eason; but that Christianity was not designed to teach any
mysterious truths, but only to confirm the religious teaching of reason;
and that no one ought to recognise as true that which cannot be proved to
him rationally. The doctrine of a Trinity was necessarily disbelieved; the
death of Christ regarded as an historic event, or a symbol that sacrifices
were abolished. Holiness was reduced to morality. Extreme veneration for
the Bible was called Bibliolatry.(726) Religion was represented as acting
by natural motives: the ethical superseded the historic. The early
theologians of this dogmatic branch of the school are now little known;
but we may name Bretschneider(727) as the type of the least heretical
portion of it at the close of this period, who believed Christianity to be
a republication of natural religion, supernatural but reasonable: and, as
the literary tendency of this school continued to exist in Roehr,(728)
after the movement had become extinct in other minds, so Wegscheider,(729)
until a recent period, was the solitary instance of the dogmatic position
slightly modified.

This completes the history of the first of the three movements, the
destructive action of rationalism. The most flourishing period of this
form of it was about the beginning of the present century. We have seen it
originating in the rational tone of Wolff's philosophy, and the well-meant
but ill-judged exegesis which Semler exhibited under the pressure of
sceptical difficulties. Stimulated by critical investigations, and by the
strong wish which operated on our own theologians, to find the cause of
everything, its adherents were led into a disbelief of the supernatural,
and ended in explaining away the miraculous, and reducing Christianity to
natural religion. The movement, it will be observed, was professedly not
intended to be destructive of Christianity. Instead of being inimical, it
originated with the clergy, and aimed at harmonizing Christianity with
reason. But it contained its own death. The negative criticism is
essentially temporary.

The activity of thought was already producing change. We have previously
stated that even the Kantian philosophy itself, though at first
stimulating the appeal to reason, fostered a deeper perception of duty,
and thus prepared the way for a moral reawakening.(730)

We shall accordingly now proceed to state the causes which introduced new
elements into the current of public thought; and then describe