The Warfare of Humanity With Unreason: Christian Thomasius

CHRISTIAN THOMASIUS

II

As we have seen, Thomasius had been driven, under a capital charge, from a leading chair in a renowned university to seek whatever chance might offer in a little town comparatively unknown.

To his contemporaries, clearly viewing the whole field, the future of his reforms, as well as his own personal prospects, must have seemed poor indeed. And yet, to us, looking along that lengthened chain of cause and effect which spans the abyss separating the American civilization of the twentieth century from the German civilization of the seventeenth, it is now clear that this catastrophe was but the necessary prelude to that great series of victories for justice, right reason, and mercy, which brought vast blessings to his country and to humanity.

There was at Halle what was known as a “ Ritter-schule: ” an intermediate academy for young nobles. It seemed but a dull centre of thought as compared with that which Thomasius had left, but he took a situation in it, and began a new career even more strenuous than the old. Discouraging prophecies were many, but all were soon brought to naught; the best of his old Leipsic students followed him; others flocked in from other parts of Germany, and soon he was more influential than ever: speaking to larger audiences and taking stronger hold.

The sovereign under whom he had thus taken refuge was the Elector Frederick III, of Brandenburg, who afterward made himself the first king of Prussia: thus beginning that line of monarchs which has since won the sovereignty of the present German Empire.

The Elector saw his opportunity. True to those sane instincts which have made the Hohenzollerns the ruling family in Europe, true to the policy which led King Frederick William III, after his defeat by the first Napoleon, to establish the University of Berlin, and the Emperor William I, after his victory over the third Napoleon, to reëstablish the University of Strasburg, Frederick III, in 1694, made the Academy of Halle a university, gave it a strong faculty, named Thomasius a full professor in it, and a few years later placed him at its head.

The new institution was at once attacked from all sides, and especially by its elder sisters. Intrigues were set on foot to induce the Emperor at Vienna to thwart the purpose of the Elector. Every attempt was made to arouse sectarian hate. A favorite reference to it among its enemies was a play upon words: naming it the University of Hell (Hölle), and alluding to it as “ein höllisches Institut.”²

But these attacks helped Thomasius’s work rather than hurt it. To understand the causes and results of such attacks an American in these days has only to recall the articles in very many sectarian newspapers and the sermons in numberless sectarian pulpits during the middle years of the nineteenth century against Cornell University and the State Universities of our Western commonwealths; very good examples may also be seen to-day in similar diatribes upholding the sectarian colleges of various Southern states against their state universities. But in that, as in more recent cases, the Darwinian theory seemed to apply: for while these diatribes kept many sons of timid parents away from Halle, there seemed a survival of the fittest: the more independent and thoughtful youth flocking to Thomasius’s lectureroom in ever increasing numbers. Erelong, his university rivaled Leipsic and Wittenberg, and became a leading centre of German thought. It became almost what Wittenberg had been in the days of Luther. Well has Thomasius been called by an eminent authority “ the corner-stone of the new university,” for during forty years his spirit was its main inspiration.

The basis of all his teaching was his development of the ideas of Grotius and Pufendorf: making law an evolution of right reason as against that survival of mediæval ideas which mainly promoted conformity with the sacred books and especially with the laws of Moses. But this was by no means all. More and more he strove to bring order out of chaos. The main material of law as then presented in Germany was an incoherent mass drawn not only from the Bible, but from the Roman Law, the Canon Law, and from decisions, glosses, notions, whimsies, — of authorities here, there, and everywhere, — often irreconcilable; — the breedingground of pedantry and the happy hunting-ground of venal ingenuity.

