there is sure to be scepticism.  When people begin to reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into eclipse.  But the church was strong and alert in the times when free thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy.  With the Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit.  The same feeling which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the moral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade from the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting.  The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those limits.  The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation, gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one shape or another agreed to accept.  The Trinitarian controversy of the sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent.  The deism of England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of dissolution.

All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and not of the religious spirit.  The sceptical side of it with reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with reference to natural religion.  The wild pantheism of which there were one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies uncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, had been full of religiosity, such as it was.  These had all passed away with a swift flash.  There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the immortal De Imitatione, in whom the special qualities of Christian doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being.  But this was not the deism with which either Christianity