A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 20 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 20Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 2)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 20
Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (part 2)
RobertsonEnglish
11. In Germany, as we have seen, the relative selectness of culture, the comparative aloofness of the "enlightened" from the mass of the people, made possible after the War of Independence a certain pietistic reaction, in the absence of any popular propagandist machinery or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In the opinion of an evangelical authority, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "through modern enlightenment (Aufklärung) the people had become indifferent to the Church; the Bible was regarded as a merely human book, the Saviour merely as a person who had lived and taught long ago, not as one whose almighty presence is with his people still." According to the same authority, "before the war, the indifference to the word of God which prevailed among the upper classes had penetrated to the lower; but after it, a desire for the Scriptures was everywhere felt." This involves an admission that the "religion of the heart" propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion "to the educated among its despisers" (1799) was not really a Christian revival at all. Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that in Prussia there was almost no attendance on public worship, and the clergy had fallen into profound discredit. A pietistic movement had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy; and seeing that the freethinking of the previous generation had been in part associated with French opinion, it was natural that on this side anti-French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more "national" forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the tone of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been more religious than that of previous years. Inasmuch, however, as the "enlightenment" of the scholarly class was maintained, and applied anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn back the course of progress. "When the third centenary commemoration, in 1817, of the Reformation approached, the Prussian people were in a state of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious matters." Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation period there went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an anti-rationalist declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at Dresden in 1811, between the rationalists or "Friends of Light" and the Scripturalists of the old school; and the effect was a general disintegration of orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue of, the governmental policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging their opponents in the way of official appointments. The Prussian measure (1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist was treated as a historical commemoration, tended to the same consequences, though it also revived old Lutheran zeal; and when the new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling was substantially non-religious. "In the south of Germany especially the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary tendencies produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of religious sentiment." The bulk of society showed entire indifference to worship, the churches being everywhere deserted; and "atheism was openly avowed, and Christianity ridiculed as the invention of priestcraft." One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to "effect a union among all who retained any measure of Christian belief, in order to raise up their national religion and faith from the lowest state into which it has ever fallen since the French Revolution."
But the clerical effort evoked a counter effort. Already, in 1846, official interference with freedom of utterance led to the formation of a "free religious" society by Dr. Rupp, of Königsberg, one of the "Friends of Light" in the State Church; and he was followed by Wislicenus of Halle, a Hegelian, and by Uhlich of Magdeburg. As a result of the determined pressure, social and official, which ensued on the collapse of the revolution of 1848, these societies failed to develop on the scale of their beginnings; and that of Magdeburg, which at the outset had 7,000 members, has latterly only 500; though that of Berlin has nearly 4,000. There is further a Freidenker Bund, with branches in many towns; and the two organizations, with their total membership of some fifty thousand, may be held to represent the militant side of popular freethought in Germany. This, however, constitutes only a fraction of the total amount of passive rationalism. There is a large measure of enlightenment in both the working and the middle classes; and the ostensible force of orthodoxy among the official and conformist middle class is in many respects illusory. The German police laws put a rigid check on all manner of platform and press propaganda which could be indicted as hurting the feelings of religious people; so that a jest at the Holy Coat of Trèves could even in recent years send a journalist to jail, and the platform work of the militant societies is closely trammelled. Yet there are, or have been, over a dozen journals which so far as may be take the freethought side; and the whole stress of Bismarckian reaction and of official orthodoxy under the present Kaiser has never availed to make the tone of popular thought pietistic. Karl Marx, the prophet of the German Socialist movement (1818-1883), laid it down as part of its mission "to free consciousness from the religious spectre"; and his two most influential followers in Germany, Bebel and Liebknecht, were avowed atheists, the former even going so far as to avow officially in the Reichstag that "the aim of our party is on the political plane the republican form of State; on the economic, Socialism; and on the plane which we term the religious, atheism"; though the party attempts no propaganda of the latter order. "Christianity and Social-Democracy," said Bebel again, "are opposed as fire and water."
Some index to the amount of popular freethought that normally exists under the surface in Germany is furnished, further, by the strength of the German freethought movement in the United States, where, despite the tendency to the adoption of the common speech, there grew up in the last quarter of the nineteenth century many German freethinking societies, a German federation of atheists, and a vigorous popular organ, Der Freidenker.
Thus, under the sounder moral and economic conditions of the life of the proletariate in Germany, straightforward rationalism, as apart from propaganda, is becoming among them more and more the rule. The bureaucratic control of education forces religious teaching in the common schools; and there is no "conscience clause" for unbelieving parents. A Protestant pastor at the end of the century made an investigation into the state of religious opinion among the working Socialists of some provincial towns and rural districts, and found everywhere a determined attitude of rationalism. The formula of the Social Democrats, "Religion is a private matter," he bitterly perceives to carry the implication "a private matter for the fools"; and while he holds that the belief in a speedy collapse of the Christian religion is latterly less common than formerly among the upper and middle classes, he complains that the Socialists are not similarly enlightened. Bebel's drastic teaching as to the economic and social conditions of the rise of Christianity, and the materialistic theory of history set forth by Marx and Engels, he finds generally accepted. Not only do most of the party leaders declare themselves to be without religion, but those who do not so declare themselves are so no less. Nor is the unbelief a mere sequel to the Socialism: often the development is the other way. The opinion is almost universal, further, that the clergy in general do not believe what they teach. Atheists are numerous among the peasantry; more numerous among the workers in the provincial towns; and still more numerous in the large towns; and while many take a sympathetic view of Jesus as a man and teacher, not a few deny his historic existence --a view set forth in non-Socialist circles also.
