It was primarily the growth of physical science, from the middle of the sixteenth century, that gave solidity and permanence to the new movements of rationalistic revolt aroused by the spectacle of the Reformation and the strifes it engendered. That spectacle, and in general the wars of religion which followed, tended more to make scoffers or skeptics than to develop constructive rationalism. One of the conclusions forced on statesmanlike minds by the religious wars in France was that “a peace with two religions was better than a war with none”; and the seventeenth century there began with a strong though secretive tendency among the idle classes to what in the next century became universally known as the Voltairean temper. In the seventeenth, however, it was still almost wholly denied the use of printing; and under this disadvantage it must have fared ill were it not for the new studies which at once developed and buttressed the spirit of inquiry. They built up a new habit of mind, the surest obstacle to dogma.

Were men wont to develop their beliefs logically, the teaching of Copernicus alone, when once accepted, would have broken up the orthodox faith, which at nearly every point implied the geocentric theory. Giordano Bruno, recognizing this, wove on the one hand the Copernican principle into his restatement of the ancient doctrine of the infinity of the universe, and on the other hand derided alike Catholicism and Protestantism. But a comprehensive philosophy is not the kind of propaganda that first “comes home to men’s business and bosoms”: the line of practical disturbance lay through exact science; and it is in the practical and experimental work of Galileo that Copernicanism begins (1616–38) strongly to stir the educated intelligence of Europe. Bacon and Bodin, like Luther, had rejected it as theoretically propounded. It was the telescopic discoveries of Galileo that staggered the skeptics and alarmed the Church.

The need for a solid discipline as a grounding for rationalism is made clear by the aberrations of many of the earlier religious doubters. Bodin, as we have seen, held fanatically by witchcraft; and he likewise accepted astrology, as did many half-developed Italian freethinkers who rejected the ideas of demons and sorcery, and doubted much concerning the Bible. Men reasoned on such matters by the light of their training, of what seemed to be probability, and of scanty evidence, in matters where the traditional hypotheses could be properly checked only by minute and patient scrutiny. Thus the disbelievers in astrology were as a rule bigoted Christians who, like Luther, merely rejected it as unscriptural, while Melanchthon leant to the belief. Of the early English Protestants many theologically rejected it as regards the moral life, while assenting to the theory of astral influence on men’s affairs in other regards. Only with new science could come the rational challenge; and even men like Bacon, who consciously strove after scientific method, remained partly prepossessed by the old belief in astral forces. The word “influence,” in this sense, constantly appears in all kinds of Tudor and early Stuart literature.

It has been said with broad truth that whereas Greece, with her dialectic discipline, exhorted men to make their beliefs agree with one another, and the Christian Church ordered them to make their beliefs agree with her dogma, the modern spirit demands that beliefs should agree with facts. Such a spirit first promoted and then was immensely promoted by the study of natural science. Even in the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, physicians were proverbially given to irreligion; and the study of physics was still more conducive to religious doubt than that of physic. In England the naturalistic spirit, as we may term it, was notably popularized by Bacon in the course of the seventeenth century, but the effectual growth of Protestant fanaticism began in his day, and had to run its course before much energy was available for scientific research; though both Gilbert the electrician and Harvey the discoverer of the circulation of the blood belonged to Bacon’s generation. Only a small number of superior minds were capable of the scientific attitude. But even before the Restoration educated Englishmen were weary enough of strife to begin the gatherings which afterwards became the Royal Society, devoted strictly to scientific inquiry, with a positive veto on all theological discussion.

