1. When two generations of Protestant strife had turned to naught the intellectual promise of the Reformation, and much of the ground first won by it had lapsed to Catholicism, the general forward movement of European thought availed to set up in Germany as elsewhere a measure of critical unbelief. There is abundant evidence that the Lutheran clergy not only failed to hold the best intelligence of the country with them, but in large part fell into personal disrepute.1 “The scenes of clerical immorality,” says an eminently orthodox historian, “are enough to chill one’s blood even at the distance of two centuries.”2 A Church Ordinance of 1600 acknowledges information to the effect that a number of clergymen and schoolmasters are guilty of “whoredom and fornication,” and commands that “if they are notoriously guilty they shall be suspended.” Details are preserved of cases of clerical drunkenness and ruffianism; and the women of the priests’ families do not escape the pillory.3 Nearly a century later, Arnold resigned his professorship at Giessen “from despair of producing any amendment in the dissolute habits of the students.”4 It is noted that “the great moral decline of the clergy was confined chiefly to the Lutheran Church. The Reformed [Calvinistic] was earnest, pious, and aggressive”5—the usual result of official hostility.

In such circumstances, the active freethought existing in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century could not fail to affect Germany; and even before the date of the polemic of Garasse and Mersenne there appeared (1615) a counterblast to the new thought in the Theologia Naturalis of J. H. Alsted, of Frankfort, directed adversus atheos, Epicureos, et sophistas hujus temporis. The preface to this solid quarto (a remarkable sample of good printing for the period) declares that “there are men in this diseased (exulcerato) age who dare to oppose science to revelation, reason to faith, nature to grace, the creator to the redeemer, and truth to truth”; and the writer undertakes to rise argumentatively from nature to the Christian God, without, however, transcending the logical plane of De Mornay. The trouble of the time, unhappily for the faith, was not rationalism, but the inextinguishable hatreds of Protestant and Catholic, and the strife of economic interests dating from the appropriations of the first reformers. At length, after a generation of gloomy suspense, came the explosion of the hostile ecclesiastical interests, and the long-drawn horror of the Thirty Years’ War, which left Germany mangled, devastated, drained of blood and treasure, decivilized, and well-nigh destitute of the machinery of culture. No such printing as that of Alsted’s book was to be done in the German world for many generations. But as in France, so in Germany, the exhausting experience of the moral and physical evil of religious war wrought something of an antidote, in the shape of a new spirit of rationalism.

Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political settlement,6 but the drift of opinion was markedly freethinking. Already in 1630 one writer describes “three classes of skeptics among the nobility of Hamburg: first, those who believe that religion is nothing but a mere fiction, invented to keep the masses in restraint; second, those who give preference to no faith, but think that all religions have a germ of truth; and third, those who, confessing that there must be one true religion, are unable to decide whether it is papal, Calvinist, or Lutheran, and consequently believe nothing at all.” No less explicit is the written testimony of Walther, the court chaplain of Ulrich II of East Friesland, 1637: “These infernal courtiers, among whom I am compelled to live against my will, doubt those truths which even the heathen have learned to believe.”7 In Germany as in France the freethinking which thus grew up during the religious war expanded after the peace. As usual, this is to be gathered from the orthodox propaganda against it, setting out in 1662 with a Preservative against the Pest of Present-day Atheists,8 by one Theophilus Gegenbauer. So far was this from attaining its end that there ensued ere long a more positive and aggressive development of freethinking than any other country had yet seen. A wandering scholar, Matthias Knutzen of Holstein (b. 1645), who had studied philosophy at Königsberg, went about in 1674 teaching a hardy Religion of Humanity, rejecting alike immortality, God and Devil, churches and priests, and insisting that conscience could perfectly well take the place of the Bible as a guide to conduct. His doctrines are to be gathered chiefly from a curious Latin letter,9 written by him for circulation, headed Amicus Amicis Amica; and in this the profession of atheism is explicit: “Insuper Deum negamus.” In two dialogues in German he set forth the same ideas. His followers, as holding by conscience, were called Gewissener; and he or another of his group asserted that in Jena alone there were seven hundred of them.10 The figures were fantastic, and the whole movement passed rapidly out of sight—hardly by reason of the orthodox refutations, however. Germany was in no state to sustain such a party; and what happened was a necessarily slow gestation of the seed of new thought thus cast abroad.

