The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe, reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which the Christianising Jews first brought from the east.  Of the fabric which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of histories of opinion.  Whether this be the case or not, the fact that these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature, will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised deities of the falling church.  And if so, then Rousseau’s deism, while intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.

Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau’s deism with as much precision as it allows.  It was a special and graceful form of a doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without qualification.  People constantly speak as if deism only came in with the eighteenth century.  It would be impossible to name any century since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a special revelation.[337] A praeter-christian deism, or the principle of natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea of a definite lawgiver?  The very scholastic disputations themselves, by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could have sanctioned.  It has been said that religion is at the cradle of every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion.  Wherever there is argumentation,