INTRODUCTORY.

CHAPTER I.

Brief Sketch of the Life of Reimarus. Translated and abridged from Strauss’s “Life of Reimarus.”

HERMANN SAMUEL REIMARUS was born on the 22nd of December, 1694, at Hamburg. His father, Nikolaus—the son of a clergyman from Stolzenberg, near Stettin—was a native of Kiel, where he had studied theology. He married the daughter of a distinguished patrician family named Wetken. He was such a good man and such an accomplished scholar that his influence upon the education and character of his son, whom he taught almost entirely until he turned twelve, must have been very important. Reimarus left his father’s house to become a pupil of the renowned John Albrecht Fabricius, whose daughter he eventually married. At the age of sixteen, he left the Johanneum for the Gymnasium, and in the year 1714, when he was twenty years old, he entered the University of Jena. Theology was his favorite