d the consequences of that movement were not calculated to impress
educated men with the belief that things were changed for the better, or
that the reformers had achieved the work in which the Apostles were
unsuccessful. Thus an atmosphere of unbelief and of contempt for
everything Christian gradually arose, and Paganism appeared more
cheerful, more human, and more poetical than the repulsive Galilean
doctrine of holiness and privation. This spirit still governs the
educated class. Christianity is abominated both in life and in
literature, even under the form of believing Protestantism.

In Germany theological study and the Lutheran system subsisted for two
centuries together. The controversies that arose from time to time
developed the theory, but brought out by degrees its inward
contradictions. The danger of biblical studies was well understood, and
the Scriptures were almost universally excluded from the universities in
the seventeenth century; but in the middle of the eighteenth Bengel
revived the study of the Bible, and the dissolution of the Lutheran
doctrine began. The rise of historical learning hastened the process.
Frederic the Great says of himself, that the notion that the history of
the Church is a drama, conducted by rogues and hypocrites, at the
expense of the deceived masses, was the real cause of his contempt for
the Christian religion. The Lutheran theology taught, that after the
Apostolic age God withdrew from the Church, and abandoned to the devil
the office which, according to the Gospel, was reserved for the Holy
Spirit. This diabolical millennium lasted till the appearance of Luther.
As soon, therefore, as the reverence for the symbolical books began to
wane, the belief in the divine foundation departed with the belief in
the divine guidance of the Church, and the root was judged by the stem,
the beginning by the continuation. As research went on, unfettered now
by the authorities of the sixteenth century, the clergy became
Rationalists, and stone after stone of the temple was carried away by
its own priests. The infidelity which at the same time flourished in
France, did not, on the whole, infect the priesthood. But in Germany it
was the divines who destroyed religion, the pastors who impelled their
flocks to renounce the Christian faith.

In 1817 the Prussian Union added a new Church to the two original forms
of Protestantism. But strict Calvinism is nearly extinct in Germany, and
the old Lut