The spirit which permeated the teaching of Thomasius gave him a special power. The foremost purpose of his predecessors and rivals was the maintenance of dogma, their principal means hairsplitting definitions, distinctions, subtleties, and pedantries. Through all these the young professor broke boldly. His evident ambition was to distinguish himself, not by buttressing outworn beliefs, but by infusing into the younger generation a love for truth; — a straightforward use of right reason in seeking it and a manly courage in defending it. His clear purpose was to give his country deeper foundations of justice, and to begin on these a better superstructure of law. He was by no means contemptuous of ancient sources. If right reason was embodied in an Old or New Testament declaration, or in a Roman code, or in the decision of a mediæval court, or in the better thought of a contemporary pedant, he was glad to make use of it; but he was, of all things and in the highest sense, practical: anxious to set men, not at spinning new theories to cover old abuses, but at thinking out better theories and working out better practice.³

The main result of all this was soon seen in the new sort of professional men who went forth from Halle. That University became, under his direction, the training school for the state officials of Prussia. Instead of pedants discoursing endlessly in wretched Latin on the weight of the grapes of Eshcol, or on the meaning of this or that word in Aristotle, or on the sin of “syncretism” and the like, we find men under his guidance learning to think upon municipal and international law, on public economy, on state administration, and, none the less for all this, on a new and nobler literature.

As the years went on, increasing numbers of young men were sent out from this seat of learning to lay foundations for Prussian administration, and thus to prepare the ground for the House of Hohenzollern, and for the present German Empire.⁴

Nor did science, literature, or theology suffer. Better progress was made in each of these. Into every one of these fields great men went forth from the new university, especially into theology. Such men in our own day, from Tholuck and Julius Mülller to Harnack and Pfleiderer, — who have been and are leaders of religious thought in Germany, and indeed throughout Christendom, — are the legitimate results of Thomasius’ influence: without him, so far as we can now see, they would have been impossible.

But while thus building up his department and the University, he did not forget his duty to the German people at large. He ceased, indeed, to publish his literary journal, but this was only that he might give all his time to works of greater importance. He never forgot that his main effort must be to lay better foundations of principle, to bring in better modes of thought, and to stimulate a more practical performance of duty. In 1691 was published his Doctrine of Common Sense ; in 1692, his Doctrine of Morals; and, after a number of other treatises designed to uplift the character and conduct of the whole nation, appeared, in 1705, his work on Natural and International Law.

Yet all this was but a part of his activity. While doing university work, and writing treatises, learned and popular, he plunged more and more into great living questions, — the greatest on which any man of his time could be engaged, and in which he rendered more direct service to mankind than did any other German between Luther and Lessing.

First of these was Witchcraft. To understand the work of Thomasius in finally destroying a growth so widespread, so noxious, and so tenacious of life, we must look back over its history.

Its roots ran deep into the earlier strata of human civilization, and especially into the mythologies and theologies of Babylonia, Persia, Judea, Rome, and the rude tribes of early Europe. In the early days of Christianity a rank growth had come from sundry passages in our own sacred books; above all from the command in the Old Testament, “Ye shall not suffer a witch to live,” and from the declaration in the New Testament that ‘The Gods of the heathen are devils.”

Various great fathers and doctors of the church, with St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Thomas Aquinas at their head, strengthened this growth, and it was more and more bound on the consciences of the faithful by the edicts of various popes and councils.

Typical among these may be noted the bull Spondent Pariter, issued in 1317 by Pope John XXII. In this solemn utterance to the universal church, under guarantee of his infallibility in all teachings relating to faith and morals, he complained that he and many of the faithful were in danger of their lives from the arts of sorcerers; that such sorcerers could send devils into mirrors and finger-rings; could kill men by magic words; that they had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image of him with needles, and he therefore increased the powers of inquisitors, and called on all rulers to hunt down those guilty of these things.

Still another effort in the same direction was made by Pope Eugene IV. Bringing his infallibility to bear on the subject, he exhorted inquisitors, especially in his bulls of 1437 and 1445, to seek out and punish the witches who caused bad weather. This and other edicts, universally supposed to be issued under direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, led to new carnivals of judicial murder in various parts of Europe; but the great stroke of all came later, when Pope Innocent VIII used his infallibility to yet more serious purpose. For in 1484 he issued his famous bull Summis Desiderantes, which, of all edicts ever sent forth under Paganism or Christianity, caused the most unlimited cruelty and the most profuse shedding of innocent blood. Inspired especially by the Scripture command, he exhorted the clergy of Germany to wage war on sorcerers, and especially on those who, by producing evil weather, destroyed vineyards, gardens, and growing crops.

