of churches and states was the one might which it seemed everywhere
necessary to break. The conflict with ecclesiasticism, however, was
taken up also by Pietism, the other great spiritual force of the age.
This was in spite of the fact that the Pietists' view of religion was
the opposite of the rationalist view. Rationalism was characterised by
thorough-going antagonism to supernaturalism with all its consequences.
This arose from its zeal for the natural and the human, in a day when
all men, defenders and assailants of religion alike, accepted the dictum
that what was human could not be divine, the divine must necessarily be
the opposite of the human. In reality this general trait of opposition
to religion deceives us. It is superficial. In large part the
rationalists were willing to leave the question of religion on one side
if the ecclesiastics would let them alone. This is true in spite of the
fact that the pot-house rationalism of Germany and France in the
eighteenth century found the main butt of its ridicule in the priesthood
and the Church. On its sober side, in the studies of scholars, in the
bureaux of statesmen, in the laboratories of discoverers, it found more
solid work. It accomplished results which that other trivial aspect must
not hide from us.

Troeltsch first in our own day has given us a satisfactory account of
the vast achievement of the movement in every department of human
life.[2] It annihilated the theological notion of the State. In the
period after the Thirty Years' War men began to question what had been
the purpose of it all. Diplomacy freed itself from Jesuitical and papal
notions. It turned preponderantly to commercial and economic aims. A
secular view of the purpose of God in history began to prevail in all
classes of society. The Grand Monarque was ready to proclaim the divine
right of the State which was himself. Still, not until the period of his
dotage did that claim bear any relation to what even he would have