teller and Spalding as belonging, with Nicolai, Mendelssohn, and others, to a “secret institute, whose object was to remodel religion and alter the form of government.” This seems to be a fantasy.?

119 So Steffens, cited by Hagenbach, tr. p. 124.?

120 P. Gastrow, Joh. Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 45. See Pusey, 140–41, note, for Semler’s account of the rigid and unreasoning orthodoxy against which he reacted. (Citing Semler’s Lebenschreibung, ii, 121–61.) Semler, however, records that Baumgarten, one of the theological professors at Halle, would in expansive moods defend theism and make light of theology (Lebenschreibung, i, 103). Cp. Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, pp. 12, 18. Pusey notes that “many of the principal innovators had been pupils of Baumgarten” (p. 132, citing Niemeyer).?

121 Cp. Dr. G. Karo, Johann Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 25; Saintes, pp. 129–31.?

122 Cp. Gostwick, p. 51; PÜnjer, i, 561.?

123 Karo, p. 44.?

124 Cp. Saintes, p. 132 sq.?

125 Cp. Karo, pp. 3, 8, 16, 28.?

126 Over a hundred and seventy in all. PÜnjer, i, 560; Gastrow, p. 637.?

127 Karo, pp. 5–6.?

128 Gastrow, p. 223.?

129 Pusey, p. 142; A. S. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 313.?

130 Cp. Karo, p. 5 sq.; StÄudlin, cited by Tholuck, Abriss, p. 39.?

131 Kahnis. p. 116.?

132 Wahre GrÜnde wanum Gott die Offenbarung nicht mit augenscheinlichen Beweisen versehen hat.?

133 Die GÖttliche Eingebung, 1771.?

134 Beweis das Gott die Menschen bereits durch seine Offenbarung in der Natur zur Seligkeit fuhre.?

135 Gostwick, p. 53; PÜnjer, i, 546, note.?

136 Cp. Kahnis, pp. 132–36, as to Bahrdt’s early morals.?

137 Geschichte seines Lebens, etc. 1700–91, iv, 119.?

138 See below, p. 331.?

139 Geschichte seines Lebens, Kap. 22; ii, 223 sq.?

140 Baur, Gesch. der chr. Kirche, iv. 597.?

141 Translated into English in 1789.?

142 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Abschn. I—Werke, 1838 p. 239 (Eng. tr. 1838, pp. 50–51); Rousseau, Contrat Social, liv, iv, ch. viii, near end; Locke, as cited above, p. 117. Cp. BartholmÈss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, 1855, i, 145; Baur, as last cited.?

143 See his Werke, ed. 1866, v, 317—Aus dem Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, 49ter Brief.?

144 If Lessing’s life were sketched in the spirit in which orthodoxy has handled that of Bahrdt, it could be made unedifying enough. Even Goethe remarks that Lessing “enjoyed himself in a disorderly tavern life” (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. vii); and all that Hagenbach maliciously charges against Basedow in the way of irregularity of study is true of him. On that and other points, usually glossed over, see the sketch in Taylor’s Historic Survey of German Poetry, 1830, i, 332–37. All the while, Lessing is an essentially sound-hearted and estimable personality; and he would probably have been the last man to echo the tone of the orthodox towards the personal life of the freethinkers who went further in unbelief than he.?

145 E.g. his fable The Bull and the Calf (Fabeln, ii, 5), À propos of the clergy and Bayle.?

146 Sime, Life of Lessing, 1877, i, 102.?

147 E.g. his early notice of Diderot’s Lettre sur les Aveugles. Sime, i, 94.?

148 Dramaturgie, StÜck 7.?

149 Sime, i, 103–109.?

150 Sime, i, 73, 107; ii, 253.?

151 In his Gedanke Über die Herrnhuter, written in 1750. See Adolf Stahr’s Lessing, sein Leben und seine Werke, 7te Aufl. ii, 183 sq.?

152 Julian Schmidt puts the case sympathetically: “He had learned in his father’s house what value the pastoral function may have for the culture of the people. He was bibelfest, instructed in the history of his church, Protestant in spirit, full of genuine reverence for Luther, full of high respect for historical Christianity, though on reading the Fathers he could say hard things of the Church.” Gesch. der deutschen Litteratur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit, ii (1886), 326.?

