An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant | Page 8

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