To their scientific studies they had a powerful lead from France, where Descartes had virtually begun a new era in philosophy by his Discourse on Method (1637), a work which professed allegiance to the Church but reversed all the Church’s methods; and where Gassendi, a truer if a less influential physicist than Descartes, controverted the spiritualistic positions of the latter in a singularly modern spirit of rationalism. By this time, too, had begun to appear the impotence of the Church against the ubiquitousness of modern heresy. She contrived to strike where she should have spared, and to spare where she ought in consistency to have struck. Galileo was probably, as he professed to be, an orthodox Catholic in his main theological beliefs, yet he was persecuted by the Inquisition; and though the story of his “Still it moves” is a fable, he was forced to recant under threat of torture. Descartes, who protested his loyalty to the Church, was at least a new support to theism; but because his teachings were adopted in France by the Jansenists, the quasi-Protestant enemies of the Jesuits within the Catholic Church, they were ecclesiastically prohibited, and his supporters in the Church and the university were persecuted; while the prudent Gassendi, who at times reasons like an atheist, contrived without protestation to keep on good terms with the Church, of which he was actually a Canon. He had taken orders solely for the sake of an income; and he was never disturbed, though he wrote a vindication of Epicurus, one of the most nearly atheistical of the leading Greek philosophers.

Nowhere is the new impulse to science more clearly seen than in papal and Spanish-ruled Italy. There, as Bacon complained was the case nearly everywhere throughout Europe, most scientific professors were poorly paid, while the learned professions were well endowed; yet at the close of the sixteenth century there did not exist a single distinguished Greek scholar in the peninsula; and while this may have been due to papal policy, the unfostered study of the natural sciences went forward on all sides. Narrowly watched by the Church, the students nevertheless propagated new science throughout north-western Europe. Unhappily, as we have seen, the theological spirit still hampered its evolution, but the study persisted.

From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards it is clear that physical science by its very method and character undermined theology. Here there were possible rational proof and intelligent agreement, instead of the eternal sterility of theological debate on irrational propositions. In France, Holland, and England, the followers of Descartes, even when agreeing on a fundamentally wrong theory of cosmic physics, made for rationalism by their discipline as well as by what was accurate in their detailed science; the influence of the English Royal Society was recognizably anti-clerical; and from Gassendi onwards the whole scientific movement told decisively against superstition, so that the belief in witchcraft was discredited within a generation from the time of its worst intensity. Glanvil, who in England professed a scientific skepticism, on Cartesian lines, defended the superstition as Bodin had done in France, and was supported not only by the theologians but by such a pious man of science as the chemist Boyle, who was equally skeptical in his own proper sphere; yet they could not restore credulity among the thinking minds. More august beliefs were shaken in turn. Boyle in his latter years set himself anxiously to defend Christianity; and Newton was moved to exert himself even in the cause of theism, which was newly undermined. But Newton himself was a Unitarian; his distinguished contemporary the astronomer Halley was reputed a thorough unbeliever; and Newton’s own philosophy, which proceeded on Gassendi as well as on the devout Kepler, was denounced by some, including the German Leibnitz, as tending to atheism. Leibnitz in turn stood wearily aloof from the Church in his own country. No personal bias or prejudice could cancel the fundamental dissidence between exact science and “revealed” dogma.

While the literary movement of English Deism in the eighteenth century was not ostensibly grounded on physical philosophy, being rather critical and logical, it always kept the new science in view; and the movement in France, as set up by the young Voltaire, connected itself from the first with the Newtonian philosophy, which there had to drive out the Cartesian, now become orthodox. In the hands of La Mettrie biological science pointed to even deeper heresy; and for such propagandists as Diderot and D’Holbach all science was an inspiration to a general rejection of religion. Even the pursuit of mathematics developed pronounced unbelievers, such as D’Alembert and Condorcet. When, finally, in the latter half of the century the scientific spirit flagged or stagnated in England, first by reason of the new growths of industry and the new imperial expansion, later by reason of reaction against the French Revolution, it was the French men of science, in particular the astronomers and mathematicians, as Laplace, Lagrange, Lalande, and Delambre, who carried on the profession of rationalism. In particular, Laplace’s great contribution, the nebular hypothesis, clinched on non-theistic grounds the whole development of modern astronomy; and the philosopher Kant, who on that point had in a measure anticipated him, never conformed to Christian orthodoxy even while glosing it in the effort to conserve theism.

