sense with Shaftesbury, it was pantheistic-mystical with Spinoza, spiritualistic with Descartes, theistic with Leibnitz, materialistic with the men of the Encyclopaedia.  It was orthodox with nobody.  The miracle as traditionally defined became impossible.  At all events it became the millstone around the neck of the apologists.  The movement went to an extreme.  All the evils of excess upon this side from which we since have suffered were forecast.  They were in a measure called out by the evils and errors which had so long reigned upon the other side.

Again, in the field of the writing of history and of the critique of ancient literatures, the principles of rational criticism were worked out and applied in all seriousness.  Then these maxims began to be applied, sometimes timidly and sometimes in scorn and shallowness, to the sacred history and literature as well.  To claim, as the defenders of the faith were fain to do, that this one department of history was exempt, was only to tempt historians to say that this was equivalent to confession that we have not here to do with history at all.

Nor can we overlook the fact that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a great philosophical revival.  Here again it is the rationalist principle which is everywhere at work.  The observations upon nature, the new feeling concerning man, the vast complex of facts and impulses which we have been able in these few words to suggest, demanded a new philosophical treatment.  The philosophy which now took its rise was no longer the servant of theology.  It was, at most, the friend, and even possibly the enemy, of theology.  Before the end of the rationalist period it was the master of theology, though often wholly indifferent to theology, exactly because of its sense of mastery.  The great philosophers of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, belong with a part only of their work and tendency to the rationalist movement.  Still their work rested upon that which had already been done by Spinoza and Malebranche, by Hobbes and Leibnitz, by Descartes and Bayle, by Locke and Wolff, by Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists.  With all of the contrasts among these men there are common elements.  There is an ever increasing antipathy to the thought of original sin and of supernatural revelation, there is the confidence of human reason, the trust in the will of man, the enthusiasm for the simple, the natural, the intelligible and practical, the hatred of what was scholastic and, above all, the repudiation of authority.

All these elements led, toward the end of the period, to the effort at the construction of a really rational theology.  Leibnitz and Lessing both worked at that problem.  However, not until after the labours of Kant was it possible to utilise the results of the rationalist movement for the reconstruction of theology.  If evidence for this statement were wanting, it could be abundantly given from the work of Herder.  He was younger than Kant, yet the latter seems to have exerted but slight influence upon him.  He earnestly desired to reinterpret Christianity in the new light of his time, yet perhaps no part of his work is so futile.