Note 112 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Yet another influential deist was Johann August Eberhard (1739–1809), for a time a preacher at Charlottenburg, but driven out of the Church for the heresy of his New Apology of Sokrates; or the Final Salvation of the Heathen (1772).112 The work in effect placed Sokrates on a level with Jesus,113 which was blasphemy.114 But the outcry attracted the attention of Frederick, who made Eberhard a Professor of Philosophy at Halle, where later he opposed the idealism of both Kant and Fichte. Substantially of the same school was the less pronouncedly deistic cleric Steinbart,115 author of a utilitarian System of Pure Philosophy, or Christian doctrine of Happiness, now forgotten, who had been variously influenced by Locke and Voltaire.116 Among the less heterodox but still rationalizing clergy of the period were J. J. Spalding, author of a work on The Utility of the Preacher’s Office, a man of the type labelled “Moderate” in the Scotland of the same period, and as such antipathetic to emotional pietists;117 and Zollikofer, of the same school—both inferribly influenced by the deism of their day. Considerably more of a rationalist than these was the clergyman W. A. Teller (1734–1804), author of a New Testament Lexicon, who reached a position virtually deistic, and intimated to the Jews of Berlin that he would receive them into his church on their making a deistic profession of faith.118