153 Taylor, as cited, p. 361.?

154 Sime, i, 73.?

155 See Lessing’s rather crude comedy, Der Freigeist, and Sime’s Life, i, 41–42, 72, 77.?

156 Cp. his letters to his brother of which extracts are given by Sime, ii, 191–92.?

157 Sime, ii, 188.?

158 As to the authorship see Saintes, pp. 101–102; and Sime’s Life of Lessing, i, 261–62, where the counter-claim is rejected.?

159 Zur Geschichte und Literatur, aus dem 4ten Beitr.—Werke, vi. 142 sq. See also in his Theologische Streitschriften the Axiomata written against Pastor Goeze. Cp. Schwarz, Lessing als Theologe, 1854, pp. 146, 151; and Pusey, as cited, p. 51. note.?

160 Compare the regrets of Pusey (pp. 51, 153), Cairns (p. 195), Hagenbach (pp. 89–97), and Saintes (p. 100).?

161 SÄmmtliche Schriften, ed. Lachmann, 1857, xi (2), 248. Sime (ii, 190) mistranslates this passage; and Schmidt (ii, 326) mutilates it by omissions. Fontanes (Le Christianisme moderne: Étude sur Lessing, 1867, p. 171) paraphrases it very loosely.?

162 Sime, ii, 190.?

163 Stahr, ii, 239; Sime, ii. 189.?

164 See Sime, ii, 222, 233: Stahr, ii, 254. Hettner, an admirer, calls the early Christianity of Reason a piece of sophistical dialectic. Litteraturgeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts, ed. 1872, iii. 588–89.?

165 Stahr, ii, 243. Lessing said the report to this effect was a lie; but this and other mystifications appear to have been by way of fulfilling his promise of secrecy to the Reimarus family. Cairns, pp. 203, 209. Cp. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, note 29.?

166 See it analysed by BartholmÈss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, i, 147–67; and by Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historic Jesus (trans. of Von Reimarus zu Wrede), 1910.?

167 Gostwick, p. 47; BartholmÈss, i, 166. His book was translated into English (The Principal Truths of Natural Religion Defended and Illustrated) in 1766; into Dutch in 1758; in part into French in 1768; and seven editions of the original had appeared by 1798.?

168 Stahr, ii, 241–44.?

169 Id. ii, 245.?

170 The statement that, in Lessing’s age, “in north Germany men were able to think and write freely” (Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit., p. 80) is thus seen to be highly misleading.?

171 Von dem Zwecke, Jesus und seiner JÜnger, Braunschweig, 1778.?

172 Taylor, Histor. Survey of German Poetry, i, 365.?

173 Stahr, ii, 253–54.?

174 Cp. Introd. to Willis’s trans. of Nathan. The play is sometimes attacked as being grossly unfair to Christianity. (E.g. CrouslÉ, Lessing, 1863, p. 206.) The answer to this complaint is given by Sime, ii, 252 sq.?

175 See Cairns, Appendix, Note I; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 149–62; Sime, ii, 299–303; and Stahr, ii, 219–30, giving the testimony of Jacobi. Cp. PÜnjer, i, 564–85. But Heine laughingly adjures Moses Mendelssohn, who grieved so intensely over Lessing’s Spinozism, to rest quiet in his grave: “Thy Lessing was indeed on the way to that terrible error ... but the Highest, the Father in Heaven, saved him in time by death. He died a good deist, like thee and Nicolai and Teller and the Universal German Library” (Zur Gesch. der Rel. und Philos. in Deutschland, B. ii, near end.—Werke, ed. 1876, iii. 69).?

176 See in Stahr, ii, 184–85. the various characterizations of his indefinite philosophy. Stahr’s own account of him as anticipating the moral philosophy of Kant is as overstrained as the others. Gastrow, an admirer, expresses wonder (Johann Salomo Semler, p. 188) at the indifference of Lessing to the critical philosophy in general.?

177 Sime, ii, ch. xxix, gives a good survey.?

178 Letter to his brother, Feb., 1778.?

179 Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (the second) Einleitung, § 14.?