But this was not the worst. As his apostles, there were sent out two inquisitors, Institor and Sprenger. To increase their authority they were furnished, not only with the Papal bull, but with an Imperial patent and certificates of sundry theological faculties; while to complete their effectiveness they were provided with a special manual: the Witch Hammer : the Malleus Maleficarum.

This work was received as almost divinely inspired, and its teachings soon became fruitful in horrors throughout. Germany, and indeed throughout Christendom. Its doctrines were preached in thousands of pulpits, spread by myriads of traveling friars, and soon through central Germany came wide and systematic spying, torture, strangling, and burning. The victims were numbered by thousands. They included many men and children, but the overwhelming majority were women. Typical of the reasoning in the Witch Hammer may be noted a most cogent argument for seeking the main culprits among women: a rare bit of philology. It asserted that the word femina (woman) was a compound of fe (faith) and minus (less);—therefore that women had less faith than men; hence that they were especially prone to alliances with Satan.

From the bishops in the great cities the witchcraft procedure spread more and more, and the torture chambers were soon in full operation everywhere. The victims writhing under torture, anxious only for death to end their suffering, confessed to anything and everything. All that was needed was that the inquisitors should hint at the answers desired, and, there being no limit to the torture, there was no limit to the folly of the confessions. The agonized victims confessed readily to raising storms, spreading epidemics and cattle pests, riding on broomsticks to the Blocksberg, doing homage to Satan, signing Satanic compacts in their own blood, taking part in every sort of vile rite which the imagination of the inquisitors could conceive, and especially to bearing children to Satan. Confessions of this latter sort were forced by torture from the lips not only of women, but of children; and then, for this preposterous crime, thus absurdly proven, they were strangled and burned.

The main agents in carrying on this sacred work in Germany were, first, the Dominicans, and, at a later period, the Jesuits. They did it thoroughly. Especially throughout the seventeenth century we find them pushing it everywhere. Of much influence was the fact that people suspected of heresy could be very conveniently brought to the stake by means of trial for witchcraft. In this way war was waged against the new religious ideas to such effect that whole districts were thereby turned back into the older faith.

Leaders of a forlorn hope against this folly and cruelty arose in Teutonic lands as elsewhere,—especially such as Molitor, Cornelius Agrippa, John Wier, Balthazar Becker, Cornelius Loos, and above all, Dietrich Flade. All were persecuted and silenced, and the two last were judicially murdered. Loos, indeed, escaped capital punishment by dying in prison, but Flade, though Chief Justice of the province and Rector of the University of Treves, was put on trial by the Archbishop, tortured until he confessed everything suggested to him, and was then strangled and burned.⁵

To maintain this system, there continued a stream of infallible teachings from Rome: notably the bulls against witchcraft of Julius II, Adrian VI, and various successors; — and to deepen and extend it new treatises were written by strong men in various parts of the world — one of the most cruel being a new manual for witch finders and witch murderers by the Jesuit Del Rio.

Despite all this pressure, opposition continued. Even from the Jesuits themselves, who had become leading agents in all these atrocities and follies, there arose three young men who sought to open the eyes of their brethren. Two of these, Tanner and Laymann, were soon silenced with ignominy and cruelty: the third, Father Spee, had a different fate. Appointed to hear the final confessions of witches at Würzburg before their execution, he learned from them that, without exception, they had made their previous confessions to the inquisitors simply because they could no longer resist the torture, and they besought him to let them die without a lie in their mouths. To this he finally consented, and, thenceforth, was obliged to see hundreds of men, women, and children whom he absolutely knew to be innocent , consigned to torture and death. The strain of this fearful revelation made him prematurely old and gray; and, escaping from his frightful duty after about a year of service, he prepared a most eloquent treatise against the whole delusion, the Cautio Criminalis; — and this, in order that his authorship might not be tracked through the confessional, he published at the Protestant town of Rinteln. In spite of its convincing statement of facts and its eloquent arraignment of the whole procedure, it had little immediate effect. The persecutions raged much as before. He also imparted his secret to a young student , — von Schönborn,—who afterward rose to be Primate and Prince Archishop of Mainz; but though von Schönborn told the secret to Leibnitz, and stopped witchcraft procedure in his diocese during his term of office, he dared not take open ground against the superstition, and after his death the trials went on in his diocese as before.

