"'That signifies as little to me as a midge on the wall. Let any one say what he will, I, on the other hand, have what I will. He who would gain something must venture something, and not mind what people say. I have revealed and confided to you more than to my own wife and children. Now come home with me to supper.'"
Such is the purport of the sad irony of the flying sheet, which is peculiarly appropriate here, as it evidently gives expression to the common sentiments of the time. At the conclusion of it one particular intrigue of a small German court is more alluded to than related.
Even after 1700, this cold, bitter way of speaking of the political condition of Germany continued generally; for the "aufklärungs" literature, which sprang up at this period, altered the style more than the spirit. Indeed, from the end of the War of Succession till 1740, during the longest period of peace which Germany had experienced for a century, a diminution of political interest is discernible in the small literature. It is always the extraordinary destinies of individuals which more specially interest the public--the prophecies of a Pietist, the trial of a woman for child murder, the execution of an alchymist, and such like. When on Christmas night, 1715, two poor peasants were suffocated by coal vapours in a vineyard-hut at Jena, whilst they, together with a student and a torn copy of Faust's book of necromancy, were endeavouring to raise a great treasure, this misfortune gave rise to full a dozen flying sheets--clerical, medical, and philosophical--which fiercely contended as to whether the claw of the devil or the coals had been the cause of death. All the battles that had been fought, from that of Hochstädt to Malplaquet, had not made a greater sensation. Even in the "Dialogues from the Kingdom of the Dead,"--a clumsy imitation of Lucian, in which opinions were given of the public characters of the day,--it is evident that it is more particularly the anecdotes and the private scandal which attracted the people. Once more an interest was powerfully excited by the expulsion of the Protestant Salzburger; but in the year 1740 a great political character impressed itself on the soul of Germany, and announced by the thunder of his cannon the beginning of a new time.
But it was not the "State system" alone which loosened the connection of the burgher class, and turned the German into an isolated individual: the powers which usually confirm and strengthen the united life of individuals, faith and science, worked to the same effect.
CHAPTER V.
"DIE STILLEN IM LANDE," OR PIETISTS.
(1600-1700.)
The contrast between the epic time of the Middle Ages, and the new period which has already been often called the lyrical, is very perceptible in every sphere of human life, and not least in the realm of faith.
The Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages had consecrated the life of every individual by a multitude of pious usages, and shut it up in an aristocratic spiritual state, in which the spirit of the individual was fast bound in rigid captivity, with little spontaneous action. The Reformation destroyed in the greater part of Germany these fetters of the popular mind; it set freedom of decision and mental activity in opposition to the outward constraint and splendid mechanism of the old Church. But Protestantism gave a system of doctrine, as well as freedom and depth, to the German mind. In the great soul of Luther, both these tendencies of the new faith were in equilibrium; the more passionately he struggled for his explanation of holy writ and the dogmas of his school, the stronger and more original was the mental process through which, after his own way, he sought his God in free prayer. It is, nevertheless, clear that the great progress which accrued to the human race from his teaching, could not fail to result in forming two opposite tendencies in Protestantism. The two poles of every religion, knowledge and the emotions of the soul, the intellectual boundaries of religious knowledge and the fervid resignation of self to the Divine, must prevail in the soul with varying power, according to the wants of the individual and the cultivation of the period; now one, now the other will preponderate, and the time might arrive when both tendencies would come into strife and opposition. At first Protestantism waged war against the old Church, and against the parties that arose within itself,--a necessary consequence of greater freedom and independence of judgment.
It is difficult to judge how far this liberal tendency of Protestantism would have led the nation, if adversity had not come upon them. The great war, however, gave rise to a peculiar apathy even in the best. Each party engaged bore a token of their faith upon their banners, each brought endless misfortune upon the people, and in all, it was apparent how little baptism and the Lord's Supper availed to make the professors of any confession good men. When the flames of war were dying away, men were much inclined to attribute a great portion of their own misery and that of the country to the strife of the contending persuasions. It naturally followed that the colder children of the world attached little value to any religion, and turned from it with a shrug of the shoulder when the old ecclesiastical disputes, which even during the war had never been entirely silenced, began to rage with loud bluster in the pulpit and the market-place. In many districts the mass of the people had been compelled, by dragonades and the most, extreme methods of coercion, to change their persuasion three and four times, and the formulas of belief were not more valued by them, from their having learnt them by rote. Thus waste and empty had become the inward life of the Church, which, together with the coarseness and vices introduced among men by the long war, gave to the ten years after it an aspect so peculiarly hopeless. There was little to love, very little to honour upon earth.