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."