of thinkers who, under the leadership of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke
and others, attempted to adapt humanistic philosophy to theological
speculation, to establish the sufficiency of natural religion as
opposed to revelation, and to deny the unique significance of the
Old and New Testament Scriptures. The English Deists were not deep
or comprehensive thinkers, but they were typically humanistic in that
their interests were not mainly theological or religious but rather
those of a general culture. They were inconsistent with their humanism
in their doctrine of a personal God who was not only remote but
separated from his universe, a _deus ex machina_ who excluded the idea
of immanence. While less influential in England, they had a powerful
effect upon French and German thinking. Both Voltaire and Rousseau
were rationalists and Deists to the end of their days and both were
unwearied foes of any other-than-natural sources for our spiritual
knowledge and religious values.

In Germany the humanistic movement continued under Herder and his
younger contemporaries, Schiller and Goethe. Its historical horizon,
racial and literary sympathies, broadened under their direction,
moving farther and farther beyond the sources and areas of accepted
religious ideas and practices. They led the revival of study of the
Aryan languages and cultures; especially those of the Hellenes and the
inhabitants of the Indian peninsula. They originated that critical
and rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present
civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism
of the moment. Thus the nature and place of _man_, under the influence
of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more
important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased
to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence
of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures,