ormers were Christian
ministers and so many Rationalists. From the historical point of view,
however, we find this line of development quite intelligible. We find,
for instance, Robert Owen (a great Rationalist) advocating the
substitution of arbitration for war nearly a century ago, and we
discover the earlier sources of Owen's enthusiasm in English Radicals
like Godwin, who were affected by the early French Revolutionaries, who
had been influenced by Rousseau, and so on. It is a quite natural
evolution of ideas, as they find a congenial soil in each generation in
certain types of temperament. But where are the traces or what was the
nature of God's co-operation with these men? Looking to their generally
heterodox character and the hostility of the Churches to them, the idea
is not without humour; but, even if we reconcile ourselves to this
peculiar feature, anything in the nature of positive evidence of divine
action is wholly lacking, and we can understand the whole process
without it. The theory is merely a desperate and unfounded assertion of
men who are determined that God shall not be left out.

There is a further grave difficulty. One would imagine that the kind of
paternal affection which is ascribed to God would have induced him to
intervene at an earlier stage. The kind of father who co-operates with
the more gifted and ambitious of his children, and does nothing for the
less gifted and sluggish, is a narrow-minded and narrow-hearted man.
Affection turns rather to those who cannot help themselves, or who need
judicious and constant inspiration. This view we are considering is even
less flattering to God, because the aspiring children of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries seem able to dispense with his co-operation,
while the ignorant and priest-ridden children of earlier ages could do
little of themselves. The theologians who have found this new formula
are of the more liberal school. They do not attribute all the blunders
and crimes and failures of the Middle Ages to free will, to a sheer and
deliberate obstinacy in clinging to evil. They realise the overpowering
nature of the environment and the drastic discouragement by the clergy
of anything like novelty or initiative in ethics. It was then that man
needed God, if there is a God. But, on this theory, God argued with the
academic wisdom of a medieval theologian; he concluded that medieval men
were quite capable of originating modern ideas, and he would