their importance and dreaded their exaggerations.  Not only could they find no convenient place, scarcely even a footing, in his philosophical system, but they were out of accord with his own temperament and with the opinions, which he was so greatly contributing to form, of the age in which he lived.  They offended against his love of clearness, his strong dislike of all obscurity, his wish to see the chart of the human faculties mapped out and defined, his desire to translate abstract ideas into the language of sound, practical, ordinary sense, divested as far as could be of all that was open to dispute, and of all that could in any way be accounted visionary.  His perpetual appeal lay to the common understanding, and he regarded, therefore, with much suspicion, emotions which none could at all times realise, and which to some minds were almost, or perhaps entirely unknown.  Lastly, his fervent love of liberty indisposed him to admissions which might seem to countenance authority over the consciences of men on the part of any who should assert special claims to spiritual illumination.

Locke struck a keynote which was harped upon by a host of theologians and moralists after him, whenever, as was constantly the case, they had occasion to raise their voice against that dreaded enemy, enthusiasm.  There were many who inveighed against ’the new modish system of reducing all to sense,’ when used to controvert the doctrines of revelation.  But while with vigour and success they defended the mysteries of faith against those who would allow nothing but what reason could fairly grasp, and while they dwelt upon the paramount authority of the Spirit which inspired Holy Scripture, they would allow no sort of spiritual influence to compete with reason as a judge of truth.  Reason, it was perpetually argued, is sufficient for all our present needs.  Revelation is adequately attested by evidence addressed to the reason.  We need no other proof or ground of assent; at all events, none other is granted to us.  It was not so indeed in the first age of the Church.  Special gifts of spiritual knowledge and illumination were then given to meet special requirements.  The Holy Spirit was then in very truth immediately present in power, the greatest witness to the truth, and its direct revealer to the hearts of men.  Many of the principal preachers and theological writers of the eighteenth century dwell at length upon the fulness of that spiritual outpouring.  But it is not a little remarkable to notice with what singular care they often limit and circumscribe its duration.  A little earlier or a little later, but, at all events, at the end of a generation or two after the first Christian Pentecost, a line of demarcation was to be drawn and jealously guarded.