Note 73 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Edelmann’s teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic,73 with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he of course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspiration the appanage of all; and the gospels were by him dismissed as late fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could not be learned; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age, he estimated Jesus highly.74 A German theologian complains, nevertheless, that he was “more just toward heathenism than toward Judaism; and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity”; adding: “What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy, such things were unheard of.”75 The force of Edelmann’s attack may be gathered from the same writer’s account of him as a “bird of prey” who rose to a “wicked height of opposition, not only against the Lutheran Church, but against Christianity in general.”