12. Under the widely-different political conditions in Russia and the Scandinavian States it is the more significant that in all alike rationalism is latterly common among the educated classes. In Norway the latter perhaps include a larger proportion of working people than can be so classed even in Germany; and rationalism is relatively hopeful, though social freedom is still far from perfect. It is the old story of toleration for a dangerously well-placed freethought, and intolerance for that which reaches the common people. In Russia rationalism has before it the task of transmuting a system of autocracy into one of self-government. In no European country, perhaps, is rationalism more general among the educated classes; and in none is there a greater mass of popular ignorance. The popular icon-worship in Moscow can hardly be paralleled outside of Asia. On the other hand, the aristocracy became Voltairean in the eighteenth century, and has remained more or less incredulous since, though it now joins hands with the Church; while the democratic movement, in its various phases of socialism, constitutionalism, and Nihilism, has been markedly anti-religious since the second quarter of the century. Subsidiary revivals of mysticism, such as are chronicled in other countries, are of course to be seen in Russia; but the instructed class, the intelliguentia, is essentially naturalistic in its cast of thought. This state of things subsists despite the readiness of the government to suppress the slightest sign of official heterodoxy in the universities. The struggle is thus substantially between the spirit of freedom and that of arbitrary rule; and the fortunes of freethought go with the former.
13. "Free-religious" societies, such as have been noted in Germany, may be rated as forms of moderate freethought propaganda, and are to be found in all Protestant countries, with all shades of development. A movement of the kind has existed for a number of years back in America, in the New England States and elsewhere, and may be held to represent a theistic or agnostic thought too advanced to adhere even to the Unitarianism which during the two middle quarters of the century was perhaps the predominant creed in New England. The Theistic Church conducted by the Rev. Charles Voysey after his expulsion from the Church of England in 1871 to his death in 1912, and since then by the Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh, is an example. Another type of such a gradual and peaceful evolution is the South Place Institute (formerly "Chapel") of London, where, under the famous orator W. J. Fox, nominally a Unitarian, there was preached between 1824 and 1852 a theism tending to pantheism, perhaps traceable to elements in the doctrine of Priestley, and passed on by Mr. Fox to Robert Browning. In 1864 the charge passed to Moncure D. Conway, under whom the congregation quietly advanced during twenty years from Unitarianism to a non-scriptural rationalism, embracing the shades of philosophic theism, agnosticism, and anti-theism. In Conway's Lessons for the Day will be found a series of peculiarly vivid mementos of that period, a kind of itinerary, more intimate than any retrospective record. The latter part of his life, partly preserved in one of the most interesting autobiographies of the century, was spent between England and the United States and in travel. After his first withdrawal to the States in 1884 the Institute became an open platform for rationalist and non-theological ethics and social and historical teaching, and it now stands as an "Ethical Society" in touch with the numerous groups so named which have come into existence in England in the last dozen years on lines originally laid down by Dr. Felix Adler in New York. At the time of the present writing the English societies of this kind number between twenty and thirty, the majority being in London and its environs. Their open adherents, who are some thousands strong, are in most cases non-theistic rationalists, and include many former members of the Secularist movement, of which the organization has latterly dwindled. On partly similar lines there were developed in provincial towns about the end of the century a small number of "Labour Churches," in which the tendency was to substitute a rationalist humanitarian ethic for supernaturalism; and the same lecturers frequently spoke from their platforms and from those of Ethical and Secularist societies. Of late, however, the Labour Churches have tended to disappear. All this means no resumption of church-going, but, by the confession of the Churches, a completer secularization of the Sunday.
