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 in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his scientific freedom and conscientiousness.  Both of these men represent the effort to construe the world, including man, from the point of view of the natural and also of the social sciences, and to define the place of religion in that view of the world which is thus set forth.  The fact that there had been no such philosophical readjustment in Great Britain as in Germany, made the acceptance of the evolutionary theory of the universe, which more and more the sciences enforced, slower and more difficult.  The period of resistance on the part of those interested in religion extended far into the decade of the seventies.

A word may be added concerning America.  The early settlers had been proud of their connection with the English universities.  An extraordinary number of them, in Massachusetts at least, had been Cambridge men.  Yet a tradition of learning was later developed, which was not without the traits of isolation natural in the circumstances.  The residence, for a time, even of a man like Berkeley in this country, altered that but little.  The clergy remained in singular degree the educated and highly influential class.  The churches had developed, in consonance with their Puritan character, a theology and philosophy so portentous in their conclusions, that we can without difficulty understand the reaction which was brought about.  Wesleyanism had modified it in some portions of the country, but intensified it in others.  Deism apparently had had no great influence.  When the rationalist movement of the old world began to make itself felt, it was at first largely through the influence of France.  The religious life of the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century was at a low ebb.  Men like Belaham and Priestley were known as apostles of a freer spirit in the treatment of the problem of religion.  Priestley came to