Note 55 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

11. In Germany, as we have seen, the relative selectness of culture, the comparative aloofness of the “enlightened” from the mass of the people, made possible after the War of Independence a certain pietistic reaction, in the absence of any popular propagandist machinery or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In the opinion of an evangelical authority, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “through modern enlightenment (Aufklärung) the people had become indifferent to the Church; the Bible was regarded as a merely human book, the Saviour merely as a person who had lived and taught long ago, not as one whose almighty presence is with his people still.”55 According to the same authority, “before the war, the indifference to the word of God which prevailed among the upper classes had penetrated to the lower; but after it, a desire for the Scriptures was everywhere felt.”56 This involves an admission that the “religion of the heart” propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion “to the educated among its despisers”57 (1799) was not really a Christian revival at all. Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that in Prussia there was almost no attendance on public worship, and the clergy had fallen into profound discredit.58 A pietistic movement had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy;59 and seeing that the freethinking of the previous generation had been in part associated with French opinion, it was natural that on this side anti-French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more “national” forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the tone of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been more religious than that of previous years.60 Inasmuch, however, as the “enlightenment” of the scholarly class was maintained, and applied anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn back the course of progress. “When the third centenary commemoration, in 1817, of the Reformation approached, the Prussian people were in a state of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious matters.”61 Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation period there went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an anti-rationalist declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at Dresden in 1811,62 between the rationalists or “Friends of Light” and the Scripturalists of the old school; and the effect was a general disintegration of orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue of, the governmental policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging their opponents in the way of official appointments.63 The Prussian measure (1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist was treated as a historical commemoration, tended to the same consequences, though it also revived old Lutheran zeal;64 and when the new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling was substantially non-religious. “In the south of Germany especially the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary tendencies produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of religious sentiment.” The bulk of society showed entire indifference to worship, the churches being everywhere deserted; and “atheism was openly avowed, and Christianity ridiculed as the invention of priestcraft.”65 One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to “effect a union among all who retained any measure of Christian belief, in order to raise up their national religion and faith from the lowest state into which it has ever fallen since the French Revolution.”