THE ENLIGHTENMENT
551
Yet appearances are against it. The eighteenth-century En–
lightenment weakened faith, even destroyed it in many men. We
need only glance into our hymnbooks and our catechism in order to
recognize that the Enlightenment did all sorts of harm even in the
Church itself. At the same time we shall not forget that, in many
places, congregations are still alive where they once went through
the (ecclesiastical) Enlightenment, and almost in a state of rigor
mortis where they did not go through that experience. In connection
with the harm done, we shall not forget the humiliating fact that
the shame of the persecution of witches was not driven from the
world through fullness of pitying love or through the force of
Christian truth, but through the Enlightenment. And the same thing
is true of many other superstitions. Fortunately-in men like Sailer–
there is also a direct and positive connection between the impulse of
the historical Enlightenment and the truth .and love of Christianity.
But in general the relation is not right: the Enlightenment took
place, and takes place, outside the Church, took place and takes
place in a secularized world. It is in practice a movement of autonomy,
it is seldom a movement from the Christian will to truth and to ef–
fectual aid. Quite often, in criticism from the Christian point of
view, the succession has been reversed and enlightenment regarded
as the root from which secularization sprang; in reality secularization
of the political power, of wealth, and of thought went on for centuries
in a world of baptized and believing Christians until what we call
the historic "Enlightenment" could develop as an un-Christian and
anti-Christian movement.
That it did not arise as a Christian movement, as a spiritual
impulse within the Church, must not be attributed solely, or even
primarily, to itself, but to the nature, activity, and thought of a society
which for centuries purported to be, and regarded itself as, Christian,
without being Christian in nature, activity, or thought. In such a
world
it
was easy for the rising bourgeoisie to regard its own rise,
which it accomplished against the sacred authorities, as an enlighten–
ment concerning the properly good, reasonable, and happier nature
of man and the world. Two hundred years later, the proletariat, out
of its misery, its solidarity, and .again in a world in which God was
not a force in man, developed the second Enlightenment: the belief
that, through the proletarian struggle, total freedom could be surely
