uage until
recent years.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rationalist movement had always had
over against it the great foil and counterpoise of the pietist movement.
Rationalism ran a much soberer course than in France. It was never a
revolutionary and destructive movement as in France. It was not a
dilettante and aristocratic movement as deism had been in England. It
was far more creative and constructive than elsewhere. Here also before
the end of the century it had run its course. Yet here the men who
transcended the rationalist movement and shaped the spiritual revival in
the beginning of the nineteenth century were men who had themselves been
trained in the bosom of the rationalist movement. They had appropriated
the benefits of it. They did not represent a violent reaction against
it, but a natural and inevitable progress within and beyond it. This it
was which gave to the Germans their leadership at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in the sphere of the intellectual life. It is worthy
of note that the great heroes of the intellectual life in Germany, in
the period of which we speak, were most of them deeply interested in the
problem of religion. The first man to bring to England the leaven of
this new spirit, and therewith to transcend the old philosophical
standpoint of Locke and Hume, was Coleridge with his _Aids to
Reflection_, published in 1825. But even after this impulse of Coleridge
the movement remained in England a sporadic and uncertain one. It had
nothing of the volume and conservativeness which belonged to it in
Germany.

Coleridge left among his literary remains a work published in 1840 under
the title of _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_. What is here written
is largely upon the basis of intuition and forecast like that of Remarus
and Lessing a half-century earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were
already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke
and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, and
destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's
maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss'
first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly
appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first
radical and subversive in the extreme. They were fiercely repudiated in
Strauss' own country. Yet in the main there was acknowledgement of the
correctness of the principle for which S