trauss had stood. Hardly before
the decade of the sixties was that method accepted in England in any
wider way, and hardly before the decade of the seventies in America.
Ronan was the first to set forth, in 1863, the historical and critical
problem in the new spirit, in a way that the wide public which read
French understood.

When we come to speak of the scientific movement it is not easy to say
where the leadership lay. Many Englishmen were in the first rank of
investigators and accumulators of material. The first attempt at a
systematisation of the results of the modern sciences was that of
Auguste Comte in his _Philosophie Positive_. This philosophy, however,
under its name of Positivism, exerted a far greater influence, both in
Comte's time and subsequently, in England than it did in France. Herbert
Spencer, after the middle of the decade of the sixties, essayed to do
something of the sort which Comte had attempted. He had far greater
advantages for the solution of the problem. Comte's foil in all of his
discussions of religion was the Catholicism of the south of France. None
the less, the religion which in his later years he created, bears
striking resemblance to that which in his earlier years he had sought to
destroy. Spencer's attitude toward religion was in his earlier work one
of more pronounced antagonism or, at least, of more complete agnosticism
than in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his
scientific freedom and conscientiousness. Both of these men represent
the effort to construe the world, including man, from the point of view
of the natural and also of the social sciences, and to define the place
of religion in that view of the world which is thus set forth. The fact
that there had been no such philosophical readjustment in Great Britain
as in Germany, made the acceptance of the evolutionary theory of the
universe, which more and more the sciences enforced, slower and more
difficult. The period of resistance on the part of those interested in
religion extended far into the decade of the seventies.

A word may be added concerning America. The early settlers had been
proud of their connection with the English universities. An
extraordinary number of them, in Massachusetts at least, had been
Cambridge men. Yet a tradition of learning was later developed, which
was not without the traits of isolation natural in the circumstances.
The residence, for a time, even of a man like Berkeley in