15. A partly similar evolution has taken place among the Protestant Churches of France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Holland. French Protestantism could not but be intellectually moved by the intense ferment of the Revolution; and, when finally secured against active oppression from the Catholic side, could not but develop an intellectual opposition to the Catholic Reaction after 1815. In Switzerland, always in intellectual touch with France and Germany, the tendencies which had been stamped as Socinian in the days of Voltaire soon reasserted themselves so strongly as to provoke fanatical reaction.[88] The nomination of Strauss to a chair of theology at Zürich by a Radical Government in 1839 actually gave rise to a violent revolt, inflamed and led by Protestant clergymen. The Executive Council were expelled, and a number of persons killed in the strife.[89] In the canton of Aargau in 1841, again, the cry of “religion in danger” sufficed to bring about a Catholic insurrection against a Liberal Council; and yet again in 1844 it led, among the Catholics of the Valais canton, to the bloodiest insurrection of all. Since these disgraceful outbreaks the progress of Rationalism in Switzerland has been steady. In 1847 a chair was given at Berne to the rationalistic scholar Zeller, without any such resistance as was made to Strauss at Zürich. In 1892, out of a total number of 3,151 students in the five universities of Switzerland and in the academies of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, the number of theological students was only 374, positively less than that of the teaching staff, which was 431. Leaving out the academies named, which had no medical faculty, the number of theological students stood at 275 out of 2,917. The Church in Switzerland has thus undergone the relative restriction in power and prestige seen in the other European countries of long-established culture. The evolution, however, remains negative rather than positive. Though a number of pastors latterly call themselves libres penseurs or penseurs libres, and a movement of ethical culture (morale sociale) has made progress, the forces of positive freethought are not numerically strong. An economic basis still supports the Churches, and the lack of it leaves rationalism non-aggressive.[90]
A somewhat similar state of things exists in Holland, where the “higher criticism” of both the Old and New Testaments made notable progress in the middle decades of the century. There then resulted not only an extensive decay of orthodoxy within the Protestant Church, but a movement of aggressive popular freethought, which was for a number of years well represented in journalism. To-day, orthodoxy and freethought are alike less demonstrative; the broad explanation being that the Dutch people in the mass has ceased to be pietistic, and has secularized its life. Even in the Bible-loving Boer Republic of South Africa (Transvaal), in its time one of the most orthodox of the civilized communities of the world, there was seen in the past generation the phenomenon of an agnostic ex-clergyman’s election to the post of president, in the person of T. F. Burgers, who succeeded Pretorius in 1871. His election was of course on political and not on religious grounds; and panic fear on the score of his heresy, besides driving some fanatics to emigrate, is said to have disorganized a Boer expedition under his command;[91] but his views were known when he was elected. In the years 1899–1902 the terrible experience of the last Boer War, in South Africa as in Britain, perhaps did more to turn critical minds against supernaturalism than was accomplished by almost any other agency in the same period. In Britain the overturn was by way of the revolt of many ethically-minded Christians against the attitude of the orthodox churches, which were so generally and so unscrupulously belligerent as to astonish many even of their freethinking opponents.[92] As regards the Boers and the Cape Dutch the resultant unbelief was among the younger men, who harassed their elders with challenges as to the justice or the activity of a God who permitted the liberties of his most devoted worshippers to be wantonly destroyed. Among the more educated burghers in the Orange Free State commandos unbelief asserted itself with increasing force and frequency.[93] An ethical rationalism thus motived is not likely to be displaced; and the Christian churches of Britain have thus the sobering knowledge that the war which they so vociferously glorified[94] has wrought to the discredit of their creed alike in their own country and among the vanquished.
