never been able to conceive religion in any other terms than those of dogma, or the Christian assurance on any other basis than that of external authority. Nothing could be franker than the antagonism of the movement, from its inception, to the liberal spirit of the age. By inner logic Newman found himself at last in the Roman Church. Yet the Anglo-Catholic movement is to-day overwhelmingly in the ascendant in the English Church. The Broad Churchmen of the middle of the century have had few successors. It is the High Church which stands over against the great mass of the dissenting churches which, taken in the large, can hardly be said to be theologically more liberal than itself. It is the High Church which has showed Franciscanlike devotion in the problems of social readjustment which England to-day presents. It has shown in some part of its constituency a power of assimilation of new philosophical, critical and scientific views, which makes all comparison of it with the Roman Church misleading. And yet it remains in its own consciousness Catholic to the core.

In America also the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete effects of the division of the churches was the separation of the education of the clergy from the universities, the entrusting it to isolated theological schools under denominational control. The system has done less harm than might have been expected. Yet at present there would appear to be a general movement of recurrence to the elder tradition. The maintenance of the religious life is to some extent a matter of nurture and observances, of religious habit and practice. This truth is one which liberals, in their emphasis upon liberty and the individual, are always in danger of overlooking. The great revivals of religion in this century, like those of the century previous, have been connected with a form of religious thought pronouncedly pietistic. The building up of religious institutions in the new regions of the West, and the participation of the churches of the country in missions, wear predominantly this cast. Antecedently, one might have said that the lack of ecclesiastical cohesion among the Christians of the land, the ease with which a small group might split off for the furtherance of its own particular view, would tend to liberalisation. It is doubtful whether this is true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their permanence. The middle of the nineteenth century in the United States was a period of intense denominationalism. That is synonymous with a period of the stagnation of Christian thought. The religion of a people absorbed in the practical is likely to be one which they at least suppose to be a practical religion. In one age the most practical thing will appear to men to be to escape hell, in another to further socialism. The need of adjustment of religion to the great intellectual life of the world comes with contact with that life. What strikes one in the survey of the religious thought of the country, by and large, for a century and a quarter, is not so much that it has been reactionary, as that it has been stationary. Almost every other aspect of the life of our country, including even that of religious life as distinguished from religious thought, has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. This it is which in a measure has created the tension which we feel.

B. THE BACKGROUND

Deism

In England before the end of the Civil War a movement for the rationalisation of religion had begun to make itself felt. It was in full force in the time of the Revolution of 1688. It had not altogether spent itself by the middle of the eighteenth century. The movement has borne the name of Deism. In so far as it had one watchword, this came to be 'natural religion.' The antithesis had in mind was that to revealed religion, as this had been set forth in the tradition of the Church, and particularly under the bibliolatry of the Puritans. It is a witness to the liberty of speech enjoyed by Englishmen in that day and to their interest in religion, that such a movement could have arisen largely among laymen who were often men of rank. It is an honour to the English race that, in the period of the rising might of the rational spirit throughout the western world, men should have sought at once to utilise that force for the restatement of religion. Yet one may say quite simply that this undertaking of the deists was premature. The time was not ripe for the endeavour. The rationalist movement itself needed greater breadth and deeper understanding of itself. Above all, it needed the salutary correction of opposing principles before it could avail for this delicate and difficult task. Religion is the most conservative of human interests. Rationalism would be successful in establishing a new interpretation of religion only after it had been successful in many other fields. The arguments of the deists were never successfully refuted. On the contrary, the striking thing is that their opponents, the militant divines and writings of numberless volumes of 'Evidences for Christianity,' had come to the same rational basis with the deists. They referred even the most subtle questions to the pure reason, as no one now would do. The deistical movement was not really defeated. It largely compelled its opponents to adopt its methods. It left a deposit which is more nearly rated at its worth at the present than it was in its own time. But it ceased to command confidence, or even interest. Samuel Johnson said, as to the publication of Bolingbroke's work by his executor, three years after the author's death: 'It was a rusty old blunderbuss, which he need not have been afraid to discharge himself, instead of leaving a half-crown to a Scotchman to let it off after his death.'

It is a great mistake, however, in describing the influence of rationalism upon Christian thought to deal mainly with deism. English deism made itself felt in France, as one may see in the case of Voltaire. Kant was at one time deeply moved by some English writers who would be assigned to this class. In a sense Kant showed traces of the deistical view to the last. The centre of the rationalistic movement had, however, long since passed from England to the Continent. The religious problem was no longer its central problem. We quite fail to appreciate what the nineteenth century owes to the eighteenth and to the rationalist movement in general, unless we view this latter in a far greater way.

Rationalism

In 1784 Kant wrote a tractate entitled, Was ist Aufklärung? He said: 'Aufklärung is the advance of man beyond the stage of voluntary immaturity. By immaturity is meant a man's inability to use his understanding except under the guidance of another. The immaturity is voluntary when the cause is not want of intelligence but of resolution. Sapere aude! "Dare to use thine own understanding," is therefore the motto of free thought. If it be asked, "Do we live in a free-thinking age?" the answer is, "No, but we live in an age of free thought." As things are at present, men in general are very far from possessing, or even from being able to acquire, the power of making a sure and right use of their own understanding without the guidance of others. On the other hand, we have clear