3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly clerical and scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part sown in the seventeenth century; but the ground was not yet propitious. Leibnitz (1646–1716), the chief thinker produced by Germany before Kant, lived in a state of singular intellectual isolation;19 and showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises chiefly in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age, he was wont from his boyhood to grapple critically with every system of thought that came in his way; and, while claiming to be always eager to learn,20 he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm his own powerful bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies him to think how many men he has met who were at once intelligent and atheistic;21 and his propaganda is always dominated by the desire rather to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As early as 1668 (aet. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was published as a Confessio naturæ contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza he reacted instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its first (anonymous) appearance an “unbearably bold (licentiosum) book,” and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it “dared to apply to sacred Scripture.”22 Yet in the next year we find him writing to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound orthodoxy of the Church. “A philosophic age,” he declares, “is about to begin, in which the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools, will spread even among politicians. Nothing is more likely to strengthen atheism and to upset faith, already so shaken by the attacks of great but bad men [a pleasing allusion to Spinoza], than to see on the one side the mysteries of the faith preached upon as the creed of all, and on the other hand become matter of derision to all, convicted of absurdity by the most certain rules of common reason. The worst enemies of the Church are in the Church. Let us take care lest the latest heresy—I will not say atheism, but—naturalism, be publicly professed.”23 For a time he seemed thus disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza on points of optics before he discovered the authorship; and he is represented later as speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even visited Spinoza in 1676, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript of the Ethica; but he remained hostile to him in theology and philosophy. To the last he called Spinoza a mere developer of Descartes,24 whom he also habitually resisted.

This was not hopeful; and Leibnitz, with all his power and originality, really wrought little for the direct rationalization of religious thought.25 His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the common stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is for the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account of an empiricism of which the “clearness” was really predetermined by the conviction of truth. His Theodicée,26 written in reply to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers27 a process of begging the question. Deity, a mere “infinition” of finite qualities, is proved à priori, though it is expressly argued that a finite mind cannot grasp infinity; and the necessary goodness of necessary deity is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant that such a philosopher, himself much given to denying the religiousness of other men’s theories, was nevertheless accused among both the educated and the populace of being essentially non-religious. Nominally he adhered to the entire Christian system, including miracles, though he declared that his belief in dogma rested on the agreement of reason with faith, and claimed to keep his thought free on unassailed truths;28 and he always discussed the Bible as a believer; yet he rarely went to church;29 and the Low German nickname Lövenix (= Glaubet nichts, “believes nothing”) expressed his local reputation. No clergyman attended his funeral; but indeed no one else went, save his secretary.30 It is on the whole difficult to doubt that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere had been and has been for deism and atheism.31 He and Newton were the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age; and Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy of Newton32 tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic predecessor Descartes would not stand criticism.33 Spinoza being, according to him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,34 there remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and his ethic of optimism—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds—which seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to make thoughtful men give up the principle.

4. Other culture-conditions concurred to set up a spirit of rationalism in Germany. After the Thirty Years’ War there arose a religious movement, called Pietism by its theological opponents, which aimed at an emotional inwardness of religious life as against what its adherents held to be an irreligious orthodoxy around them.35 Contending against rigid articles of credence, they inevitably prepared the way for less credent forms of thought.36 Though the first leaders of Pietism grew embittered with their unsuccess and the attacks of their religious enemies,37 their impulse went far, and greatly influenced the clergy through the university of Halle, which in the first part of the eighteenth century turned out 6,000 clergymen in one generation.38 Against the Pietists were furiously arrayed the Lutherans of the old order, who even contrived in many places to suppress their schools.39 Virtues generated under persecution, however, underwent the law of degeneration which dogs all intellectual subjection; and the inner life of Pietism, lacking mental freedom and intellectual play, grew as cramped in its emotionalism as that of orthodoxy in its dogmatism. Religion was thus represented by a species of extremely unattractive and frequently absurd formalists on the one hand, and on the other by a school which at its best unsettled religious usage, and otherwise tended alternately to fanaticism and cant.40 Thus “the rationalist tendencies of the age were promoted by this treble exhibition of the aberrations of belief.”41 “How sorely,” says Tholuck, “the hold not only of ecclesiastical but of Biblical belief on men of all grades had been shaken at the beginning of the eighteenth century is seen in many instances.”42 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 “Our soul is mortal; religion is a popular delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so govern the world the better.”43 But again there is the testimony of the mint-master at Hanover that at court there all lived as “free atheists.” And though the name “freethinker” 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,44 was probably a survival from the name of the old sect of the “Free Spirit,” rather than an adaptation from the French esprit fort or the English “freethinker.”

