Part 20

No man, not Weishaupt himself, has made stronger professions of benevolence, of regard for the happiness of mankind, and of every thing that is amiable, than Dr. Bahrdt. It may not be useless to enquire what effect such principles have had on his own mind, and those of his chief coadjutors. Deceit of every kind is dishonourable; and the deceit that is professedly employed in the proceedings of the Union is no exception. No pious fraud _whatever_ must be used, and pure religion must be presented to the view without all disguise.

"The more fair Virtue's seen, the more she charms. Safe, plain, and easy, are her artless ways. With face erect, her eyes look strait before; For dauntless is her march, her step secure.

Not so, pale Fraud--now here she turns, now there, Still seeking darker shades, secure in none, Looks often back, and wheeling round and round, Sinks headlong in the danger she would shun."

The mean motive of the Protestant Sceptic is as inconsistent with our notions of honesty as with our notions of honour; and our suspicions are justly raised of the character of Dr. Bahrdt and his associates, even although we do not suppose that their aim is the total abolishing of religion. With propriety therefore may we make some enquiry about their lives and conduct. Fortunately this is easy in the present instance. A man that has turned every eye upon himself can hardly escape observation. But it is not so easy to get fair information. The peculiar situation of Dr. Bahrdt, and the cause between him and the public, are of all others the most productive of mistake, misrepresentation, obloquy, and injustice. But even here we are fortunate. Many remarkable parts of his life are established by the most respectable testimony, or by judicial evidences; and, to make all sure, he has written his own life. I shall insert nothing here that is not made out by the two last modes of proof, resting nothing on the first, however respectable the evidence may be. But I must observe, that his life was also written by his dear friend Pott, the partner of Walther the bookseller. The story of this publication is curious, and it is instructive.

Bahrdt was in prison, and in great poverty. He intended to write his own life, to be printed by Walther, under a fictitious name, and in this work he intended to indulge his spleen and his dislike of all those who had offended him, and in particular all priests, and rulers, and judges, who had given him so much trouble. He knew that the strange, and many of them scandalous anecdotes, with which he had so liberally interlarded many of his former publications, would set curiosity on tiptoe, and would procure a rapid sale as soon as the public should guess that it was his own performance, by the singular but significant name which the pretended author would assume. He had almost agreed with Walther for a thousand dahlers, (about L. 200), when he was imprisoned for being the author of the farce so often named, and of the commentary on the _Religion Edict_, written by Pott, and for the proceedings of the German Union. He was refused the use of pen and ink. He then applied to Pott, and found means to correspond with him, and to give him part of his life already written, and materials for the rest, consisting of stories, and anecdotes, and correspondence. Pott sent him several sheets, with which he was so pleased, that they concluded a bargain. Bahrdt says, that Pott was to have 400 copies, and that the rest was to go to the maintenance of Bahrdt and his family, consisting of his wife, daughter, a Christina and her children who lived with them, &c. Pott gives a different account, and the truth was different from both, but of little consequence to us. Bahrdt's papers had been seized, and searched for evidence of his transactions, but the strictest attention was paid to the precise points of the charge, and no paper was abstracted which did not relate to these. All others were kept in a sealed room. Pott procured the removal of the seals and got possession of them. Bahrdt says, that his wife and daughter came to him in prison, almost starving, and told him that now that the room was opened, Pott had made an offer to write for their support, if he had the use of these papers--that this was the conclusion of the bargain, and that Pott took away all the papers. N. B. Pott was the associate of Walther, who had great confidence in him (_Anecdotenbuch fur meinen lieben Amtsbruder, p. 400_) and had conducted the business of Stark's book, as has been already mentioned. No man was better known to Bahrdt, for they had long acted together as chief hands in the Union. He would therefore write the life of its founder _con amore_, and it might be expected to be a rare and tickling performance. And indeed it was. The first part of it only was published at this time; and the narration reaches from the birth of the hero till his leaving Leipzig in 1768. The attention is kept fully awake, but the emotions which successively occupy the mind of the reader are nothing but strong degrees of aversion, disgust, and horror. The figure set up to view is a monster, a man of talents indeed, and capable of great things; but lost to truth, to virtue, and even to the affectation of common decency--In short, a shameless profligate.--Poor Bahrdt was astonished,--stared--but, having his wits about him, saw that this life would sell, and would also sell another.--Without loss of time, he said that he would hold Pott to his bargain--but he reckoned without his host. "No, no," said Pott, "your are not the man I took you for--your correspondence was put into my hands--I saw that you had deceived me, and it was my duty, as a man _who loves truth above all things_, to hinder you from deceiving the world. I have not written the book you desired me. I did not work for you, but for myself--therefore you get not a groschen." "Why, Sir," said Bahrdt, "we both know that this won't do. You and I have already tried it. You received Stark's manuscript, to be printed by Walther--Walther and you sent it hither to Michaelis, that I might see it during the printing. I wrote an illustration and a key, which made the fellow very ridiculous, and they were printed together, with one title page.--You know that we were cast in court.--Walther was obliged to print the work as Stark first ordered, and we lost all our labour.--So shall you now, for I will commence an action this instant, and let me see with what face you will defend yourself, within a few weeks of your last appearance in court." Pott said, "You may try this. My work is already sold, and dispersed over all Germany--and I have no objection to begin yours to-morrow--believe me, it will sell." Bahrdt pondered--and resolved to write one himself.

