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He did not like the singing in the churches, and pronounced it mere bawling. In prayer, whether public or private, he had not the least faith; and in his conversation as well as his writings he treated it as a superstition, holding that to address anything unseen would open the way for fanaticism. Not only did he argue against prayer; he also ridiculed it, and declared that a man would be ashamed to be caught by another in the attitude of prayer. One of his maxims was that
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To kneel or prostrate himself on the earth, even for the purpose of symbolizing to himself reverence for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man. [1461] So too he held that the doctrine of the Trinity had no practical value, and he had a
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for didactic purposes. Swerving from thoroughgoing freethought for fear of moral harm, he ends by sacrificing intellectual morality to what seems to him social security. His doctrine, borrowed from Lessing, of a
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revelation which told man only what he could find out for himself, is a mere flout to reason. While he carries his
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or à priori conception of duty, so extravagantly far as to argue that it is wrong even to tell a falsehood to a would-be murderer in order to mislead him, he approves of the systematic employment of the pulpit function by men who do not believe in the creed they there expound. The priest, with Kant's encouragement, is to
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while he remains free as a scholar to write in a contrary sense in his own name. And this doctrine, set forth in the censured work of 1793, is repeated in the moralist's last treatise (1798), wherein he explains that the preacher, when speaking doctrinally,
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Kant thus ended by reviving for the convenience of churchmen, in a worse form, the medieval principle of a
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Kant's recognition of Scripture is purely a matter of expedience. The State needs the Bible to control the people; the masses need it in order that they, having weak consciences, may recognize their duty; and the philosopher finds it a convenient vehicle for conveying to the people the faith of reason. Were it rejected it might be difficult, if not impossible, to put in its place another book which would inspire as much confidence. All the while
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Kant's principles of course led him to deny that the Bible is authoritative in matters of religion, or that it is of itself a safe guide in morals.... Its value consists in the fact that, owing to the confidence of the people in it, reason can use it to interpret into Scripture its own doctrines, and can thus make it the means of popularizing rational faith. If anyone imagines that the aim of the interpretation is to obtain the real meaning of Scripture, he is no Kantian on this point
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; [1462] and so strong did the official reaction become that in the opinion of Heine all the German philosophers and their ideas would have been suppressed by wheel and gallows but for Napoleon, [1463] who intervened in the year 1805. The Prussian despotism being thus weakened, what actually happened was an adaptation of Kant's teaching to the needs alike of religion and of rationalism. The religious world was assured by it that, though all previous arguments for theism were philosophically worthless, theism was now safe on the fluid basis of feeling. On the other hand, rationalism alike in ethics and in historical criticism was visibly reinforced on all sides. Herder, as before noted, found divinity students grounding their unbelief on Kant's teaching. Staüdlin begins the preface to his History and Spirit of Skepticism (1794) with the remark that
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Skepticism begins to be a disease of the age ; and Kant is the last in his list of skeptics. At the close of the century
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and it was through the Kantian influence that
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[1464]--in the tendency, that is, to bring rational criticism to bear alike on history, dogma, and philosophy. Borowski in 1804 complains that
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devoid of knowledge
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[1465] These views, as we have seen, were partly accommodating, partly subversive in the extreme. Kant regards Jesus as an edifying ideal of perfect manhood,
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in whom as such makes a man acceptable to God, because of following a good model.
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While he thus treats the historical account of Jesus as of no significance, except as a shell into which the practical reason puts the kernel, his whole argument tends to destroy faith in the historic person of Jesus as given in the gospel, treating the account itself as something whose truthfulness it is not worth while to investigate. [1466] In point of fact we find his devoted disciple Erhard declaring:
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I regard Christian morality as something which has been falsely imputed to Christianity; and the existence of Christ does not at all seem to me to be a probable historical fact --this while declaring that Kant had given him
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for his alluring exposition of emotional theism, caused one of them, a tutor, to be brought before a clerical consistory for having taught his pupil to throw all specifically Christian doctrines aside. The tutor admitted the charge, and with four others signed a declaration