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]