[138] Leland, View of Deistical Writers, pp. 230-250.
[139] Schlosser, History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii., p. 85-86.
[140] Pastoral Care.
[141] Works, vol. v., p. 306.
CHAPTER XX.
ENGLAND CONTINUED: PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY RATIONALISM.—COLERIDGE AND CARLYLE.
All history betrays the operation of a compensating principle. The payment may be slow, but there is seldom total repudiation. An influence which departs from a country and sets in upon its neighbor, transforming thought, giving new shades to social life, and instilling foreign principles into politics, is sure, in course of time, to return from its wanderings, bearing with it other forces with which to react upon the land whence it originated. Thought, like the tidal wave, visits all latitudes with its ebb and flow.
The present condition of Anglican theology is an illustration of intellectual re-payment. Two centuries ago England gave Deism to Germany, and the latter country is now paying back the debt with compound interest. After the Revolution of 1789, and the brilliant ascendency of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French spirit rapidly lost its hold upon the English mind. But there immediately arose a disposition to consult German theology and philosophy. English students frequented the German universities, and the works of the leading thinkers of Berlin, Heidelberg, and Halle, were on sale in the book-stores of London. The intimate relations of the royal family of England to Germany, together with the alliance between the German States and Great Britain for the arrest of French arms, increased the tendency until it assumed importance and power. The fruit was first visible in the application of German Rationalism and philosophy to English theology. When Coleridge came from the Fatherland with a new system of opinions, he felt as proud of his good fortune as Columbus did on laying a continent at his sovereign's feet. Ever since that profound thinker assumed a fixed position, a reaction against orthodoxy has been progressing in the Established Church. There are reasons why the slow but effectual introduction of German Rationalism has been taking place imperceptibly.