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

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." [1717] 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." [1718] This involves an admission that the "religion of the heart" propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion "to the educated among its despisers" [1719] (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. [1720] A pietistic movement had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy; [1721] 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. [1722] 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." [1723] 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, [1724] 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. [1725] 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; [1726] 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." [1727] 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. [1728] 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. [1729] 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; [1730] 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"; [1731] though the party attempts no propaganda of the latter order. "Christianity and Social-Democracy," said Bebel again, "are opposed as fire and water." [1732] 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. [1733] 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. [1734] Bebel's drastic teaching as to the economic and social conditions of the rise of Christianity, [1735] 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. [1736] Nor is the unbelief a mere sequel to the Socialism: often the development is the other way. [1737] The opinion is almost universal, further, that the clergy in general do not believe what they teach. [1738] Atheists are numerous among the peasantry; more numerous among the workers in the provincial towns; and still more numerous in the large towns; [1739] and while many take a sympathetic view of Jesus as a man and teacher, not a few deny his historic existence [1740]--a view set forth in non-Socialist circles also. [1741]