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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
observed in antiquity and those arising within early
Christendom. As Fritz Mauthner! says, Christian unbelief is more
active in character. Unlike the religions of Greece and Rome,
Christianity had its theology and orthodoxy. Every individual
was brought up in a milieu which required him to accept
clearly formulated religious dogmas. Those who opposed the
traditional faith were marked as rebels and heretics.
For some time denial of any part of the official belief was
sufficient to invite a charge of heresy. During the Middle Ages
positive unbelief or irreligion must have been almost
unthinkable. That a person might deny the existence of God could
hardly be imagined. The heretic was charged and condemned
because he opposed traditional conceptions. The whole
attitude of the Middle Ages was theocentric and, as Fritz
Mauthner says, it took four hundred years to change it.
Unbelief as a radical denial of spiritual values appeared
later. Beginning as an individual attitude, it gradually became
a social-political movement with a programme that involved
denial of the existence of God and all positive religion.
The first clear signs of widespread individual unbelief
appeared, of course, at the time of the Reformation. Then, for
the first time, it became possible to criticise religious traditions,
discuss the idea of God and even question his existence without
risking one’s life. Luther was not burned at the stake—that
marks the beginning of the new period. In connection with the
Reformation a marked increase in the numbers of freethinkers
is also to be noticed. This is not contradicted by the fact that a
widespread development in Western civilisation freethinking
has its roots in English deism.
In Europe freethinking began to be a serious social
phenomenon at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In France it
developed into atheism. In Germany it implied at first only
opposition to the Church, but it moved towards atheism in the
ninteenth century through the influence of Marxism.
In the English-speaking countries the connection between
freedom of religion and atheism can be clearly seen: for example
in the period of the great Methodist revival in England; and in
America during the heyday of the itinerant evangelists like
Billy Sunday.
1 Der Atheismus und Seine Geschichten im Abendlande, Bnd. i-v., Stuttgart, 1920-3.
112
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