All the later generalizations of science have told in the same way; and all have had to struggle for life against the instinctive hostility of the Christian Churches, Protestant and Catholic alike. Geology, after generations of outcry, made an end in the nineteenth century of the orthodox theory of cosmic creation; the evolution theory drove home the negation with a new constructive doctrine; and Darwinism, after a no less desperate contest, has upturned the very foundations of Christian ethics as well as dogma. As represented by Huxley, its chief polemist, it is definitely non-Christian and non-theistic. It does not countervail this essential tendency that a number of men of science in each generation profess to adhere to Christianity. The adherence is seldom thorough, and when it is, it is commonly recognized to stand for lack of culture on the historical and ethical sides of the issue. The result is that Protestant Christianity nearly everywhere capitulates outwardly to natural science, professing still to save its own more essential dogmas; while Catholicism forces upon its adherents either “scientific nescience” or a dissimulation fatal to zeal.

It lies on the face of our sketch of the movement of physical science that it is subversive of Christian orthodoxy, though not of extra-Christian theism. But since Giordano Bruno all cosmic philosophy that keeps the tincture of religion has pointed to pantheism; and all moral philosophy since Descartes has been more or less fatally subversive of Christian dogma. In the great work of Spinoza (1671), who partly proceeded on Descartes and partly transcended him, we have a philosophy and an ethic that are reluctantly pronounced by respectful theists to be virtually atheistic; and no great philosophy since has reversed that impetus. The God of Kant and the God of Hegel are as non-Christian as the Absolute of Bradley.

Moral philosophy had begun to be non-theological in Montaigne’s day (1580); and his disciple, Charron, constructed in his Wisdom what is pronounced to be the first modern treatise on that footing. Less than a century later the English Cumberland, although a bishop of the Church, took a similarly rationalistic course in morals in his reply to Hobbes (1672), making no appeal to revelation, though of course making no attack on it; and the almost undisguised naturalism of Hobbes was thus tacitly countenanced in fundamentals from the clerical side, in the very act of repudiation. Shaftesbury, who became the most influential moralist of the first half of the eighteenth century, did but develop the naturalistic principle on avowedly theistic and non-Christian lines. Bishop Berkeley, who assailed both Spinoza and Shaftesbury, could justify his Christian beliefs only by arguing that skeptics themselves, in the study of mathematics, accepted many arbitrary propositions, and might as well accept the mystery of Jesus Christ. Even Locke, though he stood for a “reasonable” and non-dogmatic Christianity, was in effect an influence for deism in respect of his philosophy.

All later moral philosophy of any standing has been either plainly non-evangelical or essentially irreconcilable with the Christian faith. Even the argumentation of Bishop Butler (1736) has no more validity for it than for any other, and is finally as favourable to atheism as to theism. Hume, who developed from deism into a final agnosticism, was at all stages anti-Christian in his ethic as well as in his metaphysic and his historical criticism of religion; and Adam Smith was strictly deistic. The later and deeper German philosophies of Kant and Fichte are no more truly helpful to Christianity, though elaborate attempts have been made to adapt Kantism to its service; and though Hegel finally proposed to rehabilitate its dogmas, his German disciples for the most part became anti-Christian; one of them, Feuerbach, becoming one of the most formidable critics of the faith. The professionally Christian moral philosophies, such as that of Paley in England (1785), have been abandoned by the sincerely religious no less than by the students of philosophy. Coleridge, seeking to give a philosophic aspect to the faith of his latter years, had to fall back on the “modal” Trinity, and could make no judicial defence of the doctrines of salvation and damnation.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, finally, the balance of philosophic thought has been overwhelmingly hostile to Christian beliefs. Everywhere, whether it be professedly utilitarian or “transcendental,” it is essentially monistic and evolutionist; and while the expressly naturalistic doctrine, typified in the teaching of Spencer, positively rejects all pretence of revelation, the spiritistic schools do nothing for historic religion beyond claiming to have reinstated a theism which is not “providential,” and so amounts in practice to pantheism. The so-called materialism of Germany, represented by the writings of Moleschott and BÜchner, though constantly assailed on metaphysical grounds, is the common-sense conviction of millions of educated men; and the metaphysical attack makes scarcely a pretence of claiming belief for conventional religion. Christianity thus subsists without anything that can properly be described as philosophic support, save as regards some Catholic systems which rationalists or men of science rarely take the trouble to examine, and the sentimental mode of reasoning latterly labelled Pragmatism. This is really an unwarrantable application of a term which its framer, Mr. C. S. Pierce, applied to a practice of testing beliefs by ascertaining how far they are acted on in life. The so-called “Pragmatism” of Professor William James and Mr. Schiller is the vitally different process of certificating beliefs as true by the amount of comfort and stimulus derived from them. This procedure Mr. Pierce repudiates; but the bulk of current “Pragmatism” flies that flag, and not his.