Nor did the Protestant Reformation bring in any alleviation of these follies and cruelties. The leading reformers, both Lutheran and Calvinist, accepted the whole monstrous system. The great body of Protestant theologians and ecclesiastics, as soon as they obtained power, exerted themselves to prove their orthodoxy by making their procedure even more searching and cruel than that in the Catholic states.

In small towns, both Catholic and Protestant, more executions then took place in a single year for this imaginary crime than are now allowed in the whole German Empire for capital crimes during many decades of years. It is a statement abundantly proved that in the century previous to the birth of Thomasius,—the hundred years between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century, — more than one hundred thousand persons were put to death in Germany alone for witchcraft ; and though there had gradually come some diminutions in the number of victims, it remained a fearful curse even in Thomasius’s time — accepted largely by the best of men, and among these by Thomasius himself.⁶

But in 1694 he was called, as professor of law, to take part in trying an alleged witch. Basing his decision upon the doctrines and methods of the great theologians and jurists of Germany, and indeed of the world, he gave his views against the supposed criminal. Happily the accused was saved by the verdict of the majority of Thomasius’s associates, and among others by the vote of Professor Stryck, his principal rival in the Halle Faculty of Law. Had Thomasius been a mere dogmatist, or a logical gladiator, or a sensation-monger, or simply opinionated or selfish or conceited, he would have plunged into the fray, and, with pen and tongue, shown himself right and his opponents wrong. It was a fine opportunity for noise, for popularity, and for victory over Stryck, his great rival. But he spurned all such temptations; put aside all hostile feeling toward Stryck; bore his mortification without complaining; began studying the whole subject more thoroughly; examined with the utmost care all the cases he could hear of; and the result was that he not only acknowledged himself wrong, but, having begun by declaring against witchcraft persecution, he soon took a step further, for which the whole world is to-day his debtor: he declared his disbelief in the whole system, and especially in a devil — hoofed, horned, and tailed—who whisks wretches through the air, assembles them upon the Blocksberg, accepts their homage, and makes those compacts with them which formed the foundation of the witchcraft trials.⁷

Thomasius’s position was now full of peril. Indeed, he seems himself to have felt this, and he was careful to define it. He stated, no doubt with perfect honesty, that as the Bible, both in the Old and New Testament, declares the existence of witches and sorcerers, and also declares, “Ye shall not suffer a witch to live,” he did not presume to deny the existence of witches or their criminality; but what he protested against was the usual mode of action attributed to Satan, and especially the existence of Satanic compacts and that mass of unreason which the great theologians and ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period, Catholic and Protestant, had for so many generations developed and defended.

This disclaimer helped him little. Catholic writers denounced it as only one more example of the skeptical tendencies of Protestantism; Protestants denounced it as bringing disgrace upon their Church. Both the old theologians and the new pointed out the fact that he impugned not only the judgments of the most learned and pious authorities, Catholic and Protestant, but that he defied the clear statements of Holy Writ, the beliefs of the primitive Church, the assertions of the Fathers, the decisions of Councils dictated

by the Holy Spirit, the solemn decrees of a long line of Popes, the whole mass of theological wisdom, past and present, and therefore the voice of the Holy Church Universal as uttered “always, everywhere, and by all.”

Remembrances of the fate of many who had made a similar fight might well haunt him, and especially of the trial of Dietrich Flade, who, like him, had at first believed in witchcraft, like him had then discovered its folly, like him had said so, and then, though like him an eminent jurist and university professor, had been tortured and put to death.

Since that judicial murder a century had passed, and a series of champions had won various strong positions for humanity; but though the defenders of the superstition could no longer send their enemies to the scaffold, they had fallen back into strong entrenchments, and were well armed.