180 Hurst, History of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 130. “It was a popular belief, as an organ of pious opinion announced to its readers, that at his death the devil came and carried him away like a second Faust.” Sime, ii, 330.?

181 Cited by Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 125. Outside Berlin, however, matters went otherwise till late in the century. Kurz tells (Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, ii, 461 b) that “the indifference of the learned towards native literature was so great that even in the year 1761 Abbt could write that in Rinteln there was nobody who knew the names of Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing.”?

182 Karl Hillebrand, Lectures on the Hist. of German Thought, 1880, p. 109.?

183 Deutsche Merkur, Jan. and March, 1788 (Werke, ed. 1797, xxix, 1–144; cited by StÄudlin, Gesch. der Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus, 1826, p. 233).?

184 Kurtz, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. 1864, ii, 224.?

185 T. C. Perthes, Das Deutsche Staatsleben vor der Revolution, 262 sq., cited by Kahnis pp. 58–59.?

186 See above, pp. 321, 328.?

187 Kant distinguishes explicitly between “rationalists,” as thinkers who would not deny the possibility of a revelation, and “naturalists,” who did. See the Religion innerhalb der grenzen der blossen Vernunft, StÜck iv, Th. i. This was in fact the standing significance of the term in Germany for a generation.?

188 Letter to his brother, February 2, 1774.?

189 Known as Zopf-Schulz from his wearing a pigtail in the fashion then common among the laity. “An old insolent rationalist,” Kurtz calls him (ii, 270).?

190 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 372; Gostwick, pp. 52, 54.?

191 Philosophische Betrachtung Über Theologie und Religion Überhaupt, und Über die JÜdische insonderheit, 1784.?

192 PÜnjer, i, 544–45.?

193 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. ix, Bohn ed. p. 71.?

194 See the details in Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 368–72; Kahnis, p. 60.?

195 Marokkanische Briefe. Aus dem Arabischen. Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1785. The Letters purport to be written by one of the Moroccan embassy at Vienna in 1783.?

196 Briefe, xxi.?

197 P. 49.?

198 P. 232.?

199 Das zum Theil einzige wahre System der christlichen Religion. It had been composed in its author’s youth under the title False Reasonings of the Christian Religion; and the MS. was lost through the bankruptcy of a Dutch publisher.?

200 Noack, Th. III, Kap. 9, p. 194.?

201 Mauvillon further collaborated with Mirabeau, and became a great admirer of the French Revolution. He left freethinking writings among his remains. They are not described by Noack, and I have been unable to meet with them.?

202 It was a test of the depth of the freethinking spirit in the men of the day. Semler justified the edict; Bahrdt vehemently denounced it. Hagenbach, i, 372.?

203 Cp. Crabb Robinson’s Diary, iii, 48; Martineau, Study of Spinoza, p. 328; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 162–68. Bishop Hurst laments (Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 145) that Herder’s early views as to the mission of Christ “were, in common with many other evangelical views, doomed to an unhappy obscuration upon the advance of his later years by frequent intercourse with more skeptical minds.”?

204 On the clerical opposition to him at Weimar on this score see DÜntzer, Life of Goethe, Eng. tr. 1883, i, 317.?

205 Cp. Kronenberg, Herder’s Philosophie nach ihrem Entwickelungsgang, 1889.?

206 Kronenberg, p. 90.?

207 Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, 1882, pp. 381–87; Kronenberg, Herder’s Philosophie, pp. 91, 103.?

208 Kahnis, p. 78, and Erdmann, as there cited. Erdmann finds the pantheism of Herder to be, not Spinozistic as he supposed, but akin to that of Bruno and his Italian successors.?

209 The chief sample passages in his works are the poem Das GÖttliche and the speech of Faust in reply to Gretchen in the garden scene. It was the surmised pantheism of Goethe’s poem Prometheus that, according to Jacobi, drew from Lessing his avowal of a pantheistic leaning. The poem has even an atheistic ring; but we have Goethe’s own account of the influence of Spinoza on him from his youth onwards (Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. III, B. xiv; Th. IV, B. xvi). See also his remarks on the “natural” religion of “conviction” or rational inference, and that of “faith” (Glaube) or revelationism, in B. iv (Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 134); also Kestner’s account of his opinions at twenty-three, in DÜntzer’s Life, Eng. tr. i, 185; and again his letter to Jacobi, January 6, 1813, quoted by DÜntzer, ii, 290.?