14. Alongside of the lines of movement before sketched, there has subsisted in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century a considerable organization of Unitarianism. In the early years of the nineteenth century it was strong enough to obtain the repeal (1813) of the penal laws against anti-Trinitarianism, whereafter the use of the name "Unitarian" became more common, and a sect so called was founded formally in 1825. When the heretical preachers of the Presbyterian sect began openly to declare themselves as Unitarians, there naturally arose a protest from the orthodox, and an attempt was made in 1833 to save from its new destination the property owned by the heretical congregations. This was frustrated by the Dissenters' Chapels Act of 1844, which gave to each group singly the power to interpret its trust in its own fashion. Thenceforward the sect prospered considerably, albeit not so greatly as in the United States. During the century English Unitarianism has been associated with scholarship through such names as John Kenrick and Samuel Sharpe, the historians of Egypt, and J. J. Tayler; and, less directly, with philosophy in the person of Dr. James Martineau, who, however, was rather a coadjutor than a champion of the sect. In the United States the movement, greatly aided to popularity by the eloquent humanism of the two Channings, lost the prestige of the name of Emerson, who had been one of its ministers, by the inability of his congregation to go the whole way with him in his opinions. In 1853 Emerson told the young Moncure Conway that "the Unitarian Churches were stated to be no longer producing ministers equal to their forerunners, but were more and more finding their best men in those coming from orthodox Churches," who "would, of course, have some enthusiasm for their new faith." Latterly Unitarians have been entitled to say that the Trinitarian Churches are approximating to their position. Such an approach, however, involves rather a weakening than a strengthening of the smaller body; though some of its teachers are to the full as bigoted and embittered in their propaganda as the bulk of the traditionally orthodox. Others adhere to their ritual practices in the spirit of use and wont, as Emerson found when he sought to rationalize in his own Church the usage of the eucharist. On the other hand, numbers have passed from Unitarianism to thoroughgoing rationalism; and some whole congregations, following more or less the example of that of South Place Chapel, have latterly reached a position scarcely distinguishable from that of the Ethical Societies.
15. A partly similar evolution has taken place among the Protestant Churches of France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Holland. French Protestantism could not but be intellectually moved by the intense ferment of the Revolution; and, when finally secured against active oppression from the Catholic side, could not but develop an intellectual opposition to the Catholic Reaction after 1815. In Switzerland, always in intellectual touch with France and Germany, the tendencies which had been stamped as Socinian in the days of Voltaire soon reasserted themselves so strongly as to provoke fanatical reaction. The nomination of Strauss to a chair of theology at Zürich by a Radical Government in 1839 actually gave rise to a violent revolt, inflamed and led by Protestant clergymen. The Executive Council were expelled, and a number of persons killed in the strife. In the canton of Aargau in 1841, again, the cry of "religion in danger" sufficed to bring about a Catholic insurrection against a Liberal Council; and yet again in 1844 it led, among the Catholics of the Valais canton, to the bloodiest insurrection of all. Since these disgraceful outbreaks the progress of Rationalism in Switzerland has been steady. In 1847 a chair was given at Berne to the rationalistic scholar Zeller, without any such resistance as was made to Strauss at Zürich. In 1892, out of a total number of 3,151 students in the five universities of Switzerland and in the academies of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, the number of theological students was only 374, positively less than that of the teaching staff, which was 431. Leaving out the academies named, which had no medical faculty, the number of theological students stood at 275 out of 2,917. The Church in Switzerland has thus undergone the relative restriction in power and prestige seen in the other European countries of long-established culture. The evolution, however, remains negative rather than positive. Though a number of pastors latterly call themselves libres penseurs or penseurs libres, and a movement of ethical culture (morale sociale) has made progress, the forces of positive freethought are not numerically strong. An economic basis still supports the Churches, and the lack of it leaves rationalism non-aggressive.
A somewhat similar state of things exists in Holland, where the "higher criticism" of both the Old and New Testaments made notable progress in the middle decades of the century. There then resulted not only an extensive decay of orthodoxy within the Protestant Church, but a movement of aggressive popular freethought, which was for a number of years well represented in journalism. To-day, orthodoxy and freethought are alike less demonstrative; the broad explanation being that the Dutch people in the mass has ceased to be pietistic, and has secularized its life. Even in the Bible-loving Boer Republic of South Africa (Transvaal), in its time one of the most orthodox of the civilized communities of the world, there was seen in the past generation the phenomenon of an agnostic ex-clergyman's election to the post of president, in the person of T. F. Burgers, who succeeded Pretorius in 1871. His election was of course on political and not on religious grounds; and panic fear on the score of his heresy, besides driving some fanatics to emigrate, is said to have disorganized a Boer expedition under his command; but his views were known when he was elected. In the years 1899-1902 the terrible experience of the last Boer War, in South Africa as in Britain, perhaps did more to turn critical minds against supernaturalism than was accomplished by almost any other agency in the same period. In Britain the overturn was by way of the revolt of many ethically-minded Christians against the attitude of the orthodox churches, which were so generally and so unscrupulously belligerent as to astonish many even of their freethinking opponents. As regards the Boers and the Cape Dutch the resultant unbelief was among the younger men, who harassed their elders with challenges as to the justice or the activity of a God who permitted the liberties of his most devoted worshippers to be wantonly destroyed. Among the more educated burghers in the Orange Free State commandos unbelief asserted itself with increasing force and frequency. An ethical rationalism thus motived is not likely to be displaced; and the Christian churches of Britain have thus the sobering knowledge that the war which they so vociferously glorified has wrought to the discredit of their creed alike in their own country and among the vanquished.
