The country where Rationalism has exerted its first
and chief influence is Germany, than which no nation of modern times has
been more prospered or passed through deeper affliction. At one time she
was the leader of religious liberty and truth, not only in Europe, but
throughout the world. She was thirty years fighting the battles of
Protestantism, but the end of the long conflict found her victorious.
Since that day, however, she has lost her prestige of adherence to
evangelical Christianity; and her representative theologians and
thinkers have distorted the Bible which she was the very first to
unseal. We rejoice that her condition is more hopeful to-day than it was
twenty-five years ago; but recovery is not easy from a century-night of
cold, repulsive Rationalism. As a large number of those stupendous
battles that have decided the political and territorial condition of
Europe have been fought on the narrow soil of Belgium, so has Germany
been for ages the contested field on which were determined the great
doctrinal and ecclesiastical questions of the European continent and of
the world.
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