So there had been created a strangely composite man, compounded of elements native to himself, to that undeveloped barbarian Frederick William, and to Voltaire! Joined to a strong practical common sense in the management of affairs was a passion for insincere, unsound, and shallow French ideals. And combined with the most despotic and arbitrary of wills, was an inflexible regard for the right of the humblest. While he despised the beliefs of Protestant and Catholic alike, he declared "I mean that every man in my kingdom shall have the right to be saved in his own way." And he secured that right for his people, too!
His rule was a despotism, but it was a despotism of intelligence and justice. He called himself the first official servant of the state, and no clerk in his kingdom gave such faithful service as he. He arose at four o'clock in the morning. He made himself personally acquainted with every village and landed estate in his kingdom, which he treated as if it were a great private enterprise and interest, for which he was responsible.
He was a reformer without heart; a King intent upon the well-being of his people, without tenderness; a leader prepared, if need be, not to lead, but to drag Prussia with a rough hand up the rugged path of virtue and prosperity; and determined to make his nation great, whether it wanted to be or not!
There were many pleasanter companions and gentler fathers in his day. There were sovereigns who did not terrify wrong-doers and children on the street with uplifted canes. But this Frederick, with character scarred and distorted, was the one man in Europe who was converting a kingdom into a POWER, and the one man of his age whom history would call GREAT!
But such a being as this, one who has turned to adamant in heroic mold, cannot sympathetically comprehend the finer currents about him. There was going on, quite unnoticed by King Frederick, an awakening in the German mind, and while he was building a structure of material greatness, there had commenced, unobserved by him, another structure, which was to be the chief glory of Germany.
The passion for speculative thought awakened by Spinoza was stirring the German soul to its depths. Kant had found that Spinoza's _Eternal Order_ must be a _Moral Order_. That the moral instincts which guided mankind, and were the all in all, were the God in us, the in-dwelling of the Divine. Thus was embodied the essence of Christianity in a new and speculative philosophy.