CHAPTER IX.
RENOVATION INAUGURATED BY SCHLEIERMACHER.
The commencement of the nineteenth century found the German people in a state of almost hopeless depression. They saw their territory laid waste by the victorious Napoleon, and their thrones occupied by rulers of Gallic or Italian preferences. They had striven very sluggishly to stem the current of national subjection and humiliation. The star of France being in the ascendant, the Rhine was no longer their friendly ally and western limit. No stage in the history of a people is more gloomy and calls more loudly for sympathy than when national prestige is gone, and dignities usurped by foreign conquerors. Though the apathy of despair is a theme more becoming the poet than the historian, we find a vivid description of the sadness and desolation produced by the French domination given by one who deeply felt the disgrace of his country. This writer says:
"The Divine Nemesis now stretched forth her hand against devoted Germany, and chastened her rulers and her people for the sins and transgressions of many generations. Like those wild sons of the desert, whom in the seventh century, heaven let loose to punish the degenerate Christians of the East, the new Islamite hordes of revolutionary France were permitted by Divine Providence to spread through Germany, as through almost every country in Europe, terror and desolation.
"What shall I say of the endless evils that accompanied and followed the march of her armies, the desolation of provinces, the plunder of cities, the spoliation of church property, the desecration of altars, the proscription of the virtuous, the exaltation of the unworthy members of society, the horrid mummeries of irreligion practised in many of the conquered cities, the degradation of life and the profanation of death. Such were the calamities that marked the course of these devastating hosts. And yet the evils inflicted by Jacobin France were less intense and less permanent than those exercised by her legislation. In politics the expulsion of the ecclesiastical electors, who, though they had sometimes given in to the false spirit of the age, had ever been the mildest and most benevolent of rulers; the proscription of a nobility that had ever lived in the kindliest relations with its tenantry; and on the ruins of old aristocratic and municipal institutions that had long guarded and sustained popular freedom, a coarse, leveling tyranny, sometimes democratic, sometimes imperial, established; in the church the oppression of the priesthood, a heartless religious indifferentism, undignified even by attempts at philosophic speculation, propagated and encouraged; and through the poisoned channels of education the taint of infidelity transmitted to generations yet unborn. Such were the evils that followed the establishment of the French domination in the conquered provinces of Germany. Doubtless, through the all-wise dispensations of that Providence who bringeth good out of evil, this fearful revolution has partly become, and will yet further become, the occasion of the moral and social regeneration of Europe."[52]
The patriot saw his country degraded; but the Christian wept for his absent faith. Rationalism was strongest when national humiliation was deepest. These formed a fitting twinship. It is a scathing comment on the influence of skepticism upon a people that, in general, the highest feeling of nationality is coexistent with the devoutest piety. It is the very nature of infidelity to deaden the emotions of patriotism, and that country can hardly expect to prove successful if it engage in war while its citizens are imbued with religious doubt. If lands are conquered, it knows not how to govern them; if defeated, skepticism affords but little comfort in the night of disaster. We do not attach a fictitious importance to Rationalism when we say that it was the prime agent which prevented the Germans from the struggle of self-liberation, and that the victory of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna would never have been needed had those people remained faithful to the precedents furnished by the Reformers.
When Fichte was in his old age, and had completed his system of philosophy, he published his Addresses to the German People. Political writing was a new field for him, and yet, whoever will take the pains to study the fruits of his thinking, will easily perceive that the spirit animating the Addresses was the same which pervaded his entire philosophy. He saw the degradation of his country. Though at a time of life when youthful fervor is supposed to have passed away, he became inflamed with indignation at the insolence of the conqueror and the apathy of his countrymen, and addressed himself to the consciousness of the people by calling upon them to arise, and reclothe themselves with their old historic strength. His voice was not disregarded. The result proved that those who had thought him in his dotage, and only indulging its loquacity, were much mistaken. He wrote that enthusiastic appeal with a great aim. He had spent the most of his life in other fields, but posterity will never fail to honor those who, whatever their habits of thinking may have been, for once at least have the sagacity to see the wants of their times, and possess the still higher wisdom of meeting them. Fichte died in 1814; but it was at a time when, Simeon-like, he could congratulate himself upon the prospects of humanity. He still felt the rich glow of youth when, in his last days, he could say: "The morning light has broken, and already gilds the mountain-tops, and gives promise of the great coming day."
After independence had been achieved and the downfall of Napoleon had become a fact, there appeared evidences of new evangelical life. When the German soldiers recrossed the river which their ancestors had loved to call "Father Rhine," and felt themselves the proud possessors of free soil, not only they, but all their countrymen living in the Protestant principalities, manifested a decided dissatisfaction with that skepticism which had paralyzed them. Moreover, the memory that France had been the chief agent in introducing Rationalism was not likely to diminish their hatred of all infidelity. The masses breathed more freely, but they were still imbued with serious error. Restoration was the watchword in politics; but it was soon transferred to the domain of religion and theology.