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

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, [1766] 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. [1767] 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. [1768] 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, [1769] 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" [1770] 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. [1771] 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." [1772] 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. [1773] In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, of which he denied the authenticity, he played the part of a "destructive" critic. [1774] He "saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of confessionalism"--that is, the movement for an exact statement of creed. [1775] 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; [1776] 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. [1777]