16. The history of popular freethought in Sweden yields a good illustration, in a compact form, of the normal play of forces and counter-forces. Since the day of Christina, as we saw, though there have been many evidences of passive unbelief, active rationalism has been little known in her kingdom down till modern times, Sweden as a whole having been little touched by the great ferment of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, however, stirred the waters there as elsewhere. Tegnér, the poet-bishop, author of the once-famous Frithiof's Saga, was notable in his day for a determined rejection of the evangelical doctrine of salvation; and his letters contain much criticism of the ruling system. But the first recognizable champion of freethought in Sweden is the thinker and historian E. G. Geijer (d. 1847), whose history of his native land is one of the best European performances of his generation. In 1820 he was prosecuted for his attack upon the dogmas of the Trinity and redemption--long the special themes of discussion in Sweden--in his book Thorild; but was acquitted by the jury. Thenceforth Sweden follows the general development of Europe. In 1841 Strauss's Leben Jesu was translated in Swedish, and wrought its usual effect. On the popular side the poet Wilhelm von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical warfare; and a blacksmith in a provincial town contrived to print in 1850 a translation of Paine's Age of Reason. Once more the spirit of persecution blazed forth, and he was prosecuted and imprisoned. H. B. Palmaer (d. 1854) was likewise prosecuted for his satire, The Last Judgment in Cocaigne (Kräkwinkel), with the result that his defence extended his influence. In the same period the Stockholm curate Nils Ignell (d. 1864) produced a whole series of critical pamphlets and a naturalistic History of the Development of Man, besides supplying a preface to the Swedish translation of Renan's Vie de Jésus. Meantime translations of the works of Theodore Parker, by V. Pfeiff and A. F. Akerberg, had a large circulation and a wide influence; and the courage of the gymnasium rector N. J. Cramer (d. 1893), author of The Farewell to the Church, gave an edge to the movement. The partly rationalistic doctrine of Victor Rydberg (d. 1895) was in comparison uncritical, and was proportionally popular.
On another line the books of Dr. Nils Lilja (d. 1870), written for working people, created a current of rationalism among the masses; and in the next generation G. J. Leufstedt maintained it by popular lectures and by the issue of translations of Colenso, Ingersoll, Büchner, and Renan. Hjalmar Stromer (d. 1886) did similar platform work. Meantime the followers of Parker and Rydberg founded in 1877 a monthly review, The Truthseeker, which lasted till 1894, and an association of "Believers in Reason," closely resembling the British Ethical Societies of our own day. Among its leading adherents has been K. P. Arnoldson, the well-known peace advocate. Liberal clerics were now fairly numerous; Positivism, represented by Dr. Anton Nyström's General History of Civilization, played its part; and the more radical freethinking movement, nourished by new translations, became specially active, with the usual effect on orthodox feeling. August Strindberg, author and lecturer, was prosecuted in 1884 on a charge of ridiculing the eucharist, but was declared not guilty. The strenuous Victor Lennstrand, lecturer and journalist, prosecuted in 1888 and later for his anti-Christian propaganda, was twice fined and imprisoned, with the result of extending his influence and discrediting his opponents. "Utilitarian Associations," created by his activity, were set up in many parts of the country; and his movement survives his death.
17. Only in the United States has the public lecture platform been made a means of propaganda to anything like the extent seen in Britain; and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus far been done by the late Colonel Ingersoll, the leading American orator of the last generation, and the most widely influential platform propagandist of the last century. No other single freethinker, it is believed, has reached such an audience by public speech; and between his propaganda and that of the freethought journals there has been maintained for a generation back a large body of vigorous freethinking opinion in all parts of the States. Before the Civil War this could hardly be said. In the middle decades of the century the conditions had been so little changed that after the death of President Lincoln, who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at that, it was sought to be established that he was latterly orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 1860 he escaped attack on his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, was likewise an unbeliever. The great negro orator, Frederick Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln. It is even alleged that President Grant was of the same cast of opinion. Such is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States, from Washington onwards; and still the social conditions impose on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist power of the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought remains dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals, and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of rationalistic science been more angrily opposed by the priesthood; because nowhere is the ordinary prejudice of the priest more voluble or better-bottomed in self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist Bishop Keener delivered a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory before the OEcumenical Council of Methodism at Washington, declaring that it had been utterly refuted by a certain "wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds." Various professors in ecclesiastical colleges have been driven from their posts for accepting in turn the discoveries of geology, biology, and the "higher criticism"--for instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South Carolina; Toy of Louisville; Winchell of Vanderbilt University; and more than one professor in the American college at Beyrout. In every one of the three former cases, it is true, the denounced professor has been called to a better chair; and latterly some of the more liberal clergy have even commercially exploited the higher criticism by producing the "Rainbow Bible." Generally speaking, however, in the United States sheer preoccupation with business, and lack of leisure, counteract in a measure the relative advantage of social freedom; and while culture is more widely diffused than in England, it remains on the whole less radical in the "educated" classes so-called. So far as it is possible to make a quantitative estimate, it may be said that in the more densely populated parts of the States there is latterly less of studious freethinking because there is less leisure than in England; but that in the Western States there is a relative superiority, class for class, because of the special freedom of the conditions and the independent character of many of the immigrants who constitute the new populations.
Section 2.--Biblical Criticism
It is within the last generation that the critical analysis of the Jewish and Christian sacred books has been most generally carried on; but the process has never been suspended since the German Aufklärung arose on the stimuli of English and French deism.