The first of his main attacks on the whole witchcraft position were made by Thomasius during the opening years of the eighteenth century, and the earlier of these were curious in that they appeared as the theses of students under his presidency : notable among them being one by Johann Reiche in 1701 and another by Paul Ipsen in 1712. Thomasius freely acknowledged his controlling part in these, and during the remainder of his life followed them up with lectures, treatises, tracts, discussions of trials, translations of foreign works, — all in the same direction against this theological and judicial monstrosity.⁸

The air was thick with missiles, theological and judicial. In the Protestant church, there was cited against him that colossus of theology and ecclesiastical law, Benedict Carpzov: — the man who boasted that he had read the Bible through fifty-three times; that he took the Holy Communion at least once a month; that he had sentenced, or caused to be sentenced to death over twenty thousand persons; that he had devoted his life to strengthening the foundations of witchcraft procedure, and to increasing the severity of torture. In the older church, at the head of Thomasius’s innumerable adversaries, as regarded theory, sat a multitude of the most eminent theological writers; and, as regarded practice, such prelates as the Archbishop of Salzburg, and the Bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg, who quietly ignored all argument, and went on torturing and burning as of old.

But the work of so many heroic champions and martyrs, now crowned by the efforts of Thomasius, began to bear abundant fruit. When the Archbishop of Salzburg sent at one time to the stake ninetyseven persons, mainly for witchcraft, he ended the series of greater burnings; when the Bishop of Würzburg brought Maria Renata to the scaffold and stake in 1749, he ended judicial executions for witchcraft in Germany; and when Anna Göldi was executed at Glarus, Switzerland,in 1782,the whole series was ended in civilized Europe.

But, perhaps, even greater were Thomasius’s services in another field. Closely allied with the witchcraft superstition was the system of Procedure by Torture then prevalent throughout the Continent. The connection between torture and witchcraft was logical. In England, where torture was rarely used, witchcraft never produced any such long series of judicial murders as on the Continent; but in Scotland and Continental Europe, wherever torture was applied it came to be an axiom that a person charged with witchcraft who once entered the torture chamber was lost.1

The system of procedure by torture in securing testimony regarding crime had lingered along with more or less vitality ever since the days of the Roman Republic. One of the strongest arguments against it had been made by Cicero, though it is only fair to state that, on another occasion, Cicero, after the fashion of men like him, argued on the other side. In the later days of the Roman Empire, largely under the influence of the Stoics, it had nearly died out. Successive Pagan emperors had ameliorated it; had, indeed, abolished its worst features, and its destruction seemed certain. The barbarians of Europe, with few exceptions, disclaimed it in their codes; from the Vehmgericht it was absolutely excluded.

The Christian Church, too, in its days of comparative weakness, seemed to pronounce against it. In the fifth century St. Augustine, in the sixth St. Gregory, and in the ninth Pope Nicholas I, were among great church leaders who denounced it, and during the early Middle Ages it fell comparatively into abeyance.

But the great misfortune was that the Church, after arriving at power, abjured the mild policy which it had supported during its weakness, gave torture new vitality, found cogent reasons for it, and introduced it in a far more cruel form and to a far greater extent than had ever before been known under Greeks, Romans, or barbarians.

For, under the Greeks and Romans, and in the ancient world generally, the cruelties of torture were limited. It was from this fact, indeed, that Cicero drew one of his strongest arguments, namely, that a criminal, if robust, could resist torture and avoid confession, but that an innocent man, if physically weak, might be forced to confess crimes which he had never committed.

But in the Christian Church, during the Middle Ages, there was developed the theory of “excepted cases.” Under the belief that heresy and witchcraft were crimes especially favored by Satan, and that Satan would help his own, the old Roman procedure by torture was not only revived, but at last made unlimited. It was held that no torture could be too severe in suppressing these crimes. Every plea against the most extreme torture was met by the argument that Satan would of course strengthen heretics and witches to resist ordinary torture. The restraints of the earlier Pagan civilization were therefore cast aside. In trials for heresy and witchcraft there was absolutely no limit to torture. This new evolution of cruelty received the highest infallible sanction when in 1252 Innocent IV issued his directions to the Inquisition in Tuscany and Lombardy that confession should be extorted from heretics by torture, and this sacred precedent was followed for centuries by new and even more cruel decrees of Popes, Councils, and Bishops, regarding procedure against both heretics and witches throughout Europe.

