Note 95 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

13. Frederick, though reputed a Voltairean freethinker par excellence, may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of the rationalizing philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire, written in 1736, four years before his accession, he promises to send him a translation he has had made of the “accusation and the justification” of Wolff, “the most celebrated philosopher of our days, who, for having carried light into the darkest places of metaphysics, and for having treated the most difficult matters in a manner no less elevated than precise and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism”; and he speaks of getting translated Wolff’s Treatise of God, the Soul, and the World. When he became a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear, for Voltaire at this time had produced no explicit anti-Christian propaganda. At first the new king showed himself disposed to act on the old maxim that freethought is bad for the common people. In 1743–44 he caused to be suppressed two German treatises by one Gebhardi, a contributor to Gottsched’s magazines, attacking the Biblical miracles; and in 1748 he sent a young man named Rüdiger to Spandau for six months’ confinement for printing an anti-Christian work by one Dr. Pott.95 But as he grew more confident in his own methods he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration he allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create strife. With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians, and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would;96 and when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find, he answered with the gospel precept, “Love your enemies.”97