History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion

by Adam Storey Farrar

Such are the historical tendencies from about 1750 till about 1790—cold but learned orthodoxy; the commencement of critical rationalism, and open deism. About that time new influences came into operation, the effects of which are at once evident. Without taking account of the excitement caused by the political events of the French revolution, we may name two such new causes of movement—the literary influence of the court of Weimar, and the philosophy of Kant.

The centres of intellectual activity in Germany now changed. We are so apt to forget that Germany, especially at the end of the last century, formed a set of [pg 228] independent principalities, which varied in taste, in belief, and in literary tone, that we fail to realise the individuality of the scenes of literary activity. At the end of the last century there was one spot which became the very focus of intellectual life. The court of Karl August at Weimar, insignificant in political importance, was great in the history of the human mind.[706] There were gathered there most of the mighty spirits of the golden ago of German literature,—Herder, Wieland, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul; a constellation of intellect unequalled since the court of Ferrara in the days of Alphonso.[707] The influence made itself felt in the adjacent university of Jena; and this little seminary became from that time for about twenty years,[708] until the foundation of Berlin, the first university in Germany. In it alone the philosophy of Kant became naturalized.[709] Some of the ablest men in Germany were its Professors; and about this time Jena and Weimar became the stronghold of free thought.

Except in the case of Herder,[710] the literary influence was not directly influential on theology. But it gave moral support to theological movement; though ultimately, by introducing a truer and more subjective appreciation of human nature, it was the means of generating [pg 229] the deep insight in the critical taste of thinking men which furnished the death-blow to rationalism. The same remark is true of the effects of the philosophy of Kant.[711] Its ultimate result was valuable in removing the eudæmonism common in ethics, and turning men's attention to the moral law within. But its immediate effects were to reinforce the appeal to reason, and to destroy revelation by leaving nothing to be revealed.

The nature of this system, so far as is necessary for our purpose, may be soon told. Kant, dissatisfied with the distrust in the human faculties induced by the scepticism of Hume, and the one-sided sensationalism of Condillac, carried a penetrating analysis into the human faculties;[712] attempting to perform with more exactness the work of Locke, to measure the human mind, which is the sounding-line, before fathoming the ocean of knowledge. Like Copernicus inverting astronomy, he reversed metaphysics, by referring classes of ideas to inward causes which before had been referred to outer.

He detected, as he supposed, innate forms of thought[713] in the mental structure, which form the conditions under which knowledge is possible. When he applied his system to give a philosophy of ethics and religion, he asserted nobly the law of duty written [pg 230] in the heart,[714] but identified it with religion. Religious ideas were regarded as true regulatively, not speculatively. Revelation was reunited with reason, by being resolved into the natural religion of the heart. Accordingly, the moral effect of this philosophy was to expel the French materialism and illuminism,[715] and to give depth to the moral perceptions: its religious effect was to strengthen the appeal to reason and the moral judgment as the test of religious truth; to render miraculous communication of moral instruction useless, if not absurd; and to reawaken the attempt, which had been laid aside since the Wolffian philosophy, of endeavouring to find a philosophy of religion.[716] From this time in German theology we shall find the existence of the twofold movement; the critical one, the lawful descendant of Semler, examining the historic revelation; and the philosophical one, the offshoot of the system of Kant, seeking for a philosophy of religion.

During the next twenty years, from 1790 to 1810, when so many influences were operating in common, it is not easy to measure the effect of the speculative philosophy upon particular minds with such exactness as to ascertain which ought properly to be classed in the destructive tendency, and which gave signs of the reaction. We must however be careful to exclude those younger minds[717] that were already appearing on the field, to become the heroes of the subsequent history, whose tone was so decidedly affected by new influences as to belong to the age of reaction.

In this sub-period we may name three tendencies: (1) the continuation of the Exegesis inaugurated in the last epoch by Semler, until about the end of the century it found its utmost limit in Paulus,[718]—the result of the [pg 231] age of illumination; (2) a dogmatic tendency, more or less the growth of new influences introduced by the new philosophy, which attempted to reconcile reason with the supernatural, and may be represented in its nearest approach to orthodoxy, at the end of this period, by Bretschneider;[719] and (3) the awakening of a distinct expression of the appeal to the supernatural which had never quite died out in the church, in the Arminianism of Reinhardt in the north, and of Storr in the south.[720] The last needs no further investigation; but we shall consider briefly the other two.

The exegetical method which formed the first was that which is now usually called the old or common-sense rationalism.[721] This form of rationalism differed from the English deism and French naturalism, in not regarding the Bible as fabulous in character, and the device of priestcraft;[722] but only denied the supernatural. By them the apostles had been regarded as impostors; and scripture was not only not received as divine, but not even respected as an ordinary historical record; whereas rationalism was intended as a defence against this view. It denied only the revealed character of scripture, and treated it as an ordinary history; and, distinguishing broadly between the fact related [pg 232] and the judgment on the fact, sought to separate the two, and explained away the supernatural element, such as miracles, as being orientalisms in the narrative, adapted to an infant age, which an enlightened age must translate into the language of ordinary events.

Eichhorn at Göttingen[723] applied this view to the Old Testament. Deeming miracles impossible, he did not regard them as fraud, but admitted on the contrary that the agents or narrators honestly believed them. The supernatural was not imparted to deceive, but was the result of oriental modes of speech, such as hyperbole, parable, or ellipsis, in which the steps by which the process was performed were omitted. The smoke of Sinai was considered a thunderstorm; the shining of Moses's face a natural phenomenon.

The principles which Eichhorn applied to the Old Testament, Paulus of Jena extended to the New.[724] The miraculous cures were explained by an ellipsis in the omission of the natural remedies; the casting out of devils as the power of a wise man over the insane; the transfiguration as the confused recollection of sleeping men, who saw Jesus with two unknown friends, in the beautiful light of the morning among the mountains: nay, trespassing on still more holy ground, he dared impiously to explain away the resurrection of our blessed Lord by the hypothesis that his death was only apparent. These are a specimen of the mode of exegesis adopted in this school, which is usually specifically called Rationalism. In this mode Jesus appeared to [pg 233] be merely a wise and virtuous man; and his miracles were merely acts of skill or accident. Paulus presented this as the original Christianity. The theory did not last long, save in the mind of its author, who lived until a recent period, to see the entire change of critical belief. Attributing the supernatural to ignorance, it did not even propose, like the later schools, to explain the marvellousness of the phenomena, objectively by so plausible a theory as legends, nor subjectively by myths:[725] it was too clumsy, not to say irreverent, an explanation of the facts to satisfy a people of deep and poetical soul like the Germans.