rs,[119] whose writings
served for a time to preserve the Church from the infection of his most
dangerous errors. But gradually these views became an object of
speculative interest to Metaphysical inquirers, and found favor even
with a growing class of Philosophical Divines;[120] partly by reason of
the strong intellectual energy with which they were conceived and
announced, and partly, also, there is reason to fear, on account of a
prevailing tendency to lower the authority of Scripture, and to exalt
the prerogatives of reason, in matters of faith. The system of Spinoza,
as developed in his "Tractatus Theologico-politicus," and, still more,
in his "Ethica,"--a posthumous publication,--may be said to contain the
germs of the whole system both of Theological and Philosophical
Rationalism which was subsequently unfolded,--in the Church, by Paulus,
Wegscheider, and Strauss,--and, in the Schools, by Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel.

Theological Rationalism consists in making Reason the sole arbiter and
the supreme judge in matters of faith; in setting aside or undermining
the authority of Revelation, partly by denying or questioning the
plenary inspiration of Scripture, partly by explaining or accounting for
miracles on natural principles, partly by assuming, as Strauss assumes,
that whatever is supernatural must necessarily be unhistorical; in
reducing every article of the creed, by a new method of critical
exegesis, to a mere statement of some natural fact or some moral
doctrine, embellished, in the one case, by mythical legends, and
accommodated, in the other, to local and temporary prejudices, but
amounting substantially to nothing more than a natural development of
human thought. The prolific germs of this Neologian method of the
interpretation of Scripture are to be found every where in the writings
of Spinoza.

Philosophical Rationalism, again, although often, or rather generally,
blended with the Theological, is yet, in some respects, distinct from
it. The one has been developed in the Church, the other in the Schools.
The former, cultivated by divines who acknowledged more or less
explicitly the authority of Scripture, has directed its efforts mainly
to the establishment of a new method of Biblical exegesis and criticism,
by which all that is peculiar to Revelation, as a supernatural scheme,
might be enervated or explained away. The latter cultivated by
Philosophic speculators who were not bound by any authority, no