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 mediæval 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 sense with Shaftesbury, it was pantheistic-mystical with Spinoza, spiritualistic with Descartes, theistic with Leibnitz, materialistic with the men of the Encyclopædia. It was orthodox with nobody. The miracle as traditionally defined became impossible. At all events it became the millstone around the neck of the apologists. The movement went to an extreme. All the evils of excess upon this side from which we since have suffered were forecast. They were in a measure called out by the evils and errors which had so long reigned upon the other side.
Again, in the field of the writing of history and of the critique of ancient literatures, the principles of rational criticism were worked out and applied in all seriousness. Then these maxims began to be applied, sometimes timidly and sometimes in scorn and shallowness, to the sacred history and literature as well. To claim, as the defenders of the faith were fain to do, that this one department of history was exempt, was only to tempt historians to say that this was equivalent to confession that we have not here to do with history at all.
Nor can we overlook the fact that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a great philosophical revival. Here again it is the rationalist principle which is everywhere at work. The observations upon nature, the new feeling concerning man, the vast complex of facts and impulses which we have been able in these few words to suggest, demanded a new philosophical treatment. The philosophy which now took its rise was no longer the servant of theology. It was, at most, the friend, and even possibly the enemy, of theology. Before the end of the rationalist period it was the master of theology, though often wholly indifferent to theology, exactly because of its sense of mastery. The great philosophers of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, belong with a part only of their work and tendency to the rationalist movement. Still their work rested upon that which had already been done by Spinoza and Malebranche, by Hobbes and Leibnitz, by Descartes and Bayle, by Locke and Wolff, by Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. With all of the contrasts among these men there are common elements. There is an ever increasing antipathy to the thought of original sin and of supernatural revelation, there is the confidence of human reason, the trust in the will of man, the enthusiasm for the simple, the natural, the intelligible and practical, the hatred of what was scholastic and, above all, the repudiation of authority.
All these elements led, toward the end of the period, to the effort at the construction of a really rational theology. Leibnitz and Lessing both worked at that problem. However, not until after the labours of Kant was it possible to utilise the results of the rationalist movement for the reconstruction of theology. If evidence for this statement were wanting, it could be abundantly given from the work of Herder. He was younger than Kant, yet the latter seems to have exerted but slight influence upon him. He earnestly desired to reinterpret Christianity in the new light of his time, yet perhaps no part of his work is so futile.
[Pietism]
Allusion has been made to pietism. We have no need to set forth its own achievements. We must recur to it merely as one of the influences which made the transition from the century of rationalism to bear, in Germany, an aspect different from that which it bore in any other land. Pietism had at first much in common with rationalism. It shared with the latter its opposition to the whole administration of religion established by the State, its antagonism to the social distinctions which prevailed, its individualism, its emphasis upon the practical. It was part of a general religious reaction against ecclesiasticism, as were also Jansenism in France, and Methodism in England, and the Whitefieldian revival in America. But, through the character of Spener, and through the peculiarity of German social relations, it gained an influence over the educated classes, such as Methodism never had in England, nor, on the whole, the Great Awakening in America. In virtue of this, German pietism was able, among influential persons, to present victorious opposition to the merely secular tendencies of the rationalistic movement. In no small measure it breathed into that movement a religious quality which in other lands was utterly lacking. It gave to it an ethical seriousness from which in other places it had too often set itself free.
In England there had followed upon the age of the great religious conflict one of astounding ebb of spiritual interest. Men turned with all energy to the political and economic interests of a wholly modern civilisation. They retained, after a short period of friction, a smug and latitudinarian orthodoxy, which Methodism did little to change. In France not only was the Huguenot Church annihilated, but the Jansenist movement was savagely suppressed. The tyranny of the Bourbon State and the corruption of the Gallican Church which was so deeply identified with it caused the rationalist movement to bear the trait of a passionate opposition to religion. In the time of Pascal, Jansenism had a moment when it bade fair to be to France what pietism was to Germany. Later, in the anguish and isolation of the conflict the movement lost its poise and intellectual quality. In Germany, even after the temporary alliance of pietism and rationalism against the Church had been transcended, and the length and breadth of their mutual antagonism had been revealed, there remained a deep mutual respect and salutary interaction. Obscurantists and sentimentalists might denounce rationalism. Vulgar ranters like Dippel and Barth might defame religion. That had little weight as compared with the fact that Klopstock, Hamann and Herder, Jacobi, Goethe and Jean Paul, had all passed at some time under the influence of pietism. Lessing learned from the Moravians the undogmatic essence of religion. Schleiermacher was bred among the devoted followers of Zinzendorf. Even the radicalism of Kant retained from the teaching of his pietistic youth the stringency of its ethic, the sense of the radical evil of human nature and of the categorical imperative of duty. It would be hard to find anything to surpass his testimony to the purity of character and spirit of his parents, or the beauty of the home life in which he was bred. Such facts as these made themselves felt both in the philosophy and in the poetry of the age. The rationalist movement itself came to have an ethical and spiritual trait. The triviality, the morbidness and superstition of pietism received their just condemnation. But among the leaders of the nation in every walk of life were some who felt the drawing to deal with ethical and religious problems in the untrammelled fashion which the century had taught.
We may be permitted to try to show the meaning of pietism by a concrete example. No one can read the correspondence between the youthful Schleiermacher and his loving but mistaken father, or again, the lifelong correspondence of Schleiermacher with his sister, without receiving, if he has any religion of his own, a touching impression of what the pietistic religion meant. The father had long before, unknown to the son, passed through the torments of the rational assault upon a faith which was sacred to him. He had preached, through years, in the misery of contradiction with himself. He had rescued his drowning soul in the ark of the most intolerant confessional orthodoxy. In the crisis of his son's life he pitiably concealed these facts. They should have been the bond of sympathy. The son, a sorrowful little motherless boy, was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby. He was to escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which his father had passed. Even there the spirit of the age pursued him. The precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race was wrestling with. He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the man he so revered. Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself upon his father's mercy, only to be abused and measurelessly condemned. He had his way. He resorted to Halle, turned his back on sacred things, worked in titanic fashion at everything but the problem of religion. At least he kept his life clean and his soul sensitive among the flagrantly immoral who were all about him, even in the pietists' own university. He laid the foundations for his future philosophical construction. He bathed in the sentiments and sympathies, poetic, artistic and humanitarian, of the romanticist movement. In his early Berlin period he was almost swept from his feet by its flood. He rescued himself, however, by his rationalism and romanticism into a breadth and power of faith which made him the prophet of the new age. By him, for a generation, men like-minded saved their souls. As one reads, one realises that it was the pietists' religion which saved him, and which, in another sense, he saved. His recollections of his instruction among the Herrnhuter are full of beauty and pathos. His sister never advanced a step upon the long road which he travelled. Yet his sympathy with her remained unimpaired. The two poles of the life of the age are visible here. The episode, full of exquisite personal charm, is a veritable miniature of the first fifty years of the movement which we have to record. No one did for England or for France what Schleiermacher had done for the Fatherland.