ABSTRACT
I t is clear from what has been said in the last chapter that the principle of religious toleration had not yet gone far. Its progress was to be considerably accelerated in the later part of the eighteenth century by a loosening of the old bonds of strict credal definition that had hitherto bound all profession of Christianity. In this respect the Reformation had been just as medieval as scholasticism. Although Luther had girded at Aristotle he had not been able to cast off his shackles, and from the point of view of a priori arbitrariness there was nothing to choose between Calvin’s Institutes and the Summa of S. Thomas Aquinas. The Reformation had broken to pieces the external system of Rome, but it had brought in exchange several other systems equally deduced from a number of data which were regarded as authoritatively bestowed by divine revelation. Its scholars were not as near akin to modern students as was Erasmus. None of them as yet had been able to institute a scientific method of inquiry into the bases of religious belief. It is this that divides them from our own day. The truly modern age did not begin until the historic method of inquiry had been built up. What separates us from the Middle Ages and the Reformation period is not any necessary difference in the conclusions at which we arrive, but the whole mental atmosphere in which our thinking is done. The three characteristic notes of modern thought may be taken to be its emphasis upon reason, its refusal to be bound by tradition, and its acceptance of the method pursued in natural science as the norm for all inquiry. The system was begun in the early seventeenth century when Lord Bacon of Vernlam let nature reveal to him her secrets by applying a method which was purely inductive. It was developed in Holland when the French Catholic Descartes ‘grappled with the greatest problems of thought as from a tabula rasa’. No doubt it is capable of exaggerations and mistakes, as Pascal, Descartes’ contemporary, pointed out, and it possesses very little hope of finality, but such as it is the method is woven into the fibre of all our thought, at least for those of us who are outside the Roman communion. That communion might have developed it from seed sown in the Renaissance, but the counter-Reformation made that impossible, and the seed germinated in later Protestantism, which was unfortunately less capable of checking its exaggerated tendencies. In England it resulted in Deism, a type of thought which spread to Germany and produced the Enlightenment (Aufklärung, Illumination). This exchange between the two countries was balanced by another, in which England was the debtor. From Germany came Pietism, which had meanwhile developed there, to replace Deism in England by Methodism. In this chapter we shall follow only the fortunes of the deistic movement as it passes into the Enlightenment.