210 See the Alt-Testamentliches Appendix to the West-Oestlicher Divan.?

211 Heine, Zur Gesch. der Rel. u. Phil. in Deutschland (Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 92).?

212 Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. I, B. iv (Werke, ed. 1886, xi, 123).?

213 Id. Th. III, B. xiv, par. 20 (Werke, xii, 159).?

214 Id. pp. 165, 186.?

215 Id. p. 184.?

216 Cited by Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 50.?

217 Compare, as to the hostility he aroused, DÜntzer, i, 152, 317, 329–30, 451; ii, 291 note, 455, 461; Eckermann, GesprÄche mit Goethe, MÄrz 6, 1830; and Heine, last cit. p. 93.?

218 Eckermann, MÄrz 11, 1832.?

219 Id. Feb. 4, 1829.?

220 Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 150.?

221 Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. III, B. viii; Werke, xi, 334.?

222 Cp., however, the estimate of Krause, above, p. 207. Virchow, GÖthe als Naturforscher, 1861, goes into detail on the biological points, without reaching any general estimate.?

223 Remarked by Hagenbach, tr. p. 238.?

224 Letter to Goethe, August 17, 1795 (Briefwechsel, No. 87). The passage is given in Carlyle’s essay on Schiller.?

225 In Die Sendung Moses.?

226 See the Philosophische Briefe.?

227 Carlyle translates, “No Rights of Man,” which was probably the idea.?

228 Letter to Goethe, July 9, 1796 (Briefwechsel, No. 188). “It is evident that he was estranged not only from the church but from the fundamental truths of Christianity” (Rev. W. Baur, Religious Life of Germany, Eng. tr. 1872, p. 22). F. C. Baur has a curious page in which he seeks to show that, though Schiller and Goethe cannot be called Christian in a natural sense, the age was not made un-Christian by them to such an extent as is commonly supposed (Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 46).?

229 Cp. Tieftrunk, as cited by Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, p. 225.?

230 Id. p. 376. In his early essay TrÄume eines Geistersehers, erlÄutert durch TrÄume der Metaphysik (1766) this attitude is clear. It ends with an admiring quotation from Voltaire’s Candide.?

231 Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist AufklÄrung? in the Berliner Monatschrift, Dec. 1784, rep. in Kant’s VorzÜgliche kleine Schriften, 1833, Bd. i.?

232 For an able argument vindicating the unity of Kant’s system, however, see Prof. Adamson, The Philosophy of Kant, 1879, p. 21 sq., as against Lange. With the verdict in the text compare that of Heine, Zur Gesch. der Relig. u. Philos. in Deutschland, B. iii (Werke, as cited, iii, 81–82); that of Prof. G. Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. i, 1905, p. 94 sq.; and that of Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel, rep. in vol. entitled The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays, 1907, pp. 264, 266.?

233 Stuckenberg, pp. 225, 332.?

234 Cp. Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben ... dargestellt, 1877, i, 33, 48; Kronenberg, Herder’s Philosophie, p. 10.?

235 Cp. Hagenbach, Eng. tr. p. 223.?

236 Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, StÜck iii, Abth. i, § 5; Abth. ii (ed. 1793, pp. 145–46, 188–89).?

237 Work cited, StÜck ii, Abschn. ii, Allg. Anm. p. 108 sq.?

238 E.g. StÜck iv, Th. i, preamble (p. 221, ed. cited).?

239 Id. StÜck iii, Abth. ii, Allg. Anm.: “This belief,” he avows frankly enough, “involves no mystery” (p. 199). In a note to the second edition he suggests that there must be a basis in reason for the idea of a Trinity, found as it is among so many ancient and primitive peoples. The speculation is in itself evasive, for he does not give the slightest reason for thinking the Goths capable of such metaphysic.?

