ame any century
since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be
found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a
supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a
special revelation.[337] A praeter-christian deism, or the principle of
natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of
a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea
of a definite lawgiver? The very scholastic disputations themselves,
by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning
faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not
always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could
have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of
every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that
the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there
is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to
reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners
might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their
work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged
and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed
bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at
strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in
many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of
Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling
which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of
man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards
the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the
moral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade from
the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting.
The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within
the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years
to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those
limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent
judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation,
gradually impaired the traditional authority bo