kind no Christian doubts—­what are its powers? how far is it a rule of faith?  What is its rightful province?  What are its relations to faith and conscience? to Reason, Scripture, Church Authority?  Can it be implicitly trusted?  By what criterion may its utterances be distinguished and tested?  Such, variously stated, were the questions asked, sometimes jealously and with suspicion, often from a sincere, unprejudiced desire to ascertain the truth, and often from an apprehension of their direct practical and devotional value.  The inquiry, therefore, was one which formed an important element both in the divinity and philosophy of the period, and also in its popular religious movements.  It was discussed by Locke and by every succeeding writer who, throughout the century, endeavoured to mark the powers and limits of the human understanding.  It entered into most disputes between Deists and evidence writers as to the properties of evidence and the nature of Reasonable Religion.  It had to do with debates upon inspiration, upon apostolic gifts, upon the Canon of Scripture, with controversies as to the basis of the English Church and of the Reformation generally, the essentials and nonessentials of Christianity, the rights of the individual conscience, toleration, comprehension, the authority of the Church, the authority of the early fathers.  It had immediate relation to the speculations of the Cambridge Platonists, and their influence on eighteenth-century thought, upon such subjects as those of immutable morality and the higher faculties of the soul.  It was conspicuous in the attention excited in England, both among admirers and opponents, by the reveries of Fenelon, Guyon, Bourignon, and other foreign Quietists.  It was a central feature of the animated controversy maintained by Leslie and others with the Quakers, a community who, at the beginning of the century, had attained the zenith of their numerical power.  It was further illustrated in writings upon the character of enthusiasm elicited by the extravagances of the so-called French Prophets.  In its aspect of a discussion upon the supra-sensual faculties of the soul, it received some additional light from the transcendental conceptions of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy.  In its relation with mediaeval mysticism on the one hand and with some distinctive aspects of modern thought on the other, it found an eminent exponent in the suggestive pages of William Law; with whom must be mentioned his admirer and imitator, the poet John Byrom.  The influence of the Moravians upon the early Methodists, the controversy of Wesley with Law, the progress of Methodism and Evangelicalism, the opposition which they met, the ever-repeated charge of ‘enthusiasm,’ and the anxiety felt on the other side to rebut the charge, exhibit the subject under some of its leading practical aspects.  From yet another point of view, a similar reawakening to the keen perception of other faculties than those of reason and outward sense is borne witness to in