1. At the beginning of the century, educated men in general believed in the Semitic myths of creation, as given in Genesis: long before the end of it they had more or less explicitly rectified their beliefs in the light of new natural science and new archæology. The change became rapid after 1860; but it had been led up to even in the period of reaction. While in France, under the restored monarchy, rationalistic activity was mainly headed into historical, philosophical, and sociological study, and in England orthodoxy predominated in theological discussion, the German rationalistic movement went on among the specialists, despite the liberal religious reaction of Schleiermacher, who himself gave forth such an uncertain sound. His case and that of his father, an army chaplain, tell signally of the power of the mere clerical occupation to develop a species of emotional belief in one who has even attained rationalism. When the son, trained for the church, avowed to his father (1787) that he had lost faith in the supernatural Jesus, the father professed to mourn bitterly, but three years later avowed that he in his own youth had preached Christianity for twelve years while similarly disbelieving its fundamental tenet. He professionally counselled compromise, which the son duly practised, with such success that, whereas he originally addressed his Discourses on Religion (1799) to "the educated among its despisers," he was able to say in the preface to the third edition, twenty years later (1821), that the need now was to reason with the pietists and literalists, the ignorant and bigoted, the credulous and superstitious. In short, he and others had been able to set up a fashion of poetic religion among deists, but not to lighten the darkness of orthodox belief.
The ostensible religious revival associated with Schleiermacher's name was in fact a reaction of temperament, akin to the romantic movement in literature, of which Chateaubriand in France was the exponent as regarded religious feeling. The German "rationalism" of the latter part of the eighteenth century, with its stolid translation of the miraculous into the historical, and its official accommodation of the result to the purposes of the pulpit, had not reached any firm scientific foundation; and Schleiermacher on the other side, protesting that religion was a matter not of knowledge but of feeling, attracted alike the religious emotionalists, the seekers of compromise, and the romantics. His personal and literary charm, and his tolerance of mundane morals, gave him a German vogue not unlike that of Chateaubriand in France. His intellectual cast and ultimate philosophic bias, however, together with his freedom of private life, ultimately alienated him from the orthodox, and thus it was that he died (1834) in the odour of heresy. Heresy, in fact, he had preached from the outset; and it was only in a highly emancipated society that his teaching could have been fashionable. The statement that by his Discourses "with one stroke he overthrew the card-castle of rationalism and the old fortress of orthodoxy" is literally quite false, for the old compromising pseudo-rationalism survived a long while, and orthodoxy still longer; and it is quite misleading inasmuch as it suggests a resurgence of faith. The same historian proceeds to record that some saw in the work "only a slightly disguised return to superstition, and others a brilliant confession of unbelief." "The general public saw in the Discourses a new assault of romanticism upon religion. The clergy in particular were painfully aroused, and did not dissemble their irritation. Spalding himself could not restrain his anger." Schleiermacher's friend Sach, who had passed the Discourses in manuscript, woke up to denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic, and denuded of the ideas of God, immortality, and morality.
In England the work would have been so denounced on all sides; and the bulk of Schleiermacher's teaching would there have been reckoned revolutionary and "godless." He was a lover of both political and social freedom; and in his Two Memoranda on the Church Question in regard to Prussia (1803) he made "a veritable declaration of war on the clerical spirit." Recognizing that ecclesiastical discipline had reached a low ebb, he even proposed that civil marriage should precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory; besides planning a drastic subjection of the Prussian Church to State regulation. In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, of which he denied the authenticity, he played the part of a "destructive" critic. He "saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of confessionalism"--that is, the movement for an exact statement of creed. Nor can it be said that, despite his attempts in later life to reach a more definite theology, Schleiermacher really held firmly any Christian or even theistic dogma. He seems to have been at bottom a pantheist; and the secret of his attraction for so many German preachers and theologians then and since is that he offered them in eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of faith which avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious rationalism to reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and the dogged refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to explain away. Philosophically and critically speaking, his teaching has no lasting intellectual substance, being first a negation of intellectual tests and then a belated attempt to apply them. It is not even original, being a development from Rousseau and Lessing. But it had undoubtedly a freeing and civilizing influence for many years; and it did little harm save insofar as it fostered the German proclivity to the nebulous in thought and language, and partly encouraged the normal resistance to the critical spirit. All irrationalism, to be sure, in some sort spells self-will and lawlessness; but the orthodox negation of reason was far more primitive than Schleiermacher's. From that side, accordingly, he never had any sympathy. When, soon after his funeral, in which his coffin was borne and followed by troops of students, his church was closed to the friends who wished there to commemorate him, it was fairly clear that his own popularity lay mainly with the progressive spirits, and not among the orthodox; and in the end his influence tended to merge in that of the critical movement.