This procedure by torture naturally passed into the courts under lay control, and all the more so because ecclesiastics had so much to do with the administration of justice in them: a method which was considered reasonable in one court seemed reasonable in another.

From time to time noble voices were raised in the Church against it, and among these that of Geiler of Kaisersberg, — the most popular of mediæval preachers at the beginning of the sixteenth century,— whose warnings against it resounded under the arches of Strasburg Cathedral, and along the upper Rhine.

But all in vain. During generation after generation procedure by torture was extended and systematized. In the sixteenth century the great “Caroline Code” of Charles V gave it new life in Germany, Italy, and Spain. In the seventeenth century the codes of Louis XIV gave it new life in France. In the eighteenth century the Code of Maria Theresa gave it new sanction in Germany.

In Great Britain, it long flourished noxiously in Scotland, and especially during the reign of James VI. Fortunately England remained comparatively free from it, the main exceptions to the milder English practice, strange to say, having occurred under Lord Coke and Lord Bacon.

Strong thinkers, indeed, arose from first to last against it. But when such philosophers as Montaigne and Bayle and Voltaire, and such jurists as Pussort and Sonnenfels and Beccaria, would have abolished torture, the whole church influence, as well as the vast conservative authority in the legal profession, was against such an innovation, and this procedure steadily maintained its hold upon the world.⁹

It was widely argued that, since the Almighty punishes the greater part of mankind with tortures infinite in severity and eternal in duration, men might imitate the divine example by administering tortures, which at the worst can only be feeble and brief, as compared with the divine pattern. It was also held, as a purely practical view, by the great body of the ecclesiastics and lay lawyers that torture was the only effective method of eliciting testimony. Among the monuments of this vast superstition which exist to this day, the traveler sees the “witch towers,” the torture chambers, and the collections of instruments of torture in various towns on the Continent: notably at Nuremberg, Ratisbon, Munich, and The Hague; but perhaps nothing brings the system more vividly before us than the executioner’s tariffs still preserved. Four of these may be seen in the library of Cornell University, and, among them, especially that issued by the Archbishop Elector of Cologne in 1757. On four printed folio pages, it enumerates in fifty-five paragraphs every sort of hideous cruelty which an executioner could commit upon a prisoner, with the sum allowed him for each, and for the instruments therein required. Typical examples from this tariff are the following: —

Thalers.

Ulb.

1. For tearing asunder with four horses.5 26

2. For quartering 4

5. For beheading and burning 5 26

7. For strangling and burning 4

8. For heaping the pile of wood and kindling 12

9. For burning alive 4

11. For breaking a man alive on the wheel 4

13. For setting up the wheel with the body twisted in it 2 52

19. For cutting off a hand or sundry fingers, and for beheading, — altogether 3 26

20. For burning with a hot iron 1 26

22. For beheading and placing the head upon a pike 3 26

24. For beheading, twisting the body in the wheel, and placing the head upon a pike, — altogether 5

28. For tearing a criminal before his execution with red-hot pincers, — each tearing of the flesh 26

31. For nailing a tongue or hand to the gallows 1 26

42. For the first grade of torture 1 26

44. For the second grade of torture, including setting the limbs afterward, with salve for same 2 26

and so on through fifty-five items and specifications.

On this whole system, also, thus widespread, thus entrenched, thus defended, Thomasius declared war. He carried on the contest with his usual earnestness; yet at one time he faltered. The weight of authority against him seems to have aroused his suspicion that he might, after all,be wrong. In his justification it should be noted that many of his friends who were inclined to adopt his other ideas could not see any efficient means of eliciting true testimony save by the rack. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of his greatest admirers, his biographer, Luden, while praising all his other work, expressed grave doubts as to the wisdom of his opposition to torture.¹⁰

But Thomasius brought to bear on this subject his old strength and keenness; his doubts gradually faded; his convictions grew firm. His enemies kept him well occupied. The disciples of Carpzov were active in showing the godless and atheistic character of Thomasius’s views upon torture, as well as upon witchcraft, and even Leibnitz — in many ways the greatest thinker of his time — sided mildly against him.

