it was pantheistic-mystical with Spinoza, spiritualistic with Descartes,
theistic with Leibnitz, materialistic with the men of the Encyclopædia.
It was orthodox with nobody. The miracle as traditionally defined became
impossible. At all events it became the millstone around the neck of the
apologists. The movement went to an extreme. All the evils of excess
upon this side from which we since have suffered were forecast. They
were in a measure called out by the evils and errors which had so long
reigned upon the other side.

Again, in the field of the writing of history and of the critique of
ancient literatures, the principles of rational criticism were worked
out and applied in all seriousness. Then these maxims began to be
applied, sometimes timidly and sometimes in scorn and shallowness, to
the sacred history and literature as well. To claim, as the defenders of
the faith were fain to do, that this one department of history was
exempt, was only to tempt historians to say that this was equivalent to
confession that we have not here to do with history at all.

Nor can we overlook the fact that the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries witnessed a great philosophical revival. Here again it is the
rationalist principle which is everywhere at work. The observations upon
nature, the new feeling concerning man, the vast complex of facts and
impulses which we have been able in these few words to suggest, demanded
a new philosophical treatment. The philosophy which now took its rise
was no longer the servant of theology. It was, at most, the friend, and
even possibly the enemy, of theology. Before the end of the rationalist
period it was the master of theology, though often wholly indifferent to
theology, exactly because of its sense of mastery. The great
philosophers of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, belong
with a part only of their work and tendency to the rationalist movement.