Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/395

 (1660) contain some of the most interesting religious thought of the century—an attempt to form a deeper conception of reason, and its operations in the spiritual sphere, than was possible either for narrow orthodoxy, or for rationalism in its earliest phases. His followers, the most systematically metaphysical of the Cambridge Platonists, More and Cudworth, belong to the subsequent period. Pure mysticism is represented most strikingly by the German Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), on whose work I have not had courage to venture, but mystical piety found representatives in most Protestant countries.

The consideration of the appearance of a liberal strain in seventeenth-century theology brings us naturally to the third great force whose influence is traceable in the literature of the early seventeenth century,—that revolution to which we have referred in the opening chapter, the growth of a new, rationalistic conception of the world. In the years which this volume covers, rationalism is shaping and asserting itself, but is far yet from having become the recognised and omnipresent force it proved in the period which follows. Bacon, at the opening of the century, heralds and proclaims its advent, but he was not able to formulate its principles adequately; and it was not until the end of the Forties that Bacon and Descartes began to be studied at the English universities. English thought is still scholastic; still most active in theological and historical studies; and science is only gradually emancipating itself from