This is another specimen of the _Union_.

DR. CARL FREDERICK BAHRDT was born in 1741. His father was then a parish minister, and afterwards Professor of Theology at Leipzig, where he died, in 1775. The youth, when at College, enlisted in the Prussian service as a hussar, but was bought off by his father. He was M. A. in 1761. He became catechist in his father's church, was a popular preacher, and published sermons in 1765, and some controversial writings, which did him honour--But he then began to indulge in conviviality, and in anonymous pasquinades, uncommonly bitter and offensive. No person was safe--Professors--Magistrates--Clergymen, had his chief notice--also students--and even comrades and friends. (Bahrdt says, that these things might cut to the quick but they were all just.) Unluckily his temperament was what the atomical philosophers (who can explain every thing by æthers and vibrations) call sanguine. He _therefore_ (his own word) was a passionate admirer of the ladies. Coming home from supper he frequently met a young Miss in the way to his lodgings, neatly dressed in a rose-coloured silk jacket and train, and a sable bonnet, costly, and like a lady. One evening (after some old Renish, as he says,) he saw the lady home. Some time after, the mistress of the house, Madam Godschusky, came into his room, and said that the poor maiden was pregnant. He could not help that--but it was very unfortunate, and would ruin him if known.--He therefore gave the old lady a bond for 200 dahlers, to be paid by instalments of twenty-five.----"The girl was sensible, and good, and as he had already paid for it, and her conversation was agreeable, he did not discontinue his acquaintance." A comrade one day told him, that one Bel, a magistrate, whom he had lampooned, knew the affair, and would bring it into court, unless he immediately retrieved the bond. This bond was the only evidence, but it was enough. Neither Bahrdt nor his friend could raise the money. But they fell on another contrivance. They got Madam Godschusky to meet them at another house, in order to receive the money. Bahrdt was in a closet, and his comrade wore a sword. The woman could not be prevailed on to produce the bond till Bahrdt should arrive, and the money be put into her hands, with a present to herself. The comrade tried to flutter her, and, drawing his sword, shewed her how men fenced--made passes at the wall--and then at her--but she was too firm--he then threw away his sword, and began to try to force the paper from her. She defended herself a good while, but at length he got the paper out of her pocket, tore it in pieces, opened the closet door, and said, "There you b----, there is the honourable fellow whom you and your wh-- have bullied--but it is with me you have to do now, and you know that I can bring you to the gallows." There was a great squabble to be sure, says Bahrdt, but it ended, and I thought all was now over.--But Mr. Bel had got word of it, and brought it into court the very day that Bahrdt was to have made some very reverend appearance at church. In short, after many attempts of his poor father to save him, he was obliged to send in his gown and band, and to quit the place. It was some comfort, however, that Madam Godschusky and the young Miss did not fare much better. They were both imprisoned. Madam G. died sometime after of some shocking disease. The court records give a very different account of the whole, and particularly of the scuffle; but Bahrdt's story is enough.

Bahrdt says, that his father was severe--but acknowledges that his own temperament was hasty, (why does not his fathers temperament excuse something? _Vibratiunculæ_ will explain every thing or nothing.) "_Therefore_ (again) I sometimes forgot myself. One day I laid a loaded pistol on the table, and told him that he should meet with that if he went on so. But I was only seventeen."

Dr. Bahrdt was, of course, obliged to leave the place. His friends, and Semler in particular, an eminent theological writer, who had formed a very favourable opinion of his uncommon talents, were assiduous in their endeavours to get an establishment for him. But his high opinion of himself, his temper, impetuous, precipitant, and overbearing, and a bitter satirical habit which he had freely indulged in his outset of life, made their endeavours very ineffectual.

