Note 6 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political settlement,6 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.”7 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,8 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,9 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.10 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.