belief out of the midst of Hume's scepticism. In short, there was a general breaking up and readjustment; a recurrence of the same general phenomena which happened at the close of the scholastic period, when the unskilfully united elements cf reason and religion fell asunder, and the dissociated ingredients appeared in their separate forms of mysticism and conventionalism, scepticism and philosophy.-The immediate reaction of religious feeling against the scholasticism of logical "evidence" was forcibly expressed by the younger Dodwell in England and by Lessing in Germany. Dodwell argued that histories and syllogisms could never establish a faith of sufficient energy to overrule life and conduct, to console us in life and death, and to supply such an assurance of truth as to leave behind no misgivings as to possible mistake. The first step of philosophy, he said, was to cast aside our prejudices and preconceptions; whereas our holy religion bids us cherish and abide by them: to sit down to examine our religion is already to surrender it; and the principle of postponing belief until reason is satisfied would justify a whole life of sceptical suspense. "True religion," says Lessing,

"consists not in historical facts or written documents, but in eternal spiritual truths. The latter cannot be established by contingent historical facts; a miracle, even if unsusceptible of disproof, cannot compel me to believe what is in itself irrational. Historical facts are confessedly incapable of demonstration; and if so, nothing can be demonstrated by their means. Prophecies visibly fulfilled, miracles visibly performed, have a very different force from such as are only historically related. Nor is religion more dependent on books than on events. Religion is older than the Bible; the Bible is founded on religion, not religion on it; nor is Christianity based upon the New Testament; it existed before any part of the New Testa1 In his "Christianity not founded on Argument."

ment was written; apostles and evangelists did not make it true, but taught it because it was true; there was an interval of time before any of them wrote, and a still longer ere the canon was formed. And if religion existed before and independently of the Bible, it may well survive its destruction. Luther emancipated us from tradition; but our escape from the still more intolerable burthen of the letter is still to come. When, O Luther, thou great but ill appreciated name, will anyone give us a Christianity such as thou wouldst now teach, such as Christ himself would now sanction!"

The Readjustment of Belief.

The collapse of conventional dogmatism is the signal and opportunity for a revival of natural religion. When the coarse and inert philosophy of the many comes, aз it inevitably must, to lose its credit and vitality, philanthropists will always strive to anticipate the demoralising effects of its final overthrow by providing an adequate substitute. Such a substitute, to those who are not too exacting or morbidly fastidious, is always at hand, and becomes more and more obvious through the operation of the same causes through which conventional fictions are discredited. Even amidst the imposing ceremonial of his temple the Jew felt that its dimensions were too narrow for the religion of the universe,-that the heavens alone adequately declare God's glory.1 At the decline of Paganism, when the Roman Augurs could scarcely maintain becoming seriousness, a member of the Augural college ventured to exhibit the simple belief of natural religion in advantageous contrast with the symbols of superstition. In the face of the growing externalism of the Christian Church, Clement of Alexandria and afterwards Augustin

1 Psalm xix., 1 Kings viii. 27, and the 8th, 29th, 65th, 104th, and several other Psalms.

appealed to the living witness of the "book of nature, and Origen spoke of the religious significancy of creation as giving a foretaste of heavenly raptures. Many have

"The

been the efforts since made on the part of philosophy to enlarge its boundaries by responding to the religious aspirations left unsatisfied by theology. When the elements of scholasticism fell asunder, and the sceptical dogmatism of the nominalistic churchman confronted either the equally sceptical superficiality of common sense, or the dizzy sublimities of mysticism, Nicolaus Cusanus and the Florentine Academy tried to restore the connection of religion with rational philosophy, and Raymond de Sebonde went so far as to assign to the "book of creatures or of nature a priority over that of revelation. second book," he says in his preface, "was given only because men were unable to read the first, that "older scripture wrote by God's own hand," which stands aloof and inaccessible to human corruptions and mistakes, whereas the other is exposed to endless mutilations and false interpretations of every sort." The early German poets and preachers led back the bewildered conscience from church morality to true morality; and it is remarkable that the chief writers on ethics in later times were naturalists or free-thinkers. Bacon gave up the name of religion to conventionalism, but reserved its essence for the pursuit of science; although the latter, confined for the time to utilitarian aims, was unconscious of the full import of its mission. But this was asserted by Spinoza: and Lord Herbert of Cherbury still more unequivocally reunited religion to philosophy, disclaiming at the same time its superstitious counterfeits. The moral sense, hesitatingly asserted by Charron and the Socinians, became in Spinoza supreme, virtually ending the long nominalistic severance, and assigning a subordinate position to traditional books and dogmas. "Can anything be more monstrous," he 1 See Appendix C.