At last he got a professorship at Erlangen, then at Erfurth, and in 1771, at Giessen. But in all these places he was no sooner settled than he got into disputes with his colleagues and with the established church, being a strenuous partizan of the innovations which were attempted to be made in the doctrines of christianity. In his anonymous publications, he did not trust to rational discussion alone, but had recourse to ridicule and personal anecdotes, and indulged in the most cutting sarcasms and gross scurrility. Being fond of convivial company, his income was insufficient for the craving demand, and as soon as he found that anecdote and slander always procured readers, he never ceased writing. He had wonderful readiness and activity, and spared neither friends nor foes in his anonymous performances. But this could not last, and his avowed theological writings were such as could not be suffered in a Professor of Divinity. The very students at Giessen were shocked with some of his liberties. After much wrangling in the church judicatories he was just going to be dismissed, when he got an invitation to Marschlins in Switzerland to superintend an academy. He went thither about the year 1776, and formed the seminary after the model of Basedow's Philanthropine, or academy, at Dessau, of which I have already given some account. It had acquired some celebrity, and the plan was peculiarly suited to Bahrdt's taste, because it left him at liberty to introduce any system of religious or irreligious opinions that he pleased. He resolved to avail himself of this liberty, and though a clergyman and Doctor of Theology, he would outstrip even Basedow, who had no ecclesiastical orders to restrain him. But he wanted the moderation, the prudence and the principle of Basedow. He had, by this time, formed his opinion of mankind, by meditating on the feelings of his own mind. His theory of human nature was simple--"The leading propensities, says he, of the human mind are three--Instinctive liberty (Freyheitstriebe)-instinctive activity (Triebe fur Thatigkeit)--and instinctive love (Liebes triebe)." I do not wish to misunderstand him, but I can give no other translation.--"If a man is obstructed in the exercise of any of these propensities he suffers an injury.--The business of a good education therefore is to teach us how they are to be enjoyed in the highest degree."

We need not be surprised although the Doctor should find it difficult to manage the Cyclopedia in his Philanthropine in such a manner as to give satisfaction to the neighbourhood, which was habituated to very different sentiments,--Accordingly he found his situation as uncomfortable as at Giessen. He says, in one of his latest performances, "that the Grisons were a strong instance of the immense importance of education. They knew nothing but their handicrafts, and their minds were as coarse as their persons." He quarrelled with them all, and was obliged to abscond after lying sometime in arrest.

He came to Durkheim or Turkheim, where his father was or had been minister. His literary talents were well known.--After some little time he got an association formed for erecting and supporting a Philanthropine or house of education. A large fund was collected, and he was enabled to travel into Holland and England, to engage pupils, and was furnished with proper recommendations.--On his return the plan was carried into execution. The castle or residence of Count Leining Hartzburgh, at Heidesheim, having gardens, park, and every handsome accommodation, had been fitted up for it, and it was consecrated by a solemn religious festival in 1778.

But his old misfortunes pursued him. He had indeed no colleagues to quarrel with, but his avowed publications became every day more obnoxious--and when any of his anonymous pieces had a great run, he could not stifle his vanity and conceal the author's name. Of these pieces, some were even shocking to decency. It was indifferent to him whether it was friend or foe that he abused; and some of them were so horribly injurious to the characters of the most respectable men in the state, that he was continually under the correction of the courts of justice. There was hardly a man of letters that had ever been in his company who did not suffer by it. For his constant practice was to father every new step that he took towards Atheism on some other person; and, whenever the reader sees, in the beginning of a book, any person celebrated by the author for sound sense, profound judgment, accurate reasoning, or praised for acts of friendship and kindness to himself, he may be assured that, before the close of the book, this man will convince Dr. Bahrdt in some private conversation, that some doctrine, cherished and venerated by all Christians, is a piece of knavish superstition. So lost was Dr. Bahrdt to all sense of shame. He said that he held his own opinions independent of all mankind, and was indifferent about their praise or their reproach.

