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]