That method logically concludes nothing for or against any belief, but may be made to seem to support almost any. It posits, in effect, that true beliefs are those by which men can successfully live, but offers no test of the reality of any alleged grounding of life upon a belief. Empirically, the negative of any opinion may thus be as easily substantiated as the affirmative, since the naturalist and the supernaturalist may alike claim individual success and satisfaction; and the adherents of the different faiths may do as much. For the “Pragmatist” of this order, accordingly, two contraries may be equally “true.” Any resort to objective tests, the method of science, puts that of Pragmatism (of this order) out of action. It has thus no philosophic significance save as a quasi-philosophical reaffirmation of the pietist claim of “experience,” and leaves religion as it found it.

Other quasi-philosophical defences of Christianity are even less durable. A considerable amount of temporary favour has been won by what may be termed the Irrationalist defence, typified by the works of Mr. Benjamin Kidd and Mr. A. J. Balfour. As put by the former, it is a suicidal process of reasoning against reliance on reason, the necessary effect being to discredit the verdict claimed, as being attainable only through the very act of reason that is condemned. As more subtly handled by Mr. Balfour, the Irrationalist case takes the form of a denial that scientific beliefs, so-called, are any more capable of “ultimate proof” than the beliefs which constitute religion. We have here a very modern reversion to the orthodox forensic method anciently pursued by Cicero, and in later times employed by Huet, Pascal, and Berkeley. Its complete practical failure in all ages might serve to indicate its necessary nugatoriness to those who most affect it. Were the central thesis true, there is obviously no more warrant on that basis for any one creed than for any other; and a “solipsism” which warrants any and every claim alike is of no use to the Christian Church, which seeks to warrant a given revelation. Whatever be their abstract right to certainty, most men in search of it inevitably test the less certain proposition in the light of the more certain: and this bias, bound up with all sincere mental life, is as fatal to anti-critical defences as it is vital to all scientific advance. An inquiring age is not to be made credulous by the argument from nescience.

Most men, in short, accept or reject religious creeds on the strength not of any systematically philosophic reasoning, but of either emotional bias or common-sense examination of concrete evidence. The former is as a rule, though not always, susceptible of influence from the latter. Thus the main instruments in turning men from Christian credences have been the documentary and historical forms of criticism.

Such criticism, secretly frequent among educated men in the sixteenth century, never ventured into print till the seventeenth, and even then did so very circumspectly. English Deism begins its literary existence with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose first work, produced under French influences, appeared in Latin in 1624. His position was that the doctrine of forgiveness for faith is immoral; that all pretences of revelation are repugnant to moral reason; and that as all so-called revelations are sectarian and mutually exclusive, human reason must proceed for itself on a basis of natural theism. Such audacity was possible in virtue partly of the resort to Latin, partly of the high personal standing of the writer. The next outstanding anti-Christian work is the Leviathan (1651) of Hobbes, who ventured to publish in English under the doctrinally tolerant rule of Cromwell. In his treatise, not only is the attitude of faith constantly disparaged, despite constant resort to scriptural citation, but there is a beginning of open criticism of the inconsistencies of the Pentateuch. Such criticism seems to have gone much further in private discussion long before that time; and it is clear from many apologetic treatises that doctrinal unbelief was abundant; but the publication of a skeptical work that could be read by the unlearned marks an era of germinating unbelief. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) carries the principle of rational textual criticism of the Bible further; and after the French Catholic professor Richard Simon had published in French his critical treatises on the texts of the Old and New Testaments (1678 and 1689), though these were professedly orthodox, Biblical criticism began a new life.

