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.