A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

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. [1242] Contending against rigid articles of credence, they inevitably prepared the way for less credent forms of thought. [1243] Though the first leaders of Pietism grew embittered with their unsuccess and the attacks of their religious enemies, [1244] 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. [1245] Against the Pietists were furiously arrayed the Lutherans of the old order, who even contrived in many places to suppress their schools. [1246] 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. [1247] Thus "the rationalist tendencies of the age were promoted by this treble exhibition of the aberrations of belief." [1248] "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." [1249] 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." [1250] 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, [1251] 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."