[Footnote 2:  Troeltsch, Art.  ‘Aufklaerung’ in Herzog-Hauck, Realencylopaedie, 3 Aufl., Bd. ii., s. 225 f.]

Then also, in the economic and social field the rational spirit made itself felt.  Commerce and the growth of colonies, the extension of the middle class, the redistribution of wealth, the growth of cities, the dependence in relations of trade of one nation upon another, all these things shook the ancient organisation of society.  The industrial system grew up upon the basis of a naturalistic theory of all economic relations.  Unlimited freedom in labour and in the use of capital were claimed.  There came a great revolution in public opinion upon all matters of morals.  The ferocity of religious wars, the cruelty of religious controversies, the bigotry of the confessional, these all, which, only a generation earlier, had been taken by long-suffering humanity as if they had been matters of course, were now viewed with contrition by the more exalted spirits and with contempt and embitterment by the rest.  Men said, if religion can give us not better morality than this, it is high time we looked to the natural basis of morality.  Natural morality came to be the phrase ever on the lips of the leading spirits.  Too frequently they had come to look askance at the morality of those who alleged a supernatural sanction for that which they at least enjoined upon others.  We come in this field also, as in others, upon the assertion of the human as nobler and more beautiful than that which had by the theologians been alleged to be divine.  The assertion came indeed to be made in ribald and blasphemous forms, but it was not without a great measure of provocation.

Then there was the altered view of nature which came through the scientific discoveries of the age.  Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Gassendi, Newton, are the fathers of the modern sciences.  These are the men who brought new worlds to our knowledge and new methods to our use.  That the sun does not move about the earth, that the earth is but a speck in space, that heaven cannot be above nor hell beneath, these are thoughts which have consequences.  Instead of the old deductive method, that of the mediaeval Aristotelianism, which had been worse than fruitless in the study of nature, men now set out with a great enthusiasm to study facts, and to observe their laws.  Modern optics, acoustics, chemistry, geology, zoology, psychology and medicine, took their rises within the period of which we speak.  The influence was indescribable.  Newton might maintain his own simple piety side by side, so to say, with his character, as a scientific man, though even he did not escape the accusation of being a Unitarian.  In the resistance which official religion offered at every step to the advance of the sciences, it is small wonder if natures less placid found the maintenance of their ancestral faith too difficult.  Natural science was deistic with Locke and Voltaire, it was pantheistic in the antique