semi-ecclesiastical structure of dogmatic supernaturalism—­as that “profane Babylon” but also reveals his rejection of the distinctively religious experience itself by characterizing as “an impudent wench” the Christian church.  The attack is partly therefore on the faith in transcendent values which fixes man’s relative position by projecting him upon the screen of an infinite existence and which asserts that he has an absolute, that is, an other-than-human guide.  Again Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, denounces indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethical values, the whole structure of organized religion, calling it those “foul smelling weeds of theology.”  It was inevitable that such men as Erasmus and Thomas More should hold aloof from the Reformation, not, as has been sometimes asserted, from any lack of moral courage but because of intellectual conviction.  They saw little to choose between Lutheran, Calvinistic and Romish dogmatism.  They had rejected not only mediaeval ecclesiasticism but also that view of the world founded on supersensuous values, whose persistent intimations had produced the speculative and scholastic theologies.  To them, in a quite literal sense, the proper study of mankind was man.

It is hardly necessary to speak here of the attitude towards the old “supernatural” religion taken by the English Deists of the last half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century.  Here was the first definite struggle of the English church with a group of thinkers who, under the leadership of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke and others, attempted to adapt humanistic philosophy to theological speculation, to establish the sufficiency of natural religion as opposed to revelation, and to deny the unique significance of the Old and New Testament Scriptures.  The English Deists were not deep or comprehensive thinkers, but they were typically humanistic in that their interests were not mainly theological or religious but rather those of a general culture.  They were inconsistent with their humanism in their doctrine of a personal God who was not only remote but separated from his universe, a deus ex machina who excluded the idea of immanence.  While less influential in England, they had a powerful effect upon French and German thinking.  Both Voltaire and Rousseau were rationalists and Deists to the end of their days and both were unwearied foes of any other-than-natural sources for our spiritual knowledge and religious values.

In Germany the humanistic movement continued under Herder and his younger contemporaries, Schiller and Goethe.  Its historical horizon, racial and literary sympathies, broadened under their direction, moving farther and farther beyond the sources and areas of accepted religious ideas and practices.  They led the revival of study of the Aryan languages and cultures; especially those of the Hellenes and the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula.  They originated that critical and rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic