ss of the presence or pressure of free
thought. The less violent of the two forms of unbelief is seen in the
Gnostics, the rationalists of the early Church, who summoned Christianity
to the bar of philosophy, and desired to appropriate the portion of its
teachings which approved itself to their eclectic tastes; the more violent
kind in the rejection of Christianity as an imposture, or in the attempts
made to refer its origin to psychological causes, on the part of the early
enemies of Christianity, Celsus and Julian, prototypes of the positive
unbelievers of later times. The Greek theology, which embodied the
dogmatic statements in which the Christian Church under the action of
controversy gave explicit expression to its implicit belief, is the
example of the stimulus which the pressure of free thought gave to the use
of reason in defence.

As we pass down the course of European history, the Pagan literature which
had suggested the first attack disappears: but as soon as the elements of
civilization, which survived the deluge that overwhelmed the Roman empire,
had been sufficiently consolidated to allow of the renewal of speculation,
a repetition of the contest may be observed.

The revived study of the Greek philosophers, and of their Arabic
commentators introduced from the Moorish universities of Spain, with the
consequent rise of the scholastic philosophy in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, furnished material for a renewal of the struggle of reason
against authority, a second crisis in the history of the Church. The
history of it becomes complicated by the circumstance that free thought,
in the process of disintegrating the body of authoritative teaching, now
began to assume on several occasions a new shape, a kind of incipient
Protestantism. Doubting neither Christianity nor the Bible, it is seen to
challenge merely that part of the actual religion which, as it conceived,
had insinuated itself from human sources in the lapse of ages.
Accordingly, the critical independence of Nominalism, in a mind like that
of Abelard, represents the destructive action of free thought, partly as
early Protestantism, partly as scepticism; while the series of noted
Realists, of which Aquinas is an example, that tried anew to adjust faith
to science, and thus created the Latin theology, represents the defensive
action of reason. The imparting scientific definition to the immemorial
doctrines of the Church constituted the defence.