a positive religion, his love of an abstract religiousness, and his revolt against the distant Deity of popular religion. The position of the generous liberal Jew, Nathan, is nearly his own position. He was not unconscious of the necessity of faith, nor even of the value of tradition in the interpretation of the Scriptures, believing that the word of God cannot be confined to a book. In his heart he valued much of Christian truth. But he was not satisfied with the historical evidences for Christianity, and by treating it as a revelation for the youth rather than for the manhood of the world, he furthered the Rationalism which he really disliked.

With Lessing we may mention the three principal Lutheran theologians of this period, J. A. Ernesti (d. 1781), J. David Michaelis (d. 1791), and J. S. Semler (d. 1791). All three have been sharply blamed and warmly praised, and a nice judgement is required in balancing their merits and defects. Ernesti is chiefly remarkable for his treatment of the New Testament, and the great pains which he devoted to the discovery of its philological and grammatical meaning. He did good work by promoting the principle that the sense of Scripture must be determined by the science of language and not by preconceived dogmatic opinions. But he was imperfectly conscious of the fact that Christianity as a new religion modified the significance of words which had been employed previously to its advent. Michaelis was an eminent Orientalist, anxious to enrich biblical studies with analogies discovered in the languages akin to Hebrew. Unhappily, although he was a convinced, he was not a converted Christian. He did not abandon the creed of his good Pietist father, but his habits were disfigured by intemperance and his lectures were spiced with obscenity. These two scholars were not strictly rationalistic. Their desire was to be scientific, introducing into Germany that zeal for biblical history and textual criticism which existed

in England and Holland before it existed in Germany. Their learning was extensive, but it would have been put to a better purpose if they had more often remembered that to be a theologian it is necessary to have a heart as well as a head, and that the teachers who insist that the Bible ought to be criticized like any other book are likely to have pupils who will criticize it like no other book.

Semler, who was the ablest of the three, is indeed an instance of the truth that the theologian who sows the wind may live to reap the whirlwind. A good man, who like Michaelis had been trained in Pietism, he was an exceptionally learned scholar, and became a professor at Halle where he succeeded Baumgarten. He rightly held that dogma to be studied fruitfully must be studied historically. And so long as he, a professor of Christian theology, freely criticized the New Testament, treated the history of the Church as a series of aberrations, and taught that every man ought to have a 'private' religion of his own and make his own system of belief, his popularity was impregnable. But this popularity melted like a cloud when Semler disclosed his conviction that private judgement might run wild, set himself to criticize the English Deists and the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, and opposed the infamous preacher Karl F. Bahrdt, a libertine alike in theology and in morals. He died broken-hearted when he saw that he had failed to stop the hurricane of unbelief and opposition, and by a cruel irony he became branded with the title of the father of Rationalism '.1

·

In a great degree these three theologians were the victims of their predecessors. A stiff and barren Lutheranism, posing as orthodox, had provoked the feeling that liberty

It may be noted that the word liberalis occurs thrice, and liberaliter once, among the Latin titles of his works. The first instance is in his ✓ Institutio brevior ad liberalem eruditionem theologicam, 1765. Semler by 'liberal' meant 'candid', 'open-minded'. The sense of 'anti-orthodox' is a later use of the word.

could only be gained by departing as far as possible from a system which had kept the Christian student in the fetters of a new legalism. An understanding of the Bible was stifled by a mechanical theory of inspiration which taught that even the variant readings of the Old Testament were inspired, maintained the pre-eminent sanctity of the Hebrew language, and asserted that the books of Ruth and Esther were as indispensable as those comprised in the New Testament. The same school had also professed to find in the Bible all later developments of religious speculation accepted in Lutheran theology. And when it was shown that these developments had been subsequently evolved, there came a tendency to accumulate and emphasize their differences rather than to seek 'the higher unity in which much of this discordance would have harmonized '.1

The influence of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) upon religion has been so variously estimated by his compatriots that an Englishman may well be cautious in giving his opinion. On the one hand he has been called' the philosopher of Protestantism', and on the other hand it has been replied that, if that be the case, Protestantism is the grave-digger of Christianity'. He put the philosophy of criticism in the place which had been occupied by rationalistic dogmatism. The soil was the same, but he dug the foundations deeper, teaching men to see what they are and what they want. His insight into evil and his exaltation of the categorical imperative of the moral law were well fitted to help men to distrust themselves, to rid themselves of conceit, and even to feel conscious of a desire which only Christ can satisfy. But he was not a schoolmaster to Christ'.

