a significant effect on the supply of students for the theological
profession. The numbers of Protestant and Catholic theological students
in all Germany have varied as follows:--Protestant: 1831, 4,147; 1851,
1,631; 1860, 2,520; 1876, 1,539; 1882-83, 3,168. Catholic: 1831, 1,801;
1840, 866; 1850, 1,393; 1860, 1,209; 1880, 619. [1814] Thus, under
the reign of reaction which set in after 1848 there was a prolonged
recovery; and again since 1876 the figures rise for Protestantism
through financial stimulus. When, however, we take population into
account, the main movement is clear. In an increasing proportion, the
theological students come from the rural districts (69·4 in 1861-70),
the towns furnishing ever fewer; [1815] so that the conservative
measures do but outwardly and formally affect the course of thought;
the clergy themselves showing less and less inclination to make
clergymen of their sons. [1816] Even among the Catholic population,
though that has increased from ten millions in 1830 to sixteen millions
in 1880, the number of theological students has fallen from eleven
to four per 100,000 inhabitants. [1817] Thus, after many "reactions"
and much Bismarckism, the Zeit-Geist in Germany was still pronouncedly
skeptical in all classes in 1881, [1818] when the church accommodation
in Berlin provided only two per cent. of the population, and even
that provision outwent the demand. [1819] And though there have been
yet other alleged reactions since, and the imperial influence is
zealously used for orthodoxy, a large proportion of the intelligent
workers in the towns remain socialistic and freethinking; and the
mass of the educated classes remain unorthodox in the teeth of the
socialist menace. Reactionary professors can make an academic fashion:
the majority of instructed men remain tacitly naturalistic.
Alongside of the inveterate rationalism of modern Germany, however,
a no less inveterate bureaucratism preserves a certain official
conformity to religion. University freedom does not extend to open
and direct criticism of the orthodox creed. On the other hand, the
applause won by Virchow in 1877 on his declaration against the doctrine
of evolution, and the tactic resorted to by him in putting upon that
doctrine the responsibility of Socialist violence, are instances of the
normal operation of the lower motives against freedom in scientific
teaching. [1820] The pressure operates in other spheres in Germany,
especially under such a regimen as the present. Men who never go to
church save on official occasions, and who have absolutely no belief
in the Church's doctrine, nevertheless remain nominally its adherents;
[1821] and the Press laws make it peculiarly difficult to reach the
common people with freethinking literature, save through Socialist
channels. Thus the Catholic Church is perhaps nowhere--save in Ireland
and the United States--more practically influential than in nominally
"Protestant" Germany, where it wields a compact vote of a hundred or
more in the Reichstag, and can generally count on well-filled churches
as beside the half-empty temples of Protestantism.
Another circumstance partly favourable to reaction is the simple
maintenance of all the old theological chairs in the universities. As
the field of scientific work widens, and increasing commerce raises
the social standard of comfort, men of original intellectual power
grow less apt to devote themselves to theological pursuits even
under the comparatively free conditions which so long kept German
Biblical scholarship far above that of other countries. It can
hardly be said that men of the mental calibre of Strauss, Baur,
Volkmar, and Wellhausen continue to arise among the specialists in
their studies. Harnack, the most prominent German Biblical scholar
of our day, despite his great learning, creates no such impression of
originality and insight, and, though latterly forced forward by more
independent minds, exhibits often a very uncritical orthodoxy. Thus
it is à priori possible enough that the orthodox reactions so often
claimed have actually occurred, in the sense that the experts have
reverted to a prior type. A scientifically-minded "theologian" in
Germany has now little official scope for his faculty save in the
analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books and the New Testament documents
as such; and this has been on the whole very well done, short of
the point of express impeachment of the historic delusion; but there
is a limit to the attraction of such studies for minds of a modern
cast. Thus there is always a chance that chairs will be filled by
men of another type.