Griesbach pursued his skeptical investigations for the establishment of natural religion and others aided him in his undertaking. But the men of this class were not the principal agents of the complete ruin of the religious vitality of the people. We turn to Edelmann and Bahrdt, two of the most decided enemies of Christianity who have appeared in these later centuries.
The former was the better man, but his career brought discredit on private virtue and public morality. In the early part of his life he was blameless, but he subsequently betrayed all the personal weakness which his skepticism tended to engender. We get a fair portrait of him from the pen of one of his countrymen, Kahnis: "What Edelmann wished was nothing new," writes this author; "after the manner of all adherents of Illuminism, he wished to reduce all positive religions to natural religion. The positive heathenish religions stand, to him, on a level with Judaism and Christianity. He is more just toward heathenism than toward Judaism, and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity. Everything positive in religion is, as such, superstition. Christ was a mere man, whose chief merit consists in the struggle against superstition. What he taught, and what he was anxious for, no one, however, may attempt to learn from the New Testament writings, inasmuch as these were forged as late as the time of Constantine. All which the church teaches of his divinity, of his merits, of the gracious influence of the Holy Spirit, is absurd. There is no rule of truth but reason, and it manifests its truths directly by a peculiar sense. Whatever this sense says is true. It is this sense which perceives the world. The reality of everything which exists is God. In the proper sense there can, therefore, not exist any atheist, because every one who admits the reality of the world admits also the reality of God. God is not a person—least of all are there three persons in God. If God be the substance in all the phenomena, then it follows of itself that God cannot be thought of without the world, and hence that the world has no more had an origin than it will have an end. One may call the world the body of God, the shadow of God, the son of God. The spirit of God is in all that exists. It is ridiculous to ascribe inspiration to special persons only; every one ought to be a Christ, a prophet, an inspired man. The human spirit, being a breath of God, does not perish; our spirit, separated from its body by death, enters into a connection with some other body. Thus Edelmann taught a kind of metempsychosis. What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy, such things were unheard of. But as yet the faith of the church was a power in Germany!"
From Edelmann the transition is easy to the reckless and vicious Bahrdt. This man stands among the first of those who have brought dishonor upon the sacred vocation. What Jeffreys is to the judicial history of England, Bahrdt is to the religious history of German Protestantism. Whatever he touched was disgraced by the vileness of his heart and the satanic daring of his mind. He heard theological lectures. Thinking that in this field he could infuse most venom and reap a greater harvest of gold than in any other, he stripped for the undertaking. While a mere youth he gained, by his tricky management, a professor's chair. He blasphemed to his auditors by day, while at night he surrendered himself to the corruptions of the gambling-room, the beer-cellar and the house of prostitution. The slave of passion and of doubt, he was, of all his contemporaries, the most loud-spoken against the claims of God's truth, and adherence to the canons of the church. His mind was quick, active, and penetrating. Seizing the pen, he invaded the sanctity of every doctrine that stood in the way of his corrupt theories. He took up the Bible with sacrilegious purpose, and made it the plaything of his vicious heart. He sneered at what was revered by the church and the good men of past ages, with the kind of levity that should greet the recital of the stories of Sinbad the Sailor and the Wonderful Lamp.
He published many works, the aim of all being to infuse into the masses a contempt of the received Scriptures. He issued a travesty of the New Testament under the title of The New Testament, or The Newest Instructions from God through Jesus and his Apostles. He did just what he pleased with the miracles and words of Christ. He would convert dialogue into parable, and make any passage, however grave in import, minister to his unsanctified purpose. He banished such expressions as 'kingdom of God,' 'holiness,' 'sanctification,' 'Saviour,' 'Redeemer,' 'way of salvation,' 'Holy Ghost,' 'name of Jesus,' and all other terms that could leave the impression of inspiration and divine presence.
But corrupt as the church was, it was not ready for this fearful leap; therefore Bahrdt received a torrent of abuse. Banished and hunted by opposition, he gained many adherents from the force of the very arrows discharged against him. He had fallen from the height of faith which he occupied when he went to Giessen, a fact which he refers to in his autobiography: "I came to Giessen," says he, "as yet very orthodox. My belief in the divinity of the Scriptures, in the direct mission of Jesus, in his miraculous history, in the Trinity, in the gifts of grace, in natural corruption, in justification of the sinner by laying hold of the merits of Christ, and especially in the whole theory of satisfaction, seemed to be immovable. It was only the manner in which three persons were to be in one God, which had engaged my reason. I had only explained to myself a little better the work of the Holy Spirit, so as not to exclude man's activity. I had limited a little the idea of original sin; and in the doctrine of the atonement and justification, I had endeavored to uphold the value of virtue, and had cleared myself from the error that God, in his grace, should not pay any regard at all to human virtuous zeal. That in the doctrine of the Lord's Supper I was more Reformed than Lutheran, will be supposed as a matter of course."
But in due time he dropped these points of belief, one by one, until he indulged in all the illicit extravagances of the radical skeptics of France. The opposition he met with was a sore rebuke, but it failed to cure him. He set out for a journey to England and Holland with but three florins in his purse, and he suffered much by the way. He came home again only to find new edicts against him. On arriving at Halle, where he had once been honored, he was met with the following repulse from the faculty, at whose head stood Semler, the father of his doubt: "Our vocation demands not only that we should prevent the dissemination of directly irreligious opinions, but also that we should watch over the doctrines which are contained in Holy Scripture, and, in conformity with it, in the Augsburg Confession of Faith."
He labored as an educator, preacher, professor, and author. He made all his enterprises subservient to the dearest object of his life,—money. He wrote plain books for the masses, and his writings were perused alike in palace and cottage. While a resident in Halle he established an inn in the suburbs of the city where his depraved nature was permitted to indulge in those nameless liberties unbecoming, not only the theologian, but the rational man. His liaison with the servant-girl in his employ made his wife an object of public pity, and we can easily understand his injustice to the latter when he tells us himself that he had never loved with passion. His death was of a piece with his life. Having been a public frequenter of brothels and the associate of the loosest company, he died like the libertine. He was taken off by syphilis.
It is not necessary to enlarge upon the lesson of Bahrdt's life. He was the German crystallization of all the worst elements of French skepticism. He began his work with an evil purpose, and never sought the wisdom of God who promises to give liberally to all who ask him. The infamy of his life was soon forgotten, and only his teachings remained to corrupt the young and injure the mature of the land. While his love of money controlled his matrimonial alliances and literary labors, his hatred of revealed religion distorted his whole moral and intellectual nature. He is illustrative of the certain doom which awaits the man who commits himself to the sole guidance of his doubts. Semler's moral life was in spite of erroneous opinions; Bahrdt's was in conformity with them. And what the latter was in his career and death is the best comment that can be written on the natural effect of Rationalism. Would that he had been the only warning; but he had his followers when his creed became the fashion of the German church. The depth of his infamy is only aggravated by the holy sphere in which he wrought fearful havoc upon the succeeding generation. The Old Play says truly:
"That sin does ten times aggravate itself,
That is committed in an holy place;
An evil deed done by authority
Is sin and subornation; deck an ape
In tissue, and the beauty of the robe
Adds but the greater scorn unto the beast;
The poison shows worst in a golden cup;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning's flash;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds;
And every glory that inclines to sin,
The shame is trebled by the opposite."