that day and to their interest in religion, that such
a movement could have arisen largely among laymen
who were often men of rank. It is an honour to
the English race that, in the period of the rising
might of the rational spirit throughout the western
world, men should have sought at once to utilise that
force for the restatement of religion. Yet one
may say quite simply that this undertaking of the
deists was premature. The time was not ripe for
the endeavour. The rationalist movement itself
needed greater breadth and deeper understanding of
itself. Above all, it needed the salutary correction
of opposing principles before it could avail for this
delicate and difficult task. Religion is the most
conservative of human interests. Rationalism
would be successful in establishing a new interpretation
of religion only after it had been successful in many
other fields. The arguments of the deists were
never successfully refuted. On the contrary,
the striking thing is that their opponents, the militant
divines and writings of numberless volumes of ’Evidences
for Christianity,’ had come to the same rational
basis with the deists. They referred even the
most subtle questions to the pure reason, as no one
now would do. The deistical movement was not really
defeated. It largely compelled its opponents
to adopt its methods. It left a deposit which
is more nearly rated at its worth at the present than
it was in its own time. But it ceased to command
confidence, or even interest. Samuel Johnson
said, as to the publication of Bolingbroke’s
work by his executor, three years after the author’s
death: ’It was a rusty old blunderbuss,
which he need not have been afraid to discharge himself,
instead of leaving a half-crown to a Scotchman to let
it off after his death.’
It is a great mistake, however, in describing the
influence of rationalism upon Christian thought to
deal mainly with deism. English deism made itself
felt in France, as one may see in the case of Voltaire.
Kant was at one time deeply moved by some English writers
who would be assigned to this class. In a sense
Kant showed traces of the deistical view to the last.
The centre of the rationalistic movement had, however,
long since passed from England to the Continent.
The religious problem was no longer its central problem.
We quite fail to appreciate what the nineteenth century
owes to the eighteenth and to the rationalist movement
in general, unless we view this latter in a far greater
way.
Rationalism
In 1784 Kant wrote a tractate entitled, Was ist
Aufklaerung? He said: ’Aufklaerung
is the advance of man beyond the stage of voluntary
immaturity. By immaturity is meant a man’s
inability to use his understanding except under the
guidance of another. The immaturity is voluntary
when the cause is not want of intelligence but of resolution.
Sapere aude! “Dare to use thine own understanding,”