Note 236 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

The same motive and purpose are clearly at work in his treatise on Religion within the bounds of Pure [i.e. Mere] Reason (1792–1794), where, while insisting on the purely ethical and rational character of true religion, he painfully elaborates reasons for continuing to use the Bible (concerning which he contends that, in view of its practically “godly” contents, no one can deny the possibility of its being held as a revelation) as “the basis of ecclesiastical instruction” no less than a means of swaying the populace.236 Miracles, he in effect avows, are not true; still, there must be no carping criticism of the miracle stories, which serve a good end. There is to be no persecution; but there is to be no such open disputation as would provoke it.237 Again and again, with a visible uneasiness, the writer returns to the thesis that even “revealed” religion cannot do without sacred books which are partly untrue.238 The doctrine of the Trinity he laboriously metamorphosed, as so many had done before him, and as Coleridge and Hegel did after him, into a formula of three modes or aspects of the moral deity239 which his ethical purpose required. And all this divagation from the plain path of Truth is justified in the interest of Goodness.