We are here mainly concerned to note the breadth and universality of the movement.  It was a transformation of culture, a change in the principles underlying civilisation, in all departments of life.  It had indeed, as one of its most general traits, the antagonism to ecclesiastical and theological authority.  Whatever it was doing, it was never without a sidelong glance at religion.  That was because the alleged divine right of churches and states was the one might which it seemed everywhere necessary to break.  The conflict with ecclesiasticism, however, was taken up also by Pietism, the other great spiritual force of the age.  This was in spite of the fact that the Pietists’ view of religion was the opposite of the rationalist view.  Rationalism was characterised by thorough-going antagonism to supernaturalism with all its consequences.  This arose from its zeal for the natural and the human, in a day when all men, defenders and assailants of religion alike, accepted the dictum that what was human could not be divine, the divine must necessarily be the opposite of the human.  In reality this general trait of opposition to religion deceives us.  It is superficial.  In large part the rationalists were willing to leave the question of religion on one side if the ecclesiastics would let them alone.  This is true in spite of the fact that the pot-house rationalism of Germany and France in the eighteenth century found the main butt of its ridicule in the priesthood and the Church.  On its sober side, in the studies of scholars, in the bureaux of statesmen, in the laboratories of discoverers, it found more solid work.  It accomplished results which that other trivial aspect must not hide from us.

Troeltsch first in our own day has given us a satisfactory account of the vast achievement of the movement in every department of human life.[2] It annihilated the theological notion of the State.  In the period after the Thirty Years’ War men began to question what had been the purpose of it all.  Diplomacy freed itself from Jesuitical and papal notions.  It turned preponderantly to commercial and economic aims.  A secular view of the purpose of God in history began to prevail in all classes of society.  The Grand Monarque was ready to proclaim the divine right of the State which was himself.  Still, not until the period of his dotage did that claim bear any relation to what even he would have called religion.  Publicists, both Catholic and Protestant, sought to recur to the lex naturae in contradistinction with the old lex divina.  The natural rights of man, the rights of the people, the rationally conditioned rights of the State, a natural, prudential, utilitarian morality interested men.  One of the consequences of this theory of the State was a complete alteration in the thought of the relation of State and Church.  The nature of the Church itself as an empirical institution in the midst of human society was subjected to the same criticism with the State.  Men saw the Church in a new light.  As the State was viewed as a kind of contract in men’s social interest, so the Church was regarded as but a voluntary association to care for their religious interests.  It was to be judged according to the practical success with which it performed this function.