2. Gradually that had developed a greater precision of method, though there were to be witnessed repetitions of the intellectual anomalies of the past, so-called rationalists losing the way while supernaturalists occasionally found it. It has been remarked by Reuss that Paulus, a clerical "rationalist," fought for the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the very year in which Tholuck, a reconverted evangelical, gave up the Pauline authorship as hopeless; that when Schleiermacher, ostensibly a believer in inspiration, denied the authenticity of the Epistle to Timothy, the [theological] rationalist Wegscheider opposed him; and that the rationalistic Eichhorn maintained the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch long after the supernaturalist Vater had disproved it. Still the general movement was inevitably and irrevocably rationalistic. Beginning with the Old Testament, criticism gradually saw more and more of mere myth where of old men had seen miracle, and where the first rationalists saw natural events misconceived. Soon the process reached the New Testament, every successive step being resisted in the old fashion; and much laborious work, now mostly forgotten, was done by a whole company of scholars, among whom Paulus, Eichhorn, De Wette, G. L. Bauer, Wegscheider, Bretschneider, and Gabler were prominent. The train as it were exploded on the world in the great Life of Jesus by Strauss (1835), a year after the death of Schleiermacher.
This was in some respects the high-water mark of rational critical science for the century, inasmuch as it represented the fullest use of free judgment. The powerful and orderly mind of Strauss, working systematically on a large body of previous unsystematic criticism, produced something more massive and coherent than any previous writer had achieved. It was not that he applied any new principle. Criticism had long been slowly disengaging itself from the primary fallacy of taking all scriptural records as standing for facts, and explaining away the supernatural side. Step by step it was recognized that not misinterpretation of events but mythology underlay much of the sacred history. Already in 1799 an anonymous and almost unnoticed writer had argued that the entire gospel story was a pre-existent conception in the Jewish mind. In 1802 G. L. Bauer had produced a treatise on Hebrew Mythology, in which not only was the actuality of myth in Bible narrative insisted on, but the general principle of animism in savage thought was clearly formulated. Semler had seen that the stories of Samson and Esther were myths. Even Eichhorn--who reduced all the Old Testament stories to natural events misunderstood, accepted Noah and the patriarchs as historical personages, and followed Bahrdt in making Moses light a fire on Mount Sinai--changed his method on coming to the New Testament, and pointed out that only indemonstrable hypotheses could be reached by turning supernatural events into natural where there was no outside historical evidence. Other writers--as Krug, Gabler, Kaiser, Wegscheider, and Horst--ably pressed the mythical principle, some of them preceding Bauer. The so-called "natural" theory--which was not at all that of the "naturalists" but the specialty of the compromising "rationalists"--was thus effectively shaken by a whole series of critics.
But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake off completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to Abraham as standing for the patriarch's own prophetic anticipation, set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to the dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of the childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical principle in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them oriental merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in its mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions of miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus, the "Christian Evêmeros"--who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid of them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed to be walking on the water he was really walking on the bank--was still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher's Reden. The mythical theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions and genera--saga and legend, historical myth, mythical history, philosophical myth, poetic myth--and the differences of the mythological school over method arrested the acceptance of their fundamental principle.
3. No less remarkable was the check to the few attempts which had been made at clearing the ground by removing the Fourth Gospel from the historical field. Lessing had taken this gospel as peculiarly historical, as did Fichte and Schleiermacher and the main body of critics after him. Only in England (by Evanson) had the case been more radically handled. In 1820 Bretschneider, following up a few tentative German utterances, put forth, by way of hypothesis, a general argument to the effect that the whole presentment of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel is irreconcilable with that of the Synoptics, that it could not be taken as historical, and that it could not therefore be the work of the Apostle John. The result was a general discussion and a general rejection. The innovation in theory was too sudden for assimilation: and Bretschneider, finding no support, later declared that he had been "relieved of his doubts" by the discussion, and had thus attained his object. Strauss himself, in his first Leben Jesu, failed to realize the case; and it was not till the second (1863) that he developed it, profiting by the intermediate work of F. C. Baur.
4. But as regards the gospel history in general, the first Leben Jesu is a great "advance in force" as compared with all preceding work. Himself holding undoubtingly to the vital assumption of the rationalizing school that the central story of Jesus and the disciples and the crucifixion was history, he yet applied the mythical principle systematically to nearly all the episodes, handling the case with the calmness of a great judge and the skill of a great critic. Even Strauss, indeed, paid the penalty which seems so generally to attach to the academic discipline--the lack of ultimate hold on life. After showing that much of the gospel narrative was mere myth, and leaving utterly problematical all the rest, he saw fit to begin and end with the announcement that nothing really mattered--that the ideal Jesus was unaffected by historic analysis, and that it was the ideal that counted. In a world in which nine honest believers out of ten held that the facts mattered everything, there could be no speedy or practical triumph for a demonstration which thus announced its own inutility. Strauss had achieved for New Testament criticism what Kant and Fichte and Hegel had compassed for rational philosophy in general, ostensibly proffering together bane and antidote. As in their case, however, so in his, the truly critical work had an effect in despite of the theoretic surrender. Among instructed men, historical belief in the gospels has never been the same since Strauss wrote; and he lived to figure for his countrymen as one of the most thoroughgoing freethinkers of his age.