Bahrdt's licentious, very licentious life, was the cause of most of these enormities. No income could suffice and he wrote for bread. The artful manner in which the literary manufacture of Germany was conducted, made it impossible to hinder the rapid dispersion of his writings over all Germany; and the indelicate and coarse maw of the public was as ravenous as the sensuality of Dr. Bahrdt, who really battened in the Epicurean sty. The consequence of all this was that he was obliged to fly from Heidesheim, leaving his sureties in the _Philanthropine_ to pay about 14,000 dahlers, besides debts without number to his friends. He was imprisoned at Dienheim, but was released I know not how, and settled at Halle. There he sunk to be a keeper of a tavern and billiard-table, and his house became the resort and the bane of the students in the University.--He was obliged therefore to leave the city. He had somehow got funds which enabled him to buy a little vineyard, prettily situated in the neighbourhood. This he fitted up with every accommodation that could invite the students, and called it _Bahrdt's Ruhe_. We have already seen the occupations of Dr. B. in this _Buen Retiro_--Can we call it _otium cum dignitate_? Alas, no! He had not lived two years here, bustling and toiling for the German Union, sometimes without a bit of bread--when he was sent to prison at Halle, and then to Magdeburg, where he was more than a year in jail. He was set at liberty, and returned to _Bahrdt's Ruhe_, not, alas, to live at ease, but to lie down on a sick-bed, where, after more than a year's suffering increasing pain, he died on the 23d of April 1793, the most wretched and loathsome victim of unbridled sensuality. The account of his case is written by a friend, a Dr. Jung, who professes to defend his memory and his principles. The medical description melted my heart, and I am certain would make his bitterest enemy weep. Jung repeatedly says, that the case was not venereal--calls it the vineyard disease--the quicksilver disease, (he was dying of an unconquerable salivation,) and yet, through the whole of his narration, relates symptoms and sufferings, which, as a medical man, he could not possibly mean to be taken in any other sense than as effects of pox. He meant to please the enemies of poor Bahrdt, knowing that such a man could have no friends, and being himself ignorant of what friendship or goodness is. The fate of this poor creature affected me more than any thing I have read of a great while. All his open enemies put together have not said so much ill of him as his trusted friend Pott, and another confident, whose name I cannot recollect, who published in his lifetime an anonymous book called _Bahrdt with the Iron Brow_--and this fellow Jung, under the absurd mask of friendship, exhibited the loathsome carcase for a florin, like a malefactor's at Surgeon's Hall. Such were the fruits of the German Union, of that Illumination that was to refine the heart of man, and bring to maturity the seeds of native virtue, which are choaked in the hearts of other men by superstition and despotism. We see nothing but mutual treachery and base desertion.

I do not concern myself with the gradual perversion of Dr. Bahrdt's moral and religious opinions. But he affected to be the enlightener and reformer of mankind; and affirmed that all the mischiefs in life originated from despotism supported by superstition. "In vain," says he, "do we complain of the inefficacy of religion. All positive religion is founded on injustice. No Prince has a right to prescribe or sanction any such system. Nor would he do it, were not the priests the firmest pillars of his tyranny, and superstition the strongest fetters for his subjects. He dares not show Religion as she is--pure and undefiled----She would charm the eyes and the hearts of mankind, would immediately produce true morality, would open the eyes of freeborn man, would teach him what are his rights, and who are his oppressors, and Princes would vanish from the face of the earth."

Therefore, without troubling ourselves with the truth or falsehood of his religion of Nature, and assuming it as an indisputable point, that Dr. Bahrdt has seen it in this natural and so effective purity, it is surely a very pertinent question, "Whether has the sight produced on his mind an effect so far superior to the acknowledged faintness of the impression of Christianity on the bulk of mankind, that it will be prudent to adopt the plan of the German Union, and at once put an end to the divisions which so unfortunately alienate the minds of professing Christians from each other?" The account here given of Dr. Bahrdt's life seems to decide the question.

But it will be said, that I have only related so many instances of the quarrels of Priests and their slavish adherents, with Dr. Bahrdt. Let us view him in his ordinary conduct, not as the champion and martyr of Illumination, but as an ordinary citizen, a husband, a father, a friend, a teacher of youth, a clergyman.

When Dr. Bahrdt was a parish-minister, and president of some inferior ecclesiastical district, he was empowered to take off the censures of the church from a young woman who had born a bastard child. By violence he again reduced her to the same condition, and escaped censure, by the poor girl's dying of a fever before her pregnancy was far advanced, or even legally documented. Also, on the night of the solemn farce of consecrating his Philanthropine, he debauched the maid-servant, who bore twins, and gave him up for the father. The thing, I presume, was not judicially proved, otherwise he would have surely been disgraced; but it was afterwards made evident, by the letters which were found by Pott, when he undertook to write his life. A series of these letters had passed between him and one Graf, a steward, who was employed by him to give the woman the small pittance by which she and the infants were maintained. Remonstrances were made when the money was not advanced; and there are particularly letters about the end of 1779, which show that Bahrdt had ceased giving any thing. On the ** of February 1780, the infants (three years old) were taken away in the night, and were found exposed, the one at Usstein, and the other at Worms, many miles distant from each other, and almost frozen to death. The first was discovered by its moans, by a shoemaker in a field by the road-side, about six in the morning; the other was found by two girls between the hedges in a lane, set between two great stones, past all crying. The poor mother travelled up and down the country in quest of her infants, and hearing these accounts, found them both, and took one of them home; but not being able to maintain both, when Bahrdt's commissioner refused contributing any more, it remained with the good woman who had taken it in[17].

[17] This is worse than Rousseau's conduct, who only sent his children to the Foundling hospital, that he might never know them again. (See his Confessions.)