Note 131 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Among the other theologians of the time who exercised a similar influence to the Wolffian, Töllner attracts notice by the comparative courage with which, in the words of an orthodox critic, he “raised, as much as possible, natural religion to revelation,” and, “on the other hand, lowered Scripture to the level of natural light.”131 First he published (1764) True Reasons why God has not furnished Revelation with evident proofs,132 arguing for the modern attenuation of the idea of revelation; then a work on Divine Inspiration (1771) in which he explicitly avowed that “God has in no way, either inwardly or outwardly, dictated the sacred books. The writers were the real authors”133—a declaration not to be counterbalanced by further generalities about actual divine influence. Later still he published a Proof that God leads men to salvation even by his revelation in Nature134 (1766)—a form of Christianity little removed from deism. Other theologians, such as Ernesti, went far with the tide of illuminism; and when the orthodox Chr. A. Crusius died at Leipzig in 1781, Jean Paul Richter, then a student, wrote that people had become “too much imbued with the spirit of illuminism” to be of his school. “Most, almost all the students,” adds Richter, incline to heterodoxy; and of the professor Morus he tells that “wherever he can explain away a miracle, the devil, etc., he does so.” Of this order of accommodators, a prominent example was Michaelis (1717–1791), whose reduction of the Mosaic legislation to motives of every-day utility is still entertaining.