16. The history of popular freethought in Sweden yields a good illustration, in a compact form,[95] of the normal play of forces and counter-forces. Since the day of Christina, as we saw, though there have been many evidences of passive unbelief, active rationalism has been little known in her kingdom down till modern times, Sweden as a whole having been little touched by the great ferment of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, however, stirred the waters there as elsewhere. Tegnér, the poet-bishop, author of the once-famous Frithiof’s Saga, was notable in his day for a determined rejection of the evangelical doctrine of salvation; and his letters contain much criticism of the ruling system. But the first recognizable champion of freethought in Sweden is the thinker and historian E. G. Geijer (d. 1847), whose history of his native land is one of the best European performances of his generation. In 1820 he was prosecuted for his attack upon the dogmas of the Trinity and redemption—long the special themes of discussion in Sweden—in his book Thorild; but was acquitted by the jury. Thenceforth Sweden follows the general development of Europe. In 1841 Strauss’s Leben Jesu was translated in Swedish, and wrought its usual effect. On the popular side the poet Wilhelm von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical warfare; and a blacksmith in a provincial town contrived to print in 1850 a translation of Paine’s Age of Reason. Once more the spirit of persecution blazed forth, and he was prosecuted and imprisoned. H. B. Palmaer (d. 1854) was likewise prosecuted for his satire, The Last Judgment in Cocaigne (Kräkwinkel), with the result that his defence extended his influence. In the same period the Stockholm curate Nils Ignell (d. 1864) produced a whole series of critical pamphlets and a naturalistic History of the Development of Man, besides supplying a preface to the Swedish translation of Renan’s Vie de Jésus. Meantime translations of the works of Theodore Parker, by V. Pfeiff and A. F. Akerberg, had a large circulation and a wide influence; and the courage of the gymnasium rector N. J. Cramer (d. 1893), author of The Farewell to the Church, gave an edge to the movement. The partly rationalistic doctrine of Victor Rydberg (d. 1895) was in comparison uncritical, and was proportionally popular.
On another line the books of Dr. Nils Lilja (d. 1870), written for working people, created a current of rationalism among the masses; and in the next generation G. J. Leufstedt maintained it by popular lectures and by the issue of translations of Colenso, Ingersoll, Büchner, and Renan. Hjalmar Stromer (d. 1886) did similar platform work. Meantime the followers of Parker and Rydberg founded in 1877 a monthly review, The Truthseeker, which lasted till 1894, and an association of “Believers in Reason,” closely resembling the British Ethical Societies of our own day. Among its leading adherents has been K. P. Arnoldson, the well-known peace advocate. Liberal clerics were now fairly numerous; Positivism, represented by Dr. Anton Nyström’s General History of Civilization, played its part; and the more radical freethinking movement, nourished by new translations, became specially active, with the usual effect on orthodox feeling. August Strindberg, author and lecturer, was prosecuted in 1884 on a charge of ridiculing the eucharist, but was declared not guilty. The strenuous Victor Lennstrand, lecturer and journalist, prosecuted in 1888 and later for his anti-Christian propaganda, was twice fined and imprisoned, with the result of extending his influence and discrediting his opponents. “Utilitarian Associations,” created by his activity, were set up in many parts of the country; and his movement survives his death.
17. Only in the United States has the public lecture platform been made a means of propaganda to anything like the extent seen in Britain; and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus far been done by the late Colonel Ingersoll, the leading American orator of the last generation, and the most widely influential platform propagandist of the last century. No other single freethinker, it is believed, has reached such an audience by public speech; and between his propaganda and that of the freethought journals there has been maintained for a generation back a large body of vigorous freethinking opinion in all parts of the States. Before the Civil War this could hardly be said. In the middle decades of the century the conditions had been so little changed that after the death of President Lincoln, who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at that,[96] it was sought to be established that he was latterly orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 1860 he escaped attack on his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, was likewise an unbeliever.[97] The great negro orator, Frederick Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln.[98] It is even alleged that President Grant[99] was of the same cast of opinion. Such is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States, from Washington onwards; and still the social conditions impose on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist power of the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought remains dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals,[100] and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of rationalistic science been more angrily opposed by the priesthood; because nowhere is the ordinary prejudice of the priest more voluble or better-bottomed in self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist Bishop Keener delivered a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory before the Œcumenical Council of Methodism at Washington, declaring that it had been utterly refuted by a certain “wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds.”[101] Various professors in ecclesiastical colleges have been driven from their posts for accepting in turn the discoveries of geology, biology, and the “higher criticism”—for instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South Carolina; Toy of Louisville; Winchell of Vanderbilt University; and more than one professor in the American college at Beyrout.[102] In every one of the three former cases, it is true, the denounced professor has been called to a better chair; and latterly some of the more liberal clergy have even commercially exploited the higher criticism by producing the “Rainbow Bible.” Generally speaking, however, in the United States sheer preoccupation with business, and lack of leisure, counteract in a measure the relative advantage of social freedom; and while culture is more widely diffused than in England, it remains on the whole less radical in the “educated” classes so-called. So far as it is possible to make a quantitative estimate, it may be said that in the more densely populated parts of the States there is latterly less of studious freethinking because there is less leisure than in England; but that in the Western States there is a relative superiority, class for class, because of the special freedom of the conditions and the independent character of many of the immigrants who constitute the new populations.[103]
Section 2.—Biblical Criticism
It is within the last generation that the critical analysis of the Jewish and Christian sacred books has been most generally carried on; but the process has never been suspended since the German Aufklärung arose on the stimuli of English and French deism.
