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

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, [1310] 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, [1311] 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. [1312] Native writers in independent works added to the propaganda. Andreas Riem (1749-1807), a Berlin preacher, appointed by Frederick a hospital chaplain, [1313] 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." [1314] 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." [1315] 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, [1316] setting up a system which "tore education away from the Christian basis," [1317] 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. [1318] As Basedow was the first to set up vigorous reforms, it is not too much to call him an instaurator of rational education, whose chief fault was to be too far ahead of his age. This, with the personal flaw of an unamiable habit of wrangling in all companies, caused the failure of his "Philanthropic Institute," established in 1771, on the invitation of the Prince of Dessau, to carry out his educational ideals. Quite a number of other institutions, similarly planned, after his lead, by men of the same way of thinking, as Canope and Salzmann, in the same period, had no better success. Goethe, who was clearly much impressed by Basedow, and travelled with him, draws a somewhat antagonistic picture of him on retrospect (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. xiv). He accuses him in particular of always obtruding his anti-orthodox opinions; not choosing to admit that religious opinions were being constantly obtruded on Basedow. Praising Lavater for his more amiable nature, Goethe reveals that Lavater was constantly propounding his orthodoxy. Goethe, in fine, was always lenient to pietism, in which he had been brought up, and to which he was wont to make sentimental concessions. He could never forget his courtly duties towards the established convention, and so far played the game of bigotry. Hagenbach notes (i, 298, note), without any deprecation, that after Basedow had published in 1763-1764 his Philalethie, a perfectly serious treatise on natural as against revealed religion, one of the many orthodox answers, that by Pastor Goeze, so inflamed against him the people of his native town of Hamburg that he could not show himself there without danger. And this is the man accused of "obtruding his views." Baur is driven, by way of disparagement of Basedow and his school, to censure their self-confidence--precisely the quality which, in religious teachers with whom he agreed, he as a theologian would treat as a mark of superiority. Baur's attack on the moral utilitarianism of the school is still less worthy of him. (Gesch. der christl. Kirche, iv, 595-96). It reads like an echo of Kahnis (as cited, p. 46 sq.). Yet another influential deist was Johann August Eberhard (1739-1809), for a time a preacher at Charlottenburg, but driven out of the Church for the heresy of his New Apology of Sokrates; or the Final Salvation of the Heathen (1772). [1319] The work in effect placed Sokrates on a level with Jesus, [1320] which was blasphemy. [1321] 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, [1322] author of a utilitarian System of Pure Philosophy, or Christian doctrine of Happiness, now forgotten, who had been variously influenced by Locke and Voltaire. [1323] 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; [1324] 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. [1325]