owerful, movement. It kept fewer
of those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate had
reduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of
its own, which a still further extension of the same change is
assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless,
along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never
willingly let die.

The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course
to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in
early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the
active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe,
reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which
the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric
which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with
its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and
practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious
imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental
direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain
distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of
histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that
these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature,
will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity
associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in
their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods
of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with
something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised
deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and
diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to
keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly
expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.

Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much
precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a
doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the
practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties
of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without
qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with
the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to n