trade of one nation upon another, all these
things shook the ancient organisation of society. The industrial system
grew up upon the basis of a naturalistic theory of all economic
relations. Unlimited freedom in labour and in the use of capital were
claimed. There came a great revolution in public opinion upon all
matters of morals. The ferocity of religious wars, the cruelty of
religious controversies, the bigotry of the confessional, these all,
which, only a generation earlier, had been taken by long-suffering
humanity as if they had been matters of course, were now viewed with
contrition by the more exalted spirits and with contempt and
embitterment by the rest. Men said, if religion can give us not better
morality than this, it is high time we looked to the natural basis of
morality. Natural morality came to be the phrase ever on the lips of the
leading spirits. Too frequently they had come to look askance at the
morality of those who alleged a supernatural sanction for that which
they at least enjoined upon others. We come in this field also, as in
others, upon the assertion of the human as nobler and more beautiful
than that which had by the theologians been alleged to be divine. The
assertion came indeed to be made in ribald and blasphemous forms, but it
was not without a great measure of provocation.

Then there was the altered view of nature which came through the
scientific discoveries of the age. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,
Gassendi, Newton, are the fathers of the modern sciences. These are the
men who brought new worlds to our knowledge and new methods to our use.
That the sun does not move about the earth, that the earth is but a
speck in space, that heaven cannot be above nor hell beneath, these are
thoughts which have consequences. Instead of the old deductive method,
that of the mediaeval Aristotelianism, which had been worse than
fruitless in the study of nature, men now set out with a great
enthusiasm to study facts, and to observe their laws. Modern optics,
acoustics, chemistry, geology, zoology, psychology and medicine, took
their rises within the period of which we speak. The influence was
indescribable. Newton might maintain his own simple piety side by side,
so to say, with his character, as a scientific man, though even he did
not escape the accusation of being a Unitarian. In the resistance which
official religion offered at every step to the advance of the sciences,
it is small wonder