of the eighteenth century have in many respects scarcely received their due share of appreciation.  Moreover, negative results make little display.  There is not much to show for the earnest toil that has very likely been spent in arriving at them; and a great deal of the intellectual labour of the last century was of this kind.  Reason had been more completely emancipated at the Reformation than it was at first at all aware of.  Men who were engaged in battling against certain definite abuses, and certain specified errors, scarcely discovered at first, nor indeed for long afterwards, that they were in reality contending also for principles which would affect for the future the whole groundwork of religious conviction.  They were not yet in a position to see that henceforward authority could take only a secondary place, and that they were installing in its room either reason or a more subtle spiritual faculty superior even to reason in the perception of spiritual things.  It was not until near the end of the seventeenth century that the mind began to awaken to a full perception of the freedom it had won—­a freedom far more complete in principle than was as yet allowed in practice.  In the eighteenth century this fundamental postulate of the Reformation became for the first time a prominent, and, to many minds, an absorbing subject of inquiry.  For the first time it was no longer disguised from sight by the incidental interest of its side issues.  The assertors of the supremacy of reason were at first arrogantly, or even insolently, self-confident, as those who were secure of carrying all before them.  Gradually, the wiser of them began to feel that their ambition must be largely moderated, and that they must be content with far more negative results than they had at first imagined.  The question came to be, what is reason unable to do?  What are its limits? and how is it to be supplemented?  An immensity of learning, and of arguments good and bad, was lavished on either side in the controversy between the deists and the orthodox.  In the end, it may perhaps be said that two axioms were established, which may sound in our own day like commonplaces, but which were certainly very insufficiently realised when the controversy began.  It was seen on the one hand that reason was free, and that on the other it was encompassed by limitations against which it strives in vain.  The Deists lost the day.  Their objections to revelation fell through; and Christianity rose again, strengthened rather than weakened by their attack.  Yet they had not laboured in vain, if success may be measured, not by the gaining of an immediate purpose, but by solid good effected, however contrary in kind to the object proposed.  So far as a man works with a single-hearted desire to win truth, he should rejoice if his very errors are made, in the hands of an overruling Providence, instrumental in establishing truth.  Christianity in England had arrived in the eighteenth century at one of those periods of revision when it