And as the Pietists demanded of the Church a
worthier conception of human rights and duties, the Jurists also began,
after the great war, to place the natural law of men in opposition to
the injustice of despotic States, and to vindicate the reasonable law
of States against intriguing politicians. Together with mathematical
discipline and natural philosophy, the science of law became the
laboratory in which minds were reared to ideal requirements. From them
sprang a new philosophy.

After the Thirty Years' War there began, in the great civilized
nations, a systematic exposition of those convictions which Science,
from its then standing-point, was able to give concerning God, the
creation and the government of the world. The French Descartes, the
English Locke, the Dutch Spinoza, and the German Leibnitz, Thomasius
and Wolf, were the great exponents of this philosophy.

They all, with the exception of the free-thinker Spinoza, sought to
keep their system, concerning the divine rule in nature and in the soul
of man, in unison with the doctrines of Christian theology.

After Descartes had put forth his propositions, nothing appeared fair
or true to the inquiring spirit of man but what could be proved by
unanswerable demonstration,--all belief in authority passed away;
science assumed a new dominion. The divines, also, once her severe
rulers,--even Luther had placed the words of Holy Scripture above the
human reason,--now found that natural theology was the ally of
revelation. Young theologians eagerly sought in this philosophy new
supports to their faith. The necessity and wisdom of a Creator were
demonstrated from the movements of the stars, the volcanic fires, or
the convolutions of a snail's shell. On the other hand, there was no
lack of men who denied the creating power of a personal God and the
immortality of the soul. But against such isolated deists and atheists,
most of the philosophers, and the Christian piety of the great mass of
the people, rose in arms.

The great German philosophers who, at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, were the leaders of this movement, carried a holy fervour into
the various circles of German life. Leibnitz, the great creative
intellect of his time, a wonderful mixture of elastic pliancy and firm
tranquillity, of sovereign certainty and tolerant geniality, worked, by
his countless monographs and endless letters, especially on the leaders
of the nation and on foreigners, on prin