Page:The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/17

 "As far as Christology is concerned," says Dorner, "a declension from the ancient Lutheran doctrine concerning the Person of Christ had long set in even among the orthodox divines. The edifice of Lutheran Christology had been, for the most part, already forsaken by its inhabitants before 1750. . . . A deistical atmosphere seemed to have settled upon this generation, and to have cut it off from vital communion with God. To order one's self according to mere natural reason and self-complacency in this finite state of existence, and to think of nothing beyond it, were regarded as true wisdom and sound common-sense. Religion was converted into morality, and morality into the politic teaching of Eudaæonism, in a coarser or more refined form."

"Atheism," said Leibnitz, in the early part of the century, "will be the last of heresies; and in effect indifference, which marches in its train, is not a doctrine, for genuine Indifferents deny nothing, affirm nothing; it is not even doubt, for doubt being suspense between contrary probabilities supposes a previous examination: it is a systematic ignorance, a voluntary sleep of the soul. . . . Such is the hideous and sterile monster which they call indifference. All philosophic theories, all doctrines of impiety, have melted and disappeared in this devouring system, . . . this fatal system, . . . . The state to which we are approaching is one of the signs by which will be recognized that last war announced by Jesus Christ: Nevertheless, when the Son of Man Cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?"

In England the Deistic atmosphere brooded over the land through the first half of the eighteenth century, then coming to final dissolution in the scepticism of Hume, who issued his Natural History of Religion in 1757, and therein attempted to show that Religion owed its origin to the tendency of the human mind to personify the causes of phenomena. In the same year, 1757, appeared Brown's Estimate of the Manners