5. For a time there was undoubtedly "reaction," engineered with the full power of the Prussian State in particular. The pious Frederick William IV, already furious against Swiss Radicalism in 1847, was moved by the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 to a fierce repression of everything liberal in theological teaching. "This dismal period of Prussian history was the bloom-period of the Hengsterbergan theology" --the school of rabid orthodoxy. In 1854, Eduard Zeller, bringing out in book form his work on the Acts of the Apostles (originally produced in the Tübingen Theological Journal, 1848-51), writes that "The exertions of our ecclesiastics, assisted by political reaction, have been so effectual that the majority of our theologians not only look with suspicion or indifference on this or that scientific opinion, but regard scientific knowledge in general with the same feelings"; and he leaves it an open question "whether time will bring a change, or whether German Protestantism will stagnate in the Byzantine conditions towards which it is now hastening with all sail on." For his own part, Zeller abandoned the field of theology for that of philosophy, producing a history of Greek philosophy, and one of German philosophy since Leibnitz.
6. Another expert of Baur's school, Albrecht Schwegler, author of works on Montanism, the Post-Apostolic Age, and other problems of early Christian history, and of a Handbook of the History of Philosophy which for half a century had an immense circulation, was similarly driven out of theological research by the virulence of the reaction, and turned to the task of Roman history, in which he distinguished himself as he did in every other he essayed. The brains were being expelled from the chairs of theology. But this very fact tended to discredit the reaction itself; and outside of the Prussian sphere of influence German criticism went actively on. Gustav Volkmar, turning his back on Germany in 1854, settled in Switzerland, and in 1863 became professor at Zürich, where he added to his early Religion Jesu (1857) and other powerful works his treatises on the Origin of the Gospels (1866), The Gospels (1869), Commentary on the Apocalypse (1860-65), and Jesus Nazarenus (1881)--all stringent critical performances, irreconcilable with orthodoxy. Elsewhere too there was a general resumption of progress.
To this a certain contribution was made by Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), who, after setting out as an orthodox Hegelian, outwent Strauss in the opposite direction. In 1838, as a licentiate at Bonn, he produced two volumes on The Religion of the Old Testament, in which the only critical element is the notion of a "historical evolution of revelation." Soon he had got beyond belief in revelation. In 1840 appeared his Critique of the Gospel History of John, and in 1841 his much more disturbing Critique of the Gospel History of the Synoptics, wherein there is substituted for Strauss's formula of the "community-mind" working on tradition, that of individual literary construction. Weisse and Wilcke had convinced him that Mark was the first gospel, and Wilcke in particular that it was no mere copy of an oral tradition but an artistic construction. As he claimed, this was a much more "positive" conception than Strauss's, which was fundamentally "mysterious." Unfortunately, though he saw that the new position involved the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus, he left his own historic conception "mysterious," giving no reason why the "Urevangelist" framed his romance. Bauer was non-anthropological, and left his theory as it began, one of an arbitrary construction by gospel-makers. Immediately after his book appeared that of Ghillany on Human Sacrifice among the ancient Hebrews (1842), which might have given him clues; but they seem to have had for him no significance.
As it was, his book on the Synoptics raised a great storm; and when the official request for the views of the university faculties as to the continuance of his licence evoked varying answers, Bauer settled the matter by a violent attack on professional theologians in general, and was duly expelled. For the rest of his long life he was a freelance, doing some relatively valid work on the Pauline problem, but pouring out his turbid spirit in a variety of political writings, figuring by turns as an anti-Semite (1843), a culture-historian, and a pre-Bismarckian imperialist, despairing of German unity, but looking hopefully to German absorption in a vast empire of Russia. Naturally he found political happiness in 1870, living on, a spent force, to do fresh books on Christian origins, on German culture-history, and on the glories of imperialism.
7. In 1864, after an abstention of twenty years from discussion of the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus, adapted for the German People. Here, accepting the contention of F. C. Baur that the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of composition of the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur's view that Matthew came first, he undertook to offer more of positive result than was reached in his earlier research, which simply dealt scientifically with the abundant elements of dubiety in the records. The new procedure was really much less valid than the old. Baur had quite unwarrantably decided that the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most certainly genuine of the discourses ascribed to Jesus; and Strauss, while exhibiting a reserve of doubt as to all "such speeches," nonetheless committed himself to the "certain" genuineness alike of the Sermon and of the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew. Many scholars who continue to hold by the historicity of Jesus have since recognized that the Sermon is no real discourse, but a compilation of gnomic sayings or maxims previously current in Jewish literature. Thus the certainties of Baur and Strauss pass into the category of the cruder certainties which Strauss impugned; and the latter left the life of Jesus an unsolved enigma after all his analysis.
As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of the previous twenty years had "run to seed" in a multitude of treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are being endlessly discussed. The scientific course for Strauss would have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life: failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem, though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was, save in formula, between Baur's negations and his own.