exclaimed, "than to submit the divine light of reason, heaven's best and noblest gift, to the dead letter of a book, exposed during so many ages to all the hazards of malice, mutilation, and neglect; to think it no wrong to disparage the divinely imparted faculties of the soul, while deeming it profanation to doubt the judgment and fidelity of those through whose hands the Bible has been transmitted?" Spinoza taught the soul the lesson of religious resignation to the Absolute and Infinite, leaving nominal religion as a practical discipline to train common minds in the plain maxims of justice and charity. His system was called a system of ethics because, though founded on a speculative view of nature, its purpose was ethical, having duty and freedom for its objects. In one sense, however, it was immoral, because prostrating the energies of the soul before a cold and sterile synthesis of the All considered as a mere mechanism of causation, it failed in the essential element of moral vitality, and was more fit for oriental ascetics than to become the creed of modern Europe. Leibnitz based upon his Monadology, or theory of a continuously ascending scale of being, a system of "natural theology" of a more active kind, which may be described as "moral naturalism," and as standing midway between Spinoza's abstract naturalism and the pure moralism of Kant. It was natural, because founded on a general view of nature; moral, as uniting the contemplation of final causes, which had been rejected by Spinoza and by Hobbes, to that of efficient or mechanical ones. The faculty of perception, said Leibnitz,1 which consciously or unconsciously inheres in all being, is ever accompanied by appetition; all beings strive towards the supreme Being or God; in man alone instinctive desire rises into consciousness, and consciousness is further susceptible of being raised from obscure perceptions of elementary faith into clearer Pursuing here the train of thought already suggested by Cusanus and

Bruno.

ideas of philosophy. The allegiance of the will in this course of aspiration constitutes morality, which, in fact is only an inferior phase in an identical process,morality contemplating limited perfection, religion absolute or divine. Leibnitz regarded individual permanency or immortality not as an exceptional privilege in man, but as the necessary attribute of all substance, and extending in a certain sense to all being. In Leibnitz the mind may be said to have made a momentary pause, similar to that which occurred at the revival of learning, for the purpose of gathering up the best philosophic thoughts of former ages; and it was under his influence that the notion of human progress, which ever since the commencement of modern philosophy had been growing into prominence, became definitively installed among the ideas of religion. The idea was not unknown to the medieval schools of Aquinas and St. Victor; but the ladder of ascent through nature to God rested, with them, on treacherous foundations, and its fall interrupted for ages the continuity of faith and science, leaving heaven and earth without any apparent link of intelligible connection. The idea of progress and perfectibility, formally announced by Bacon, Pascal, and Descartes, is justly associated with the advance of physical science, as owing to that advance its actual establishment as a maxim, and the most incontestible proofs of its reality. Yet it existed much earlier as an instinct of our moral being, and obtained currency as a faith long before it became a philosophical conviction. The age of iron was never consciously felt except in connection with an anticipated golden one, and the deeply deplored "fall" was only the first mental symptom of the effort to rise. It was only by a perversion of the notion of religion, either by superstition, or by the spirit of

1 Calling it "indefectibility" in inferior animals; "immortality" in man. 2 Hence Kuno Fischer gives to the reform initiated by Leibnitz the general name of "Rehabilitation." "Fr. Baco von Verulam," p. 372.