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from the mass of the people, made possible after the War of Independence a certain pietistic reaction, in the absence of any popular propagandist machinery or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In the opinion of an evangelical authority, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
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[1717] According to the same authority,
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[1718] This involves an admission that the
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propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion
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[1719] (1799) was not really a Christian revival at all. Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that in Prussia there was almost no attendance on public worship, and the clergy had fallen into profound discredit. [1720] A pietistic movement had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy; [1721] and seeing that the freethinking of the previous generation had been in part associated with French opinion, it was natural that on this side anti-French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more
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forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the tone of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been more religious than that of previous years. [1722] Inasmuch, however, as the
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of the scholarly class was maintained, and applied anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn back the course of progress.
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When the third centenary commemoration, in 1817, of the Reformation approached, the Prussian people were in a state of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious matters. [1723] Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation period there went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an anti-rationalist declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at Dresden in 1811, [1724] between the rationalists or
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Friends of Light and the Scripturalists of the old school; and the effect was a general disintegration of orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue of, the governmental policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging their opponents in the way of official appointments. [1725] The Prussian measure (1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist was treated as a historical commemoration, tended to the same consequences, though it also revived old Lutheran zeal; [1726] and when the new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling was substantially non-religious.
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In the south of Germany especially the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary tendencies produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of religious sentiment. The bulk of society showed entire indifference to worship, the churches being everywhere deserted; and
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[1727] One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to
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society by Dr. Rupp, of Königsberg, one of the
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Friends of Light in the State Church; and he was followed by Wislicenus of Halle, a Hegelian, and by Uhlich of Magdeburg. [1728] As a result of the determined pressure, social and official, which ensued on the collapse of the revolution of 1848, these societies failed to develop on the scale of their beginnings; and that of Magdeburg, which at the outset had 7,000 members, has latterly only 500; though that of Berlin has nearly 4,000. [1729] There is further a Freidenker Bund, with branches in many towns; and the two organizations, with their total membership of some fifty thousand, may be held to represent the militant side of popular freethought in Germany. This, however, constitutes only a fraction of the total amount of passive rationalism. There is a large measure of enlightenment in both the working and the middle classes; and the ostensible force of orthodoxy among the official and conformist middle class is in many respects illusory. The German police laws put a rigid check on all manner of platform and press propaganda which could be indicted as hurting the feelings of religious people; so that a jest at the Holy Coat of Trèves could even in recent years send a journalist to jail, and the platform work of the militant societies is closely trammelled. Yet there are, or have been, over a dozen journals which so far as may be take the freethought side; [1730] and the whole stress of Bismarckian reaction and of official orthodoxy under the present Kaiser has never availed to make the tone of popular thought pietistic. Karl Marx, the prophet of the German Socialist movement (1818-1883), laid it down as part of its mission
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; and his two most influential followers in Germany, Bebel and Liebknecht, were avowed atheists, the former even going so far as to avow officially in the Reichstag that
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; [1731] though the party attempts no propaganda of the latter order.
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Christianity and Social-Democracy, said Bebel again,