human
[1248]
gpt
How sorely, says Tholuck,
human
[1249] Orthodoxy selects that of a Holstein student who hanged himself at Wittemberg in 1688, leaving written in his New Testament, in Latin, the declaration that
gpt
Our soul is mortal; religion is a popular delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so govern the world the better. [1250] But again there is the testimony of the mint-master at Hanover that at court there all lived as
human
And though the name
gpt
was not yet much used in discussion, it had become current in the form of Freigeist--the German equivalent still used. This, as we have noted, [1251] was probably a survival from the name of the old sect of the
human
Free Spirit, rather than an adaptation from the French esprit fort or the English
gpt
Divine Jurisprudence, in which the principles of Pufendorf on natural law, already offensive to the theologians, were carried so far as to give new offence. Reading Pufendorf in his nonage as a student of jurisprudence, he was so conscious of the conflict between the utilitarian and the Scriptural view of moral law that, taught by a master who had denounced Pufendorf, he recoiled in a state of theological fear. [1252] Some years later, gaining self-possession, he recognized the rationality of Pufendorf's system, and both expounded and defended him, thus earning his share in the hostility which the great jurist encountered at clerical hands. Between that hostility and the naturalist bias which he had acquired from Pufendorf, there grew up in him an aversion to the methods and pretensions of theologians which made him their lifelong antagonist. [1253] Pufendorf had but guardedly introduced some of the fundamental principles of Hobbes, relating morals to the social state, and thus preparing the way for utilitarianism. [1254] This sufficed to make the theologians his enemies; and it is significant that Thomasius, heterodox at the outset only thus far forth, becomes from that point onwards an important pioneer of freethought, toleration, and humane reform. Innovating in all things, he began, while still a Privatdocent at Leipzig University, a campaign on behalf of the German language; and, not content with arousing much pedantic enmity by delivering lectures for the first time in his mother tongue, and deriding at the same time the bad scholastic Latin of his compatriots, he set on foot the first vernacular German periodical, [1255] which ran for two years (1688-90), and caused so much anger that he was twice prosecuted before the ecclesiastical court of Dresden, the second time on a charge of contempt of religion. The periodical was in effect a crusade against all the pedantries, the theologians coming in for the hardest blows. [1256] Other satirical writings, and a defence of intermarriage between Calvinists and Lutherans, [1257] at length put him in such danger that, to escape imprisonment, he sought the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg at Halle, where he ultimately became professor of jurisprudence in the new university, founded by his advice. There for a time he leant towards the Pietists, finding in that body a concern for natural liberty of feeling and thinking which was absent from the mental life of orthodoxy; but he was