1. At the beginning of the century, educated men in general believed in the Semitic myths of creation, as given in Genesis: long before the end of it they had more or less explicitly rectified their beliefs in the light of new natural science and new archæology. The change became rapid after 1860; but it had been led up to even in the period of reaction. While in France, under the restored monarchy, rationalistic activity was mainly headed into historical, philosophical, and sociological study, and in England orthodoxy predominated in theological discussion, the German rationalistic movement went on among the specialists, despite the liberal religious reaction of Schleiermacher,[104] who himself gave forth such an uncertain sound. His case and that of his father, an army chaplain, tell signally of the power of the mere clerical occupation to develop a species of emotional belief in one who has even attained rationalism. When the son, trained for the church, avowed to his father (1787) that he had lost faith in the supernatural Jesus, the father professed to mourn bitterly, but three years later avowed that he in his own youth had preached Christianity for twelve years while similarly disbelieving its fundamental tenet.[105] He professionally counselled compromise, which the son duly practised, with such success that, whereas he originally addressed his Discourses on Religion (1799) to “the educated among its despisers,” he was able to say in the preface to the third edition, twenty years later (1821), that the need now was to reason with the pietists and literalists, the ignorant and bigoted, the credulous and superstitious.[106] In short, he and others had been able to set up a fashion of poetic religion among deists, but not to lighten the darkness of orthodox belief.
The ostensible religious revival associated with Schleiermacher’s name was in fact a reaction of temperament, akin to the romantic movement in literature, of which Chateaubriand in France was the exponent as regarded religious feeling. The German “rationalism” of the latter part of the eighteenth century, with its stolid translation of the miraculous into the historical, and its official accommodation of the result to the purposes of the pulpit, had not reached any firm scientific foundation; and Schleiermacher on the other side, protesting that religion was a matter not of knowledge but of feeling, attracted alike the religious emotionalists, the seekers of compromise, and the romantics. His personal and literary charm, and his tolerance of mundane morals, gave him a German vogue not unlike that of Chateaubriand in France. His intellectual cast and ultimate philosophic bias, however, together with his freedom of private life,[107] ultimately alienated him from the orthodox, and thus it was that he died (1834) in the odour of heresy. Heresy, in fact, he had preached from the outset; and it was only in a highly emancipated society that his teaching could have been fashionable. The statement that by his Discourses “with one stroke he overthrew the card-castle of rationalism and the old fortress of orthodoxy”[108] is literally quite false, for the old compromising pseudo-rationalism survived a long while, and orthodoxy still longer; and it is quite misleading inasmuch as it suggests a resurgence of faith. The same historian proceeds to record that some saw in the work “only a slightly disguised return to superstition, and others a brilliant confession of unbelief.” “The general public saw in the Discourses a new assault of romanticism upon religion. The clergy in particular were painfully aroused, and did not dissemble their irritation. Spalding himself could not restrain his anger.” Schleiermacher’s friend Sach, who had passed the Discourses in manuscript, woke up to denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic, and denuded of the ideas of God, immortality, and morality.[109]