Note 110 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In England the work would have been so denounced on all sides; and the bulk of Schleiermacher’s teaching would there have been reckoned revolutionary and “godless.” He was a lover of both political and social freedom; and in his Two Memoranda on the Church Question in regard to Prussia (1803) he made “a veritable declaration of war on the clerical spirit.”110 Recognizing that ecclesiastical discipline had reached a low ebb, he even proposed that civil marriage should precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory; besides planning a drastic subjection of the Prussian Church to State regulation.111 In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, of which he denied the authenticity, he played the part of a “destructive” critic.112 He “saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of confessionalism”—that is, the movement for an exact statement of creed.113 Nor can it be said that, despite his attempts in later life to reach a more definite theology, Schleiermacher really held firmly any Christian or even theistic dogma. He seems to have been at bottom a pantheist;114 and the secret of his attraction for so many German preachers and theologians then and since is that he offered them in eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of faith which avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious rationalism to reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and the dogged refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to explain away. Philosophically and critically speaking, his teaching has no lasting intellectual substance, being first a negation of intellectual tests and then a belated attempt to apply them. It is not even original, being a development from Rousseau and Lessing. But it had undoubtedly a freeing and civilizing influence for many years; and it did little harm save insofar as it fostered the German proclivity to the nebulous in thought and language, and partly encouraged the normal resistance to the critical spirit. All irrationalism, to be sure, in some sort spells self-will and lawlessness; but the orthodox negation of reason was far more primitive than Schleiermacher’s. From that side, accordingly, he never had any sympathy. When, soon after his funeral, in which his coffin was borne and followed by troops of students, his church was closed to the friends who wished there to commemorate him, it was fairly clear that his own popularity lay mainly with the progressive spirits, and not among the orthodox; and in the end his influence tended to merge in that of the critical movement.115