But Thomasius pressed on, and was at last victorious. The sovereigns of Prussia and of other German states gradually, under the influence of the new thought, allowed torture to fall into disuse. There were some rare exceptions, but at the close of Frederick the Great’s reign it had virtually ended.¹¹

The influence of Thomasius soon spread throughout other parts of Europe. Though torture lingered in France, and was only fully swept from the statute books by the Revolution of 1789, and though it prevailed in various other parts of Continental Europe until even a later period, it had mainly vanished before the end of the eighteenth century, under the antagonism of Thomasius in Germany, Voltaire in France, and Beccaria in Italy.

In still another great struggle Thomasius did heroic work. While in the thick of this war against witchcraft and torture,he fought no less bravely against intolerance.

Very early in his career he laid down certain fundamental ideas on the subject, and these frequently reappear in his writings. He declared against all state interference with religious convictions; he formulated the theory that human law deals with men’s wills, and not with their consciences; and from these germs there bloomed forth essays, dialogues, satires, every form of attack upon every form of intolerance, culminating in 1722 in his History of the Struggle between the Empire and Church in the Middle Ages. From the first word of this book he goes straight to the mark. He points out errors of the Fathers of the Church, displays the futility of persecution, and makes clear the necessity of proclaiming religious liberty. All this gave great offense, and especially were his enemies shocked by one pungent expression: “The duty of Princes is not to save souls, but to preserve peace.” This was denounced as rank heresy, and even as blasphemy. The idea of toleration had hardly begun to dawn. Persecution had, indeed, been discouraged in the early Church, but, as a rule, only while the Church was herself persecuted. The one good example in this respect was set by Lactantius, — but it had no appreciable effect on the Church at large. When she became able to persecute, she changed her view. Nothing could be more tolerant than the pleasmade against persecution by Tertullian and Hilary of Poictiers when the Church was weak; nothing more provocative to cruelty than the arguments for persecution by Eusebius, St. Augustine, and the great mass of other leaders, when the Church had become strong. The same must be said of Protestantism. In its period of weakness it was tolerant; in its period of power it was intolerant.¹² When at last toleration was forced upon Europe as a result of the terrible religious wars of Germany, it was in a form which to us now seems incredible. The religious peace of Passau in 1552 established a toleration expressed in the maxim, — “To whom the territory belongs, the religion belongs:” Cujus est regio ejus est religio. Toleration virtually extended only to allowing subjects who dissented from the religious ideas of their ruler to emigrate from his dominions. Even into minds blessed with the largest and most liberal instincts, — minds like those of Luther and Melanchthon,—no full ideas of toleration, much less of religious liberty, had really entered. But Thomasius followed out his principle logically. He stood not merely for toleration, but for religious liberty. Whoever was oppressed for conscience’ sake found in him a defender. Spener and his disciples were glad to avail themselves of his aid against oppression, and he stood by them firmly, receiving more than his share of the epithets hurled at them; and it should also be said to his honor that when the followers of Spener, at last, in their turn, became powerful, and therefore intolerant, he left them forever.

All along in Thomasius’s career we see him putting forth ideas of vast use to the world: germ ideas, some of which have been obliged to wait for centuries before coming to full bloom and fruitage in institutions and laws. He did not hesitate to declare in Germany — groaning under Princes by the grace of God — that men were created naturally equal. He asserted the rights of women to a higher education and to the individual possession of property. His impartiality was judicial, and to the last he continued his various methods of work. In 1720-21 he published a book of Thoughts and Reminiscences of his legal life, an admirable mixture of statements profound and comical, grave and gay; but all pervaded with love of truth and hatred of tyranny.

His old enemies remained bitter; but a new generation was coming on, and the strongest men in it were his friends. Supporters came when least expected. The University of Leipsic, from which he had been forced to flee by night to save his life, finally made amends by calling him to one of its most honored professorships. This he declined, and was soon afterward made Director of the University of Halle, and first Professor of Jurisprudence. His work ended only with his life. His manner of attack in his later years became less unsparing than in his youth; but what he lost in vigor he gained in authority.

