Note 186 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

The spirit of rationalism, in any case, was now so prevalent that it began to dominate the work of the more intelligent theologians, to whose consequent illogical attempts to strain out by the most dubious means the supernatural elements from the Bible narratives186 the name of “rationalism” came to be specially applied,187 that being the kind of criticism naturally most discussed among the clergy. Taking rise broadly in the work of Semler, reinforced by that of the English and French deists and that of Reimarus, the method led stage by stage to the scientific performance of Strauss and Baur, and the recent “higher criticism” of the Old and New Testaments. Noteworthy at its outset as exhibiting the tendency of official believers to make men, in the words of Lessing, irrational philosophers by way of making them rational Christians,188 this order of “rationalism” in its intermediate stages belongs rather to the history of Biblical scholarship than to that of freethought, since more radical work was being done by unprofessional writers outside, and deeper problems were raised by the new systems of philosophy. Within the Lutheran pale, however, there were some hardy thinkers. A striking figure of the time, in respect of his courage and thoroughness, is the Lutheran pastor J. H. Schulz,189 who so strongly combatted the compromises of the Semler school in regard to the Pentateuch, and argued so plainly for a severance of morals from religion as to bring about his own dismissal (1792).190 Schulz’s Philosophical Meditation on Theology and Religion191 (1784) is indeed one of the most pronounced attacks on orthodox religion produced in that age. But it is in itself a purely speculative construction. Following the current historical method, he makes Moses the child of the Egyptian princess, and represents him as imposing on the ignorant Israelites a religion invented by himself, and expressive only of his own passions. Jesus in turn is extolled in the terms common to the freethinkers of the age; but his conception of God is dismissed as chimerical; and Schulz finally rests in the position of Edelmann, that the only rational conception of deity is that of the “sufficient ground of the world,” and that on this view no man is an atheist.192