Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/515

 pietistical Eichhorn ministry, because of his peculiar doctrine concerning the gospel. This was the first case during the present century in which an assault has been attempted upon the freedom of scientific teaching, and even this was an infinitely less heinous one than the present. The faculties of the university were deeply stirred, and for months together official pronunciamentos swarmed about the town; men of the highest standing, such as Marheinecke and others, declared that protestantism and enlightenment were threatened in their very foundations in case such usurpation, hitherto unheard of in Prussia, were allowed to take its course. And even such expressions of opinion as reached a conclusion subservient to the ministerial view based their conclusion on the ground that the case in question concerned a licentia docendi in the theological faculty, with the fundamental principles of which Bauer's doctrines were incompatible. They took care expressly to declare that had the question concerned a licentia docendi in any one of the nontheological faculties, in a philosophical faculty, e. g., the decision must necessarily have been reversed. No one, not even Eichhorn himself, harbored the conceit that this doctrine and its teaching was to be dealt with by the criminal court. A teacher who spread abroad scientific teachings subversive of theological doctrines was deprived of the opportunity to proclaim his teaching from a theological chair; but to call in the jailer to suppress him—to that depth of subservience to absolutism had no one at that time descended. Alas, that Eichhorn, the much berated, could not have lived to see this day! With what admiration and with what gratification would he have looked upon his "constitutional" successors!

Even in the days of Eichhorn's pietistical absolutism, with its ecclesia militans of obscurantism, there survived so much of a sense of decency regarding the ancient traditions as to exempt the liberty of scientific teaching from the indignity of that preventive censure which in those days rendered repressive legislation superfluous. In their search for some tenable and tangible criterion of the scientific