As we look back over his life, so full of blessings to mankind, we can now see clearly one result of his activity to which no reference has hitherto been made, yet which was in some respects the most permanent of all; — a result so fruitful that it has acted and is still acting powerfully in our own time, and above all in France, Great Britain, and the United States.

This was his general influence on the higher education in favor of freedom from sectarian interference or control. Down to the time of his work at Halle, German universities had been mainly sectarian,and their sectarian character, whether frankly brutal and tyrannical, or exercised deftly and through intrigue, held back science and better modes of thought during many generations.

Theology, as the so-called “queen of the sciences,” insisted on shaping all teaching in the alleged interest of “ saving souls.” Innumerable examples of this in the dealings of the older universities might be cited. But Thomasius’s work at the University of Halle began the end of it. By him, more than by any other, was that institution brought out of the old sectarian system. In the environment of right reason which he there promoted, and which was spread throughout his fatherland, was evolved that freedom of research and instruction which has made the German universities the foremost in the world, and has given to Germany a main source of strength, — and not less in theology than in other fields.

His effort against witchcraft, torture, persecution, and various cruelties and pedantries, was triumphant long ago, but his work against sectarian control of instruction still continues, and nowhere more steadily than in the United States. Evidences of it in Great Britain are the liberalizing of her great universities, and the election of laymen to so many positions in the higher instruction to which only ecclesiastics were formerly eligible. Evidences of it in France are the successful efforts now making to wrest the control of primary education from various monkish orders. In our own country it is seen in the escape of various older universities from sectarian control, and in the establishment of new universities, especially in our Western states, freed from this incubus,—and all, whether East or West, more and more under management of laymen rather than of ecclesiastics. The clauses in various state constitutions, notably that recently inserted in the constitution of the state of New York, forbidding appropriations to institutions under sectarian management, testify to the continuance of this movement. Sectarian hostility is, indeed, still strong in some parts of our country. It keeps back somewhat the proper development of the state universities of the North, and thus far absolutely prevents proper legislative appropriations to the state universities of the South. It has also been a main source of opposition to the establishment of a university at the city of Washington, which, though proposed by Washington himself, and supported by nearly every president since his time, still remains in abeyance. But the ideas of Thomasius will yet bear fruits in these fields as in others.¹³

His death came in 1728. He had looked forward to it without fear. All that the Church, with the dogmas then in vogue, could do to increase the terrors of death failed to daunt him. Striking was his selection of a text for his own funeral sermon. It began with the words of St. Paul before Felix: “Neither can they prove whereof they now accuse me; but this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy so worship I the God of my fathers.” ¹⁴

So ended a life precious not merely to Germany, but to universal humanity. Many have thought it unlovely. We naturally expect little kindliness or serenity of temper in a man so continually belligerent. As we hear of struggle after struggle, fight after fight, — of war perpetual, — we begin to suspect him as a dyspeptic, or an Ishmaelite. To the present writer, standing before his portrait in the great hall of the University of Halle, and before his bust in the University of Leipsic, the falsity of this theory was revealed. The face is large, kindly, — even jovial: it is the face of a man keen enough to see far into the unreason of his time, and bold enough to fight it; not dyspeptic, never vexed, never peevish, never snappish; but large, fearless, strong, determined, persistent,¹⁵

From first to last he was a warrior. Many have thought his methods too drastic. But his was a period when, as a rule, only drastic methods could avail; — a time like that when Luther began his work; when Richelieu and Mirabeau grappled with the enemies of France; when Cromwell took the helm in England; when Washington led in establishing our republic and Lincoln led in saving it. At such times measures apparently the most humane are often in reality the most cruel. When Christian Thomasius began his work, “sweet reasonableness” was absurd; mild methods futile. Only a man who could fling himself, and all that he was, and all that he hoped to be, into the fight, — who could venture everything and continue venturing everything until the last, could be really of use. He had, doubtless, the defects of his qualities; but he did his work for Germany and for mankind. He was the second of the three great reformers in Germany; and, at his death, there seemed to come a transmigration of his soul to the third; for, a few months later, in that same part of Germany in which he died, was born Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.