religious conviction. They were not yet in a position to see that
henceforward authority could take only a secondary place, and that they
were installing in its room either reason or a more subtle spiritual
faculty superior even to reason in the perception of spiritual things.
It was not until near the end of the seventeenth century that the mind
began to awaken to a full perception of the freedom it had won--a
freedom far more complete in principle than was as yet allowed in
practice. In the eighteenth century this fundamental postulate of the
Reformation became for the first time a prominent, and, to many minds,
an absorbing subject of inquiry. For the first time it was no longer
disguised from sight by the incidental interest of its side issues. The
assertors of the supremacy of reason were at first arrogantly, or even
insolently, self-confident, as those who were secure of carrying all
before them. Gradually, the wiser of them began to feel that their
ambition must be largely moderated, and that they must be content with
far more negative results than they had at first imagined. The question
came to be, what is reason unable to do? What are its limits? and how is
it to be supplemented? An immensity of learning, and of arguments good
and bad, was lavished on either side in the controversy between the
deists and the orthodox. In the end, it may perhaps be said that two
axioms were established, which may sound in our own day like
commonplaces, but which were certainly very insufficiently realised when
the controversy began. It was seen on the one hand that reason was free,
and that on the other it was encompassed by limitations against which it
strives in vain. The Deists lost the day. Their objections to revelation
fell through; and Christianity rose again, strengthened rather than
weakened by their attack. Yet they had not laboured in vain, if success
may be measured, not by the gaining of an immediate purpose, but by
solid good effected, however contrary in kind to the object proposed. So
far as a man works with a single-hearted desire to win truth, he should