The first drastic attacks of a direct and businesslike kind on orthodoxy were those of the English Deists of the early years of the eighteenth century, typified in the works of Anthony Collins, who soberly and amiably called in question alike revelation, prophecy, and miracles. Soon such criticism was reinforced by the inquiry of Middleton into Roman Catholic miracles, on lines which implicitly called in question those of the gospels; and the essay of Hume on miracles in general put the case against them on grounds which could be turned only by arguments that evaded them. The polemic of the whole French school of freethinkers, headed by Voltaire, thereafter attacked every aspect of Jewish and Christian supernaturalism and of Jewish and Christian history considered as a moral dispensation; the English Unitarians, represented by Priestley, made a number of converts to their compromise; and when Gibbon came to deal with the rise of Christianity in his great work (1776–88), he set forth on naturalistic grounds a tentative sociological explanation which could not be overthrown by orthodox methods, and is to be superseded only by a more searching analysis on the same lines. So decisive was the total effect of the critical attack that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century many German theologians within the Church had begun to deal with the supernatural elements in the Old Testament on rationalistic though temporizing methods, and some had even begun to apply the same treatment to the New. Finally came, in England, the powerful common-sense attack of Thomas Paine (1793), which at once set up a movement of popular rationalism that has never since ceased.

To all such rationalism, however, a strong check was set up for a whole generation, especially in England, by the universal reaction against the French Revolution. Hitherto the upper classes, there as in France, had been noted mainly for unbelief in religious matters; but when it was seen from the course of the Revolution that heterodoxy could join hands with democracy, there was a rapid change of front, on the simple ground of class interest. During the first generation of the nineteenth century, accordingly, all English freethinking was either driven under the social surface or classed as disreputable, so that it was possible to assume a great revival of faith. In France, similarly, the literary pietism of Chateaubriand seemed to have crowned with success the official restoration of the Church’s authority; and even the intellectual revival was associated with Christian zeal on the part of such energetic personalities as Guizot. Even in Germany, though there the work of Biblical criticism on rationalist lines went steadily on, there was a pietist revival. Before the middle of the century was reached, however, it was clear that in France and Germany rationalism was in full renascence; and in England, where such facts are less readily avowed, scholarly writings even in the fourth decade had begun to prove the solidarity of European culture.

As regards Biblical criticism, there appears to be a certain periodicity of action. In the eighteenth century, when the work done was mainly of the common-sense order, the French physician Jean Astruc laid down a basis for exact documentary analysis by pointing to the two elements of Yahwist (Jehovist) and Elohist narrative as indicating two distinct sources. On such lines the earlier German scholars of the nineteenth century long laboured, till the common-sense criticism was lost sight of. In the meantime, however, a long line of partially rationalist criticism of the New Testament culminated in the Life of Jesus by Strauss; and educated Christendom was shaken to its foundations, insofar as it ventured to read. Side by side with that of Strauss, there proceeded in Germany a great movement of documentary and historical analysis, till professional theology there became almost identified with the surrender of Christian supernaturalism.

As the critical movement proceeded in England it came about that an admired dignitary of its Church, Bishop Colenso, was convinced on common-sense lines of the utterly unhistorical character of the main Pentateuchal narrative, and courageously published his views (1862). From that point the European criticism of the Old Testament, which had been proceeding on the assumption of the genuineness of the narrative, took a new course with such rapid success that within a generation the whole mass of the Old Testament had been either decisively or provisionally reduced, chiefly by Dutch and German scholars, to a variety of sources never wholly in accordance with the traditional ascription, and representing collectively a vast historical process of fabrication. In the face of the facts, the claim of “inspiration” still made for the books by some of the scholars who expound the process of their composition is naturally treated with indifference by educated men not professionally committed to such a position.

