intellectual promise of the Reformation, and much of the ground first
won by it had lapsed to Catholicism, the general forward movement of
European thought availed to set up in Germany as elsewhere a measure of
critical unbelief. There is abundant evidence that the Lutheran clergy
not only failed to hold the best intelligence of the country with them,
but in large part fell into personal disrepute. [1208] "The scenes of
clerical immorality," says an eminently orthodox historian, "are enough
to chill one's blood even at the distance of two centuries." [1209]
A Church Ordinance of 1600 acknowledges information to the effect
that a number of clergymen and schoolmasters are guilty of "whoredom
and fornication," and commands that "if they are notoriously guilty
they shall be suspended." Details are preserved of cases of clerical
drunkenness and ruffianism; and the women of the priests' families do
not escape the pillory. [1210] Nearly a century later, Arnold resigned
his professorship at Giessen "from despair of producing any amendment
in the dissolute habits of the students." [1211] It is noted that
"the great moral decline of the clergy was confined chiefly to the
Lutheran Church. The Reformed [Calvinistic] was earnest, pious,
and aggressive" [1212]--the usual result of official hostility.
In such circumstances, the active freethought existing in France at the
beginning of the seventeenth century could not fail to affect Germany;
and even before the date of the polemic of Garasse and Mersenne there
appeared (1615) a counterblast to the new thought in the Theologia
Naturalis of J. H. Alsted, of Frankfort, directed adversus atheos,
Epicureos, et sophistas hujus temporis. The preface to this solid
quarto (a remarkable sample of good printing for the period) declares
that "there are men in this diseased (exulcerato) age who dare to
oppose science to revelation, reason to faith, nature to grace,
the creator to the redeemer, and truth to truth"; and the writer
undertakes to rise argumentatively from nature to the Christian God,
without, however, transcending the logical plane of De Mornay. The
trouble of the time, unhappily for the faith, was not rationalism,
but the inextinguishable hatreds of Protestant and Catholic, and the
strife of economic interests dating from the appropriations of the
first reformers. At length, after a generation of gloomy suspense,
came the explosion of the hostile ecclesiastical interests, and
the long-drawn horror of the Thirty Years' War, which left Germany
mangled, devastated, drained of blood and treasure, decivilized, and
well-nigh destitute of the machinery of culture. No such printing
as that of Alsted's book was to be done in the German world for
many generations. But as in France, so in Germany, the exhausting
experience of the moral and physical evil of religious war wrought
something of an antidote, in the shape of a new spirit of rationalism.
Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular
arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political
settlement, [1213] but the drift of opinion was markedly
freethinking. Already in 1630 one writer describes "three classes
of skeptics among the nobility of Hamburg: first, those who believe
that religion is nothing but a mere fiction, invented to keep the
masses in restraint; second, those who give preference to no faith,
but think that all religions have a germ of truth; and third, those
who, confessing that there must be one true religion, are unable to
decide whether it is papal, Calvinist, or Lutheran, and consequently
believe nothing at all." No less explicit is the written testimony
of Walther, the court chaplain of Ulrich II of East Friesland, 1637:
"These infernal courtiers, among whom I am compelled to live against
my will, doubt those truths which even the heathen have learned
to believe." [1214] In Germany as in France the freethinking which
thus grew up during the religious war expanded after the peace. As
usual, this is to be gathered from the orthodox propaganda against it,
setting out in 1662 with a Preservative against the Pest of Present-day
Atheists, [1215] by one Theophilus Gegenbauer. So far was this from
attaining its end that there ensued ere long a more positive and
aggressive development of freethinking than any other country had yet
seen. A wandering scholar, Matthias Knutzen of Holstein (b. 1645),
who had studied philosophy at Königsberg, went about in 1674 teaching
a hardy Religion of Humanity, rejecting alike immortality, God and
Devil, churches and priests, and insisting that conscience could
perfectly well take the place of the Bible as a guide to conduct. His
doctrines are to be gathered chiefly from a curious Latin letter,
[1216] written by him for circulation, headed Amicus Amicis Amica;
and in this the profession of atheism is explicit: "Insuper Deum
negamus." In two dialogues in German he set forth the same ideas. His
followers, as holding by conscience, were called Gewissener; and
he or another of his group asserted that in Jena alone there were
seven hundred of them. [1217] The figures were fantastic, and the
whole movement passed rapidly out of sight--hardly by reason of the
orthodox refutations, however. Germany was in no state to sustain
such a party; and what happened was a necessarily slow gestation of
the seed of new thought thus cast abroad.
Knutzen's Latin letter is given in full by a Welsh scholar settled
in Germany, Jenkinus Thomasius (Jenkin Thomas), in his Historia
Atheismi (Altdorf, 1692), ed. Basel, 1709, pp. 97-101; also
by La Croze in his (anon.) Entretiens sur divers sujets, 1711,
p. 402 sq. Thomasius thus codifies its doctrine:--"1. There is
neither God nor Devil. 2. The magistrate is nothing to be esteemed;
temples are to be condemned, priests to be rejected. 3. In place
of the magistrate and the priest are to be put knowledge and
reason, joined with conscience, which teaches to live honestly,
to injure none, and to give each his own. 4. Marriage and free
union do not differ. 5. This is the only life: after it, there
is neither reward nor punishment. 6. The Scripture contradicts
itself." Knutzen admittedly wrote like a scholar (Thomasius,
p. 97); but his treatment of Scripture contradictions belongs
to the infancy of criticism; though La Croze, replying thirty
years later, could only meet it with charges of impiety and
stupidity. As to the numbers of the movement see Trinius,
Freydenker Lexicon, 1759, s. v. Knutzen. Kurtz (Hist. of the
Christian Church, Eng. tr. 1864, i, 213) states that a careful
academic investigation proved the claim to a membership of 700
to be an empty boast (citing H. Rossel, Studien und Kritiken,
1844, iv). This doubtless refers to the treatise of Musæus, Jena,
1675, cited by La Croze, p. 401. Some converts Knutzen certainly
made; and as only the hardiest would dare to avow themselves, his
influence may have been considerable. "Examples of total unbelief
come only singly to knowledge," says Tholuck; "but total unbelief
had still to the end of the century to bear penal treatment." He
gives the instances (1) of the Swedish Baron Skytte, reported in
1669 by Spener to the Frankfort authorities for having said at
table, before the court preacher, that the Scriptures were not
holy, and not from God but from men; and (2) "a certain minister"
who at the end of the century was prosecuted for blasphemy. (Das
kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, 2 Abth. pp. 56-57.) Even
Anabaptists were still liable to banishment in the middle of
the century. Id. 1 Abth. 1861, p. 36. As to clerical intolerance
see pp. 40-44. On the merits of the Knutzen movement cp. Pünjer,
Hist, of the Christian Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437-8.