Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/308

Rh 290 RATIONALISM tion had been formed of either religion or revelation, and none at all of their relation to each other, while the idea of God was simply that of the deists. It was in the application of its principles and method (thus brought into vogue) to Biblical studies that rational- ism won its greatest triumphs, and really accomplished its greatest measure of good work. Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), the father of modern Biblical criticism, as the Germans call him, was the greatest representative of the school in this department. A pietist by education, with something of Gottfried Arnold's liking for heretics and all his dislike of ecclesiasticism, but with none of Arnold's mysticism, a man of immense learning, without any clear and systematic management of it, he was the first German to apply the strict principles of historical criticism, in conjunction with the rationalistic truths and errors of his day, to the study of the Scriptures and ecclesi- astical history, particularly the history of doctrines. He assailed with all the wealth of his learning the traditional view of the limits and authority of the Biblical canon especially, and having, as he held, demonstrated its human origin and fallibility, he proceeded to deal freely with the books composing it, as sharing the failings common to everything human. He found the Scriptures pervaded with " local ideas," and his Christianity was really limited to the " natural religion " of the deists and the moral truths taught by Christ. As a man who had been under a pietistic training, he was, it is true, unwilling to refer to the understanding alone for evidence of the truths of Christianity, but his enlargement of the test is confined to the admission of an appeal to the measure of virtue and happiness produced. By this extended test he tries the matter of the Scriptures, assigning to his category of local ideas " whatever is not adapted to make men wise unto their true advantage." The supernatural origin of the Scriptures as writings and most of the miracles recorded in them he rejected ; but, on the other hand, he was a vigorous opponent of the adversaries of Christianity and of the naturalists who denied revelation altogether, Keim- arus, for instance, the author of the Wolfenbiittel Frag- mente. Other decided rationalists contemporaneous with Semler were Teller (1734-1804), Eberhard (1739-1809), and Steinbart (1738-1809), who all agreed in confounding religion with morality, and in reducing Christianity to a popularization of utilitarian morals. Meanwhile the profounder spirits of the nation Lessing, Herder, Hamann, and others were conceiving truer ideas of the nature of religion, of the human conditions of revela- tion, and of the character of the Bible and the mission of Christianity. It was, however, Kant who produced the greatest immediate effect on the history of rationalism. Himself a rationalist, regarding religion only as a form of morality, and revelation as at most a possible aid to the earlier propagation of moral principles, he nevertheless started doubts and ideas which sealed the doom of rational- ism in its first shallow form. There was an end of the demonstrable natural religion of Wolff when once Kant's criticism of the proofs of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul met with even partial acceptance. The breath of lofty mysticism which inspired his grand ethical system was also fatal to the cold shallow reasoning and commonplace utilitarianism of previous rationalists. Yet, though Kant proclaimed principles which compelled rationalism to assume other positions, and which really contained within them the seeds of its destruction, he re- mained himself a rationalist, for the reason especially that he never advanced to a profound conception of the nature of either religion or revelation and the conditions and relations of both. His fruitful idea of the relation of revelation to a community rather than to an individual he was unable to apply properly to the revelation contain? in the Bible. Though his morality was something infinitely beyond 18th-century utilitarianism, it still constituted for him religion, and the only test he applied to a professed revelation was that it must contain the purest moral teach- ing. Fichte, accepting Kant's ethical principles, taught that a revelation that is, proclamation of God as the moral lawgiver of the world might be a necessity in the case of a degeneration of mankind to such an extent that the idea of goodness should be lost. On the other hand, Fries and Jacobi took up the position of Kant regardiiiLf the limitations of human knoivledge of religious truth, and still further prepared for the advance beyond rationalism by claiming for man a special religious faculty, under the names of faith, feeling, or a sense of the infinite. Fichte, in his later period, made an advance in the same direction, abandoning the abstract ethical position of Kant by an appeal to love as the supreme principle in God and man. He thus reached a position more suited for the apprehen- sion of the nature of religion, and he recognized in the workings of genius with its incomprehensible light and movements manifestations analogous to the phenomena of revelation. Meantime, the rationalists amongst theo- logians continued their work of reducing the Bible, with its history, miracles, and doctrines, by one means or another, into harmony with their notions of a rational and useful moral revelation, though for the most part they did not acknowledge the claims of the Old Testament to be considered a revelation at all, or at most a revelation for the childhood of the race. The accounts of miracles in the Bible were either denied or explained away as natural occurrences, or as poetical and Oriental phraseology, while the doctrines of the Bible and the creeds were diluted into religious or moral commonplaces. As representative Bibli- cal scholars of this class J. G. Eichhorn (1752-1827) and H. E. G. Paulus may be mentioned, as representative theologians Henke (1752-1809), Wegscheider (1771-1849), and Rohr (1752-1848). But early in the new century the triumph of a profounder philosophy of religion and of a worthier treatment of re- ligious systems and the records of revelation began rapidly to make itself felt. Schleiermacher once more carried religion from the confined and frigid regions of the under- standing and the distant heights of abstract morals into the vaster and yet nearer, warmer and yet clearer, world of feeling. Following Herder, he annihilated the rational- istic distinction between natural and revealed religion by claiming revelation for all religion and religions, and he mediated in the fruitless contention of rationalism versus supernaturalism by vindicating a supernatural element for the religious life and Christianity, while at the same time he justified rationalism in its rejection of any infraction of the laws of nature. He put an end to the conception of revelation as the communication of doctrine by sub- stituting for it the, at all events, profounder and truer view that it consists in a fundamental affection of the whole religious nature, giving it a new and special direction, the organs of it being historical personalities endowed with supreme religious genius. Hegel and Schelling contributed in other ways, particularly by substituting another idea of God and nature, to the decay of rationalism. Amongst Biblical critics De Wette, under the influence of Herder's poetic insight into early literatures and of Fries's religious philosophy, contributed largely to a truer appreciation of the Bible as literature and the record of revelation than such scholars as Eichhorn and Paulus had attained to. In the year 1828 Dr Pusey could inform English theolo- gians that the school had had its day, and early in the third decade of the century Hase was able to sum up the work of the school, which was then practically defunct,