With whatever bias the problem be approached, all really critical study of the documents latterly tells against the Christian position. Writers who, like Renan, have treated Christian origins in a spirit of literary sympathy with that of belief, none the less undo faith, and offer at best a sentimental historical construction in place of the destroyed tradition. The orthodox defence, on the other hand, grows rapidly less confident in the hands of scholarly men. The later development of professional study, as set forth in the English EncyclopÆdia Biblica shows a progressive collapse of the traditional belief on almost every detail, some continental theologians now going further in their rejection of it than many professed rationalists.

The general result of two generations of critical research and controversy is that practically all Biblical students have accepted the main results of the “higher criticism,” whatever debate there may still be over details. There is tacit or overt agreement that the Hexateuch is a composite body of writings of many periods; that the Mosaic authorship is a myth; that the quasi-historical books are similarly works of redaction; that the Psalms are not Davidic and the Solomonic books not Solomonic; and that the prophets are endlessly manipulated. Even the view that all the prophets are post-Maccabean finds some acceptance. And the dissolution of the Old Testament tradition necessarily involves the New. Though the rigorous documentary analysis of that lagged behind the criticism of the Hebrew books, the general conceptions of miracles and of inspiration have long lacked serious defence. Arnold’s “Miracles do not happen” startled only those who had been inattentive to the whole movement of scientific and historical thought.

To-day it can hardly be said that there is any serious defence of New Testament supernaturalism. Some years ago a large number of Anglican clerics signed a memorial calling for a liberal attitude towards all historical criticism of the texts, and this was followed by an appeal to the Bishop of London asking that belief in the Virgin Birth should no longer be required of candidates for holy orders. The appeal was of course refused; but no competent inquirer doubts that hundreds of clergymen of the orthodox Churches are Unitarian in their beliefs. Living controversy now turns, not on the supernaturalism of the gospels, but on the purely historical question as to whether the Gospel Jesus ever lived; and over this issue Unitarians are found to be as resentful as Trinitarians ever were on the Unitarian issue. In Germany the debate has gone far, some of the more open-minded theologians admitting that the old lines of defence must be abandoned as inadequate. In England all critical processes take place more slowly, but there is now accumulating a defensive literature which tells of widespread unsettlement. The method of confident bluster is found not to avail in an age which has seen the rapid abandonment of so many vital positions, all in their time maintained with the same contemptuous confidence.

The average layman has of course not yet been reached by such a problem as that of the Historicity of Jesus; but he has long been well accustomed to the defensive attitude in matters of faith. Down to the time of Colenso the “sensations” of the controversy were over the books which attacked. For a generation past the attack has been so general that the new “sensations” were those set up by new attempts at defence or counter-attack. Such books as the late Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, Mr. Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution, and Mr. Balfour’s Foundations of Belief, in their turn elicited an amount of excitement which told chiefly of eagerness for weapons of defence against the rationalist invasion. None of the works named will bear any critical scrutiny. Drummond’s was repented of by its author, as it well might; and the irrationalism of Mr. Kidd and Mr. Balfour soon ceased to comfort the clergy who hastily hailed it as a means of stablishing the faith.

What subsists is the mass of mainly conventional, formal, and uncritical orthodoxy, the custom of the majority, which stands for the same mental inertia as preserved ancient paganism substantially intact for five hundred years after Socrates, and enabled its traditional polytheism to overgrow early Christianity. And the professional defence to-day is at many points singularly like that put forward for pagan polytheism by the Platonists and Neo-Platonists. At its best it is certainly not more philosophical than the performance of Plotinus; at its worst not more hollow than the performance of Cicero.