He

1 E. B. Pusey, op. cit., p. 145. The whole passage in Pusey is informing and judicious.

2 So, as against Paulsen and Bousset, Dr. Albert Ehrhard, Der Katholizismus und das zwanzigste Jahrhundert, p. 185 (Jos. Roth'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart und Wien, 1902).

gave the word religion a new meaning and one essentially opposed to Christianity. Historically religion has meant a personal relation between man and God, however God may be conceived by the worshipper, and God is above each man and all mankind. Kant's religion is not that relation. With him the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality are postulates of the practical reason; they are requisite for the moral life, and the fundamental principle of the moral life is esteem for man for his own sake. However majestic the categorical imperative appears, it cannot in religion act as an adequate substitute for that personal Word who came among us full of grace and truth'; and the moral and religious results of his philosophy are, as Dr. Friedrich Loofs observes, in essential agreement with the ideas of the Illumination '. He was the chief of eighteenth-century rationalists, and in 1793 he defined a Rationalist as 'one who simply holds natural religion as morally necessary, that is, as a duty', while the Supernaturalist 'believes a supernatural revelation necessary for a universal religion'.

The distinction between the Rationalist and the Supernaturalist thus clearly made was widely acknowledged, and an effort was made by the Supernaturalists to maintain the truth of the revelation contained in the Bible. The State had already taken alarm, and various edicts were passed to suppress the growth of Rationalism. They failed, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century the battle was already lost. In England Deism and Arianism, after seriously threatening Christianity, had been overcome. In Scandinavia the kindred movements also failed. But in Holland, Switzerland, and Germany the Illumination was supreme. In Prussia especially the individual had been glorified and the Church divided into local societies. The liturgies were mutilated, the Church music was debased, the hymns

1 Grundlinien der Kirchengeschichte, p. 285 (Niemeyer, Halle a. S.,

which had been the glory of Lutheranism were transformed,1 and pastors preached on moral improvement and natural science.

Among the Calvinists of Switzerland the decay of Christianity came even earlier than among the Lutherans of Germany. In 1763 Rousseau, who was himself a sentimental Deist with Protestant sympathies, wrote a scathing description of the ministers of Geneva and challenged them to show what difference existed between their belief and his own. You ask them if Jesus Christ is God, they dare not reply; you ask them what mysteries they acknowledge, they dare not reply. To what question then will they reply, and what will be the fundamental articles, different from mine, on which they are willing that a decision should be made, if the above articles are excluded? A philosopher casts a rapid glance at them: he sees through them, he sees in them Arians, Socinians. . . . They are really extraordinary gentlemen, your ministers; one does not know what they believe, or what they do not believe, one does not even know what they pretend to believe; their only way of proving their faith is by attacking that of others. . . . From all this I conclude that it is not easy to say in what the holy reformation at Geneva now consists.' 2

The history of Dutch Protestantism during the eighteenth century is not easy to unravel. We can, however, detect certain forces which were making for the destruction of an orthodox Calvinism no less than the marked Socinian tendencies of the sect of Remonstrants. This Socinianism infected many of the English Nonconformists who studied in Holland. Within the State Church of Holland itself

The common people sometimes resisted successfully the introduction of deistic hymns.

2 J.-J. Rousseau, Lettres de la Montagne, pp. 231 sqq. (Paris, Dalibon, 1826). Rousseau is probably the first to use the word 'moderniste' in a quasi-theological sense. He addresses a materialist as a 'moderniste'. Lettre à M. De***, January the 15th, 1769.

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