Something of the explanation is to be detected in the sub-title, "Adapted for the German People." From his first entrance into the arena he had met with endless odium theologicum; being at once deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tübingen, and virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment to a chair at Zürich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with him was made a ground of damage to his friends; and though he had actually been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in 1848 by his fellow citizens of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his candidature for the new parliament at Frankfort through the hostility of the rural voters, he had abundant cause to regard himself as a banned person in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the people as against the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally and justifiably operative in the conception of his second work; and this none the less because his fundamental political conservatism had soon cut short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As he justly said, the question of the true history of Christianity was not one for theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the intellectual process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten, he strove to establish the proposition that the new Reformation he desired was akin to the old; and that the Germans, as the "people of the Reformation," would show themselves true to their past by casting out the religion of dogma and supernaturalism. Such an attempt to identify the spirit of freethought with the old spirit of Bibliolatry was in itself fantastic, and could not create a genuine movement, though the book had a wide audience. The Glaubenslehre, in which he made good his maxim that "the true criticism of dogma is its history," is a sounder performance. Strauss's avowed desire to write a book as suitable to Germans as was Renan's Vie de Jésus to Frenchmen was something less than scientific. The right book would be written for all nations.
Like most other Germans, Strauss exulted immensely over the war of 1870. In what is now recognized as the national manner, he wrote two boastful open-letters to Renan explaining that whatsoever Germany did was right, and whatsoever France did was wrong, and that the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was altogether just. These letters form an important contribution to the vast cairn of self-praise raised by latter-day German culture. But Strauss's literary life ended on a nobler note and in a higher warfare. After all his efforts at popularity, and all his fraternization with his people on the ground of racial animosity (not visible in his volume of lectures on Voltaire, written and delivered at the request of the Princess Alice), his fundamental sincerity moved him to produce a final "Confession," under the title of The Old and the New Faith (1872). It asked the questions: "Are we still Christians?"; "Have we still religion?"; "How do we conceive the world?"; "How do we order our life?"; and it answered them all in a calmly and uncompromisingly naturalistic sense, dismissing all that men commonly call religious belief. The book as a whole is heterogeneous in respect of its two final chapters, "Of our Great Poets" and "Of our Great Musicians," which seem to have been appended by way of keeping up the attitude of national fraternity evoked by the war. But they could not and did not avail to conciliate the theologians, who opened fire on the book with all their old animosity, and with an unconcealed delight in the definite committal of the great negative critic to an attitude of practical atheism. The book ran through six editions in as many months, and crystallized much of the indefinite freethinking of Germany into something clearer and firmer. All the more was it a new engine of strife and disintegration; and the aging author, shocked but steadied by the unexpected outburst of hostility, penned a quatrain to himself, ending: "In storm hast thou begun; in storm shalt thou end."
On the last day of the year he wrote an "afterword" summing up his work and his position. He had not written, he declared, by way of contending with opponents; he had sought rather to commune with those of his own way of thinking; and to them, he felt, he had the right to appeal to live up to their convictions, not compromising with other opinions, and not adhering to any Church. For his "Confession" he anticipated the thanks of a more enlightened future generation. "The time of agreement," he concluded, "will come, as it came for the Leben Jesu; only this time I shall not live to see it." A little more than a year later (1874) he passed away.
It is noteworthy that he should have held that agreement had come as to the first Leben Jesu. He was in fact convinced that all educated men--at least in Germany--had ceased to believe in miracles and the supernatural, however they might affect to conform to orthodoxy. And, broadly speaking, this was true: all New Testament criticism of any standing had come round to the naturalistic point of view. But, as we have seen, the second Leben Jesu was far enough from reaching a solid historical footing; and the generation which followed made only a piecemeal and unsystematic advance to a scientific solution.
8. And it was long before even Strauss's early method of scientific criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old Testament history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting from the clues given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above all by the suggestion of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element implied in the God-names Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded, for sheer lack of radical skepticism, on the assumption that the Pentateuchal history was true. On this basis, modern Old Testament criticism of a professional kind may be said to have been founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a quasi-rationalistic method to bring back unbelievers to belief. Of his successors, some, like Ilgen, were ahead of their time; some, like De Wette, failed to make progress in their criticism; some, like Ewald, remained always arbitrary; and some of the ablest and most original, as Vatke, failed to coördinate fully their critical methods and results. Thus, despite all the German activity, little sure progress had been made, apart from discrimination of sources, between the issue of the Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of the Scotch Catholic priest, Dr. Geddes, in 1800, and the publication of the first part of the work of Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch (1862). This, by the admission of Kuenen, who had begun as a rather narrow believer, corrected the initial error of the German specialists by applying to the narrative the common-sense tests suggested long before by Voltaire. That academic scholarship thus wasted two generations in its determination to adhere to the "reverent" method, and in its aversion to the "irreverence" which proceeded on the simple power to see facts, is a sufficient comment on the Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt the sacred books to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment of their flocks, the German theologians injured their own.
As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss's appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same spirit sought to revert, even in "intellectually free" Germany, to its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss's Leben Jesu; and after a time those who shared his views were excluded even from philosophical chairs. Later, the brochure in which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents (1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same writer was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. In private life, persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in our day is German "expert" criticism beginning openly to reckon with propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels, in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included, pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology and myth. The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as "F. Nork"), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely speculative works, indicated many of the mythological elements in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus.