5. After the collapse of the popular movement of Matthias Knutzen, the thin end of the new wedge may be seen in the manifold work of Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who in 1687 published a treatise on “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.45 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.46 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.47 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,48 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.49 Other satirical writings, and a defence of intermarriage between Calvinists and Lutherans,50 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 “of another spirit” than they, and took his own way.

In philosophy an unsystematic pantheist, he taught, after Plutarch, Bayle, and Bacon, that “superstition is worse than atheism”; but his great practical service to German civilization, over and above his furthering of the native speech, was his vigorous polemic against prosecutions for heresy, trials for witchcraft, and the use of torture, all of which he did more than any other German to discredit, though judicial torture subsisted for another half-century.51 It was by his propaganda that the princes of Germany were moved to abolish all trials for sorcery.52 In such a battle he of course had the clergy against him all along the line; and it is as an anti-clerical that he figures in clerical history. The clerical hostility to his ethics he repaid with interest, setting himself to develop to the utmost, in the interest of lay freedom, the Lutheran admission of the divine right of princes.53 This he turned not against freedom of opinion but against ecclesiastical claims, very much in the spirit of Hobbes, who may have influenced him.

The perturbed Mosheim, while candidly confessing that Thomasius is the founder of academic freedom in Germany, pronounces that the “famous jurists” who were led by Thomasius “set up a new fundamental principle of church polity—namely, the supreme authority and power of the civil magistrate,” so tending to create the opinion “that the ministers of religion are not to be accounted ambassadors of God, but vicegerents of the chief magistrates. They also weakened not a little the few remaining prerogatives and advantages which were left of the vast number formerly possessed by the clergy; and maintained that many of the maxims and regulations of our churches which had come down from our fathers were relics of popish superstition. This afforded matter for long and pernicious feuds and contests between our theologians and our jurists.... It will be sufficient for us to observe, what is abundantly attested, that they diminished much in various places the respect for the clergy, the reverence for religion, and the security and prosperity of the Lutheran Church.”54 Pusey, in turn, grudgingly allows that “the study of history was revived and transformed through the views of Thomasius.”55

6. A personality of a very different kind emerges in the same period in Johann Conrad Dippel (1673–1734), who developed a system of rationalistic mysticism, and as to whom, says an orthodox historian, “one is doubtful whether to place him in the class of pietists or of rationalists, of enthusiasts or of scoffers, of mystics or of freethinkers.”56 The son of a preacher, he yet “exhibited in his ninth year strong doubts as to the catechism.” After a tolerably free life as a student he turned Pietist at Strasburg, lectured on astrology and palmistry, preached, and got into trouble with the police. In 1698 he published under the pen-name of “Christianus Democritus” his book, Gestäuptes Papstthum der Protestirenden (“The Popery of the Protestantizers Whipped”), in which he so attacked the current Christian ethic of salvation as to exasperate both Churches.57 The stress of his criticism fell firstly on the unthinking Scripturalism of the average Protestant, who, he said, while reproaching the Catholic with setting up in the crucifix a God of wood, was apt to make for himself a God of paper.58 In his repudiation of the “bargain” or “redemption” doctrine of the historic Church he took up positions which were as old as Abailard, and which were one day to become respectable; but in his own life he was much of an Ishmaelite, with wild notions of alchemy and gold-making; and after predicting that he should live till 1808, he died suddenly in 1734, leaving a doctrine which appealed only to those constitutionally inclined, on the lines of the earlier English Quakers, to set the inner light above Scripture.59

7. Among the pupils of Thomasius at Halle was Theodore Louis Lau, who, born of an aristocratic family, became Minister of Finances to the Duke of Courland, and after leaving that post held a high place in the service of the Elector Palatine. While holding that office Lau published a small Latin volume of pensées entitled Meditationes Theologicæ-Physicæ, notably deistic in tone. This gave rise to such an outcry among the clergy that he had to leave Frankfort, only, however, to be summoned before the consistory of Königsberg, his native town, and charged with atheism (1719). He thereupon retired to Altona, where he had freedom enough to publish a reply to his clerical persecutors.60

