ree of
culture among the educated classes.

From this sketch it will be seen that toleration was the outcome of new
political circumstances and necessities, brought about by the disunion
of the Church through the Reformation. But it meant that in those States
which granted toleration the opinion of

[127] a sufficiently influential group of the governing class was ripe
for the change, and this new mental attitude was in a great measure due
to the scepticism and rationalism which were diffused by the Renaissance
movement, and which subtly and unconsciously had affected the minds of
many who were sincerely devoted to rigidly orthodox beliefs; so
effective is the force of suggestion. In the next two chapters the
advance of reason at the expense of faith will be traced through the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

[1] Translated by Lecky.

[2] Complete toleration was established by Penn in the Quaker Colony of
Pennsylvania in 1682.

[3] Especially Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants (1637), and
Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying (1646).

[4] The Reformed Church consists of the followers of Calvin and Zwingli.

CHAPTER VI

THE GROWTH OF RATIONALISM

(SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES)

DURING the last three hundred years reason has been slowly but steadily
destroying Christian mythology and exposing the pretensions of
supernatural revelation. The progress of rationalism falls naturally
into two periods. (1) In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries those
thinkers who rejected Christian theology and the book on which it relies
were mainly influenced by the inconsistencies, contradictions, and
absurdities which they discovered in the evidence, and by the moral

[128] difficulties of the creed. Some scientific facts were known which
seemed to reflect on the accuracy of Revelation, but arguments based on
science were subsidiary. (2) In the nineteenth century the discoveries
of science in many fields bore with full force upon fabrics which had
been constructed in a naive and ignorant age; and historical criticism
undermined methodically the authority of the sacred documents which had
hitherto been exposed chiefly to the acute but unmethodical criticisms
of common sense.

A disinterested love of facts, without any regard to the bearing which
those facts may have on one's hopes or fears or destiny, is a rare
quality in all ages, and it had been very rare indeed since the ancient
days