By Mark
Pattison, B. D. We are surrounded with a Babel of religious creeds and
theories, and it is all-important that we should know how we have
inherited them. If we would understand our times, we must know the
productive influences of the past; if we would thread the present mazes
of religious pretension, we should not neglect those immediate agencies
in their production that had their origin near the beginning of the
eighteenth century. These agencies are three in number: 1. The formation
and growth of that compromise between church and state which is called
Toleration; 2. Methodism without the Church and the evangelical movement
within it; 3. The growth and gradual diffusion, through all religious
thinking, of the supremacy of reason. The theology of the Deistic age is
identical with Rationalism. That Rationalistic period of England is
divided into two parts: from 1688 to 1750, and from 1750 to 1830. The
second age may be called that of evidences, when the clergy continued to
manufacture evidence as an ingenious exercise,--a literature which was
avowedly professional, a study which might seem theology without being
it, and which could awaken none of the dormant skepticism beneath the
surface of society.
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