Note 143 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss’s appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same spirit sought to revert, even in “intellectually free” Germany, to its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss’s Leben Jesu;143 and after a time those who shared his views were excluded even from philosophical chairs.144 Later, the brochure in which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents (1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same writer was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. In private life, persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in our day is German “expert” criticism beginning openly to reckon with propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels, in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included, pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology and myth.145 The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as “F. Nork”), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely speculative works,146 indicated many of the mythological elements in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus.147