240 StÜck iii, Abth. i, § 5; pp. 137, 139.?

241 StÜck iii, Abth. ii, p. 178.?

242 Kant explicitly concurs in Warburton’s thesis that the Jewish lawgiver purposely omitted all mention of a future state from the Pentateuch; since such belief must be supposed to have been current in Jewry. But he goes further, and pronounces that simple Judaism contains “absolutely no religious belief.” To this complexion can philosophic compromise come.?

243 Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, p. 329.?

244 Borowski, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kant’s, 1804, cited by Stuckenberg, p. 357.?

245 Stuckenberg, pp. 359–60.?

246 Stuckenberg, p. 361.?

247 Cp. F. C. Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 63–66.?

248 The first, on “Radical Evils,” appeared in a Berlin monthly in April, 1792, and was then reprinted separately.?

249 Stuckenberg, p. 361.?

250 Ueberweg, ii, 141; Stuckenberg, p. 363.?

251 Stuckenberg, pp. 304–309.?

252 Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, StÜck iv, Th. 2.?

253 Cp. Stuckenberg, p. 332; Seth Pringle-Pattison, as cited.?

254 Stuckenberg, pp. 340, 346, 354, 468.?

255 Letter of May 22, 1799, reproduced by Heine.?

256 Zur Gesch. der Rel. u. Philos. in Deutschland. Werke, as cited, iii, 96, 98.?

257 Stuckenberg, p. 311.?

258 Id. p. 357.?

259 Stuckenberg, p. 351. “It is only necessary,” adds Stuckenberg (p. 468, note 142), “to develop Kant’s hints in order to get the views of Strauss in his Leben Jesu.”?

260 Id. p. 375. Erhard stated that Pestalozzi shared his views on Christian ethics.?

261 Stuckenberg, p. 358.?

262 Cp. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, 11te Aufl. p. 119; R. Unger, Hamann und die AufklÄrung, 1911.?

263 BartholmÈss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, 1855, i, 136–40.?

264 In demanding a “history of the human conscience” (Neue Anthropologie, 1790) Platner seems to have anticipated the modern scientific approach to religion.?

265 GesprÄche Über den Atheismus, 1781.?

266 Lehrbuch der Logik und Metaphysik, 1795.?

267 W. Smith, Memoir of Fichte, 2nd ed. p. 10.?

268 Id. pp. 12, 13, 20, 23, 25, etc.?

269 Id. pp. 34–35.?

270 Smith, p. 94.?

271 Id. p. 34.?

272 Adamson, Fichte, 1881, p. 32; Smith, as cited, pp. 64–65.?

273 Letter to Kant, cited by Smith, p. 63.?

274 Asserted by Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 386.?

275 Cp. Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 132–33; Adamson, Fichte, pp. 50–67; W. Smith, Memoir of Fichte, pp. 106–107.?

276 Adamson, pp. 71, 73.?

277 GrundzÜge des gegenwÄrtigen Zeitalters, 16te Vorles. ed. 1806, pp. 509–510.?

278 Compare the complaints of Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. pp. 136–37, and of Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Bohn ed. p. 72. Fichte’s theory, says Coleridge (after praising him as the destroyer of Spinozism), “degenerated into a crude egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy, while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exotericÉ to call God.” Heine (as last cited, p. 75) insists that Fichte’s Idealism is “more Godless than the crassest Materialism.”?

279 GrundzÜge, as cited, p. 502.?

280 Cp. Seth Pringle-Pattison, as cited, p. 280, note.?

281 Kurtz, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. 1864, ii, 225. Jahn was well in advance of his age in his explanation of Joshua’s cosmic miracle as the mistaken literalizing of a flight of poetic phrase. See the passage in his Introduction to the Book of Joshua, cited by Rowland Williams, The Hebrew Prophets, ii (1871), 31, note 33.?

282 R. N. Bain, Gustavus Vasa and his Contemporaries, 1894, i. 265–68.?

283 A. Sorel, L’Europe et la rÉvolution franÇaise, i (1885), p. 458.?

284 See articles on Beethoven by Macfarren in Dictionary of Universal Biography, and by Grove in the Dictionary of Music and Musicians.?

285 Grove, art. cited, ed. 1904, i, 224.?