s common task of the modern Christian world. That
international quality of scholarship which seems to us natural, is a
thing of very recent date. That a discovery should within a reasonable
interval become the property of all educated men, that scholars of one
nation should profit by that which the learned of another land have
done, appears to us a thing to be assumed. It has not always been so,
especially not in matters of religious faith. The Roman Church and the
Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain
international character. Again the Renaissance and Reformation had a
certain world wide quality. The relations of the English Church in the
reigns of the last Tudors to Germany, Switzerland, and France are not to
be forgotten. But the life of the Protestant national churches in the
eighteenth century shows little of this trait. The barriers of language
counted for something. The provincialism of national churches and
denominational predilections counted for more.

In the philosophical movement we must begin with the Germans. The
movement of English thought known as deism was a distinct forerunner of
the rationalist movement, within the particular area of the discussion
of religion. However, it ran into the sand. The rationalist movement,
considered in its other aspects, never attained in England in the
eighteenth century the proportions which it assumed in France and
Germany. In France that movement ran its full course, both among the
learned and, equally, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the
unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it
more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for
years cried, '_Ecrasez l'infame_,' and Rousseau preached that the youth
would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had
had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many
minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism. Quite logically,
therefore, after the downfall of the Republic and of the Empire there
set in a great reaction. Still it was simply a reversion to the absolute
religion of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth by the Jesuit party.
There was no real transcending of the rationalist movement in France in
the interest of religion. There has been no great constructive movement
in religious thought in France in the nineteenth century. There is
relatively little literature of our subject in the French lang