From the first, then, humanistic leaders have not only frankly
rejected the scholastic theologies, which had been the traditional
expression of those absolute values with which the religious
experience is chiefly concerned, but also ignored or rejected the
existence of those values themselves. Thus Petrarch is generally
considered the first of modern humanists. He not only speaks of
Rome--meaning the whole semi-political, semi-ecclesiastical structure
of dogmatic supernaturalism--as that "profane Babylon" but also
reveals his rejection of the distinctively religious experience itself
by characterizing as "an impudent wench" the Christian church. The
attack is partly therefore on the faith in transcendent values which
fixes man's relative position by projecting him upon the screen of an
infinite existence and which asserts that he has an absolute, that is,
an other-than-human guide. Again Erasmus, in his _Praise of Folly_,
denounces indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethical
values, the whole structure of organized religion, calling it those
"foul smelling weeds of theology." It was inevitable that such men as
Erasmus and Thomas More should hold aloof from the Reformation, not,
as has been sometimes asserted, from any lack of moral courage but
because of intellectual conviction. They saw little to choose between
Lutheran, Calvinistic and Romish dogmatism. They had rejected not only
mediaeval ecclesiasticism but also that view of the world founded on
supersensuous values, whose persistent intimations had produced the
speculative and scholastic theologies. To them, in a quite literal
sense, the proper study of mankind was man.

It is hardly necessary to speak here of the attitude towards the old
"supernatural" religion taken by the English Deists of the last half
of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. Here
was the first definite struggle of the English church with a group