The times. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1897-1901, 1901-04-14

| long became the mask for profoundel
skepticism in Protestant Europe, as II die
afterward in New England We find II
in England on the eve OF the French Rev
olution. combined with science in Priest
ley and with mathematics and philosophy
In Price.
Among the apologize and defensive
forces may be numbered the practical
vindication of Christianity by a certain
revival of piety in the Anglican Church
which produced WHEREFORE, Cowper, and
the Evangelieals, and still more by the
| religious crusade of John Wesley. Yves
ley's achievements, however were among
the poor and illiterate, and were conse-
| quently demonstrations of the power OF
Christianity rather than of its truth. His
Church had the advantage of being born,
| not like other Protestant Churches in doc
trinaI controversy, but in evangelical re-
action against the impiety and vice OF the
age. 1t was, however, not undogmatic;
besides what might he called the dogma
of sudden conversion, il implicitly accept
| ed. not only the literal inspiration of
! Scripture, hut the bulk of the Anglican
Articles, to which was afterward added,
as an ordination text, general agreement
with the more important of Wesleys SER
mons.
! The French Revolution brought on a
strong reaction against the free thought
which had been hideously travestied in
the blasphemous follies and sullied by the
crimes of the Jacobins. In England the
Tory mob, with true instinct, sacked the
/ library and laboratory of Priestley. Cole
! lect. had hailed the revolutionary dawn,
/ shared the reaction, and combining in a
curious way German metaphysic with
( English orthodoxy and Esta blishmentar-
ianism, produced a religious system which
perhaps entities him to high place among
English theologians in the proper sense
of that term, as denoting a philosophic
enquirer into the nature of the Deity and
the relations between the Deity and man;
though, as his guiding light was philoso-
ply, not authority or tradition. he may in
| that respect be numbered among the pro-
meters of free thought and of the re-
suits to which it was ultimately to lead
Such free thinking as there was natur-
ally took a turn answering in violence to
the repression. Tom Paine assailed ortho-
doxy not with freedom only but with en-
nifty the most yirulent. Though far from
an attractive, he is by no means an un-
important figure. His criticisms of the
credibility and morality of Scripture, un-
learned and coarse as they were, went,
not over the heads Of the people like the
high-fying and metaphysical speculations.
but straight to their understandings and
their hearts. 1t was difficult for apollo
getic fencers to parry such home thrusts.
The same sort of effect has been produced
by the irreverent frankness Of Ingersoll
in our own day. Shelley rushed from the
religion of Eldon into what he took for
Satanism; though his Satan is really the
power of good, while the God of Eldon,
as viewed by him. is the Devil.
Wrecked, body and soul, by the Thirty
Years War, and afterward stifed under
a group of petty despotisms, Germany
was for time lost TO intellectual prog
ress. Her churches and their clergy, the
Lutheran clergy at least, were in a very
low condition. When her intellect began
to work again. il was in a recluse and
highly speculative way, the natural con-
sequence of its exclusion from politics and
other fields of action. together with the
complete severance of the academical ele-
ment from the people. Hence, from Leib-
nitz and Leasing onward, there was d
train OF metaphysical PHILOSOPHERS, each
of them processing to find in our con-
seriousness key to the mystery of Being,
and an account of God, of his counsels,
and of the relation between him and man.
In derision of such speculations it was
said that to the French belonged the land,
a hp iSh ba 70
the air. Essentially incapable of verih-
cation these theories went on shifting in
nebulous succession and, with the excep-
ton of that of Kant, may now be said
to have vanished, leaving scarce rack
behind. Even of the great Hegel little
remains. Leibnitz, with his best of all
possible worlds" hardly survived Can
dide." Still, we must speak with respect
and gratitude of these efforts of minds,
powerful in their way and devoted to
truth, to solve for US the great mystery.
Speculation so free could not fail to pro-
mote general freedom of thought, and
the treatment by these thinkers of the
popular and established religion was as
philosOphic as possible, though, with the
exception of Feuerbach, all OF them were
thesis. BY Leasing much was done for
the recognition of all religions and the
promotion of universal federation.
Presently, however came direct criti-
cism of the Bible, the way to which, long
before. had been lighted by Spinoza 1t
assumed q strange form in the work of
Paulus, who applied to the Gospel mira
cles a solvent something like that which
Euhemerus had applied to the Pagan Pan
theon, reducing them TO natural occur
rences turned into miracles by Il devout
imagination. The miraculous fish with
would sell for the coin. The miraculous
feeding Of the five thousand was brought
within the compass of belief by supposing
that they were not fasting but had only
gone without a regular meal. Christ
walking on the water was his holding
out a hand from the shore to Peter who
had leaped into the water to ascertain
whether it was really Christ that was
walking on the shore.
Far more serious, and a startling blow
to orthodoxy, was the Life of Jesus" by
Strauss. who undertook to explain the
Gospels on the mythical theory, showing
that the reputed incidents of the life of
Jesus and his miracles were mythical full
ailments of Old Testament prophecies and
aspirations. From this, his first theory,
Strauss afterward partly receded, and in
his second Life of Jesus" after a critical
examination of the authorities, he comes
to the conclusion that few great men
have existed of whose history we have