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, ‘Ecrasez l’infame,’ 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.