8. While Thomasius was still at work, a new force arose of a more distinctly academic cast. This was the adaptation of Leibnitz’s system by Christian Wolff, who, after building up a large influence among students by his method of teaching,61 came into public prominence by a rectorial address62 at Halle (1721) in which he warmly praised the ethics of Confucius. Such praise was naturally held to imply disparagement of Christianity; and as a result of the pietist outcry Wolff was condemned by the king to exile from Prussia, under penalty of the gallows,63 all “atheistical” writings being at the same time forbidden. Wolff’s system, however, prevailed so completely, in virtue of its lucidity and the rationalizing tendency of the age, that in the year 1738 there were said to be already 107 authors of his cast of thinking. Nevertheless, he refused to return to Halle on any invitation till the accession (1740) of Frederick the Great, one of his warmest admirers, whereafter he figured as the German thinker of his age. His teaching, which for the first time popularized philosophy in the German language, in turn helped greatly, by its ratiocinative cast, to promote the rationalistic temper, though orthodox enough from the modern point of view. Under the new reign, however, pietism and Wolffism alike lost prestige,64 and the age of anti-Christian and Christian rationalism began. Thus the period of freethinking in Germany follows close upon one of religious revival. The 6,000 theologians trained at Halle in the first generation of the century had “worked like a leaven through all Germany.”65 “Not since the time of the Reformation had Germany such a large number of truly pious preachers and laymen as towards the end of the first half of the eighteenth century.”66 There, as elsewhere, religion intellectually collapsed.

9. Even before the generation of active pressure from English and French deism there were clear signs that rationalism had taken root in German life. On the impulse set up by the establishment of the Grand Lodge at London in 1717, Freemasonic lodges began to spring up in Germany, the first being founded at Hamburg in 1733.67 The deism which in the English lodges was later toned down by orthodox reaction was from the first pronounced in the German societies, which ultimately passed on the tradition to the other parts of the Continent. But the new spirit was not confined to secret societies. Wolffianism worked widely. In the so-called Wertheim Bible (1735) Johann Lorenz Schmid, in the spirit of the Leibnitz-Wolffian theology, “undertook to translate the Bible, and to explain it according to the principle that in revelation only that can be accepted as true which does not contradict the reason.”68 This of course involved no thorough-going criticism; but the spirit of innovation was strong enough in Schmid to make him undermine tradition at many points, and later carried him so far as to translate Tindal’s Christianity as old as Creation. So far was he in advance of his time that when his Wertheim Bible was officially condemned throughout Germany he found no defenders.69 The Wolffians were in comparison generally orthodox; and another writer of the same school, Martin Knutzen, professor at Königsberg (1715–1751), undertook in a youthful thesis De æternitate mundi impossibili (1735) to rebut the old Averroïst doctrine, revived by modern science, of the indestructibility of the universe. A few years later (1739) he published a treatise entitled The Truth of Christianity Demonstrated by Mathematics, which succeeded as might have been expected.

10. To the same period belong the first activities of Johann Christian Edelmann (1698–1767), one of the most energetic freethinkers of his age. Trained philosophically at Jena under the theologian Budde, a bitter opponent of Wolff, and theologically in the school of the Pietists, he was strongly influenced against official orthodoxy through reading the Impartial History of the Church and of Heretics, by Gottfried Arnold, an eminently anti-clerical work, which nearly always takes the side of the heretics.70 In the same heterodox direction he was swayed by the works of Dippel. At this stage Edelmann produced his Unschuldige Wahrheiten (“Innocent Truths”), in which he takes up a pronouncedly rationalist and latitudinarian position, but without rejecting “revelation”; and in 1736 he went to Berleburg, where he worked on the Berleburg translation of the Bible, a Pietist undertaking, somewhat on the lines of Dippel’s mystical doctrine, in which a variety of incredible Scriptural narratives, from the six days’ creation onwards, are turned to mystical purpose.71 In this occupation Edelmann seems to have passed some years. Gradually, however, he came more and more under the influence of the English deists; and he at length withdrew from the Pietist camp, attacking his former associates for the fanaticism into which their thought was degenerating. It was under the influence of Spinoza, however, that he took his most important steps. A few months after meeting with the Tractatus he began (1740) the first part of his treatise Moses mit aufgedecktem Angesichte (“Moses with unveiled face”), an attack at once on the doctrine of inspiration and on that of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The book was intended to consist of twelve parts; but after the appearance of three it was prohibited by the imperial fisc, and the published parts burned by the hangman at Hamburg and elsewhere. Nonetheless, Edelmann continued his propaganda, publishing in 1741 or 1742 The Divinity of Reason,72 and in 1741 Christ and Belial. In 1749 or 1750 his works were again publicly burned at Frankfurt by order of the imperial authorities; and he had much ado to find anywhere in Germany safe harbourage, till he found protection under Frederick at Berlin, where he died in 1767.

