An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant. Edward Caldwell Moore

and salvation appears to have been changed.

      In the case of each of these particular movements the church, as the organ of Christianity, has passed through a period of antagonism to these influences, of fear of their consequences, of resistance to their progress. In large portions of the church at the present moment the protest is renewed. The substance of these modern teachings, which yet seem to be the very warp and woof of the intellectual life of the modern man, is repudiated and denounced. It is held to imperil the salvation of the soul. It is pronounced impossible of combination with belief in a divinely revealed truth concerning the universe and a saving faith for men. In other churches, outside the churches, the forms in which men hold their Christianity have been in large measure adjusted to the results of these great movements of thought. They have, as these men themselves believe, been immensely strengthened and made sure by those very influences which were once considered dangerous.

      In connection with this indication of the nature of our materials, we have sought to say something of the time of emergence of the salient elements. It may be in point also to give some intimation of the place of their origins, that is to say, of the participation of the various nationalities in this common task of the modern Christian world. That international quality of scholarship which seems to us natural, is a thing of very recent date. That a discovery should within a reasonable interval become the property of all educated men, that scholars of one nation should profit by that which the learned of another land have done, appears to us a thing to be assumed. It has not always been so, especially not in matters of religious faith. The Roman Church and the Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain international character. Again the Renaissance and Reformation had a certain world wide quality. The relations of the English Church in the reigns of the last Tudors to Germany, Switzerland, and France are not to be forgotten. But the life of the Protestant national churches in the eighteenth century shows little of this trait. The barriers of language counted for something. The provincialism of national churches and denominational predilections counted for more.

      In the philosophical movement we must begin with the Germans. The movement of English thought known as deism was a distinct forerunner of the rationalist movement, within the particular area of the discussion of religion. However, it ran into the sand. The rationalist movement, considered in its other aspects, never attained in England in the eighteenth century the proportions which it assumed in France and Germany. In France that movement ran its full course, both among the learned and, equally, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for years cried, 'Écrasez l'infâme,' and Rousseau preached that the youth would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism. Quite logically, therefore, after the downfall of the Republic and of the Empire there set in a great reaction. Still it was simply a reversion to the absolute religion of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth by the Jesuit party. There was no real transcending of the rationalist movement in France in the interest of religion. There has been no great constructive movement in religious thought in France in the nineteenth century. There is relatively little literature of our subject in the French language until recent years.

      In Germany, on the other hand, the rationalist movement had always had over against it the great foil and counterpoise of the pietist movement. Rationalism ran a much soberer course than in France. It was never a revolutionary and destructive movement as in France. It was not a dilettante and aristocratic movement as deism had been in England. It was far more creative and constructive than elsewhere. Here also before the end of the century it had run its course. Yet here the men who transcended the rationalist movement and shaped the spiritual revival in the beginning of the nineteenth century were men who had themselves been trained in the bosom of the rationalist movement. They had appropriated the benefits of it. They did not represent a violent reaction against it, but a natural and inevitable progress within and beyond it. This it was which gave to the Germans their leadership at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the sphere of the intellectual life. It is worthy of note that the great heroes of the intellectual life in Germany, in the period of which we speak, were most of them deeply interested in the problem of religion. The first man to bring to England the leaven of this new spirit, and therewith to transcend the old philosophical standpoint of Locke and Hume, was Coleridge with his Aids to Reflection, published in 1825. But even after this impulse of Coleridge the movement remained in England a sporadic and uncertain one. It had nothing of the volume and conservativeness which belonged to it in Germany.

      Coleridge left among his literary remains a work published in 1840 under the title of Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit. What is here written is largely upon the basis of intuition and forecast like that of Remarus and Lessing a half-century earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, and destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss' first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first radical and subversive in the extreme. They were fiercely repudiated in Strauss' own country. Yet in the main there was acknowledgement of the correctness of the principle for which Strauss had stood. Hardly before the decade of the sixties was that method accepted in England in any wider way, and hardly before the decade of the seventies in America. Ronan was the first to set forth, in 1863, the historical and critical problem in the new spirit, in a way that the wide public which read French understood.

      When we come to speak of the scientific movement it is not easy to say where the leadership lay. Many Englishmen were in the first rank of investigators and accumulators of material. The first attempt at a systematisation of the results of the modern sciences was that of Auguste Comte in his Philosophie Positive. This philosophy, however, under its name of Positivism, exerted a far greater influence, both in Comte's time and subsequently, in England than it did in France. Herbert Spencer, after the middle of the decade of the sixties, essayed to do something of the sort which Comte had attempted. He had far greater advantages for the solution of the problem. Comte's foil in all of his discussions of religion was the Catholicism of the south of France. None the less, the religion which in his later years he created, bears striking resemblance to that which in his earlier years he had sought to destroy. Spencer's attitude toward religion was in his earlier work one of more pronounced antagonism or, at least, of more complete agnosticism than in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his scientific freedom and conscientiousness. Both of these men represent the effort to construe the world, including man, from the point of view of the natural and also of the social sciences, and to define the place of religion in that view of the world which is thus set forth. The fact that there had been no such philosophical readjustment in Great Britain as in Germany, made the acceptance of the evolutionary theory of the universe, which more and more the sciences enforced, slower and more difficult. The period of resistance on the part of those interested in religion extended far into the decade of the seventies.

      A word may be added concerning America. The early settlers had been proud of their connection with the English universities. An extraordinary number of them, in Massachusetts at least, had been Cambridge men. Yet a tradition of learning was later developed, which was not without the traits of isolation natural in the circumstances. The residence, for a time, even of a man like Berkeley in this country, altered that but little. The clergy remained in singular degree the educated and highly influential class. The churches had developed, in consonance with their Puritan character, a theology and philosophy so portentous in their conclusions, that we can without difficulty understand the reaction which was brought about. Wesleyanism had modified it in some portions of the country, but intensified it in others. Deism apparently had had no great influence. When the rationalist movement of the old world began to make itself felt, it was at first largely through the influence of France. The religious life of the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century was at a low ebb. Men like Belaham and Priestley were known as apostles of a freer spirit in the treatment of the problem of religion. Priestley came to Pennsylvania in his exile. In the large, however, one may say that the New England