, to consider briefly his
influence. In two respects, it seems to me, it has been decided and
impressive. In the first place, he gave an impulse to rationalistic
inquiries in Germany; and many there are who think this was a good
thing. He made it fashionable to be cynical and doubtful. Being ashamed
of his own language, and preferring the French, he encouraged the
current and popular French literature, which in his day, under the
guidance of Voltaire, was materialistic and deistical. He embraced a
philosophy which looked to secondary rather than primal causes, which
scouted any revelations that could not be explained by reason, or
reconciled with scientific theories,--that false philosophy which
intoxicated Franklin and Jefferson as well as Hume and Gibbon, and which
finally culminated in Diderot and D'Alembert; the philosophy which
became fashionable in German universities, and whose nearest approach
was that of the exploded Epicureanism of the Ancients. Under the
patronage of the infidel court, the universities of Germany became
filled with rationalistic professors, and the pulpits with dead and
formal divines; so that the glorious old Lutheranism of Prussia became
the coldest and most lifeless of all the forms which Protestantism ever
assumed. Doubtless, great critics and scholars arose under the stimulus
of that unbounded religious speculation which the King encouraged; but
they employed their learning in pulling down rather than supporting the
pillars of the ancient orthodoxy. And so rapidly did rationalism spread
in Northern Germany, that it changed its great lights into _illuminati_,
who spurned what was revealed unless it was in accordance with their
speculations and sweeping criticism. I need not dwell on this
undisguised and blazing fact, on the rationalism which became the
fashion in Germany, and which spread so disastrously over other
countries, penetrating even into the inmost sanctuaries of theological
instruction. All this may be progress; but to my mind it tended to
extinguish the light of faith, and fill the seats of learning with
cynics and unbelieving critics. It was bad enough to destroy the bodies
of men in a heartless war; it was worse to nourish those principles
which poisoned the soul, and spread doubt and disguised infidelities
among the learned classes.

But the influence of Frederic was seen in a more marked manner in the
inauguration of a national policy directed chiefly to military
aggrandi