An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant by Edward Caldwell Moore
page 27 of 282 (09%)
page 27 of 282 (09%)
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religious tolerance obtains, which the Roman Church would have done
everything in its power to prevent. Again, we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that the reaction had been felt only in Roman Catholic lands. A minister of Prussia forbade Kant to speak concerning religion. The Prussia of Frederick William III. and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna. The history of the censorship of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom. But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively sustained, was almost doomed to further that alienation between the life of piety and the life of learning which is so much to be deplored. In the Church the conservatives have to this moment largely triumphed. In the theological faculties of the universities the liberals in the main have held their own. The fact that both Church and faculties are functionaries of the State is often cited as sure in the end to bring about a solution of this unhappy state of things. For such a solution, it must be owned, we wait. The England of the period after 1815 had indeed no such cause for reaction as obtained in France or even in Germany. The nation having had its Revolution in the seventeenth century escaped that of the eighteenth. Still the country was exhausted in the conflict against Napoleon. Commercial, industrial and social problems agitated it. The Church slumbered. For a time the liberal thought of England found utterance mainly through the poets. By the decade of the thirties |
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