to criticise the Bible and the
dogmatic teaching of the Church. This fourth great period of free thought,
which extends to the present time, has been marked by more striking events
than former ones.(70) Though the movement relates to a similar sphere, the
history is rendered more complex by union with literature, and connexion
as cause or effect with social changes, as well as by the reciprocal
operation of its influence in different countries. Language, which is
always a record of opinion, popular or scientific,(71) classifies the
forms of this last great movement of free thought under three names, viz.
Deism in England in the early part of the eighteenth century; Infidelity
in France in the latter part of it; and Rationalism in Germany in the
nineteenth; movements which exhibit characteristics respectively of the
three nations, and of their intellectual and general history. English
Deism, the product of the reasoning spirit which was stimulated by
political events, directed itself against the special revelation of
Christianity from the stand-point of the religion of natural reason, and
ran a course parallel with the gradual emancipation of the individual from
the power of the state. French infidelity, breathing the spirit of
materialist philosophy, halted not till it brought its devotees even to
atheism, and mingled itself with the great movements of political
revolution, which ultimately reconstituted French society. German
Rationalism, empirical or spiritual,(72) in two parallel developments, the
philosophical and the literary, neither coldly denied Christianity with
the practical doubts of the English deists, nor flippantly denounced it as
imposture with the trenchant and undiscriminating logic of the French
infidels; but appreciating its beauty with the freshness of a poetical
genius, and regarding it as one phase of the religious consciousness,
endeavoured, by means of the methods employed in secular learning, to
collect the precious ideas of eternal truth to which Christianity seemed
to it to give expression, and by means of speculative criticism to exhibit
the literary and psychological causes which it supposed had overlaid them
with error.

Nor has the activity of reason used in defence been less manifest in these
later movements. The great works on the Christian evidences are the
witness to its presence; and the deeper and truer appreciation of
Christianity now shown in every country, and the increasing intere