Edelmann’s teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic,73 with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he of course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspiration the appanage of all; and the gospels were by him dismissed as late fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could not be learned; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age, he estimated Jesus highly.74 A German theologian complains, nevertheless, that he was “more just toward heathenism than toward Judaism; and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity”; adding: “What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy, such things were unheard of.”75 The force of Edelmann’s attack may be gathered from the same writer’s account of him as a “bird of prey” who rose to a “wicked height of opposition, not only against the Lutheran Church, but against Christianity in general.”

11. Even from decorous and official exponents of religion, however, there came “naturalistic” and semi-rationalistic teaching, as in the Reflections on the most important truths of religion76 (1768–1769) of J. F. W. Jerusalem, Abbot of Marienthal in Brunswick, and later of Riddagshausen (1709–1789). Jerusalem had travelled in Europe, and had spent two years in Holland and one in England, where he studied the deists and their opponents. “In England alone,” he declared, “is mankind original.”77 Though really written by way of defending Christianity against the freethinkers, in particular against Bolingbroke and Voltaire,78 the very title of his book is suggestive of a process of disintegration; and in it certain unedifying Scriptural miracles are actually rejected.79 It was probably this measure of adaptation to new needs that gave it its great popularity in Germany and secured its translation into several other languages. Goethe called him a “freely and gently thinking theologian”; and a modern orthodox historian of the Church groups him with those who “contributed to the spread of Rationalism by sermons and by popular doctrinal and devotional works.”80 Jerusalem was, however, at most a semi-rationalist, taking a view of the fundamental Christian dogmas which approached closely to that of Locke.81 It was, as Goethe said later, the epoch of common sense; and the very theologians tended to a “religion of nature.”82

12. Alongside of home-made heresy there had come into play a new initiative force in the literature of English deism, which began to be translated after 1740,83 and was widely circulated till, in the last third of the century, it was superseded by the French. The English answers to the deists were frequently translated likewise, and notoriously helped to promote deism84—another proof that it was not their influence that had changed the balance of activity in England. Under a freethinking king, even clergymen began guardedly to accept the deistic methods; and the optimism of Shaftesbury began to overlay the optimism of Leibnitz;85 while a French scientific influence began with La Mettrie,86 Maupertuis, and Robinet. Even the Leibnitzian school, proceeding on the principle of immortal monads, developed a doctrine of the immortality of the souls of animals87—a position not helpful to orthodoxy. There was thus a general stirring of doubt among educated people,88 and we find mention in Goethe’s Autobiography of an old gentleman of Frankfort who avowed, as against the optimists, “Even in God I find defects (Fehler).”89

On the other hand, there were instances in Germany of the phenomenon, already seen in England in Newton and Boyle, of men of science devoting themselves to the defence of the faith. The most notable cases were those of the mathematician Euler and the biologist von Haller. The latter wrote Letters (to his Daughter) On the most important Truths of Revelation (1772)90 and other apologetic works. Euler in 1747 published at Berlin, where he was professor, his Defence of Revelation against the Reproaches of Freethinkers;91 and in 1769 his Letters to a German Princess, of which the argument notably coincides with part of that of Berkeley against the freethinking mathematicians. Haller’s position comes to the same thing. All three men, in fact, grasped at the argument of despair—the inadequacy of the human faculties to sound the mystery of things; and all alike were entirely unable to see that it logically cancelled their own judgments. Even a theologian, contemplating Haller’s theorem of an incomprehensible omnipotence countered in its merciful plan of salvation by the set of worms it sought to save, comments on the childishness of the philosophy which confidently described the plans of deity in terms of what it declared to be the blank ignorance of the worms in question.92 Euler and Haller, like some later men of science, kept their scientific method for the mechanical or physical problems of their scientific work, and brought to the deepest problems of all the self-will, the emotionalism, and the irresponsibility of the ignorant average man. Each did but express in his own way the resentment of the undisciplined mind at attacks upon its prejudices; and Haller’s resort to poetry as a vehicle for his religion gives the measure of his powers on that side. Thus in Germany as in England the “answer” to the freethinkers was a failure. Men of science playing at theology and theologians playing at science alike failed to turn the tide of opinion, now socially favoured by the known deism of the king. German orthodoxy, says a recent Christian apologist, fell “with a rapidity reminding one of the capture of Jericho.”93 Goethe, writing of the general attitude to Christianity about 1768, sums up that “the Christian religion wavered between its own historic-positive base and a pure deism, which, grounded on morality, was in turn to re-establish ethics.”94