The French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, which caused social and political upheavals throughout Europe, toppled down thrones, overthrew empires, and broke up and reformed the boundaries of nations, mark a new epoch in the history of Prussia, and indeed of all Germany, whose people had been taught by these disastrous wars that they had common interests which could not be protected without national unity, the want of which had never before been made so painfully manifest.
After the downfall of Napoleon, the ambassadors of the Allied Powers met in Vienna to settle the affairs of all Europe. Nations, provinces, and cities were given away in the most reckless manner, without any thought of the interests or wishes of the people, to the kings and rulers who could command the greatest influence in the congress or whose displeasure was most feared. Germany demanded the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine, but was thwarted in her designs by Great Britain and Russia, who feared the restoration of her ancient power.
Prussia received from the congress, as some compensation for its sufferings and sacrifices during the Napoleonic wars, the duchies of Jülich and Berg, the former possessions of the episcopal sees of Cologne and Treves, and several other territories, which were formed into the Rhine province. On the other hand, it lost a portion of the Sclavonic population which it had held on the east; so that, though it gained nothing in territory, it became more strictly a German state, and was consequently better fitted gradually to take the lead in the irrepressible movement toward the unification of Germany.
In the Congress of Vienna it was stipulated that Catholics and Protestants should have equal rights before the law. The constitutional law of Prussia was extended to the newly-acquired provinces and “all ecclesiastical matters, whether of Roman Catholics or of Protestants, together with the supervision and administration of all charitable funds, the confirming of all persons appointed to spiritual offices, and the supervision over the administration of ecclesiastics as far as it may have any relation to civil affairs, were reserved to the government.”
In 1817, upon the occasion of the reorganization of the government, we perceive to what practical purposes these principles were to be applied. The church was debased to a function of the state, her interests were placed in the hands of the ministry for spiritual affairs, and the education of even clerical students was put under the control of government.
It was in this same year, 1817, that the tercentennial anniversary of the birth of Protestantism was celebrated. For two centuries Protestant faith in Germany had been dying out. Eager and bitter controversies, the religious wars and the plunder of church property during the XVIth and early part of the XVIIth centuries, had given it an unnatural and artificial vigor. It was a mighty and radical revolution, social, political, and religious, and therefore gave birth to fanaticism and intense partisan zeal, and was in turn helped on by them.
There is a natural strength in a new faith, and when it is tried by war and persecution it seems to rise to a divine power. Protestantism burst upon Europe with irresistible force. Fifty years had not passed since Luther had burned the bull of Pope Leo, and the Catholic Church, beaten almost everywhere in the North of Europe, seemed hardly able to hold her own on the shores of the Mediterranean; fifty years later, and Protestantism was saved in Germany itself only by the arms of Catholic France. The peace of Westphalia, in 1648, put an end to the religious wars of Germany, and from that date the decay of the Protestant faith was rapid. Many causes helped on the work of ruin; the inherent weakness of the Protestant system from its purely negative character, the growing and bitter dissensions among Protestants, the hopeless slavery to which the sects had been reduced by the civil power, all tended to undermine faith. In the Palatinate, within a period of sixty years, the rulers had forced the people to change their religion four times. In Prussia, whose king, as we have seen, was supreme head of the church, the ruling house till 1539 was Catholic; then, till 1613, Lutheran; from that date to 1740, Calvinistic; from 1740 to 1786, infidel, the avowed ally of Voltaire and D’Alembert; then, till 1817, Calvinistic; and finally again evangelical.
During the long reign of Frederic the Great unbelief made steady progress. Men no longer attacked this or that article of faith, but Christianity itself. The quickest way, it was openly said by many, to get rid of superstition and priest-craft, would be to abolish preaching altogether, and thus remove the ghost of religion from the eyes of the people. It seems strange that such license of thought and expression should have been tolerated, and even encouraged, in a country where religion itself has never been free; but it is a peculiarity of the Prussian system of government that while it hampers and fetters the church and all religious organizations, it leaves the widest liberty of conscience to the individual. Its policy appears to be to foster indifference and infidelity, in order to use them against what it considers religious fanaticism. Another circumstance which favored infidelity may be found in the political thraldom in which Prussia held her people. As men were forbidden to speak or write on subjects relating to the government or the public welfare, they took refuge in theological and philosophical discussions, which in Protestant lands have never failed to lead to unbelief. This same state of things tended to promote the introduction and increase of secret societies, which, in the latter half of the XVIIIth century, sprang up in great numbers throughout Germany, bearing a hundred different names, but always having anti-Christian tendencies.
To stop the spread of infidelity, Frederic William II., the successor of Frederic the Great, issued, in 1788, an “edict, embracing the constitution of religion in the Prussian states.” The king declared that he could no longer suffer in his dominions that men should openly seek to undermine religion, to make the Bible ridiculous in the eyes of the people, and to raise in public the banner of unbelief, deism, and naturalism. He would in future permit no farther change in the creed, whether of the Lutheran or the Reformed Church. This was the more necessary as he had himself noticed with sorrow, years before he ascended the throne, that the Protestant ministers allowed themselves boundless license with regard to the articles of faith, and indeed altogether rejected several essential parts and fundamental verities of the Protestant Church and the Christian religion. They blushed not to revive the long-since-refuted errors of the Socinians, the deists, and the naturalists, and to scatter them among the people under the false name of enlightenment (Aufklärung), whilst they treated God’s Word with disdain, and strove to throw suspicion upon the mysteries of revelation. Since this was intolerable, he, therefore, as ruler of the land and only law-giver in his states, commanded and ordered that in future no clergyman, preacher, or school-teacher of the Protestant religion should presume, under pain of perpetual loss of office and of even severer punishment, to disseminate the errors already named; for, as it was his duty to preserve intact the law of the land, so was it incumbent upon him to see that religion should be kept free from taint; and he could not, consequently, allow its ministers to substitute their whims and fancies for the truths of Christianity. They must teach what had been agreed upon in the symbols of faith of the denomination to which they belonged; to this they were bound by their office and the contract under which they had received their positions. Nevertheless, out of his great love for freedom of conscience, the king was willing that those who were known to disbelieve in the articles of faith might retain their offices, provided they consented to teach their flocks what they were themselves unable to believe.
In this royal edict we have at once the fullest confession of the general unbelief that was destroying Protestantism in Prussia, and of the hopelessness of any attempt to arrest its progress. What could be more pitiable than the condition of a church powerless to control its ministers, and publicly recognizing their right to be hypocrites? How could men who had no faith teach others to believe? Moreover, what could be more absurd, from a Protestant point of view, than to seek to force the acceptance of symbols of faith when the whole Reformation rested upon the assumed right of the individual to decide for himself what should or should not be believed? Or was it to be supposed that men could invest the conflicting creeds of the sects with a sacredness which they had denied to that of the universal church? It is not surprising, therefore, that the only effect of the edict should have been to increase the energy and activity of the infidels and free-thinkers.